2 Nov 2011 : Column 1061

second world war, with a vision to change people’s lives and create jobs and growth, but its potential is still unfulfilled. School results have risen sharply over the past 10 years. Most secondary schools now perform around the national average, and this year two secondary schools became academies. I am sure that the Minister will have watched the excellent recent television programme about Passmores school.

Harlow college is now widely recognised as one of the best further education colleges in the country, with pass rates exceeding 99.5%. Anglia Ruskin university opened a campus in the town this term that now has approximately 200 students studying for degrees. Wherever I go in Harlow, parents are delighted with the idea of a new apprentice school, which is exactly what it is, and they have no ideological objections. In fact, the Harlow bid for a UTC is not opposed by the local state schools. Harlow council and Essex county council have said that they support UTCs, and would like to see a UTC in Harlow.

In the first round, we assembled a strong bid, but found out only very late in the process that Harlow was to benefit from an enterprise zone, specialising in bio-tech and medical technology. In his feedback, Lord Hill was very fair and made the point that we should now reflect the new enterprise zone in our bid. That was the right decision; it is worth taking the time to get the bid right.

The Harlow partners are responding to that feedback. Anglia Ruskin is broadening its university courses, to meet the needs of the emerging “MedTech” enterprise zone, with firms like Bupa Home Healthcare. Harlow council is delivering the proposed “MedTech” campus—a specialised industrial estate, which will employ the highly skilled technicians that a UTC provides. Harlow already has several biotech and pharmaceutical firms, such as GlaxoSmithKlein, and is in the London-Cambridge science corridor. We have several strong local hospitals—primarily Princess Alexandra hospital and the Rivers private hospital in Sawbridgeworth. The Health Protection Agency is considering a move to Harlow, partly because of its own financial position, and partly because of the enterprise zone. I hope that in due course it too will have a need for medical technicians and engineers. In the second wave of UTC applications we hope to include medical technology as one of the Harlow specialisms, and to submit an even stronger bid. I hope that the Minister was listening very carefully to that last statement.

If there is one thing that I would urge the Minister to do, it would be to go much further and much faster. As the Baker Dearing Educational Trust has said:

“The Government has committed to funding 24 UTCs. But we hope to see 100 within five years.”

We know that public spending is constrained, but UTCs offer us the chance to get back to the great vision of Rab Butler, who sought to establish a high-quality technical education in Britain for the first time. It is worth quoting what Rab Butler said in this very House about his Bill in 1944:

“It is very wrong that in so many parts of England, particularly in industrial areas, which I have visited myself, that decades have been allowed to elapse before the technical development necessary for education in those areas has come to anything at all. There are many towns and cities I have been to in which the technical college has always been the mirage in the distance across the other side of the desert. We cannot allow that state of affairs to go on, and that is why we insist that there should be a proper development of technical education...Compared to our competitors, friends