---

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

My hon. Friend and constituency neighbour makes the point well that we have got rid of the poverty wages that were paid in the health service in the 1990s. I am sure that we are now all getting letters about nurses’ pay, but we should be proud of what the Government have done on nurses’ pay in real terms since 1997. On compulsory competitive tendering and dirty hospitals, my hon. Friend and I both know from our experience of local government that there were pressures to ensure that the priority in terms of local hospitals was not quality but price. Price was the priority not because there was a concern to bring about a more efficient service; the concern about price led to a lower quality of service and to the major element of every single contract being the price of labour, which was pushed down. I welcome the commitment in the Budget speech to an £8 billion investment in education. In my constituency, we can be proud of our record on education; there are new buildings and there is the commitment to continue to replace buildings, and standards are rising, too. They have risen in terms not only of GCSEs, but of the general quality of education. I was proud that Stanley school of technology, which is under the great leadership of Janet Bridges, was in the top 10 most improved schools under the new indices. It is in one of the most deprived communities in my constituency. The teachers there do a sterling job. They do it for two reasons: because they are dedicated to their profession, and because they have support from the Labour Government and money going into their school. I and teachers in my constituency are concerned about 16, 17 and 18-year-olds who have fallen out of the education system and out of the employment market; I have raised this matter before. Those people are seldom represented in any statistics. That is why I was pleased by yesterday’s announcement that we will make it compulsory—that might be too emotive a word to use—to be in education until the age of 18. A teacher came to my surgery a few weeks ago and asked, ““Does that mean that we will force people to do A-levels?”” No, that is not what it means. It will force people to take part in training courses and apprenticeships, and it will ensure that they have basic numeracy and literacy skills. That is vitally important. In many constituencies, entire groups of young people aged 16 to 18 are being left out. Unfortunately, a lot of young people drop out of the education system at 14 and never really get back into it.