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Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd: Will the hon. Gentleman clarify something that he said earlier? He is in close contact with Lancashire county council's ruling group.Is the council going to increase its education spending by £26.6 million in the coming year--the amount that the Government have provided?
Mr. Pike: I must emphasise that a standard spending assessment is not money from the Government; it is what the Government say a council can spend. In the current financial year, Lancashire county council is spending 7.5 per cent. above SSA. Yes, the £20-odd million that is being made available is going to schools; but, because the council must cut its overall budget, other education and social services must be cut proportionately more. The council will continue to spend well above its SSA. It already gives priority to schools, and it will pass the money on to them.
Mr. Mans: The hon. Gentleman said that Lancashire county council had problems because it had been capped. Surely it makes no sense for a council that has been capped to decrease the amount of money that is available for schools, as Lancashire did last year. A council with limited resources should make education a priority, rather than spending its money elsewhere.
Mr. Pike: The hon. Gentleman has not been listening. Lancashire is already spending 7.5 per cent. above SSA on education. Anyone who does not recognise that the council already regards education as a priority is not living in the real world.
Mrs. Wise: Does my hon. Friend agree that measures such as the proposed voucher scheme for four-year-olds
are detrimental to areas such as Lancashire, where four-year-olds are already at school? Lancashire can only lose. Is that not an example of the inadequacy and stupidity of the Government's approach?
Mr. Pike: That is a valid point. Until nursery education is provided as of right for all who want it, and is included in the grant formula, counties such as Lancashire will be penalised even more by the move to the voucher system. Tory and Liberal members of Lancashire county council understand the problems better than Conservative Members of Parliament: they have lobbied the Government for more money.
Under the area cost adjustment, every primary school pupil in Essex receives an extra £147 this year. Secondary school pupils aged between 11 and 15 receive an extra £197, and those aged between 16 and 18 an extra £235. The arrangements should be reviewed.
Mr. Nigel Evans:
I shall give this question another go, because I know that the hon. Gentleman is more up to speed than his hon. Friends. Does he agree that Lancashire county council could save money if it dropped its campaigns against schools that wish to become grant-maintained--such as Clitheroe Royal grammar school, where the Labour MEP Michael Hindley sends his daughter and where, no doubt, some of the hon. Gentleman's constituents send their children?
Mr. Pike:
I totally disagree with what the hon. Gentleman has said. Like anyone else, including me, the council has the right to campaign against grant-maintained status. We have an absolute right to ensure that parents are in possession of all the facts before they vote. By law, every governing body must decide each year whether to ballot on grant-maintained status. Most have not done so, because they know that Lancashire has a first-class education record, and they want to remain part of mainstream education.
Mr. Pope:
Conservative Members say that there has been an abuse of taxpayers' money. Will my hon. Friend join me in condemning the disgraceful way in which the Government have spent millions of pounds on the Grant Maintained Schools Trust and the Grant Maintained Schools Foundation? Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money have been spent on bribing schools to opt out.
Mr. Pike:
I do condemn that, as I condemn the way in which the Government have spent millions of pounds on advertising their policy on issues such as privatisation over the past few years.
Mr. Hawkins:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Pike:
As the hon. Member will not be a Lancashire Member for long--he is in danger of losing his seat--I will give way to him.
Mr. Hawkins:
Will the hon. Gentleman remind his hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Mr. Pope) that the Government have an electoral mandate? We won the election. Lancashire county council, however, is wasting taxpayers' money on improper campaigns.
Mr. Pike:
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. Does he believe in local government or not? Education is a local government responsibility. In 1981, Labour won control of Lancashire county council, and--with or without an overall majority--it has been in control ever since. Having fought elections on the basis of certain policies, it has the right to implement them.
Conservatives often misleadingly say that Lancashire wastes money on administration. According to my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall), the figure is below the national average. In any event, such matters as student grants--on which Lancashire has an excellent administration record--are part of the education budget, and must be provided for.
The capital allocations have implications foreducation. The annual capital guideline for 1996-97 is£8.166 million, but the bid was for £37.227 million. The amount provided for improvement and replacement work within that sum is only £265,000. Indeed, in total, the bid is less than that for the committed county council programme for the forthcoming year.
We have many old schools that need to be rebuilt or improved if we are to provide education in the most suitable schools. In many schools, work needs to be done on the smaller programmes. In the forthcoming year, £265,000 is available to spend on 771 schools. What nonsense. Rosehill junior school is desperate to have toilets that are fit for 1996. The county has made that work a top priority. It recognises that the work needs to be done and it carried out some urgent work just over a year ago, but it cannot fund the main programme because it does not have the money.
Mr. Keith Mans (Wyre):
I am grateful to you,Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to say a few words about Lancashire and education.
Lancashire county council--particularly the education authority--likes to say no to education. It said no to local management of schools. When it was forced to do it,it delegated to schools the minimum amount that it could get away with. Even now, some years on, when many Labour activists and, indeed, the Labour leadership in London, understand how useful local management of schools has been, the county still delegates less to schools than virtually any other large shire county. That was the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd) made about costs outside schools and about bureaucracy.
Lancashire county council keeps back from schools nearly 15 per cent. of the general schools budget for costs outside schools. If they were among the best rather than the worst in the land, each school in Lancashire would have, on average, another 7 per cent. to spend on teaching, books and other things that help education, and Lancashire county council would have 7 per cent. less to spend on facilities outside schools and central bureaucracy.
Recently, the county showed where its priorities lie.As has been mentioned, the county council recently appointed a new chief education officer. It had an ideal opportunity to look again at the chief education officer's responsibilities, bearing in mind the fact that, since the last one was appointed, a number of schools in Lancashire have become grant-maintained--
Mr. Mans:
The hon. Gentleman talks about an avalanche, and that is precisely what will happen to Lancashire county council when Blackburn and Blackpool become unitary authorities, because then the responsibility and the scope of the education authority in Lancashire will be reduced considerably.
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