Debate on the Address

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is the tragedy: these proposals are not good for young people and not good for the system. They have been put forward just to satisfy some stupid ministerial target. People will say, ““Haven't we done well, getting this extra number of people to go to university?”” The Government will not have done well unless all those people really get something out of going to university and end up with a qualification that they are proud of and, more important, a qualification that will enable them to command a better salary in the market. Of course, at the top and middle levels of the university system, that still happens. A degree can give people cachet, knowledge and habits of mind that employers find worth while. However, the more that young people are invited into universities without having met that minimum level 3 requirement, the more difficult it will be for the universities to teach them to the required degree standard, and the less value those degrees will have. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean) said, more people will then drop out with a debt round their neck and absolutely nothing to show for it. I hope that the Government will understand that they cannot simply legislate to make everyone a graduate. They have to work away at it, and that will require reform in our schools and in our education system generally. I hope that they will be successful in that, because I would like to live in a world in which many more people have the opportunity to gain a high level of education as well as to buy a home and to get a decent job. Those things are, of course, all related in this expensive, complex and technical world. The problems for health are exactly the same as those for education, including top-down targets and Ministers desperately wanting to do the right thing but ending up doing the wrong thing. The central irony in the Queen's Speech is that the Queen, on advice from the Government, has told us that we are going to have cleaner hospitals. How many times have we heard Ministers promise cleaner hospitals? The Gracious Speech tells us that we shall achieve that by having a new, tougher and more impressive regulator to regulate the hospitals to make sure that they are clean. If the problem at the moment is that standards are not high enough and not being policed enough, why do we need to wait a year for another piece of legislation, a new quango, a new chief executive, a new logo and a new set of management consultancy papers? Why can these steps not be taken now? Nobody in the House would mind if the Government just got on with introducing the required standards through the existing mechanisms and making sure that they were met. The Government have desperately been trying to do that in a top-down way for many months now, and it simply is not working. Perhaps they should ask themselves whether that is the way to run a large national health service, or whether what my right hon. and hon. Friends have been saying about devolving more power, responsibility and authority to hospitals and to clinical and other staff at local level might not make more sense. I cannot believe that the Government wish to preside over a national health service in which 6,000 people a year die and have a hospital-acquired infection on their death certificate. I have to keep pinching myself to remind myself that that has actually happened. I cannot believe that Ministers find it satisfactory to have to make statements to the House about a hospital group in which 90 people died as a result of hospital-acquired infections. Somehow, because nobody could believe that 90 people could die in the same place in a relatively short space of time, that case has been treated more seriously than the hundreds and thousands of people who are dying month by month and year by year and who are being ignored. I am sure no one in the House wants such things to happen. We do not want this to be a party political football; we want the problem to be solved. All our constituents need it to be solved. They are now getting worried about even being admitted to an NHS hospital when they are in need or in danger. They are worried that getting something quite moderate sorted out will result in their getting something far worse. There must be a solution, and it does not involve legislation or a new quango. Among the most worrying aspects of the Queen's Speech are the chilling phrases that imply that the problem can wait 15 or 18 months—or however long it takes to get the new legislation through and to set up the new quango—and the Government's naive belief that the new quango will have the magic solution that has so far escaped all the quangos and all the Ministers who have looked at the problem. This is extremely worrying and it sums up exactly what is wrong with the state of the Government today. I will vote against the Queen's Speech because I see nothing in it to solve the main problems facing the country. I will vote against it because it does not strengthen our democracy; it undermines it further. I will vote against it because it does not tackle the lack of trust in politics; it accentuates it by not offering us a referendum or sorting out the English problem. I will vote against it because I do not think that it contains solutions to the problems in our large public services, and because I do not believe that it truly meets the aspirations of the British people. If the Government believe that they can play silly party political games with those aspirations, they will fail.