Speeches by Turner.

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. Merry Christmas, everyone. In that spirit of glad tidings, I draw the Committee’s attention to my declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my membership of the GMB and Unite trade unions. Clause 25 enables the reinstatement of one of…”

“That was quite a generous amount of time for an intervention. The hon. Member may wish to go back to the record, because the point I made was that the experiment over pay and terms and conditions has failed. The challenge to the Opposition was: do they recognise that there is a serious problem with school support staff…”

“Is it the case—perhaps this gets to the heart of the matter—that the proposed way that the SSSNB would work is that a matter would be referred to a body, an agreement would be reached, and it would be passed back to the Secretary of State to write it into regulations? Nowhere in the Bill does it say that that would be …”

“I thank the hon. Member for Chippenham for her intervention. I agree with her up to a point. Teaching assistants’ wages have increased by about 24% on average over the period that we are talking about, while the consumer prices index has increased by 40% over the same period, so there has been an erosion in wages. We c…”

“The hon. Member is making an interesting argument. I am keen to tease out the evidence for the assertion that there is a relationship between the decentralisation of pay and terms and conditions, and performance. Can he explain why, then, the overwhelming majority of academies subscribe to the National Joint Council gr…”

“It is Christmas.”

“I am trying to understand what the shadow Minister means by cost to the education sector. Does he mean the running cost of the body itself or the cost of an agreement? If he means the latter, how could that possibly be accounted for when, as we have heard, any new pay scale is likely to be some years away and would be …”

“We have covered a huge amount of ground in this debate, so I will restrict my remarks to a few matters that have been raised. I say to the shadow Minister that if he thought that the Minister’s summary was bureaucratic and difficult to follow, he should sit through some meetings of the National Joint Council for Local …”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I think I am correct in saying that Buckinghamshire is one area that has opted out of the National Joint Council, so I recognise that the shadow Minister brings a particular perspective to the debate, but the final line of the amendment states that “a prescribed m…”

“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way a second time. He describes a picture of extraordinary success. Classroom-based support staff spend the majority of their time supporting SEND learners. Does he regard the SEND system as a success?”

“Why does the hon. Gentleman’s argument against central direction-setting not apply to teachers? Is he arguing for the abolition of the School Teachers Review Body?”

“That is a direct question. We could talk about the way the PISA rankings are constructed.”

“That is fine—I think that applies to both the intervention and the response. A direct question had been put about whether there is an alternative proposition on pay and terms and conditions, which is the matter we are considering today. I hope we will have an opportunity to talk in much more detail about the matters th…”

“I want to continue on the shadow Minister’s theme of milk. It used to be common in factories where there were particulates in the air to include a clause in someone’s contract that said they were entitled to a glass of milk during the day, because it was believed at the time that a glass of milk would remove those part…”

“I will not speak for long, because most of the points have been made in the debate, but I want to come back to the point made by the shadow Minister and the hon. Member for Bridgwater. There is perhaps a legitimate difference in principle between the two sides: when there are extreme examples, should there or should th…”

“Like my hon. Friend, I have intense sympathy with many of the arguments put forward by the hon. Member for Dundee Central, but the “Make Work Pay” document published earlier this year, which was subsequently endorsed in the Labour manifesto, stated: “It is important that businesses can restructure to remain viable, to …”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I draw attention to my declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and to my membership of the GMB and Unite trade unions. Before we move past the hon. Gentleman’s point about information, which we have talked about a lot, is the core problem not …”

“I want to pick up the thread from Baggy’s questions about the forthcoming legislation. Obviously, we have the previous Government’s draft rail reform Bill in the public domain. How much of the new legislation is likely to be carried over from the previous work by the former Government, and how much material should we e…”

“I want to follow up on the comments you made, Minister, about wanting the new body to be arm’s length. Perhaps the last deliberate attempt to set up an arm’s length structure was the Strategic Rail Authority. It is fair to say that that independence, because circumstances changed, came to be seen as a problem in Westmi…”

“Yes, I want to follow up on the earlier discussion about an accessible railway. The minutes of the May board meeting of Network Rail stated that the lack of traction on the Access for All programme which had significantly underperformed in CP6 now created challenges in the transition to CP7. Earlier this week, the Mini…”