Achieving Economic Growth — House of Commons, 2022-05-18
Topic: Education
Andrew Edmund Armstrong Selous (Conservative, Centre-right): I am so grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. There is a wonderful Indian employer in my constituency who calls his disabled staff "differently abled". That is a wonderful way to put it, because they have amazing gifts to bring. Often, employers will say that they are some of the most hard working and dedicated, which is why our disability confident campaign, which has clearly been successful, is so important, so I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point Secondly, I am focusing in particular on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill and what it needs to do, and I want to raise the appalling difficulty that many of us on both sides of the House have in getting sufficient additional general practice capacity where there are huge new housing developments. We are a country that generally does public administration and planning well—for example, I rarely come across a child who does not have a school place—because we have brilliant civil servants and brilliant local authority officers. However, I must say that a major exception is general practice, where the system is not working well. I ask my Front-Bench colleagues please to note that and take it back across Government There is an alphabet soup of different places to go to try to get a health hub or extra GP surgeries. One could try section 106 or the community infrastructure levy. One might be lucky with the housing infrastructure fund. Perhaps one’s local authority—or even Government capital from the Treasury to the Department of Health and Social Care—will come to the rescue. It is complicated and uncertain, and we are not serving our constituents well in ensuring that general practice capacity is available. I have 14,000 new houses being built, which will help with the housing issues that I mentioned, but that is more than 36,000 new residents coming to my area for which we must have the general practice capacity. I will keep campaigning on that issue until it is resolved I turn to the Schools Bill. The Government are doing lots of good things in schools and skills, and never has that been more important. I am pleased to report to my hon. Friends on the Front Bench that the Church of England is particularly pleased with the Bill. Why is that significant? The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church run a third of the schools in England, so it is a big stakeholder. The Bishop of Durham and Nigel Genders, our chief education officer, have said how pleased they are and that they have extremely good co-operation with the Secretary of State for Education, which they are delighted with. They think they can do a lot more together. I like what we are doing on lifetime skills. T-levels are really important. There is a little more work to do on apprenticeships, but what we are doing on employer representative bodies is absolutely right I have a particular issue with computer numerical control operators in my area as engineering businesses are screaming to get hold of them. I am working closely with the Bedford College Group on that, which we must press through. Those jobs pay about £48,000 a year, so it is not right that we cannot get people to do them. The skills Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart)—is coming to Houghton Regis on 6 June and I look forward to his visit.