Joe Morris

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I am very proud to be speaking today about the value of apprenticeships and National Apprenticeships Week. I represent the largest constituency in England, so it will be unsurprising to my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes) and everyone else that I want to speak about apprenticeships in Northumberland and the north-east, as well as Callerton and Throckley, where young people typically have extreme difficulty in accessing apprenticeships. I visited my old school on Friday and had the pleasure of speaking to the deputy head; we spoke about the issues that many of the students at Queen Elizabeth’s High School still have in getting access to skilled employment after they leave school and vocational education. Simply put, for many people in the north-east who want to remain there, there are not enough jobs, particularly in Northumberland. One of the major failures of the previous Government is that young people had to leave Hexham to find their futures elsewhere. I do not wish to score political points on that issue; people’s need to leave is a political reality. One of the things that I will judge myself by is whether people can make their homes and their lives in Northumberland. Apprenticeship programmes are essential to increasing social mobility, pride in communities and, frankly, to combating some of the depopulation in my part of the world. As I have said before in this Chamber and in the main Chamber, I represent the place where I grew up but unfortunately I am much more likely to bump into the parents and grandparents of my former schoolmates in the street than I am to bump into my former schoolmates themselves. That is a tragedy and a shame. We need to ensure that local businesses are able to benefit from flexibility. I spent a couple of years working in the steel sector, where I saw highly sought-after apprenticeships that were much more competitive than Oxford and Cambridge. However, we have an apprenticeship regime that is designed for multinational companies; it is not designed for industries that are far smaller, or for businesses such as Brocksbushes Farm Shop, which I visited a couple of weeks ago. I had an incredibly productive conversation there about the challenges it faces. It wants to offer more young people employment and more upskilling. It is held back not just by inflexibility in the current regime—and I urge the Government to look at that, and at how they can work with rural and small businesses to make the apprenticeship scheme work better for them—but by poor transport links. One of things that would make a major difference to the farm shop is simply having a bus stop slightly nearer to its premises. That would massively increase the ability of young people to get out there and to get the skills they need, while earning an income. As I come to the end of my speech, I urge the Minister to seriously consider how we can improve apprenticeships—not just in major urban centres and in areas with good transport links, but in areas with poor transport links. That is because transport infrastructure is a key part of how we improve the issue.