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Draft Legislative Programme

I shall be brief. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak at a unique parliamentary occasion: a discussion of the draft legislative programme. In the past, the programme has remained the preserve of a few people in the higher echelons of Government, but now the entire House has the opportunity to participate in it. Whatever disagreements hon. Members have with the programme, the fact that we can debate it here is a very welcome step forward indeed. I believe that most Members agree with it. There is a great deal in the programme, but I shall mention three Bills that I believe will impact on my constituency and on others. Few Members, councillors or elected officials can help feeling a sense of hopelessness and anger when constituents approach them about problems with public transport services within their communities. I believe that the problem is particularly acute for Members who represent areas that are geographically isolated and have statistically low car usage. No one disagrees that bus operators should be able to make a profit, but we must ensure that they continue to provide an essential public service. They receive a substantial public subsidy, and with that should go a clear responsibility to ensure an effective public service. I hope that the draft Bill will have real teeth for elected local authorities to ensure effective public transport in their communities. Members often present petitions before the House and we sometimes meet the managing directors of our bus companies. Occasionally, we have a little bit of success, but there is a major problem, as everyone’s postbag over the last few months will confirm. When these problems are compounded, they can lead to genuine hardship and isolation. It is often the elderly and, indeed, the young trying to take advantage of employment opportunities, who live in these isolated areas and experience transport problems. I believe that the local transport Bill will be widely welcomed in the House and outside in the wider community. Secondly, I would mention the child maintenance and other payments Bill. Much attention will rightly be focused on the question of child maintenance, but I shall make particular mention of the other payments side of it. The Bill includes a commitment to set up a scheme for lump-sum compensation for people suffering from asbestos-related diseases. My constituency used to have a chemical works, owned by Turner and Newall, which made asbestos products for 80 years. The consequences were dire not just for the work force, but for their families as well. My grandfather worked there after he left the services after the first world war and my own aunt has asbestos-related disease. She has it because my grandmother washed my grandfather’s overalls. That shows how insidious this disease is and how much hardship it creates. As I said, it is not just those workers who are affected, but their families and others who worked in shipyards, plumbing and a range of other industries. It is brave and honourable to recognise what happened there. The people who suffer from this disease have pretty dreadful lives, with all the disadvantage and pain that goes with it. This lump-sum compensation may make a little bit of difference to however many years these people have left. The Government are acting wholly honourably by including this measure in the next legislative programme. Finally, the education and skills Bill is more important than any other Bill for securing long-term economic prosperity and success for this nation. It offers an opportunity for a national crusade to ingrain in the nation’s psyche the importance of the skills and education agenda. The impact of globalisation hits us all. Seven years ago, a group of women workers in my constituency who were in textiles and made garments for Marks and Spencer lost their jobs. Marks and Spencer made the commercial decision to source those goods from the far east and China. The argument then was all about low wages and low skills, and how we could compete with them. Over the next three years, by 2010, China will produce more PhDs than the whole of the United States. The argument is no longer about trying to compete on low wages and skills; it is about competing on skills alone. We need Ministers to sell the Bill. I hope that whatever specific disagreements we might have on different sides of the Chamber, we can have a form of national unity on the importance of developing the skills agenda. I recently took part in a state of the city debate in the city that I represent—Sunderland. I was asked a question by a member of our local Youth Parliament: what sort of jobs did I think they, as young people, would have in 30 years’ time? The question made me think. It was very perceptive. I thought about what the economy was like when I left school just over 30 years ago in my constituency and what we thought about the future. The economy was dominated by mining, shipbuilding and heavy and light engineering. That is what we did. In many ways, we thought that it would go on. If I had predicted 30 years ago that we would lose shipbuilding, mining and other industries, while at the same time predicting that employment levels would be higher, people would not have believed it. If I had predicted that in 30 years’ time my local area would produce 380,000 cars a year—remember the state of the British car industry and its reputation in the 1970s—and that some would be exported to Japan, not many people would have believed it. I would not have believed it. Yet that has been the pace of change in the past 30 years. Although it is difficult to predict the future, we can say that whatever the pace of change has been in the past 30 years, the pace of change in the next decade will be as quick.