Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Willetts and Mike Crockart

Thursday 7th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Willetts]

There is certainly a global race and I believe that the Government’s policies are securing us a strong position in it. We are not complacent, but the improvements in the tax relief, the protection for medical research and the innovations taking products closer to market ensure that when companies look around Europe it is clear to them that Britain is the best place to locate their pharmaceutical activities.

[Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

The Scottish life sciences sector is worth £3 billion to the economy and employs 32,000 people. Last week, Edinburgh’s BioQuarter announced that three new companies have just moved in. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, as we have already heard, the life sciences sector is about more than the golden triangle in the south-east of England?

[Mr Willetts]

That is absolutely right. As well as what is happening in the north-west of England, the Edinburgh BioQuarter is of international repute and the university of Dundee is the centre of another excellent cluster of medical research. This is a British strength, not simply a strength in the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle.

Social Mobility

Debate between Lord Willetts and Mike Crockart

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I thank the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) for securing this important debate and for giving me my first opportunity to speak about social mobility since becoming one of the vice-chairs of the all-party social mobility group.

It is entirely appropriate that the debate takes place in Westminster Hall, as it was here, nearly 500 years ago, that King Henry VIII’s closest aide came to put a Bill for the relief of the poor before Parliament. The causes of poverty listed in that Bill included unemployment and bad upbringing. It provided for a works programme that compelled the able-bodied to work on projects such as road building, maintenance of fortresses and harbours and cleansing of watercourses, in return for a fair wage. Even child beggars were to be hired as apprentices to skilled craftsmen, offering them a chance of a future that they would otherwise never have had. The proposals were radical, but that quality was perhaps more pronounced because they were the brainchild of Thomas Cromwell, who was the King’s chief Minister, Earl of Essex and Master of the Rolls—but also the son of a blacksmith from Putney.

We should be clear about what we mean by social mobility. We are not talking about creating equality of income, or equality of experience. Our aim is to achieve equality of opportunity and a society in which individuals who grow up in poorer families can use their talent and effort to move up the socio-economic ladder. The problem is that people from low-income backgrounds find it extremely difficult to get on in life through education and employment. Now, as in 1535, poverty is the greatest barrier to social mobility and equality.

The all-party group’s report on social mobility showed that the prospects of half of all children born in the UK can be almost entirely linked to their parents’ socio-economic circumstances. Perhaps contrary to outward perception and certainly counter to the American dream, America and Britain have the highest intergenerational correlations between the social status of fathers and sons—47% in America and 50% in the UK, whereas, by comparison, in Denmark it is just 15% and in Australia 17%. I have no doubt that that is in large part down to educational attainment.

The BBC 1 programme “Who Do You Think You Are?” has sparked many people’s interest in examining their backgrounds and finding out about their predecessors—often with surprising results. I, too, have looked into my predecessors. I found it quite easy, helped by the fact that my father, Robert Crockart, had a father named Robert George Crockart, whose father was Robert Crockart—you can guess the rest, Mr Rosindell. My father was born in Methven, a small village outside Perth, and I have traced his direct predecessors back almost 400 years to the 1600s, when they all worked manually on the land around Methven, so there was no degree of geographic mobility, never mind social mobility—yet here I stand. The only difference is education and my being the first in my family to achieve a degree—and not even that good a degree, it has to be said. That is only one example, but one that I am sure is repeated many hundreds of times across the country. That is why I regard access to education and especially higher education as key in this debate.

Two days ago, as part of my party’s attempts to increase representative diversity, I was shadowed by a potential Liberal Democrat candidate from a poor background, who blogged about the experience afterwards and reminded me of a certain quote:

“I believe that access to higher education is a key enabler of social mobility and the best way to narrow the gap between the richest and poorest in society.”

It is a wonderful quote. It is from me. I do not want to open old wounds, but those words were written in my letter of resignation from Government over the increase in tuition fees. I did so not because of any pledge, but because of a personal understanding that knowing that a figure indicated a contingent liability rather than an actual debt was a differentiation that would be lost on many young people from backgrounds like mine.

Nevertheless, I think the Government are right to view the problem more widely and to take a life-cycle approach by examining issues and interventions from the early years all the way through to adulthood.

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

The hon. Gentleman rightly expresses the anxieties that people had at the time of our tuition fee and loan proposals. Does he take some encouragement from the UCAS evidence that applications from school leavers and 18-year-olds at college have barely fallen? Indeed, we are running at the second highest rate of applications ever, and, in particular, we cannot find any differential fall in applications. If anything, applications from young people from low-income backgrounds have held up slightly better than those from other groups.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Willetts and Mike Crockart

Thursday 14th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Willetts]

I do discuss this issue with the Scottish Government because it is important that students throughout the whole of the United Kingdom have proper opportunities to travel to universities around the United Kingdom. I also observe that, proportionally, many more Scottish students still wish to study at English universities than the other way round.

[Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

The Secretary of State will be aware of the recent announcement in Edinburgh by the climate change Minister of £20 million to be channelled into marine energy. Does he agree that the green investment bank could play a key role in this exciting sector and could do that best by being located in Edinburgh near to the hub of this developing sector?