Contribution
I will see my hon. Friend in 30 years—I will be sitting here and he will be sitting there.
Earlier this year, Craig announced that he was retiring after one heck of a stint. We will always be grateful to Craig for his commitment to our community, our young people, our county and our collective future.
We must look to our industrial heartlands to make the most of what we already have, ensuring that real growth, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister would say, is felt in all postcodes in Staffordshire and that growth is translated into well-paid, meaningful career opportunities for local people. The growth potential that comes from investing in British industry and the skills required is massive in communities across our county, and there is no better place, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner) noted, than our ceramics industry. It provides the building blocks of and for our United Kingdom, and without it we could not manufacture steel, glass, cement, bricks and many other important things.
I am grateful to Staffordshire chambers of commerce for its work helping deliver fully funded business start-up training for budding entrepreneurs across the county. By the end of this year, approximately 300 people will have completed that programme in 2026. Later this week, the chambers and I will welcome Baroness Foster and the board of Intertrade UK to Staffordshire, and to Newcastle-under-Lyme in particular, to meet Staffordshire’s businesses and employers to see what more we can do to increase trade between Northern Ireland and our fair county. Like the chambers, my colleagues and I from Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent want to see the establishment of a mayoral strategic authority for our area at the earliest opportunity. It will set us firmly on the path to helping unlock investment and the creation of well-paid local jobs and employment opportunities. I want to let the Minister address some of these points so will skip some of my speech, but I want to raise a couple of further issues.
There is a geopolitical need for us to get this right. Our international competitors—we know who they are—are investing in education, training and equipping the workforce of the future with the skills needed for that future, and we must do the same. It is vital that British manufacturing is at the heart of our trade agenda and that we redouble our efforts to buy British, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central would say, every step of the way, and all of that will help job creation in Staffordshire.
I ask the Minister to touch on a few specific areas. Staffordshire is home to many rural communities. I am proud to represent a number of them in Madeley, Audley, Betley and Wrinehill and would be grateful if the Minister could set out, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford did, what we are doing to ensure that rural communities do not fall behind. Will the Minister also encourage his colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to get on with giving us a mayoral authority and to prioritise that over local government reorganisation, and what is being done in Government to make sure that all relevant Departments are talking to each other? For those who live in a rural area and do not drive and who need a bus—there is some consistency of thought here, because I promise I had not shown my speech to my constituency neighbours—a chance would have been a fine thing over the last decade. So some clarity and inter-Government working would be helpful too.
How are we ensuring that Government understand what employers are looking for and ensuring that what they are looking for is reflected in our skills and training? I welcome the billions of pounds of investment in the youth guarantee and the growth skills levy, as well as new youth hubs from, as we have heard, Tamworth to Stafford to Newcastle-under-Lyme, but we need more of that.