Industrial Strategy Consultation

Marcus Fysh Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I am interested to hear this observation from my hon. Friend. We are talking about a consultation. It is important to participate in the new industries, so that through our research and development and scientific expertise we can take our place in that respect, but of course a lot of our existing industries make an important contribution to our economy and to employment, and we want to make sure that they can prosper, too.

[Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

I welcome these proposals and note that in all 10 of the areas of focus, the Yeovil area and its aerospace cluster present outstanding and crucial opportunities to optimise our potential. Will my right hon. Friend visit my constituency and help me to promote a local centre of excellence, an institute of technology, to build local skills and actively to encourage inward investment from the likes of Boeing, so that in partnership with great local companies such as Leonardo, we can deliver the skills and jobs of the future and maintain our strategic abilities in helicopters?

[Greg Clark]

In my tour of the country—from Orkney to Somerset, it now seems—I will be delighted to look at the aerospace cluster in Yeovil. Companies reinforce each other by their presence, and as we know from experience across the world, when we have several companies all in the same sector, it is a source of resilience to local economies.

South-west Growth Charter

Marcus Fysh Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I feel like I ought to go like a train, Sir Roger, in the time limit, but not like the trains that were running out of the south-west yesterday, which were not going at all. I sometimes feel like I am the Boadicea of the north of the south-west region, and that my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), who so gallantly brought this debate to the House, is like the Alan Sugar of the south of the region, but in between, we have a myriad of talent. We are a talented force and we are joining forces and working together for our region.

We should not be underestimated. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) said, the south-west Conservative MPs won the election—to get political about it. There are 51 of us and we should not be underestimated. We came into this House on a manifesto promise to increase productivity in the south-west, and we are determined to do that but we cannot do it without the right framework behind us. We already have so much going in the south-west; we are achieving a lot. We have a lot of top-quality businesses and companies, but we could do more with the right framework, so I urge the Minister to listen and not to take us for granted.

One must always have a plan and a strategy, and we do. We have the south-west growth charter, and we also have our local enterprise partnerships working. We have a really solid framework from which to work. We are not working individually—although we all have our individual bids—but as a team, particularly on infrastructure and our particular asks.

In the time I have I will focus on just a couple of areas: skills and infrastructure. As I said, we already have some top-quality companies in my constituency. I must mention the Claims Consortium Group, with its Investors in People gold standard, the Ministry of Cake, Peter Brett Associates, Albert Goodman, Francis Clark, and Viridor, which is under the Pennon banner. There are so many of them, all doing great work, but they could all do more. So often, we find it difficult to attract the right talent and keep it in our region, and that is something we need to concentrate on. I applaud the Government’s apprenticeship scheme—I think it will work well—but we need to work more. I have the first nuclear apprenticeship degree in my constituency, being run through Bridgwater and Taunton College, and, as has been said, we need to build on the nuclear strength we have in the south-west.

We need to build on health, aerospace, textiles and marine —the things we are really good at and strong in already—but it is important that we work with the region as part of the Government’s industrial strategy. We must ensure that we do not miss out on any designations that are being handed out under the strategy outlined in the Green Paper. We need to be part of the bidding process but we need to win, and we must not be hampered if we do not happen to have signed a devolution deal yet. We are already doing good work and we must not be hampered, or even penalised.

I will just mention AgustaWestland, as many people who live in my constituency work there. I had a very good meeting with the company. It employs 17,500 people across the south-west. It particularly urges innovation and investment in science and technology, with which I think we would all agree.

[Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Rebecca Pow]

I will give way to my hon. Friend, because the company is in his constituency.

[Marcus Fysh]

Yes, that is a wonderful industry and we need to focus on it and raise its skill levels. Investing in infrastructure is absolutely fundamental to what we are trying to achieve in the area.

[Rebecca Pow]

My hon. Friend is right. The company stressed to me that it is not just about wanting engineers to build helicopters but about attracting young people into the area to be those engineers. The industry is inspirational and is going somewhere. We need the seed-corn money from business, and grants for medium and small companies so that they can start to do research in that field. We can do that in the south-west; we can build on it and we can all take advantage of it.

I just want to throw in that we need a university. We are warm-hearted in Somerset, but we are a cold spot where academia is concerned. I would like to speak to the Minister about how we ease the numbers game so that we can apply to be a university.

I will sum up on the infrastructure note. We all agree that we have lots of ideas but the Minister needs to bring it on. We want to see the spades in the ground. I want to see the A358 come to fruition before the next election. We have to have junction 25 upgraded, we have to have the A303, and we have to have the road to Barnstaple done. They all work together. I ask the Minister to put some money back into growth deal 3. It was almost in the bag, but the bag seems to have been opened and the money has been let out. Please can we have that, devolution or no devolution?

We can do it in the south-west. Give us the tools and we will deliver, but do not destroy our beautiful environments at the same time. We are a spectacularly stunning region. We can make the economy work but we can also make it work in a glorious environment.

Backbench Business

Marcus Fysh Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Members who have spoken already.

I want to support the millions of customers all over the land who rely on the Post Office service in many remote areas as well as in towns. A post office recently closed in my village, East Coker, so I understand how important that is to a community; but it is true even in big towns such as Crewkerne, where the town centre post office recently closed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Phil Wilson (in the Chair)]

Because we donated 15 minutes to the Division, we will now finish at 4.45 pm. I want to bring in the Front Benchers at a quarter past 4. I reiterate that if people limit the time that they take, everyone should get in. I call Marcus Fysh to continue his speech.

[Marcus Fysh]

Thank you, Mr Wilson. I was saying that it is often only when a community faces the loss of its post office that it realises what a wonderful service the post office system provides. I speak in support of not just the customers but the postmasters who provide that service.

Post offices are often owned by hard-working families who constantly look for ways to improve their flagging profitability and get more footfall. Postmasters run 97% of the country’s 11,500 post office branches, but they lack any meaningful union membership or collective voice. They are represented only by the National Federation of SubPostmasters, a trade association that is funded in part by Post Office Ltd. NFSP chief executive George Thomson recently said that “without serious changes” to the Post Office Ltd business,

“there may not be a network to fight for in the future.”

Successive Governments have spent billions subsidising Post Office Ltd. Some £2 billion of taxpayers’ money has been used on the latest network transformation programme, which has not yet proved able to make the network sustainable and profitable. The Post Office has halved its losses in the last financial year, but that seems to have been done at the expense of postmasters’ pay and increasing branch closures and redundancies. The front-line service has suffered: the queues remain and extended opening hours are sometimes inconsistent and quite unpredictable. We must ask why. In many cases, postmasters are struggling to staff and operate their branches on the money that the Post Office now pays. The reduced revenues from core services simply make many things that post offices do unprofitable, and I know from speaking to postmasters up and down my constituency that they are genuinely concerned about whether they will be able to keep going with those things.

Hon. Members have made several useful proposals during the debate, and I urge the Government to consider them carefully, because Post Office Ltd itself does not seem to have any obvious plans to introduce new services or increase revenue in a way that could help. A growing number of post office branches are up for sale—there are currently more than 730 advertised on the Daltons Business website alone.

One of the key issues with the franchise model that we need to look at is that the computer system on which the whole network relies is well and truly overdue for replacement. It is, in fact, at the centre of an ongoing High Court action. Thousands of postmasters have been blamed for losses that may in fact have been caused by the use of that computer system. Some of those postmasters have been convicted and some have been made bankrupt by the Post Office, and losing that court action may pose a major solvency problem for the Post Office itself. I call on the Government to look into that with some urgency.

In that context, it should not be a major surprise that the unions are taking action, although the Post Office’s move away from a defined-benefit pension scheme is possibly not the right point to complain about, given that there has been a major move away from such schemes in almost every other walk of life in recent years. We need to look at the Post Office; it is in danger of running out of control and its governance issues require serious work and attention. I urge the Government to take an active role in that, because postmasters and their customers up and down the land really depend on the Post Office.