Speeches by Hinds.

“Will the hon. Lady write to me?”

“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I join colleagues in thanking the petitioners, and Ellen Roome in particular, for initiating the petition and enabling this Westminster Hall debate. We were all deeply affected by hearing the statement that was just read out. Ellen, you have the sympathies of everybod…”

“And me!”

“The hon. Gentleman just said that the Government would bring a mental health worker into every school. Could he repeat that, for the avoidance of doubt?”

“The hon. Gentleman should have added the GCSE numbers to the numbers for technical and vocational qualifications, otherwise it is misleading. We all want kids to study the subjects they wish to study, and the subjects from which they will benefit. I am not sure how what the hon. Gentleman says negates what I just said,…”

“I am grateful to Labour colleagues for their interventions, and for telling this House and the country what they need to know. All these successful schools and trusts have been doing exactly that. They have brought new talent into the profession, and they have helped to improve retention, but no, they are not the right…”

“Ah!”

“I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for letting the House know that the new Labour party still rejects synthetic phonics, which has the most remarkable depth of evidence behind it, in favour of its fashionable, progressive policies. This is why I say that all the progress achieved by our reforms is at imminent risk. La…”

“I am sure that today Labour MPs will cheer what they see as the final demise of the Gove-Gibb reforms, but the Bill before us reverses far further back than that. If this Bill passes in anything close to its current form, it will be as if Lord Adonis was never the Schools Minister and Lord Blunkett had never sat in the…”

“There obviously has been a lot of money sloshing around. You used the term “arms race”, but you might call it a land grab. We have even heard the parallel of the South Sea bubble: not everybody is watching all of these programmes and there are very high production values, very high production costs. Obviously, if that …”

“Not on that point.”

“There is obviously a lot of consideration, a lot of benefits to the UK economy and society from your industry. There is employment, there is export earnings, and then there are important cultural benefits both to domestic audiences and, we feel, as part of our projection in the world. I wondered which of those things—t…”

“Is the mental health support in schools that the Minister just mentioned the same as or different from the plan for mental health support teams in schools that was already being rolled out by the previous Government?”

“You have to change for the dubbing anyway.”

“I think you are right. I would love more kids to be studying computer science. You talk about the difficulty of finding teachers to teach AI; computer science itself is actually very difficult to recruit teachers for because of course there are massive job opportunities in your industry and elsewhere. The question I wa…”

“My final question related to that: where does all this leave the public service broadcaster? All of them in some ways have been in partnerships with the big streamers, but you mentioned amazing content like “Mr Bates”, which I cannot imagine originating from a multinational based in the United States. What does all thi…”

“Would you point to a year in the future where you project that for telly in general it will no longer be viable to produce content, programmes, entertainment shows specifically, for a country the size of ours?”

“How much does it matter where the investment ultimately comes from? In other words, should we worry that so much British high-end television is made with American money?”

“Does the hon. Gentleman know by how much the number of teachers in this country increased during the last Parliament?”

“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Harris. I thank the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), for introducing this debate today. This petition has succeeded already in a very important way: it has brought this debate to Westminster Hall. It is …”