---

Regional Economy (Tackling the Recession)

May I say what a pleasure it is to be in a Victorian town hall that has not been demolished? We made the mistake of demolishing ours in 1970 and it has been regretted ever since. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed said, such public buildings reflect an age of confidence when this was a prosperous region. Those who built the public buildings knew that and had a statement to make. They built buildings that they knew would last for centuries, whereas we build ones that will be knocked down in 30 years. I hope that that trend is beginning to change. As my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough said, there is much doom and gloom these days. I do not think that it is entirely justified. The tabloid agenda—if I may summarise it as such—is that everything is bad and getting worse, that all MPs are useless, that the Government are useless, that nothing changes for the better and that everybody is in it for what they can get out of it. However, like other hon. Members I represent some of the poorest communities in the country and the lives of my constituents have changed significantly for the better in the last 10 or 12 years. In 1997, there were people in Sunderland who earned £1 an hour. There were not just one or two such people. It included workers in paper mills, security guards and care workers. The minimum wage, which is getting up to £6 an hour, and tax credits have made a big difference to the lives of those people. In the mid-1990s in Sunderland, one had to wait for two years for a hip operation at the local hospital. I have no doubt that it was the same elsewhere. One can now have such an operation within 18 weeks. As we know, a huge amount has been invested in the health service nationally. About 10 or 15 years ago, only 9 or 10 per cent. of the pupils at Sandhill View school in my constituency were achieving five A to C grades at GCSE. Just one tenth of the pupils were meeting that minimum standard. The school has been entirely rebuilt. It has been put under completely new management. It is a community school, so the buildings are not all shut up during the holidays or when the school is not functioning. It is really part of the community. And with exactly the same catchment area it now scores near to 50 per cent., including maths. I can see that there is a long way to go—everybody can see that—but, my goodness, that is quite a large change. I would think that it is actually among the biggest changes that have taken place anywhere in the country, coming from such a low point as Sandhill View did. We have suffered, like everybody else, the loss of a lot of our traditional manufacturing industries—glass, shipbuilding, the mines, a lot of engineering—and those things did not stop closing just because a Labour Government were elected in 1997. We all know that is a result of world forces that are beyond the control of any Government, never mind any politician. But what we have been successful at—I think this is true across the region and other contributions today have reflected it—is diversifying our economy, reinventing ourselves and making us actually less vulnerable to the slings and arrows of fortune, particularly now in the current recession. On the outskirts of my constituency is Doxford international business park. Some 15 years ago it was an empty site: 7,500 people now work there, all of them in industries or businesses that did not exist in Sunderland, certainly, at that time. I mention all those things and I could mention more, just to say that I do not accept the line that everything is bad and getting worse—and it needs to be challenged regularly. Anyone with eyes to see can see the kinds of things that I have just talked about in their own constituencies and throughout the region. I doubt whether those changes for the better have occurred just in this region or just in my constituency. I suspect that they are reflected across the country. Although I do not attribute all of them, of course, to the fact that there is a Labour Government, I do think that the fact that we have had a Labour Government for the last 12 years has something to do with it. We have talked about future challenges here, and we all know that there are plenty of them. Hon. Members have identified some of them and the Minister, who made an excellent speech, has enumerated some, so I will just touch on them. It seems to me that one of the ways forward for this region is for it to make itself a leader in this country and perhaps in Europe in renewable energy technology. Electric cars have been mentioned. Thank God for Nissan, incidentally. When we were losing all the mines, the shipyards and the engineering, up came Nissan and demonstrated that you can set up a car plant using our work force, which is as good as any in the world. We have heard a lot about the British work force up to that time, and how they were not up to this or that and about how everything was going to have to go somewhere else. Actually, Nissan demonstrated that workers on Wearside and in the north-east are as good and efficient as those anywhere in the world, given the right management and the right investment, which certainly has occurred with Nissan. That has made an enormous difference to the area that I represent, not only because of the 3,000 or 4,000 people employed at Nissan, but because of all the spin-off industries as well. Now it looks as though there is a chance that we can become a world leader with electric cars, and I welcome that. One area that has not been touched on is waste disposal. I think that this is one of the great challenges facing the human race over the 40 or 50 years. If you look at the booming economies of India and China, which are growing by 8 per cent. or 10 per cent., where is all the waste going to go? I saw an article in a newspaper that said plastic was invented in 1909 and that every bit of plastic since that time, with the exception of a small amount that may have been burned, is still in existence today. Where is it all going? Where is it all going to go? Where is this plastic cup or this bottle going to go when I have finished drinking out of it? It is one of the greatest challenges that we face. We cannot go on as we are. We have got to get a great deal more sophisticated about how we live our lives, in the first place—that is, switch to tap water—and about how we dispose of the waste that has been generated and cannot be reduced. Some high-tech solutions are going to be required. I am glad to say that, although this region lags behind the country when it comes to waste disposal—and this country lags behind the rest of western Europe—we are making some progress now. Three local authorities in my area—Sunderland, South Tyneside and, I think, Gateshead—have got together to invest in new plant and high-tech solutions. That is an area in which we have quite a big part to play if we choose to go down that road. The other area on which we must spend a great deal of money and effort is education. The Government have been doing that over the past 10 or 12 years. We must have the skills that enable us to compete in the world. Most of the rest of the world, and certainly east Asia, have worked out that they must have such skills if they are to hold their own in the world. Traditionally, we have lagged behind, but we have not done badly. We have made education a great deal more practical so that young people coming out of school have the kind of skills that are needed to connect them up with industry. Moreover, we have universities linked to industry. However, we must continue making big investments in education if we are to hold our own in the world. Finally, I want to flag up the issue of the growth in agency workers. Any discussion about efficiency always seems to involve talk of laying off people who have secure jobs and replacing them with people who have insecure jobs. As a result, there is a class of people growing up in this country—they are in all our constituencies—who have no access to occupational pensions, sick pay, holiday pay, redundancy pay or any of the little things that we have quaintly come to associate with civilisation over the past hundred years and for which my party has struggled. Suddenly, there is a class of people who do not qualify for such benefits. It is a big and widening divide that needs to be challenged. I am concerned about the kind of bidding war that is opening up on how much we can all cut. That is the wrong debate. Obviously, we all know that, at the end of the day, the Government must balance the books, but it should be done in a sensible and non-hysterical way. I listened to that shameful piece of opportunism by the Liberal Democrat leader who called for bold and savage cuts. I do not wish to embarrass the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed, who, I suspect, is not as signed up as his party leader to such cuts, but I think that the speech was a cynical bid to attract the votes of the southern middle classes. That is the kind of language that will get us all into trouble because it drives the debate further forward in that direction and there will be consequences, especially for a region such as this which is heavily dependent on Government spending. When I was first elected in 1987, there were parts of my constituency in which all civilised life had collapsed. Our job as Members of Parliament was to evacuate people who could no longer bear to live in the streets and estates in which the world of work had collapsed and in which there was an epidemic of crime and yobbery. Such a situation arose as a result of the bold and savage cuts that the incoming Government had made at the beginning of the 1980s. A generation of youth grew up—and many still cause us problems—who had no prospect of work, no skills and no hope. Many of them went on to pass through the criminal justice system, and we are, to some extent, still clearing up the mess in this region and in other parts of the country. I hope that there will be no repeat of that folly. In the great depression in 1929, or whenever it started, one of the first things that the Republican Government did was to make bold and savage cuts. By doing that, they dug the pit a great deal deeper around the world—not just in America—than it need have been.