Christmas Adjournment

It is a pleasure, Madam Deputy Speaker, to have caught your eye and to have an opportunity to raise a few constituency matters. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the birth of the new city of Milton Keynes. We have had a tremendous year of celebrations, culminating some two weeks ago in the visit of Her Majesty the Queen, during which she opened the magnificent new MK Dons stadium, which is a tribute to the hard work of the Winkelman family. Let me start, however, by paying tribute to John Moffoot, the unsung hero at Milton Keynes council, who organised that visit. Milton Keynes faces many challenges, but the majority of them seem to stem from the Government's desire to force the expansion of the city on its residents. Personally, I have no great problem with the expansion of Milton Keynes; however, I strongly feel that it should be a local decision. For a community to be truly sustainable, it must have the support of local people, and much of the expansion does not. Scant lip service has been paid to the views of local people by the unelected and unaccountable quango, Milton Keynes Partnership, in imposing its will. I have been campaigning for four years now for ““I before E””—infrastructure before expansion. If we are to expand in Milton Keynes, it is vital that we provide the infrastructure first. Many of the comments I shall make today are based on the premise that, unfortunately, the Government are simply not providing that infrastructure. I start on the subject of schools and the desperate news that has been given to Milton Keynes in recent weeks that the Government will massively cut our basic needs allocation for building new schools. That allocation is very much a basic need: it is for the provision of new schools. The cut will result in a shortfall of some £64.5 million over the next three years for our new schools. Already we have identified that we need 15 new schools over the next few years to accommodate the increase in pupil numbers that the expansion will bring. That is one new primary school every year. Let us take as an example Gifford Park, a primary school in my constituency that knows that locally it will have 476 new dwellings, yet because of the cut it will probably not get an extension. We will also need five new secondary schools over the next few years to accommodate the increase in pupil numbers. Oakgrove is a marvellous new school in Middleton in my constituency. It has already had two phases of extension and is waiting for the third. However, it now has no idea whether it will get the money to extend. I wonder whether the Minister can offer any advice to my constituents: given that the funding has been cut—some £64.5 million—where exactly does she suggest that my parents send their schoolchildren? At best, we will see kids bussed around Milton Keynes, as we have seen for several years previously. What exactly are we going to do—and what exactly are the Government going to do to make sure that there is no such shortfall? I turn to another theme affecting my constituency, and in doing so I want to add a few points to those made in early-day motion 317, on the Open university, which is in my name and has been signed by some 210 Members of this House. There are many flourishing businesses in my constituency bringing employment to the area, but one stands out for the scale, quality and uniqueness of its contribution. One of the first coups of the founding fathers of the new town of Milton Keynes was to secure a very special university within its boundaries. Milton Keynes attracted the fledgling Open university to occupy a major site near the village. Many felt that this revolutionary institution, which harnessed technology to deliver higher education at a distance, simply would not survive. They did not believe that it was possible to enable students to study in their own time, away from the life of a traditional campus, and to graduate on equal terms with students from the best traditional universities. To borrow a cliché, the rest, of course, is history. I am happy to say that some 38 years later, the Open university is not only one of Milton Keynes's biggest success stories, with more than 200,000 students studying every year. It is one of the UK's best success stories and is emulated worldwide—for example, in the middle east, where its staff helped to set up, and provided the teaching materials for, the Arab OU, which already has 30,000 students. Recently, the Open university has started talking to the Government of China about exploring the benefits of collaboration on open and distance learning in order to meet the huge growth in demand for higher education that China's economy requires. In Milton Keynes, the OU has played a major role in helping to develop the cultural, scientific and social life of the area. It is an exemplary citizen—a founder member of the Community Foundation, and of the local theatre and art gallery. More than 400 of its staff still serve on school governing bodies or work as volunteers in community organisations and local charities. From next January, the whole university will be involved in fundraising events for the Prince's Trust. The OU runs a microwave link to local schools in Milton Keynes, enabling them to access a wider curriculum and to link with schools all over the world. It has supported dozens of local schools in setting up and running their own local history projects, in order to give parents the chance to acquire IT skills alongside their children. It has supported Bletchley Park in preserving its computers and cryptographic history, and in making it accessible to the world. Far beyond Milton Keynes, the Open university has served as a beacon in bringing education to ever-greater numbers of people. It led the world in harnessing the widest possible range of assistive technologies to enable people with disabilities to study on an equal platform with their peers. From its earliest experiments using the latest technology to take education right into people's lives via their TV sets, it has continued to pioneer ways of reaching ever more people in ever more places using the full power of the digital age. Let me give just a couple of examples. In 2007, the OU's audience includes new migrants in London developing language skills, alongside studying for OU qualifications in health and social care; naval pilots studying for an OU foundation degree in military aviation, alongside their flying training; and upwards of 125,000 teachers in Uganda, Sudan and Nigeria, who are using the OU's learning materials. The OU has rightly been the recipient of a Queen's award for export achievement. One of the biggest challenges facing the UK economy is addressing the IT skills gap. That is not just because the IT sector is booming, but because all business areas are now leveraging competitive advantage by adding value through IT. More than 70,000 of the jobs advertised in the UK now have an IT component, and the only way to address the gap between the supply of, and demand for, people with appropriate IT and business skills is to upskill and re-skill those already in work. The OU is a major contributor in this arena nationally, allowing people to dip in and update their IT and business skills in line with their job requirements, without the need physically to attend a classroom. Every year, more than 30,000 computing, IT and business course places are taken up by part-time OU students. The Open university is also a centre for space and other such research. Technology developed for space missions could soon be exploited to provide a cost-effective, rapid and accurate tool for diagnosing tuberculosis. In sub-Saharan Africa, TB, combined with AIDS, is the major killer. The OU is exploring using that same technology to identify the signature of the TB bacterium, and to provide accurate and rapid diagnosis of TB without the need for a specialist laboratory. The Open university has achieved all that without any compromise on quality. Since the introduction of the teaching quality index in 2005, the OU has topped the overall student satisfaction ratings three times in a row. Under the previous system, it was in the top 5 per cent. of universities for teaching quality. It is a truly remarkable institution and a great British success.