Andy Burnham

I shall make some progress. I said that we wish to move services from being good to being great. That means building on the foundations we have laid in the past decade to create more personalised and more preventive services that are more responsive and are of higher quality. So we want to lock in the achievements of the past 10 years and to hand power to people-to patients, pupils and parents. To do that, we are turning targets into rights and entitlements in order to guarantee the services and the standards that people expect and deserve.

The Children, Schools and Families Bill provides a range of guarantees to pupils and parents. It aims to help everyone reach their full potential, to make everyone aware of their entitlements and to allow everyone to seek redress if their expectations are not met. I particularly welcome the entitlements that will improve children's health. We propose that every five to 16-year-old should have access to five hours of high quality physical education and sport every week, in and out of the school day, and that every 16 to 19-year-old should have access to three hours of that. I also welcome our proposal that every pupil should have access to regular competitive sport, to coaching, to a choice of different sports and to help to lead and volunteer in sport. Furthermore, we propose that every pupil should go to a "Healthy School" that promotes healthy eating, an active lifestyle and emotional health and well-being. Those are genuine steps forward and I want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for introducing them.

In essence, the Bill is about the right to a rounded education. As someone who was unlucky enough to spend his entire secondary school career in a northern comprehensive under Mrs. Thatcher, I have always felt passionate about this. I saw the after-school activities-music, culture and sport-dry up in the teachers' dispute of the mid-1980s, never to return. These new guarantees would prevent that from ever happening again.

In the NHS, there will be a similar shift in power to the public from professionals. In the next period of reform, as we move towards a service that is more preventive and people-centred, empowered patients and staff will lead change. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire mentioned the reform journey and the ideas. I was the one who promised to remove practice boundaries and to give patients more choice in primary care. He mentioned payment by results, and we are introducing a further reform to the tariff to link payment to the quality of services provided. Where is he in these debates? I am putting forward these proposals, and he comes to the House today and asks where the changes are.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the commitment to making the NHS the preferred provider. As we will have more reform, not less, in the coming period we will have to take more work out of the hospital setting and we will have to ask NHS staff to work in different settings. That is precisely why we must give the NHS the chance, the space and the time to rise to the challenge, and to make those changes and to improve health care as a result.

— from debate entitled “Education and Health”

The three speeches/headings immediately before

  1. 1 earlier: Graham Stuart

    rose-

  2. 2 earlier: Andy Burnham

    I consider it one of the finest achievements of this Government that we have taken 600,000 children out of poverty. That is what this party and this Government set out to do. Many of those children live in my constituency and the constituencies of hon. Members sitting on the Labour Benches today. Although it is one of our finest achievements, we will go further.

  3. 3 earlier: Bob Russell

    Does the Secretary of State regard as a triumph for new Labour the fact that 12 years on 4 million children are living in poverty?

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