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4.46 pm
Mr. James Clappison (Hertsmere): It is a great pleasure to address the House on this subject. This is my first opportunity to speak from the Back Benches on constituency matters for several years.
I was interested in the contribution of the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick). I may have been one of the people he was getting at when he mentioned the arrogance of former Ministers. I do not feel like a fleeing communist dictator. I have not taken to a helicopter to escape the wrath of the people. I have simply moved from one side of the House to the other and listened to what
the electorate had to say to me. Labour Members should remember that all hon. Members are elected by the electorate and held to account by them. None of us should grow too confident or arrogant. All Ministers and the Prime Minister should remember that they, too, can be held to account by the electorate in due course.
I am pleased to be able to speak on a subject of great importance to my constituents, who will be interested in the contents of the Queen's Speech, especially as regards education. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) on his appointment as Secretary of State for Education and Employment. I recognise and appreciate that he has a deep and sincere interest in education, and especially in improving standards for those in less privileged areas such as the inner cities. I recognise, too, that in framing the legislation in the Queen's Speech, he comes to the House with a mandate for the changes that he is seeking to make.
Perhaps the centrepiece of the right hon. Gentleman's legislative programme is phasing out the assisted places scheme. I regret that change, but I must frankly recognise that the right hon. Gentleman has a mandate from the electorate for it. That is regrettable, because more than 400 children in my constituency receive a high standard of education at independent schools through the assisted places scheme. The right hon. Gentleman, perhaps in an unguarded moment, referred to them as the privileged few. They may be privileged in the sense that their parents choose to give them a good education, but they are privileged in no other sense.
The common denominator among those children is that their parents do not have much money. Many receive completely free places because their parents' combined incomes are less than £10,000; the remainder of the parents have combined incomes of between £10,000 and £26,000. I would not describe those people as privileged and I doubt whether the right hon. Gentleman, on reflection, would do so either. They are low-income families receiving a good opportunity.
That does not mean that those children would not have had good opportunities at other schools in my constituency, because Hertsmere is proud of offering high standards in all its state sector secondary schools. Five of the seven secondary schools happen to be grant-maintained. They have achieved many distinctions; one received a special commendation from the schools inspectorate, while others have received national recognition in other ways. However, children on the assisted places scheme have an opportunity to receive education at schools of not just national but international excellence, including Haberdasher's Aske's school. Those schools are much coveted by parents in my constituency as a destination for their children to receive the education of their choice.
I recognise the fact that the Secretary of State for Education and Employment has, through the election, received a mandate for phasing out the assisted places scheme. I welcome what he said in his speech today about the scheme's future. Despite his mandate, we want to ask a number of questions on behalf of parents whose children are on the scheme and who are concerned about its future. I take what the right hon. Gentleman said today as an assurance that children now on the scheme will continue to receive education at those schools throughout their school life. The right hon. Gentleman gave that assurance
in response to a question, and I look to him now to deny it, if it is not the case. That is how I interpreted his response, and I welcome it.
Parents have many other concerns, including about the priority given to the brothers and sisters of those at present on the scheme. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, in other forms of education, brothers and sisters have priority in admission. He will have to address that issue in due course.
The Government's mandate is interesting, because the Labour party manifesto made a commitment to phase out the assisted places scheme and to use the savings to reduce class sizes for five, six and seven-year-olds. That is the basis on which the Labour party put that pledge to the electorate. Many people feel that the objective of reducing class sizes is desirable in itself. Why the assisted places scheme should be sacrificed in order to achieve that is not entirely clear. Unfortunately for the Secretary of State, the manifesto quotes the cost of the scheme as £180 million a year, but the savings made from phasing out the scheme are different from the cost of the scheme, because they must take into account the cost of educating in the state sector those who would have been on the assisted places scheme.
Mr. Blunkett:
I should not like the hon. Gentleman or any other hon. Member to pursue a red herring. The money that the assisted places scheme will yield over the coming years is greater than the amount now being spent on the scheme, because the previous Government, in their public expenditure prediction totals, intended to expand dramatically the assisted places scheme. Indeed, they intended to double it.
We shall not expand the scheme, but we shall reuse the resources. I remind the hon. Gentleman of the words of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He said that he was not committing new money to the 110,000 youngsters who had entered school in the past two years, on the ground that the marginal cost was so small that they could be absorbed at no extra cost.
Mr. Clappison:
I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has raised that matter because, as he will know, independent analysis has been carried out on that basis--the full cost of the assisted places scheme. Before he tries to discredit the source of that analysis, I should say that it comes from the Institute of Public Finance and has been supplied to me by the House of Commons Library. The Institute of Public Finance estimates that the saving from phasing out the assisted places scheme will fall well short of the figure that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, because it has taken into account the cost of providing smaller class sizes for five, six and seven-year-olds and set that against the net saving. It estimates that the saving from phasing out the scheme all at once will be £49 million, which is the figure that my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) put to the right hon. Gentleman. However, my hon. Friend was being rather generous--that is the amount that would be saved if the scheme were phased out all at once.
The Secretary of State has just made the commitment that the scheme will be phased out over a number of years, with children at present receiving education under the scheme being allowed to continue to do so. The net savings in the first year, according to the Institute of
Public Finance, will be no more than £13 million. Over the full period of the phasing out of the scheme, it estimates that there will be a £250 million black hole between what will be saved from phasing out the scheme and what is needed to reduce class sizes, in terms of both new teachers and capital expenditure.
The Secretary of State and I will no doubt debate that matter on many occasions in the future, and I shall be interested to see the costings that he makes. What is his view of the net savings to be made and the cost of alternative education for children now on the assisted places scheme, and how does he arrive at his calculation? According to the Institute of Public Finance, there will simply not be enough money to pay for reducing the class sizes of five, six and seven-year-olds. The £180 million mentioned in the manifesto was the cost, not the savings, and the matter was put to the electorate on that basis. Those matters will have to be pursued, and the Secretary of State will have to say a little more about them.
Grant-maintained schools are also of great interest to my constituents. Five of the seven secondary schools in my constituency are grant-maintained. In each case, a substantial majority of parents voted for grant-maintained status; they want to know the Government's plans for the future of those schools. Given that the schools have made considerable progress as grant-maintained schools, they want to know why the Government are considering changing the structure. One of the points made in the right hon. Gentleman's manifesto, to which I shall return in a moment, was that there should be a greater concentration on standards rather than on structure. That being the case, parents of children at such schools in my constituency will want to know why the Government want to make any changes at all.
We are all concerned about the important subject of standards in schools. I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman's serious, sincere concern about it. We shall take a constructive approach towards that matter. We shall want to look constructively and critically--
Mr. Don Foster (Bath):
Who is we?
Mr. Clappison:
I hope that concern about standards is shared throughout the House. We want to look constructively and critically at the Labour party's proposals. We shall look at them on the basis of whether those changes are well thought out in detail and are designed to help to improve standards, or whether they are gimmicks.
Last year, the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues made various proposals about, for example, summer literacy camps. They also proposed changes to the amount of time spent on homework by children, which would involve a degree of prescription. The centrepiece of the Labour party's manifesto commitment on standards--the flagship proposal--which was designed to attack underachievement in urban areas, was a new scheme involving the Premier League. It proposed the creation of study support centres at Premier League grounds for the benefit of local children. We have not heard anything about that in the Queen's Speech, but it is something that we shall look at with great interest. We shall be extremely interested to hear about the future of that proposal,
because we are concerned with proposals that will deliver real improvements in standards, not with gimmicks and wheezes.
One of the features of new Labour's election campaign was its specific proposals to the electorate. I congratulate the party on the magnificence of its marketing and public relations campaign, because it set a high standard in the marketing of ideas and suggestions. In the remainder of this Parliament, we shall want to consider the Labour party's proposals in detail. We shall want to see not just gimmicks and photo opportunities, but the real merits of its proposals, which we can examine in detail. It simply will not be good enough to offer a photo opportunity, a wheeze and a gimmick in place of a well-thought-out idea. We will hold the Labour party to account not just on those specific proposals, but on its entire conduct of Government business.
The Labour party has come into government with what can be described only as a very good inheritance. We have sustained, steady economic growth. Yesterday, the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in seven years and is on course to fall to its lowest level for 17 years. We have witnessed particularly large falls in the number of unemployed under-25s, especially those who have been unemployed for more than a year. The new Minister of State, the hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), generously described that fall as a bonus. Today, the inflation rate hit its target of 2.5 per cent. Those achievements represent an extremely good economic inheritance.
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