Graham Stuart
MP for Beverley and Holderness · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I hope and expect that we can move forward in the right way and get the balance right between being overly prescriptive to the banking industry and setting a clear sense of direction to make sure that no one is left behind, as so many Members have set out.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) on securing this debate.”
“Is my hon. Friend as astonished as I am that the Minister—I know she is new to her post—has come here to propose a six-month extension of the movement of costs from bills to the Exchequer and cannot tell the Committee how much money that will cost?”
“The Minister is being most generous again. I did not ask her about protecting consumers from energy price shocks; I asked about a clear, unequivocal manifesto pledge to reduce household energy bills by £300. She, like her predecessors, refuses to address it directly. It was a clear promise.”
“Banking hubs themselves came out of an industry response from the NatWest executive. Does the Minister agree that we must present the information from the Lloyd review to the banking groups, be clear about what we want, and give them the opportunity to respond and provide a solution, as they did with banking hubs, so that we can perhaps a…”
“I am pleased to say that Lloyds listened and, as of this morning, people can deposit cheques at those places. These issues being raised by Members across the House today are important. I trust that given the timing of the Richard Lloyd report, the Minister in her seat will make sure that they are be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.”
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“I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for honouring his pledge to give way to me. I think that he has now come to the heart of the matter, certainly as far as the amendments from our hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) are concerned: whether the electorate would seek to use the power of recall to challenge Members on matters of conscience, on how they vote and, fundamentally, on how they do their job in this place. Hon. Friends who represent university towns might have found themselves subject to such proposals when it came to voting on tuition fees. On balance, I do not believe that the electorate would abuse that power, but I recognise that there is a risk. Does my right hon. Friend have any evidence that it would be misused, as we would see it, in that way?”
“I suppose the worst case scenario with the Government’s Bill is when somebody does something that the public regard as pretty serious, yet which neither leads to a custodial sentence, as many noxious things do not, nor to a suspension of a sufficient number of days, and we are left with the public feeling cheated by a recall Bill that did not deliver what they would have expected.”
“Could it be misused in a way that undermines people in doing what they should do, which is to act in line with their conscience? It is worth noting that the hon. Gentleman, for his part, felt that he could trust the public, and felt that his predecessor would have been able to rely on his public even as he was doing things that they would not have agreed with, because they respected how and why he was doing them.”
“The Bill sets the offence at a level that leads to a custodial sentence or, in the context of this House, to a very long and severe sanction by the Standards Committee. Earlier, I posed the question of whether the public would feel cheated when somebody did something that they felt was dreadful but that, in the view of the Committee and the processes of this House, did not lead to a suspension of sufficient time to allow them to express themselves on the subject. That is at the heart of the matter, and that is what we are agonising over. We have heard excellent speeches from, for instance, the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), who set the issue in the Northern Ireland context. That is a good context in which to question how communities that are sometimes severely divided might seek to use the recall mechanism.”
“It is a pleasure to follow so many powerful speeches, none more so than that just given by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns). I have supported the efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) in bringing forward a vision of a recall controlled by the public, not controlled, as it might be perceived, by Whips or by the Standards Committee, however well constituted. The speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley) was telling. The question is this: is it possible to allow the public to trigger recall for wrongdoing without that being abused so that it strays into matters of conscience or towards constraining the public from deciding what is or is not wrongdoing?”
“That is a fair point. However, the public are not one thing, are they? The public are made up of a lot of individuals, and therefore one has to allow a certain collection of them to come together before starting to suggest that a recall reflects a wider public opinion. Otherwise we stand the chance of very small numbers of people being able to trigger it.”
“They will wonder why we are putting so many barriers in the way of their deciding to exercise a right of recall and remove people from this place. As Chair of the Education Committee, I am reminded that so many teachers, or certainly the teaching unions, appear to go to such lengths to protect the worst-performing teachers in the system even though, in every case, the teacher who is idle, has low standards or fails their pupils undermines morale in the staff room and all the hard work of most teachers in the school, and those elsewhere who do so much to prioritise teachers. However, standing here in this Chamber, I guess I can recognise the sense of, “If they come for one, they may come for all.” A certain paranoia runs through us.”
“The hon. Gentleman is right. That is why, although I will reflect on what I have heard today—I am less sure than I was about supporting the amendments —my opinion is still that we should trust the public. We want the public to trust us, and we need to trust them. However, we need to ensure that we do not allow a tiny minority of the public to use recall in a way that most people, even in the area concerned, regard as untoward and unreasonable, simply because it is there and they feel they can use it. If that small minority are feeling powerless and think that their voice is not being heard, they will pick up whatever instrument is to hand and seek to use it to propagate their case, which they no doubt feel strongly about. That balance is what we are agonising about today. I try to look at this from the perspective of the public outside.”
“It would be terrible if the fear of recall were to influence not how Members treat their constituents or work on their behalf, but how they vote. That goes to the heart of the debate.”
“My hon. Friend made a powerful speech. At the heart of the issue is whether the public, with no prior wrongdoing having been proved, can be trusted to use this power without it being abused in order to challenge Members on matters of conscience. I do not often speak up for the Liberal Democrats, but in this Parliament our coalition partners took an unpopular decision on tuition fees as part of a coalition agreement that they thought was in the national interest. Members representing university towns may have taken that decision even though they stood on that manifesto pledge. Following this debate, I am going to have to wrestle with the idea of whether I am confident that the proposed process would not have been used to turf out those MPs for doing what they thought was right.”
“If Members look at the data that WriteToThem, which is part of the TheyWorkForYou stable of internet tools, used to produce its league table, they will see that an awful lot of colleagues from all parties appeared not to respond to constituents: they did not write back to or take care of them. It is up to the electorate to decide whether they are being properly served by a Member of Parliament. That is at the heart of the issue for those of us who wish to give the public that right, and we hope, albeit in the spirit of optimism, that it will be used in the right way.”
“I suggest, therefore, that this process is a perfect candidate for a sunset clause, whereby it would be trialled for a five-year Parliament. It might be said that after giving the public the right of recall, there is no way this House would ever have the courage to take it back from them. I suggest, however, that if that right ends up being used not for wrongdoing, but to challenge Members on how they vote, this House should then have the courage to do something about it. It is not just proven wrongdoing that is of a criminal character or that is so severe that a Member is suspended for 21 days that upsets the public.”
“My hon. Friend, as ever, makes a subtle and important point, which takes me back to the observation of my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) about US Congressmen always looking over their shoulders because they are elected to serve only two-year terms. It is not entirely a bad thing, however, that MPs are always looking over our shoulders to ensure that we communicate to our constituents why we are doing what we are doing and why we have made certain promises and voted in certain ways. I do not know whether this has already been mentioned, but I accept that we are taking a risk. If we give the public the right of recall without any prior wrongdoing having been proved, we do not know how it will be used or what the pressures—political or otherwise—that may occur in coming years will do.”
“They are quite likely to be backed in their local area, but I recognise that we are taking a risk, which is why I suggested a sunset clause.”
“I take that point on board. For the entire period during which I have been involved with the Conservative party, I have for ever been hearing how old, out of touch and ludicrously right wing many of its members are. It was said that they would never select anyone to stand for Parliament who did not accord with their views. It turns out that whatever their views—in times past, if they had very strong views on capital punishment, they may have said in advance that they would only choose a candidate who believed in capital punishment—they eventually selected someone completely different, because they respected that person and wanted to back them. I put it to the hon. Lady that I am not sure that the many people who have been mentioned today would be disowned by their constituents for taking brave and unpopular decisions.”
“The argument against the amendments of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park is that powerful interests would come along and act. It always strikes me that the vulnerability of British politics to money is tremendous; yet I suggest that the cases in which it is abused are remarkably few and far between, notwithstanding the righteous efforts of the hon. Gentleman to highlight those he comes across. I simply ask him why we should not give this a chance for a Parliament. If the public in a local area was of the opinion that there had been an abuse, people would be able to divine who was behind such an attempt and see through what was behind it, even if the person named as bringing it forward was a front person. Time will tell: we perhaps need to give it a chance to find out whether that is true or not.”
“Ultimately, however, it would not be the press barons but our electorates who decided. If the hon. Gentleman is saying that our electorates are easily moulded by the tabloid press, I point out that the public would decide, not the press barons. That goes back to the earlier point that this is about trusting the public to exercise their judgment and come to the right conclusion.”
“Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) made a powerful speech on the importance of speaking up for Parliament and about the fact that Parliament works, whatever problems people may have with parties or individual MPs. None the less, I think that we need to trust the public to do the right thing. If we do that, they will feel that we have given them a say in judging whether or not we have done wrong.”
“I tend to agree. There is an idea that powerful outside forces will pick on a Member of Parliament, but as many Members have commented, whatever the public disgust with MPs in general—rightly or wrongly—people tend to have a much higher opinion of the MP in their own area. If such an MP was under threat for doing his or her job and for bravely standing up for what he or she thinks is right, I would trust local people to send out the strong message that they will have no truck with such efforts to destabilise and remove the MP. There would be risks, as there always are, but at least the decision would rest with the public in the constituency, who would ultimately decide the MP’s fate. We are where we are, and there is a crisis at least of public trust, although not of Parliament. My hon.”
“My right hon. Friend is right that there was no appetite in Yorkshire for that proposal, but there is a sense of neglect and frustration that the votes of people in Yorkshire are being diluted by those who represent areas where decisions have no effect. That cannot be allowed to continue and it must be tackled now. Further delay is not acceptable to my constituents.”
“Has the right hon. Gentleman spoken to many of his own constituents? Are they telling him that they do not believe in English votes on English laws? I do not believe that that is true. The right hon. Gentleman’s party is going to set itself on the wrong side of the people, at a time when, as he has rightly said, there is a real sense of neglect and frustration as a result of the failure to listen. He is taking a great risk here. He should listen to this: English votes for English laws is right. Everyone else—Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Scottish nationalists—knows that, and so should he.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is there now a convention that those Members of Parliament who attend this place the least often are not subject to the Back-Bench time restrictions that apply to all other Back Benchers?”
“My constituents see the Labour party as having acted in self-interest by refusing to put right the West Lothian question, and since 2010 perhaps the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s party’s self-interest has been in play in the coalition. There is genuine anger at this inequality, and hitting it into the long grass will no longer do. People will not trust that we are going to act if we do not act soon.”
“My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) was absolutely right when he pointed out that the Scottish people voted so that their Scottish Members of Parliament would have less say over affairs that do affect their constituents, but no reduction whatsoever in their say over what goes on in the primary schools, nurseries, hospitals and surgeries in my constituency in East Yorkshire.”
“Rather than destabilising our United Kingdom as the former Prime Minister suggested, giving justice to English voters, instead of embracing an asymmetry—giving justice to English voters when matters pertain solely to their interests—is something that people will demand, and the Labour party needs to change its tune.”
“Following the latest round of concessions made during the Scottish referendum campaign, the English feel a profound sense of neglect. That neglect must not be perpetuated any longer. Fair votes for all is a principle that should find support across this House. To resist that pressure is like ignoring a long dormant but potentially disastrous and simmering volcano capable of exploding with the same passion we saw north of the border. I know some Opposition Members recognise this, however much they may be leant on to tone down their words. From various speakers we heard recognition of the injustice of the current situation and their discomfort at the fact that Scottish MPs are voting on exclusively English matters. It must be put right.”
“Labour’s desperate attempt to do what is in its interest, rather than what is right, what is in the national interest and what people believe to be true, regardless of party allegiance, is shameful. The Conservative party can stand proud, because we campaigned hard to maintain the Union, even though politically it would appear not to be in our interest to do so. We believe in this country and we believe in keeping it together. There has been talk, not least from a former Prime Minister, of two-tier MPs. It seems that a former Prime Minister can never attend yet speak for as long as he likes. Putting that aside, we heard talk from a former Prime Minister about two-tier MPs. That is not acceptable. He is not here now.; let us hope he turns up for a bit at the end—one never knows.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker—well, I think it’s thank you, anyway. This debate takes places just five days after the by-elections in Clacton and Heywood and Middleton. We should not underestimate the significance of the results there. Many Members on both sides of the House have talked about the disaffection, disenchantment and disassociation with our political system felt by many millions of people. That risks getting worse if Scottish MPs continue to vote on exclusively English matters. We have had sophistry after sophistry from Labour Members. They have tried in a sophisticated way to justify the unjustifiable. The British people do not think it is right. Scottish nationalist supporters cannot see why Scottish MPs should vote on English matters; nor can people in Wales or people in England, regardless of how they vote.”
“The question that sits in the air following the contributions of the two speakers before the right hon. Lady is about who is going to defeat ISIS. My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) was suggesting that it had to be done internally, by the Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, or there would be the question of the regional ownership of the military force driving ISIS out. Who is going to provide that effective force? We could be bombing for 10 years with little to show for it.”
“Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the best early visits that a new Education Minister could conduct would be to the Pen Green centre, which the Committee has visited, to see the masters and PhD courses? It not only provides an excellent local service to children, many of whom are from deprived backgrounds, but also acts as a beacon of best practice and education for a much wider area—nationally and internationally. The Minister would be spending his time well.”
“The Government have a vision of doing more through schools, utilising the resource, and we heard during our hearings on the children’s centres that perhaps the previous Government made an error in building entirely new things, rather than better utilising the infrastructure that they had. None the less, it is possible to allow infant schools to do more for younger children and to provide good or, I hope, excellent provision in an area, without destroying those often long-standing nursery schools that are brilliant today. That is the appeal to the Minister: not to get so caught up in coherence and uniformity that we end up, inadvertently, destroying jewels that might not be everywhere, but certainly are present and deserve to be preserved. At that point, I could sit down—”
“The clear message we heard is that education is too important to wait until children reach school age. In particular, we concluded that if we are serious about closing the attainment gap for disadvantaged children, it is imperative that Ministers should set out coherent, long-term thinking on early years and children’s centres. It is worth asking the Minister—a central message from many of us today—not to let coherence or a desire for uniformity and equity to allow or excuse the destruction of rare, peculiar centres of excellence that do a brilliant job and that are found to be doing so by everyone who looks at them.”
“It is a pleasure to take part in the debate under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to follow the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who is a distinguished member of the Education Committee. As she showed in her powerful and passionately argued speech, she is deeply informed about education and the welfare of young people. The future of nursery education is an important issue, and one at which the Education Committee looked closely during our inquiry into Sure Start children’s centres last year. As I touched on, we visited the Pen Green centre for children and families in Corby, run, as the hon. Lady said, by the brilliant Margy Whalley. We also visited the Netherlands and Denmark in February 2013 to compare provision for early years in those countries with that in England.”
“That is not to visit the obsession of the shadow Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), with the tiny number of people who are not qualified teachers, which seems to be a sideline in the overall education debate; it is to go to the heart of the status of those people in relation to those who work in primary schools. My Committee concluded that the Government are right to want to increase the qualifications of the early-years work force. As Susan Gregory of Ofsted reminded us, the historic situation is that “you need a higher qualification at entry level to work with animals than you do to work with young children.””
“With that in mind, Ministers have set out their plans to reduce the number of different early-years qualifications, to improve the quality of training and to raise the status and quality of the work force by replacing the current early-years professional status qualification with new grades of early-years teacher and early-years educator. Early-years teachers will be graduates and will need to meet the same entry requirements and pass the same skills tests as trainee school teachers. So far, so good: there is an inspiring vision of integrated nought-to-18 teaching work force, with an upgrading and re-engineering of the training, requirements and qualifications of those working in that sector. They will not, however, be accorded qualified teacher status in the same way as primary and secondary teachers.”
“Likewise, my Committee expressed concerns about how the Government’s ambition to create an integrated nought-to-18 teaching work force will be delivered successfully. It is important to focus on that, although it sounds like a soundbite. An integrated nought-to-18 teaching work force is the Government’s stated policy. The then Minister told us that she wanted “to see a much greater consistency across the teaching workforce and much less of a silo between the early years and primary school”. Who can say, in any party, that she was not right to do so?”
“I cannot think of one, actually, but we have nursery schools managing to achieve that, to achieve what the previous Government and this Government want to do for social justice, delivered through education. I again make the case: let us ensure that we do not inadvertently lose them. Despite that, the Government’s policy seems a little confused. The Education Committee expressed regret that the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Childcare and Education, now the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, showed little enthusiasm for maintained nurseries, many of which have closed over the past decade.”
“Crucially, some types of provision, such as childminders, are considerably less likely to be good or outstanding in deprived areas. By contrast, Ofsted found that children from low-income families make the strongest progress when supported, as has been said, by highly qualified staff, in particular with graduate-level qualifications. Where are such staff most frequently found? In nursery schools. To quote Ofsted’s report: “Nursery schools have high levels of graduate level staff and perform as strongly in deprived areas as in more affluent ones.” Of how many types of educational provision can we say that they perform as strongly in deprived areas as in more affluent ones?”
“I will come on to funding and raising the status of early years. If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will come back to that, but he is right. Nursery schools do a particularly good job of supporting children from poorer homes—that is worth saying. The Government’s educational reforms have two main aims: to raise standards for all and to close the gap in attainment. If we have things that do a peculiarly good job in looking after the interests of disadvantaged children, we should be extremely wary before risking, inadvertently or otherwise, their destruction. Ofsted’s early-years report, published in March, stated that only just over a third of children from low-income backgrounds reach a good level of development in the early years. In some local areas, that figure is less than a fifth.”
“The truth is that considerably more money is being spent on early-years provision, despite overall constraints on spending. I would imagine there will a combination of some re-engineering—a lot of which will be unpopular, as anyone we take the money away from will hate us for it—and potentially finding additional funds. However, given that this supposedly austere Government are still spending over £100 billion a year more than they have coming in, I am not clear that additional funding outside the budget could easily be found.”
“I agree with the hon. Lady that that is an anomaly in the Government’s vision for the future. There is an inconsistency. However, I would gently chide her by saying that the money has to be found from somewhere, because there are real cost implications. If we are going to will the ends, we have to will the means, and that will mean taking tough decisions—unless people think that there is an infinite money tree somewhere. We will have to take the existing budget and orient it more to the early years. It could be said that this Government have done that in a number of ways, from abolition of the education maintenance allowance—that act was enormously unpopular—at one end to the introduction of the offer for two-year-olds and its extension from 20% to 40% at the other.”
“Naomi Eisenstadt told us that the perceived low status of children’s centre staff can create a barrier to successful multi-agency working, adding that “if you do not have status within the community and you ring the health agency, they are not going to ring you back.” Delivering equal pay for early-years teachers would of course require the extra resources I have talked about.”
“As all members of the Select Committee here today, and others, know, the key issue in raising educational quality for anyone, at any time, is the quality of the teacher. That is what counts. If we pay people half the rate of what is paid to those working with children who are just a little bit older, is it any wonder that we struggle to bring in the innovators, pioneers and greatest communicators? We need to set out a plan—it would be good to hear the Opposition’s funded plan from their Front-Bench spokesperson—to bring about that outcome. It can be no surprise that there is a continuing disparity of status between early-years and school-based teaching. The impact of that lower status is felt beyond the issue of attracting high-quality recruits into the nursery sector.”
“Even if it were to take 10 or 15 years, we would at least have a vision of how we were going to create a genuinely integrated work force, in which early-years teachers were given pay and status equal to that of teachers elsewhere in the education system. At present, figures from the Pre-school Learning Alliance reveal that pre-school staff earn, on average, £17,000 a year, which is only around half as much as primary school staff, who earn an average of £33,000. The former Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk, confirmed that England has the biggest gap in salaries between those who work in nurseries and those who work in schools of any country in western Europe.”
“On pay, we said that it is not enough simply to set out a vision of equality with other teachers: if we accept the premise that the early years are a peculiarly critical time in a child’s development, Ministers need to set out—and this is the key point, whether it is done through finding more money or re-engineering the budget— “a course of action…to a position where equal pay attracts equal quality” of applicants. That is the key. We cannot have Government setting out an aim of an integrated work force, with that equality as a premise, and then failing to put in place any of the building blocks to take us there. At the moment, it seems to be all aspiration, with very little evidence of a closing of the gap.”
“Given the constraints we are under and the overspending by Government today, let alone five years ago, we are going to have to find the money for early-years provision from re-engineering our education budget. That could be said to be the more mature debate. It is always easy to say, “Oh no, we should just find the additional money.” The truth is that that will be very difficult. On status, the Committee said in our report that the message that early-years teachers will not be equal to teachers in schools is “strong and unjust”.”
“Well, it will, but not for a Treasury Minister. As the hon. Gentleman will know, every Department comes along and says, “If only you gave me more money, you’d save so much later. No one would go to prison and you’d be saving money all round.” Understandably, the Treasury is a little sceptical. On that basis, we would for ever simply throw more money at the education system, because if we only provided the right start in life, we would have greater economic success and more highly skilled industries, and would live in nirvana. The greatest thing I can say about the previous Government’s education policy is about how much they spent on education. The fruits are slow to emerge, but that is not to say that there are not benefits to be had if those resources are used well.”
“In conclusion, the Government have more to do, to ensure the survival of maintained nursery schools, to encourage the development of the network of nursery schools with children’s centres around the country and to set out a strategy to realise their proper aspiration for an integrated nought-to-18 work force.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. I do not know all the details surrounding that case, so I will not rush to judgment on those who made that decision, but he makes powerful points, which I hope will be heard clearly by those responsible for those centres, as they consider what they will do about them in the future. The issue is that we either find additional money or rebalance the existing budget. Speaking for myself, that gives us yet another demonstration of why it was a poor use of over £1 billion of taxpayers’ money to offer free school meals to the children of middle-class parents who can already afford them, rather than deploying that funding in the classroom, where it could have been used to attract and retain the quality teachers who we know make such a difference to children’s attainment.”
“I forgot to welcome the Minister to his place, which was very rude of me. It is a delight to see him in his position, bringing his youthful enthusiasm to the early-years sector and the challenges it brings.”