| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Helen Jones: The hon. Gentleman' intervention is almost entirely wrong, because Warrington was not
doing well. Large parts of Warrington had very high unemployment under the Conservatives. If he will permit me, I will give him the figures and the reasons why we managed to tackle that.First, because Warrington was a new town—the hon. Gentleman may well have a point on this—it was fortunate enough to be at the heart of a very good motorway network. That was public infrastructure provided by public money. Warrington was also fortunate enough to have a council that actively promoted economic development and provided sites for new businesses in the town—a Labour council, looking forward.
The council was able to take advantage of the improvement of the economy under this Government because of many of the schemes that the Government introduced, such as the new deal, which the Tories opposed consistently, and modern apprenticeships. We hear a great deal of discussion about those, and the Tories try to talk them down, but they are providing good training for a number of young people in my constituency. The results can be seen very clearly. Long-term unemployment in Warrington has fallen by 83 per cent. since 1997, and long-term youth unemployment has fallen by 79 per cent. I can tell the hon. Gentleman in very simple terms what difference the Government have made in Warrington. They got people back to work, and everything else has followed from that.
I do not deny that there is much more to be done. There are still serious inequalities in the borough, and I represent many of the most deprived wards. We have surmounted the first challenge, which was to return people to work; the challenge for us now is to improve their skills and give them long-term careers in which they can develop those skills and earn a good living. I welcome the new deal for skills that was announced in the Budget statement, which I expect to benefit many of the people whom I represent. It must, however, be accompanied by ways of helping people to move on after gaining those skills.
If, as the debate suggests, we all agree that vocational skills are undervalued, we must ensure that the acquisition of such skills can lead to other things—further and higher education, for instance, according to how people want to develop. We cannot do that if we cap the number of people who can move on. That is why I am so worried about the Conservatives' refusal to tell us how many people they want to put into higher education. Talk is all very well, but if an artificial cap is imposed on numbers, those who suffer will be the very people who have been traditionally under-represented in higher education throughout history.
The Conservatives talk of making sure that people who are capable of undergoing higher education can do so, but that has never happened in this country. Only those who believe that ability is distributed according to income—which is complete nonsense—could imagine that it had. Working-class pupils are always, and have always been, under-represented in higher education. It is people from poorer families whom we must help to grow and develop.
My constituency needs that above all, because we hope to benefit from the recently proposed northern corridor. We are ideally placed to benefit from it. On the M62, we have Omega, the largest industrial
development site in the north-west. I want—and I know that the local council wants—to attract high-tech, science-based jobs to the area. I hope that we shall be able to use both the new deal for skills and the investment in science and innovation that the Chancellor announced to attract such jobs to regions such as mine—not just the golden triangle of the south-east—so that we can turn the ideas developed in our north-western universities into employment opportunities. That is the way to enable our economy to prosper in the future.
Chris Grayling: The hon. Lady speaks of the need to give more opportunities to young people from less well-off backgrounds in her constituency. Following the passage of the Higher Education Bill, even given the new grants that it will provide, those young people will leave university £10,000 in debt. Does she support the Government's policy on introducing fees, and will she vote for the Bill's Third Reading?
Helen Jones: My constituents and the hon. Gentleman know my views on the Bill, but let me say this. The Opposition's policies would benefit none of the people whom I represent, because they would prevent them from going to university at all. I will take no lectures from him on opportunities for members of lower-paid families.
Mr. Sheerman: Does my hon. Friend agree that the Budget statement said that the expansion of UK universities would be funded, and that the amount received by each student during that expansion would be maintained, whereas critics had said that the £1 billion from fees would be compensated for by the taking away of public money? Is that not a great relief for most of us?
Helen Jones: I agree. It is also proper for the Government to tackle the scandalous underinvestment in universities that has continued for far too long.
If my constituency is to benefit from future development in the north, investment is needed in public transport as well as in skills and science. The corridor cannot be developed simply by blocking up the M62. The Government have already made some advances, with investment in buses, bus exchange and traffic management in my constituency. The upgrading of the west coast main line will bring particular benefits to my constituents but more needs to be done. Bank Quay station in Warrington is an absolute disgrace for a mainline railway station. The rail corridor from Liverpool to Manchester needs considerable work to upgrade local stations such as Birch Wood and Glazebrook, to ensure that more trains stop at smaller stations and that bus services link up, so that public transport can be used to get to work.
It a long-cherished wish of my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Ian Stewart) and myself that before long the Manchester tram system will be extended to Cadishead in his constituency and to the Birch Wood industrial area in mine. That is a long-term project but it has been a failure of Governments over time not to think long term about infrastructure and its contribution to developing the economy. I hope that the present economic stability will allow the planning of such projects in future.
If my constituency is to benefit from the Budget, projects are needed that tackle disadvantage in the most deprived areas and allow all to benefit. There is only one Sure Start project in my constituency—for a new children's centre at St. Stephen's. Although it provides the best possible start for youngsters in that area and spreads best practice elsewhere, more projects are needed. I am pleased about the Budget proposal to extend children's centres to the most deprived wards and then to every community.
Sure Start is one of the Government's most forward-thinking and innovative initiatives. I hope that it will be combined with improvements to child care. Warrington has more than 4,000 nursery education places for three and four-year-olds, which is a great improvement, but they are part-time places. Parents in work often find it a struggle to find appropriate child care. The new tax credits have helped, but parents on low incomes in particular have difficulty finding the nursery places that they need. Investment in child care fulfils all the criteria for good public services. It supports individual effort, looks after the most vulnerable, tackles disadvantage and ultimately saves money. As an ex-secondary school teacher, I believe that early-years investment ultimately saves the schools system a great deal of money because it prevents problems developing later.
Sir John Butterfill: I agree with the hon. Lady's comments about Sure Start. Does she agree that one of the great benefits of that scheme is not simply that it provides child care but that it assists young mothers to acquire parenting skills?
Helen Jones: The hon. Gentleman is right. The other advantage of Sure Start is that it is a universal service, so no stigma attaches to anyone in using it. That, too, is important in trying to tackle disadvantage.
We also need further investment in community policing. My constituency is lucky in that we have community action teams in various areas and 11 community support officers. The Budget was right to make it clear that there will be no cuts in policing. If we are to create a confident society in which people feel at ease, it is important to ensure that they feel safe and secure on our streets and in other public spaces.
The key for any politician is how we maintain support for investment in public services and how we tailor them to people's needs. The Opposition propose the parent's passport and vouchers. Such an approach has the merit, I suppose, of being simple, but it has the demerit of being absolutely wrong. Under the mantle of choice, it would actually deny choice to most people. We heard about the Opposition's school proposals—we can never be sure exactly what they are as they seem to change from day to day—but we need only to look at their proposals for the health service to see how misguided they are. Apparently, a patient would receive 60 per cent. of the NHS cost of an operation, but let us consider the example of an old lady waiting for a hip operation. Unless she could raise the rest of the money, she would have no choice whatsoever, while at the same time her local hospital would be being starved of funds. That is a classic example of "To them that have shall be given."
I see no merit in considering people's relationship with public services solely through the consumer model; the situation is much more complicated than that. It is
right to say that people want public services to meet their needs quickly, but a consumer has no responsibility except to herself. She buys or does not buy, turns up or does not turn up, as she wishes. People think about public services in a way very different from that. They recognise a whole network of complex obligations that entail meeting not only their own needs, but the needs of others. The key for us is how we meet those needs and spread best practice in public services.We need to define what people want when they talk about choice in public services. It is easy to do that when they talk about wanting to see a doctor near their home or place of work, or about wanting to book their hospital appointment at a time convenient to them. But much of what we hear about choice depends on improving access. I see no evidence to suggest that many people want to rush off to hospital at the other end of the country—unless they need a particular specialist service—or that they want to be able to change their child's school or child care arrangements in the same way as they switch between supermarkets. They have a much longer, two-way relationship with such services. What they want is for us to ensure that the service provided by their local hospital, school or child care facilities is as good as that found anywhere else.
In looking at funding, the question for us is how we spread best practice. A model that we should think seriously about is the one that was used for beacon schools. Best practice in schools was recognised and rewarded, but in a way that required schools to spread that best practice elsewhere. We need to do much more of that in public services and to find many more such models. My fear is that if we fragment our services too much, we will lose the chance to operate the virtuous circles that spread best practice. That is why I have some reservations about how we devolve services locally. It is true that many communities, particularly poorer ones, are not consulted enough about the services provided for them and that they are not involved in those services. Things are often done to them, rather than with them, so we must build funding mechanisms that involve people on the ground.
I enter a note of caution, however, about devolving ownership too far down, because two problems often follow. The first is that there is no evidence of loads of people wanting to go out and run the services. The experience of most Members in respect of finding school governors would confirm that. Even as governors have been accorded more and more powers, it has proved more and more difficult to find people who want to become governors.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |