Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

Indeed. When visiting Jaguar Land Rover in Liverpool, I was fortunate enough to see that working in practice. St Margaret’s primary school was visiting that great British company as part of that programme, gaining the sort of insight into learning, manufacturing and employment that my hon. Friend rightly highlights. Of course we will continue to support that kind of initiative.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Last week’s CBI education survey found that 68% of employers were dissatisfied with the quality of careers guidance, but in just three months’ time the statutory duty for schools to provide a careers service will become effectively meaningless as the amount of money is reduced and schools have to define for themselves and pay for themselves from within their already squeezed resources. Given that the number of young people not in education or training and youth unemployment is at crisis levels, how will the Minister act from day one to ensure the consistency, accessibility and quality of careers advice?

[Mr Hayes]

The Connexions service was roundly criticised for doing none of that. Connexions, over which the last Government presided, failed according to Ofsted, the Skills Commission inquiry into information, the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, and the Edge survey. We will do better, because we understand that good-quality advice and guidance help people to change their lives by changing their life chances. Of course this is a challenge; it is a catharsis leading from failure to success.

School Funding

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to respond to the debate under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on securing the debate and on the erudite way in which he introduced his argument. When discussing an issue of local government finance, by law it is necessary to invoke the Schleswig-Holstein question, which he wisely did. When looking at education funding and the many complex questions about welfare expenditure and the formulae for allocating funding to local authorities, it is right to reflect on the complexity and difficulty of such issues, which the Government are discovering to their cost.

I understand that many hon. Members today made sincere and heartfelt arguments in defence of their own local communities and about some of the funding discrepancies that occur between local authority areas, reflecting the differences in local authority funding formulae broadly, not just in education, and some of the discrepancies that occur between individual schools in their local communities. A common thread seemed to be an argument for additional spending on education. That is absolutely fine, but it does not quite fit with some of the concern expressed about the record of the Labour Government and the deficit. The fact is that we saw a dramatic increase in investment in education and in schools during those years and we are now seeing a squeeze on schools funding within which some of these difficult issues need to be played out.

It is true, as the hon. Member for Gloucester said, that this is a long-standing issue. It goes back far longer than 20 years. The entire problem of discrepancy that we are grappling with reflects the fact that the education funding formula has a historical root. Allocation to schools and to local authorities was based on an incremental change in existing historical patterns. Then there were changes, many of which were introduced by the Labour Government, to make that system more progressive through the various specific grants that were introduced and to achieve particular ends and outcomes in education through those specific grants. The aim was also to begin the process—it was begun—to try to deal with some of the funding discrepancies through such means as the dedicated schools grant.

Therefore, it would not be fair to say that the Labour Government were not engaged in finding ways of dealing with some of the inexplicable and difficult variations in funding. The then Opposition spokesperson, Baroness Buscombe, reflected that fact when the dedicated schools grant was introduced, saying:

“We welcome the principal policy behind the regulations, the new ring-fenced dedicated schools grant, the multi-year budgets and the rationalisation of standards grants.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 February 2006; Vol. 678, c. 1340.]

Progress was being made.

However, there are tensions in relation to what hon. Members want. All of us wanting to see fairer and more progressive funding need to recognise that there are tensions between those two objectives. It is sometimes difficult to be more progressive and invest money in education outcomes that deal with some of the disadvantages that children have in schools and at the same time have a more equal funding formula that flattens some of the discrepancies to allow schools to have similar levels of funding.

[David Mowat]

Three times now the hon. Lady has used the word “progressive”. Can she explain to us how it is more progressive that Warrington, which has a substantially lower income per head than Westminster, has 50% less funding for its schools? That does not seem progressive to me.

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[Ms Buck]

There are several answers to that. As a Member of Parliament for Westminster, I was anxious that we should not be drawn too far into our own local experiences. I just point out that the last time I looked, which was a year ago, my local authority had the ninth-highest entitlement to free school dinners—the imperfect but accepted measure of deprivation for funding purposes—in the entire country. The school deprivation is significantly greater than the deprivation of the local authority area as a whole. One of the other difficulties that we must face is that school populations are not necessarily the same as resident populations. That is another area of tension that must be dealt with. I am completely at one with those who say that not all the discrepancies can be explained, but some are more easily explicable than others.

[Richard Graham]

rose—

[Sheryll Murray]

rose—

[Ms Buck]

I will give way first to the introducer of the debate.

[Richard Graham]

Can the shadow Minister confirm that she, like every other hon. Member who has spoken in the debate, supports the principle that every pupil in the country should receive the same basic funding?

[Ms Buck]

The issue is more difficult than that. The core of the debate, which I want to come on to, is this. There need to be—the dedicated schools grant was taking us in this direction—some basic building blocks of education funding. The issue then is that although we do not have unlimited money—we did not have unlimited money even in the more generously funded years—we must also recognise that we need to address not just the deprivation element, but things such as special educational needs funding, which is a very difficult issue as well. It is very difficult to achieve what the hon. Gentleman wants to achieve without significant additional funding and without some of the consequences that none of the hon. Members who have so far spoken has been willing to deal with.

[Sheryll Murray]

The hon. Lady mentioned the pupil premium entitlement. Did she mean entitlement or did she actually mean people who are claiming free school meals?

[Ms Buck]

I was about to come to the issue of free school meals. Of course it is difficult to accommodate, as an indicator of deprivation, any element that involves a degree of take-up. All Governments have had to and will continue to grapple with that. Some changes in local government allocations in the funding formulae, which have factored in the index of multiple deprivation and the take-up of tax credits, have proved to be even more difficult, because that variation is even more challenging. Obviously, if we could come up with a deprivation funding formula without dealing with take-up, that would be better. If we could find a way of doing that, I could understand why people would want to do so.

To return to my point, there is a tension between fair funding and progressive funding that we have not managed to resolve. There is also a tension between the core desire to see all schools and all pupils have a basic funding allocation to which a progressive element—a pupil premium or whatever people want to call it—is a relatively small top-up, and the historical desire for local authorities to have a say and for local democracy to be an element in deciding how funding is allocated. In another context, the Conservative party would argue that case quite strongly. One reason why it proved to be such a challenge, not just under the Labour Government but before that, was that local authorities were receiving funding for schools but not passing all that funding on to schools or were making their own decisions about how to share out the grant. Accusations can be levelled at all political parties, in different ways, because of what was done, but of course some of that is intrinsic to local democracy. If we take it out of the equation completely, that throws up other and very difficult questions.

We recognise that school funding is extremely complex, that there is a case for further reform and that that reform is of course far harder to achieve when funding is as tight as it is now. We are seeing the squeeze on school budgets. Even with the pupil premium, funding will fall. At the time of the 2010 spending review, the Department for Education said that total funding for the schools budget would be increased by 0.1% in real terms in each of the following four years. However, subsequent higher projections of economy-wide inflation have changed the real-terms calculation. They indicate, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a real-terms cut over the whole period of about 1% and a small real-terms increase in only one year. Of course, that is at a time when pupil numbers are expected to increase. That gives us an indication of the broader context in which some of these demands have arisen.

To make the position even more complicated for the Government, there is an absolute shambles going on because the Department for Work and Pensions has failed to work out a system whereby the new universal credit can accommodate a proper indicator for school dinners. It is struggling to find a way of doing that. That means that the way of calculating the deprivation indicator is moving even further away from what the hon. Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) is saying should be the case. We are, at the moment, at a complete loss to know how the deprivation factor will be properly assessed when it comes to future funding. Both those things—the squeeze on funding and the inability to calculate a future pupil premium, because of the free school meal entitlement shambles—undermine the Government’s case that the problem is so desperate that an immediate solution must be found.

Following the Government’s consultation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies brought out an absolutely damning critique of the Government’s thinking. The report exposes the rather arrogant belief, which we see in so many other areas of public policy, that the problems can be sorted now that we have a Conservative Government, and that the previous Government had, by definition, got everything wrong. When it looked at the small print, however, it found that things were much more difficult.

The report, which I encourage all Members to look at, shows that: the Government’s plans would lead to a large funding transfer from secondary schools to primary schools; the average gains and losses could be 10% or more; one in six schools would face budget losses of 10% or more; there would be huge numbers of winners and losers; and, even over a transitional period lasting six years, some schools would incur annual cash losses of up to 5%. The Secretary of State has therefore started to row back from his enthusiasm for seeing early movement on finding a response.

[David Mowat]

I am sure the IFS’s list of problems, which the hon. Lady has just read out, is correct, but does that not demonstrate the size of the problem that must be fixed? The fact those problems will exist if we move to a fair formula demonstrates how much inequity there is at the moment. However, will the hon. Lady clarify the Opposition’s position on introducing a new funding formula? Would they like us to carry on as we are doing, or would they prefer to see a new formula developed, albeit over time?

[Ms Buck]

As I thought I made clear in my opening remarks, I completely understand that there are arguments about similar schools with similar characteristics receiving different grant funding because of an historical pattern. I am merely pointing out that that was difficult to tackle when we had a generous funding framework, because of the impact on schools and the numbers of winners and losers. If it had been easy to tackle those issues, and there had not been large numbers of winners and losers, much greater progress would have been made, and some of the winners and losers would have been secondary schools in Conservative Members’ constituencies. Now, however, we are in a time of public spending constraint, so most of the challenges are far greater and could be far more damaging for schools, including some in the constituencies represented by Members here, who have made a powerful case, in principle, for having a fairer formula. My critique relates to the fact that the Government are rushing in and saying, “This can all be solved. The previous Government made a complete shambles. We’ll be able to oblige you with a solution,” when they cannot, of course, offer one or answer many of the questions that have been asked.

I want to finish by asking the Minister a few questions. How many winners and losers will there be as a result of the “Next steps” proposals and the Government’s decision to dictate to local areas how they organise their funding? Do the Government propose any modelling or pilots to test their proposals? In the light of what head teachers, collectively, want, why are the Government restricting local formulae to 10 centrally chosen criteria? Why will they not allow some flexibility to reflect differences in local circumstances?

What is the cost of using the Education Funding Agency to administer the budgets of increasing numbers of academies? Can academy chains gather all the funding and distribute it as they see fit, including holding back money for central services? If that is the case, does the Minister propose any restrictions? Is he taking any steps to monitor salaries in academy chains? Obviously, top pay will impact on the money spent on pupils.

How will the introduction of universal credit affect the Department’s thinking on free school meals and the pupil premium? The Department acknowledged it will cause “turbulence”. What exactly did that mean? Is free school funding per pupil per actual pupil or per notional pupil? Finally, will the Minister confirm that, as a result of the Government’s botched efforts, there will be no major overhaul of school funding during this Parliament?

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I absolutely agree. Education on both sides of the border was driven in the first instance by the vigorous missionary activity of Churches, and we praise and cherish the role of the Church of England in making sure that children have an outstanding and inclusive education. I welcome the report, and I look forward to working with Bishop John Pritchard to extend the role of the Church in the provision of schools.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

How many of the free schools currently planning to open in September, and seeking expressions of interest from parents on that basis, have not yet signed contracts for specific premises?

[Michael Gove]

Of the free schools that are planning to open this September, more than half have agreed sites, 21 are in negotiations about sites and four, including one in the hon. Lady’s constituency, do not yet have sites. That is significantly better progress than at this time last year, yet we went on to see every single free school that was advertising that it would open opening in time.

Services for Young People

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Stuart]

I agree with the Minister; that is exciting and interesting. My note of caution is that there must be many positive services, including youth services, which would struggle to collect the evidence, dissociated from all the other impacts and influences on young people’s lives, to prove that they were delivering. Perhaps that is why, in many cases, we might want to have the payment by results managed and triggered at a higher level, with those people making a discretionary decision. When they see great work—when they see it they can recognise it—they will realise that it is offering value for money. They could take things that did not have an individual evidence base, yet would none the less continue to be commissioned. A dangerous and perhaps self-interested parallel with my previous life as a publisher is an advertiser who places an advert for £1,000 and immediately receives £2,000 back in directly attributable profit on sales. He may spend the rest of his career thinking that advertising is just about getting money back immediately without any other elements to it, which would be a mistake. Life is more complicated than that, and the danger of finding such things as the work in Peterborough, or, possibly, the initiatives mentioned by the Minister, is that we are looking for everything to be able to justify itself on a payments by results basis. Perhaps councils, or other bodies at a higher level, should commission without having to expect that from each initiative in their portfolio.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

While we are on this interesting issue, may I encourage the hon. Gentleman in his caution? Although the Minister made a good point about how one can hold an institution to account for services for which it is responsible, is it not the case that, for the youth service, good youth work in deprived communities is good at—we need it to be good at—helping reduce offending behaviour? Of course, offending behaviour and its impact has nothing to do with the youth service, but it will be measured by the police or the youth offending team in the local authority. Often, the youth service will be targeting those most at risk of offending behaviour anyway. Is it not the case, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, that this is very complex? It would be quite dangerous to encourage an organisation like an individual youth club to be held too much to account for an issue such as offending behaviour.

[Mr Stuart]

I think I agree with the hon. Lady. One of the criticisms we have made of the sector is the need, collectively, to make a better case. When Ministers—we have one with us today, and the hon. Lady was one previously—go to the people in the Treasury, they need a strong case, especially when it is, “Give me money today and I will give you savings tomorrow.” There is a certain natural and understandable scepticism in the Treasury, and a strong evidence base is needed from which to make the point.

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[Mr Stuart]

I was reflecting on those words even as I read them, but their implications are clear. If there is no firm action plan, the criticism—to spell it out for my hon. Friend in case he, too, is missing the blindingly obvious—is that if the strategy produced by the Government after such a long period of preparation does not spell out exactly what they are going to do and how they will hold to account those responsible for delivering services, there is every danger that we will have fine words and no real delivery. That might be a statement of the obvious, but there is a serious risk, with a strategy that is light on content, in respect of whether there is confidence that it will deliver on the ground.

Positive for Youth has the right focus on fostering young people’s aspirations and on their personal and social development. It is good to hear the Government praise the potential of young people and extol the qualities and achievements of the vast majority, especially in light of the negativity towards young people generated by last summer’s riots. The Government and the Minister are right to emphasise the positive. If all we ever measure are provisions averting negative behaviour by young people, we suggest that their natural tendency is to behave negatively. In fact, the Minister wants to emphasise—the Government are right about this—that most young people are positive members of our society and that we should support and celebrate their positive behaviour.

[Ms Buck]

Mr Robertson, I wonder whether it is appropriate—I know it is not normally done—to welcome the young people who are listening to the debate, because it is to be appreciated. The message that the hon. Gentleman has just given about the majority of young people being positive and aspirational for themselves will be heard in this Chamber as well as outside it.

[Mr Stuart]

Yes. Having served as a Minister, the hon. Lady will know that we can be as positive as we like for as long as we like in as many speeches as we like, but as soon as we say something negative, that will appear in the newspaper. That is the nature of being in power and the nature of news.

It is right to call the paper “Positive for Youth” and immediately emphasise the positive and recognise that we regard young people not as a problem, but as an immense, positive force for good in our society. That is important and we cannot say it too often, although it will never appear in any form of press thereafter. But we have to live with that.

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[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Thank you very much, Mr Betts, for calling me to speak.

I congratulate the Education Committee on its report and its Chairman, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), on his opening speech. There is much that is excellent in the report, which contains a powerful critique of the Government’s approach and other points that I hope the Minister will respond to.

There have also been some excellent speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass), which were drawn from their considerable personal expertise and knowledge, both in their local communities and more widely, in the area of youth work. I also found much to agree with in the contribution that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt).

What is clear from the Education Committee’s report and from the speeches that we have heard today is that we all agree that youth services matter, and they matter most to the most vulnerable and to the most challenged communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham said, in the context of youth unemployment—with 250,000 young people who have been unemployed for more than a year and with 1.4 million under-25s who are not in education, employment or training—the value of youth services is even greater. Although it is completely correct that youth unemployment did not start in the spring of 2010, the fact that it has increased and is a major and consistent problem is all the more reason why greater care should have been taken, and should still be taken, to provide the funding and support for a youth service that is one strategy among a number of different strategies to help young people to cope with the tragic experience of unemployment.

As my hon. Friend also said, the context of youth unemployment also includes the removal of education maintenance allowance. The removal of EMA matters not only because of education—this is not a debate about EMA itself and its value—but because young people need to be able to provide for themselves. That ability means gaining access not only to education, but to enrichment and support, which includes the youth service and the valuable application of young people’s own leisure time. The fact that many young people are now being denied opportunities to attend enrichment activities in out-of-school programmes—for example, the opportunity to pay for the transport that the hon. Member for Wells referred to—is also relevant to the Select Committee’s report. Young people whom I have spoken to were furious about the removal of EMA. I would say that it was probably the one aspect of policy that they felt even more strongly about than the raising of tuition fees for higher education.

We have touched a little on the riots. It is absolutely right that we understand—we all do understand—that the riots did not occur because of cuts in youth services; no one is alleging that the riots occurred because of those cuts. However, the fact that youth services and the wide range of provision for young people have been under such pressure, particularly in some of our toughest urban communities, did not help. As two excellent reports—the London School of Economics report, “Reading the Riots”, and the Children’s Society report, “Reporting the Riots”—indicate, the riots should be a warning to us not to neglect youth services even further in our most challenged communities.

There are many important points in the Education Committee’s report that Opposition and Government Members can agree on. We can all agree that youth services, or services for young people, span a much wider range of activities than the statutory youth service framework. We have heard examples of excellent practice in a range of community, faith, sporting and, of course, privately-supported and business-supported activities, which form part of the life opportunities for many young people. Indeed, statutory youth work itself covers a variety of different activities, ranging from outreach to youth clubs and from school-based youth work to careers guidance. Of course, there is also the national citizenship service, which I will refer to later. It is right that we appreciate the range of those activities and that we look to have a different pattern of services and activities in different types of community. What will be effective in a constituency in inner London, such as my own, will not be the right mix for communities in rural areas, the north of England and so forth.

What we need to do—the Education Committee’s report certainly implies this if it does not explicitly state it—is do better at mapping the range of activities that are accessible and available to young people, so that we have a better understanding of the context within which our statutory youth services operate. That leads us to something that came out strongly in the speech by the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness—namely, that we have a real problem with the quality of data, both on inputs and outcomes. Better quality of data would enable us to make better judgments about the quality and value of youth services.

Data about inputs are of only limited value, but they are none the less important. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan made a request for a better and more consistent data set, so that we can look at what has happened to the funding of statutory youth services over a decade, and she was absolutely right to do so. Within that context, however, the absorption of so many different youth services programmes into the early intervention grant has made it even harder to get a handle on what is happening to the funding of statutory youth services. The Minister should help us to address that problem.

It is a central point of the Education Committee’s report that we lack rigour in understanding what works. That is not a new problem for this Government, but we do not have the dataset to enable us to make better judgments about what works in terms of quality and outcome. The Minister has promised that he will respond to those points, and I hope he will. He needs to convince us that the Government have a strategy to ensure that services for young people are delivering and to monitor how they are delivering, so that we can make proper judgments about what works.

What we do have a good idea about is the scale of the cuts in youth services funding over the last couple of years. We know that there has been a real-terms 20% cut in the early intervention grant and that around half of local authorities have cut their youth services in the last two years, with Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils making the biggest cuts overall. We also know that those cuts are disproportionate to the local government average and that about £200 million worth of cuts will have been made to youth services by April this year. In some cases, that means that centres are closing, but it also means that youth workers have lost their jobs. Around 3,000 youth workers are at risk of losing their jobs, which means that even those centres that can remain open are providing a much lower level of service.

The House of Commons Library has analysed some of this information about the cuts for me. In some cases, local authorities have cut 100% of their youth provision. For example, Kingston upon Thames has cut 100% of its youth provision; Peterborough 89%; Westminster 70%; Bracknell Forest 48%; and so forth. There is a long list of local authorities that have cut their youth provision; they are not all Conservative or Liberal Democrat-controlled authorities, but there is a strong bias in that direction.

From the evidence that was given to the Select Committee and subsequently from the publication of Positive for Youth, the Government’s youth strategy, we know that the leading national organisations in the youth service field challenge the Minister’s claim that large slugs of money have been spent on youth services, and they question what that actually means. We have had the figures that support their concern.

We have heard today, and the Select Committee report draws out, a worry that the national citizenship service, the aspirations of and principle behind which no one is challenging, potentially eats up a disproportionate volume of such scarce resources as are available. My local authority is one of the pilots, and I have found out that last year just 60 young people participated in the programme and, most worryingly for the Minister, only a third of them were on free school meals. In an ideal world we would all be happy to support the scheme, but when resources are so tightly constrained it is extremely worrying that we provide so much money for a scheme for such a small number of young people—it will be a bigger number this summer, but still tiny proportionately—such a small proportion of whom are from lower-income backgrounds.

[Tim Loughton]

I am rather curious about what the hon. Lady says. She says that only a third of the participants in the NCS—it is national citizen, not citizenship, service—are on free school meals, but that is three times the proportion in the general population, so we are doing rather well. I wonder how many of the young people who went on the scheme in her Westminster constituency she has met, and what their testimonials were of the value of the scheme.

[Ms Buck]

I think that the Minister misses my point. I do not dispute that the scheme has the potential to be a good one. My argument is that in the four wards of my local authority that are in the highest two deciles of deprivation in the country, there are 6,000 teenagers, so, on the face of it, a scheme that concentrates, as it did last year, on just 60 of those young people, only a third of whom are on free school dinners, does not represent good value for money. He is absolutely right that the number of children on free school dinners is above the national average, but it is not above the average for Westminster. We have a great number of schools and a very deprived school population, and the last time I checked we had the ninth highest proportion of children on free school dinners in the country. As my hon. Friends have drawn out in the debate, we need to be alert to that issue—not because of the principle of the programme, but because we need to question whether, at this moment, it is the right one.

We have heard a number of important points about not just the amount of money, but how we get it to work effectively, the relationship between the statutory agencies and that between them and charities, including small ones, and the number of funding sources that some youth centres have to draw in to make the centres sustainable. A particular concern of mine is that we have seen in the youth service a reliance on short-term funding. Again, that did not start in 2010, but there is patchwork funding, with very short-term funding streams, which are around for a year or six months and then disappear.

A critical word that I do not think we heard from the Chairman of the Select Committee, or from anyone this afternoon, and which is absolutely at the heart of youth service delivery, is “relationships”. Young people, particularly those from the most challenged environments, value their relationships with statutory youth workers and others who work in the youth service. It is important to reflect on the fact that when such relationships are vulnerable and are disrupted, perhaps because there is high turnover, the impact disproportionately damages young people’s lives.

The cuts in the youth service will not be cost-free. We know that diversion and prevention is a central role of the youth service, and we all agree that we need to do better at building the data to demonstrate that. Where youth services are not available to provide the right range of activities, it is likely that at least some young people will find themselves caught up in antisocial, and sometimes criminal, behaviour.

We heard, importantly, about early intervention, and the hon. Member for Wells made a point about mental health and the worryingly high and increasing level of poor mental health among many young people. I think that we all agree that early intervention should not be something we discuss just in the context of the under-fives. It is a moving concept, and the changeover from primary to secondary school and into adolescence is a critical time for us to focus on early intervention. The youth service can, of course, contribute much to the enrichment and support of learning, and we need to do better at demonstrating that.

What should the Government do? We need them to do better at supporting the sector through change, and ensuring that when youth services draw, as they sometimes should, on private and voluntary funding, it is not necessarily a time of massive disruption and short-term funding. We need to hear young people’s voices, as the Select Committee did, and reflect those voices in policy, and we need greater honesty about what is happening out there and about the criteria for intervention. I hope that the Minister will respond on that point. He has been honest in telling the National Youth Agency that youth service cuts have been disproportionate compared to those to the total funding for local government, and he has promised us guidance on what the intervention would be when the cuts were disproportionate.

We have some figures, and I have a freedom of information request out at the moment and am looking forward to the reply. We understand what is going on out there, and we now need to know when the Minister will intervene, what his definition of disproportionate cuts is and how he will stop local authorities that are effectively withdrawing, or doing devastating damage to, their youth service.

The Children’s Society report on the riots, which has wider application, states that

“those in the transition to adulthood stage said that more government support is needed—two thirds (67%) of 17 year olds and six out of ten (60%) of young adults... This mirrors the response of young people in the focus groups, with… participants saying that more activities and support are needed to ‘occupy young people with something constructive’.”

Without such support, we are likely to face genuine costs in the failure to meet needs, particularly those of our most deprived young people. It is to its considerable credit that the Select Committee understands that, but the reality on the ground indicates that the Government do not yet do so.

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[Tim Loughton]

My point holds clear. The fact that there was the online forum and other people not on the Committee consulted young people does not mean that young people appeared in front of the Committee itself. The Committee visited no youth projects in the United Kingdom; it went to Germany. Indeed, the report contains an apology for the fact that the Committee did not get out and visit some of the projects that it was due to see. I think that I am correct in saying that young people were not involved in the compilation, road testing or critique of the final report. That is the point I am making. If the Chairman of the Select Committee wants to correct me on that, he can do so.

The contrast with Positive for Youth is that young people saw the drafts, wrote the words, changed the final results, were consulted around the country, came into my office and went to the O2. In addition, we went to lots of different projects around the country to get young people’s views and those of other people involved in youth services. That is why I think that Positive for Youth was a fantastic exercise in involving people, particularly young people. Select Committees could gain some experience from that.

I am particularly pleased—I was going to mention this in a moment—that we are funding the British Youth Council to set up a youth select committee, which will act as a shadow select committee and, I hope, meet in this place and take evidence from the Chairman of the Select Committee and others, particularly young people. That sends out a fantastic signal that we value young people’s input in the place where it matters—here—as well.

[Ms Buck]

I do not want to enter too much into a private quarrel, but surely the fact is that Positive for Youth is in most respects a perfectly good strategic document. The Select Committee report is extremely good in its analysis of some of the weaknesses of the Government’s approach to youth services, but the point is that wherever young people are brought together, the single message they give is: “We are not overly bothered about the reports you produce. We are bothered about the actual youth work that is available and the activities that are accessible to us in our communities.” That is what they tell us, and it is what they tell virtually every MP who is faced with closures and cuts in their youth services.

[Tim Loughton]

Young people would tell the hon. Lady—she did not answer my earlier question about whether she had met any young people from her constituency who had been on national citizen service—that they value being involved and having their views taken on board. Absolutely, they value having their questions and concerns answered. Whether or not young people get the answers that they want, they need to be taken seriously. Absolutely, we have tried to take on board young people’s views and give them ownership of this youth policy.

Positive for Youth is not a finished document that, as with so many other past Government reports, will go on a shelf and gather dust. It is an evolving, organic and living document that I want every young person in the country to wave in the face of the leader of their local council and the mayor at their town hall and say, “This is what Positive for Youth says should happen. We want it to happen here. How can we make it happen here? Why isn’t it happening here?” That is why a lot of things will evolve from it and why, in a year’s time, I will come back to Positive for Youth and do an audit of what has and has not been achieved. I will go back to those areas of weakness, and I will also flag up areas of strength where we can learn from best practice, which we are particularly bad at doing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stuart]

The Committee will look forward to pursuing that further with the Minister, but if it is a correction I am grateful for it.

The purpose of our inquiry was to recognise that so many youth services struggle to show their impact—we criticised them for that and also sympathised with them because of the impossibility of doing so—but we know anecdotally from young people that those services are important. We wanted to provide a platform for youth services to be heard to ensure that time was found to focus on them. We hoped that the process of conducting the inquiry would make it less likely that ill-thought-out and disproportionate cuts would be made by local authorities in a tough situation—caused by the profligate behaviour of the previous Government, to reinforce the Minister’s point and to make a tiny rebuttal of so many partisan remarks from Opposition Members.

Despite the Minister’s occasional tetchiness at our probing—

[Ms Buck]

Occasional?

[Mr Stuart]

I say “occasional”, but we are working together, and the Minister is committed. One of the best things that the Prime Minister is doing for the governance of this country is keeping Ministers in place for a decent period, at least so far. Notwithstanding the Minister’s tetchiness, I hope that Ministers remain in office for longer periods, because that will lead to better understanding of the issues with which they are wrestling. Select Committees, which probe and challenge, and write reports such as ours, do so because they care about the issues. I hope that any heat, as well as light, that we might generate will strengthen the Minister’s arm. I know that he is personally committed to the matter, and works tremendously hard to look after the interests of our young people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. I want a mixed provision of youth services up and down the country, whether in brand spanking new buildings such as the 63 myplace centres, a great investment by this Government, or in well established youth clubs, schools or other buildings. I want young people to have full knowledge about the availability of all those schemes—not just youth services but training opportunities, apprenticeships, the national citizen service and everything that they can do in our communities. “Positive for Youth” is a gateway for young people in this country to see that the Government value them. Our whole society should value them, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that they contribute to society in the future.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Speaking at the National Youth Agency conference last month, the Minister said:

“I know that many people are concerned that youth services have faced disproportionate cuts as councils look to tighten their belts…And, I’ll be honest, I’m concerned too…there is no excuse to neglect youth services, or to treat them as an easy area to make savings.”

However, as a recent parliamentary answer to me showed, many local authorities are making cuts of 30%, 40%, 50% or in some cases 70%, far in excess of the general reduction in local authority spending. What steps is he taking to put his fine words into practice?

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for repeating my words, because they are absolutely right. That is why we issued that document—to send out a very clear message—and why we are revising the guidance, which we are consulting on in the next few weeks. She, like every local authority in the country and youth groups, will have the opportunity to have their say on what their local youth services should offer. That is all about young people having a voice and being able to gauge whether they are being treated seriously within their local authorities. This Government are giving them a voice that was not heard under the previous Labour Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning such an example of good practice. Frankly, I do not care who the provider is; it is the way they provide the service and whether they are providing the services that young people want at the time they want them. It is about the quality of the service. They may not be able to do it in Labour-controlled Middlesbrough, but apparently they can in Northamptonshire and I congratulate them on it.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

The new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has warned that gang crime is now a significant problem in half of all London boroughs, and similar issues affect cities across the country. Good youth work is critical to a successful strategy to tackle gangs and youth violence, yet not only are youth services being reduced, as the Minister has just told us, but the National Council for Voluntary Organisations warned last week that the charitable sector is facing a £1 billion shortfall and many small community youth organisations, including the Stephen Lawrence centre, are at risk of closure. What assessment has the Minister made of the contribution of reduced capacity in council and community youth services to a successful anti-gangs and youth violence strategy?

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is right to raise the problem of gang culture. The Government take it very seriously. The Home Secretary chairs an inter-ministerial group on gangs, on which I represent the Department for Education, but I have to say that some of the very best anti-gang projects I have seen around the country—including in London in places such as Croydon, with “Lives not Knives”—involve the voluntary sector working in partnership with the local authority. They are going into schools working with the victims of those crimes and their families, spreading best practice and saying, “Not in my name”. The very best response to the troubles we saw in the summer was from young people coming together with voluntary organisations, saying, “Not in my name will this sort of violence happen,” and coming up with constructive and positive examples. That is why Positive for Youth is such an important part of the Government’s policy.

Apprenticeships

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

We have enjoyed a thoughtful debate this evening with contributions from both sides of the House that have stressed Members’ real concern, and interest in, apprenticeships and the need to raise the skills base among young people and the general population. In particular, I congratulate Members on both sides who have taken on apprentices, with your support, Mr Speaker, and hope that that will encourage others who have vacancies to divert them to that purpose. [Interruption.] I apologise to the House—I have a terrible cold and my throat keeps catching.

We heard some thoughtful contributions from Opposition Members. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) asked where the strategy was for linking youth unemployment to apprenticeships. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) spoke from personal experience about apprenticeships and warned about the impact of the cuts in the construction industry and the extent to which they might choke off opportunities for young people in that important sector. My hon. Friends the Members for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie), for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) and for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) all made pleas for making better use of public procurement powers, which is a message I would also like the Minister to take away. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), who chairs the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, and others mentioned their fears about the extent to which adult in-work training programmes are branded as apprenticeships—I will touch upon this in my contribution—in the context of the abolition of Train to Gain. Although in-work programmes offer important skills training to older people, they are not exactly what many of us consider to be apprenticeships.

When the Minister made his contribution at the start of the debate, he used poetry and spoke from the heart, and I genuinely believe that he has a passion for apprenticeships and for providing an alternative to the traditional academic and higher education route, particularly for young people. That message was reinforced by the overwhelming majority of contributions we heard this evening. That was at the heart of the report on 14 to 18-year-olds’ education by Professor Wolf, who stressed the importance of expanding the number of high-quality apprenticeships that offer genuine career progression to young people. We are all as one in saying that apprenticeships are of equal value and provide an alternative and equally important route for young people through post-16 education.

The Labour Government made substantial progress on that issue, as well as on increasing—quite rightly, and for which I make no apology—the number of young people who went into higher education. In the globalised economy in which we operate, it is absolutely essential that we do not tip the balance the other way and underplay the importance for many of our young people of a university education.

We quadrupled the number of apprenticeships to 279,000, and those who make much of the additional apprenticeships that the coalition Government have introduced have not stressed the context of the abolition of the future jobs fund, which was intended to provide 200,000 jobs for young people; the rise in youth unemployment, which is now at its highest level since comparable records began in 1992; or the rise, by 140,000, in the number of young people not in education, employment or training. The Minister spoke of the number of NEETs being 925,000 in 2009, but that figure now exceeds 1.1 million.

The additional apprenticeships that are being provided—and they are being provided; that is not in doubt—must therefore be seen in the context of the rise in demand and need, particularly among young people, and the abolition of the future jobs fund. Alongside that, young people have also borne the brunt of many other Government cuts, which have had an impact on their ability to access and make better use of skills and training. Those cuts range from the abolition of the education maintenance allowance to the scrapping of Connexions, access to face-to-face careers advice and youth work and mentoring services, which were also an important signpost for such skills and training.

Overall, as many Opposition Members have said, while the economy is flatlining employers and, especially, small employers are unlikely to respond with apprenticeships, employment or work training on the scale that we would like. A recent Federation of Small Businesses survey showed that only 8% of the small businesses surveyed had taken on an apprentice in the previous year, and that is a particular concern, because we know from labour force survey statistics that in the past more than half of apprenticeships were based in businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

We welcome the Government’s incentive scheme, which I hope will be effective, because it certainly needs to be in the economic context in which we operate, but I add my voice to those asking the Government to review as soon as possible the incentive payment’s concentration only on those businesses with fewer than 50 employees, as we also want to put a great deal of stress on the role of medium-sized organisations—those with between 50 and 149 employees—in creating employment.

The £1 billion youth jobs fund that the coalition is delivering via the Work programme is also a cause for concern, because it is unlikely to have any impact on the delivery of apprenticeships to young people, so I hope that it too will be reviewed. Money and effort are being concentrated on a Work programme, but we need to ensure that it delivers apprenticeships, too.

Almost all Opposition Members who spoke stressed that the growth in apprenticeships, of which Government Members have made so much, has not delivered for young people in the way it has for their older counterparts. That masks a genuinely worrying position for young people. In 2009, the final year of the Labour Government, 42% of apprenticeship starts went to those aged under 19; in 2010-11, that figure had fallen to 29%. In 2009, 41% of all starts went to 19 to 24-year-olds, and that figure had fallen to 31% last year. That is genuinely concerning. Given the crisis of youth unemployment, we need to make absolutely sure that the opportunities out there are going to young people who need them.

In the context of the abolition of Connexions and the reduction in funding and access to a face-to-face careers service, it is also important that the young people most in need of accessing apprenticeships have the knowledge and support to be able to do so. In the past few months, I have had extensive first-hand experience of working with young NEET children who need access to apprenticeships and training. They have so little ability to be guided to the opportunities that exist, and that is worrying. The issue of confidence among young people without good qualifications is critical; it is no good simply relying on access to the internet and telephone advice lines. Even for those who are able to use those, making that first contact requires a mentor—a guide and someone to advise them. Without that, I fear that those who most need support will be those least able to access it.

Members have spoken about pre-apprenticeship training, which I would also like to emphasise. About 10% of young people not in education, employment or training have been in that situation for a year or more. They are a core group about whom we should be most concerned. Such an experience, at that stage in life, can be absolutely devastating to a young person. As the Minister is aware, many of those young people have not got GCSE C grades in English and maths, in particular. The problem is that because there is such competition for the apprenticeships that now exist, particularly among young people who have been through a university education, young people without a GCSE find it very hard—in some cases, impossible—to get on the first rung of the apprenticeship ladder.

Although additional skills training within the apprenticeship programme is welcome, we need to make sure that we are not locking out some of the young people with particular needs. That issue has been raised with me by the apprenticeship training agencies, which are very concerned about the issue. It is particularly worrying because a young person who has perhaps done all right at GCSE, but not got a C grade in maths or English, will be required to retake before they even get on to the apprenticeship programme. That can be difficult and challenging.

I have been impressed with the work of my local regional apprenticeship training agency with young NEETs. Some of its outcomes are very impressive: 90% of its apprenticeship starts involve young people who are not in employment, education or training. All its apprenticeships starts are new placements, not conversions, and 99% of them are in the 16-to-24 year-old age group. However, there is a worry that the Government are not making such good use of the resources and skills that such agencies provide. It would be helpful if the Minister confirmed that client hosts of apprenticeship training agencies will be included as beneficiaries of the £1,500 apprentice incentive schemes. Will the Minister meet representatives from the new Confederation of Apprenticeship Training Agencies to discuss that?

In conclusion, we welcome an expansion of apprenticeships. Any good news, money or resources in the field are welcome and need to be supported. However, given the issue of access to the additional places, there is still a real risk that young people are being left on the shelf. We look to the Government not only to congratulate themselves on a higher number of apprenticeships overall but to address more effectively how to respond to the national emergency engulfing so many of our young people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend knows that the work the Government have done on apprenticeships has been outstanding and it is due to the support, encouragement and advice of hon. Members like him that that work is cutting through in the constituencies in the way that he describes. It is not just our constituencies: the shadow Secretary of State’s constituency has seen a 69% increase in the number of apprenticeships and I know that he will want to take the first opportunity to rise to the Dispatch Box and congratulate the Government on that.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

During the passage of the Education Bill, the Minister spoke movingly of the scope for the careers guidance service to be a driver of social mobility and quoted a survey that found that 27% of state school pupils have received bad careers guidance, set against 6% of private pupils. The model he has developed for careers guidance leaves 16 to 19-year-old school leavers with only a web or helpline service and does not transfer any of the money from careers guidance to schools for face-to-face services: how many private schools is he aware of in which teenagers receive only a web-based or telephone advice service?

[Mr Hayes]

I welcome the hon. Lady’s question on this subject, because she, too, will want to know that in her constituency, apprenticeship numbers are also up by 69%. To answer her question directly, it is absolutely right that schools make a judgment about the mix of provision that suits their pupils. She is right, too, that private schools typically buy independent, impartial advice and that is the kind of advice that all children deserve, which is why we are changing the situation.

Public Disorder

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Our hearts go out to all of the victims of the destructive violence we have seen in the last week, including those in the three episodes that have occurred in my constituency, and to those so tragically killed a couple of days ago. Every single one of these acts is an individual act of criminality for which those responsible must be prosecuted, and our grateful thanks go out to the police for the work that they have done. We owe them a debt that we should not repay by cutting their numbers and assaulting the leadership and integrity of our safer neighbourhood teams.

This was not a protest and no one marched or looted with a manifesto, but nothing comes from nothing. This was an unprecedented event—an explosion on our streets that reflects a chasm between many parts of society and elements of our urban youth. We have heard a lot during this debate of concerns about the way we live now, including family, fatherhood and the community, and those are issues that we should address. We have also heard concerns about the economic prospects for our young. We have heard very little about other great themes such as values, consumerism and the stresses on our society caused by a 30-year widening in inequality. We have also heard very little about the problematic relationship between too many of our young people and the police, but that deserves to be addressed.

Very few, if any, of these issues started on election day last year, and I am happy to confirm that fact. I know that cuts in public spending did not cause the riots that we have seen, although I also believe that youth unemployment and cuts in our youth services have not and will not help the problem of young people with nothing to do and no prospects. However, I urge Government Members to recognise that if we are to continue a thoughtful and mature debate on the causes of this crisis, they should not imply that many of the roots of the problem lie in May 1997. That is not true either, and we will not understand the problems if we follow that path.

In the few seconds left to me, I want to focus not on the immediate policing priorities with which we have rightly been concerned this week, and not on the great themes of our economy, our society and our institutions of authority, but on a very practical issue involving gangs. It is of course true that in Hackney, south London and other parts of the country we have had a gang culture for many years, but it is also true that there has been an explosion of gang activity. Some of it is criminal, and some of it involves youth gangs. Those activities overlap in a way that is sometimes fluid and sometimes distinct—sometimes they feed off each other—but now it is percolating not just into city communities such as mine in Westminster and Kensington, of all places, but out into the suburbs. It is facilitated and driven by social media, although not caused by them.

We can turn that gang culture around, and we can do it quickly. There are fine individuals and fine voluntary and community organisations that can play a part in solving the problem, but they need our sustained support, not just today, for six weeks or for six months, but over the coming years. I urge the House to accept that, if we condemn the criminal deeds that we have seen and punish the criminals who are responsible for them—as we must—we must also ensure that we do not write off our blighted urban young.

Sure Start Children’s Centres

Karen Buck Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

We will judge a week on Thursday whether Kent can return much Labour support, and we look forward to that judgment, but again I pay tribute to those local authorities that in difficult circumstances are doing their best to keep the Sure Start infrastructure intact. They deserve credit for that, because they are making some difficult decisions, and later I will go through some local authorities and list those examples that the House will be interested to hear.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Westminster council is also seeking not to lock the doors of its 12 children’s centres, but it is achieving that by implementing an 18% cut in funding through reduced outreach services and reduced services for child development, and by ensuring that smaller centres no longer provide any help for families seeking employment. How does that fit with the Government’s objective of getting mothers back into employment?

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I look over her local authority’s border into Hammersmith and Fulham, where even more worrying steps are being taken, steps that my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) has skilfully exposed. I will come to those issues later, because there is a real issue about whether, in keeping open a centre, the service to parents in local authorities throughout the country is being destroyed. That is the key issue for the House to consider.

Let me, however, give the Government credit where credit is due—most unlike me, but here we go: they have certainly talked a good game on early intervention. To show just how committed they were to the issue, they commissioned not one but two distinguished Opposition Members to advise them on it, and the Field review—I am pleased to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) in his place—and the Allen report found common ground.

First, each report sets out a persuasive case for investing public resources heavily in the early years of a child’s life. They argue that doing so will help us to tackle the root causes of poverty and to build true social mobility in Britain. Only that will challenge a society where, in the words of my right hon. Friend,

“at the age of three but certainly by five, the die of life is set for most children.”—[Official Report, 2 March 2011; Vol. 524, c. 320.]

We all must seek to work together to challenge such a world.

Secondly, their recommendations are based on the assumption that the existing 3,600 Sure Start children’s centres throughout the country, one to serve every community, should be the essential infrastructure—indeed, the delivery system—if the vision of high quality early intervention is to become a reality. That is the key question that we need to consider today.

The departmental Select Committee in the previous Parliament found that Sure Start had begun to make an appreciable difference to children’s lives. It stated:

“Parents in Sure Start areas relative to those in non-Sure Start areas reported using more child and family-related services…and their children were socially more competent. These results seem to show that programmes are becoming more effective over time, particularly in their work with the most disadvantaged, and that children are feeling the benefit of longer exposure to the programmes.”

That is a ringing endorsement.

In essence, Sure Start built into the early years universal comprehensive education. Its strength is that it brings together parents, of all backgrounds, who may not have known each other before. Instead of providing only state support, Sure Start, by bringing those people together, helped them to create self-sustaining support networks in the community, through one parent working with another, and in that way it gave all young parents the extra support that they need. That is a fundamental strength of Sure Start, and it must not be lost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Gove]

The right hon. Gentleman has not misled the House—he never misleads the House—but I am afraid that he has got himself in what we call in Scotland “a bit of a fankle”. He asserted that Hampshire was going to cut children’s centres, and then he was caught short by the facts. I know that he has more respect for the House than to want to put himself in a position of having inaccurate facts in front of him, so all he needs to do, as graciously as is his natural custom, is acknowledge that Hampshire is keeping its children’ centres open and congratulate it on that.

One reason why Hampshire, Hammersmith and Fulham, Kingston upon Hull, Kingston upon Thames and many other Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils, as well as Labour ones, can keep their Sure Start children’s centres open is that there is enough money. I can make that assertion because of the evidence that has been put forward by two of the people who have the best understanding of the early years. Anne Longfield OBE, chief executive of 4Children, has said that the Government are

“continuing to provide adequate funding to keep centres open and councils should resist the temptation to use this money to plug gaps elsewhere.”

Anand Shukla, the acting chief executive of the Daycare Trust, has said:

“The Government has allocated sufficient funding for the existing network of Sure Start Children’s Centres to be maintained”.

The money is there—independent witnesses say so—and well-run local authorities all over the country, represented by councillors of different parties, are maintaining that network. Therefore, every single plank of the right hon. Gentleman’s argument has collapsed beneath him, and I have been on my feet for only six minutes.

[Ms Buck]

What does the Education Secretary say to parents in my constituency, which has the seventh highest child poverty in the country, in the light of Westminster city council’s briefing? The briefing states:

“As you may have heard in the media, central government funding for Sure Start Children’s Centres nationally has been reduced, which means in Westminster we have to save 17% from our Children’s centre budget”,

meaning a saving of £715,000, including roughly £250,000 off early learning and child support, and £400,000 off outreach and family support. Children’s centres will be bricks and mortar without the staff even to ensure that services can be run safely.

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Lady is a highly energetic constituency MP—indeed, I was represented by her for a brief period, and I know how passionately she takes up such causes. However, Westminster, like many other local authorities, is succeeding not just in keeping the Sure Start children’s centre network open, but in providing an enhanced service for children and young people. The question that she and every Opposition Member must address is this: if they believe, as I do, that Sure Start is a valuable service, and that it is a good thing that the Government have set up an early intervention grant, and that we are devoting resources and intellectual energy to the early years, will they support the coalition in the steps that it is taking, or do they have an alternative plan? Do they believe that money should come from other areas of Government expenditure to spend more on any of those services? If they believe that we should spend more than we are spending, can they explain which services they would cut or which taxes they would increase? I am very happy to give way to any right hon. or hon. Member who can enlighten me on Labour’s economic policy, including the hon. Member for Hammersmith.