Business and trade secretary says claims deal will deliver limited economic boost are based on old data
At PMQs earlier this month Rishi Sunak said the Department for Education would review sex education in schools in England. He was responding to a question from Miriam Cates, who claimed that children were being exposed to material that was “age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate”.
Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, has now released more details of the review – although not the names of the people who will sit on an independent panel contributing to it. She says she is “deeply concerned” about some of the claims about what’s being taught. In a statement she says:
I am deeply concerned about reports of inappropriate lessons being taught in schools.
This urgent review will get to the heart of how RSHE is currently taught and should be taught in the future. This will leave no room for any disturbing content, restore parents’ confidence, and make sure children are even better protected.
Badenoch told Times Radio she was “unbelievably excited” about the outcome of the negotiations. She said:
It is one of the biggest trade deals we’ve ever done. It’s certainly the biggest trade bloc we’ve entered since we joined the European Economic Community. And what it’s going to do is open up our economy to where the new global growth is coming from.
The CPTPP regional countries’ total GDP is about £9tr, about 500 million people. It’s where the new middle class will be coming from in the future and now we’re going to have a closer trading relationship with them.
She said what mattered most was not the potential of the deal now, but its potential for the future. She told the Today programme:
Think of it like us buying a start-up. It’s not about what it’s doing today, but about the potential for growth tomorrow.
She urged an interviewer to “not keep talking” about Brexit. On Times Radio, when asked about the fact that the 0.08% boost to GDP produced by the deal in no way compensates for the estimated 4% drop in GDP Brexit will produce, she said:
First of all, what the OBR [which produced the 4% figure] is doing is forecasting, which is why a lot of the modelling is so speculative. The second thing is that we are still in a free trade agreement with the EU. This is in addition to our free trade agreement.
I think it would be quite ridiculous to suggest that we shouldn’t carry out any free trade deals now that we’ve left the EU.