The comments made by Rishi Sunak, the then Local Government Minister, on 23 May 2018.
Plant nurseries are an essential part of the rural economy and it is vital they are protected.
This legislation will put a stop to this unreasonable burden on businesses and will help maintain a productive, competitive and sustainable agricultural sector.
The comments made by Rishi Sunak, the then Communities Minister, on 28 March 2018.
It is simply wrong that, while there are 200,000 long-term empty properties across the country, thousands of families are desperate for a secure place to call home.
This new power will equip councils with the tools they need to encourage owners of long-term empty properties to bring them back into use – and at the same time tackle the harmful effect they have on communities through squatting, vandalism and anti-social behaviour.
The comments made by Rishi Sunak, the then Communities Minister, on 27 March 2018.
This report details the hard work that’s been happening across the country over the past year to help families with a variety of challenging problems improve their lives, reduce their dependency on local services, and in doing so deliver better value for taxpayers.
Adults who were once far from the job market are now moving into work. Children are getting the right support they need and local leaders are encouraging and challenging all services working with children and their families to act early and offer whole family support, to stop their problems becoming worse.
The comments made by Rishi Sunak, the then Communities Minister, on 9 March 2018.
The Litter Innovation Fund is part of our wider strategy to deliver a substantial reduction in litter and littering while leaving a cleaner, greener and tidier environment for the next generation.
I am looking forward to seeing these projects supporting that strategy while helping communities make a real difference in their area.
The speech made by Andrew MacKinlay, the Labour MP for Thurrock, in the House of Commons on 17 March 1994. The speech was made at 05:15.
I begin the debate which I have initiated on the impact on the commuters of the closure of Fenchurch Street station and Limehouse station for seven weeks this summer by apologising to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and to the House, its servants and its officers for detaining them at this unearthly hour. I extend that apology to the Minister and to his colleague, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Patnick), who, on a personal level, are always courteous. Nevertheless, I shall not hesitate to criticise the Government and their stewardship of our railway network as it affects east London and Essex, despite the fact that the Minister has always been courteous and helpful to me about constituency matters.
The fact that Back-Benchers have to raise important issues at ridiculous hours of the day and night reflects the imbalance of the way in which we do things in this House. Before I depart from the House, my ambition is that the balance between Government business and BackBenchers’ debates will have been altered. Government business should be held in the middle of the night and Back-Benchers’ initiatives should be held during the day. I have already been in the Palace for 21 hours, working on parliamentary business. It is absurd that we hold these debate so late when the Minister, like me, has a full diary for the day ahead.
Having got that point off my chest, I state clearly that I do not question the urgent need for the resignalling works on the line that goes from Fenchurch Street to Southend, via my constituency of Thurrock and the constituency of Basildon; nor do I minimise the urgent need for Fenchurch Street station and other stations along that line to be refurbished and for the track to be renewed. Indeed, that work is long overdue, but I question whether, to complete those works, it is necessary to close Fenchurch Street and Limehouse stations for seven weeks from 22 July. Had the Government and managers of Network SouthEast been alive to the decay of the London-Tilbury-Southend and Great Eastern lines and their stations, those closures would not have been necessary. They are a direct consequence of years of neglect and indifference by the Secretary of State and his predecessors under this Administration.
My constituents will suffer enormous additional delay and inconvenience as a result of that neglect. The impact will be quite awful for the thousands of commuters who travel from East Tilbury, Tilbury, Grays and, to a lesser extent, South Ockendon stations. They would wish me to place on record their considerable irritation at the inconvenience that they face this summer. The problem is not exclusive to my constituency but will affect thousands of commuters from Essex and east London, Southend, Shoeburyness, Basildon, Pitsea, Upminster, Dagenham Dock and particularly Barking. Some 19,000 commuters a day use Barking station and there is already considerable congestion and problems for commuters interlining from that station on their way to work in London.
When Fenchurch Street and Limehouse stations close this summer, Network SouthEast intends that the bulk of commuters travelling from Essex will disembark at Barking and join the already heavily used, if not overloaded, District and Metropolitan underground lines from Barking. Commuters who normally interline with the docklands light railway at Limehouse station will have an additional problem to get to their place of work in the new docklands development area.
The closures will affect not only travellers to Barking but commuters living in Barking. Had my late colleague Jo Richardson still been with us, I am sure that she would have participated in this debate because of the enormous impact that the closure of Fenchurch Street station will have on the Barking and Dagenham constituents. I regret that no other hon. Members whose constituents will be affected by the closures are in the Chamber. In fairness, the right hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Channon) is indisposed. He takes a keen interest in transport matters, having been a former Transport Secretary, and is also my chairman on the Transport Select Committee. I am sure that, had it been possible, he would have been here tonight. The inescapable fact remains, however, that there are Essex Conservative Members who should have been here tonight to speak up for their commuters, who will be greatly disadvantaged by the closures.
I have been a consistent and unashamed critic, not just of the Government and their transport policy, but of the managers of Network SouthEast, who do not respond as they should to the interests of commuters. They make cosmetic efforts to recognise those interests, but I am not satisfied that they properly champion consumers’ interests in their dealings with the Government. Were they to fulfil the spirit of their duties as line managers they would join me in criticising the Government for their chronic underfunding of the lines, which in turn has led to the chaos of one of London’s oldest mainline stations being closed for seven weeks in the summer.
The managers make some attempt to acknowledge the interests of commuters. Just this morning, they issued commuters with a glossy brochure entitled, “LTS Newsline: Customer Newsletter”. The banner headline reads: Station to shut for seven weeks”. The second page of the document is headed: LTS moves towards shadow franchise”. It goes on: The senior management team headed by Chris KinchinSmith, divisional director of LTS, has already expressed its initial willingness to mount a bid for the line, providing the terms of the franchise are acceptable. I hope that the Minister will acknowledge that during the tortuous debates on rail privatisation, in the House and in the Select Committee, we were assured both by the Minister and by the chairman of British Rail that line managers who might be contemplating putting in a bid for a franchise should keep that interest separate from their operational role. Mr. Kinchin-Smith and his colleagues, in a document paid for by commuters through their fares, are flagging up an interest in bidding for a franchise—that clearly runs contrary to the spirit of those undertakings. I hope that the Minister will accept that, and that his Department will tick off people who are mixing up their responsibilities in this way.
Another sign that the legitimate interests of commuters are being ignored is the lack of facilities for the travelling public. The document also tells commuters that no toilets will be available for their use at Barking station, the main inter-line station, which is due to accommodate a great many more travellers this summer. That is symptomatic of the decay of the line and its understaffing by Network SouthEast and it is wholly unacceptable. It is not unreasonable to say that the line and its passengers must be properly looked after. It is a very bad state of affairs if they cannot provide WCs for commuters.
I move to the central issue of the debate—the closure of the Fenchurch Street main line station. Mr. Chris Kinchin-Smith says: We know this work will cause severe disruption for many of our customers”. My word, he can say that again; it is the understatement of the year. He then argues that the temporary closure of Fenchurch Street station is essential.
As I have said, I have no way of testing whether it is essential or unavoidable now, but it could have been avoided had there been proper funding and planning of the refurbishment and restoration of the line in previous years. The Government and the line management failed to acknowledge that, despite the fact that I and other Labour Members have been drawing attention to the problems of the misery line for a number of years.
The management’s document says that the station will be closed when many passengers take their holiday. That is very kind of them, but the fact that the work will be carried out in July or August will not greatly reduce the irritation to customers. We are not a town that has a “holiday week”. Thurrock does not close down and nor does Essex. In the south-east of England, in modern times, holidays straddle the summer months. It is of no great consolation to us that the work will be conducted in the summer and it is nonsense to suggest that that is any great concession to the fare-paying customers.
In their document, the managers of network SouthEast also say: We are working closely with London Underground”. I am not sure that that is so. Dear old London Underground has been told there about the closure of Fenchurch Street and Limehouse station and has to live with it.
In the past 24 hours, I have corresponded with the senior public affairs executive of London Underground. She replied: The eastern section of the District Line is currently operating the optimum level of service possible and therefore additional trains can not be provided by the line — that is the District line— during the 7 week closure period.”. The management of London Underground are in no position significantly to abate the problems of commuters from Essex; nor can they do anything to affect the impact on the existing underground customers who will also suffer through increased congestion on already overcrowded underground trains.
I also criticise the management because their glossy and expensive document does not give much time or attention to the problems that will be faced exclusively by my constituents on the Tilbury loop line. The section headed, “Your Questions Answered”, contains hardly any reference to mitigating the problems for my constituents, apart from telling us that present proposals include the Tilbury line and that all stopping services will terminate at Barking with onward travel by tube. It then gives us the good news that LTS tickets will be valid on the underground.
I have been fighting a continuing battle with Network SouthEast about its penalty fares scheme and how it relates to the closure of Fenchurch Street. I support the principle of the penalty fare scheme, but the management of Network SouthEast on the London-Tilbury-Southend line have been unable to maintain the ticket machines so that honest fare-paying passengers can purchase a ticket and avoid the embarrassment of having to defend their position when an inspector gets on the train. It is a wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs when, night after night on the main concourse of Fenchurch Street station, it is impossible, unless one has the exact fare, to purchase a ticket for use on that line. If Fenchurch Street station is to be refurbished, I hope that the management are able to get their act together. Apparently the machines there are supposed to be self-replenishing in change, but they do not self-replenish and the management seem incapable of arranging for people to empty them and fill them up with change.
The situation gets worse. If more people have to change at Barking on to London Underground, which is also introducing a penalty fares scheme from the beginning of this financial year, it makes it even more imperative that passengers are able to purchase a ticket or permit to travel at stations in Essex. I hope that the Minister will take that on board and ensure that the management of London Underground and Network SouthEast understand that that is a reasonable expectation and demand by the commuters in view of the penalty fares policy.
I want to ask the Minister some questions. First, what compensation will commuters who are disadvantaged by the lengthy closure of Fenchurch Street station receive? They do not have a good service at the present time. Despite what the management say, the journeys are still erratic in terms of punctuality. Their problems will be compounded. I guess that the vast majority of commuters from Essex will have each day an additional three quarters of an hour travelling time, at least, to their place of work in London as a result of the closure. That is not fair when one bears in mind that commuters from Southend, if travelling only on the LTS line, pay £1,912 per annum for their season ticket. If they are travelling LTS and Great Eastern, the season ticket costs £2,056 per annum. In my constituency, commuters from Tilbury pay £1,564 per annum. At that price, bearing in mind the problems that they will experience this summer, they are entitled to a rebate. I hope that the Minister will consider that matter and make the appropriate recommendation to the management of Network SouthEast.
Secondly, is the Minister able to give me an assurance that when the work is complete following the closure of Fenchurch Street and Limehouse stations, there will be no further hiatus for commuters from Essex? I ask that because I have no confidence about the frankness of the management of Network SouthEast. For example, they did not mention the possibility of this closure until it was almost unavoidable. They must have known about it a year or two ago, but they did not tell us. I have a deep suspicion that there will be further closures of stations along the LTS line in the coming months or perhaps the next two years. If I am wrong, I would welcome that correction and reassurance from the Minister.
Thirdly, after significant sums of public money have been spent on refurbishing the LTS line and Fenchurch Street station, will the station be fully used to the advantage of the Essex commuters? Each evening, commuters wanting to get back to Essex are faced with the absurd irritation of having to look at the clock and decide whether to head for Fenchurch Street station or Liverpool Street station. About halfway through the evening, Fenchurch Street is closed and those travelling to Essex must use Liverpool Street.
Fenchurch Street is a mainline station. It services my constituents on the Tilbury loop, and many others who want to get to towns between London and Southend. I do not think it unreasonable to expect those people to be able to board a train at Fenchurch Street throughout the evening. I hope that, following the expenditure on Fenchurch street, that problem will be remedied and a proper service will be restored.
Although I have tempered my remarks, I hope that the Minister will understand why I legitimately accuse the Government of neglecting the line. They are, to a large extent, to blame for the problems that will be experienced this summer by my constituents and by people living throughout Essex and in east London. Some of the blame must lie with the management of Network SouthEast but, putting that aside, I hope that the Minister will tell us that he will have a further meeting with the management to establish whether the work can be completed without closing the station.
I feel that, although it might be inconvenient and involve some additional cost to Network SouthEast, the work could be completed in the middle of the night and over a series of weekends. It might take a good deal longer, but the disadvantage to computers would be a good deal less. I suspect that a seven-week closure of Fenchurch Street station is the easy way out for the management, rather than being truly unavoidable. I hope that the Minister will investigate that.
I also hope that the Minister will establish whether it will be possible to increase capacity on London Underground during the closure of Fenchurch Street—assuming that it goes ahead—and that he will ensure that passengers can purchase tickets from properly maintained machines, both on that line and throughout the Network SouthEast area. That is not happening now. Finally, I hope that commuters will be told about any other anticipated problems months, if not years, in advance, rather than those problems’ being sprung on them with the minimum notice.
I expect the Minister to say that Network SouthEast has consulted local Members of Parliament, because that is what Network SouthEast told me today. It is true that Mr. Kinchin-Smith has invited me to meet him, and I look forward to arranging a mutually convenient date. What he has never done, however, is write to me, as a Member of Parliament, saying, “We have a problem: we are going to have to close Fenchurch Street station, which will affect your commuters.” All I got was a press release, some weeks weeks ago—not even a letter. I do not protest about that discourtesy on my own behalf, but I am protesting on behalf of my constituents and other commuters from Essex. It shows the way in which the management of the line treat their customers.
I hope that we will receive some reassurance from the Minister and that, as a consequence, the enormous chaos will be avoided for commuters this summer.
The Parliamentary answer given by Douglas Hogg, the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, in the House of Commons on 27 January 1989.
Mr. Atkinson
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he has had any discussions with the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis on the independent establishment of vigilante groups on the London Underground; and if he will make a statement.
Mr. Douglas Hogg
No. Policing the London Underground is the responsibility of the British Transport police. About 80 police officers from the Metropolitan and City of London police forces are to be loaned to the British Transport police L Division for the next 12 months. If the Guardian Angels or any other group act unlawfully or engage in conduct likely to provoke a breach of the peace, they cannot expect to be exempt from the ordinary processes of the law. But these would be operational issues for the police to consider.
The Parliamentary answer given by Herbert Morrison, the then Minister for Transport, in the House of Commons on 17 July 1929.
Mr. GOSSLING asked the Minister of Transport if he is aware that trains upon the Underground Railway frequently run with the doors open; and if he will take immediate steps to remedy this danger by making it compulsory for the railway company to install guards upon these trains or any other means to safeguard the travelling public?
Mr. HERBERT MORRISON I believe it occasionally happens that railway carriage doors are left open, but my information is that the railway companies concerned already adopt measures to secure that doors left open are closed as soon as possible. If, however, the hon. Member would give me any specific information he may have of failure in this respect I will look further into the matter. I may say that so far as I have been able to ascertain no accidents from this cause are known to have occurred recently.
The comments made by Liz Truss, the then Education Minister, on 10 April 2013.
Parents want and deserve high-quality early education for their young children. The extension of the Teach First Leadership Development Programme into the early years will mean talented individuals will be even more attracted to this important profession which makes all the difference to young lives. I hope it will encourage bright graduates who otherwise may not have considered working with young children.
Teach First has an excellent reputation for delivering high-quality teachers. This announcement will help to capitalise on this expertise for the early years profession to get the status it deserves. It will also drive up early education quality in poorer areas where it is most needed.
The comments made by Liz Truss, the then Education Minister, on 8 April 2013.
It is not good enough that only 60 per cent of state-funded schools and colleges offering A level Maths also offer further maths A level. These students are potentially missing out on a place at a top university to study maths and science.
That is why we are making £25 million available over five years to enhance the Further Mathematics Support Programme (FMSP). This programme targets schools and colleges where no students are currently taking further maths A level, helping them to improve and extend their maths provision. It is an excellent programme which will enable more students to study further maths A level.
The speech made by Liz Truss, the then Education Minister, on 18 March 2013.
Thank you very much. I am really pleased to be here and to have the chance to outline our thinking on the curriculum. I am also looking forward to hearing policy recommendations from National Leaders of Education. The Fellowship Commission and the hard work that flows from it are not merely greatly appreciated but invaluable.
NLEs were posed the following Challenge Question for the 2013 Fellowship Commission: “How can the proposed curriculum and qualification reforms be successfully implemented across all schools, within scarce resources?”
I would like to focus today on the School Curriculum, as opposed to the National Curriculum. The two are related, of course, but quite distinct.
The National Curriculum is our framework for education, which we launched six weeks ago. There has been much debate about what should be in it.
That debate will doubtless continue. But what really matters is that this is a new approach to education, one that gives head teachers and schools far greater freedom. How they implement the National Curriculum is down to them.
The School Curriculum is best described as the life within the National Curriculum. Government has a part to play in setting out the trellises and marking out the footpaths. How the garden grows is for schools to decide. And in order for teachers to be able to give life to the garden, government has to give them freedom: freedom from excessively prescriptive top-down diktats and the freedom to innovate.
There will be no new statutory document telling teachers how to do their job. No national strategies telling teachers everything that they have to do. No national roll-out. This is a huge cultural shift. And it is complemented by more money going to the front line.
It is a massive opportunity for teachers, and especially head teachers. We know that many will grab it with great gusto and be eager to share best practice.
The reason we are proposing to disapply the National Curriculum next year is so that head teachers will have a year to decide how to maximise this opportunity.
There are many existing examples of energetic, engaged schools. Pimlico Academy has written a curriculum that is being promoted nationwide by Civitas. Based on the Core Knowledge Curriculum developed by E.D Hirsch in the United States, it is being marketed to other schools.
Woodberry Down Community Primary School in Hackney has brilliant teachers whose pupils work with advanced fractions, multiplication and division in a fun way that will stick with them for life.
The Prince’s Teaching Institute works in partnership with Cambridge University to develop Continuing Professional Development courses and run a network of schools that participate in a Schools Programme and help organise Regional Events.
This sort of exchange of information and ideas will be typical of education systems that succeed in the 21st Century. Happily, modern technology makes such exchanges simpler and faster.
The flip-side of this is that the advanced nature of technology provides a particularly strong imperative for creating an up-to-date, flexible education system. It is both an opportunity and a challenge: technology can be immensely helpful in delivering the curriculum but it also raises the stakes – we will fall hopelessly behind in the global race if we do not equip successive generations with contemporary skills.
Our draft programmes of study for design and technology are very deliberately less prescriptive and more widely focused than the status-quo. This will be a broader, more practical, activity-based curriculum. Schools are free to teach elements such as CAD-CAM even if they not directly prescribed. Further input from experts during the consultation period will help us finesse this further.
The interaction of different subjects
Design and technology offer a reminder of the interaction between subjects. Computers have a central role in design and technology these days and our new, more challenging computing programme of study is designed to prepare pupils to work in the cutting-edge industries of the future. Small mathematical calculations can cause mechanical failure on a grand and disastrous scale. And reading the great works of literature can be one of the most enjoyable ways of learning about history.
I do not believe in blurring subject lines altogether, but plainly teachers will often want to show pupils how skills can be useful in a variety of contexts. I visited a school near my constituency that begins lessons by looking at the Stock Exchange, which is both an excellent way of demonstrating the importance of maths and may create a few multi-millionaires!
Repetition and practice will always be integral to effective learning, but a well-rounded, inspirational education is about much more than that. For example, in history we want to make sure that children have a clear sense of chronology and of Britain’s place in the world, but then we want them to learn how to navigate their way around that knowledge.
Previous national strategies stifled such innovation and inhibited lateral thinking on the part of teachers. Contrastingly, the likes of the Institute of Physics and the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics have really helped schools to shape learning. Such organisations will feed into a new School Curriculum – or rather large number of School Curricula – which government does not control.
But nor is government abdicating responsibility. At the same time as giving head teachers and schools much greater flexibility, we are adopting a very tough approach to accountability. We expect head teachers to take a lead in ensuring that their staff are well-trained and able to deliver the new curriculum.
Ofsted’s inspection evaluation schedule requires inspectors to consider the accuracy with which best practice is identified and modelled, as part of the assessment of leadership.
And where schools are failing we will say so publicly, and take action.
The point is that we don’t want schools to fail because they haven’t had a chance to succeed. Central control and uniformity mean sclerosis. And, perhaps counter-intuitively, they actually make it harder for teachers to learn from and adopt best practice – because no-one has the freedom to develop best practice in the first place.
Evidence based education
Dr Ben Goldacre, Research Fellow in Epidemiology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has just published a paper commissioned by the DfE. It is about how evidence and research are used in education and I encourage you all to read it. I know that such an emphasis on rigour and expertise is very much at the heart of what the Fellowship Commission does too.
Dr Goldacre persuasively makes the case in his paper that just as medicine has benefitted enormously from trials, so too can education. He writes:
There are many differences between medicine and teaching, but they also have a lot in common. Both involve craft and personal expertise, learnt over years of experience. Both work best when we learn from the experiences of others, and what worked best for them. Every child is different, of course, and every patient is different too; but we are all similar enough that research can help find out which interventions will work best overall, and which strategies should be tried first, second or third, to help everyone achieve the best outcome.
He also eloquently spells out why an evidence based approach is liberating rather than restrictive, writing:
Evidence based practice isn’t about telling teachers what to do: in fact, quite the opposite. This is about empowering teachers, and setting a profession free from governments, ministers and civil servants who are often overly keen on sending out edicts, insisting that their new idea is the best in town.
Simply put, it is government’s job to set the “what” but not the “how”.
The case for school autonomy is proven – but depends on effective sharing. The OECD’s education expert Andreas Schleicher has written:
Global educational comparisons like PISA show consistently that schools in high performing education systems tend to have considerable discretion with regard to how they set their academic direction and how they manage their resources… Our PISA data show that if you have a school system in which knowledge is shared effectively and you are a school with significant autonomy, your students are likely to perform better on PISA than students in a school with limited autonomy, on average across OECD countries at least. But if you are in a system without a culture of peer-learning and accountability, autonomy can actually work against you.
As Dr Goldacre has highlighted, there are parts of the world where a proper grasp of how research can improve teaching practice is essential for career progression. Teachers in Shanghai and Singapore take part in “Journal Clubs”, where they talk about and assess a new piece of research, and debate whether it could be usefully applied in the classroom. They then report back on shortcomings and scope for improvement.
Research and teaching schools
Universities provide an excellent template for how ideas can be explored and exchanged. Many of the most celebrated ones in the country are research universities. There is no reason why we shouldn’t also come to boast about our world-class research schools.
The Sir Isaac Newton Free School in Norfolk, which opens in September, will be a sixth form specialising in maths and science, and link in closely with Norfolk’s world-class engineering and science industries, as well as being a beacon for maths and science teaching.
We already have 363 Teaching Schools in 136 local authority areas, and two-thirds of all schools work with other schools in leadership development clusters. Academy chains operate along similar lines. This is a very good platform on which we can build.
Chains do not have to mean uniformity. The most appealing chain restaurants allow their proprietors a great deal of flexibility, so whilst there may be old favourites on the menu, the decor can vary considerably and customers may be treated to live jazz (or forced to endure it, according to taste). That said, if you hit on a genuinely winning formula, there’s no shame in sticking to it. It just shouldn’t be dictated from central HQ.
Conclusion
We want to give head teachers and teachers the opportunity to be brilliant, and the chance to dazzle and inspire. That inspiration should extend further than their pupils and reach their peers in the teaching profession.
Random controlled trials have their place in education. But instead of random controlled trials we have had the merely random. It is a curiously unambitious and unimaginative attitude to what schools can be – and ignores what the best schools already are.
So diktats are out and evidence based education, innovation and shared best practice are in. I am very grateful for your involvement in this exciting process – and extremely optimistic about what we can achieve.
Thank you.