Antonia Bance MP: speeches

Speeches

• 9 Oct 2024 · Skills England · Hansard source

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  As my hon. Friend might expect, I agree with him on all those points. I hope very much that our current Skills Minister’s tenure is significantly longer than the average, and that Skills England proves long-lasting and effective in responding to the industrial strategy. We expect the Green Paper on industrial strategy perhaps as early as next week, but certainly by the Budget. This may be a tangent, but it is important. I want an industrial strategy that makes choices and sets out which sectors are our priorities—yes, clusters where we are already world-beating, or could be, but also places that are our priorities for industrial development and catch-up. Good growth must level the playing field, and national growth cannot be at the expense of left-behind places like the one I represent. However, Skills England must respond not just to industrial strategy and migration, but to all of Government, as it touches skills such as our agenda for getting people back to work. We want people helped into real jobs that offer a route out and a route up, and not just any job. That means no more jobcentres running their own skills and education programmes separate to the priorities of Skills England. Third, we need a Skills England that is directive, not hands-off; one that sees its role as supporting training that meets the industrial strategy, not courses that do not. I will give an example: one shortage occupation is lab technicians for our world-leading life sciences sector. If the gap is lab technicians, then it is Skills England’s job to make sure that the courses for lab techs run, are funded, are supported and are filled. If that means that young women in an area cannot do low-level hair and beauty courses that set them on a path to a life on the minimum wage, but are instead channelled into a higher-wage, higher-skilled job that offers a career path, such as being a lab tech, so be it. That is Skills England doing its job. It may be easier and cheaper to run a business management course in a classroom at a college, but given the shortage occupation list and the industrial strategy, we need bricklayers and welders. Yes, it will cost more to make the facilities available and we may have to pay the lecturers a bit more too, but that is what is needed.

• 9 Oct 2024 · Skills England · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered Skills England. It is an honour to serve under you as Chair, Sir Christopher. I am so glad to have the opportunity to raise the urgent need to reset our adult skills system in England, to press my case for my constituency and region, and to seek further information about the Government’s plans. The argument I will make today is this: Skills England cannot be just another quango. We need a confident and directive organisation that takes what our economy needs, directs provision, drives learner uptake, and delivers more workers with higher skills ready for better jobs on higher wages. I will also press the case for my constituency, for the Black Country and for the wider west midlands. Judging by the number of people here, there is some interest in this topic, and perhaps we should seek further opportunities to talk about these issues. I am sorry that in my inexperience, I asked only for a 30-minute debate. We are here today because the Conservatives oversaw a decade of decline in skills, and it has made our country poorer. Employers are unable to fill job vacancies, more than a third of vacancies are down to skills shortages, learners cannot get the training they need and industry is left without the skills to tackle the challenges of the future. That is why Labour have pledged to overhaul our skills system and set up a new body for skills: Skills England. Skills England is a central part of our plan for growth, good jobs and prosperity. It will have three key jobs: to assess skills needs, to oversee the suite of qualifications and courses on offer, and to co-ordinate all the players in the sector, of which there are many. The point is to bring order to the skills system, joining it up and making it more responsive to what employers need. I want to say a bit more about the nature of Skills England and how it goes about its job. I have five key points. First, Skills England must spot and respond to genuine skills needs through the best available data and intel. We sometimes forget how hard it is, caught up in the day-to-day, for employers to predict the shape of the market for their goods and services in the future, how the supply chains will change and what that means for their workforce, products and quality. I hope that Skills England, alongside our industrial strategy, can help with that. One of the aspects of Skills England I am most pleased about is that it will be tripartite, with unions on the board as of right. Our movement has always taught working people to read, write, do maths and, more recently, use computers, to help them get on in life. As we face another industrial transition out of energy-intensive and carbon-reliant industries, we need to plan and manage with workers and use their insights too. Workers’ voices need to be around the table on skills, and with this Government, I know that they will be. Secondly, Skills England must be co-ordinated across Government and, most importantly, with the Migration Advisory Committee and the industrial strategy. I looked at the shortage occupation list this morning and it is frankly an indictment of our skills system that so many vital jobs in manufacturing and construction are listed: bricklaying, welding—something those in my own area are expert in—roofers, carpenters, joiners and retrofitters. No more. Skills England must start to direct support to fill these skills gaps so that we can grow our own. Above all, Skills England must work hand in glove with our new industrial strategy and deliver the skills training that will make the strategy real.

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I do agree. I have met many of his constituents in Southampton Itchen while campaigning with him over the years. I have seen the conditions that many of them and families in my own constituency live in, and I look forward to the security that the Bill will give them. I am so pleased and proud that we will bring this Bill forward straight away—no delay, no hold-ups. Loads of renters out there are saving for their next unwanted house move; it takes, on average, £1,700 to move house. They are worried that they may lose their homes and be forced out of the area where their kids go to school. I say to those renters today, “We’ve got your backs. You will be able to stay in your homes—this will be law inside the year. Take heart!” If the landlord tries to raise the rent so high as to amount to a de facto eviction, renters will finally have recourse: they can go to a tribunal and stop a rent rise above market rates. I gently say to the Minister that it would be good to understand how the tribunal will find out what market rates are; as we all know, looking at Rightmove will not help—that covers only new lets, not all lets in an area. But that detail is for later stages. What matters is this: no more no-fault evictions; security and predictability for renting families; rights rebalanced between renters and landlords; safe homes; and proper action on rogue landlords. This has been a long time coming, and I am so proud.

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Member agree that it is precisely those small individual landlords who struggle to keep up with decent renting regulation, even as minimal as it is now? They make up the majority of the rogue landlords that many of us have heard about in our constituency surgeries. Frankly, it is often a good thing that small landlords who are unable to provide decent properties and keep up with legislation get out of the market in favour of those who can.

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to stand here today. I have worked on these issues for more than 15 years. A decade ago, I ran the “Evict Rogue Landlords” campaign at Shelter. I spent a decade on the board of the Nationwide Foundation, funding renter groups and campaigners such as the Renter’s Reform Coalition, and a happy year on the board of Generation Rent, which was ended only by my election. There is so much to welcome in this Bill, but I am so sad that the Opposition Benches are so empty and that Conservative Members have wasted so much time. I thought that the shadow Secretary of State’s speech was curious, trampling on previous Conservative promises on section 21, citing stats sourced from landlord lobbyists about landlords leaving the sector, and rewriting history about why the previous Tory Bill failed. It was quite a performance. Representing Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley, I stand to speak for those renters who use housing benefit to pay their rent. I am so glad that the Bill will end the disgraceful “no DSS” policy. In the long term, the answer for most of my constituents who rent privately is a social home, and I would like to see the proportion of private rented properties in my constituency reduce as we build the social rented homes that we have promised. There is so much that is so good in this Bill. I think my second favourite measure is the application of the decent homes standard to private renting. Over the past 15 years, I have met renter after renter living with damp dripping down the walls, infestations, faulty electrics, and landlords who just do not care—they do not fix it, but still take the rent every month—with temporary accommodation landlords often the worst. Bringing in Awaab’s law and decent homes, and supporting councils to enforce the law will make the change and make every home safe. I wish to associate myself with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh). At Shelter, a decade ago, I worked with the Lullaby Trust to make sure that babies were safe in temporary accommodation and I am sad, angry and shocked to hear of the deaths of 55 babies in temporary accommodation in the years since. But, without doubt, my favourite measure in the Bill is the end of section 21. For once and for all, we will end the ability of landlords to throw people out of their homes “just ’cos”. For 40 years, the cards have been stacked in favour of the landlords. Today, we bring forward plans to rebalance the rules, so landlords can run their businesses, shouldering the appropriate level of risk, and renters know their home is theirs for as long they want it.

• 8 Oct 2024 · VAT: Independent Schools · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am honoured to speak for the first time in this House as the Member of Parliament for Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley. I represent the village of Coseley in Dudley, as well as the towns of Tipton, Wednesbury and Hateley Heath in Sandwell. In the last Parliament, Shaun Bailey was a tireless advocate for this special corner of the Black Country, and I wish him well as he resumes his legal studies. Let me tell you about Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley. We are an industrial constituency, shaped by factories, foundries, mines and canals. We have beautiful parks, laid out for the leisure of working people, and civic buildings of grace and gravitas, such as the grade II listed Tipton central library and the 16th-century St Bart’s in Wednesbury. But more than anything, we have the people of the Black Country—creative, ingenious, hard-working and down to earth people like Thomas Barratt. Born in Coseley, he stopped the enemy advance and saved his patrol at Ypres. He was a boilermaker, awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously at just 22. The workers of Tube Town, the metal finishing capital of the world, went out on strike for two long months in 1913 for a decent wage. They were backed all the way by their wives, heroes in their own right, who somehow kept 25,000 families fed amid near destitution. They won. I am proud to say that their union became my union, Unite. Workers have come to the constituency from Ireland, the Caribbean, Bangladesh, Kashmir and Punjab; they left their homes to provide for their families, facing racism but prevailing, building churches, temples, mosques and gurdwaras, and seeing their children succeed. We are a proud, working-class community. Too often, people have stood in this place and talked our area down. I will never. Of course, the name “Black Country” is for the smoke of heavy industry; there has been coalmining, steel fabrication, metal finishing, and nail, brick and chain making. We are where the industrial revolution started. James Watt’s first steam engine hauled coal in Tipton, at the Bloomfield colliery. Today, despite everything, a quarter of all workers in our area are still in manufacturing. We may be the Black Country, but modern manufacturing is clean, high-skill and high-wage. In Sandwell, 1,000 firms —with 21,000 jobs—make everything, from street furniture to hinges to locks to the precision metal forming for aeroplanes and power plants. I am proud to wear the “Made in Britain” badge, and to back our new deal for working people. If we are to have a new industrial revolution here in the UK as we meet the challenge of climate change, let us make it with our hands and our brains, in the place that was the crucible of the first industrial revolution, the Black Country. I stand for no more and no less than this: prosperity for every family. My friends at the TUC worked out that if wages had risen in the last decade by the amount by which they rose between 1997 and 2010, the average worker in my constituency would be £93 a week better off. That is nearly five grand a year more in people’s pockets. In the Black Country, we work hard, but forces bigger than any individual—deindustrialisation, Thatcherism, and the cruel austerity of these last 14 years —mean that good folk there earn less and have fewer chances and fewer choices than people elsewhere. Fully half of our kids grow up below the poverty line, in infested B&Bs, in homes with damp dripping down the walls, or in flats made for two, but home to three times that. For many, most weeks, the money stretches, just about—until the week when it does not. I want to turn the thoughts of those in this House to the young people in my constituency, almost none of whom go to fee-paying schools. Four in 10 kids in my constituency did not get grade 4 GCSE in maths and English last year. That has to change, and we will change it. As I stand here today, the obstacles to delivering prosperity, and more than that—comfort, security, leisure—to every worker and every family seem almost insurmountable, but we take heart from our history: from Ernie Bevin, who forged the working-class women and men of the UK into an industrial machine that, from a standing start, equipped our country for victory. In my area, those in saucepan factories made grenades, and car makers built the machines to defeat fascism. That is a reminder that once we turn our minds to something, the ingenuity and drive of the British working class can rarely be equalled. It is for us, here, to set it free. I will always stand against decline and for progress. After all, I grew up in a world where people like me could not get married, but now our beloved daughter has both her mamas’ names on her birth certificate. To believe in progress is to believe that once again this country can work for working people. It is time, Madam Deputy Speaker, so my final words are to the people of our towns. Tipton, Coseley, Wednesbury, Hateley Heath: I am here to serve you always.

• 5 Sept 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend will be aware of the disgraceful union-busting tactics and intimidation employed by Amazon against GMB members seeking union recognition at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry. Despite more than 1,000 votes in favour, union recognition was lost by just 28 votes. What steps is he taking to ensure that workers, such as the brave and determined GMB activists at Amazon, can more easily win union recognition?

• 25 Jul 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Many residents in Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley are sick of the noise and disruption of illegal off-road motorbikes. During the election campaign, we promised to change the rules so that the police could crush illegal off-road bikes that they seize within 48 hours—something that the Tories failed to do in 14 years. Can the Leader of the House update us on when those measures may be brought forward and when Members may have an opportunity to discuss actions to cut anti-social behaviour?