Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-11-23
Topic: Education
Barry John Sheerman (Labour, Centre-left): My old friend, and hon. Friend, is absolutely right. The percentage of impermanent and short-term contracts in colleges and universities is not good and does not bode well for a happy team delivering high-quality output FE colleges are vital if we are to produce the people who work in the sectors in which we must improve our productivity. There is very little sign that that is being taken seriously. My local college is brand-new, with a fine new building—an extraordinarily good building—because it invested. Why should kids going to FE college not have the nice environment that university students have? All those colleges that invested in new buildings and high-class facilities are now in deep financial trouble. They are struggling We must also take into account the intransigence of the Department for Education on the question of GCSEs in English and maths. There should be a practical qualification as well as an academic one, and I and many others have called for this for many months and years. At the moment, most FE colleges are warehousing tens of thousands of young people who cannot get on with their lives or start an apprenticeship because they do not have a GCSE in English and maths We know that some very good reforms have come out of the Sainsbury recommendations. They were a good piece of policy in many ways. The new skills levy and apprenticeship levy are excellent policies, based on getting someone who knows about that stuff to take evidence. I gave evidence. However, in the Budget the Government have not considered one of the ramifications of the policy, which is the 62% drop in the number of young people starting an apprenticeship this year. That is appalling news for the income streams of further education colleges. According to the regulators—we had the commissioner in the House of Commons only this week—many of the colleges are experiencing real problems with their financial arrangements. My own college, Kirklees College, and many others are struggling, and this Budget does nothing to help them My next point is on housing. I believe that everyone in this country should have the chance of a decent home, but many people cannot afford one. Let us reflect on the history of housing crises over the years. The Victorians could see the problem and, as the railways came, they established a programme for garden suburbs. After the first world war, Lloyd George declared that we needed "homes fit for heroes", and the Liberal Government encouraged the building of council houses. What a wonderful initiative that was! Between the wars, the new towns started to be built, and after the war we had the prefabs. In every housing crisis, there has been a resolute determination to have a policy to fix it, but the policy announced in yesterday’s Budget is neither bold nor imaginative, and it will not fix the problem. As the Chancellor was making his remarks yesterday, I could see behind him rows of people who jump up and down in their constituencies and tell their constituency associations and their local electorate, "There will be no houses near you. You can have the green views and the rolling hills. No one will move in next door to you." The nimbys rule in the Conservative party, but they should stop being so powerful I want to finish by mentioning the north-south divide. There was little in the Budget about the north of England, and there was precious little about Yorkshire. When I asked the Secretary of State whether the Budget would give us the money to electrify the Pennine rail link, he would not answer, because the money is not in there; we have not got it. This country has greater gaps between its regions than any other OECD country. If only the Chancellor had grasped the real chance he had in the Budget to invest in the northern regions, he could have given us great transportation and great communications. He could have invested in the north, rather than investing in London and the south all the time. We will fight this Budget. We will fight it for Yorkshire and for working people, and we will change it when there is a Labour Government.