John Hayes MP: We will ensure every young Briton has access to the training and experience they need to succeed

John Hayes MP is the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. 

The great majority of young people in the UK are either employed or in full-time education, but there are still too many who do not have the opportunity to fulfil their potential or meet their aspirations. At present almost 670,000 16–24-year-olds are unemployed and not in full-time study.  This headline figure represents 9% of the cohort, compared to 12% after the 1990s recession. While employment prospects will improve for many as the economy recovers from recession, there is evidence of a long-term structural problem for certain groups of unemployed young people. Even before the recession unemployment remained a particular problem for the low skilled. This reflects a fundamental change in the economy and its labour force needs; Britain’s future chance to compete is as a high tech, high skilled nation.

This is why the Government is committed to a new approach that will extend opportunity by ensuring that everyone has access to the training and experience they need to succeed. Last week the Government announced a £60m commitment to get more vulnerable young people into work, a boost to Apprenticeships and radical reforms to transform vocational education. These are part of a series of measures which I and my colleagues in BIS, DfE and the DWP are bringing forward to prioritise youth employment, and tackle some of the long term structural barriers that stop some young people from getting a job and starting their career.

In total the Government will provide funding for up to 250,000 more Apprenticeships over the next four years – more than our country has ever seen before – and funding for 100,000 work placements over the next two years. Over 100 large companies and tens of thousands of small companies around the country have responded to the Government’s call and pledged to offer work experience places.

John Hayes MP: Building a highly-skilled workforce is critical to rebalancing the economy

John Hayes MP is the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. 

Last week’s Budget recognised the urgent reality that Labour failed to address - that Britain’s working age population currently has lower skills than those of America, France and Germany.  We cannot, and should not, compete on a low-skills basis, which is why it is essential to our economic success that we build a highly-skilled workforce. 

This endeavour is critical to rebalancing the economy and returning to sustainable growth.  History proves that prosperity is inseparable from production: the invisible economy of banking and finance has revolutionised the UK over the past century, creating an abundance of jobs and wealth, but it has to be reinforced by a thriving industrial base.  

The Government understands this well.  Last year’s announcement of funding for an additional 75,000 apprenticeships has been buttressed by the statement in this year’s Budget that an extra £180 million will be available to fund up to 50,000 more apprenticeships.  Crucially, 40,000 of these places will support progression from an expanded Work Programme, thereby helping more unemployed young people into skilled employment. 

John Hayes MP: This Government will create more apprenticeships than modern Britain has ever seen

John Hayes MP is the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. 

I’ve long had reservations about the classification “NEET”;  young people are particularly prone to being pigeonholed, often in unhelpful ways: from mods and rockers to hoodies, widely adopted labels have never done them much justice.

There is no such thing as a “typical” NEET, just a wide range of young people facing different challenges and circumstances.  Far greater flexibility is needed to respond to the NEETs problem effectively; the more diverse the range of options to help them, and the more flexibility the agencies concerned enjoy, the more appropriate our response will be.

Up and down the country, the young people I meet have ambition. They want to get on with their lives, to gain skills and knowledge, and they recognise that a place at university or an apprenticeship can help them achieve this. The investment we make in our young people is our gift to future generations, but the unavoidable fact that so many young people in Britain have not enjoyed the benefits of that investment is reflected throughout the country.

The Labour government spent millions on a bewildering succession of schemes, to little effect. The number of 20–24 year olds who were NEET grew from 12.1% to 17% between 2003 and 2008 – and this while the economy was still booming. At the last count, some 874,000 young people aged 16–24, about one in seven of the total, were not in any form of education or work.  For a nation that cares about fairness and opportunity, that is unacceptable.

John Hayes MP: This Government will create more apprenticeships than modern Britain has ever seen

John Hayes MP is the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning.  Click here to read his recent speech on this topic to the Royal Society of Arts.

Practical learning has long been regarded by the educational establishment as a distant second to academic study. The degree brand retains an aura of intellectual and social exclusivity but the same can be said of few practical qualifications.

In part, this is due to the alarming frequency with which many such qualifications have come and gone.  In recent times, we have seen the creation of new qualifications that initially seem useful but too often prove to be anything but when a youngster swaps school for the workplace.

But I refuse to believe that Britain is doomed to dwindle into a race of pseudo-celebrities and merchant bankers.  On the contrary, I believe that it is British manufacturing, and the practical skills that underpin it, that must lead us into renewed economic growth. We must intensify our efforts to re-establish apprenticeships as the primary form of practical training.

This Government will create more apprenticeships than modern Britain has ever seen - a rise of 75,000 during this Parliament - and not just in the traditional craft sectors but in the new crafts too, such as advanced engineering; IT; the creative industries; and financial services.

I think it impoverishes our culture that apprenticeships, which have been around as a form of training for at least twice as long as universities, do not confer a specific title on those undertaking them. It was in an effort to redress this disparity that my colleague David Willetts recently announced that apprentices in the construction industry would in future be given the title of “technician”.

I plan to go further; people speak of the intellectual beauty of a mathematical theorem but there is beauty, too, in the economy and certainty of movement of a master craftsman.  I believe that both kinds of beauty must be recognised.  And that implies not that the stock of academe must fall but that the stock of craft must rise.

John Hayes MP: The education of offenders must be at the centre of the rehabilitation revolution

John Hayes MP is Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning.

Government’s first concern must always be to protect the public. But sending offenders to prison is not enough to achieve this objective; we must also do our best to ensure that those who commit crime do not reoffend.

The penal system has great capacity to rehabilitate as well as to punish. It therefore makes sense in social, as well as financial, terms to ensure that those who transgress do so only once. After punishment finishes, reintegration must follow.

Crime costs us around £60bn a year: a truly staggering figure. And we know that over £9bn of that is the result of reoffending. So much could be prevented through effective and, above all, relevant education courses. Only by equipping prisoners and offenders in the community with the right skills will they be able to access work and so make a positive contribution to the economy.

That is why giving offenders the chance of a fresh start through education is so important. The Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, has called for a “rehabilitation revolution” aimed at cutting the rate of reoffending. I want learning to be at the centre of this revolution. What more effective tool is there than education to steer someone away from a destructive way of life and towards a constructive one? But for offender learning to reach its potential we must ensure that education inspires a new sense of purpose, putting those who have done wrong back on the right track.

John Hayes MP: We must use this economic crisis to engineer a moral capitalism

John Hayes, co-founder of the Cornerstone Group, is MP for South Holland and The Deepings and is Shadow Minister for Vocational Education.

Economic gloom makes people fearful. At present they are particularly worried about the impact of the financial crisis on job security, mortgage costs and the future of pensions. Conservative proposals to reinvigorate the nation’s skills are at the heart of an effective response to the economic downturn, improving productivity, competitiveness and sustainability.

The truth at the heart of this crisis is that markets are not enough - they never have been. Without an accompanying sound ethical framework a free economy simply doesn’t work. Because the flow of capital cannot be separated from the tide of human affairs, markets and civil society are intrinsically linked.

Yet for more than a decade the sound values needed to guide the practice of capitalism were neglected, as temporary economic success was built on the unsteady pillars of excessive borrowing and spending. Mountains of corporate and personal debt have grown alongside a bloated, spendthrift public sector.  Worse still these fragile pillars were built on a foundation of sand; insufficient infrastructural investment, poor productivity and an eroded skills base.

Meanwhile, while the City is insufficiently regulated; paradoxically, small and medium enterprises are burdened by red tape and regulation. So, as the bedrock of our economy has been chipped away, we are left excessively dependent on financial services, themselves at the mercy of the global ebb and flow of capital.

John Hayes MP: To inspire we must be confident about our Conservatism

John Hayes, co-founder of the Cornerstone Group, is MP for South Holland and The Deepings and is Shadow Minister for Vocational Education.

British politics has changed; the old battles between left and right have lost much of their meaning. The last Conservative Government instigated economic reforms, bitterly resisted by the Labour party at the time, which made our economy far more flexible. The resultant long period of uninterrupted economic growth (although not yet as long as the post-war boom) has brought greater wealth for most people. As the press reported last week, the middle classes have seen their earnings grow twice as fast as personal inflation over the last ten years. Yet in many ways our lives are worse. In spite of our rising prosperity, surveys show that we are less happy than we were 50 years ago. In many parts of our nation a sense of community is just a memory and countless towns and cities that in the light are indistinguishable from one another, after dark, become concrete wastelands where few dare venture.

At long last sensible politicians are being to grasp that standard of living and quality of life are not synonymous. David Cameron understands this political dynamic. His focus on civil renewal and well-being reflects the changing priorities of our society. We now see public space as important as private gain, we talk as much of well being as we do of wealth. Greater prosperity has also finally led to an understanding that spending alone will not fix the problems of our broken society. We have amongst the highest rates of family breakdown, teenage pregnancy and drug addiction in Europe. In stark contrast to Labour’s rhetoric, the poorest in our country have actually got poor over the last ten years and nearly 1.3 million 16 to 24 year-olds are inactive, a rise of roughly 15% since 1997.

John Hayes MP: Blair's beginning was his end

John Hayes, MP for South Holland and The Deepings and is Shadow Minister for Vocational Education, argues that there is a lot more to Tony Blair's demise than Iraq.

Tony Blair has dominated British politics. Over a dozen years he made the Labour Party electable and the Conservative Party unelectable. In 1997 he effectively ended John Major’s political career; at the 2001 election he crushed the able William Hague; and in 2005 forced Michael Howard so far onto the back foot that the respected former Home Secretary struck few telling blows. It has been Blair’s decade; all of politics has pivoted on him.

This domination has changed the language of politics too. Since Churchill, no other Prime Minister has orated with Mr Blair’s fluency and none before him publicly conversed with such style.

John Hayes MP: Our young people need jobs

John Hayes is MP for South Holland and The Deepings and is Shadow Minister for Vocational Education.

Who can blame Bulgarians and Rumanians for wanting to use their recently acquired entitlement to travel across the continent to seek work outside their poor homelands? It’s not their aspirations that are the problem; but our ability to match them to Britain’s need for labour.

Having woefully underestimated the tide of immigrants from Poland and elsewhere in the first wave of new EU entrants, the Government has now imposed restrictions on access to our labour market. Immigrants from the new member states must have secured a job in advance, possess a needed skill or both and employers face heavy fines if they employ those who shouldn’t be here.

The new measures are welcome, though likely to be insufficient. Strict controls on immigration where we still have full control i.e. from beyond the EU, are needed for many reasons; ranging from fears about the exploitation of immigrant workers from developing nations to concerns about the excessive demand placed on Britain’s health, housing and education infrastructure by incomers. As David Cameron and David Davis have rightly said, in determining the level of controlled immigration from outside the EU we should take account of all of these factors.

John Hayes MP: Thoughts on the Further Education Bill

John Hayes is MP for South Holland and The Deepings and is Shadow Minister for Vocational Education.

When a Government is obliged to restructure, reorder and rescind things of its own making it’s clear that its lost its nerve, lost its way or both. So it is with further education and skills. Ministers have been told what they ought to do – the Foster report, the interim Leitch review and the Conservatives opposition have charted the right course. The Government should give FE more independence; give employers a greater role in driving a demand-led skills agenda; and dismantle the bureaucracy and red-tape which is stifling innovation and excellence in the sector. It should redesign qualifications to impart and test needed competences; and breakdown the rigidity between employers, FE, HE and schools to deliver the best opportunities for young people. Yet there was very little of substance in the FE White Paper published earlier this year and the Bill announced in the Queens speech earlier this week appears to offer little more force or clarity.

The only significant announcement in the FE White Paper was a new Quality Improvement Agency (QIA), bringing together the improvement and development activities of the Learning and Skills Development Agency, the DfES Standards and Skills for Life Units, the Learning and Skills Council and the Adult Learning Inspectorate. This restructuring will do nothing to reduce the organisations that currently have a monitoring, inspection or improvement role in FE Colleges. Although the Education and Inspection Bill merges The Adult Learning Inspectorate with Ofsted, the new Quality Improvement Agency will bring the total number of bodies back up to 17.

Judged by what has been spun, the Bill is not a vehicle to take forward the agenda of deregulation outlined in the Foster Report on FE. The Education Select Committee found that the ‘present planning and funding mechanisms for skills training appear incoherent, over-complex, burdensome, and often act as a barrier to further education's development rather than a support to it’ and that the changes suggested in the White Paper on Further Education ‘may not be radical enough’.

Worse still, it seems that though the Government is give FE colleges the right to award degrees, simultaneously the LSC will take new legal powers to sack college principles and senior managers. So it’s clear that the Government doesn’t know whether to deregulate the sector or regulate it still more.

We must have the courage to allow FE colleges to innovate and excel. That means less regulation and more independence. The sector is grown-up but it continues to be nursed and nannyed by this patronising Government.

It is expected that Leitch – wisely – will want to give a greater role to the employer-led Sector Skills Councils (SSCs). The only significant change to the Learning and Skills Council likely is the closure of its local offices. With businesses typically national or local and the Government only a week or two ago advocating a greater role for localities in economic development, this regionalisation is unwelcome and unwanted. A much more radical approach is needed if we are to create a system that responds to the needs of learners and employers.

Provisions to change the regulations for training levies may open the way for their extension but extra investment must lead to more than remedial training. We should refocus investment to deliver high-order skills. Demographic change means that over 70% of the 2020 workforce has already completed compulsory education. It is vitally important that we up-skill and re-skill those already in work to maximise their potential and meet the needs of a dynamic economy.

Sector Skills Agreements (SSA’s) – the plans put together by the SSCs currently have no statutory status. Leitch may propose ways of giving the SSCs greater power over the provision of training through modern apprenticeships and voluntary levies and over quality control through licence to practice. It is also possible that Leitch may propose a new regional tier to the SSCs which we would consider unhelpful. The SSCs are not mentioned in the Government’s release on the bill. When will the Government set Further Education colleges free? Should powers be transferred from the LSC to the SSCs? Will an extra tier of bureaucracy be imposed through the expansion of the SSCs with no significant reform of the LSC? These are the kind of questions that need answers. Answers the Secretary of State speaking in the Queens Speech debate failed to give and that the Bill is itself is also unlikely to provide.

John Hayes MP on David Cameron's first 100 days: Social Justice

Every day this week ConservativeHome is dedicating Your Platform to a different take on the first 100 days of Cameron's leadership. John is Conservative MP for South Holland and the Deepings.

At the start of the last parliament I routinely used the term social justice in conversation with a fellow Tory MP. It was met with a mixture of disbelief and hostility - social justice is a socialist idea, I was told. Thank God the party has travelled a long way since then. David Cameron’s first act as party leader was to establish a policy group on social justice. There is every reason for all shades of Conservative opinion to welcome this new emphasis.

One nation conservatives should be automatic enthusiasts. They instinctively understand that you can’t claim to love Britain but be indifferent to the circumstances of many of your fellow countrymen. You can’t want to keep the pound but keep quiet about those without the money to make ends meet. Labour’s record on poverty is very mixed. Whilst billions of pounds have been sunk into battles against poverty, anyone familiar with life on Britain’s poorest estates knows that poverty is still winning the war.

If we are to win this struggle we can’t keep pulling the same levers and expect different results. David Cameron has promised to look for new, better weapons. He has spoken of the importance of social enterprise and of more rehabilitation places for people with drug problems. He has promised greater support for that much neglected institution that underpins any society’s caring capacity – the family. In this understanding there is much for ‘traditional values conservatives’ to welcome.

This emphasis should also encourage small government conservatives. One of the principal reasons for the fattening of government has been the growth of social problems. Every fractured family costs the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds. Addiction fuels crime and diminishes economic capacity. Poor schools and the problem of truancy mean many children turn to crime and never fulfil their potential. If we solve social problems we’ll not only be doing the right thing, we will also be laying the foundations for a more limited state.

All this goes to prove how that Tory MP – no longer in parliament – was so wrong. Social justice isn’t a bolt-on extra for authentic Conservatives. The Conservative Party is at its best when it’s true to its compassionate roots. Throughout our party’s history we have fought to extend opportunity, ownership and democracy. When Labour next claim that they have a monopoly of compassion, remind them ours is the party of Wilberforce, Shaftesbury and Disraeli. When Liberals next claim that they care more than you, remind them that their party opposed almost every social reform introduced by those very same one nation conservatives.

Iain Duncan Smith and the Centre for Social Justice deserve enormous credit for the rediscovery of the party’s one nation tradition; Iain has led the party’s thinking on this central issue. All Conservatives should welcome the new breadth of David Cameron’s Conservatism. The ‘crunchy’ commitments to conserve the beauty of the environment and to stand up to soulless big business are fundamentally conservative. He has brought a reasonableness to parliamentary debate by avoiding the petty point scoring that turns people off politics. And he has elevated political discourse by understanding that politics is not just about what we earn but about who we are. The kind of people for whom quality of life – with all its cultural and social dimensions – is a root to fulfilment way beyond self-interest. That is why David Cameron’s emphasis on social justice offers the greatest promise. I hope ConservativeHome will find a way to help this emphasis evolve into a powerful new policy agenda.

STEPHAN SHAKESPEARE OF YOUGOV WILL BE EXPLORING DAVID CAMERON'S IMPACT ON THE OPINION POLLS TOMORROW.

John Hayes MP: Of hearts and homes - why Brown is barking up the wrong tree

Until recently John Hayes MP was Shadow Housing Minister.  He is also a leading member of the Cornerstone Group.  He is now Shadow Minister for Vocational Education.  A speech he gave on 'the home' in May 2004 was a key inspiration for the formation of this blogsite.

We plant trees for those born later. And we should build houses for them too. Homes matter. They matter to the young couple looking for their first shared property; they matter to the family desperate for more space; they matter to the children trapped in temporary accommodation for want of a place of their own. Homes matter because they are evocative of love and security, of warmth and certainty. We think of home when abroad. And there is no more reassuring image than a homecoming – redolent of all that is familiar and welcoming. Homes have become harder to come by in recent years. People have had to stretch much further to climb onto the property ladder. For many the ladder is beyond reach – a home of their own is but a distant dream.

So, Gordon Brown’s fascination with housing is unsurprising. Indeed, beyond the downgrading of his growth forecast, perhaps the most significant aspect of his pre Budget statement was what he said about his plans in this regard. Mr Brown is such an admirer of Kate Barker’s study of housing supply that since its publication in March 2004 he has a dedicated a Treasury team to work on how its principal recommendations could be implemented.

Mrs Barker proposed a massive expansion of house building to counter the problem of house price affordability, which has left aspirant homeowners in 8 out of 10 British towns unable to mount the property ladder.

Her approach to housing affordability appeals to the Chancellor. They share views about a supply side solution. They are both wrong.  As we begin a new political year it is worth studying why Labour’s housing policy is so inadequate.