A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

After a decade of Conservative damage to the sector, I desperately want the Government to get skills policy right. Labour believes in a high-skill, high-wage economy that offers fulfilling, rewarding work and jobs in which people will take great pride. That is why, for years, I and my colleagues in the Labour party, including my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition in his speech opening the debate on the Loyal Address on Tuesday and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) during her time as Shadow Secretary of State for Education, have championed lifelong learning, further education and all those who learn and teach in this sector.

In contrast, in a startling, if only partial, conversion in the Conservative party after a decade spent in power, including times when the Education Secretary and the Prime Minister sat around the Cabinet table and nodded through cuts to further education and a loan-based funding model that, by the Government’s own admission, directly reduced the number of adults in education, we have reforms that offer, at best, a mere reversal of some of the worst excesses of Conservative ideology over the past decade. It is a desperate attempt to polish the windows, having taken a sledgehammer to the foundations.

Those are questions that the Secretary of State should answer, but let me conclude by addressing the perfectly reasonable question: what would Labour do to guarantee a bright future for children and young people? Let me tell the House what would have been in a Labour Queen’s Speech this week. We would have started with a credible, radical plan to enable children and young people to bounce back from the pandemic—a plan that created time for children to play, learn and develop, that gave the teaching profession the recognition and support it needs to guarantee a world-class education for every child and that ensured the national tutoring programme reached all children who need it. We would have detailed proposals for children’s wellbeing, catch-up breakfast clubs guaranteeing every child a healthy breakfast and creating more time in the school day for children to recover lost learning and time lost with their friends and teachers.

We would have delivered a credible plan to support young people into work. We would have implemented policies outlined earlier this year by my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) that would have guaranteed every young person not in education or employment a job or training opportunity to end long-term youth unemployment. We would have ensured the apprenticeship levy was used to create opportunities for our young people, as we suggested with our proposal to use the underspend from the apprenticeship levy last year to create 85,000 youth apprenticeship opportunities. Most importantly, we would be working right across a Labour Cabinet to end the scourge of rising child poverty, which is scarring the lives of millions of children. Tackling child poverty will always be a priority for Labour, and I am proud that my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) will be leading our programme of work on this within the shadow Cabinet.

Before I came into Parliament, I spent a decade of my life working for and championing a brighter future for young people, because while children make up 20% of the population of this country, they are 100% of our future. They are ambitious, optimistic, imaginative, creative and excited about the world they will grow up in. They have so much to offer, and our job as adults is to give them every opportunity to make the most of their childhoods and their future, so let us not let them down with empty rhetoric and hollow promises. Today, let us commit to truly deliver a programme of change that transforms children’s lives, fulfils the promise that this will be the best place to grow up and, in creating a brighter future for young people, gives the promise of a better future for every one of us.

The proposals look to build the prestige of further education and create more employer-led qualifications. As the Secretary of State, who has demonstrated a real passion for FE, has acknowledged, this must be backed up by a real-terms increase in funding. Further education has often been described as the Cinderella of our education system, but we should be reminded that Cinderella became a senior member of the royal family and could banish the two ugly sisters of snobbery and underfunding once and for all.

In the longer term, the Government should, alongside the remarkable kickstart programme of financial support for businesses that hire apprentices and young people, look at reform of the apprenticeship levy to ensure that more disadvantaged would-be apprentices can climb the skills ladder. Degree apprenticeships should be rocket-boosted with the ambition of having at least half of all students completing degree apprenticeships over the next 10 years.

Alongside FE, I would like the Government to do more to support university technical colleges. They have some superb outcomes and our ambition should be to have a UTC in every town across the country. Sixty-one per cent. of UTCs were rated good or outstanding in the past year compared with a national average of 50%, while in 2020 55% of students went on to university in contrast to 50% nationally, and 13% went on to do an apprenticeship whereas the national average is just 6%.

The White Paper mentions careers guidance. We will not transform skills unless we change careers guidance fundamentally. There is too much replication, duplication and overlap with the Department for Work and Pensions. Department for Education careers advice must be about skills, skills, skills. It must ensure that all the way through schooling pupils are taught about apprenticeships and FE and given more opportunities for work experience. Ofsted should focus on this kind of careers guidance, in short implementing the Baker clause—a much stricter criterion of inspection. Our curriculum should be changed to embed work and skills all the way through children’s, pupils’ and students’ learning.

The Government have put out the levelling-up skills ladder of opportunity. I am really optimistic that this Queen’s Speech will bring people to that ladder and help them climb to the top.

The context of the covid crisis makes choices such as these all the more critical, because as we seek to build economic recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic it is vital that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. The Budget in March and this Queen’s Speech are clearly laying the grounds for more austerity and Tory cuts.

It is also important to point out that no party and no Government who forced through a devastating Brexit in the middle of a pandemic can credibly claim to be focused on recovery. With the powers we have, the Scottish Government are doing everything they can to mitigate the damage and protect our businesses. A fair recovery must be investment-led, so at the centre of our recovery plans is an economic transformation with fair work and the climate emergency at its heart. It includes an investment of £500 million to support new jobs and to retrain people for the jobs of the future, as well as funding the young person’s guarantee of a free university, college, apprenticeship or training place for every young person who wants one.

What a contrast that is to what the Prime Minister has announced in the Queen’s Speech. Colleges in England have been severely underfunded for a decade, leading to a £1.1 billion gap in real-terms funding for 16-to-19 education, and this Tory Government have done very little to address that. The announcement on lifetime access to education cannot be truly considered access; all it does is pave the way for increased financial liability. No longer will educational debt, which is on average £50,000 on graduation for students in England, be reserved to the young; now the Tories want people of all ages to be saddled with debt for their education. This Tory Government need a different approach to post-16 education funding, providing long-term security and putting the interests of learners at its heart. Education is a public good and as such must be publicly funded to provide real lifelong access for all.

The Prime Minister continues his talk of the UK as a science superpower and makes impressive promises regarding research and development funding, but the story on the ground is much less rosy. Researchers are finding themselves in an eternal circle of grant applications, trying to get scraps of funding from various different bodies—one here, another there.

If the Prime Minister makes good on his announcement on additional funding for this sector, many will be relieved, but over the past six months, we have seen much that casts doubt on his promises and, as we have come to expect of this Prime Minister, absolutely no detail. There have been questions and delays over the funding of Horizon Europe, and cuts of £120 million from the ODA budget. The UK’s status as a science superpower is underpinned by international research collaboration. A while back, the UK Government announced, with much fanfare, 12 flagship hubs that were to run projects of five to 10 years for the achievement of the UK’s sustainable development goals. As a result of the ODA cuts, projects halfway through clinical trials cannot continue unless funds are found. That is jeopardising both jobs and research. Is that the action of a science superpower: withdrawing funding in the middle of human trials, in violation of medical ethics?

Also as a result of ODA cuts, universities have reported that research contracts have been terminated, in some cases with just hours’ notice. That has fundamentally undermined trust between universities, researchers and UK Research and Innovation. The system of research commissioning is now one where the first risk assessment that must be done is on the UK Government’s ability to honour their own contracts. Do the UK Government’s promises mean so little that they must now be risk assessed?

I am delighted that the Secretary of State was so enthusiastic in his praise for my home city of Glasgow and he is welcome to join me here in Glasgow at any point. I wonder whether he would also be enthusiastic about meeting the researchers who as a result of the ODA cuts are now struggling to continue with their research. Nothing in this Queen’s Speech provides any certainty for international collaboration. Instead, we have seen that young people’s ability to travel freely to 27 other countries has been curtailed. Opportunities have been lost. Despite his praise of the Turing scheme, it is a poor relative of the Erasmus scheme and our young people can see right through this.

Scotland is a confident nation, one that celebrates diversity. Although the electorate in England might buy the Prime Minister’s promises, young people in Scotland can see through them. They want a different path, one with opportunity, and they want to choose their own future as an independent nation. The Scottish Parliament elections have shown that the young people of Scotland are clear: they know that the SNP Government have their interests at heart and they look forward to rejoining the independent nations of the EU.

I thank the Prime Minister for his personal commitment to the best start for every baby when he and I launched the Government’s vision for the 1,001 critical days together at the Monkey Puzzle Day Nursery in his constituency. The agreed actions in our vision will address inequalities across England, will contribute hugely to the Government’s levelling-up agenda and can, in a generation, transform our society for the better. I fully intend to collaborate closely with colleagues in the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Administrations to share learning and best practice, to make this a positive story for our whole United Kingdom.

Why does support in the early years change lives for the better? Humans are unique in the animal kingdom in the extent of our underdevelopment at birth. What other offspring cannot fend for itself at all until it is at least a year old? But the physical underdevelopment is only a tiny part of the human story. At birth, the brain is only partially formed, and the way in which it develops is profoundly affected by an infant’s earliest experiences. Mental ill health, drug and substance misuse and domestic violence in the home can all create trauma in a developing brain, which can have a permanent impact on both physical and emotional health, with not only long-term consequences for the total well of human happiness but the financial cost to society of poor early relationships. Depression, homelessness, drug taking, violence, self-harming, knife crime—too many of these costly problems can be laid at the door of poor early relationships.

The vision for the 1,001 critical days includes a joined-up start for life offer for every family in England; the development of multidisciplinary family hub networks that are open-access, are universal and include both physical and virtual support; a digital version of the red book;a newly empowered workforce; improved outcomes measurement and evaluation; and strong leadership at both local and national levels. It is an incredibly ambitious programme of measures, and I am so proud to be leading their implementation on behalf of the Government.

The commitment of the Government should be music to all our ears. I thank the many Members right across the House who have been so supportive of this agenda for so long. A focus on the 1,001 critical days may just be the most important thing we will ever do to ensure a bright future for the next generation.

Despite fewer people presenting to their GPs in the first place as a result of the pandemic, worrying trends have appeared along the treatment chain. Macmillan’s research demonstrates that, as of February this year, the number of people being seen by a specialist after an urgent referral had dropped by 8% from February 2020. The disruption to services across the last 14 months has created a backlog of people receiving their first treatment for cancer, which currently stands at 38,500. That is despite the strongest efforts of our tremendously hard-working NHS staff.

Despite the urgent nature of the 62-day period from diagnosis to treatment, thousands of patients have had to wait longer. The lowest number of people missing that waiting time period was 16,111, in November last year, but that was still 44% higher than pre-pandemic numbers. We all know that NHS staff have worked their hardest and could not have done more, but even if cancer services could now operate at 110% of pre-pandemic capacity, we are looking at more than 15 months to clear that backlog, and that is without the 45,000 missing cancer patients all turning up all of a sudden. So this just is not possible or sustainable with the extensive challenges that lie ahead. The Government must do everything they can to put patients first, clear that backlog, find those missing patients and bring down the growing waiting lists. But how?

Concerns have been raised by the Royal College of Radiologists that delays to scans have been worsened by a 33% shortfall in that workforce. It is unfortunately growing clearer that our cancer workforce are suffering and need immediate attention from the Government. Alongside other cancer APPG chairs, I was happy to sign a funding statement in March which called on the Government to recognise that NHS services need resources to super-boost capacity above pre-pandemic levels. The Government really must act now to make sure that this does not spiral into a greater health crisis and to protect lives. The way to achieve that is with a plan that ensures the long-term resuscitation of the cancer workforce—a plan that will recruit and train, bring jobs and maintain the standards of care that people deserve nationwide.

Cancer was left out of the Chancellor’s Budget in March. The backlog was not mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. I ask the Government to make sure that the other c-word is not forgotten once more.

Many environmental groups have rightly raised concerns about the fact that the Environment Bill takes action on illegal deforestation but not on legal deforestation—given what is proposed in Brazil, they have a real point. Of course, it is difficult to criminalise products in the UK that have been produced legally in other countries, and it is often very difficult to prove that this has happened, even in a court of law. We must take every possible step to prevent damaging legal and illegal deforestation where it does serious damage to ecosystems. Where countries need deforestation for economic reasons, we should help them where necessary and provide aid to help them find alternative ways.

There are two steps that I want to see taken in the Environment Bill or by Ministers in the coming months, to a clear timetable and with a clear commitment. First, I hope that the Government will accept amendments, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), that would prevent UK-based financiers from supporting investments in businesses that exploit forest risk products. I think that is absolutely essential. Secondly, I want to see the introduction of a clear system of sustainable food labelling in this country. I have tabled an amendment that would mandate the Government to do that. If it is difficult to make agricultural products coming from areas of legal deforestation illegal, let us at least give consumers the power to reject those products themselves. If we do so, retailers will inevitably also reject those products.

Another change that I would like to see in the Environment Bill relates to something rather closer to home. I am the parliamentary species champion for one of our favourite, but sadly now dwindling, species: the hedgehog. Some of the measures in the Agriculture Act 2020, and now in the Environment Bill, can make a real difference. I want to see greater protection for the hedgehog against the wanton destruction of habitats. We still have to conduct newt surveys, and small creatures such as the lagoon sand worm are protected, but a developer can simply rip up a hedge without even checking whether there are hedgehogs or other endangered species in it, and that needs to change. When the time comes for that debate, I will be pushing Ministers either to provide that protection immediately or, perhaps more realistically, to move rapidly to create a new framework that provides proper protections—updated, modern protections —for hedgehogs and other species with dwindling numbers.

This Government are already providing more wildlife and animal protection than almost any of their predecessors, and this Queen’s Speech contains a range of very welcome measures to improve the legal protection we offer, and I commend Ministers for that. The Environment Bill takes us further than virtually any other country in taking responsibility for our planet and our ecology. There is more to come from this Government as they look at some of the issues, such as live animal transport, that must be addressed for animal welfare in this country. These are very welcome, overdue and necessary. I hope that Members on both sides will agree that, based on these measures alone, the Queen’s Speech should have—I fear that it probably will not—the unanimous support of the House.

The Government need to act now on three fronts. First, they need to recognise that it is absolutely key to our economic recovery that we invest in manufacturing, which is central to our economy, creating good, well-paid and stable jobs when too many people are now in insecure and low-paid employment.

Secondly, on the challenges of net zero, this is the year of Glasgow, with the immense potential that that brings. However, if we are to rise to that challenge, demanding —rightly so—that we end the scandal of global warming, and then take advantage of that, it means investment in our world-class manufacturing and research and development. One example of where the Government simply fall behind continental Europe is investment in gigafactories, and another is investment in infrastructure.

Thirdly, if the Government mean what they say about the levelling-up agenda, it is crucial that much of manufacturing is located in seats of high deprivation, such as Erdington. I always describe Erdington as being rich in talent, but it is one of the poorest constituencies in the country. At its heart we have the jewels in the crown of manufacturing, such as Jaguar Land Rover and the GKN factory—we are battling right now to save that from closure. Manufacturing is key if the Government are to come anywhere near achieving their objective of levelling up.

In conclusion, let me return to the success of the vaccine roll-out. It has demonstrated the enormous and endless potential of the state, businesses and workers coming together to deliver, in our hour of need, one of this country’s greatest achievements. It also demonstrates just how important manufacturing is to Britain. The Government need to learn those lessons, but I fear that they will not. They are proceeding with nowhere near the ambition that is necessary. Is it true that some welcome initiatives have been taken? Yes, it is, but not at the scale demanded. If France, Germany and America can do it, Britain demands and deserves better.

The Queen’s Speech is also about levelling up for those groups everywhere who are still not achieving their full potential, particularly through education and work opportunities. The education and skills Bill will be an essential ingredient in this, as lifelong training is the reality for all of us wherever we work.

When it comes to work, the past 12 months have been an enormous challenge for employers. They have been tested more than ever before, and the overwhelming majority have worked with their employees to find new ways to work and support their families, and to support staff suffering from the mental health challenges of the pandemic. If we are to enable everyone in this country to reach their full potential, we need to be actively levelling up in the workplace, too. Within the Government’s legislative programme, we need to tackle some of the issues that we encountered with working practices during the pandemic. We must be optimistic about ensuring that everybody—every woman, in particular, and every parent—in this country can reach their potential.

Since 2010, this Government have made it an important priority to help women to level up in the workplace. There has been progress in recording and cutting the gender pay gap for women under 35, in increasing childcare and in extending the right to request flexible working, but a truly bright future for the next generation will take these steps further. Ensuring that everyone in this country can reach their full potential in work is important not only because it is fair, but because it is essential for the prosperity of our entire nation. Making all jobs flexible by default has become the reality for the past 12 months, so let us not slip back into the old ways of working. Let us use the challenges of the past 12 months as a platform for a more positive, flexible way to work from now on. And let us level up for pregnant women at work, too, because too many of them have suffered from their employers’ lack of understanding of the law during the pandemic, being put on sick leave when they should not have been.

The Government already know that 50,000 women a year leave their jobs when they are pregnant because of discrimination, often covered up by the use of non-disclosure agreements, many forced out of work at a time when they cannot get another job. Too many women still see a lack of a level playing field at work, so let us level up for them too, and let us have within the Government legislative programme plans to stop pregnant women being made redundant and stop the use of non-disclosure agreements covering up unlawful activity, particularly sexual harassment and discrimination at work. Let us have proper shared care for dads, too, because it is better for everyone. All jobs as flexible by default unless there is a good reason not to—that is what levelling up has to look like for everyone in the future.

Finally, I welcome the online harms Bill included in the Gracious Speech, published yesterday for scrutiny before being formally debated in this place. It is groundbreaking legislation—the UK truly leading the world in tackling online harms. An important part of a bright future for the next generation needs to be an internet that benefits, not detracts from, our lives. As well as regulating that industry to ensure that it does not create harm, we need laws to give victims protections, too. So either within or alongside the Online Safety Bill, the Government need to tackle the deficits in the law, especially on sharing intimate sexual images without consent. The Law Commission review is now finished and will be complete before the Bill comes to the House, and I hope the Government will undertake to insert into the Online Safety Bill important changes in criminal law to protect victims of that heinous crime of intimate image abuse.

The Bills in the Queen’s Speech start to rebuild our country after the challenges of the pandemic. Its optimism and vision to level up are exactly what our country needs.

It is the non-statutory services that have suffered, but that is surely a false economy. Our children’s social care budget is in crisis. For every child who ends up in the system, we must remember the anguish and the enduring damage that getting to that point can cause, but it is also bad value for money. Investing in our children and their families early is not just the right thing to do morally, but the right thing to do for our taxpayers, too. We have only to look at the example of charities such as the Abingdon Bridge or Wolvercote Young People’s Club to see what an incredible difference these youth services make to the lives of our young people, but we need to be able to help everyone, and there are far too many gaps. When the Vibe youth club in Didcot was closed, the young people who relied on it just did not know where to go.

I welcome the aims set out in the education recovery plan, but I hope that in developing these plans, the Government will not overlook the role that local government and youth services can play. The Liberal Democrats have proposed devolving money away from the National Citizen Service and the youth investment fund to local authorities so that they can expand youth service provision and provide educational recovery programmes. That would make such a difference to my constituents; I ask the Minister what thought has been given to doing it.

For many young people, apprenticeships provide that practical bridge between education and work, and towards fulfilling independent futures where they are masters of their own destiny. In Oxfordshire, we want to do even better. We have incredible local providers such as Abingdon & Witney College and Activate Learning, but the Government do not make it easy.

In her answer last month to a question that I tabled in March, the apprenticeships Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan)—revealed that more than £1 billion in apprenticeship levy funding paid by employers had expired unused between May 2020 and February 2021. That was a 22% increase on the year before, which just shows that there is far too much bureaucracy and too little flexibility in the system. It has disadvantaged young people, who are missing out. Nationally, the Liberal Democrats have campaigned for the apprenticeship levy to be expanded into a wider skills and training levy to help to prepare the UK’s workforce for the economic challenges ahead.

Finally, there is great appetite to engage with the kickstart scheme, but I was deeply concerned to hear a business roundtable organised by our local enterprise partnership, that data on the kickstart scheme is gathered only at a regional level by the Department for Work and Pensions. If the Government want it to succeed, I plead with Ministers: give us the data at a county level—let us help you.

Our children and young people deserve a brighter future. As we emerge from this pandemic, it is the impact on the next generation that really concerns me the most. We need serious investment in them—in early years, children’s centres and youth services, as well as schools, colleges and universities. Only if we do that will the dream of a brighter future become a reality.

Why do people come here? These are not bad people; they are good people. They just want a better future. They come here because their own countries are in chaos. Therefore, we have to commit ourselves to international aid and overseas development. I will not labour the point, but I have been critical of the way the budget has been cut. We have promised to restore it, but we have to concentrate aid in a practical way, on the poverty that is motivating this mass migration. Immigration is a vital issue.

The next issue is housing. Some of my colleagues who represent prosperous seats in the south-east are rightly worried about the planning Bill. Personally, I see no point in encouraging developers to build on green-belt land. They always want to build executive housing on green land; we want to build housing in the cities, the towns, the north of England and the midlands. I think we should reconnect with people by committing ourselves to a Macmillan Government-type programme of building 300,000 houses a year. His mistake, perhaps, was to build council houses. I want to build housing for young people that they can afford so that they can convert rent into purchase. That will really connect with young people, who, in places such as the south-east, simply cannot get on the property ladder. That is how this Government will be a success—by giving people a stake in their own society, so that they are not just renters. That is a true levelling-up agenda.

I am also grateful to the Government for taking on the issue of free speech in universities. It is none of my business, really, but if the Labour party is to reconnect with so many of its natural supporters in the north, it has to turn its back on this woke, politically correct agenda of denigrating our past. The past is the past. I understand that, on my mother’s side, my grandfather was born in Barbados—he was the son of a missionary—but it is quite probable that his grandfather and great-grandfather were involved in the slave trade and may even have owned slaves. Am I to denounce my own family? The fact is that the slave trade was so endemic in the 18th century that there are probably hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are descended from slave owners. Slavery is wrong. It was wrong; it is wrong. We led the world in abolishing it, but the history is as it is.

Similarly, when I go up to the Committee corridor, I see a picture of Queen Elizabeth I—a glorious picture of Gloriana. She ensured that my ancestor Richard Leigh was hung, drawn and quartered for no other reason than that he was a Catholic priest. But do I condemn Elizabeth I? No; it is part of our history. We have to be proud of Britain. We have to stop tearing down statues, stop denigrating our past, and accept that the past is the past, with all its benefits and regrettable occurrences.

Why should we be stuck with an energy policy that is wedded to new nuclear power stations and is piling costs on to our electricity bills? The £20 billion Hinkley Point C project is 45 times more expensive than the current offshore wind prices. We do not need nuclear for base-load—the National Grid chief executive officer debunked that myth in 2015. It is utter madness to commit further billions to new nuclear power stations or small water reactors and nuclear fusion. It is just creating another nuclear waste legacy, when the existing one is already costing us over £130 billion.

It is obvious that renewable energy is the future. We need to grasp the opportunities to create green jobs and the potential to provide rewarding careers that offer people opportunities to travel around the world. But there was nothing—absolutely nothing—in the Queen’s Speech on renewable energy policy. For base-load, in our energy policy we need to go ahead and price the mechanism for pumped hydro storage. For just around £1.5 billion, we could get the Cruachan dam extension and the new Coire Glas scheme constructed, which would create much-needed high-quality job opportunities in rural Scotland. Even better, analysis by Imperial College suggests that investment in pumped hydro storage could save us £700 million a year in system costs by 2050, so let us get that done.

When will the UK Government do something to get the Peterhead carbon capture and storage project over the finishing line? Equinor and SSE Thermal say it could be operational by 2026, so it could be part of the just transition and provide vital job opportunities for our young people. The same is true for hydrogen. Agree a contract for difference mechanism and get the St Fergus project up and running.

Why, oh why, are the UK Government not doing more to get wave and tidal projects to a stage where they can be scaled up? This really is the way that Scotland can lead the world. Instead, we are constrained by UK Government policy and procurement processes. We have already missed out on green jobs in manufacturing and fabrication hubs because of flaws in the CfD process for offshore wind procurement. This is further proof that Westminster does not work for Scotland.

Where is Westminster’s policy for scaling up heat pump production and installation to the 600,000 installations a year that the 10-point plan tells us are going to happen? There are only 20,000 installations a year at the moment. When will Westminster get a grip of energy efficiency policy? They need to treat it like a national infrastructure project, the way the Scottish Government do. The Scottish Government spend four times what Westminster does per capita, creating jobs and the required long-term investments.

In tree planting, Scotland by far leads the way: 85% of the trees planted in the UK in the past decade are in Scotland. In the Queen’s Speech Bill document, the UK Government brag about planting 13,500 hectares of trees last year. What they do not say is that over 85% of the trees were planted in Scotland under the Scottish Government. It was nothing to do with Westminster. That is greenwashing of the highest order.

Westminster cannot con us with greenwashing. They cannot con an electorate who knew full well what they were voting for in the Scottish elections last week. They knew that voting in the SNP and the Greens was a clear indication that they want an independent Scotland, leading the way to net zero and creating a bright and optimistic future. Westminster should not stand in their way, and I suggest that Labour should not back the Tories on that, either.

Many of those findings and conclusions—with some relief, on my part—chime with and complement the early years healthy development review, while at the same time stretching some of the core offer to children up to the age of five. The review is unequivocal in its recommendations that, when it comes to the levelling-up agenda, which we have heard so much about, particularly for those children living in households with high levels of deprivation, the education, health and development of young people must be society’s top priority, as must community and professional support for parents to help them make their homes a nurturing, safe environment where babies and toddlers can take their first steps towards a healthy, happy and productive life. By putting children at the centre of their community and public services and by prudently and effectively investing in early years education, we can together start to transform the life chances of many more children in our country, wherever they happen to live.

I very much support the education recovery plan being led by the commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, who I know is working hard to find the right formula to help bridge the gaps and build a system that gives better and fairer opportunities for children as we come out of the pandemic. That is against an important backdrop of £1.7 billion of support through the education recovery plan, the catch-up package, the tutoring programme and the recovery premium, as well as the £400 million to improve access to remote learning, given the digital divide that we saw play out in the last year, including in Eddisbury. The increase in support for schools needs to be replicated in the early years.

I want to touch quickly on two other aspects of school life on which we need to continue to do more and have better focus. The first is school exclusions. I led an independent review of school exclusion two years ago, and there has been some progress—for instance, the £10 million on behaviour hubs—but there is still much to do, including a practice improvement fund, ensuring that schools are responsible for children they exclude and moving alternative provision into the mainstream as a centre of excellence. I hope to meet Ministers soon to discuss the progress of all my recommendations, so that we can make further, important progress.

Since finding myself on the Back Benches, I have also found time to chair a taskforce on the future of physical education, with support from the Association for Physical Education and others, including Jason Robinson, the England rugby union star and world cup winner who saw PE as the thing that changed his life from a road of failure to one of success.

One consequence of the pandemic has been a deeply concerning drop-off in physical exercise and activity among children of all ages. Now that schools are back and sports and activities are reopening there are signs of improvement, but I am afraid that evidence is also emerging that some schools are reducing physical education time in order to focus on catching up in other subject areas. So we need to look specifically at physical education, and one key life skill in that is swimming—we saw 150,000 children leaving primary school without being able to swim 25 metres. That situation clearly needs to be addressed urgently, both as part of the welcome catch-up programme and more systematically through physical education by ensuring that all of its irrefutable and lifelong impact on physical, social, emotional and cognitive development is at the very heart of school life. In doing that we can take another step forward in our shared ambition of giving every child the best possible start in life.

We live in the fifth richest economy in the world, and our children should not be forced to live like this. Rickets is on the increase. In the north-east area, over one in four—35,000—children are living below the UK poverty line and are not eligible for free school meals under the current criteria. More than one in 10—about 13,000—north-east children who are currently eligible for free school meals do not take up the offer, and another 4,000 schoolchildren in the north-east are not covered by universal infant free school meals. There are families with no recourse to public funds, many of whom will be living well below the poverty line, but they are not usually eligible for means-tested free school meals.

To make things worse, this Government have changed the way funding is allocated to schools, which is leaving them thousands of pounds worse off in missing pupil premium funding, while those same schools are unable to take advantage of the Government’s catch-up funding. In the north-east alone, this amounts to a cut of between £5.16 million and £7.26 million—all this after a decade of cuts to our schools that has really hammered our schools and the school infrastructure. School funding in the north-east is down 2.6% in real terms since 2013-14, and class sizes have greatly increased.

To turn the tide, we need bold Government intervention and initiatives to breathe life into our schools, communities and industry to give our children a fighting chance and a fair chance to move on to honest work so that they can build a life for their families and break the cycle in the next generation. Our asks are modest: a fair chance for our children to find good, decent, dignified work that they can build a life and a family around. We should accept nothing less in a country as rich as ours in the 21st century. Levelling up will mean nothing if our kids continue to go to school hungry. Everyone has a right to food: it is a human right.

The second topic I want to talk about is the important commitment to the world’s poorest that we made in our manifesto. The Whips know my views on this subject; they know that I am sad that we are breaking our promise to the very poorest in the world. However, I welcome today’s announcement about a plan for girls’ education, and the leadership that the UK Government are showing to ensure that every child in the world can get 12 years of quality education. Surely there is nothing better that we can do for our world than to ensure that every child, wherever they are born in this world, is able to have an education. Doing so will make our world so much more prosperous, so much healthier and so much safer. It will also tackle so many of the issues that we are facing in this country.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said, so many desperate people are fleeing parts of the world. If they can get a good education where they are born, surely that would be the better way forward for the world. I welcome the leadership that the UK Government are showing on this issue, as they co-host with Kenya in July the replenishment of the Global Partnership for Education, which is asking for $5 billion of funding over five years. I hope that the UK—albeit with the reduced amount of UK aid—will be able to contribute very significantly to that sum. We are asking the UK Government for $600 million of that $5 billion over five years.

There is a third, rather disparate, topic that I want to touch on as we talk about a brighter future for the next generation. I will just play the role that I am afraid I played in the Budget debates: a bit of a Cassandra regarding the bond markets. As someone who traded the bond markets—I do not even like to mention how long ago that was, but it was a long time ago, when we had bear markets in bonds—I know that the bond markets can turn on a dime. With the amount of fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus that we have in this country, I think there is quite a strong risk that we might spark inflation. We saw inflation in America in the statistics that came out this week, and we saw the way in which the markets react to it. We are running quite a large risk in terms of our deficit, with the potential for interest rates to go only one way from here: upwards. That could really damage the brighter future for the next generation.

I urge those who are looking at the leading indicators for our economy, and the Chancellor, as he thinks about some of the fiscal choices that he is going to make, to remember that often a stitch in time saves nine when it comes to fiscal decisions. To ensure a brighter future for everyone and for future generations, I want to see us bring our deficit back to being a manageable one that gives bond markets confidence that the UK gilt market is one of the best places in the world to invest.

We are told again that the Environment Bill is coming. A little like the tooth fairy, though, it comes in the night and is gone again. After three years in the legislative process, and promised for much longer than that, I get the impression that it is more about keeping the window dressed than addressing the issues. It is more important for England than the rest of us and it puzzles me that the Opposition parties in England cannot find it in themselves to demand that it moves faster, for the sake of the children breathing the dirty air, if nothing else.

I welcome the measures to enhance animal welfare. I wish they had been matched by measures to enhance human welfare, but I welcome them for what they are. Live exports for fattening should be banned. Proper welfare policies for animals in the wild should also be introduced. I assume that the intention, then, is to ban the shooting of game birds and deer for sport. I look forward to seeing the content of those Bills and checking whether the truth lives up to the spin. Always check the receipts, I say, even when the donors are paying.

As I cast one last look at this Queen’s Speech, five years after the Brexit referendum, I wonder, is this all that taking back control amounts to? Is this it: all that upheaval, all that bitterness, all the failures of Brexit so that we can have this insipid, uninspired stuff? Taking back control—aye, right.

We know that we live in the greatest country in the world, but every time we switch on the news, we hear how terrible everything is. That is neither true nor what people want to hear. Communities do not want to be told they are being left behind. Our citizens are proud of the communities they live in. They do not want to be talked down to. They want hope, they want to be able to realise their ambitions and they want their communities to be the best they can be, but they want to lead that. They do not want to just take what has been given to them and be grateful. They want to be assured that their Government are working for them, and that is why I am so pleased with this Queen’s Speech, because those communities will be very pleased to see the investment that is being delivered by this Government.

In Thurrock, we are hugely excited to be delivering the Thames freeport. Tilbury, in my constituency, is the poorest of the 100 poorest towns in this country. I am proud that it is a one nation Conservative Government who are showing their confidence in Tilbury through the freeport and through the towns fund. It has been a long time coming. After years of neglect from a Labour Government and a Labour council, I am proud that it is a Conservative Government and a Conservative council that are investing in Tilbury and making sure that we realise that ambition. Generally, it feels very much that the Labour party has historically neglected its core voters in its traditional communities, taking the view that those voters would have nowhere else to go. Well, they do, and the results of the last week prove that they are now voting Conservative because we are giving them hope, and we are talking about the things that matter to them.

Turning again to how we build a better future for all our young people, we absolutely must grip this issue of building more homes. I know that will not be welcomed by everybody on these Benches, but this is something where we must show responsibility and leadership, because for too many young people the ambition of owning their own home seems to be a pipe dream. We need to properly invest, with imagination, in the ability to deliver housing solutions, to which they can then respond.

I really welcome the strategy on tackling violence against women and girls. We have had a moment of revelation in this House about the issues women face today, although it was not a revelation to women Members of this House. We must make sure that we are able to take action that enables women to feel empowered and not threatened as they go about their lives.

Similarly, I welcome the online safety Bill. It is fair to say that the legislative environment has not kept pace with the development of social media and the internet, which has become weaponised as a tool for abuse and bad behaviour. Sadly, that abuse and bad behaviour are now spilling out into the real world. We must take advantage of that Bill.

In the short time left available to me, I wish to mention one of the things the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in approaching this pandemic, which was that the NHS would have all the money it needed to deal with it. Largely, that has been true—in fact, in some respects it has had too much; Track and Trace has a huge budget for perhaps not being as effective as we would like it to be. I just want again to give a shout out for our pharmacists, who stepped up to the plate during this pandemic. They were open when GPs were not. But we know that the financial costs of that are leading a third of them to face potential closure. I do not think we can afford to lose that valuable part of our NHS and I hope the Government do something to address it.

The planning Bill may improve the supply of housing—I welcome that, but where are the measures to address the illegal conversion of family homes into houses in multiple occupation? When coupled with the current exempt accommodation market, it is creating a gravy train for crooks, spivs and, in some cases, organised crime. How have we ended up in a situation where women and children who are fleeing domestic abuse find themselves housed alongside ex-prisoners with a history of violence or people with major substance abuse issues? We have the victims Bill, the draft Building Safety Bill and the planning Bill. We could halt the dangerous and dodgy conversions that turn family homes into HMOs, we could guarantee safe, decent and reserved accommodation for victims of domestic violence, and we could ensure that supported accommodation means exactly that.

Although I welcome proposals for the online harms Bill, I wonder whether we need to address the situation in which paedophile porn is legal if the actress—dressed as a child, looking prepubescent and filmed in a child’s bedroom—is actually over 18. What market are these films aimed at? They glorify incest, rape and abuse of minors. How can a man who openly acknowledges his appetite for this legal material be regarded as safe to work with children and have unsupervised access to his own young daughters? What bright future is there for the children who fall prey to perverts fuelled by this legal filth?

I will back the Government when they bring in measures to offer people a brighter future. I hope that Ministers will back my constituents by allowing us to amend legislation to address the issues happening right now that are destroying the future prospects of far too many people.

The benefits of our criminalising marriage under the age of 18 will be felt internationally. The UK is a leading country in women’s rights issues, and I welcome the Prime Minister’s very strong personal commitment to ensuring 12 years of quality education for girls across the world. In that global context, the exemption that allows girls aged 16 and 17 to marry with their parents’ consent appears curious. Following the first Girl summit in 2014, the Department for International Development allocated up to £39 million to support global efforts to prevent child marriages. The UK also signed two international human rights conventions, which demand that signatories end child marriage in their jurisdictions, yet we in the UK permit child marriage, and that undermines those international efforts. Furthermore, proposals to stop that happening would strengthen the Government’s existing provisions on honour-based abuse and domestic violence.

Forced marriage was criminalised in 2014 and the Forced Marriage Unit established to protect those at risk. However, I have become aware through conversations with charities that the Forced Marriage Unit often feels unable to act in cases involving children, because the victims have been groomed to appear to be willing. A clear statement in law that children aged 16 and 17 can never consent to marriage would strengthen the hand of the Forced Marriage Unit and lead to the vulnerable being protected and criminals being punished.

Removing the child marriage exception in UK law would send a clear message to other countries, including Bangladesh, which look to our leadership on child marriage and the fact that it should not be tolerated. With the international aid budget cut, it would also be an efficient way for the UK to show global leadership on children’s rights and girls’ education. I am very disappointed that that opportunity was missed in the Queen’s Speech, but there is a chance to do this with a Bill that is going into Committee, and I will be tabling amendments to it. If that fails, I shall table amendments on Report. I feel passionately that girls in this day and age need to be given the opportunity of education, of living a life and of getting married when they can choose at the age of 18 or later.

Although there are some very good things in the Queen’s Speech and I look forward to supporting them through the House of Commons, I do believe that this is a wasted opportunity. I hope that the Government will look at a way to incorporate my embryonic Bill into another Bill so that it becomes law without any further delay.

That is a shameful record for the Conservative party after over a decade in power, but me just making another speech attacking the Government, however justified, will not change things, and it does not cut the mustard for the people I represent. Instead, what I, and political, community and business leaders in the St Helens borough and across the Liverpool city region, have done is work together to support the ambition, creativity, resilience and vibrancy of our young people, by protecting the most vulnerable, ensuring opportunities for all and encouraging excellence while giving hope for the future.

That approach was endorsed last week when the Labour party in St Helens increased its vote by 15% and retained control of the council. It is why we have directly invested in young people now but are also planning for the longer term, from £750,000 on free school meals and record support for children’s services this year, to a £200 million partnership with the English cities fund to radically regenerate our borough over the next 20 years. We have said that ensuring that children and young people have a positive start in life is the top priority for us. We have also said that we want to make St Helens the best place to live, work and visit in the north-west of England. Those are complementary and, I would argue, co-dependent aims.

The next generation need and want to know about our past—our proud traditions and heritage—but we have a responsibility to ensure that they realise that they, and we, have a future too, and it is theirs to build and shape.

Again, I will reference my corner of the country, the south-east. It is notable that there has been a 19% increase in the population of the south-east, whereas in the corresponding period the population of the north-west has dropped by 6%, yet the spending per head on transport is exactly the same in both regions, at £370. That is evidence that there has been more house building in the south-east, but there has not been the spend on infrastructure. It is also notable that of all the major transport projects that are part of the Government’s welcome £640 billion of investment in infrastructure over the next five years, only one is in the south-east.

My message to those on the Front Bench is that if we want to see more houses—and I absolutely do—in the south-east, including my constituency, we need hundreds of them per year, to give young people in my constituency the chance of a home of their own. Can we also ensure that the infrastructure spend is focused on those areas that will deliver the houses, not the other parts of the country that might be a little more fashionable than Bexhill and Battle when it comes to politics these days?

In the two minutes I have remaining, I want to focus on another issue that has a huge impact on young people’s lives: violence. The shocking increase in knife crime over the last five years is something that we in this House have not spent enough time talking about. It is outrageous. There has been an 84% increase in knife crime since 2014, with almost 50,000 offences caused by a knife or bladed instrument in the last year. It has gone down a little in the last year, but we do not know whether that is a result of greater Government focus, which I have welcomed, or the lockdown. It is essential that the legislation promised targets those offenders who ruin people’s lives, families’ lives and, indeed, their own lives by the use of a bladed weapon. I want to see the Government come down hard on those perpetrators, but also look at this from a health and a community perspective, to ensure that people know that they cannot continue to do this.

I also want to focus on the other end of the spectrum. We talk about the younger population, and social care reform will impact on the young who need social care, but I represent a population that is ageing. Their numbers continue to increase, and those people need more than just a few words and a commitment that proposals to reform social care “will be brought forward”. They need the reform of social care to start this year. In the six years I have been in this place, we have talked a great deal about it, but we are not seeing the action. Successive Governments have not delivered the reform that is badly needed. I hope that this is the year when we find out what those proposals are and the Government start to legislate, because it is essential that older people are given dignity and care in their advancing years.

Finally, I will always implore the Government to remember that it is a question not just of legislating but of good legislation, given the unforeseen consequences that can come from good intentions but bad legislation. Let us ensure that we use the brains of this place and the other place to make legislation better and deliver a proper period of reform.

In London, the vacuous phrase “levelling up” means no such thing. We have seen, time and again, the Government cutting the funding for our schools to make politically expedient funding choices elsewhere in the country. The full additional costs of the pandemic have not been covered for London schools and they now face a stealth cut in the pupil premium—a cynical change in the calculation date, which the Government hoped no one would notice. This will cost schools in Southwark £1.2 million, and it is a similar sum in Lambeth. It is utterly reprehensible to cut essential funding from the most disadvantaged children, wherever they live in the country. That is not levelling up; it is deliberately dragging our children down.

It is not only schoolchildren in London who are at the mercy of this Government’s cynicism. There are no proposals at all for the desperately underfunded early years sector, and the Tories are scrapping the London weighting component of the teaching grant for higher education, too. This funding recognises the increased costs of delivering higher education in London. It improves access to higher education for lower-income students in London, wherever they come from in the country. This cut of £64 million will have devastating consequences for London’s universities and those who choose to study at them. Once again, the Tories are levelling down London to the detriment of the whole country.

Children and young people in my constituency care passionately about our planet and about their peers elsewhere in the world. They know the importance of the UK’s contribution through international aid to tackling climate change, global poverty and supporting women and girls across the globe. The children and young people in my constituency do not understand why the Government would choose to make swingeing cuts to aid during a global pandemic and a climate emergency, the consequences of which are being most severely felt by the world’s poorest nations.

The commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on international aid was enshrined in law as the democratic will of the House of Commons, on the basis of a manifesto commitment that the British people voted for and have voted for time and again. Reneging on that commitment is not a matter for the Chancellor alone. It is a matter for this Parliament, so I ask the Minister to confirm that the Government will bring forward legislation so that the many Members in this place who believe slashing UK aid to be profoundly wrong can vote against it.

Each one of our precious children and young people deserves a brighter future, but the meanness and poverty of ambition in the Gracious Speech will only let them down. They deserve a bolder and more ambitious plan for our country than this meagre offering. I call on the Government to reconsider their cynical cuts to our schools, universities and councils in London and to international aid, and instead to equip, fund and empower our local communities to deliver for everyone.

The final point I want to make is on air quality. Tackling climate change and cutting our carbon emissions is rightly a Government priority, but poor air quality is affecting people’s day-to-day lives and has serious impacts on their health. Poorer air quality is linked to an estimated 64,000 premature deaths a year. It was earlier this year named in a coroner’s report as directly contributing to the loss of life for the first time. We need to improve air quality across the country, but it is a particular issue in our cities and big towns. I know that the Government have laid out targets for air quality in the Environment Bill, but I would like to see that go further. I would set more stringent targets, including, for example, bringing limits to the pollutant PM_2.5 into line with World Health Organisation standards.

Overall, the Government are taking great steps to protect the environment and ensure a greener recovery from the pandemic. In hosting COP26, we have a prime opportunity to show global leadership on these issues. We can also move forward with ensuring that we have a good agriculture sector and a good horticulture sector and that we are producing high-quality, environmentally sound and animal welfare-friendly food. We can balance that with producing a very clean and green environment. I hope that the Government will take this opportunity to make our environmental laws as robust as possible.

What is most chilling about this is the transparency of it all—the fact that the Government do not even feel a particular need to hide what they are doing or why they are doing it. They know that it will not be the well-heeled, affluent middle classes who will struggle to produce a passport or a driving licence at the polling station. They know that disproportionately it will be the young, the poor, the marginalised and members of the minority communities who do not have a passport, or who do not drive, or who have not managed to pick up or register for their voter ID card who will be affected by the legislation. They know that in the UK between 2.5 million and 3.5 million people do not have photo ID, and they know that many of them will be added to the list of the 9 million UK citizens who are already missing from the electoral register.

Let me be clear: no one is saying that voter fraud is not a serious crime. Of course it is, and it has to be treated as such. No one is saying that those who commit such a crime should not be punished for it. Of course they should. But the fact is that voter fraud, particularly personation at polling stations, is such a rare occurrence that to have the Government legislate for it should set alarm bells ringing among those of us who believe that all Governments should be trying to remove barriers rather than to raise them.

Quite simply, there is no evidence whatsoever that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United Kingdom, so why are the Government pursuing this venture to tackle a problem that even Ruth Davidson, of all people, admitted on “Peston” last night was virtually non-existent? Why would they seek to introduce legislation to make voting more difficult at a time when more and more people are electing to vote by post? The only conclusion one can draw is that this is not about protecting the integrity of elections at all—this is an exercise in voter suppression. The voter-suppressing electoral integrity Bill is something we would expect to see from the right-wing Republicans in the state of Georgia, not from this Parliament. Indeed, this anti-democratic piece of legislation has not gone unnoticed among civil rights groups in America: the Southern Poverty Law Centre, Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union have all expressed concern that such measures are being imported into the UK. They can see that the Bill is nothing more than a crude tool of voter suppression. We can see it too. We know it is being introduced to slay a demon that the Tories invented, and to provide them with a fig leaf that they can hide behind while they cleanse the register. It is wrong, it is fundamentally anti-democratic, and if they pursue it, we will oppose it at every stage in this House.

We also have a very sensible focus on public health. I am delighted by the focus on obesity, which is clearly a key issue of our time, but I would suggest that there is more than obesity. We need to recognise the increasing interest that individuals have in purchasing all sorts of substances across the counter and from beauticians, pharmacists and other professionals, which at the moment are not regulated to the same level as a medicine would be. There is a committee under the auspices of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency—the Advisory Committee on Borderline Substances. Between that committee and the Food Standards Agency these sorts of substances are evaluated for their efficacy and also their safety, and in light of the Cumberlege report I suggest that the Advisory Committee on Borderline Substances and the FSA be reviewed to establish whether the systems they have in place are adequate for the increasing demand for these new substances, nutritional and otherwise. This is important and urgently needed.

Finally, I turn to the legislation proposed for victims of abuse, and again in the health context. These victims need all the support we can give them. At the moment their first port of call is very often the police, but the reality is that they would deliver far more valuable information and would get far better support in the context of general practice within our NHS system, yet at the moment no training is provided for GPs and there is no expectation that they should deal with this as a front and centre concern coming through their doors on a day-to-day basis. I am delighted that Devon has the only clinical commissioning group pilot with a lead officer on domestic abuse and sexual violence, but that should be rolled out. Such offences are best detected and treated within our general practice and within our NHS. That needs to be looked at urgently if we are serious.

The issues I have raised are crucial if we are to deliver a best-in-class health and care system. These issues need to be covered not in secondary legislation, but on the face of the upcoming series of legislative provisions, because what is legislated for will be done.

The artificial situation of millions of the young on furlough is another bubble soon set to burst when that is withdrawn as we lurch from cliff edge to cliff edge. Where is the commitment to the jobs of the future that Labour’s green new deal would deliver or any kind of jobs guarantee? Instead, people are paying more and more to be less and less secure.

I must be getting old, because I am looking fondly at my own youth—I think we were called generation X in those days. We were able to benefit from Erasmus, which is no longer open to generation Y—now called the millennials—and generation Z, who instead have the inferior, more monoglot, distinctly Anglophile Turing scheme. It is a startling fact that nobody born after the year 2000—21-year-olds and everyone younger, which is a sector set to grow and grow—has had any say on Brexit, and they are the most opposed to it.

What do we get instead in this Gracious Speech? An imagined war on the woke, with solutions to non-existent problems. It is funny how the usual parroted line we get about casework on universities—they are autonomous institutions—is ignored for this so-called academic freedom legislation when figures show that the number of speaker events that it would apply to is less than 1%. In other words, it is more than 99% not needed. However, there is no action on student hardship, mental health support or education cuts.

I actually agree with the Scottish high Tory Ruth Davidson on a second non-existent problem, also mentioned by the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara), which I wish to identify—the Trumpian tactics of voter suppression via the need for photo ID. I believe the adjective she used on TV last night rhymes with Jackson Pollocks. We had an electorate of 47 million at the last general election. How many cases were there of personation—the thing this measure is meant to tackle? One solitary case. This is a youth issue, because they are the people less likely to have a driving licence. It is also an equalities issue, because black people and non-binary trans individuals are the kinds of people who will fall foul of it, and they are already over-represented in the 3.5 million voters who currently have no photo ID. Cut-to-the-bone councils already have enough on their plates without having to deal with that as well. We have seen how they have had to axe low-hanging fruit such as libraries and youth services. It is another wrong priority, and there is nothing at all for the biggest item of local government expenditure everywhere: social care. We were promised a clear plan—oven ready, I think it was. We have a demographic time bomb coming down the track, but there was nothing on that specifically. Life cycle means new generations. People my age are talked about as being the sandwich generation, caring at one end for offspring and, at the other, for parents.

Look, I want to end positively, so I will quote Dua Lipa from the Brit awards. Things are opening up and the vaccination programme is rolling out, but she identified another thing missing from the speech: an NHS pay rise. There is still time for that, and the Government could do it if they wanted. To really level up, we should look at intergenerational rebalancing and not just pitting people and regions against each other. The other thing that was missing was Dennis Skinner.

The new opportunities exist in Cornwall: the emerging space sector with Spaceport Cornwall; the development of lithium extraction; our ambition to have a gigafactory in Cornwall to manufacture batteries for our future electric vehicles; and renewable energy, particularly geothermal. Cornwall can become a real powerhouse of the future jobs in this Government’s green growth ambition and contribute to our nation’s prosperity, but we need the Government to back us in order to realise those opportunities.

The third point I want to mention is an issue that really needs urgent attention, and that is the growing housing crisis in Cornwall. It has been difficult for Cornish young people to be able to buy their own home for decades. The gap between our low wages and high house prices has been increasing for many years, but one of the results of the past year has been that it is now more difficult than ever; we have seen a staggering 140% increase in demand to buy property in Cornwall. In the first quarter of this year alone, there have been 15.2 million online searches for purchasing property in Cornwall.

I fully appreciate why so many people want to move to the most amazing part of the country to live in, but it is not a sustainable position for local people. Average house prices in Cornwall are now £311,000—an increase of £38,000, or 14%, over the past year. It is simply putting buying a house even more out of the reach of local young people.

I recognise the Government’s desire to reform planning to make it easier to provide homes for the future, but we need to be cautious. There is great concern in Cornwall that making it easier for developers to build new homes will see vast swathes of Cornwall built over, changing the unique character and nature of Cornwall, and that these new homes will still be out of the reach of local people and will simply continue to fuel the second homes and buy-to-rent markets.

I am well aware that this is a complex challenge, but I would say to the Government that a one-size-fits-all national approach is not going to work for every part of the country. We need to find tailored solutions for places such as Cornwall, where demand far outstrips supply. Simply building thousands of new homes that only people from outside Cornwall can afford is not going to be the answer. Schemes such as Help to Buy, the new homes discount, the 95% mortgages and community housing trusts can all play an important part.

I want Cornish young people to have a bright future in Cornwall, to have a great education and a well-paid job, and to be able to buy their own home. Last week, the people of Cornwall put their trust in our party as never before. In a historic election, they elected a Conservative majority council for the very first time. The Queen’s Speech contains many measures that will help us together to address these challenges. Cornwall is ready to level up. What we must now do is repay that trust and deliver the funding, support, investment and economic growth that the people of Cornwall need so that our young people can enjoy a prosperous future in the place that they love.

It is no wonder that recent polls from Ipsos MORI Scottish Political Monitor show huge support for independence among the young people of Scotland, with 79% of 16 to 24-year-olds and 68% of 25 to 34-year-olds now saying that they would support leaving this Union, for it is only a Union in name. They know that we are not on a two-way street but on an endless path of right-wing destruction.

The question therefore must be: why are the UK Government looking for any which way to block the wishes of Scotland’s electorate and of new generations to have their say on Scottish independence? If the Government really wanted to reform the voting franchise that this place uses, why not empower young persons across the United Kingdom by extending the vote to them? Instead the Queen’s Speech proposals in this area will lead only to further disenfranchising of the young people across these nations, as my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) said.

With 16 and 17-year-olds now able to vote in Scottish elections, seeing many of our young people engaged and energised truly inspires real hope for our future. In the recent Holyrood elections, for the very first time, foreign nationals and refugees also had the right to vote and take part in our democracy. That is a tangible symbol of the inclusive country that Scotland is.

We in Scotland were forced out, or dragged out of the European Union against our will, in direct contradiction, as I say, to the majority in our country. We in Scotland were totally neglected, of course, in the negotiations, with no regard to our interests or our future prosperity during the negotiations with our European counterparts, yet it is we in Scotland and it is our next generation of young people who will pay the price for the storm that is brewing. That is why the choice of the young people in Scotland has been made clear: the young people of Scotland, the electorate of Scotland, have chosen the SNP to represent them, they have chosen to take their future into their own hands, and they have chosen to be asked a question on Scottish independence.

This Government are also investing millions in previously forgotten towns through the levelling-up fund and the towns deal fund, creating new jobs—all in the name of levelling up. Under a Conservative Staffordshire County Council, Conservative-led Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council and a Conservative Chancellor, we have managed to secure £7 million of funding collectively, which will see this important community asset revived in 2022. In total, the £17.6 million towns deal fund for Kidsgrove is unlocking the opportunity to regenerate our high street, upgrade our railway station, create up to 2,000 new jobs at the Chatterley Valley site and invest in activities for young people, such as the 3G astro pitches at the King’s School or the soon-to-be completed pump track at Chinky Park. That is in comparison with when Labour ran Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council from 2012 to 2018, when it spent the grand sum of £15,000 over six years. It is a Conservative Government, a Conservative county council and a Conservative borough council—all of them are blue—that are delivering for local people.

In the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, again we have legislation that delivers on what the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke want—tougher sentences for child murderers, tougher sentences for the sex offenders, tougher sentences for the killer drivers, tougher sentences for drug dealers and tougher sentences for knife carriers. It also adopts the private Member’s Bill brought forward by me and my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland), introduced almost 12 months ago, which creates a distinct offence and punishment for anyone who desecrates war memorials and war graves to our glorious dead. How anyone can object to this baffles me, and I hope Opposition Members will have seen the recent local elections as a wake-up call and will now back the Home Secretary in passing this vital piece of legislation. I also hope that they will recognise that people want us to sort out the immigration system, and that they will back my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary as she brings forward the new sovereign borders Bill. This legislation is positive, long overdue and important to the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke.

What I have mentioned today is only a snapshot of a bold and ambitious domestic agenda. It is therefore a shame that the Labour party has adopted such a negative attitude to this Queen’s Speech, but it is not a surprise. The Labour party is simply a party that represents the views and opinions of the few, not the many. In jest, I described it on BBC Radio Stoke as having become the party for the avocado-eating, chai latte-drinking elites, but I think that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) was much more succinct when he tweeted that the Labour party had become a

“London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors”.

That is no better evidenced than by the former Labour leader of Amber Valley Borough Council, Chris Emmas-Williams, who said after his electoral loss:

“The voters have let us down.”

That mentality shows that the Labour party has adopted a master and servant complex. The champagne socialists of north Islington carry on tweeting their ideology, violently denouncing anyone who does not agree with them, while Government Members proudly listen to and serve the hard-working men and women of this country—the silent majority who make our United Kingdom the best country in the world.

It is a shame that these children are not a priority for this Government, because they are for the rest of us. Every child deserves a bright start, and I will unashamedly fight for the ambitions of young people in Luton North to be met. In this Gracious Address, the Government seemed more obsessed with attacking students and student unions than with improving access to higher education for young people.

The postcode of where someone is born should never determine the opportunities that they get in life—if we are for anything as a Labour party, it is that. Why should a child in Luton North not have the same opportunities as a child who goes to Eton or Harrow? Contextual university offers and skills training offer a genuine chance to level the playing field. It is about who the student is, what they are capable of and what they know, rather than who they know. We need this to equalise the life chances of children between Luton and other parts of the country, or even between one end of Luton and the other.

Is any of us genuinely shocked that an arguably talentless Education Secretary wants to cut by half funding for teaching for those with real talent? Cutting support to the arts is economically, culturally and in so many other ways complete and utter nonsense. Before covid, UK creatives contributed almost £13 million to the UK economy every hour. Our artists’ talents should be valued for their input to our culture, as well as to our economy.

Fantastic people at the Youth Network in Luton told me loudly and clearly that our arts and cultural sectors deserve to thrive, and they are absolutely right. If the Conservative party really thinks that our musicians, artists and performers should face 50% cuts to teaching, I say to any bands, artists, actors or DJs who are listening that I will back any campaign to charge Tory MPs 50% more when they try to get into concerts, theatres, galleries, festivals or even clubs.

This very thin Queen’s Speech showed a Government failing to match the ambition of young people in Luton North, who want good, secure jobs with better rights at work; decent training and improved access to higher education; an end to inequality; and the ability to live happier, healthier lives in a place in which they can take pride. That is what we needed in this Queen’s Speech. I am optimistic about Luton’s future and I will be standing alongside young people, parents, charities and schools as we fight for a bright future for every child in Luton North. I hope that one day, we will get a Government who do the same.

The introduction of sentience into UK law is very important. Anyone who has grown up with animals or works with them knows that they are sentient beings, and it is vital that that will be enshrined in our legal system, with an animal sentience committee to ensure that the legislation is delivered in the best way.

I have campaigned for many years on ending live animal exports for fattening and slaughter. This incredibly cruel practice has been going on for far too long. Now that we have left the European Union and the European single market, it is possible for us to end this cruel trade, and I am delighted that that announcement has been made. This is a two-way process, and the Government need to do more to prevent cruelly produced products from being imported into this country. In the last Parliament, I spoke about the cruel practices involved in foie gras, including the force-feeding of ducks and geese to produce a fatty liver, which some people believe is a delicacy. The importation of that product should be banned, as should the importation of fur.

I welcome the announcement in the Gracious Speech of an international animal welfare Bill, which will strengthen measures against the importing of trophy hunting products into this country. In the last Parliament, I was pleased to sit on the Ivory Bill Committee. That Bill is now law, and we are going further still.

Domestically, I welcome the legislation announced in the Queen’s Speech to ban puppy smuggling. That practice causes great distress and ill health to many animals, and it is a fraud often perpetrated on people who want to provide a loving home for a pet. It is important that that matter is addressed. I welcome the establishment of the pet theft taskforce, which the Government announced the other day. Pet theft is a horrible crime whereby pets who are much-loved members of families are taken, causing great distress. I also welcome the introduction of mandatory microchipping for cats, as is the case with dogs, so that lost pets have a much better chance of being reunited with their owners.

This Queen’s Speech represents a solid foundation for future generations, and I commend it to the House.

Despite our progress, decades of underfunding and austerity imposed by successive UK Tory Governments continue to impact negatively on that good work. The Welsh Government budget set by the Treasury here is still lower per head in real terms than it was in 2010. The UK Government’s attempts to bypass the Senedd with levelling-up and community renewal funding expose their contempt for devolution and their lack of understanding of the real priorities for us here in Wales. The process is a complete shambles. Funding is limited and not properly targeted, and it excludes some deprived areas. To quote Jeremy Miles, the Counsel General,

“this UK Government has an appalling record on providing Wales with even a fair share of UK spending, let alone the kind of funding needed to ‘level up’”.

This Government could have gone a lot further and followed the lead given in the alternative Queen’s Speech by introducing a wellbeing of future generations Bill, a real living wage Bill, a climate and ecology Bill and the social security Bill. So it will come as no surprise that I am supporting amendment (a), tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), which calls on the Government to bring forward a climate and ecological emergency Bill; amendment (c), tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana), which calls for a people’s green new deal Bill to provide a state-led programme of economic transformation with a green jobs revolution; and amendment (f), tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), which calls on the Government to bring forward a Bill to introduce a progressive tax system, taxing the wealthy, and a windfall tax on companies making super-profits.

The late Dr Imtiaz, once mayor of my constituency, Cynon Valley, sent me a Christmas card some years ago and it said, “We do not inherit the world. We only borrowed it from our children.” We need to be sure that we leave it in a better place, for my children and yours.

Our educational assessment system in no longer fit for purpose. It is not helping young people who want to succeed through vocational courses. Many vocational courses, such as apprenticeships and T-levels, are not seen as being as important as academic ones. But if they were all put into a different assessment system, such as an all-encompassing national baccalaureate at 18—although I hope we would call it something else—parents, teachers and young people themselves would be more likely to push for qualifications that fit the person, rather than pushing them in directions they might not be keen on. I welcome the work that the National Baccalaureate Trust is doing on this, and I hope that everyone with an interest in the matter will engage with its consultation.

We must ensure that this is seen as an opportunity to level up vocational and academic subjects, and help end the negative perceptions about vocational and technical education. For instance, on GCSEs, why are we still spending valuable education time on doing exams at 16 when young people stay in education or training until 18? We need an education system that provides a wide-ranging curriculum from 14 to 18, and that enables young people to achieve their goals with recognition that their achievement is on the same path as that of others.

One issue that really struck me when visiting a further education college was the high percentage of young people doing maths and English GCSEs over and over again, failing each time but unable to move on until they passed them. We do need qualifications and examinations, but there are much better ways to assess people than allowing them to fail in an area that is not suited to them. We all know that education is the way out of poverty, but it does not have to be an academic education; it should be an education that is seen as valuable to employers and, more importantly, life chances.

My request to the Minister is to please listen to the many educators working in this field. Our levelling-up agenda is going to transform this country, and education will be part of that. I am incredibly excited about the future of this country. It is very clear from the Queen’s Speech that this Government have the right policies, and I am looking forward to delivering on our promises.

Climate change is not tomorrow’s problem, but consecutive Governments have failed to take meaningful action because its worst impacts stretch beyond the average election cycle. Issues that will have widespread consequences are too often neglected and matters that seem more immediate and are easier to see are favoured.

If the Government were serious about a brighter future for the next generation, they would support a wellbeing of future generations Bill. From climate change to nuclear proliferation, from risks from future technologies to future pandemics, we need to foresee and plan for growing risks so that we are properly equipped to tackle them. That would ensure that future Governments publish a long-term vision for a better UK, as well as a national risk assessment looking forward over the next 25 years, after every general election. An Act dedicated to safe- guarding the wellbeing of future generations would set a gold standard for ensuring that preventive safeguards are in place before it is too late. After all, the experience of the covid pandemic has taught us that crisis prevention is even more important than crisis management.

This Queen’s Speech is more than disappointing. We need a bold vision for this country that is long term and radical. We need a Government who are honest with the people—who stop making empty promises and instead deliver.

I am determined that the Government will also deliver on bigger schemes, such as the Skipton to Colne line, getting better connectivity from Silsden and Keighley to the west of the country. The national infrastructure plan outlined in the Queen’s Speech will make such projects a reality.

Good health and wellbeing for residents in places such as Keighley and Ilkley is also a key part of the levelling-up agenda. Airedale Hospital is a community asset in our constituency. It has served the people of Keighley for many years—in fact, this year it has its 51st birthday—yet it was built with a life expectancy of 30 years. Three quarters of the hospital is built from aerated concrete, which is known for its structural deficiencies. Airedale Hospital needs and deserves a rebuild. That will ensure that my constituents get the best-quality healthcare that they deserve and will level up the whole community. It will be a great construction project that delivers jobs for my community.

In the past few months, the pandemic has been extremely tough for my constituents—on top of the three national lockdowns, they have been living with enhanced local restrictions since July—yet we in this place owe it to the entire next generation to ensure that their life chances are not defined by the pandemic. Levelling up and ensuring that young people have the right advice, open recruitment and fair career progression is crucial to ensuring that, and I am absolutely keen on delivering that. I commend the hard-working efforts of all the headteachers right across my constituency, and I must congratulate Jon Skurr, the headteacher of University Academy Keighley, who was recently recognised as headteacher of the year in our community.

I am proud that this Government have levelling up at the heart of their agenda, and I am pleased that the Queen’s Speech was able to deliver that.

Moving on to the skills and post-16 education Bill, as someone who has spent much of my life in and around the education sector, I enormously welcome the provisions that have been outlined, and in particular, the flexibility to move away from a situation where it could feel like all or nothing at school-leaving age to one where, throughout their lives, people can continue to access the support they require to retrain and develop. The early years health development review, which I have been involved in, is again a fantastic opportunity to build on the work done by local authorities and local NHS providers to transform the life chances of young children and ensure that they get the start in life that sets them up for a bright future.

Finally, preserving nature and wildlife is close to my heart and to the hearts of many of my constituents in Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, which is a key part of the green lungs of our capital city and an important destination for leisure. I particularly welcome the proposals in the Bill on animal welfare. My constituents have expressed significant concerns that some of the elements would reduce the ability of conservation projects abroad to raise funds through charging people for hunting as part of their herd welfare and management activities. I am pleased to see that the proposal seems to strike a better balance between ensuring that hunting continues to make an economic contribution to conservation—transforming the resources available to support animals that would otherwise be at risk—and enhancing the protection afforded to endangered species, which my constituents and I very much want to see.

There is a huge amount to commend in this Queen’s Speech, and I associate myself with the support expressed for it across the Conservative Benches. I look forward to seeing the proposals implemented and making a difference to the lives of the people I am here to serve.

Here I would also bring in race and ethnic disparities. Two thirds of the young people I worked with in my last job were from ethnic minorities because we focused on low-income households, and we saw those disparities across education and employment. Different ethnic groups performed very differently at GCSE and A-level and in rates of university attendance—particularly at the most selective universities—and the groups that did well in education might not do anywhere near as well in the labour market. The unfairly maligned report from Dr Tony Sewell and the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities is full of data outlining this position and good recommendations that we should be focusing on to try and close some of those gaps.

That brings me on to my final point. These issues are, of course, very important for Government, and Government have a key role to play in what happens to the next generation, but this is not just a job for Government. What parents do, and what schools and colleges do, matters. We need universities to stop charging high fees for low contact time and poor graduate outcomes. We need our employers to invest in skills, and not just leave that to Government; we need them to provide work experience and internships and traineeships and apprenticeships and good jobs for young people, not work experience that only goes to the relatives of employees and clients, or unpaid internships, or focusing on recruiting people who are polished rather than those who have the most potential. If it were just a job for Government, then one well-designed Bill that we passed in this House would solve the problem, but it would have happened by now if that was the case. We need everybody who can play a role—individuals, charities, social enterprises, businesses, universities, schools and so on—trying to create a better future for the next generation, but I am hugely pleased that Government are committed to doing everything they can.

Many new industries and creative businesses are built on intuitive digital and media skills and aptitude, rather than formal qualifications. Parents who have worked in traditional industries may find it difficult to appreciate the exciting new career paths in the digital industries and their transferable skills. Some of the most successful businesses in the past year have been online businesses. We know that gaming is not just a hobby, but a pathway to great careers.

STEAM is important because it blends our heritage with our future—our heritage and creativity maintained today as the world’s capital of ceramics; and our future, which develops the limitless possibilities with ceramics as an advanced material and our ambition to be the most digitally advanced city in the UK, enabling a new generation of creative innovators to start and grow their businesses close to home. We have an advanced ceramics campus in the university quarter, as well as the roll-out of the “Silicon Stoke” strategy, which has been championed by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and will deliver great opportunities for the next generation. I will continue to ask for Government support for these projects.

STEAM acts as the glue cohesively to bring together infrastructure, education, skills and jobs with a vision for the future as Stoke-on-Trent continues to grow in ambition and capability. The city council’s recently published prospectus articulates the vision clearly, and through the STEAM agenda we will be powering up the city and steaming ahead with the delivery of our vision, which will position Stoke-on-Trent as the hub for new infra- structure, new skills and new jobs, and the new future.

The city’s history is as a transport hub through our canals and railway networks. Our plans reintroduce railway links, improve bus services and reconfigure routes citywide, which will future-proof Stoke-on-Trent as a great place in which to invest, to work and to enjoy a better quality of life, underpinned by our ambitious plans for digital connectivity and to be a gigabit-connected city.

Stoke-on-Trent has experienced the third-fastest job recovery of any UK city, with pre-pandemic levels increased by 17%. We need to ensure that our young people have the right skills to fill vacancies in this new world of remote and flexible working. Those leaving full-time education should be able to stay in our city—a city full of enterprise, innovation and culture, where house prices mean they can aspire to owning a new first home.

Stoke-on-Trent is on the up and is levelling up. It is a vibrant, creative city that is experiencing a renaissance thanks to the investment of this Government, which will ensure a brighter future for the next generation.

This Conservative Government are committed to developing opportunities for everyone at every place across the country, to fulfil their potential, to excel. As such, I was proud to stand on a manifesto commitment to level up, boosting jobs, driving growth and innovation, increasing opportunity for everyone, and ensuring that everyone has access to excellent public services, regardless of where they live.

I would like to take this stand for parts of the south- east such as Hastings and Rye, which must not be overlooked when it comes to levelling up. Yes, it is absolutely right that those in parts of our country neglected by Labour politicians and taken for granted for generations are given the opportunities and investment, but we cannot overlook parts of the south-east that are also in desperate need of investment in education and skills, transport infrastructure, connectivity and job opportunities. We simply must not neglect or take for granted our core support; if we do, we are no better than the Labour party.

Turbocharging our economic recovery in every part of our country, increasing and spreading opportunity, is vital, and I therefore welcome the landmark levelling up White Paper, which will set out bold new policy interventions to improve livelihoods and opportunity in all parts of the UK as we recover from the pandemic, grasping the opportunities of Brexit. The Government are right: a one-size-fits-all approach does not work, and nurturing different types of economic growth and building on the different strengths that different places and different towns have is vital.

At a recent meeting with my local Federation of Small Businesses, its members were delighted, as am I, to find out that employers are being placed, and utilised, at the heart of the post-16 skills system, through the skills accelerator, enabling employers and providers to collaborate to develop skills plans aimed at ensuring that local skills provision meets local needs.

I welcome the investment in road and rail, and again would harp on about HS1: we really need that for connectivity. With this Queen’s Speech, and the ambition, aims and legislation of this Government, we have much to look forward to and a bright blue future.

However, to ensure a bright future, we need to address the elephant in the room: illiteracy. The BBC launched its programme this Monday to get the roughly 9 million people who have difficulties with reading talking about the issue and improving the country’s literacy rates. Not reading holds us all back in terms of health, employment, opportunity and family. If someone cannot help their own child with their homework because they are unable to read, they are holding their child back, too.

It has taken many years to overcome the stigma of mental ill health. With the help of the National Literacy Trust, which provides the secretariat for the all-party parliamentary group on literacy that I am fortunate to chair, we will overcome the stigma of illiteracy as well, because it cannot be right that in the 21st century one in six people in Britain, one in four in Scotland and one in eight in Wales are unable to read. My task is to ensure that the Government will continue to focus on that—I hope the Minister will be able to focus on it later, too —because it is a scandal that every single Member of both Chambers should be ashamed of. We will continue to do all the work we can to address that issue.

I remain astounded by the extraordinary—and extraordinarily deficient—vapid intellectual architecture that has grown within our universities in recent decades. I saw it starting off 20 years ago with the no platforming debates when I was at university myself; now it is a general lack of intellectual curiosity or an othering of inconvenient viewpoints, which results in the loss of swathes of perfectly reasonable debate, while rendering it almost impossible to draw conclusions across anything. It is the product of an obsession with a postmodern relativism that has created a toxic quagmire of up-ended logic and muddled thinking, where no one really knows what can acceptably be said, who can acceptably speak or what level of debate and discussion can actually be had.

The frames of the very concept of debate have been loosened to such an extent, through the fashions of Foucault, Derrida or their fellow travellers, that objectivity and rationality are discarded by some as if they were some kind of out-of-fashion, transient plaything. What follows is the dystopian reality that there is no real ability to draw any form of conclusion at all—“I have my truth, you have yours, this Bench has its own.” The whole discussion is narrowed and then disparaged to the extent that up becomes down and feelings become king. My, what has it come to when a law—a law!—is now required, not to set reasonable boundaries on freedom of speech, but to ensure that people can go to the extent of using those reasonable boundaries?

People have the right to be heard. Viewpoints have the right to be challenged. Comfort must, by necessity, be discomforted. Our world demands pluralism of thought, deed and action as the price of progress and improvement. I welcome the Government’s intent in this area.

At the end of the last parliamentary Session, Her Majesty the Queen gave her Royal Assent to my private Member’s Bill, which is now the Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Act 2021. On Second Reading of the Bill, I outlined to Parliament my continuing mission for animal welfare in this country, and I am delighted that the Government have again responded to my petition for improved animal welfare in the Queen’s Speech.

Our debates on animal welfare in this place have traditionally been about pets, but it is high time that we get a grip on the care of other animals as well. I want us to ban live animal exports, and I see that the Government’s intended Bill will give us that opportunity. It is disgraceful that our well-cared-for farm animals can be loaded on to a lorry and sent thousands of miles by land and sea to destinations in southern Europe or further for hours and hours. As a farmer’s son, I know that no decent, caring farmer wants to see their animals shipped abroad for fattening or slaughter.

I also want to see an end to non-stun slaughter of animals in the United Kingdom. I petition the Government that we could find an opportunity in the legislative agenda to stop this practice, which causes unnecessary suffering to our animals. The Food Standards Agency has shown that, in 2018, 94 million cattle, sheep and poultry were slaughtered in England alone in this manner. The Veterinary Policy Research Foundation says that, of those animals non-stunned for ritual slaughter purposes, some 70% are sold on the general market without labelling. We need a full debate on that matter in the House.

Her Majesty the Queen’s Speech is an example of how this Conservative Government look to govern this country and bring opportunity to it, including Dorset and the south-west, and I wholly support the Government in their endeavours.

For young kids with all the potential in the world who have special educational needs, in my view the answer is the establishment of SEND hubs in every council area in the country; that is one of the best ways to encourage them to have a brighter future. In those hubs, staff from various commissioning bodies would be working under one roof, and professionals and family members could turn to them for help immediately, if necessary, to find the support they need. That would mean that we, as politicians, were doing everything we could to support the potential individual needs of each young person in our country. The SEND hub would have a wider remit, however, in that it would provide tailored support through careers and employment services to ensure that kids, no matter what their background, have opportunities to enter the workplace. Sadly, at present, the opportunities are limited for many.

SEND hubs—inclusive, with continuity of provision and tailored to the bespoke needs of each young person at a local level to support the overarching aims of their EHCP—would, in my view, be the very best way of closing the current aching gap, where children with SEND do not have equality of opportunity. We must address this issue as part of the levelling-up agenda and as part of the legislation contained in this Queen’s Speech. I have asked my local authority to make an application by way of the community renewal fund to put together a business case for a SEND hub in Bury, and I hope it will then apply to the UK shared prosperity fund and other revenue streams to make that a reality.

I believe that this is a fine Queen’s Speech. This Government are set on changing each and every part of this country and giving each and every one of our fellow citizens the best opportunity to thrive and succeed. For children with SEND, the proposal of a warm, welcoming and supportive hub is something the Government should strongly consider.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), following on from the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara), spoke about the requirement to show photo ID to vote. I regret that the Minister had, not unreasonably, taken a break at that point, but I urge her to read those comments in Hansard, because I thought some very good points were made about those who might be excluded from our democracy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) spoke passionately for the children in her constituency and really praised the schools in her community for stepping up and filling the gaps where the Government have dropped the ball, be that with laptops and equipment, the exams chaos, or, shockingly, a food bank inside a school.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) shared with the House the progress made by the Welsh Labour Government. Indeed, they introduced the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, which has gone on to ensure that there is a bright future for the next generation in Wales. That means that we have seen voting rights extended to 16 and 17-year-olds, free school meals extended, and a new framework for youth services.

Children and young people have been left behind by this Government since long before the coronavirus crisis. The pandemic is set to have a scarring effect on an entire generation of young people for years to come. Radical action is needed to ensure that the next generation will reach higher, with better opportunities than generations before them. This week’s Queen’s Speech was an opportunity to take stock of the devastating year that we have all experienced and instigate that radical action. The past year has been like no other. Families have given up so much and many have lost loved ones.

Coronavirus has brought into sharp focus the inequalities and insecurities rooted in our society. After a decade of Conservative Governments, it is no wonder that our public services were underfunded and underprepared for the pandemic. But even at this time of crisis, the Conservatives’ Queen’s Speech was uninspired and unambitious. It fell short across the board, but particularly when it came to young people. As shadow Minister for young people, I do not get many chances to speak at this Dispatch Box about my brief, mainly because the Conservatives do not have a Minister dedicated to young people. Their disregard for young people comes so naturally that it is endemic in the way they organise their Government, leading to a disjointed, haphazard approach on many of the issues young people face today. So perhaps I should not be surprised that this Queen’s Speech did not mention young people and that the Government have treated them as little more than an afterthought throughout this crisis.

For example, the Queen’s Speech failed to mention the youth jobs crisis. Across this country, millions of young people needed the Government to announce solutions to their patchy kickstart scheme, which has created jobs for only 3% of all young jobseekers. The Government’s kickstart scheme lacks the scale and ambition needed for a crisis of this magnitude. Labour would deliver a guaranteed job or training opportunity to every young person who needed it and work to end long-term unemployment. Young people are the key workers of the future and must be recognised for their importance in our recovery from this crisis.

The Government also missed an opportunity to finally release the long-awaited youth investment fund, which was pledged more than 18 months ago by this Government but not a penny has been spent. Covid-19 has only worsened the crisis in our youth services, and yet over the past decade what we have seen from the Conservatives is a 73% cut to our youth services, bringing them to their knees. Will the Minister confirm whether the youth investment fund will be released in full, as promised in the last Conservative party manifesto?

As hon. Members from across the House have mentioned, the Government could have used the Queen’s Speech to set out how they will support the millions of children who have faced unprecedented disruption to their learning in the past year. Children’s recovery should be at the heart of the Government’s work, and yet the Secretary of State for Education has committed just £43 per pupil per day for catch-up. Does the Minister believe that this is sufficient, or will she be asking the Chancellor, or indeed the Secretary of State, to provide more support? This Government’s scandalous failings on apprenticeships have stifled the prospects of the young people who are most in need. The drop-out rate is soaring and those from disadvantaged backgrounds have been locked out of opportunity. Will the Minister outline what action she is taking to rectify the 40% decline in new apprenticeships for young people since 2015?

As young people emerge from a devastating year, mental health must be a central focus. The relationship between financial security and probable mental health disorders is undeniable. This inequality is well documented, but successive Conservative Governments have failed to address it, and that has left less well-off young people falling through the cracks in the system. Will the Minister outline what steps she is going to take to reduce the waiting lists for access to child and adolescent mental health services?

The Conservatives’ track record on young people has been a series of let-downs and broken promises. After a decade of austerity, young people are facing surging house prices, stagnating wages and rising debts, and all the while the Government have failed to grant 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote, silencing their voices. With votes at 16 guaranteed in Wales and Scotland, there is now a fundamental inequality of rights in this country, a situation that is morally and politically unsustainable for the UK Government.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston outlined in her opening remarks, Labour would have approached the Queen’s Speech very differently to guarantee a bright future for all. Labour is committed to making Britain the best place in which to grow up, and preventing today’s young people from becoming the lost generation. We would ensure that every young person had the opportunity to fulfil their potential; that affordable, accessible, high-quality early years education was available for all; and that childcare was there for parents who needed it. We have a radical plan that would create time for children to play, learn and develop, and would give the teaching profession the support that it needs to guarantee a world-class education for every child. We would deliver a guaranteed job or training opportunities to every young person who needed them, and we would work to end long-term unemployment.

We have repeatedly heard that this generation of young people is being called a lost generation. It is not inevitable that a whole cohort of young people will be negatively impacted by this crisis. Let us be clear; it is a choice made by the Conservatives. It is a political choice, which will be remembered by the current generation of young people. As long as the Government continue to fail our children, the consequences will be felt for a generation.

I was very interested to hear the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) criticise the English education system when Scotland’s performance on the PISA league tables has drastically slipped and the attainment gap has increased. Meanwhile, UCAS data show that just 9.7% of those from Scotland’s most disadvantaged areas have been accepted at university, compared with 17% in England.

I want to wish my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) a very happy birthday and thank her for her tireless commitment to the early years agenda over 25 years. As a relatively new mum myself, I can say that what she said this afternoon, especially on maternal mental health and support, resonated. That has been a real challenge for many new parents during the pandemic, and I wish her the very best for her work on “The 1001 Critical Days”, which has now been recognised and supported by Government.

It is fantastic to hear of the input into that project from my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson), who draws on huge experience, and the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). I am sure that the wisdom and warmth that the hon. Lady brought to that role was invaluable. She raised an extremely important point about cancer services, and I know that the question of NHS delays caused by the pandemic is an area of great focus for the Cabinet Office in its work on public sector recovery and reform. That will also be tackled in new health legislation.

This afternoon, I learned to my surprise that my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) is the House’s No.1 champion of hedgehogs. I was glad to hear of his support for the ambitious environmental and animal welfare measures in the Gracious Speech. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) raised the potential of COP26 to inspire and provide opportunities in green tech for young people. In our sponsorship of COP, the Cabinet Office agrees; we are tremendously ambitious in this area. The London Gateway freeport—in my region and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price)—will help to spur new green investment and jobs, and our work on new T-levels, apprenticeships and skills will help local young people to take advantage of them. As others have said, levelling up is not only for the north.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) talked of retaining flexible working from the pandemic to help families. The Cabinet Office is actively exploring that in areas such as public appointments and civil service HR. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford) spoke movingly about illiteracy, and I hope that our lifelong learning initiatives will help to address it. The hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) supported our education plan and our kickstart scheme, and raised the issue of apprenticeships. I hope she engages with our skills for jobs White Paper and recognises the enormous investment we are making in skills, including a £3,000 incentive for firms to take on apprentices.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) is absolutely right about the emotional commitment we all feel to the future of the Union. Our family of nations has faced the great challenge of the pandemic together, through protections to the economy, support from our armed services, the procurement of vaccines and more. This is not the time to tear us apart.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) was right to highlight the futures of young girls beyond our shores, where this Government are investing hugely in their education, as the key to tackling a whole range of global challenges, and the importance of stable public finances to all our finances, which was underlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock. She also made an oft overlooked point that outcomes and not money spent ought to define success in our public services. That is why the Cabinet Office wants to use procurement reforms and digital transformation to improve the performance of our services for all citizens. She also talked of our proposals to tackle violence towards women and girls and to improve online safety in order to protect young people.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) raised the important issue of forced marriage, and I really praise her for her campaign. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle talked of not only the importance of new homes and infrastructure to young people’s futures, but the crucial new legislation we are bringing in on fighting knife crime, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) and the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). That issue affects far too many young people. It was with deep sadness that we lost Daniel Laskos to knife violence in my constituency on Friday, and his family have been in our hearts this week. I pay tribute to the work of local police officers on this case, and I hope that new powers will help them to do their vital work so that no more lives are lost to senseless violence.

A number of hon. Members referred to the levelling-up agenda and its importance to young people in their constituencies, and one rather dubious reference was made to Chumbawamba. The Government are committed to boosting funding for communities in all parts of the UK, with the £4.8 billion levelling-up fund and another £220 million to invest in local areas, ahead of launching the UK shared prosperity fund in 2022, and a series of infrastructure initiatives of the kind that my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) mentioned.

We in the Cabinet Office are also committed to ensuring that the administration of government is less Whitehall-centric, by locating more civil service roles in the regions and nations of the UK, through our ambitious places for growth programme. The civil service needs to be visible in and representative of the entire UK, across all Departments, functions and professions. This will also play an important role in demonstrating our commitment as a Government to maintaining the integrity of the Union. The Cabinet Office has recently announced that our second headquarters will be located in Glasgow, with 500 officials to be located there in the next three years.

A number of other Departments have also announced their plans to increase the UK Government presence across the UK. That includes the Department for Transport building on its presence in Leeds and Birmingham, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government establishing a second HQ in Wolverhampton, Leeds becoming home to second HQs for the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Work and Pensions, and a new Treasury economic campus in Darlington. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will have heard the passionate bid for a Home Office HQ from my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon), who have listed the huge investments already made in their city. We want opportunities for young people to go hand in hand with these moves. Again, I am particularly focused on using the tremendous talent in schools and colleges across the UK to get British students into exciting digital and data roles in the heart of government.

Of course the brightest futures can be built only on solid democratic foundations, which is why the Government are bringing forward our elections Bill, as set out in Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech. This Bill will deliver on multiple manifesto commitments and hopes to ensure that our democracy remains secure, fair, modern and transparent The potential for voter fraud in our current system strikes at a core principle of our democracy: that your vote is yours and yours alone. Any instance of or potential for electoral malpractice damages the public’s faith in our democracy and has to be taken seriously. The hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) and a number of other hon. Members use language outside this place to talk about straightforward proposals to request that voters prove they are who they say they are when they take up their sacred right to vote, calling that simple principle “voter suppression” in typically hyperbolic fashion designed to frighten and scaremonger. I completely agree that the vote is a precious right, which is why this Government believe that we should make it harder for those who seek to interfere with it.

Setting aside the fact that every voter will be able to secure a voter card from their local council free if they want one, and that many people already have that kind of identification in the form of a passport or driving licence, the demands for evidence that voter fraud is a problem do not show an understanding of what happened in Tower Hamlets when I was a councillor there. In that borough, disinterest and complacency from authorities about electoral corruption and fraud meant that it was left to four ordinary residents, risking legal bills of hundreds of thousands of pounds, to challenge the election of the mayor in 2015. It was not easy, and I pay tribute to them and people such as Councillor Peter Golds, with whom I worked at the time and who raised with the Electoral Commission our serious worries about voter fraud.

The tireless work of those residents and their barrister, Francis Hoar, exposed how easily the system can be exploited when authorities are just too nervous about taking action. Through their courage, they had the mayor’s election overturned. I do not wish to see other communities go through that simply because of reluctance on our part to introduce a very simple check that a voter is who they say they are. Indeed, I noticed that Mr Hoar himself tweeted last week that he had been subject to personation at the ballot box, so I regret that the idea that there is nothing to see here is wide of the mark.

The Opposition are not naive and inexperienced on this matter. They will know that in many council elections, the margin of victory at ward level can be exceptionally slim, yet we are electing people who will be stewards of public money and services for some of the most vulnerable in our communities. I know full well that Opposition Front Benchers understand the importance of identification at key votes, because they ask for it to be produced for their own party’s elections and even to attend Labour Live, in so far as there is any demand. Our plans simply bring us into line with Labour’s elections, and with the Labour Government’s introduction in 2003 of voter identification in Northern Ireland, where participation has not been affected.