Debate on the Address

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, we need more social and affordable housing. In my constituency, the average wage is £15,000 but starter homes cost £150,000. Even if they are stripped to the housing association bare minimum, with equipment supplied in a social home, prices are still way beyond what kids and young married people can achieve. We need more social housing, but the price of such housing has gone through the roof, just as the price of private housing at all levels has done. We have headmasters who cannot find a house for £200,000. We have business men who will not move in, because they cannot find a house for £400,000. A detached house in a little village outside Penrith is on sale for £500,000. That is the first time in our lives that such things have happened in the area. We can cut through the problems that the Government have created in housing by letting councils in my area decide housing applications for themselves. We should let them build what they need in the right style and design, and in the right place. They know best—I do not. They are the councillors and planners, so they should do it. I am deeply sceptical about raising the age at which children can leave education. Those kids deserve the chance to do what the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn) talked about in his excellent speech, and get out and get a proper apprenticeship in a worthwhile industry. I commend the right hon. Gentleman on taking up engineering as his calling. It is a noble calling, but so are plumbing, carpentry and all the other technical trades and skills that we need. Unless the Government plan to push 16-year-olds into proper apprenticeships, I do not think that their proposal will work. I am not sure what my Front-Bench team's policy is on vocational education, as I have not studied it, but I cannot support any policy that keeps children in school until they are 18, letting them out for an apprenticeship or vocational training for just one day a week. That is not nearly enough—they will be bored and disillusioned—and the net result will be 18-year-old kids, totally bored, disillusioned and untrained. We may wonder why the 19-year-old Polish plumber has got the work instead, but in Poland, 15, 16, 17 and 18-year-olds are not sitting in school, with only one day's release to a further education college. Poland and the Czech Republic are turning out people—many hon. Members are worried that they have taken our jobs; I am not, because they give the country an excellent service—and we should emulate some of the things that they do. We should emulate the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Central, who left school at 15, got a proper apprenticeship, became a skilled engineer, and then became a Member of Parliament.