Education, Skills and Training — House of Commons, 2016-05-25
Topic: Mixed Topics
Seema Louise Ghiassi Kennedy (Conservative, Centre-right): It is pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) and my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who are both great champions of their constituents. It is a great honour to speak in this debate on the Gracious Speech Many hon. Members have spoken passionately about education, skills and training. It is absolutely vital that, as a nation, we get these elements right if we want to build up a cohort of our fellow citizens who are ready to face the world of work at 18 or 22, but also later in their lives as lifelong learners, because our workforce is changing, and our economy is changing, in a profound a long-lasting way I pay tribute to the Federation of Small Businesses for its excellent report, "Going it alone, moving on up: Supporting self-employment in the UK", which provided many of the statistics that I will use in the next few minutes. Today 15% of the workforce is self-employed, compared with 8% in 1980. To support this strong and growing economy, we, as legislators, need to be as nimble as those entrepreneurs—that 15% of our constituents. There is always a balance between laissez-faire and red tape, and in our legislative programme we need to adapt to the changing economy I have great hopes of some of the Bills in the Gracious Speech, but I also have some questions for Ministers, and some suggestions on three Bills in particular. I would like to begin by speaking briefly on the better markets Bill. Competition law is always one step behind the market; I speak as somebody who spent part of my training in a competition law department. I very much welcome this Bill to keep pace with the changing markets. I welcome the "faster switching" principle for energy suppliers. I have done that myself, as have many other right hon. and hon. Members, I am sure. I particularly welcome the clarification of the roles of economic regulators. We are dealing with very adept businesses—people who are highly lawyered—and if, as legislators, we want to protect consumers, we need strong measures in place I want to speak briefly about the regulation of one market that is quite unsexy but utterly vital—the water market. Last summer, my constituents in South Ribble, along with another 300,000 households in Lancashire, had no drinkable water for one month. The contamination of cryptosporidium in our drinking water had a massive effect on consumers and, particularly, on small businesses in the catering industry. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) has spoken about this because, of course, he has many cafés and restaurants in his constituency. That incident highlighted very clearly the monopolistic nature of the water market I am therefore happy that from April next year a new non-household retail water and waste water market will be opening up. However, I am concerned about the implications of this new regime for small businesses and sole traders, because after the cryptosporidium outbreak many small businesses found it hard to access the compensation—the process was not quite as simple as for domestic consumers. Ofwat has clearly stated that part of its remit in this new water market is to ensure that the market operates effectively. It has made representations to DEFRA Ministers that the guaranteed service standards should cover all non-household customers in the market. Unfortunately, there are no Business, Innovation and Skills Ministers present, but I am sure we will be told whether anyone from that Department has discussed the issue with DEFRA and whether the guaranteed service standards will be rolled into the better markets Bill From one unsexy subject—water and sewerage—to another, namely savings and pensions. Our national statistics on savings are woeful compared with those of our EU neighbours. The French save about twice as much as we do.