Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

No, I will not, because we do not have time and, to be honest, the hon. Gentleman is becoming monotonously boring.

When the Prime Minister spoke at the Conservative party conference, he said that he was on the side of the strivers. He makes it clear in the Bill that he is on the side of employers who want to sack people—without adequate compensation or adequate protection in law.

I have tabled a number of simple, basic amendments to ameliorate the proposed legislation, all of which have been rejected. I suggested that there should be a sanction against employers who do not participate in conciliation. We are told that such a sanction already exists, so my proposal would simply codify what the Minister has said happens in practice. It is important that we include that in the Bill.

I have made a simple attempt to amend the time scales in which claimants can prepare their case. A month is not enough for them—they must collect information and seek legal advice, and individuals often draft legal papers themselves. A six-month time scale would reflect that reality.

Another proposal would ensure that the processes being introduced by the Government have the confidence of all sides. It is unacceptable for the judge to determine who is on the Employment Appeal Tribunal, because it removes the experience of both sides of industry, who could advise the judge. My proposal is simply that consensus should be achieved and that the decision should be made with the approval of both the employee and employer representatives—all parties concerned. Even that proposal has been rejected.

People are not currently adequately compensated, which is why the cap is unacceptable. In no other area of law does a judge make an assessment that someone has lost and determine compensation, only for a cap to prevent full compensation. That is why there should be no cap, and yet the Government are keen on caps—they have introduced a £5,000 cap on fines against employers. What is £5,000 to companies such as Virgin or Starbucks, which we heard about yesterday? They are billion-pound companies. What is a £5,000 fine to them? It is meaningless.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John McDonnell]

No, because the hon. Gentleman came late to the debate.

[Nick de Bois]

I am not boring!

[John McDonnell]

I might allow the hon. Gentleman to intervene if he came to the Chamber occasionally.

The point of my proposals is to ensure a balance of fairness in the regime that is being introduced. There is currently no balance whatever. The Bill is Beecroft. It is based on no evidence and on prejudice, and is the first stage of the Government’s plans to undermine employment law. This is the first stage of undermining the protections that workers have. People outside the Chamber will realise what is happening in the coming months under this Government. Jobs will be shredded and people will have no protection whatever as a result of the Bill and what will follow. On that basis, I wholeheartedly support Opposition Front Benchers in attempting to remove those clauses.

Self-Employment

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

I shall be brief. I intended to make two points, but I will now make only one, in the interest of enabling other hon. Members to speak. I want to talk about the role of education and of finance and how help can be provided to people. I fully confess to being heavily influenced by a constituent of mine, who has been working under the scheme led by Virgin Media. In the past year, she has taken steps to establish a competitive business. In fact, while she was at college, she was so entrepreneurial that she decided to use some of her student loan to help to fund the website that is driving her business. The entrepreneurial spirit is to be admired. I have no idea whether she was allowed to do that, so I will not name her, but it shows that with some lateral thinking, perhaps some of the young talent that exists can be put to good use.

I myself did not go to university. I went to a technical college in Cambridge, which I am told is now a university. The business studies course that I did was a sandwich course. It struck me that the only choice that I had during that sandwich course was to go to a placement that was put to me by the college, very helpful though it was at the time. Why cannot we set up an arrangement whereby we allow a sandwich year, even in a course of reduced time length, to become an opportunity for someone, under mentoring and guidance and with the ability to use student finance at their disposal, to take their first steps towards running a business?

If we think creatively, we can not only foster the educational and mentoring skills that are so vital; we could even allow people access to finance, perhaps on the same terms as those of the student loans scheme. I suspect that it would not be able to extend its remit to do that and we may have to look elsewhere for other sources of financing. However, if we are genuinely saying, “Let’s educate and let’s motivate,” and we have students who are showing character and willingness by seeking out the courses, there could be a useful match with an existing system in order to help them. At the end of the day, the payback to them as individuals will be substantial—the payback to the economy will be vital.

I therefore ask my hon. Friend the Minister to give the initiative that I have described some consideration and not to lose sight of something that we all too glibly talk about—

[The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)]

I have given that some consideration and I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I think we will do it. I think it is a very good idea and I will ask my civil servants to work something up.

[Nick de Bois]

I say, when you’re ahead, quit. I thank the Minister.

Financial Education

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

I understand that that would not be applied retrospectively—and a very sound recommendation it is on those terms. I shall come on to that in a moment, because I taught in a primary school the year before I was elected, and I had to teach maths. That experience has led me to the conclusion that we should absolutely ensure that primary school teachers have better maths qualifications. Although I did not do them a disservice, the children I taught would have benefited from being taught by somebody who had not struggled with maths as I did. I managed to scrape a GCSE C grade. That is why we have supported the minimum grade of B for primary school teachers.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon outlined most of our recommendations and stole quite a lot of my speech in the process. He also talked about the inquiry process and stole my three bullet points on that too. I have been left with something to say, however. It is important to remind ourselves why this subject is so important. A lot of the research that we looked at in preparing the report was quite frightening. The situation out there is even worse than I expected. Research by EdComs in June 2009 found that by the time children reach the age of 17, more than half of them are or have already been in debt. A YouGov survey in 2008 found that 70% of 18 to 24-year-olds were already in debt. As we have heard, with tuition fees and the way life is today, that figure will not go down any time soon.

A survey by M&S Money found that some 14 to 18-year-olds are given no help with basic money matters by their parents. Indeed, 19% of parents have never discussed with teenagers how to spend money, and 32% have yet to discuss how to budget or even describe what a budget is. Most telling of all is the report compiled in March this year by Credit Action which found that a lack of financial education has cost Brits nearly £250 million in bank charges and penalties alone. I know that we are all grateful to Martin Lewis for helping us to get our money back in those matters.

The lack of financial education is a growing problem. We seem to be sending young people out into the world, which is increasingly financially complex, without providing them with the skills they need. I support the Government’s drive to reduce burdens on schools, to slim down the curriculum and to mandate less to schools, but in that process we must never allow ourselves to scale down to the extent that we remove the basic capabilities that we expect our young people to have when they leave school. Our view is that the financial education component should be a key measure.

I listened to the shadow Minister’s comments about PSHE. We gave some consideration to that. One of the big fights in our inquiry, not only between panel members but between those who gave evidence to us, was about whether financial education should just sit in PSHE. As a former practitioner who was expected to deliver PSHE, I felt strongly that it was not suitable, not least because it is not examined. As the hon. Gentleman, as a former teacher, will know, and indeed as head teachers told us during the inquiry, if a subject is not examined, schools do not necessarily accord it the importance they should.

For three years, I taught in a very difficult school in Hull, in one of the most deprived catchments in the country. I had to deliver PSHE, but we had so many other pressures on us to raise standards, such as working with grade C-D borderline kids so that in the next year’s league tables we would do a little better and would not be picked out by the local media as the worst-performing school. In better-performing—dare I say it?—more middle-class schools, teachers may be able to indulge themselves a little more in developing the PSHE curriculum because they do not have quite the same pressures on them. However, I am afraid that in a lot of schools, despite the professionalism of teachers, the subject often takes a back seat. When the Arun Youth Council and My Money Young Advisers came to give evidence, I asked one young person, “What do you think of PSHE?” His response was, “Well, it’s a bit of a doss.” Sadly, that is the situation in a lot of schools. Some fantastic work is being done across the country in PSHE, and we were provided with evidence of that and told about it by other young people. Although PSHE is important and must be part of the solution, we concluded that financial education had to be examined so that schools place the necessary emphasis on it.

We made it clear that there should be a financial education element within maths that can be clearly defined and packaged to young people. It is not simply a case of putting in a few questions that look like they are about financial education, as the shadow Minister said. It is about packaging a lot of the education and skills that are already there and saying clearly to young people, “This is financial education, and this is why we are doing it.” We can also help to improve the importance placed on PSHE, which is already taught in schools, because it will be used to support the drive for standards in mathematics. I think that that provides a real opportunity to raise the profile and importance of PSHE across the country.

I will give a couple of examples from our report to demonstrate this. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon said, we did not want to come up with a wishy-washy report that said it would be easy to have financial education, knock on the Minister’s door and have him say, “Thank you very much. It looks lovely, but I am afraid that it’s not going to happen.” Therefore, we have tried to work in the direction of Government policy and to provide practical solutions.

Members who have looked at the report will have seen that on page 38 we demonstrate clearly where in the maths curriculum the financial education elements can fit nicely—we are grateful for the help we had from mathematicians. Those have been split into three headings: money and transactions; risk and reward; and financial landscape. The money and transactions elements includes being able to do compound interest calculations with a calculator or spreadsheet, to set up a spreadsheet to do calculations involving percentages and to use foreign exchange rate information to make calculations. For financial landscape, the competencies include the ability to do reverse percentage calculations and to work out an inflation rate for a given time period, which is very important and something we hear a lot about. That involves real maths skills, not wishy-washy stuff at all.

That can be supported over in the PSHE curriculum by talking to young people about the products that they might have to make choices about. For example, we can talk to them about managing money, budgeting, the subjective issues of risk and reward and what is right for them in particular situations. That is not something we felt could fit easily into one or other area, which is why the solution we have come up with is deliverable within the current curriculum without putting extra pressures on schools.

One of the recommendations that has been referred to is that of having a co-ordinator on this in schools, and that should be someone from the senior leadership team within the school. That is important, because one of the big drivers when I first started teaching in the early 2000s was the drive towards more cross-curricular working, and it happened for a bit and then we lost focus on it. Having someone at a sufficiently senior level within the school to drive that cross-curricular agenda and link the two subjects is important, and the educational professionals who came to speak to us were very supportive of that approach.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

My hon. Friend raises an important point about the leadership coming from within schools, but does he agree that there might also be a role for the private sector and financial institutions to lend their support to make pragmatic advice available?

[Andrew Percy]

My hon. Friend must have been reading my notes over my shoulder, because that is exactly the point I was about to move on to. I will be brief, because I know that other Members wish to speak. We took a lot of evidence from financial institutions and banks, and one of the challenges we set out for them in the report relates to training. It would be pointless if I went in to deliver financial education to any of my pupils, because I am not financially competent, so there is an issue of training. But we have identified that role as one that financial institutions could work on more closely. They do a lot already, and anybody who knows Barclays will have seen its money skills programme. I visited Barclays in my constituency recently, and through the fantastic Sobriety Project it was doing some excellent work with Goole high school students who are at risk of exclusion and with vulnerable young people in the town.

Nationwide has a programme, and so does Capital One. I do not want to risk missing out any institutions, but many are already engaged in financial education, so we have set them the challenge of coming together, getting their resources kitemarked and perhaps being co-ordinated by a charity. Financial institutions have a real role to play in supporting such education in the curriculum, and in helping to develop the training to which my hon. Friend refers.

I am aware that many other Members wish to speak, but I shall just mention a couple of other organisations that support our proposal, as they should be read into the record if nothing else. First, and most importantly, there is one in my constituency. After the report came out, I was inundated with e-mails from various organisations, one of which I received from one of the two credit unions in my constituency, Hull and East Yorkshire Credit Union, to which I think the shadow Minister referred. It informs me that it would very much like to support our campaign on financial education, because it is very much in line with the ethics and objects of its movement.

Nationwide contacted us to say that

“the report looks very comprehensive and is something Nationwide very much welcomes.”

The Money Advice Service issued a statement to

“welcome the APPG on Financial Education & Young People’s report on Financial Education and the Curriculum.”

We were congratulated by the Scout Association, which also has an interest in the area, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales

“call on MPs to back the introduction of mandatory financial education during Thursday’s debate.”

So there is a lot of support from a range of institutions and organisations.

Finally, I emphasise again that our proposal is not about watering down the curriculum, nor is it a wishy-washy thing with which to moralise about debt. It is about real maths skills; about using real-life experiences such as phone contracts, student tuition fees, mortgages or whatever to support the drive for standards, about which we are all passionate and we know the Minister is absolutely passionate; and it is about ensuring that young people enter this complex financial world with the skills to make better decisions than I, and many other people who have gone before them, have made.

Economic Growth and Employment

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

I withdraw that comment.

The hon. Gentleman asked whether business organisations were in favour of increasing the unfair dismissal service requirement from one to two years. That policy may sound good on the face of it, but what will happen—I say this as a former employment lawyer—is that we will simply end up with more employees making spurious discrimination claims, because there is no service requirement for them. When we put that to businesses, they take quite a different point of view of the policy.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

rose—

[Julian Smith]

rose—

Oral Answers to Questions

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

Local authorities have a duty to ensure that there are sufficient school places for all children of school age in their area and the Government are supporting local authorities in the fulfilment of that duty. Kirklees council received £17.2 million of capital for 2011-12 and a further £0.5 million as a result of the additional £0.5 billion basic need funding that was announced recently. On section 106 funding, the Government are consulting on changes to the community infrastructure levy to make it more responsive to local needs, including the need to ensure that there are enough school places.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

12. What steps he is taking to tackle the shortage of primary school places in (a) Enfield North constituency and (b) England.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

Of the £1.3 billion available to fund additional school places in England, the London borough of Enfield’s share is just under £16 million.

[Nick de Bois]

Enfield council recently announced a strategy to cope with the increasing demand, but it gives no specific consideration or role to free schools. What advice can the Secretary of State give to those interested in setting up free schools who face this purely ideological barrier?

Higher Education Policy

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denham]

Although this does not apply to the case that my hon. Friend raises, she has touched on an issue that will need to be examined in greater detail on another occasion. It has long been an oddity that the incomes declared to the Student Loans Company by those applying for loans appear to be rather low if they are set against the statistics about the social class from which people come. There is a financial incentive for minimising declared income when applying to the student loan system, and we must acknowledge that that was present to a degree under our system, too. Any sensible person will have real concerns that as fees rise towards £27,000 for a typical degree, with possible significant differences in the maintenance awards available and significant fee advantages for declaring a lower income, the temptation creatively to declare household income, shall we say, may well rise.

I think that it is a tragedy if, in a legitimate way, people take a household decision that takes somebody out of the labour market to enable somebody to take advantage of such opportunities. I am just flagging up this point without developing it further, but there is an issue here that the whole House will have to consider in the years to come.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

Does the shadow Secretary of State not understand that he is fuelling fears for those who wish to go university by constantly referring to what students have to pay? They do not. In the words of a former Home Secretary, it is graduates who pay and who benefit. That is the difference. I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman thinks carefully about the damage that he is doing to the potential of young individuals.

[Mr Denham]

With due respect to the hon. Gentleman, I shall read back to him directly the words I spoke before I took those interventions: two graduates with the same degree from the same university starting the same job will start their working life with as much as a £9,000 difference in their level of debt. That is an accurate representation of the system that there will be and of the current system, in which, as Government Members do not understand, fee repayments start after graduation. The issue, however, is that students—those planning to go to university—are being told that they will be responsible in most courses for footing the entire cost of their university education. That is undoubtedly true.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lilian Greenwood]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The fact is that many of my constituents who are considering going to university are terrified at the prospect of paying back debts of £30,000 or £40,000. That is about not just how much they have to pay, but how long they have to pay for. I am sorry that the Minister would not take my intervention, but under a graduate tax system, surely those who earn more would pay more.

[Nick de Bois]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lilian Greenwood]

No, not at the moment. Under the Minister’s scheme, those who earn the most will pay less, because they can pay their loans off quickly, before they have substantial amounts of interest to pay on top.

Sir Martin Harris, the director of the organisation charged with improving access to higher education, says that there is a “real risk” that teenagers from low-income homes will feel unable to attend university, which makes me even more convinced that this Government’s policies are not properly thought through.

Further and Higher Education (Access) Bill

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Friday 4th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I do not accept that, because we have ended up with a system whereby people go to university because they have been put on a conveyor belt to university by the state, which has encouraged people to go down that route. Many people go to university who are not best served by doing so, and who would be far better served by vocational education. We seem to be obsessed with education in this country. One of the places where one can learn an awful lot is at work. I learned more in my years at Asda than I ever did at university or school. Rather than spending three years at university, many people would be better served by getting three years’ work under their belt and learning the skills that are learned in the workplace.

I object to the idea that everybody should be on the conveyor belt of university, because I do not believe everybody is best served by it. That is demonstrated by the fact that I believe 20% to 25%—I am sure the Minister will know the figures better—drop out of their university courses. They have clearly gone to university and discovered the hard way that it was not the best thing for them. How many more stay on their degree course while probably realising in their heart of hearts that it is not right for them? They are stuck on a conveyor belt, when better alternatives for them exist.

It is a mistake to think that going to university is a panacea for everybody. For some people it is absolutely the right thing to do, and we should allow those people to go to university irrespective of their background and where they have been educated. We should say to others, who are not best suited to university, that that is no disgrace at all. We should raise the value of vocational qualifications and careers and allow people to pursue what they are good at. Everybody is good at something, and we need to find out what people are good at and allow them to develop in it. That does not always mean that they have to go to university to develop their expertise.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that even if people choose to go into business to pursue their ambitions, there is now a suggestion that we should select directors based on their sex rather than merit? Does he agree that we should put an end to such creeping social engineering?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We are not going to go down that line. We are going to stick to the subject in hand. As tempted as Mr Davies will be, I know he will restrain himself.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Thursday 17th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

T2. Does my right hon. Friend agree that tackling vexatious employment claims and introducing more flexibility for employers will encourage the growth of jobs and a sustainable economy?

[The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)]

The response that the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey), gave to the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) a few moments ago answers the question. The consultation process is under way. We want to deal with the problem that the hon. Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) raises, which is a big one, in two ways—first, by increasing the period of employment from one to two years before claims can be made, and, secondly, by insisting that all disputes that go to tribunals should go through a conciliation stage first.

Industry (Government Support)

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

A few weeks ago, the OECD, the G7 and the International Monetary Fund said that we had no choice but to make the cuts, so I think they would agree with what I have just said.

We cannot rely on a benign global economic outlook as we approach the cuts. I believe that the international financial markets are at their most fragile since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008; the euro’s troubles are only just beginning; the largest emerging economies in the world are about to raise interest rates, so demand will fall, which will affect global demand; and investor appetite for sovereign debt, including our own, is rapidly diminishing.

If we are to get our economy moving again we have no time to lose, so I look forward to the emergency Budget statement that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor will make next week.

To help industry, we need to get the banks lending again. I have met many people in Bromsgrove who tell me that it has never been so difficult to get a loan. Drawing on my 19 years’ experience of working in the City, I believe that bank lending will not recover until the banks are forced to admit the true state of their balance sheets. Right now, the markets just do not believe that our banks are being truthful about the problems that they face. In turn, the banks are not getting the capital that they need, so they are instead squeezing existing customers, as well as not lending.

As well as a thorough review of financial regulation and regulators, we need an independent audit or a stress test of each British bank, eventually leading to a private sector recapitalisation of weaker institutions that are identified. In that regard, the report that was recently issued by the Future of Banking Commission—of which, I believe, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills was a member—has made some worthy suggestions.

Also to help industry, we need a dramatically different approach to business regulation, as many of my hon. Friends have said today—an approach that is radically different from that of the previous Government. Many business men and women say that the sheer cumulative volume of regulation makes their lives so difficult. People who need to be dealing with customers and products are instead too busy complying with regulators, and many regulations are simply not necessary to keep businesses honest and safe.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

The word “regulation” is often bandied around. Although many people hear it, they do not appreciate its full impact. Does my hon. Friend agree that, in the small business sector alone, nearly one full-time employee a year is needed to deal with the growth in regulation, particularly over the past decade—equivalent to a cost of about £11 billion a year—and that there is no greater signal for turning back the clock? I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) that it is perhaps time for a one-in, two-out policy on regulation.

[Sajid Javid]

Absolutely, and I think that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills said earlier that 21,000 new business regulations have been introduced over the past 13 years—six every working day of the last Government—but such talk of regulation also applies as much to EU regulations as to domestic regulations. Much of what comes from Brussels is often unnecessary, badly thought through or just ignored by other member states when it suits them. So we need a new approach to EU regulations that helps British industry and business and not one that undermines them.

My constituency of Bromsgrove was once a very proud manufacturing hub, supplying much of the west midlands industrial complex. Much of that industry has now, sadly, disappeared. Some hon. Members may remember one of my predecessors, Sir Hal Miller, who was a passionate advocate of industry in the west midlands, especially the motor car industry.

In recent years, a large “closed for business” sign has been hanging over our country. Whether down to punitive taxation, excessive regulation or inadequate incentives, the effect was always the same: to repel new businesses and discourage existing ones. Having run a private equity business, I cannot stress highly enough how destructive those misguided policies have been. Consequently, I support the amendment, and it is hugely reassuring once again to have a Government who recognise the urgent need to re-open Britain for business.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Reeves]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. This Government—the party of the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin)—have called for £293 million of cuts from the regional development agencies. Yorkshire Forward was asked to make £44 million of cuts. It was written to and asked to come back with those cuts within two weeks—it had two weeks to determine cuts that will affect 24,000 businesses in my region. These are not Labour cuts; they are Conservative cuts.

I ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to give my constituents some commitment and some hope and certainty that the work that Yorkshire Forward does to support innovation, manufacturing, jobs and skills will continue. I urge the Government not to destroy the support for jobs and growth that the Labour Government put in place. Without Yorkshire Forward, we would not have brought clean coal to our region and the 1,000 jobs that that means in South Yorkshire. Without Yorkshire Forward, we would not have negotiated a deal with Siemens and GE to bring offshore wind, with thousands of much-needed jobs, to Hull, Grimsby and Scunthorpe.

[Nick de Bois]

What I am hearing today is that growth depends entirely on regional development agencies. We have to liberate businesses from the heavy hand of regulation and taxation that the Opposition imposed under the last Government. That is the way to growth. It is not entirely dependent on the regional development agencies to which the Opposition seem to be so wedded.