Prepared: 17:09 on 19 November 2009
1.39 pm
Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West) (Con): It has been interesting to listen to today’s speeches and some from yesterday also repay reading. I would particularly like to commend the speech of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), which showed what a model Member of Parliament can cover in not that many minutes after 17 years in Parliament. It was an inspiring speech, which I commend to anyone elected to this Parliament after the next election. It will show how it is possible to be on the Government side, pretty loyal, and interesting as well as representative of the interests of constituents.
I would like say a few words to the Secretary of State, if I may have his attention for a moment. [Interruption.] It is not comfortable for either the Prime Minister or the Secretary of State to spend all their time talking to people beside them on the Front Bench when a Member is trying to make a remark about them. It shows a discourtesy to the House which I find regrettable. The fact that the Secretary of State is now choosing to leave the Chamber could be described as going beyond what I had expected.
I think that one camera ought to be trained on the person at the Dispatch Box when a Member on the other side of the House is speaking. Yesterday we saw the Prime Minister spending all his time chatting to people. During the part of the debate when the Secretary of State was not getting involved with the Liberal Democrat spokesman, he was talking to the person sitting beside him. All that he wanted was for the person beside him to smile and nod as though he were being very clever. I think that a better example would be given to people in our schools and colleges if the Secretary of State could actually listen to the debate that the Government have introduced. I think that that is what people in this country expect.
When I speak in schools and colleges, I say to pupils, “If you are good enough, consider being a teacher.” We want the best people to become teachers. They are not always the ones with firsts, or even the ones with degrees, but I think that in many fields, whether it is formal education or otherwise, being a teacher is one of the most rewarding of experiences, and certainly very important to society.
My mother-in-law was a teacher, my sister has been a head teacher, my brother-in-law has been a lecturer, and two of our nieces are teachers. I think that it is tremendous to be able to provide education, together with inspiration, motivation, aspiration and dedication. It means saying, “I will not necessarily become as well off as some of my contemporaries who have gone into fields such as industry,” but, at the end of a working life or, indeed, at the end of a whole life, being able to look back and say, “Here are the people whom I have helped to teach and to share an excitement and interest”—whether the subject was science, literature, languages, philosophy or mechanics.
I went up to Cambridge last week to attend the launch of a book on the history of earth sciences at the university. A large part of it was dedicated to my great-great uncle, Sir Gerald Lenox-Conyngham. He never went to university, but he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Reader in geodesy and geophysics as a result of his help in developing those subjects. He has now been succeeded by Dan McKenzie, described by the present president of the Royal Society as probably the greatest living geophysicist, who made people aware of plate tectonics. Being able to challenge received ideas about what is going on inside our earth, let alone ideas about astronomy and even theories about how education can be made to work, is a great thing, and I am glad that today’s debate is about education, although I shall also say a few words about health.
My wife and I have five grandchildren who attend the same primary school that our three children attended. It has no advantage over other schools—it has as great an ethnic mix as any—except for the fact that, over the 40 years or so for which we have known it, the head teachers have been people who believed in order, and in having expectations of what teachers and children can achieve together. Every child learned to read, and, having learned to read, was given a hymn book. Every child learned to swim. Every child learned, when out, to behave in a way that prompted people to ask, “What school does that child come from? It must be very impressive.” That is something that does not require money. It is something that should be common and shared, and I hope that it will be.
The downside is that parents and teachers together do not always succeed. I hope that, when my party serves in government, we shall find a way of publishing, perhaps every two years, the results of studies keeping track of young people in each age cohort. I hope that we shall publish, for instance, the number of young people who each week, for the first time, commit a serious criminal offence. That figure used to be more than 2,000 a week. The vast majority of those young people were male, and by the age of 30 a third of young people had been convicted of an offence for which they could have been jailed for six months or more. I am glad that they were not, but those are pretty horrifying figures.
I hope that the position is now changing, but it used to be the case that 5,000 people in this country took up smoking each week. The same number of cigarettes were being sold each week. We knew that 2,000 people had died—not all of them prematurely—and we knew that 3,000 had given up while still alive. Virtually all those 5,000 people were under 21. Smoking was a habit copied from other people—a social contagion.
Let us take another issue that affects people’s lives—not just the lives of teenagers, but those of many people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. The number of people in the country who, each week, contribute to a conception that ends in a termination is over 6,000. More than 40 per cent. of people will, at some stage in their lives, contribute to a conception that ends in a formal termination.
All those figures are as easy to reduce as reducing the incidence of drink-driving among young men proved to be. We managed to reduce the number of occasions—2 million a week—on which a young man aged under 30 would drive a car having consumed more than the legal limit of alcohol to 600,000. Two-thirds of a socially acceptable, body-breaking, illegal habit evaporated with no change in the law, no change in sentencing, and no change in enforcement. We achieved a change in understanding, a change in behaviour and a change in results.
I do not claim that that was purely a Tory achievement, but some figures stick in my mind. In 1979, 1,800 people a year died in this country because a driver or rider had been on the roads having consumed more than the legal limit of alcohol. In 1986, when I became directly involved, the figure was 1,200, and it is now between 400 and 500. We have achieved massive reductions without having to opt for massive spending, massive legislation, more policing or any other Government-type approach. Making people behave differently is partly a political gift, partly a result of leadership, and partly a result of not devoting too much attention to things that do not work. We could have lowered the limit, we could have increased enforcement and we could have introduced all sorts of penalties, but none of those actions would necessarily have had the same impact.
Let me return to the subject of education. What the Government propose is not necessarily based on bad ideas, but I have been looking at what has happened since 1997—for instance, the number of first-class packages sent to teachers and governors. I once asked a Minister how high a pile just the first-year’s worth would make. The Minister could not answer. I think that far too much has been pushed out to people. What has not been said nearly often enough is that if something is working well, people will copy it. By discussing good practice and doing enough measuring to show what does not work, we can make a big change.
I experienced my first public responsibility as a governor of a school in Lambeth, south London, which in theory contained 1,200 girls. Forty per cent. of the intake was judged to be ethnic-minority. It was not until I asked that I discovered that after the raising of the school leaving age, more than 30 per cent. of the young people were not in school each day. It was not until I asked that I discovered that more than 20 per cent. of the teachers were not in school each day. It was not until I was able to get two of the West Indian mothers on to the governing body that any girl was allowed to take an O-level in the fifth form. Within three years, we saw our first pupil go to medical school.
Accepting lower standards and not having aspiration was seen to be a bad thing. One of our next-door neighbours in Lambeth said that he was sending his grandchildren back to Jamaica because they would be educated better there than they would be in London. That was shocking, and it was one reason why I decided to go into Parliament. I do not place a great deal of trust in the Bill that the Government are talking about, but I put a lot of faith in the ability of teachers of all political persuasions and none, working with parents of all political persuasions and none and with young people, to ensure that we see fewer failures and greater successes, and it becomes ingrained to bring respect into the fact of education and the excitement that it can bring.
Let me turn, relatively briefly, to the subject of health. A great many acronyms have been floating around. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), the Leader of the Opposition, has pointed out that “NHS” were the letters missing from the Queen’s Speech. No doubt that was an oversight. I am sorry if there was an oversight, but that was probably the reason.
In 1997, the Government decided—for some reason that seemed to be pretty arbitrary—that the CHCs, or community health councils, would be abolished. That decision was followed by a succession of three or four changes in the way in which the interests of people in local communities in their health system would be focused in England. CHCs were not abolished in Scotland or in Northern Ireland, and I doubt that they were abolished in Wales. We repeatedly asked here, informally and formally, why that was being done, but no serious reason was ever given. When we ask now whose idea it was, no name comes forward. That is the kind of legislation which has a harmful impact on the ground.
I hope that when we come into government—as I hope and presume that we will; I shall work hard to ensure that we do—we can, for a start, re-establish a Department for Education. I see no reason for us to continue to split education between different Departments. I also hope that we can have a Department of Health, which, if people want CHCs to be brought back with the same level of resources that they had before, will be able to do that. I think that—both in Greenwich, where I was first a Member of Parliament, and in my present constituency of Worthing—such a system, with some adaptations, would work better than the current system in which the load is placed on volunteers. The current system is almost impossible to describe, and very difficult to sell to those whom we wish to become involved.
In respect of turning aspirations into laws—this is of relevance to the Queen’s Speech—we must also acknowledge that Ministers, whether of the Labour, Conservative or any other party, should not introduce measures that will work badly.
Incidentally, on the subject of Governments saying they want to enshrine in legislation things that they are committed to doing, such as halving the deficit, can we not move forward to a time when if a Government say they want to do something, they just do it, instead of passing a law that in effect says, “This is what we will find ourselves not to have done by law afterwards”? I find that difficult to justify to college students in my constituency.
Turning to health, one of my greatest friends was a cardiologist called Professor Philip Poole-Wilson—indeed, he led the world’s cardiologists. He told me, as did doctors in my own hospital, that the Government—or the Department of Health or the national health service, depending on who wants to take responsibility—plans for MMCs, or modernising medical careers, and the MTAS, or the Medical Training Application Service, system would work perversely.
When the then Secretary of State had stopped being Secretary of State and two years later said she was surprised at how badly that had gone, we ask ourselves why had she not been listening at the time to Professor Philip Poole-Wilson, my local adviser, Dr. Gordon Caldwell, or some people on her own political side, and certainly many on my side, who had said that that was not going to work? When a good doctor with a relevant PhD in a clinical subject gets marked down, and somebody else has ripped 150 words on leadership off the internet and puts in an application, and five qualified doctors at a hospital not far from here get not a single interview between them for a next job when they are the very people who will become the consultants and teachers we need in the future, we wonder what has been going on in the Government and the Department of Health. That is not what I knew when my wife was working there.
Incidentally, Philip Poole-Wilson was one of those people who switched careers; he did not start as a doctor. When, sadly, he died, there were 29 other professors of cardiology whom he had trained. That he achieved that by the age of 65 shows that if we allow people of distinction to achieve things, they can attract a group of people around them who can then go around the world and make enormous contributions.
My last point on the NHS is to do with the national health service IT system. Every strategic health authority said that one of their hospitals must be a victim in order to bring in this new system, and, sadly, Worthing was chosen in my SHA area. The hospital tried to put that off for as long as possible, but when it came in, within six to nine months an extra £2 million had to be added to the hospital budget of £140 million a year to provide the clerical and manual back-up to substitute for the system that had been put in to replace the computer system it had, which was working, but was not working in the way in which someone, who has now left their job, up at Whitehall had imposed on them. That is terrible. Those £2 million could have been very usefully spent on some things that truly matter. When I thought of the doctors, nurses, administrators, managers and others in the hospital having to face that, knowing it was coming in and it would not work, I wept. It is not what the Government are supposed to be doing.
The final topic that I wish to address is equality. I attended an important NATO Parliamentary Assembly meeting in Edinburgh over the weekend. At one point, on the platform were put a brigadier and three other officers, all of whom were women. After they made their presentations, it was time to make some contributions. I had been reminded of my first ministerial role at the Employment Department, when I was responsible for, among other things, equality and diversity. I asked why it was that in Departments in those days—we are going back 25 years now, to 1984—80 per cent. of first-line managers were female but two promotion grades later only 40 per cent. were female. In part, the answer to that is that there was an agreement—I call it a conspiracy—between the management and unions that staff had to serve a certain number of years before they could get a promotion. Secondly, they had a system where staff had to apply for promotion; people were not told, “We want you to go for this bigger and better job.” The issue came down to the generalisation—it is no more than that—that most men who are half-qualified for something think they are over-qualified, and most women who are half-qualified think they are disqualified. The same applies normally—this is just a generalisation—to doing a good job; a woman doing a good job thinks it is a good reason to go on doing it, whereas a man doing a good job thinks it is a good reason to change and do something else. Some of these issues are cultural.
We also had issues over race. I remember being questioned on the BBC Radio 4 “Today” programme about why racial discrimination in employment had not appeared to have improved very much. I pointed out that “Today” had 40 staff, not one of whom was black or Asian. I asked whether that was because they did not have the qualifications or somebody in recruitment was discriminating. I was on the show twice more in the next few weeks. I asked the same question, and I then got a letter from the director of personnel saying would I please stop exposing the BBC to scorn by asking questions, which seems an odd request to come from the BBC. It said it would have, in effect, an open access policy, under which people doing media training at the then polytechnic next door would get work experience, so people would no longer have to be called Dimbleby or Jay or something else to get an internship at the BBC, and the BBC has now changed. Therefore, being open and fair and giving people opportunity is what unites the education and health sides of this debate, and it is certainly the driving force behind my participation in public and political service.
I hope that the Sir Christopher Kelly changes, whether modified or not, will not lead to the middle being excluded from participating in this place. I have a fear that we will have a Parliament of just the rich and the poor and not the people in between. We should also try to ensure we get the ordinary practitioner in medicine to think they might come into Parliament at some sacrifice and do well, and the average head of department of a good school, too—not to do better than they otherwise would in financial terms, but to make a contribution. Unless we make sure we do not exclude the middle, we will end up with a rather emptier Parliament.