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6.53 pm

Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham) : I will try to keep to the subject of the debate—unlike the previous speaker, the hon. Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall), who has spoken about anything but the Bill.

In this Chamber two weeks ago, I welcomed the Government's proposal for a Bill to give back negotiating rights to teachers. However, I also told the House that I suspected that there would be a sting in the tail, and I think that my hunch was about right. I had hoped that the Bill would finally establish acceptable and permanent negotiating arrangements for teachers' pay, duties and conditions of service. Yet again, the Government have failed to make any significant moves towards the introduction of a system that is satisfactory both to the teachers and to their employers, and which could replace the supposedly temporary system established by the Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act 1987.

There is now an acute shortage of teachers. Despite what the Secretary of State and Conservative Members say, it is a direct result, first, of the erosion of pay caused by the absence of free, national-level collective bargaining since 1987 ; secondly, of the vastly increased burden of unrewarded work and responsibility, which are the consequences of changes to the teaching service structure ; and, thirdly, of low morale among teachers, which is the consequence of the other two factors.

I went for a cup of tea 20 minutes ago, having been here since 2.30 pm, and I picked up the Evening Standard. Lo and behold, the first article in the Evening Standard that I read was headlined, " '1600 teachers leave London' ". The article continued :

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That reiterates what the Labour party has been saying for the past two, three or four years.

The proposals for new negotiating machinery for teachers' pay and conditions of service yet again do not conform to the requirements of international conventions, and the breach has now been compounded. This is the second time the International Labour Organisation has found the Government to be in breach of international law in their handling of teachers' negotiating rights. Since 1987, the Government have imposed amended conditions of service on teachers, they have put cash limits on salary increases and they have extended the operation of the 1987 Act beyond its expected expiry date.

Teachers' pay has been deliberately depressed in recent years by the use of cash limits. Restricting the 1991 increase to an average for white-collar employees will not even restore teachers to their position of four years ago, let alone produce proper levels of pay for the profession. Let no one say anything other than that pay is crucial to recruitment and to the retention of teachers, which is the most important factor that we are discussing today. I repeat what I said to the Secretary of State some two hours ago. Evidence shows that teachers are now worse off compared both with the rate of inflation and with their non-manual counterparts than they were when the interim advisory committee was established.

In the new proposals, there are three breaches of conformity, as set out by the ILO. The proposal for free negotiation of terms and conditions between employers and teachers under an independent chairman has a condition attached to it. The Secretary of State has the power to reject any negotiated settlement with which he disagrees, and to impose an alternative. He has an absolute power of discretion even though all negotiating parties may agree with the recommendations.

The Bill makes nonsense of the concept of true negotiation by retaining almost total power and responsibility with the Secretary of State and by allowing the negotiating body and even the so-called advisory committee to be overruled. At a time of severe teacher shortage, whatever the Secretary of State may say, when recruitment and retention of teachers is crucial, and when morale in the profession is at an all-time low, the Bill will undermine education even more. The negotiators should be left free to finalise and implement their own agreements.

Secondly, disagreements which are not resolved before the prescribed deadline may be referred by the Government to a statutory independent advisory committee. The establishment of a permanent body similar to the existing interim advisory committee is the second breach of conformity. The proposed permanent advisory committee, like the existing body, will be obliged to consult the relevant parties and will be empowered to make recommendations to the Secretary of State, who will

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retain the right to accept, modify or reject those recommendations as he sees fit. As far as I can see, that is no improvement on the present system.

Although it is true that reference to the new committee must be preceded by an attempt to resolve differences by collective bargaining, that in itself does not convert the committee phase into a process of collective bargaining. Both the negotiations and the committee phase are, as the ILO said :

It must certainly be possible to impose restrictions on the bargaining process when lengthy deadlocks ensue, but that is not to say that there should be a mechanism to infringe the autonomy of the bargaining process.

While I welcome efforts to restore direct employer-employee bargaining on pay, duties and conditions, the Government have failed to meet the requirement to put collective bargaining arrangements in place. The proposals for time-limited negotiations will serve their purpose only if the limits are not so short as to curtail productive negotiation, since that would allow the Secretary of State to exercise his overriding powers.

The third breach is represented by the provisions enabling education authorities and grant-maintained schools to opt out of national negotiations without establishing local negotiating machinery. Local education authorities or the governing bodies of publicly funded schools would be permitted to apply to the Secretary of State for permission to opt out of the national framework and to determine the pay and conditions of their teachers at a local level and at local rates. Some authorities could then conceivably pay more than others under different conditions of employment. All of this is to be done at a time of grave teacher shortages, and a glorious game of leapfrog would become the order of the day.

Teachers would be attracted to the places where pay and conditions were the best, leaving gaps that could not be filled because there would be no one left to fill them. Authorities whose teachers were attracted away could only react by increasing pay and improving conditions, thus contributing to the spiral.

Before anyone imagines that the opted-out authorities would offer all the prizes, it should be remembered that there is one back in the leapfrog game that will bring everyone down. Local authorities are required by the Government to control their spending. Where are they to raise the cash to make higher settlements than the nationally agreed figure? They will not be able to, so they will not—or, if they do, capping will follow.

The purpose of this Bill must be to keep teachers' pay low and thus continue to contribute to decline in the profession. The freedom to arrive at local settlements can only mean the freedom to arrive at low settlements, and that is not what education needs.

After opting out, all future pay and conditions settlements would be free from any control and subject only to certain restrictions on changes in pay within the first year and to the general obligation on local education authorities to consult governing bodies and teachers before implementing proposals for changes in local pay and conditions. So the Government are proposing not only that employing authorities should opt out of national collective bargaining but that they should opt out of any

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form of collective bargaining. This free-for-all outside a common framework may lead to overbidding, instability among teaching staff and an avoidable pay inflation, while not profiting the education service in general. That is hardly in line with the Government's obligation to promote voluntary negotiations between employers and employees.

Clause 9 allows grant-maintained schools to do their own thing. That may mean higher settlements by schools which attract additional funds. If so, the best teachers in an area could be enticed into the rich opted-out school, leaving others with the problems of replacing them. That is a device to fool people into thinking that grant-maintained means better when it does not, but we are not fooled—parents will not be fooled, and nor will teachers. The rich will be much richer while the rest will suffer.

The intake to teacher training courses is at an all-time low—[Interruption.]—regardless of the figures that the Department may pass in little notes to the Minister. Resignations from the profession continue in numbers that have a harmful effect on education, and the six teacher associations' survey recently revealed that the number of vacancies was at least double the Government's estimate—and it is even worse this year.

Despite the continuing trend of graduates away from teacher training, the Government persist in doing no more than tinkering at the edges. Other employers try to attract graduates with sensible starting salaries and career development plans. With such opportunities, it is no wonder that graduates are not coming into teaching.

In a profession in which low morale is widespread, the effects of measures perceived as divisive and unfair cannot be underestimated. A free-market auction of teachers held by competing authorities and governing bodies is potentially disastrous. The Government are acting contrary to the conventions that they have agreed. They must not continue to breach conventions that they have ratified and which were designed to promote and encourage voluntary negotiations to bring about mutually accepted agreement.

Without a truly independent negotiating machinery, the teaching profession will continue to degenerate. Without a large increase in salary to make teaching attractive, that degeneration will become indelible. For the sake of all our children we must now deal with the main issues—recruitment and retention of teachers. That would enhance educational standards and recognise that the nation's future is in our schools. We need a commitment to a true negotiating system, in which teachers and their employers can arrive at what is best for education.

7.7 pm

Mr. Steve Norris (Epping Forest) : I extend a warm welcome to the Bill, which fulfils the long-standing obligation to replace the Burnham machinery, which was inadequate for the negotiation of teachers' pay. The Government have fulfilled that obligation in a creative way, which will in due course commend itself to the whole House and to the teaching profession. Behind the Bill lies the desire to enhance the status of teachers in the community—a desire that will be shared on both sides of the House. This is the right way to proceed.

Contrary to the opinion expressed by the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw)—I am sorry that he is not in his place now—the Education Reform Act 1988, which was so

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derided during its passage by all sorts of vested interests and by the Opposition, has become, only two years into its operation, accepted on all sides as having advanced education.

I accept that there are the occasional dinosaurs on the Opposition Benches on whom any development will take a few decades to make an impact. Increasingly, those left of centre in politics in this country are beginning to realise that concepts such as attainment testing, the national curriculum and even grant-maintained schools are the germs of progress in education. I accept that we cannot starve an education service and that it would be rank hypocrisy to hide behind the argument that all was structure and resources were nothing. Neither side of the House has fallen for that argument.

Before the Education Reform Act 1988, a commitment to quality, standards and diversity was missing. Improvements in quality arose as a result of the enhancement of choice that the Education Reform Act made available.

Mr. Fatchett : When the Education Reform Bill was published, the Conservative party had a lead over the Labour party on education issues in virtually all the opinion polls. Why, two years after the enactment of the Bill, does the Labour party have a 30 per cent. lead in all opinion polls on education issues? What is the reason for that difference?

Mr. Norris : Having been told by various pollsters that my party's deficit in the polls has been wiped out by the intervention of my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), who in a week has achieved that as well as the reform of the community charge, I am rather sceptical of reaching any conclusions from polls.

However, when the Education Reform Bill was before the House, many people in education derided the proposals from a sectional standpoint which I did not share. Since then, many of those people, perhaps rather more quietly—we can understand why—have come to recognise how much good the Education Reform Bill contained.

I want to refer to a point raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) and for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall). They referred to clauses 8 and 9, which throw a lifeline to areas like mine. Such a lifeline has been sorely needed and I have written to my hon. Friend the Minister and many of his predecessors about it.

There is no conflict between the two interventions that I made earlier. In my constituency, the history of vacancies was made much of by Labour party representatives. They sought to fan all sorts of fears among parents, which were subsequently not realised in 1989 or this year. That was a terrible shame for parents, who naturally become disturbed when they are told, apparently by authoritative sources, that there is a prospect that their children will not be able to go to school or will be sent home from school. I received goodness knows how many letters as a result of that scare.

Fortunately, those parents were worried for nothing and they did not have to suffer that experience. That was an incredibly cynical exploitation of the perfectly valid concerns of parents. They were put under pressure in order to make a cheap political point, which frankly did not carry much weight.

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In response to the interesting patois intervention by the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), it is true that we do not get enough candidates of quality on our shortlists. We often get only one candidate, and I would be the first to agree with the hon. Gentleman that that is unsatisfactory. Equally, although we have only a handful of unfilled posts, too many have not been filled by permanent staff, and I agree that that is a less than satisfactory way for children to be taught. Clearly we must look at the way in which teachers are attracted to my part of the world.

I have always thought that the logic of differential pay and geographical variations in pay is absolutely irrefutable. My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford referred to what he called a centrist newspaper entitled The Daily Telegraph. I recall an interesting article by Bernard Levin in what must be a left-wing rag called The Times. That article was about a dispute involving Post Office workers, in which local pay bargaining was the central issue.

If I recall correctly, Mr. Allan Tuffin raised that issue after it has been suggested that particular payments were being made to postmen who lived in London. He was concerned that those payments should be made available throughout the country. I recall Bernard Levin writing, in what seemed to be a perfectly logical way, that, although he felt that a trade union leader had a perfectly natural obligation to try to secure the best deal for his members—and if that meant that he could secure money for people living in less expensive parts of the country, why should he not do that?—if a postman in Grimsby was paid the same as a postman in Chelsea, either one was being overpaid, or more likely the other was being underpaid.

In what was always called "the real world"—I hate to use that expression—there cannot be the slightest doubt that living costs differ substantially around the country. It is asinine not to recognise that that will have a huge influence on the attractiveness of public sector posts.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South referred to housing costs. In my constituency, one cannot buy a one-bedroom flat for under £55,000. I was once told that mine is the second most expensive constituency in the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr. Burns), who kindly assisted me in 1988 during my fraught experience of a by-election which is fast becoming a legend in this Parliament because we won it, will recall that it is considered normal that houses in my constituency cost £100,000 a bedroom once we move up the scale to ordinary three and four-bedroom houses.

Unlike many other professions, there is no particular reason why a teacher should wish to come to work in my high-cost area instead of working elsewhere. There is often a distinct reason why people gravitate to London—because that is where their head office is located, and they want promotion and larger salaries. They obviously accept that they will have to pay more for housing. One of the particular features of teaching is that a teacher can get to the top of his or her tree as easily in Northamptonshire, rural Essex or Lancashire as in central London or in the expensive part of Essex that I represent. It is doubly important that we counter a huge natural disincentive to people to come to teach in high-cost areas.

As part of the bedrock of this argument, I want to make an important point. It does not matter what salary we start with or whatever the national salary is—be it adequate or inadequate—there will still be an incentive for people to

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move to areas where their money buys them a great deal more. We find that problem not only in teaching, but in other public sector appointments in my constituency, and I look forward to clauses 8 and 9 addressing it.

As I endeavoured to say in an intervention during the speech by my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State, I hope that my local education authority will not hesitate to use the provisions of clause 8. I accept that that may mean that community charge payers have to make a greater contribution to teachers' salaries. I believe that my constituents would generally accept that that was the quid pro quo of being fortunate enough to live in one of the most expensive and wealthy districts in the country. I think that they would accept that they can afford to pay teachers enough to attract the quality of teachers that my constituents—and other hon. Members' constituents—deserve.

Mr. Steinberg : I have listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman's argument. Is he trying to say that he believes that, by giving local education authorities the right to negotiate, the difference in pay that teachers will receive will be the same as the cost involved in somebody moving from my district of the country, Durham, to the hon. Gentleman's, Epping Forest? Is he saying that the amount of extra salary they receive will compensate for the move? Does he not feel that it would be better for local authorities to be given the right or the power to finalise a system taking into account housing costs, and so give an incentive? Does the hon. Gentleman believe that local authorities will pay teachers enough to compensate for the huge difference in housing costs?

Mr. Norris : I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that all the scales of difference available to us understate the actual difference in housing costs—for example, between his district and mine. I do not disguise the fact that local education authorities in regions such as mine are unlikely to be able to go the whole way to compensate for differences in housing costs. That was a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall).

Inner London weighting is set at £1,500, which, if one already had a mortgage of £30,000 and so was not eligible for more tax relief would, after tax, amount to an ability to borrow another £10,000 to put towards a more expensive house. If interest rates were at 0.5 per cent., that weighting might give £20,000 but would come nowhere near the £100,000 or so necessary to compensate for moving from the constituency of the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg) to mine.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his concern on behalf of the electors of Epping Forest, which I shall convey to them. I invite the hon. Gentleman to come with me and see what a delightful place it is—perhaps he might contemplate the economics of such a move.

London allowances are of real concern, not just to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South to whom I am grateful for raising the subject and so allowing my hon. Friend the Minister to see that it is not just a single constituency issue. The fringe allowance to which my constituency teachers are entitled will, from 1 July 1989, be the magnificent sum of £384. The irony is that it is a sum paid regardless of grade ; it is almost insignificant in terms

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of its purchasing power in the context of regional costs. It is particularly galling when compared with an outer London weighting of £984—a full £600 more—and an inner London weighting of £1,500.

The reality is that teachers who live in my constituency can often travel shorter journeys to work when they happen to work in one of the London boroughs and, if that borough adds the London supplement of £750, earn more than £1,000 a year more than in my district. I accept that there will always be boundaries and that, close to metropolitan districts, those boundaries occasionally look a bit capricious. I understand that ; such anomalies will always exist. I am sure that all hon. Members with experience of metropolitan constituencies know that.

I am worried that, when calculating the weighting allowance, there is an assumption that cost in a major city such as London is based on the bull's eye principle that costs are highest in the centre and become lower as one goes further out. That may be true between Belgravia and the wilds of the countryside, but it is not true for London, throughout which there are pockets of high and low cost.

When my hon. Friend the Minister considers weighting, I urge him to use a more sophisticated formula than that currently used, so that it allows for a much more general recognition of high cost where that is clearly appropriate, as it obviously is in my constituency. If we received the inner London weighting of £1,500, rather than our fringe allowances of £834, the difference would not go a quarter of the way towards compensating for the differential housing costs to which I referred.

In giving the warmest approval to the measure, I urge my right hon. and learned Friend to look with sympathy at allowances, particularly London allowances. I urge him not to impede the progress of grant-maintained schools or local authorities towards taking control of their local pay arrangements. I believe that clauses 8 and 9 throw my constituents a lifeline which is of considerable importance for the education of children in my constituency.

7.26 pm

Mr. Dennis Turner (Wolverhampton, South-East) : I commend to the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mr. Norris) the Select Committee's report on teacher shortages. It took us more than 12 months to produce the document, within which he will find a list of recommendations dealing with London and outer London allowances, housing costs, additional responsibility allowances and a range of proposals.

The Government do not seem to have taken sufficient account of that report. That certainly appeared to be the case when the Secretary of State advanced the Government's argument earlier and spoke of teacher recruitment, retention and the other major problems identified in the report, on which the ink is still not dry. For the Government to say that there has been so much progress during such a short period leaves a little doubt in my mind as to whether they are using an element of exaggeration and deceit about the present state of education.

Mr. Rupert Allason (Torbay) : There may well be an element of exaggeration, but if the hon. Gentleman looks at the statistics for Devon he will see that this January there were 166 vacancies for teachers there, and in September the number had been reduced to just 16.

Mr. Turner : I am pleased to hear that information, although the same is not true across the whole country. However, like the hon. Gentleman, I am pleassed if there is an improvement in recruitment in Devon and join him in rejoicing in the fact that progress is being made.

I am saddened by this debate and by the Bill. In the Select Committee we made proposals which we thought that the Secretary of State might reject. Some Government supporters in the Select Committee expended energy on recommendations that they felt should be followed. When we learned that the former Secretary of State for Education and Science was to recommend a new pay and conditions organisation, we made clear recommendations in our Select Committee report.

I was full of hope that the Bill would contain a proper negotiating procedure for teachers. Although the interim advisory committee made sound recommendations on many matters, it has been criticised since 1987 because those recommendations were always curtailed by the Government's cash limits and could not adequately and properly respond to the teachers.

There are four basic objections to the proposed negotiating machinery. First, the proposal allows local education authorities and grant-maintained schools to opt out of national pay negotiations. In effect, they can pay teachers local rates. That is unacceptable for a national education service at any time, but at this time of crisis in the supply of teachers it is completely impracticable.

Secondly, the Secretary of State's reserve powers to override or refer back decisions of the negotiating committee are not compatible with free collective bargaining. We have heard that the International Labour Organisation and a committee of the United Nations have heavily criticised the Government for that aspect of the legislation. I do not want to go over that ground again. The machinery in the Bill is unsatisfactory for resolving disputes in the negotiating committee. It contains no provision for arbitration, and that is an important issue in all free negotiations.

The Government propose to move on from the interim advisory committee, and they should at least have carried the teachers' organisations with them. It is sad that the Government have failed miserably to satisfy the very people to whom they wanted to respond positively. The Secretary of State said that the proposals had the support of the teachers' organisations. We know that the National Union of Teachers is totally opposed to the Government's proposal for national negotiations.

Hon. Members have no doubt received from the Assistant Masters and Mistresses Association a document which states :

The association recommends that hon. Members oppose the Bill and ask the Government to go back to the drawing board and bring in a Bill allowing teachers free negotiations. That would take our education service forward into the 1990s and give us tranquillity and progress.

The Government should encourage everyone in education to work together to meet the needs of our communities. Even at this late stage, I ask the Minister not to run into great opposition with all the teachers'

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organisations even before the Bill becomes an Act. He should have another look at it and try to get legislation that everyone can work in the interests of our children and our future.

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