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The hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Dr. Taylor) mentioned drugs and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. He was hugely generous to that body in many waysfar fairer than I will be. We all have constituents whose primary care trusts have turned down their request for drugs, because those drugs have not been passed by NICE. The truth is that trusts could offer drugs that have not been passed by NICE, but many of them, because they want to save money, hide behind NICEs decision as a way of explaining why they are not giving those drugs. I have at least two constituents who need Velcade but who have been told that they cannot have it. That drug is made available in Scotland via the Barnett formula, and it is subsidised by English taxpayers, yet English patients cannot obtain it. Something is therefore wrong. If drugs that are clinically proven are made
available in Scotland and Wales, why are they not made available to our constituents? I thought that we had a national health service, so I ask the Minister whether we can have it back. We want a service in which drugs are made available throughout the United Kingdom, once they are proven to be effective.
The situation is the same for Alzheimers drugs. Why cannot people suffering from Alzheimers obtain drugs with a relatively small cost of £2.50that is less than a pack of 10 cigaretteswhich are proven to be effective in slowing down the onslaught of Alzheimers? What about the effect on sufferers families, as the drugs are available for a relatively small amount of money, but their loved ones cannot obtain them? That is appalling, especially when we juxtapose it with the news this week that the Government have come to a settlement with some prisoners who were forced to go cold turkey because they could not obtain access to drugs in prison. At the same time, people who are ill through no fault of their own cannot obtain access to drugs on the national health service because of cost, which is quite scandalous. I hope that that topsy-turvy, Alice in Wonderland situation can be corrected, so that drugs are given to people who desperately need them.
I shall conclude on the subject of primary care trusts, which has been mentioned time and again. There have been alterations in Ribble Valley, too. It is important to listen, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead talked about the public saying, This is the sort of health service that we want. We are paying for it; this is how we would like to be treated. The same thing happened in a town in my constituency, Longbridge, which was taken out of one primary care trust and put into another. It is completely insane for some bureaucrat to decide to do that on the basis of a geographical nicety, or for the sake of tidiness, without listening to all the doctors and patients who said that they wished to remain where they were, and to be treated in the Preston area, as opposed to east Lancashire. I know that the Minister is going to look into the issue again, to see whether any changes can be made so that the people of Longbridge can once again be covered by the primary care trust for the Preston area, and I hope that that can be done. It is not easy, particularly given the nature of the bus services in rural areas, to travel from Longbridge to parts of Burnley, Accrington or Blackburn, where my constituents may have to go to obtain part of their treatment. As I say, the move may have made sense from the point of view of bureaucratic tidiness, but it is a crying shame that people who live in a town should be told that they cannot receive their treatment there, and must go somewhere else.
Finally, we should pay tribute to all the nurses, doctors and ancillary staff, and to our teachers and their ancillary staff. They are the investment in both of those wonderful services that we have in the United Kingdom. My hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) mentioned car parking charges. Imagine what would happen if we tried to charge teachers for parking in our schools. It is nonsense. None of us would tolerate it, so why do we tolerate our nurses and doctors having to pay car parking charges when they go to work in hospitals? It is an outrage and ought to be corrected.
Sarah Teather (Brent, East) (LD): I am grateful to be called to speak in the debate. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches do not have an automatic Front-Bench right to reply, so I am being called as a Back Bencher. With that in mind, I shall keep my comments relatively brief to make sure that the other hon. Member who wants to speak has an opportunity to do so. I will confine my comments to education matters, partly to give the Secretary of State for Education and Skills something to respond to, as the debate today has been almost entirely dominated by health matters.
That may be because there is not much in the Gracious Speech about education, and perhaps also because there has not been very much about education in the press in the lead-up to the Gracious Speech. Education has not been one of the Governments key priorities to spin to the press ahead of the Queens Speech. There is just one education Bill, and by all accounts it will be relatively short and technical. But of course not everything needs legislation to achieve it, so I hope that the Governments priorities for education may be achieved through other means.
The Gracious Speech contained one phrase about which I am hopeful, on which we will hold the Government to account, and which we hope to encourage the Secretary of State to champion. I refer to the intention
to help the most vulnerable members of society.
In the UK today, the most important predictor of a students attainment at school remains parental income, and one of the most important predictors of future income is attainment in school, so for whatever reasonfor many complex reasons, I suspect, some to do with parental achievement and expectation, some to do with access to education at various stages throughout ones careerwe have a system that entrenches disadvantage, rather than offering a vehicle of hope to get out of it. Clearly, there is an enormous amount still to do in that area.
Annette Brooke: I am sure my hon. Friend would agree that funding for pupils with special needs and from deprived areas is essential. Will she encourage the Government to consider the use of pupil premiums?
Sarah Teather: My hon. Friend has pre-empted the point that I was about to make. We are of one mind. The Secretary of State made some interesting announcements outside the Chamber today. He said that the Government were looking at ways to reward schools for taking children from poorer backgrounds, which I applaud. May I suggest that he consider the policy that we have been studying, which my hon. Friend mentioned a moment ago?
The system of pupil premiums is used by a number of other countries to target money on the particular child, rather than trying to second-guess what extra help a school might need because of the deprived area in which it is situated. Deprivation funding is at present a complicated mess, as the Government know. Their child poverty review, which was published in December 2005 but received almost no publicity, recognised that.
Some money is automatically allocated by the centre. Some money must be applied for by schools. Some is
distributed on the basis of deprivation. Many of the proxies used to assess deprivation are out of date. Some money is given directly to schools and some is given to local authorities. Some of the money is not redistributed to schools, and much of it fails to reach the front line. So why not put all those complicated streams into one pot and target the money on the individual child?
That would have several advantages. First, students who need extra help would have the extra money allocated to them to pay for that extra help. Secondly, schools that at the moment, because of league tables, have a disincentive to take the students whom they fear may struggle would gain an incentive to take those students because they would come with a little extra money attached. Thirdly, if the extra help is there for students who struggle, they are far less likely to be disruptive, because they would be having the extra support that they need to benefit and to achieve.
That targeted system works well in the Netherlands, for example, and I hope very much that when the Government come to look at this that the Secretary of StateI know that he has announced that he will be consulting on such areaswill consider adopting this policy. They have acknowledged that their deprivation funding is not reaching the front line, so I hope that he will consider the policy that Liberal Democrats think would make a real difference.
To return to the reference in the Gracious Speech to vulnerable members of society, the key to that is ensuring that all schools are of a high quality, and much of that is about personnel. It is about ensuring that we have appropriately qualified teachers and head teachers in all our schools. The shortage of qualified teachers is particularly prominent in those schools that are worst performing, and they are often in the very deprived areasthe areas that take the most vulnerable members of our society who most need that expert teaching and intervention.
The Budget announced that the Government had accepted the Liberal Democrat idea of money to retrain teachers who are teaching in an area for which they are not qualified, but they agreed only to run pilots in science. I hope that they will extend that to other areas, such as modern languages, which is also of critical importance, and where there is an enormous shortage of highly qualified teachers.
We face a real crisis in recruiting good-quality leaders for our schools, and without them we have no hope of driving up performance in underperforming schools. We need a system for fast-tracking young teachers through the system, and those returning to work after a career break, perhaps for a family, to ensure that it is flexible enough so that they can attain headship. We need to consider why it is that so many of our black and ethnic minority teachers do not attain headship. There must be barriers stopping very talented teachers from different backgrounds attaining headship and those must be researched and removed.
It is baffling to me that the Government would initiate two major reviews of the further education sector, yet produce a Bill in between both of them that fails to implement most of the recommendations of either. Foster recommended major changes to simplify the funding of further education, but no one is expecting anything so dramatic to be in the Bill when it
is published. Leitch will not report until December, but we are told that the Government will tweak the Bill if Leitch proposes anything contradictory to the Bill after it is published. I am left wondering whether the Government either anticipate that there will be nothing dramatic in the Leitch review that is worth implementing, which would be extremely depressing, or whether they simply do not intend to implement the recommendations. Or perhaps we face the prospect of another Bill from the Department, such as the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill in the previous Session, which was constantly rewritten as it went through the House. I hope that that will not be case, because it is not a very sensible way to make legislation. It did not produce good legislation that will hit the issues that need to be tackled.
The Secretary of State has said that 2007-08 will be the year of skills. If that were the case, all hon. Members would strongly endorse it, but the Government have not spun the fact that there will be anything dramatic in the Bill. Perhaps the Secretary of State is completely changing practice and keeping all the ideas ready for the Bill to be produced, but I fear that that is probably not the case. I suspect that if there were anything dramatic and exciting to be published in the Bill, we would have heard about it by now. Why not take advantage not just of the Leitch report being published before Christmas, but of the Lyons review, simplify the complex and confusing funding arrangement between learning and skills councils and local authorities and shift the 16-to-19 funding to local authorities?
Then we could have joined-up funding. It could herald the beginning of a system whereby money could follow students as they move between schools and colleges, mixing vocational and academic courses. Schools and colleges could collaborate on a fair footing, not one whereby college students find themselves short-changed by about £400 each. The Government have asked for healthy cooking courses to be implemented in all schools. Many schools do not have the equipment to do that, but colleges often do. We need better collaboration, and it can be achieved only through fair funding.
We expect the Bill to have one eye-catching proposalto allow colleges to award foundation degrees. That appears to have come from nowhere. It was not in the White Paper or in the Foster review, and nobody appears to have been consulted about it. It recognises that for many students of all agents, the route into higher education is through further education. I am grateful to the Government for that However, would not it be more meaningful if on the back of that recognition, we had a flexible system that encouraged students to move between those institutions? That would recognise the reality for many students who, because of family responsibilities or caring responsibilities, or because they need to work part-time, find that they need to begin their education in their local area at a local college, but may then wish to move and do other parts of their course at another institution? Followed up by a sensible and radical funding system, that would be the beginning of a truly radical policy.
What about the Chancellors instruction to Leitch that he should look particularly at the link between
skills and welfare to work? Will that be covered in the Bill? The Government commissioned Leitch to identify the UKs optimal skills mix in 2020 to maximise economic growth, productivity and social justice, and to consider the policy implications of achieving the level of change required. When will they introduce the legislation to implement that? Will they publish another Bill in the next Session to put forward those proposals from Leitch, or will it not happen? The Leitch review may herald exciting advances, but only if the Government put it into practice.
The area of adult skills falls between different portfolios far too easily. When hon. Members ask questions about it, we are too often told that adult courses are all about Australian cake-making or tarot card reading. It gets belittled and everyone thinks it is very funny. However, the Chancellor recognised, as do we, that adult skills courses are a vital link with getting people back into work, and Liberal Democrat Members recognise that. We do not want to hear any more of the Governments rhetoric to the effect that adult skills courses are the bottom end, or the fluffy end, of course provision and are not vital for access to education. For many people, they are the only route back into reskilling and work.
The proposed Bill leaves many questions unanswered. Liberal Democrat Members will continue throughout the Session to hold the Government to account, particularly on the phrase in the Queens Speech about maximising opportunities for the most vulnerable members of our society.
Angela Watkinson (Upminster) (Con): I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the Queens Speech debate on health and educationbut I am rather surprised by the array of empty Benches on the Government side of the Chamber. Whatever happened to schools and hospitals? Whatever happened to education, education, education? Perhaps the Government think that they have resolved all the problems and there is nothing further to discuss, and that is why Labour Members are not present today.
I want to speak about the further education Bill, which was mentioned in the Queens Speech, the new measures to strengthen the probation service, and antisocial behaviour orders. I want to speak up for young people today.
Young people get a bad press; only a small proportion get into trouble, especially through antisocial behaviour, but people tend to think that that is true of all young people. That is far from the truthit applies to only a small number. However, the complaints against those who cause trouble are justified so I shall begin with negative comments, because I want to work up to a much brighter and more optimistic ending to my speech, when I shall concentrate on the good young people.
The Mayor of London has provided free bus travel for young people. I am sure that that was well intended so that they could get to and from college. Indeed, I am sure that many use it for that purpose. However, a significant number use it to cause mischief. They get on and off buses, behaving antisocially and causing nuisance. When on the buses, they intimidate not only
passengers but the drivers. The police have a difficult job trying to catch up with them because they keep moving on. That sort of behaviour from a small proportion of the young people who use buses gives them all a bad name. It is a difficult problem to tackle.
We must remember that hanging about in a group in public places is not an offence, but many people are intimidated simply by the sight of young people hanging about on street corners and in other places. However, they sometimes commit offences through nuisance, graffiti, damage to property and intimidation. Those young people get into the papers and other media and give young people generally a bad name.
I note that antisocial behaviour orders will be strengthened. I do not know the details of that proposal, but getting an ASBO in place currently takes a long timemany police hours and a great deal of a local councils time. Gathering evidence to justify an ASBO is a particular problem because the victims of the antisocial behaviour are reluctant to provide it, for fear of recrimination. We therefore need to find ways of encouraging people who are on the receiving end of antisocial behaviour to give evidence so that the police or the local authorityor both if they are working in partnershipcan obtain ASBOs more quickly.
We also need to ensure that ASBOs have teeth. Some streetwise young people are not concerned when they get an ASBO; indeed, they are proud of it. We therefore need to break the circle of not caring about the approbation of society. Young people must understand that bad behaviour has consequences.
There are also proposals to strengthen the probation service; again, I am not sure about the detail. I understand that they will tackle the way in which the probation service is managed and that its powers will be strengthened. It is important that whatever is done is effective and that probation officers are skilfully trained. They deal with difficult young people and need to co-operate with schools and the police in partnership so that those young people do not slip through the net, but turn their behaviour round and build a positive future for themselves.
I hear anecdotally from my borough commander that young children are out unsupervised in public places late at night in the dark. His officers have taken home a nine-year-old with a four-year-old brother, and the parents were surprised to find a policeman on the doorstep with their children. They did not understand why they should be brought home, because they thought that they were all right. Those children do not have the benefit of parents who supervise and devote their time to them, and a good standard of behaviour is not set at home. That makes it all the more difficult for schools, probation officers and the police to try to get the children to understand what constitutes acceptable behaviour so that they have a good future.
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