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Mr. Hope: I could not agree more genuinely about the need to consult young people. I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that the Government have consulted young people, through a variety of mechanisms. Young people have visited No. 10 Downing street as part of the social exclusion unit's strategy for including consultation with young people in its decision-making process. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that every hon. Member could do far more to consult young people? For example, I hold parliamentary youth forums in my constituency to ensure that I hear young people's views. Could not other hon. Members do the same?
Mr. Rowe: The tide is beginning to come in. The enthusiasm of young people for the United Kingdom youth parliament has outrun the available resources. I am grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, who is no longer in his place, for what little in the way of resources has been given to those of us who want to establish the parliament. However, the body will be established: it will change the face of the country and do a great deal to engage people not with party politics but with the stuff of politics. In that way, we can try to make society work better.
Access to the health service also needs to be looked at carefully. The move to consulting the consumer is in some ways welcome, but we are in danger of allowing the consumer's preference to outrun common sense. For example, many beds in the national health service are blocked because families are given a choice about which home their elderly relatives can be sent to. Although the choice is often severely limited, no placement in a particular home has to be accepted. Families pay nothing while their elderly or sick relative is in hospital, but they may have to pay top-up fees when that relative moves into a home. There is therefore a perverse incentive that leads to beds being blocked. We need to look at that and similar problems very carefully.
Finally, I turn to the question of consultants. We should honour the dedication, hard work and expertise that many consultants display, but we should also be extremely tough when consultants say that they will not work with a colleague but refuse to help health trusts by putting their reasons in writing. As a result of such behaviour, a health trust may have to spend as much as £1.25 million of patients' money which it can ill afford to get rid of a person with whom consultants will not work. Defensive practices such as that are out of date and improper.
6.7 pm
Mr. Bill Rammell (Harlow): I shall be brief, as I am aware that other hon. Members wish to contribute to the debate.
My first comments are addressed to the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow), who, in his typically robust contribution, made some of the repetitive errors for which he is known. He spoke about exclusions from school. I do not propose that violent and disruptive pupils should not be removed from school, under certain circumstances. However, the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) was right to point out that there is a danger that the difficulty may be exaggerated.
That exaggeration is a persistent problem among Conservative Members and their spokespeople. During the 18 years of the Conservative Government, there was a deliberate attempt to denigrate state education and to encourage people to move to the private sector. The constant harping on the problem of violence in state schools is part of a pattern.
Although care must be taken with the targets set for the reduction in exclusions from schools, anyone who talks to head teachers knows that league tables make schools conscious of their exclusion rates, and that schools can use those rates to manage their position in the league table. Any Government who did not take that into account and did not try to reduce exclusions would be irresponsible. Excluding pupils without offering them any alternative forms of education merely stores up social problems for the future.
Mr. David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire): The private school nearest to the House is Westminster school. Its head teacher has excluded many final-year students as a result of behaviour that was reported in both the national and the international press. Is it not clear that the problem of exclusion is therefore not confined to state schools in difficult areas?
Mr. Rammell: It certainly is not, and that is in line with my critique of the contribution from the hon. Member for Buckingham. The hon. Gentleman displayed breathtaking nerve when he criticised the Government for increasing the amount of regulation. Anyone visiting a school during the 18 years of Conservative Government was regaled by teachers with stories of the never-ending regulation and coercion to which they were subjected by that Government. We have rightly focused on standards and on the necessary regulations. However, I welcome the fact that the Government are listening to what schools and teachers are saying, and are seeking to remove some of that regulation.
I was also interested in the hon. Gentleman's comments about the percentage of national wealth invested in education under this Government. Who was it who talked about lies, damned lies and statistics? First, the percentage of national wealth that is invested in education depends greatly on the performance of the economy. In a booming economy, as we have at the moment, a percentage of national wealth invested in education means vastly more money being invested in schools than happened under a Government who went through the two worst recessions since the second world war.
Mr. Bercow: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Secondly, anybody can play with the figures. The key judgment for electors is what a Government inherit and what they have done by the end of their period in office. It is incontestable that, by the end of this Government's period of office, we will be investing a higher proportion of national income in education than the proportion that we inherited when the Conservatives left office on 1 May 1997.
We then heard from the hon. Gentleman a sustained diatribe against the new deal. I take exception to that, because I passionately believe, from talking to young people, that the new deal is the first sustained, properly funded scheme for the long-term unemployed that we have seen in this country in a generation. The hon. Gentleman pointed out that the rate of decrease in terms of long-term youth unemployment was less now than it was between 1993 and 1997. I do not have the statistics in front of me, but I do not doubt that, because we are moving towards full employment. We have dramatically reduced unemployment. As we move towards full employment, of course the rate of decrease will reduce. This way of playing with statistics to present a false impression leads to great concern.
I recently held an event at the House of Commons for employers in my constituency to focus on the opportunities to be obtained by the new deal. Unbeknown to me, a young woman from British Airports Authority, who works at Stansted airport, was there. She had been unemployed for six months; she felt that she had no hope, no opportunity. She went on the new deal, and is now the personal assistant to one of the directors at BAA at Stansted. That example demonstrates that the new deal is working.
We also heard about the national health service. Lectures from the Conservative party about our stewardship of the national health service are very difficult to take. If we consider in detail what happened under the previous Government for 18 years, we see that there were erratic increases in funding. There were a couple of good years here and there in terms of increased investment, normally as we were coming up to a general election, but in some years, the real-terms increase in funding was as little as 0.4 per cent.
The difference that people are seeing under this Government is sustained, continuing investment so that we can begin to tackle problems such as the bed blocking to which the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe) referred and some of the problems involving consultants. Sustained investment, over the longer term, needs to take place so that we can provide the kind of health service that people want.
Mr. Bercow: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman did not dispute the fact that the Government are responsible for a shortfall of about £13 billion in terms of their manifesto commitment to increasing expenditure on education. He did not cavil at that charge against the Government.
Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that he is aware that, in the majority of cases, the new deal is not producing sustained, unsubsidised jobs, and that the majority of people going on the scheme are finding jobs for a short period but are then coming out of work again?
Mr. Rammell: When we launched the new deal, nobody ever said that we would guarantee a job to
everybody when they came out of the scheme. The new deal is, however, providing opportunities where previously none existed.Liberal Democrat Members focused on the Chancellor of the Exchequer's comments. I think that my right hon. Friend was absolutely right to make those comments about the Laura Spence case. He was rightly identifying an example of a superbly qualified young woman, who was adequately qualified for entrance to Oxford university, but did not get in. That case highlighted a problem. If it was an isolated example, we could ignore it, but I do not believe that it is. I remember the example, which gained national newspaper coverage, of a young woman in my constituency who applied to Oxbridge, and was ridiculed at the interview not because of her qualifications, her intelligence or her ambition, but because of her accent.
In addition to those specific examples, an independent report this week shows that children and young people from state schools are significantly under-represented compared with what we would expect, given their qualifications. We have a real problem. There are young people who have ambition and talent and are adequately qualified, but because of historical reasons and prejudices, they are not getting access to our best universities.
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