argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Apprenticeships — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Education
Neil Carmichael (Conservative, Centre-right): I will set my remarks in the context of the successful Government industrial strategy, because it has driven the need for 83,000 additional engineers every year. I think it important to concentrate on our apprenticeship programme, which must start to fill that huge gap. The need is obvious. For example, £100 million has been invested in Airbus, in my constituency and elsewhere, to push forward the frontiers of technology, and firms in my constituency such as Renishaw, ABB, Delphi and Lister Shearing all want more engineers, because their order books are full and their export opportunities significant I want to make three points. First, we must ensure that the relationship between business and education improves by making it possible for business to tell education what it needs, and for education to appreciate the sheer numbers that are required in certain areas. That, of course, must include a focus on STEM subjects. Secondly, I think that further education colleges are the unsung heroes of this story. It might be worth while for us to start thinking about a kind of Russell group to include the very best FE colleges, so that they can lift themselves up, celebrate their success, and become the key deliverers of some of the apprenticeships to which I have referred Thirdly, we need to talk about apprenticeships in much more glowing terms than we often do, and one way to do that is to have a proper award. It is not enough just to give apprentices something from the business. There should be an award that says, "Wherever you are and whoever you are, you’ve done it and you should be proud. Here’s a certificate to salute that fact." Those three ideas are designed to improve what we understand an apprentice to be and to show why we value them so much. In my constituency, I try to do all these things in different ways. I established a festival of manufacturing and engineering, which is geared to ensuring that schools and business have an ongoing relationship. I salute the successful apprentices and firms who drive up standards and ensure that our real and growing economy is equipped with the skills to deliver the output and productivity we need. They are being created by various measures and by the long-term economic plan.
Apprenticeships — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Labor
Richard Michael John Ogilvie Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): It falls on me to be tail-end Charlie in this debate on which so much consensus could and should have been reached, as the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) pointed out. We all, across the House, share enthusiasm for apprenticeships: their improvement, their widening and their breadth. Unfortunately, today that opportunity was lost in what was, frankly, a disgraceful speech by the shadow Business Secretary. His dire, tribal attempt to rubbish this Government’s—and, above all, the country’s —remarkable achievements in growing apprenticeships and shrinking youth unemployment led to a string of inaccurate and, frankly, almost offensive claims. Let me try to deal, very briefly, with some of them The shadow Business Secretary said that the numbers of young apprenticeships were down. The Secretary of State pointed out that they are slightly down for 19 to 24-year-olds in 2013-14. In Gloucester, however, they are still more than 80% higher than the comparable figure when the previous Government were in power, and were more than double that figure in 2012-13. Overall, apprenticeships for 19 to 24-year-olds in Gloucester are at 1,730 in the past three years, compared with 740 in the last three years of the Labour Government. The figures, however one tries to twist them, are remarkable The shadow Business Secretary said that many of the apprenticeships were not worth the paper they are written on. How insulting to the 5,000 new apprentices in Gloucester. He said, and it is in the motion, that level 2 apprenticeships are not worth anything at all. Let me tell the House that that is completely wrong. The evidence shows that many apprentices do a level 2 apprenticeship—for example, in business administration—for a year and then go on to do a level 3 apprenticeship in the second year. I know this to be true as the second MP to hire his own apprentice. The shadow Secretary of State admitted that he himself does not have an apprentice and I do not believe that any others on the Opposition Front Bench do. I am happy to take an intervention. [Interruption.] The shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) is saying that he does have one, which is encouraging, but it is disappointing that the shadow Business Secretary does not and does not have that first-hand experience.
Apprenticeships — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Labor
Richard Michael John Ogilvie Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): I think my hon. Friend was going to make the point that it is important that we lead by example and employ our own apprentices wherever possible. The shadow Business Secretary went on to talk, with an element of derision, about the number of apprentices over 60 who have started since this Government came into power. I hope that my older constituents, Age UK and others will have noted that point carefully. In fact, he offended almost everybody I can imagine, including all the businesses, training colleges, councils and the NHS in Gloucester that have taken on apprenticeships in the past five years and have done so much to give the opportunities to young people that all of us across this House surely agree is incredibly important. In a sense, his final words rather summed up his speech. He finished by saying that he will be voting Labour. Well, I am delighted for the Leader of the Opposition that he has the vote of his shadow Business Secretary, but if that is the summary of his party’s strategy, it is pretty disappointing. We heard nothing about the opportunities to widen apprenticeships into more sectors, including nursing; the opportunities from the pilot scheme the Government have run to let employers take control of their training funds; and the ways in which the guilds can offer apprenticeships. There were many things that could and should have been covered today, and it is a great disappointment that they were not. I will certainly not be voting for this motion, but I do agree wholeheartedly with all the Members of this House who support apprenticeships and want to see more of them.
Apprenticeships — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Labor
Nicholas Edward Coleridge Boles (Conservative, Centre-right): It came as a bit of a surprise to learn that the Opposition were proposing a debate on apprenticeships, because as we have heard during this excellent debate, the Government can point to a remarkable record of success in their apprenticeship programme. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) that the number of apprenticeships in his constituency was 80% higher in the past year than in the last year of the previous Government, and my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) told the House that, through his efforts to create jobs fairs and no fewer than three apprenticeship fairs, unemployment in his constituency was now 50% lower than it was when he was elected to Parliament. We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller) that her local college, Basingstoke college, was keen to invest more money every year to create more apprenticeships, and I will of course be delighted to meet her and the college principal to discuss ways in which the college can bid more effectively for money in-year when it can identify ways to grow its programme I was particularly pleased to hear from the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram), who brought to the debate the enormous advantage of having completed an apprenticeship himself. I have no idea why he chose to give up that honourable trade for the one that he is now pursuing, but I am nevertheless full of admiration for him. He made an important contribution —compared with the woolly and glib thinking of those on his Front Bench—in pointing out the crucial importance of level 2 apprenticeships, particularly in construction. It would simply be wrong to tell the young men and women who are doing a level 2 apprenticeship in bricklaying that it was no longer going to be called an apprenticeship, even though they were employed, working hard, going to college and training, and even though they were securing valuable qualifications, of which many more are needed We also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), who made the particularly important point that there was a key link between apprenticeships and the industrial strategies that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has brought in. He also said that we needed to work with local economic partnerships to create apprenticeships that support the local growing sectors in his constituency and elsewhere. I am sorry that I have not yet been invited to his festival of manufacturing and engineering, but I look forward to receiving an invitation to the next one when he is re-elected in May. We have heard from my right hon. and hon. Friends about the good record of this Government. We have our record to be proud of, but Conservative Members also have a clear plan for the future. Unlike the Opposition’s proposals in the motion, our plan is fully costed and fully resourced.
Apprenticeships — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Education
Nicholas Edward Coleridge Boles (Conservative, Centre-right): We will continue to improve the quality of apprenticeships through our Trailblazers programme by getting groups of employers to develop apprenticeship standards that deliver the skills that they need. We will also offer young people a clear choice: to earn or learn—to get a job or to go to university—or to combine earning and learning through an apprenticeship. It does young people no favours to let them start their lives in subsidised inactivity, neither earning nor learning, so we will restrict the benefits that young people receive and use the money saved from that and from the proceeds of a reduction in the benefits cap from £26,000 to £23,000 to fund 3 million high-quality apprenticeships between 2015 and 2020 By contrast, what we have heard from the Opposition has been hopelessly vague. After the comprehensive demolition of the shadow Secretary of State’s policy on tuition fees by university vice-chancellors, he has clearly decided to try his luck with apprenticeships, but yet again we see that the right hon. Gentleman is better with atmospherics than with policy detail.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for being gracious in giving way. Liverpool authority received £161,000, which was the third highest allocation for maximising registration funding in the country. If there is any question to ask about the drop-off in registrations, it should be directed towards the council.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): As I said, in addition to the £161,000 of maximised registration funding, Liverpool received £288,000 to help boost its register. If that money was not enough, the city can apply to the Cabinet Office for more funding using justification-led bids. Electoral registration officers have statutory responsibility for maintaining the register, so perhaps the hon. Lady will ask her EROs what they have done with the money What has prompted the change of heart on the Labour Benches about IER? Is it because the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) is trying to taunt the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) in their bids to become the Labour candidate for the Mayor of London? Could it be that the Labour party, rightly scared of the next election, has retreated to the comfort zone of opposition politics and scaremongering about the Government’s policies?
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Macroeconomics
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): IER was the policy of your party to make the electoral process secure. The Electoral Commission has identified 16 local authorities at risk of electoral fraud. Just because you have not been able to point to it, it does not mean fraud is not happening. That is the point The same Labour party that introduced IER is now seeking to disown it. It is the same Labour party that said our long-term economic plan would lead to the disappearance of 1 million jobs. [Interruption.] Instead, 1,000 new jobs have been created every day of this Parliament. It said that reforming education maintenance allowance would increase the number of young people not in education, employment or training. [Interruption.] Instead, we have seen the biggest drop in the number of NEETs since records began.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Education
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): The Opposition said that our plan to ensure universities were properly funded would lead to fewer students going to university, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds. We now have record numbers of students, including from disadvantaged backgrounds, attending university. With this record, it is no surprise that the Opposition are seeking to create fear and uncertainty where there should be none.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): The number of people on the register is increasing all the time. If we look at the register for December or for any month, we see that it provides a partial snapshot of a two-year transition process. We also know that the old system was susceptible to fraud. In one case, someone managed to register their dog to vote.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Education
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): The registration of students, and block registration in particular, is a key issue in the motion. In my view, you either believe in individual voter registration or you do not. You cannot have it both ways. Singling out any group of voters for block registration would be a step backwards to the old, discredited system of registration What is most farcical about the stance adopted by the Opposition today is that they want to give 16-year-olds the vote, but do not trust them to be able to register themselves, even once they are at university. Their whole approach is based on political gimmicks. That is why the Leader of the Opposition ended up making a speech on under-registration in Sheffield, although Sheffield university, which has piloted a registration system involving the use of data when people enrol, has one of the highest student registration rates.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Education
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): It should be doing that. [Interruption.] It is not a case of blaming someone else. In 2013, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities, Science and Cities wrote to all vice-chancellors and academic registrars, encouraging them to look at multiple ways of getting students on to the register. We have set up a student forum in which best practice can be shared. If any academic registrars are not doing that, Members should by all means let me know, and we will write to them again to ensure that they are engaging in best practice Let me now answer the question about block registration. Data-sharing between universities and local authorities is the key, and we are working to ensure that all universities share data. That will enable electoral registration offers to have students’ enrolment details, and to chase them to register. It also means that we can preserve the central tenet of IER, which is that individuals should be responsible for their own registration.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Law and Crime
Matthew James Offord (Conservative, Centre-right): The reason there have been so few prosecutions could be, as we found out in the case of Nigel Kennedy, that there is a limited period in which a prosecution can be brought. That period may expire before the time it takes to get the evidence, and that determines that there will not be a prosecution.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Gary Nicholas Streeter (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes, we have, and the right hon. Gentleman will be pleased to learn that the Electoral Commission hit its target in the run-up to the last general election. I am pretty confident that it will do so again.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the hon. Gentleman for that invitation to intervene. Whoever is the Minister, and whoever is in government, the decision they make will be taken on the independent advice of the Electoral Commission. That is pretty clear as far as guiding principles are concerned.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): The report last week deals comprehensively with that, and there is another report to which I will refer the hon. Gentleman in a moment. Let me deal first with the important issue of why the Labour party really has adopted this attitude. I made an assumption about the backing away from Labour’s previous stance that we saw from the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan). I am sorry he is not in his place, because I know he is a great fan of block votes and he is probably looking for a few in the London Labour party at the moment for the nomination for Mayor—I am sure we could pass that on to him. I assumed it was the normal reaction that we get from the Labour party nowadays. IER was, of course, introduced—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) must contain himself for a moment. IER was, of course, introduced in 2009. What is that magic figure of 2009? Of course, Tony Blair was still around, so it is a legacy of the previous—[Interruption.] The Labour party is anxious to forget everything that went before and the reason the previous Government come into it is this: the Labour party had a track record of being extremely flaky on adopting IER The Electoral Commission published a report in 2003 and the Labour Government responded to it in 2004, saying that they were sympathetic to the principle of individual registration but they were not going to implement it—that is the reality. Ever since then, Labour has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards improving the quality of the electoral register. In the end, the experience in Northern Ireland, where IER certainly produced a reduction in the number of people on the register but also significantly reduced fraud, made it clear that Labour’s position was untenable. The people of Northern Ireland blazed the way for the rest of this country and we should salute the introduction of IER there. If it is good enough for Northern Ireland, it should be good enough for the rest of the UK as well, and it is no good the Labour party trying to row back from that now The Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 made provision for this phased implementation of IER. Ironically, that was not originally in the Bill and it was put in only as a result of pressure from the then Opposition parties in the House of Lords. The Labour party was reluctant even to take that step.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Stewart Jackson (Conservative, Centre-right): I named her, but I have named a lot of people in this debate The Labour party’s problem is simple: it is useless Labour councils. Those useless Labour councils are being given a lot of taxpayers’ money to do the job properly. They should be canvassing, registering people, ensuring that the right people are on the register and ensuring that there is electoral integrity in the register. If Labour Members have problems in Bristol, County Durham and the London borough of Merton, all of which are controlled by the Labour party, they should take them up with local people.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Stewart Jackson (Conservative, Centre-right): I cannot give way, I am afraid, because I have little time If this were a plot, we would not be putting so many public resources into the process. There has been £500,000 to boost confidence in the electoral system, £2.5 million has been spent on students and overseas voters, £6.8 million has been given to local authorities by the Department for Communities and Local Government for physical canvassing for registration, and there has been work on universities and housing associations as part of the Cabinet Office’s £9.8 million funding. We accept that some people will be missed in the DWP data-matching. In the central ward in my constituency, about 40% of people were missed. We understand that, but it is ultimately the responsibility of local authorities to find the missing voters by physical door-to-door canvassing. In that way, we will have a full register with integrity For most of the time, the previous Labour Government were content to see the potential for electoral register stuffing.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Law and Crime
Stewart Jackson (Conservative, Centre-right): No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman I have two more brief points to make. In considering this issue, the Minister should look again at bespoke funding to investigate improprieties and criminal activities in respect of election fraud, because it is difficult for a small constabulary to cope with such matters. We must look again at the Representation of the People Act 1983 in respect of ID at polling stations and the ability to challenge voters in cases of impersonation. That is an important issue Finally, the Government have done an excellent job—largely, I admit, with cross-party support—on postal vote integrity, which is still an important issue. For example, Peterborough city council threw out one in five applicants for postal votes in Central ward in May 2014. Fraud is still a problem and we must be vigilant and protect the electoral integrity of our political system. We should ensure that the right people are on the electoral register and have the opportunity to vote. That is above party politics, and it is a shame that the Labour party cannot rise above partisan point scoring in the national interest.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Education
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): EROs, who are responsible for maintaining the register in their local areas, can go to schools and talk about registering. They do not need legislation to do that. The only thing legislation will do is increase the burden on schools, which we do not want to do.
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Law and Crime
John Simon Bercow (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. He has put his concerns on the record. That said I will, if I may, make two points. First, these are matters dealt with by an established process under the auspices of the Serjeant at Arms, and although I do not cavil at the hon. Gentleman having an opinion on the matter, we do not discuss security related matters on the Floor of the Chamber. Secondly, I put it on the record that, although the hon. Gentleman has a view that he has expressed with great alacrity, there is also the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, which is on the statute book. I note what he says and I understand his concern and no one will deny him the right to his point of view, but we will leave it there for tonight.