Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
The complete record
Every one of 5,360 lines we hold for Liam Byrne, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 47 of 108.
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Her intervention gives me the chance to say on the record how important her courage in speaking out some years ago was in persuading me that I could do it too. I very much follow in her footsteps. Every child of an alcoholic has a different story. My right hon. Friend’s story is different from mine. Each of us in our own way and on our own journey learned that we could not really change things for our parents, but we sure as hell can change things for our children. That is what we have to do now as parliamentarians. We have to try to break the silence on this issue so that we can break the cycle of alcohol harm cascading down the generations. To normalise this conversation, we have to organise this conversation. We must sweep aside the stigma and the taboos.”
“Does the Foreign Secretary agree that defeating Daesh abroad requires rock-solid unity at home? Britain’s Muslim community are part of our pillar of strength. Will he join me in deploring yesterday’s headline in The Sun which sought to cast doubt on that unity of purpose? Britain’s Muslim community hate Daesh and want it defeated, and headlines like that in The Sun yesterday sow division when what we need is unity.”
“This term, schools around the country are rightly being asked not only to respect but to promote British values. Does the Secretary of State agree with the proposal in my early-day motion, tabled today, that it is time we added compassion to that list of values? My constituents think that that is one of the qualities that make this country great. Should we not start to celebrate it as such?”
“My hon. Friend is making a typically excellent speech. Is not the basic challenge of the Bill that it strengthens the Secretary of State’s hand with local government but not with Whitehall? He needs a few more ambition clauses that force his colleagues to devolve more rather than less and not to rely on backroom negotiations in the Treasury. For example, should we not be devolving many more powers to help local authorities, such as my hon. Friend’s, deal with the entrenched challenges of poverty and deprivation?”
“That is why I say that the Secretary of State needs to be more ambitious with the Bill. He needs more powers in relation to other Whitehall Departments if he is fully to achieve his ambitions. If we get that right, there is a great deal more that we can do. There is no better example than Sir Albert Bore, whom my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) praised earlier, of what can be done. I hope that the Secretary of State gives us the powers to get on with the job.”
“That would be in line with Government policy, but we cannot do it because we cannot bring together apprenticeship agencies and colleges, we cannot co-ordinate with academies and university technical colleges, and we do not have much latitude to co-ordinate with universities. We could pull that together in a new system in the west midlands, if only we had the power and resources to do so. Thirdly, we need more power to support an entrepreneurial revolution in our region. That was always the way in which we made our fortune. A new business is opening every 43 minutes in the west midlands. Up in Manchester, 20% more businesses are opening than in the west midlands. We need to be able to deliver more enterprise training and more start-up loans. Those are the kinds of powers that we need to make a difference.”
“We have great firms, such as Jaguar Land Rover, and the serious gaming industry around Coventry, but at the moment we do not have enough resource or power to put together our university powerhouses with our industrial powerhouses to do great things for the future. Secondly, we need more powers on skills. We need to create in the west midlands a German-style dual-track system that would allow our young people to take an earn-while-you-learn route up to degree level skills. Right now, just 200 young people in the west midlands are on such a route to a degree level skill, including just 70 in the great city of Birmingham and just 10 in Wolverhampton. We should be giving at least half of our young people an earn-while-you-learn route to a degree.”
“In fact, it has 2,000 fewer jobs than it had before the recession, whereas other regions, such as the north-west, have about 35,000 more jobs. We can expand opportunity for the people we serve only if we can create a bigger knowledge economy for the years to come. We therefore need more powers locally over science, skills and start-ups. First, on science, I want our region to be the enterprise and engineering capital of the country, but our universities currently draw just 3.5% of their income from the science budget. We need a bigger science budget and a bigger budget for the work that universities and industry can do together, and we need our combined authority to be able to shape those projects locally for the years to come.”
“I was also the chair of the Manchester Whitehall group, and I had to negotiate with other Departments for the powers we gave to Manchester. I can tell the Secretary of State that that was like drawing teeth. If he is to make the impact we think he could, he needs powers in relation to other Departments to force them to give away the powers that will make the difference locally. I will illustrate that point with a few comments about my home town of Birmingham and the combined authority of the west midlands. As the Secretary of State knows, the challenge we face is that wealth per head in our region is 20%, or about £4,000 a year, below the national average. Our knowledge economy—the jobs of the future—is actually shrinking, not getting bigger.”
“I want the Secretary of State to be more flexible in his approach to metro mayors. As a keen student of local government history, he will know that we only ever make incremental progress in this country. If we can encourage more power to leave Whitehall by encouraging authorities to come together, we should not let the issue of metro mayors get in the way, but just get on with it. The real message I want to give the Secretary of State is that he needs to be more ambitious. The Bill strengthens his hand in relation to local councils in this country, but not in relation to other Departments. When I was Chief Secretary, we invented the new concept of Total Place, which showed the ideas and savings that could come from putting services together.”
“I support the Bill not because of that upbringing, but because of my experience as a Minister in the Cabinet Office, in No. 10, in the Treasury and, most importantly, as the first Minister for the west midlands. Every lesson that I learned in that time in government taught me that decisions are made faster and better if they are taken locally. Many Members of the House will have seen the glory that is the new New Street station. For years, Whitehall ran around the issues, ran away from the issues and failed to get the funding in place. It was only once we had a Minister for the west midlands that we were able to get people in a room, bang heads together and make sure that the deal was done. Four or five years later we can celebrate exactly what can be done when we get power out of Whitehall and vested more locally.”
“I am very pleased to be able to speak in this debate. I want to support the Bill and the principles at its heart, and to join many Labour colleagues in paying tribute to the Secretary of State for the way in which—with the guile, cunning and charm for which he has become famous—he has pursued the principles we are debating. This afternoon, I want briefly to encourage the Secretary of State to be more flexible on the one hand and more ambitious on the other. I was not actually born in a town hall, although at times it felt like that. I am the son of a local government officer who, inspired by the practical idealism of the new towns movement, spent his career in town halls around the country. I grew up in a home in which the practical idealism of the Attlee Government was very much part of the atmosphere.”
“And the Petitioners remain, etc.] [P001544]”
“Following is the full text of the petition: [ The petition of residents of the Birmingham Hodge Hill constituency , Declares that there are too often delays in allowing burials within 24 hours in Birmingham; further that other cities have much better facilities; further that Birmingham has one of Britain's biggest Muslim communities and therefore should have better services; and further that a local petition on this matter was signed by 1,572 individuals . The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to improve burial services in Birmingham, including providing 24/7 access to coroners and health professionals who can certify and register deaths, access to MRI scanners to expedite post mortem procedures where necessary and a review of rising burial costs in Birmingham with a view to reducing charges .”
“The petition states: The petition of residents of the Birmingham Hodge Hill constituency, Declares that there are too often delays in allowing burials within 24 hours in Birmingham; further that other cities have much better facilities; further that Birmingham has one of Britain's biggest Muslim communities and therefore should have better services… The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges Birmingham City Council and the Government to work together to improve burial services in Birmingham, including providing 24/7 access to coroners…health professionals and registrars access to MRI scanners to expedite post mortem procedures where necessary and a review of rising burial costs in Birmingham with a view to reducing charges.”
“I rise to present a petition on behalf of my constituents who are receiving second-class burial services. They often have to wait days on end for the bodies of their loved ones to be released. I particularly thank the Zia Ul Quran Mosque in St Saviours Road, as well as Councillors Ansar Ali Khan, Mohammed Idrees and Mariam Khan, along with Mohammed Rasib, for helping me to collect more than 1,500 signatures.”
“May I stiffen the Minister’s answers? The truth is that British universities win more research grants from the European Research Council than any other country in Europe. Well over £1 billion flowed in last year from Europe into the British science base, which is more than any other country received. The European Union and our membership of it is mission critical to our success and the future of our high-tech, high-productivity industries. Over the months to come, will the Minister join me in helping to ensure that British universities are at the forefront of leading the campaign for this country to stay in the European Union?”
“Let me start with the basic question why a different kind of deal is necessary, and why it is necessary in the west midlands. The answer is very simple. The past five years have been hard on the west midlands. The Government’s decision to put the recovery in the slow lane meant that average wages were reduced by about £1,500 a year in the west midlands. Our productivity performance is still among the worst in England, and our employment rate has only just come back up to the level that it was at before the recession. It is now at about 70%. That is well below the UK average. Despite the entrepreneurial energy of the region that was the home of the industrial revolution, and although there is new hope, there is a lot more progress to make.”
“If there is to be any change in England’s devolutionary arrangements, and ideas such as metro mayors are to be brought back to the table, surely those changes can come only with an absolute game-changer of an offer to devolve power from Westminster to different parts of the country. I want to offer a perspective on what that game-changing deal might look like, informed by my time as a regional Minister—the first Minister for the West Midlands—and as the Chief Secretary who created the Total Place programme, which looked at ways to bring together different areas of public spending so that, for the first time in this country, we could have preventive investment without having an eye on where the gains would flow in due course.”
“It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) on securing this debate so decisively and swiftly. He speaks with immense experience of both local government and the midlands, and I completely subscribe to everything that he said. Yesterday’s Budget was lamentably poor in what it offered the west midlands. Different parts of England are now being treated in very different fashions. More importantly, my hon. Friend is right to say that the notion of elected mayors was rejected very recently in my home city of Birmingham and in Coventry.”
“We are an incredibly entrepreneurial region, but we have a profound productivity challenge, and we will not break out of that unless we transform the research base of our region and build a technical education system, which is eminently doable.”
“First, we must dramatically increase the scientific research base in the region, and secondly, we must build a technical education system, as they have in our competitor economies, from Berlin to Beijing. Our universities today have the second lowest share of research spending in the United Kingdom. Only 3.6% of our universities’ income comes from research funding. That is the lowest fraction of any university in the country. As Mike Wright, chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, pointed out recently, as a country we are producing 40% too few engineers each year. That means we have to import skilled people from abroad because we do not train enough of them here. I am afraid to say that our region has the lowest proportion of 19-year-olds achieving five good GCSEs, including English and maths.”
“I will start where the leaders of the combined authority have started: by taking aim squarely at the productivity challenge. They were right to put that in the centre of their sights. We face a challenge in the midlands: we do not have enough high-skilled jobs. If we look at the high-skilled jobs in the knowledge-intensive industries that have been created in our economy since 2009, 85% of them have been created in London and the south-east. There has been a fall in the number of knowledge-intensive jobs in the west midlands by about 2,000. In other words, despite all the progress of the past few years, the knowledge economy in the west midlands is not getting bigger, but smaller. If we want to reverse that trend, we have to do two big things.”
“It is also the only region with a trade surplus with China. My point is simple: the entrepreneurial energy of people and businesses in the west midlands has been absolutely extraordinary, but it is a shame they did not get more help in prosecuting their ambitions from the Government here in Westminster. I want to offer various ideas for how the Government can get behind the midlands. I want to challenge the Minister this afternoon on whether he is serious about devolution to the new combined authority in the west midlands. Is he prepared to countenance the game-changing powers that would make a massive difference? Is he prepared to give the new combined authority in the west midlands the wherewithal to deliver what I think could be a mighty manifesto for the midlands?”
“Finally, I want to make a moral point. Our region is scarred by some of the worst child poverty figures in the country. About a third of children in Birmingham, Sandwell and Wolverhampton grow up in poverty. About a quarter of children in Coventry and Dudley grow up in poverty.”
“The west midlands boasts the greatest British cultural brand in the world: William Shakespeare. That is why I hope that the combined authority brings Stratford-upon-Avon into its ambit as quickly as possible. Stratford-upon-Avon is not a big council; it is small. It does not have the investment required to unlock the potential of that brand. The region is so disjointed that if someone goes to tonight’s performance of “Volpone”, which finishes at about 10.40 pm, it is impossible to get the train back to Wolverhampton or Sandwell, and if someone wants to get the train back to Coventry, it will take 1 hour and 40 minutes. They can get the train to Solihull or Birmingham after the curtain falls, but in most of our region we cannot go to the glorious new theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and make it home after the final performance.”
“Most Work programme providers are not doing a great job and will say that they could do a much better job if they were able to get their hands on skills funding. Thirdly, there must be new powers over transport infrastructure. The argument for the west midlands is well rehearsed. Some 90% of UK businesses are within four hours, but the transport system is shambolic. There are big new investments coming in, but we have to take powers over both bus and train franchising if we are to deliver the integration that is possible. Crucially, we need the Highways Agency and Network Rail to give us the latitude to control prioritisation within their investment programmes in the years to come. I have two more points. The fourth set of powers that the combined authority needs are around culture.”
“That is the only way we can line up academies and university technical colleges with a new careers service, a region-wide apprenticeship agency, more specialisation in our further education system and a new partnership between further and higher education that would allow apprentices to go on to study to a degree level of skill. I hope the Minister will tell us that they are all powers that are within scope. Secondly, there have to be changes in how the Department for Work and Pensions works. Combined authorities have to acquire more power over the way in which the Work programme works, because that is the only way that we will be able to line up our skills system and our back-to-work system for the first time.”
“We are trapped in a low-pay, low-skill equilibrium, as the OECD calls it. We have to break out in two ways. First, we must build a bigger research base. Where we have done that—in places such as the advanced manufacturing centre at Warwick—we have shown that we are capable of soliciting and securing the most extraordinary new investment, but alongside that new investment there must be an effort to build a technical education system. If we are to build a new generation of technical university trusts across the region that would allow young people to study on an apprenticeship track up to a degree level of skill, the region must take control of funding that is currently locked up in Innovate UK, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Skills Funding Agency and the apprenticeship budget.”
“Our universities are critical to the strength of our science base, but following the tripling of tuition fees in the last Parliament, four out of five students no longer think that their courses are value for money. The Minister’s predecessor said that he saw no case for raising tuition fees in this Parliament. What does the Minister think? Will tuition fees go up in this Parliament? A simple yes or no will do.”
“We in this country have a parochial interest in some of those decisions being taken in a correct way, not least because of the impact of science and innovation policy on our lamentable productivity performance. I am glad the Chancellor has now woken up to the crisis in British productivity growth, which is worse today than it was at the end of the 1970s when we used to call it the British disease. What the rest of the G7 now finishes making on a Thursday night takes us until the end of Friday to get done. We will not raise living standards in our country unless we close that yawning 20% productivity gap with the rest of the G7.”
“The majority of the world’s people now live in cities; the majority will soon be interconnected with the cloud, and the internet of things will bring new networks to bear. We are now able to work together in a completely different way, and of course there is a new premium on us as a world making the right decisions. The decisions that are made over the next five to 10 years will have a critical bearing on whether we succeed in keeping global temperature rises below 2° C. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South spelled out, there is the potential for great progress in medical science and beyond if we make the right decisions over the next few years.”
“Last year was a bumper year for British science, with extraordinary achievements from landing probes on comets to advances in medical science, but, as Sir Paul Nurse said—it is important that we pay tribute to Sir Paul’s leadership of the Royal Society—the progress last year represented the fruits of years and years of patient chipping away at the coalface. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) and others have said this morning, we are in jeopardy of destroying the foundations of the progress that we saw last year unless important policy changes are made. Over the next 10 years, we could seize the fruits of the very different world taking shape around us.”
“We have managed to achieve a degree of consensus on science policy over the past 20 years that has served this country well. We need to preserve and enhance that consensus during this Parliament. However, now is the time to begin making progress on a number of substantial policy issues. In this morning’s debate, some of those issues have become clear. As we set about that task, it is important that we keep our eyes on the prize that is there for the taking with science policy over the next decade or two.”
“It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I apologise for missing the beginning of the debate. I add my congratulations to the Minister; it is good to see him in his place. I am obviously sad that I am not sitting there. None the less, if there has to be a Conservative Minister, I am glad that it is him. He is a fully signed up member of the thinking classes, despite what his father has to say, and I am sure he will distinguish himself in his new office. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield). It is good to see him back with such an increased majority, which is testament to his extraordinary work in his constituency and in the House over the last Parliament. It is with characteristic speed that he has secured this debate.”
“I hope the Minister will work with us constructively and creatively, and I hope he will take to heart the points that he has heard this morning. Over the days and weeks to come, in the run-up to the Budget, he would do well to read again the excellent opening speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central.”
“Some 350 years ago, two groups of men from different sides of the political spectrum came together at Gresham College, on the site where Tower 42 now stands, in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). On one side of the divide were the royalists and on the other side were the parliamentarians. At that moment in November 1660 they decided to put aside historic divisions and work together in the interests of science. The Royal Society was born on that afternoon after an astronomy lecture delivered by Sir Christopher Wren. We need such consensus again. If the royalists and parliamentarians could do it in 1660, the Labour party, Conservative party, Scottish National party and others could perhaps make the same move.”
“That is the only way we will be able to make sure that this country is connected to the best brainpower, wherever it happens to be born. I was the author of the first post-study work visa when I was the Minister responsible for immigration. It was not perfect, but it was a lot better than the system that we have today. If we are to ensure that we train and educate the best students for the years to come, we have to look again at how we put in place a much better post-study work visa, and I would be happy to work with the Minister on getting that right. Finally, I underline the call that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central made for a new consensus in Parliament.”
“I suggest that the right place to start is by putting a serious submission to the Treasury that calls for the Chancellor to save our further education system. We will not be able to build a world-class technical education system if we kick out its spine, and as Alison Wolf made very clear this morning, that is precisely what is coming. We cannot build a world-class technical education system if we are shutting down further education colleges all over England and closing down adult education. That is a good place to start rebooting our technical education system for the 21st century. Thirdly, we need changes to our immigration system, which we have heard a lot about this morning. We in Parliament should be calling for the free movement of scientists and students.”
“This is about not just crowding global spending into the UK, but making sure that we unlock the regenerative power in science throughout the country. I hope that one of the ideas put on the table as part of the consultation will be a radical expansion of university enterprise zones, which are a good idea that is confined to only four towns and cities in the UK. We should use university enterprise zones far more radically in the years to come. Secondly, we need a new consensus on technical education. The Minister’s colleague, the Minister for Skills, has said that he is interested in agreeing high-level principles that would guide a technical education system for the future. We go through this crisis decade in, decade out in this country, and we have got to begin making progress.”
“If we are to guard against that, we must make more progress on funding. The Business, Innovation and Skills Committee was absolutely right to say that the right target for science spending in this country is 3% of GDP. There is a cross-party consensus about that figure in Germany, Korea has already exceeded it and it is the norm in parts of Scandinavia. What we need to see in the Budget in a couple of weeks’ time is the launch of a consultation by the Chancellor on the measures that would most effectively bring in private sector money. Some of those measures would be national policy, but, as we have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) and for Nottingham South, some would ensure that science began to regenerate our cities and towns.”
“I will in a minute. We have heard three clear policy priorities that I hope the Minister will attend to. The first relates to money. As we have heard this morning, Britain is seeing not growth but substantial decline in its science budget, yet we are at a crossover moment in global science spending. China will probably spend more on science this year than the EU28 put together. By 2019, China will spend more on science than the United States of America. Four of the 10 biggest tech firms in the world are now Asian. Shanghai’s results in the programme for international student assessment are well in advance of our PISA results here in the UK. We are now at a crossover point that we perhaps last saw in 1455, when the good jobs in the world were created in the east and the cheap labour jobs were created here in the west.”
“I am glad that the right hon. Lady is sharing her experience with the House. Has she seen any evidence of High Speed 2 Ltd actually following a word that the High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill Select Committee has issued?”
“The Committee said: “We impress on HS2 the need to adjust the scheme” to reach agreement with the site owner, AXA, to maximise the number of jobs and to minimise the time for which land would be required. HS2 was directed by the Committee to work with the site owners to deliver that solution. That judgment was passed down in December. Although there have been detailed technical committee meetings and the site owners have now presented a detailed redesign of the site that would minimise land take, we have seen nothing of those discussions reflected in the provisions this afternoon.”
“That is still a very considerable number that could knock off something like a third of the unemployment in the city of Birmingham. This is a site of such economic significance that the High Speed Rail Bill Committee has considered it in considerable detail. I was incredibly grateful that although the Committee did not side completely with my argument, it recognised that the issue of unemployment in and around the rolling stock maintenance depot had to be considered. The provisions set out today on the Saltley business park do nothing to address the Committee’s concerns; in fact, they take out even more industrial land in the city of Birmingham. It could be that the site is proposed today for the relocation of business, but we simply do not know.”
“The motion contains a couple of provisions for the Saltley business park that are intimately connected with the proposed rolling stock maintenance depot, which takes out a considerable chunk of the north of my constituency. I do not want to detain the House with the details of the proposal because I have mentioned it on the Floor of the House a number of times. Suffice to say that that area of land is the size of 100 football pitches. It represents one third of the available industrial land in the whole city of Birmingham, and it is located at the junction of two of the constituencies that are among the four most unemployed constituencies in the whole United Kingdom. If we develop the site in its entirety, we could generate 7,000 jobs, which is my estimate, or 3,000 to 3,500 jobs, which is the Minister’s estimate.”
“I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly on the motion, and grateful to the Minister for setting out the process, but I am afraid the measure raises some serious questions about the integrity of the process. It raises the question of whether High Speed 2 is listening to the petitioners, to the Minister or to the Bill Select Committee, which has begun considering petitioners’ concerns with interest. The integrity of the process is fundamental. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), the shadow Minister, said, we do not expect some kind of celestial design from High Speed 2. There are bound to be problems and they will need correcting. That is why the Bill Committee, to which I again pay tribute, is so important, and why hon. Members are so grateful that it is doing such a magnificent job.”
“I hope the Minister will spare us all that spectacle and use his very good offices to ensure that HS2 will buckle down and listen to a Select Committee of this House and its recommendations.”
“I am very grateful for the Minister’s clarification, but I urge him to go further in his winding-up remarks. It is of course important to me that land is minimised and jobs are maximised, but it will be of interest to all right hon. and hon. Members of this House that HS2 not only responds to the petitioners and the Committee but is seen to do so. Frankly, we have scant evidence of that in the provisions we have seen this afternoon. I hope the Minister will take the opportunity to endorse once again the Committee’s recommendations on the rolling stock maintenance yard. I hope he will urge HS2 to do the deal and come to an agreement with the site owner, AXA. I personally do not want to occupy the site in order to ensure that HS2 honours a recommendation from a Select Committee of this House.”
“Do I take it, therefore, that the Minister will use his good offices to ensure that HS2 will indeed honour the recommendations that the Committee hands down to it? If those commitments are not honoured, the integrity of the process will be called into serious question.”