Graham Stuart MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  Can the hon. Member give a single case of a home-educated child being harmed who was not already known to social services? Again and again, it is a failure of social services when notified, not the absence of a burdensome register for parents, who often home-educate their children out of desperation.

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  She was being abused anyway.

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  As was my right hon. Friend, of course. I do not think that anyone with whom I have been in this House over the last 20 years has a more personal and visceral record of fighting for change in their constituency than the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden. Colleagues should consider that before they go into Committee and have the opportunity to reflect on the changes in this legislation, because she knows of what she speaks. She has been heroic in championing the improvement in education in her area, and she has delivered it.

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State has mentioned previous generations of politicians, and all of us in this House must recognise that we follow in the footsteps of giants. Tony Blair, Lord Adonis and others created the academy system that was built on under the last Conservative Government and brought about a transformation of English education. Why does the Secretary of State want to dismantle decades of work by Members across this House and bring about a gross socialist uniformity that will destroy the progress that has been made?

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to take part in the debate. Let me begin with the question of the need for a national inquiry into the rape grooming gangs. Given what has been said so far, I challenge colleagues who have opposed the inquiry to name a single proposal from the Jay report that cannot be implemented if we go ahead with it. It really is a matter of “and”. Notwithstanding the political theatre that Labour Members have tried to bring to the debate, the fact that both the Prime Minister and the safeguarding Minister have said that they are open-minded suggests that—sensibly, from a policy point of view and politically—the Labour party may move to the correct position. As was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson), this is a Bill in two parts, which could probably most usefully have been two separate Bills. The first half concerns safeguarding, and, for the most part, my party and I support it; the second concerns schools, and that we most certainly cannot support. Rather than accusing our amendment of being a wrecking amendment, as the Liberal Democrats have rather disappointingly done, they should recognise that the second half of the Bill—the schools element—is the wrecking element, because it makes the important safeguarding improvements part of a Bill that cannot be genuinely supported in this House. There is a troubling theme; a misguided notion that the bureaucrat knows best, as colleagues have suggested—for instance, the proposal to strip academies of the flexibility to set competitive pay for their staff. If the Government were genuinely interested in the levelling up that has just been referred to by the hon. Member for Bury North (James Frith), why not, as Sir Dan Moynihan, perhaps the nation’s most successful headteacher and trust runner, said at lunch time today, give those academy freedoms to maintained schools? Why rip away the elements that have been used by academies to produce schools such as Michaela which are the best in the country? We have an ideologically driven Labour Government—that certainly applies to those on the Front Bench; I would not want to daub everyone behind the Front Bench with the same description—who cannot even bring themselves to congratulate a school that has been the best in the country for three years in a row. The Government are signalling that they do not trust schools to attract and retain the best teachers, and trust only the Secretary of State to do so. In advocating for new schools to be opened and controlled by local authorities, they remove the contestability. Notwithstanding some of the contradictions in the Secretary of State’s speech, she did describe competition as “harmful”. I represent Beverley and Holderness, and for many years I looked at schools in Hull, where there was a view, expressed sotto voce, that “It is the people here who are the problem”. Generation after generation was failed, and when the academies programme was expanded in 2010, what happened? We saw primary schools leave local authority control en masse. We saw that it was no longer acceptable for a local authority to use its democratic mandate to give a substandard education to the local population. We saw a transformation. We saw academy groups opening up, and teachers and communities seizing that. I cannot believe that Labour Members really want to tear this away when the evidence is crystal clear from the OECD PISA tables. On any measure, English education has become immensely better.

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way on that issue?

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  On that issue, will the Secretary of State give way?

• 7 Jan 2025 · Employer National Insurance Contributions: Charities · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. We can see from the attendance on one side of the Chamber how important charities are to Opposition parties of all sorts. We are united in opposing the change, not least because those who are the most vulnerable, such as users of Citizens Advice, are likely to see services cut. There is an £88,000 impact just on the Citizens Advice service in Hull and East Riding. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Minister needs to go back to her colleagues and change direction? No one voted for a Labour Government to attack charities and the most vulnerable.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Employer National Insurance Contributions: Charities · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister agree that if it turns out that it will cost the NHS more to bring in the changes than it will gain, as colleagues from across the House fear, then it would be worth reviewing them? I know that she is not personally responsible for the initiative.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State said that 12,000 patients had to stay in hospital beds because of a lack of social care, yet we have it kicked down the road once again. What will Louise Casey tell us that we do not already know about the tough political trade-offs that have led successive Governments to fail to create a truly coherent health and social care system, and what will he do to make sure that we meet needs today, as he exemplified in November?

• 6 Jan 2025 · Armed Forces Commissioner: Appointment · Hansard source

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  The Government have said that part of their inspiration for the Armed Forces Commissioner was such a role in Germany, yet Germany has a parliamentary armed forces commissioner. Why is there that difference and why, in line with what the Minister said in an earlier answer, can we trust the independence of this new appointment?