Debate on the Address

I remind the House of the interests recorded in the register. This is a 10th anniversary Queen's Speech and 10 years on, it is quite a good time to weigh up the progress made by the previous 10 Queen's Speeches. On education, fewer than half of our 15 and 16-year-olds get good GCSEs. A quarter leave school without basic literacy or numeracy, and last week the Prime Minister sadly reflected that only 10 per cent. of those whose parents are unskilled progress to higher education. On crime, even in relatively safe areas such as west Kent, violent crime has doubled, and our town centres and villages are overwhelmed with vandalism and petty crime. On immigration, Ministers clearly have no idea just how many people have come into this country. There is complete confusion regarding estimates of population, the issuing of national insurance numbers and the count of those entering or exiting our country. On the national health service, instead of curing the patients entrusted to its care, my local acute NHS trust appears to have helped kill at least 90 of them with the outbreak of clostridium difficile. The economy is almost totally unbalanced. Record numbers are in debt or filing for bankruptcy, the housing market is unstable and there has been the first serious run on a bank since that on the City of Glasgow bank in 1878. So the issue for the House today is: does this Queen's Speech start finally to meet these challenges? My answer is clear: it does not. Let us look at some of the detail. On education, the Prime Minister must be right to identify failure of aspiration as one of the key problems besetting the British education system. Aspiration is choked off in our system—it disappears in some ““Bermuda triangle”” between local education authorities, ministerial initiatives and the teaching unions themselves. Declaring war on failing schools is not quite enough; we have to ask why failing schools are failing, and why they have been tolerated for so many years by the LEAs running them. In fact, we would not have known about failing schools had it not been for the initiative of the last Conservative Government. Conservative Ministers established Ofsted and league tables, and of course, we need to remind ourselves that league tables were bitterly opposed not simply by the teaching establishment, but by the Labour party. We would not know which of our schools are the failing ones that the Prime Minister wishes to tackle, had we listened then to the advice of Labour Members. Rather than the tinkering proposed in this Queen's Speech, we need a proper education Bill that gives head teachers the freedom to employ their staff and the power to expel disruptive pupils, without the endless appeals that we have at the moment. LEAs have clearly failed time and again in inner-city areas. We need to give parents in inner-city areas where there is sufficient public transport the benefit of a voucher that will enable them to cross inner-city borough borders, and we need to encourage new providers into the market. We have in this Queen's Speech yet another Bill"““to reform the criminal justice system””." It will create yet more offences, procedures and paperwork, instead of empowering local police commanders and repealing those parts of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984—I know that it was a Conservative Act, but it was enacted some 25 years ago and it needs modernising—that actually prevent them from taking the action necessary in our town centres and villages; instead of giving local magistrates the power to impose longer custodial sentences; and instead of reopening the many local cells that have been closed, so that they can hold overnight the hooligans and vandals who disrupt the quality of life of everybody else.