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Adjournment (Whitsun)

I wish to speak about something that needs to be a key theme for the Government over the next three, four and five years and will certainly be a key aspect of my work in my Bassetlaw constituency: raising aspirations, especially those of young people. Over the past four years in my constituency, the foundation blocks that allow aspirations to be raised have been laid. We have the top health facilities and services in Britain, according to the Government’s audited statistics. No other constituency in Britain can match our 11 out of 12 health star ratings. However, we need more, and following what has been promised I anticipate that we will get more, including four new health centres, the building of which is due to be started this year. Bassetlaw has some of the best housing stock in Britain. The former Coal Board housing is extremely good and the new housing that has been built over the past 10 years, with a range of sizes and prices, is good, popular and gives people a varied choice. The £62 million that we have secured to achieve the decent homes standard for public housing will consolidate that position and give us an above-average housing stock compared with the rest of the country. On education, starting at the end of the year we will get more private finance initiative money per pupil than anywhere else in Britain to rebuild our secondary schools as new, which will provide another vital block to build aspirations. The final block is employment. When I made my maiden speech four years ago, I was faced with the 4,500 redundancies that had taken place in the six months before the election. I am now facing the problems associated with full employment and a labour shortage. The problem is not so much a skilled labour shortage, although there is some of that, but an unskilled labour shortage. We have not had to tackle such problems in my area for generations, so I welcome tackling them because they are problems that are due to a successful economy. Those bedrocks of success, however, will not in themselves increase people’s aspirations. A culture of low aspirations goes back many generations in mining communities. Until recently, our education systems defined people’s ability in two ways: for males, the choice was to work underground in the pit, with a job for life; for females, it was to be a housewife and sometimes a textile worker. Those were the choices. Educational standards and success were often perceived in terms of the school that had the best football team and best culture of sport, rather than the one that produced pupils who were capable and able to move onward and upward in life, with a wider range of choices. In terms of tackling the deep-rooted problem of low aspirations, the key thing that Parliament and Government can do is to consider ways in which a wider world is brought to people. There are simple and basic ways of doing that, such as the twinning of schools. One small sub-theme of the new plan for Africa is to twin schools in traditional white communities, such as mine, with schools in Africa so that they have an exchange of views. Over time, in this technological age, that exchange will take place via electronic communication and the schools will learn from each other. That could make a great difference in communities like mine. I thank the Holocaust Educational Trust, which this week agreed to take six pupils from my constituency to Auschwitz. That will be a tremendous learning opportunity for them. Such an opportunity has not been offered to people in my constituency before. EDF Energy, which owns the two big power stations in my constituency—West Burton and Cottam—has excelled itself in taking primary school children—from year 6 in particular—to the Palace of Westminster over the past four years, and it has agreed to do so again. When I took those young people around the Houses of Parliament, I found to my surprise not how few of them had visited London, but how few had been on a train or to the south of England. Just the visit from some of my schools to London is one small step in raising aspirations. I commend that company for being far-sighted. This March, we had another big breakthrough with Provident Financial, which took a group from one of my most underprivileged schools to a youth hostel in the Peak district for an outward bound course. Again, that gave a group of young people opportunities that they had never considered before, and those opportunities will increase the life chances of some of them. They will realise that different options are available to them and that life does not begin and finish on their estates, but can be much wider, wherever they choose to go in their lives. That has to be an undercurrent of the debate. I commend the Youth Hostel Association, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. It was established precisely to allow working-class young people to get to understand, enjoy and benefit from the wider world outside their work and home community. It remains as relevant in its ethos and work today as it did when it was first established in the 1930s. I am delighted that this summer the Government will provide finance to allow those from less-well-off backgrounds the opportunity to take a break outside their community and for the outdoor pursuits arena to be open to them. I hope that that will be a recurrent funding stream from the Government during the four or five years of this Parliament. Another theme that I hope to see emerging is a plan on which we have been working on for some time in my constituency, and that is beginning to come to fruition. We are looking to build the equivalent of the first teaching hospital, but a teaching hospital for sport. We would like to replace one of our pupil referral units as a whole with a teaching sports academy, where not just those who have been excluded from schools, but those who are doing well and those who are beyond school—such as their younger siblings, parents and grandparents—can come. It will be funded on an economic model using the social enterprise that is now well developed in the east midlands through the East Midlands Development Agency. Any money made will go back into the community. We will be running the equivalent of a leisure centre, but with everyone within it striving to become sporting coaches and leaders, and we will be looking at the vocational routes that can come from that. This model can create an option of bringing higher education into Bassetlaw for the first time by linking with one of the universities that has degrees in sports and leisure. We hope that it will be a model for providing facilities to the community as well as increasing aspirations, and it is a model that will succeed. The project goes further than that in its uniqueness. We are not simply looking at sport but at health and education simultaneously. Money has been spent in my community on healthy living, but this is precisely the kind of vehicle that can create healthy living. That is why I am pleased to see the primary care trust, the LEA and the police contributing to the thought processes as to how we will develop this project into something sustainable. The other strong aspect is the voluntary sector and I am delighted that the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Community, the Prince’s Trust, the Coalfield Regeneration Trust, Sport England, Sporting Chance, the Football Association, the Football Foundation and many other groups have contributed towards creating what could be a beacon for other areas in the country to copy in terms of raising aspiration and improving the health of the community. Some of our definitions of neighbourhood renewal are rather bureaucratic and we need to liven them up in a way that provides vision and ownership. As well as fusing together health, education, employment and vocational training, it is young people who are taking the lead. The consultation on the project is not by me or by aging professionals paid by the Government to consult. It is the young people—the teenagers—who are showing the enthusiasm and drive. They recognise that the fusion is important and that whatever is created needs to be cross-generational. The example those young people give most strongly is their desire to have a dance studio, which they point out can be recreational and educational, can lead to vocational skills, and can be part of a healthier living programme. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, babies and toddlers can go to a dance studio. That encapsulates the model we are taking forward. I hope that, in the next two or three years, I can come back to this House and outline our successes. We need some new models for raising aspiration and this is something on which we must succeed.