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.”
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“I am not sure which debate the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) was in, but he certainly constructed a few windmills of his own to tilt at. No doubt, that will be of interest to his local press in what I know will be a tight contest. This in general has been a very good debate. It has been especially heartening to see interest across the House in driving behind a shared ambition to boost the number of apprenticeships, to close the skills shortages and gaps that bedevil so much of our economy and to close the looming large productivity gap that my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) alluded to in his opening remarks.”
“Instead, the trust took a decision to go through the most mind-bending process of selection to hand-pick parents to serve at trust level. I hope she will now encourage the trust to revisit that decision and ensure that democracy prevails.”
“I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement and her offer of additional resources to Park View school to get the teachers who are needed. I know that she would want to recognise a number of parents, including Sabina Kauser, Waheed Saleem and Arshad Malik, who helped to rebuild the governance along with Adrian Packer, Bev Mabey and the extraordinary group of teachers who came in to help restore the schools and ensure that, thanks to their work over the summer, they opened on time in September. I very much welcome the emphasis that the Secretary of State put on the teaching of British values, in particular democracy and the rule of law. She will agree, I know, that it is important that we practise what we preach. It was therefore regrettable that parent members of the trust were not able to be elected by parents at the school.”
“This Government have contrived to create a country where this generation of young people is now the first generation for a century to be poorer than the generation before them. Young people now face an unemployment queue that is three quarters of a million long; graduates now face £44,000-worth of debt; and from figures published by BIS before Christmas, we learned that the number of apprenticeships for the under-24s has not gone up but down. Social mobility in this country is in reverse, and we need more apprenticeships for young people, not fewer. The Opposition have an ambition that by 2025 as many people should be going into an apprenticeship as are going to university. Is that an ambition that the Minister will match?”
“I am conscious that this may be the last time in this Parliament that we have a debate on higher education on the Floor of the House, so it is appropriate to salute the right hon. Gentleman’s extraordinary career and contribution, not just to this field of public policy, but to public policy in this country more generally. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] During the last year or so, the right hon. Gentleman has been sanguine about a debt write-off rate that has risen quite dramatically. Why does he therefore think that a debt write-off rate of 100% would be a bad thing? Does he draw from that hypothetical argument that there is an optimum rate, and if so, will he share it with us?”
“Gentleman will just underline an acceptance that, although we might dispute the right way of calculating a RAB charge, being concerned about the level of debt write-off is none the less very important, because the lower we can keep it, the more money there is for future generations.”
“I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that contribution, because I think he has given us one of the best arguments that I have heard this afternoon for precisely the review that my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) has called for. If the right hon. Gentleman poses significant questions about the right interest rate and the right earnings threshold—which we all know was a compromise with the Liberal Democrats—there are obviously some serious questions that demand a review. That is why the logical conclusion is that the Minister should stand up later today and admit that he has changed his mind. I hope that the right hon.”
“When I was preparing my own thoughts on higher education reform, one of the documents that influenced me most was a paper prepared in 1962 and 1963 by a group of senior policy makers who wanted to persuade Harold Wilson to implement the Robbins review, which he subsequently did in 1964 and in the years thereafter. One of the phrases that rang out from those pages is that we must not and cannot be “afraid to build splendidly for our young.” As we approach the next election, those are good words to inspire us.”
“We cannot abstract this debate from what is happening to our young people. Today’s generation is the first for a century who will be poorer than the generation who came before. There are now more young people living in poverty than there are pensioners. Unemployment for young people is still too high and apprenticeship numbers for the under-24s are now falling. We have to change that and it is incumbent on us to do so. That was the argument made in an excellent book called “The Pinch”, which was published towards the end of the previous Parliament.”
“The fact that only 2% of apprentices go on to that level of study is unacceptable and needs to be revolutionised. I hope that one aspect of the new system will allow further and higher education institutions to come together in a more valuable way, both with each other and with the business communities that they serve. I also hope that the review that I know the Minister will promise in a moment will look at every possible option for protecting the unit cost of funding but also bringing down the cost to students. We know that reducing tuition fees will lower the RAB charge and therefore lower public sector net debt, which is the stated intention of the Government. Finally, I would like to underline the point made in the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield).”
“I am not sure how he can hear the evidence that has been laid before him this afternoon and say that it is so underwhelming that we do not need a review and that the current system is perfect in design and should persist long into the future. Especially welcome in this debate have been the contributions that have pointed towards the need for much bolder thinking about a different future for our higher education system, one that offers for the first time a proper, apprenticeship-based professional and technical route to degree-level skills. All of us agree that there is no prosperous future for people without skills, so we must transform—indeed, revolutionise—the number of people on an apprenticeship track who get the chance to go up to degree-level skills.”
“I notice that the student loan book sale is still in the OBR’s fiscal forecasts, so perhaps it will magically appear from left field and save the day, but it would be a significant risk. We have report after report saying that the current system is not sustainable. The former Minister who was the architect of the current system has told us that some features and functions might need to be adjusted over the next 20 years. We have the extra risks from marketisation and uncapping student numbers. The Minister, with his responsibility for science, is the champion of evidence-based policy making in the Government.”
“We were even more surprised when the Minister answered a question by saying that civil servants were still working on it. In the letter, which he kindly provided yesterday, he was unable to tell me how much the Department is spending on a policy that the Secretary of State has ruled out—I guess that is the reality of coalition Government. As these fiscal risks multiply, what has most concerned people is that the Department has refused to spell out the departmental expenditure limit provision for maintenance grants and teaching in 2016-17 and beyond. That will be the third year for the extra students who were taken on by universities last year. I suspect that people want to know that the unit cost of funding for 2016-17 will be protected, but that was the big omission from the Minister’s letter to me yesterday.”
“The PAC warned us that the Department “went ahead with its reforms to expand the role of private colleges without ensuring there were controls in place”. That is an added fiscal risk that we cannot ignore. The second great risk, which several hon. Members have mentioned, is the hastily constructed plan to uncap student numbers. The rumours in the higher education sector suggest that the plan was largely cooked up in the Treasury rather than BIS. It was certainly unveiled with some speed in the final days—if not hours—before the last Budget and it proposes an ambitious expansion of student numbers, funded by the sale of the student loan book. Most of us were surprised when the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills told us that the loan book sale was off.”
“An unanswerable case has been made to the Minister this afternoon. Two extra risks add to the urgency of the review. The first is the marketisation of the higher education system which is driving fiscal risk substantially. The University and College Union raised this issue as early as September 2010 and warned, in an excellent paper, of the fiscal risks of sub-prime education. The union asked us to look at the US, which has had problems of over-recruitment and inadequate safeguards on quality and academic freedom. Those issues have bedevilled higher education in some parts of the US. The union warns us to guard against those risks, but the truth is that we have seen a twentyfold increase in publicly backed funding to students at private colleges—the figure for this year is forecast to be £600 million.”
“Member for Havant, but even he had to admit that the RAB charge, imperfectly constructed as it is, draws our attention to the risks of preserving in aspic every single precise feature of the current design, whether that is the sticker price of tuition fees, the earnings threshold or the rates of interest. The current RAB charge is telling us is that all is not well. The right hon. Gentleman did not say whether he thought that a 100% RAB charge was a bad thing, but I took from his remarks a general acceptance that a high RAB charge is bad and a low RAB charge is good. Therefore, the current trajectory is in the wrong direction and things should change. If things should change, good people should reflect on what those things should be. We should call that reflection a review—and that is what the Committee has called for.”
“What has happened over the last three or four years is probably one of the biggest off-balance sheet financing tricks in the history of the public finances. Up to £200 billion has been moved off the public books and shunted from the present into the future. The hon. Member for Northampton South mentioned the curse for future generations and that was a point well made. In 10 years in this House, I have learned that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That is why we should pay attention to all the warnings we have heard from the PAC, the IFS and now the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and the Higher Education Commission. I am grateful for the opportunity to salute the contribution from the right hon.”
“As the Chair of the Committee pointed out with such eloquence, this report is not a one-off. It is now one of several reports that have been published over the last 18 months that tell us that the system is in crisis. Most recently, we had the Higher Education Commission report that questioned the fundamental stability of the system. In April last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that 73% of graduates will never pay back their loans in full. The Public Accounts Committee said that between £70 billion and £80 billion of loans will be written off by 2042—I make that about £500,000 of debt write-off every hour of every working day for the next 28 years. That should concern us all, because it is money that is not available for reinvestment in the future.”
“I was told that 61 jobs have been added to the shortage occupation list since the last election. In part, that has allowed businesses to fast-track in nearly 200,000 people from outside Britain because they could not find the skills on these islands. Those people brought 142,000 dependants with them, so some 334,000 people have come to Britain because businesses could not find the skills here. I am a supporter of an immigration system that is a little more generous than the Government have given us, especially when it comes to post-study work visas and students, but the fact that businesses are forced to recruit from abroad because they have failed a resident labour market test is an admission of failure and shows that our skills system is not working. That is why the Committee’s report is so important.”
“Jaguar Land Rover, which works on my doorstep, reminds me that we need around 90,000 engineers a year in this country, and we have some 50,000 graduates—a 40% deficit each year. The Royal Academy of Engineering tells us that we will need 820,000 STEM professionals between now and 2020. We are just not producing enough of them. The great tragedy in constituencies such as mine, which has the highest youth unemployment, is that we do not have a training and skills system—or a university system—that will create the people for the jobs in the good businesses that we actually have. I asked the Library this morning to tell me how many jobs have been added to the shortage occupation list. Hon. Members will know that if a job is on that list, people from outside the country can be fast-tracked in.”
“There are 22,000 fewer jobs in the knowledge economy in north-east England today than there were in 2009. In my region of the west midlands there are 2,000 fewer jobs in the knowledge economy, and there are also fewer such jobs in the south-west and in Scotland. All over the country people are tempted to vote for extremist parties because no one is giving them a sensible, realistic story about how we rebuild the opportunity economy for the years to come. Universities are critical to rebalancing our economy in a new way. Having created those jobs, we have to build the ladders to them. Industry tells us—as I am sure it tells the Government parties—that the skills problem is becoming more and more pronounced. KPMG says that a third of manufacturers cannot reshore jobs to this country because of a skill shortage.”
“We also know, however, that the only strategic way that Britain will lift itself out of the current cost of living crisis is first by creating a better supply of good, well-paid jobs, but also by building better ladders to those jobs for people, no matter where they start in life. Right now, that is not happening in enough places. In fact, in swathes of the country, the number of jobs in the knowledge economy is not increasing but decreasing. I started my career flipping burgers in McDonald’s, and I have done every job under the sun. I have started a technology business; I have created jobs for others. I happen to think that any job is better than no job, but during my career I have also learned that a good job is better than a bad job, and right now in large parts of the country there are not enough good jobs.”
“However, if we are to be candid with each other, we all know that the current student finance system was not the platonic design of the right hon. Member for Havant (Mr Willetts), but the outcome of a messy negotiation. The Liberal Democrats needed something back for breaking their pledge not to raise fees, and what they received were guarantees on income thresholds that have basically left us with a broken system that is not fit for the future and needs to change. My next point is that there is tremendous urgency to this matter—that argument was made with much power and eloquence by the hon. Member for Northampton South. We all know that living standards need to rise, and that will be a big part of our debates over the next three or four months.”
“Over the last century or two, about three quarters of economic growth has been driven by innovation, and there is no reason to doubt that that trend will continue into the future. That is why we need universities that are stronger, and world-class institutions that sit within a world-class system. It is not good enough just to have a country of great universities; we need a system that ensures that world-class universities work together pursuing excellence in mission in a good way. That is why it is not good enough to permit the current system to stand unadjusted and unaltered, because the basic truth revealed by this debate is that our system is falling off a cliff. The Government are fond of rhetoric about a long-term economic plan, and we wish there were one.”
“This will be one of the last set-piece debates in which he participates, and we will all want to salute his sagacity, wisdom and wit, not just in this debate but in many other debates and Committees over the years. At the core of the speech that was referred to earlier, Harold Wilson made a great deal of the difference between amateurs and players, and Members across the House will share the view that the hon. Gentleman is not an amateur but very much a player. The House will be much poorer for his departure. The reason this debate is so important was set out with great eloquence by my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) and by the Royal Society in its excellent report in 2011, “The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity”. Unless we grow smarter as a country, we will grow poorer.”
“This has been a simply excellent debate, and I am grateful that it has presented the Minister with an unanswerable case for the review called for by the Select Committee. Nobody listening to the arguments and evidence presented this afternoon could leave the Chamber and say that everything at the moment is fine and perfect and that nothing must change. Wide-ranging concerns have been raised across the House, and I hope that when he winds up the debate, the Minister will confirm that he will launch that review immediately. I congratulate the members of the Select Committee on initiating this debate, and I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley).”
“If he cannot answer that question, we shall have to conclude that it is a case of “Never mind a long-term plan; he has no plan at all.””
“The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the system is going bust, the Select Committee says that the system is going bust, and the Higher Education Commission says that the system is going bust. When will the Minister get the message? Let me ask him about uncapping student numbers this year. We were promised that the ceiling would be removed from places this year, next year and the year after. Earlier in the week, when I asked the Minister how he would pay for that, I received the immortal answer: “The Department…has indicated that it will not be possible to answer this question within the usual time period.” Will the Minister tell the House now how he will pay for lifting the ceiling on student numbers this year?”
“It is very bad news that the number of apprentices under the age of 19 is falling and that the number of apprentices who go on to study degree-level skills is just 2% and rising at a very slow pace. The Opposition are clear that our priority for expanding university level education is for technical degrees so that more apprentices can earn while they learn up to degree-level skills. May I ask the Minister about the expansion plans? In the autumn statement, the Chancellor said that he would sell the student loan book to expand the number of degree-level places. On 20 July, the Secretary of State said that he and the Deputy Prime Minister had put that plan in the bin. Will the Minister tell the House what the story actually is? Are we going to expand degree-level places, and how on earth are we going to pay for them?”
“All over the country over the next month, disabled students will be applying to Oxbridge and medical schools, and they deserve to know whether they will have good support in place—not just PCs, but people. This week, will he heed the call from vice-chancellors, the National Union of Students and Members on both sides of the House and ensure that disabled students do not have their chance to study—wherever they get into—destroyed by the abolition of that vital allowance?”
“I welcome the Minister to his post, and as he rightly acknowledged, he has some big shoes to fill—I, too, pay tribute to his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Havant (Mr Willetts), and the extraordinary work he undertook. I am surprised, however, that he did not leave the new Minister a briefing on the disaster of the student loans system and the £50 billion to £100 billion extra that will now be written off as public sector net debt as a result of the spiralling resource accounting and budgeting charge. My question today, however, is different. This week, the Minister has to decide whether to abolish the disabled students allowance.”
“Overall, taking into account other cuts in capital, but also the injection of money in from 24-plus loans, nearly £900 million has been taken out of adult skills over this Parliament. The impact is that fewer adults are enrolling in skills courses.”
“There will be no escape from an economy of low wages unless we increase productivity. As the Royal Society puts it: “Unless we get smarter, we will get poorer.” As we have heard this afternoon, the problem is not just one of productivity, but one of poverty. Before the summer, we published a big report in Birmingham about child poverty, which has led to a 40% spike in the number of children presenting in A and E units having tried to take their own lives. The majority of children in poverty in Birmingham are in families where people are working. How do we raise family living standards in a great city such as Birmingham? There is only one way: raising productivity and therefore raising skill levels. We have heard this afternoon about a £958 million cut in the adult skills budget.”
“In a recent report, Mike Wright, the chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, said: “We must double the number of engineering apprentices qualifying at advanced level…by 2020.” Lord Adonis has said that skills are “the single biggest impediment to economic growth.” Report after report says the same thing: we have a skills crisis in Britain that is holding the country back. The impact on productivity in this country has been devastating. We used to have a phrase for that in public debate—the British disease. A crisis of productivity means that we do not produce as much in this country as the rest of the world produces. Today, the productivity gap is 21% against the G7, meaning that what the rest of the G7 finishes producing on a Thursday night takes us until the end of Friday to complete.”
“Report after report has been put before us over the past two or three years, all basically saying the same thing: there is a skills crisis in Britain that is holding back growth, destroying productivity and keeping people trapped in the cost of living crisis that has bedevilled this Parliament. KPMG reports that a third of manufacturers would like to reshore work back to this country, but cannot do so due to a lack of skills. The Migration Advisory Committee, which was set up when my hon. Friend and I were at the Home Office, has now added 100 different roles to the shortage occupation list. As a result, under this Government, we have imported 282,000 workers because their skills could not be found at home.”
“It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) on securing the debate. She has always been a fighter for her constituency and for Hackney college, and she reminded us this afternoon of why we need to spend more time debating this subject, for which we are grateful. I want to draw out a couple of remarks from today’s debate and to sharpen the points of some of the questions that my colleagues have asked the Minister, but I will start by discussing the skills crisis that so many businesses up and down the country are now confronting.”
“This country faces a productivity crisis and a poverty crisis, so we must leave the Chamber hearing the note sounded by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch sounded—she said that there is poverty, but no poverty of ambition—as well as leaving with a determination to do something about it. The Minister is a thinking member of his party and has a track record of thinking through complicated issues. He is someone with a conscience and he cares profoundly about increasing social mobility in this country. He is blessed by simply having been appointed, with that great mind of his, to one of the most fantastic jobs in the Government. We look forward to his brief and his work with a heightened sense of anticipation. We also look forward to what he has to say to us this afternoon.”
“Those new technical universities should have partnerships with universities with world-class engineering and science facilities, perhaps as part of new university enterprise zones up and down the country. That could be one of the ways in which we make the decisive shift that was explained by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham. We have got to rebalance our economy, and rebalancing our skills system has got to be part of it. We have had an impassioned debate. Particularly welcome was the emphasis of my hon. Friends the Members for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) and for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) not only on the sheer economic importance of further and higher education and of adult learning, but on the life-changing power of such investment.”
“Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), and I have set out a different approach—a “gold standard” route for vocational education, so that we begin to reform the school system, the further education system and the university system. We believe that everyone should be doing some vocational education from the age of 14. We believe that there should be a new gold-standard technical baccalaureate with compulsory English and maths up to the age of 18. We believe that the priority for expanding the higher education system should be the creation of technical degrees, so that people can study while they are still working. We floated the idea over the summer that a new institutional partnership between further education colleges and universities is needed, along the lines of the American community college programme.”
“That means a broken bridge between the funding system that works up to the age of 18 and the one that then kicks in at the age of 24. There is no clear escalator through the skills system. Some funding for level 4 and above is offered by the Skills Funding Agency, but only for a higher apprenticeship. The problem is that, out of 200 apprenticeship frameworks, only 14 go up to level 4. Furthermore, people need a degree to understand the system. Why is that a problem? It is a problem because, as the OECD cited in its seminal report on skills in England back in 2013: “the weak articulation between level 4 and 6 programmes and university bachelor programmes is a serious problem”. There is a broken bridge, and a radical rethink is needed. On behalf of the Labour party, the shadow Secretary of State for Education, my hon.”
“Friends the Members for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), is the strategic problem with adult skills. Big cuts to further education, a very marketised higher education system and a huge explosion in the private sector college system have unleashed a series of competitive pressures in the further and higher education system. As a result, system collaboration is incredibly difficult. That problem is compounded by a broken bridge between funding for 18-year-olds and funding for those over the age of 24. My hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe underlined the appalling impact of big cuts in further education funding for those at 18, but between the ages of 18 and 24 there is only 50% funding towards tuition costs and 0% access to the Student Loans Company.”
“There is wide support to increase employer ownership of skills as one way of increasing the number of apprenticeships and higher level apprenticeships, but in an economy in which small and medium-sized enterprises are creating jobs three or four times faster than big business, the new funding system must work for SMEs. All over Britain, SMEs are saying that putting in all the money through the tax system will not work. That decision is in the Minister’s red box and I hope he will be able to tell us whether he is planning to go wholesale and introduce the plan in the autumn, as originally proposed, or whether to listen to the voices of 4 million or 5 million small businesses across the country that are asking him to think again. The third thing that the Minister was left with by his predecessors, as underlined by my hon.”
“If we want to tilt our economy decisively towards those high-value engineering and science-based industries that are the key to the bigger-knowledge economy, we must increase the number of higher apprenticeships. Just 2% of apprentices go on to study higher level skills, which is appalling and needs to increase. Across the country, however, there is a profound lack of clarity about how the Government’s new proposed money will actually be distributed. That lack of clarity is unacceptable and the Minister will want to work that out quickly.”
“I represent a constituency a mile away from the expanding Jaguar Land Rover plant in Castle Bromwich, but it has the highest youth unemployment in the country, which is prima facie evidence that the skills system is not working. We should listen to Lord Heseltine and Lord Adonis and think radically about how to devolve skills funding so that the DWP and skills budgets can be joined up in a new way. The second point, as made eloquently in a forensic speech by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), and underlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr, is that we must raise our game on skills and radically increase the number of higher apprenticeships.”
“Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) made clear, the Skills Funding Agency has taken away well over £1 million in ESOL provision that the DWP has had to put back in. It is heartbreaking for us to meet mums who are desperate to go back to work but do not have a strong enough grasp of English. They want to do well by their families, but they cannot. Proposals from Lord Heseltine and Lord Adonis radically to devolve skills funding are on the table and would allow us to put together the Work programme and skills budgets in a new way, so that we can skill people up to do the jobs that are available.”
“I certainly will. Money is tight, and I noticed that the former Member for Clacton—I am not sure whether he is still the Minister’s hon. Friend—wrote on his blog earlier this week that public sector net debt has increased and is now £400 billion higher than the debt that the Labour Government left. He said that this Government have now put on more debt in five years than the Labour Government did in 13 years. We all know that money is tight, but there are three things which the Government could turn their mind to quickly. The first thing must be integration with the Department for Work and Pensions, which means bringing together ESOL budgets in a completely new way. As my hon.”
“May I draw the Minister back to the future, rather than to the past? In the autumn statement last year, the Chancellor talked about one of the most important adult qualifications available in this country, which is degree places. He said that degree places would be uncapped and he set out, conservatively, the cost of about £1.9 billion, which was to be financed by selling off student loan debt. On 20 July the Minister’s boss, the Secretary of State, said that he and the Deputy Prime Minister had decided that the sale of student loan debt would not now go ahead. Will the Minister confirm whether the expansion will still go ahead and, if so, where on earth the money will come from?”
“In that case, the Minister will want the maximum value for money from the programme that he is responsible for. A total of £340 million has been earmarked for the employer ownership pilot for apprenticeships, but the latest figures show that only 20,000 new apprenticeships have been provided. That is a unit cost of about £17,000. Will he explain whether he thinks that is value for money and what he is doing to drive up numbers for that programme?”
“I, too, welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, but it is important that nobody shirks their responsibilities. Park View trust was an academy for almost two years, and chapter nine of the report paints a sorry picture of the Department’s oversight. I hope she thinks it appropriate to apologise for those failures today and that she asks Les Lawrence to do the same. I welcome the Secretary of State’s announcement of an education commissioner for the city, as I suggested to her on Friday. The commissioner’s first task is to ensure that teachers and officials who should not be in their jobs either resign or are removed, but the bigger task is to come together, with the city of Birmingham and the parents and pupils of Park View school, to rebuild trust and the pride of pupils and to ensure that the school’s reputation is turned around.”
“The Secretary of State will know that I have worked for five months to uncover problems at Park View school. The leader of Birmingham city council has apologised for the city’s role in the historic failures. Will she apologise to my constituents for what Peter Clarke has called the “benign neglect” of Park View since it became an academy two years ago, and will she respond positively to my letter of last week, which called for a new joint director of school standards in Birmingham so that this never happens again?”