Tristram Hunt: Will the Minister give way?
Tristram Hunt: I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way, because I appreciate that it is so annoying when someone interrupts your lecture. As we know, this is a Brexit Government, and many of the leading Cabinet Ministers promised not only £350 million a week for the NHS, but security for all our science funding. Will the Minister at the Dispatch Box give assurances to Staffordshire University and...
Tristram Hunt: Whether his Department plans to maintain infrastructure investment in deprived communities at the level currently provided by the EU.
Tristram Hunt: May I, too, welcome the Minister to his job? He was part of a campaign which not only promised £350 million a week for the NHS if we left the European Union, but said that any lost EU funding would be matched by the Government. May I join my colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), in trying to get him to confirm at the Dispatch Box that the £157...
Tristram Hunt: The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), refused to confirm that the £157 million of EU structural funds for the potteries will be matched by the Government, so can I try his boss? Will the EU regeneration funds be matched by the Government, or have the Brexiters sold north Staffordshire down the river?
Tristram Hunt: The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful point. Does he agree that for fee-paying schools that enjoy charitable status and do not pay business rates—receiving business rates relief based on it—sharing music facilities and music teachers might be one way to justify that charitable status?
Tristram Hunt: My hon. Friend is making a superb speech. Is it not ironic that what we need for the economy of the future and the digital revolution of the future is the breaking down of rather traditional arts and science silos? Creative subjects provide exactly the kind of skills and training that will let young people succeed. We would be mad to strip those subjects out of our education system, not least...
Tristram Hunt: Following on from the question from the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh), can we be clear that the Secretary of State for Education confirmed at the Dispatch Box that the children of all EU nationals would continue to be educated in British schools? Will the Minister tell us whether that will go up to the age of 18, or 21, or does he not have clue, as with the...
Tristram Hunt: You’re part of the same Government!
Tristram Hunt: The Secretary of State sought to ban parents from becoming school governors. She has blocked Ofsted from inspecting academy chains, and she refuses to have any democratic oversight of regional school commissioners. In her final days in office, with school improvement stalled, according to the chief inspector, has she not realised that the command-and-control, “Whitehall knows best”...
Tristram Hunt: My right hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does not the history of his part of east London, including Tower Hamlets and Newham, show that academisation, in and of itself, is not the answer? What transformed educational prospects in his community was the London Challenge and schools working together and collaborating to raise standards.
Tristram Hunt: Is the hon. Gentleman therefore in favour of Ofsted inspecting academy chains? At the moment, the Government prevent it from doing so, so we do not know what their overheads are, we do not know how much they are putting into each school, and we do not know what they are spending on the chief executive’s salary. Is he in favour of Ofsted inspecting academy chains?
Tristram Hunt: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wealden (Nusrat Ghani), who gave a powerful speech about child sexual exploitation, extremism and Wahhabi ideology. I am glad that she sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee. She also mentioned the Trojan horse affair; if she looked into it in detail, she would realise that the speed and nature of the Government’s academisation...
Tristram Hunt: The “Educational Excellence Everywhere” White Paper, published in March, states that every school will become an academy. Is that choice?
Tristram Hunt: Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that the SNP secured free higher education by butchering the further education budget, affecting some of the poorest in the community and those who need FE’s assistance most?
Tristram Hunt: I do not think that there was anything so grubby as a deal, but if an agreement was reached I congratulate the Opposition Chief Whip on showing how politics can be done. May I urge the Minister now to ask the private sector to follow the leadership of the trade unions and contact their employees to make the case for Europe and the terrible threats to jobs, investment and growth if we leave a...
Tristram Hunt: I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) on bringing the debate to the House today. He said, rightly, that we should be listening, and raising our voice. I want to highlight in the UK Parliament the continuing plight of the Nigerian female students abducted by Boko Haram. I want to talk briefly about the specificity of the crime, which is worth narrating, and, more...
Tristram Hunt: What steps the Government are taking to support tourism in Northern Ireland.
Tristram Hunt: According to Lord Lawson, the chair of the increasingly absurd Vote Leave campaign, a British vote to leave the European Union would result in the return of border posts and passport controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. What modelling has the Minister done on how that might affect the £750 million tourism industry in Ulster?
Tristram Hunt: I think we can all agree that this has been a pretty disastrous Budget, and that was the case even before the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) revealed the Government’s extraordinary mendacity in their pursuit of policies for political purposes rather than for the national economic interest. What is worse, as my right hon. Friend the Member for...