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7.23 pm
Mr. Tom Levitt (High Peak): Mr. Deputy Speaker, thank you for giving me the opportunity to make my maiden speech. I represent the most beautiful seat in Britain. I was going to claim that it was only the most beautiful seat in England, but I cannot see many Scottish or Welsh Members, so I think that I can claim Britain.
High Peak is in Derbyshire and takes in most of the Peak district as well as the historic towns of Buxton and Glossop and the land in between. We expected to scrape home in the seat, but having been returned with 51 per cent. of the vote, my belief in electoral reform has been shaken; perhaps it is not as necessary as I once thought. My election on 1 May completed the jigsaw for High Peak. We have a Labour borough council, a Labour county council, a Labour Member of the European Parliament and now a Labour Member of Parliament.
I mentioned Scotland a moment ago. High Peak has been described as Derbyshire's Scotland. It has hills, it is rather wet, it is in the north of the county and, since the county council elections, it has been a Tory-free zone. From that point of view, we have much to be proud of.
I am the first Labour Member since Peter Jackson to represent High Peak. He served from 1966 to 1970 and had a reputation in the House for having voted against the Labour Government more often than any other Labour Member in that period. I must tell my Front-Bench colleagues that that is not a reputation that I intend to match or surpass. I was proud to stand on the Labour manifesto. I am proud to have fought on Labour manifestos in three general elections. I will be proud to continue to work for the implementation of that Labour manifesto in the years to come.
Someone once said that people should not trust politicians with more than three passions. My three chosen passions are all relevant to the Queen's Speech. The first is disability. I have not been able to take up one parliamentary tip which I picked up yesterday by producing my book and saying how I had written it and how excellent it was. Suffice it to say that I hope to make progress on access to services for people with sensory impairments. My second field is local government. I served at parish, district and county level before coming here. Thirdly, there is education. I was a teacher for 17 years and I shall return to that issue.
There is one aspect of my past that I would like to celebrate. During the 1980s, I was both a parliamentary and European parliamentary candidate in Gloucestershire and actively involved in the campaign for the restoration of trade union rights at GCHQ. It gives me immense pride to make my maiden speech on the day those rights were restored.
My immediate predecessor in High Peak was Charles Hendry, who was, and may still be, a vice-chair of the Tory party with responsibility for communications. Perhaps the less said about that, the better. He looked after High Peak competently for five years. I congratulate him on not having taken the chicken run, as many of his colleagues did. He spent most of his career in the House, either advising Ministers or working for Tory central
office. Having achieved the position of Member of Parliament, to lose it after five years must, I concede, have been a devastating personal blow. My best wishes go to him and his young family in finding another career.
In Charles's final speech to the House just a few weeks ago, he invited hon. Members to come with him on an imaginary helicopter ride to see some of the examples of Tory success. It was by its nature a brief ride, but I would like to take hon. Members on a similar ride to look at some of the schools in High Peak and ask what we mean by "Tory success".
Let us start in the village of Tideswell, which has a large primary school where no child is taught in a class of less than 30. If we go to the town of Buxton, we can go one better. There is a reception class with 46 children in it. Still in Buxton, High Peak college is the only provider of further education in the constituency. It has fought hard to stay open recently. It has a purpose-built nursery, which is empty because the college can no longer afford to run it for the benefit of the students for whom it was intended. In the village of Whaley Bridge, an excellent private nursery is in danger of closing because it does not accept vouchers. Because of the short period for which people send their children to the nursery, vouchers are not appropriate for the style of nursery provision that it provides and it fears that it cannot survive.
A couple of miles away, at Taxal and Fernilee primary school, which was purpose-built by Derbyshire county council and the Church authorities working together just a few years ago, parents launched a £25,000 fund last weekend to build an extension to one of the classrooms because of severe overcrowding. It seems that the days are gone when parents were asked to provide the extras, not the essentials, for our children's education.
Dinting school in Glossop is an example of a school that is bursting at the seams. It must be impossible to teach there effectively, given the conditions and overcrowding. The fact that Hope valley is the most beautiful part of High Peak does not help Bamford primary school, which must lose one of its five teachers this summer. That will necessitate mixed-age classes and have a devastating effect on the confidence of staff and children in the school. My heart goes out to them.
As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was visiting the village of Castleton during the election campaign, the local primary school was proud to be opening its first indoor toilet for use. For how many years had it been waiting to do that?
The final school on my list is Chapel infants school, Chapel-en-le-Frith, which was built in Victorian times. Despite its being a good school, the Victorian buildings are not in good repair. Not only are the classrooms too small, but right next to the school is a busy main road. Some 100 yd down that main road on the opposite side is another playground with the other half of the infant school. In the playground are four "temporary" classrooms--they were temporary when they were put there 45 years ago. Their roofs are held up by pit props, among the 700 pit props holding up roofs in Derbyshire schools. The fabric of that school is a disgrace, while the practice in its classrooms is excellent. The teachers in all the schools that I have mentioned do a wonderful job, given the highly undignified circumstances in which many of them and their pupils work.
It is no wonder that we have such problems in Derbyshire schools. Of all the shire counties, Derbyshire had the third lowest standard spending assessment for education under the previous Government. It has a £100 million backlog on capital spending, £10 million of which is urgently required. Last year, the previous Government allowed Derbyshire to spend some £800,000, or 0.8 per cent.--less than 1 per cent.--of the capital building requirement. The authority was asking not for money from the Government but for permission to borrow. Without that, it was impossible for the authority to address even the most serious of the capital and physical problems in the buildings which had to be put right.
One could guess from my description that Derbyshire has the highest primary class sizes of any shire county in the country. That is the Tory inheritance, in terms of education in Derbyshire and schools in High Peak. That is the legacy that we must turn round and put right, and that is how the last Government failed the people of High Peak.
Mr. Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire):
It is my pleasant first obligation to welcome you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to the Chair and to congratulate you on your appointment. It is a great pleasure to see a friendly and a skilful face in the Chair and we look forward to your wise counsel prevailing over us for many years to come.
It is also a privilege to follow yet another fine maiden speech. I may have disagreed with the content and argument put forward in it, but it was another example of an articulate and skilfully argued speech, which put some older hon. Members to shame. I have considerably more notes in my hand than the hon. Member for High Peak (Mr. Levitt), and I congratulate him on his fine speech and wish him a successful and happy period in the House. He should not take it personally if I say that I hope that he will not stay too long.
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman paid a generous tribute to his predecessor, Charles Hendry. This is the sort of debate in which Charles would have wished to speak. He was committed to the welfare of everyone in our country, as all Conservative Members are. His passionate work for the homeless in the all-party homelessness group bears testimony to his sense of compassion and concern. He will be sadly missed in the House for his expression of the authentic voice of one-nation Toryism.
As far as I could see, the Gracious Speech was a strange mixture of soundbite politics, dogma and a limited dose of common sense. Tonight, I shall concentrate on the dogma that characterised too much of the Queen's Speech. First,
I refer to the words of an earlier Member of the House, Mr. Edmund Burke. The Edmund Burke Society kindly sent every Member of the House a copy of his speech to the electors of Bristol of November 1774--more than 200 years ago. It made terrifying reading in terms of the illumination that it offered to the Government's programme and our general political situation because it was so deeply contemporary. I wonder whether Edmund Burke was prophesying the behaviour of the Minister without Portfolio, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson), or perhaps the Prime Minister, when he said:
Unemployment is, rightly, a matter that concerns the new Government. I would have been more appreciative of their concern had they paid fuller tribute to the previous Government's achievements in that regard. After all, this economy has the lowest unemployment of any major European economy. That happened not by accident but as a result of Government policies. I am staggered by the scale of the reduction in my constituency. Library figures show that, over the past year, unemployment in Mid-Worcestershire fell by 34.7 per cent. to 1,240--a reduction of 660 compared with just a year ago. I welcome the huge reductions that have taken place. However, it is staggering that the Government's attachment to a number of dogmatic principles means that they are probably the first in British political history to come to this House with a Gracious Speech that makes pledges to the people of this country that will increase unemployment, for that is the direct effect of three of their pledges.
The first is the windfall tax, which cannot be paid out of some pot of gold that will do no harm to the rest of the economy. It will be paid for in one of three ways. First, it may be paid for through increased prices for the products of those utilities that must eventually bear that tax. Secondly, it may come out of reduced investment, which will cut employment in the capital goods sector. Thirdly, it may come out of the dividends that would otherwise go to those who hold the shares--the pension funds. In fact, ordinary people will pay the price one way or the other. I suspect that one major impact of that tax will be its effect on unemployment because of the reduction in capital spending by those utilities.
The windfall tax is but one of three pledges in the Queen's Speech that will increase unemployment. Another is the pledge on the national minimum wage. The Deputy Prime Minister has admitted that any damn fool knows that that will cause some kind of shake-out in employment. There it is--an unemployment-increasing pledge at the heart of the Queen's Speech.
The most bizarre and extraordinary pledge is that on the opt-in to the social chapter. We have all the evidence in the world from German and French industrialists and international commentators that our opt-out from the social chapter made us a unique magnet within the European Union for inward investment. It is clear that that opt-out was crucial to maintaining that high investment. We now read a bizarre oxymoron in the Queen's Speech, which promises to "improve competitiveness", yet in the same sentence promises that we will
I am afraid that the Government have again fallen prey to dogma in relation to the health service. In my county of Worcestershire, 85 per cent. of the county's general practitioners are now fundholders. That offers enormous benefits, not just to the 85 per cent. of patients in those fundholding practices but to the other 15 per cent., because that initiative has improved the quality of health care across the national health service. It has levelled up and not levelled down the quality of health care available to all my constituents. As so often in the past, that difference represents the crucial distinction between the two sides of the House.
There are two fundholding practices and one non-fundholding practice in the town of Droitwich Spa. Those GPs have adopted imaginative approaches, including taking advantage of improvements in technology, to produce a dramatic improvement in the quality of health care available locally. All that will be put at risk by the Government's dogmatic insistence on overturning fundholding and replacing it with some kind of meddling commissioning group. I do not know what such groups will be like--we may hear about that later today or in the next few weeks. It is clear, however, that they will be quangos--the great enemy that was attacked a little while ago by the Labour party.
It is obvious that fundholding puts the power where it should be--in the hands of the general practitioner, the man or woman who knows what his or her patients need. Fundholding represents a profoundly democratic approach; by abolishing it, the Government will reduce the level of democracy in the NHS, not increase it.
I love the story about the old days before our reforms when GPs used to send Christmas cards to the consultants at hospitals because they desperately needed their good favour if they were to get their patients treated. There was a two-tier health service then--whether a GP's patients got on to a consultant's list depended on how well that GP got on with the consultant. It was a matter of who one knew and how one could work the system. That two-tier health service has been swept away by fundholding. Instead, the consultants now send Christmas cards to GPs because they want their custom, favour and patients to treat. That is a wonderful illustration of the reversal of power within the NHS, but the Government are dogmatically seeking to overturn that. Fundholding means decentralising, but the Government are set upon recentralising. That is profoundly regrettable.
Before I return to my theme about dogma in the Queen's Speech, I must pause to pay tribute to one of the more sensible measures in it. I am absolutely delighted that it includes a commitment to introduce a Bill to clarify
the relationship between NHS trusts and the private sector in terms of the provision of capital for new hospital building.
I have a special relationship with the new Minister of State at the Department of Health, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Ms Jowell), because she is my pair. That relationship was put in some jeopardy when she descended on Worcester unannounced in the run-up to the election. She made certain statements about the local hospital, but I will forgive and forget that particular lapse.
As the hon. Lady will know, the proposed new hospital in Worcester lies outside my new constituency, but it will serve all my constituents. That building project is at a crucial, advanced stage. The consortium that wants to build that hospital places great importance on the proposed Bill. I thank the Government sincerely for picking up a piece of legislation that was developed by the current Secretary of State's predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell), which would have featured in our own Queen's Speech. I am aware that my right hon. Friend, the NHS generally, the health authority and the trust have done a huge amount of work to bring the new hospital building to fruition at last. I am delighted that the final obstacle--the lack of clarity concerning the relationship between the private sector and NHS trusts--will be swept aside.
I am still concerned that the hon. Lady was unable to answer some of the direct questions that I put to her after her visit about that hospital project. For example, I asked whether she would sweep aside the apparently strong opposition of the union in Worcester to the development of a hospital that used private capital. She failed to say whether the consortium that had been accepted to build the hospital was undoubtedly acceptable to the Labour party.
I am still unclear about the status of the review of the private finance initiative. Will that review last for days, weeks or months? How will it relate to the Bill referred to in the Queen's Speech? I sincerely hope that all those obstacles are removed. If they are, I shall be the first to express my gratitude to the Labour party for picking up our policy and running with it to ensure that that new hospital is at last delivered to the people of Worcestershire.
Some of the most worrying dogma in the Queen's Speech relates to education. In common with my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant), I should like to refer particularly to the assisted places scheme. It is right that I should declare a limited interest, because both my children attend schools that award assisted places, although they are not beneficiaries of them.
When I knocked on doors during the election campaign, I was struck by the extraordinarily large number of people whose children were in receipt of assisted places. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham has said, such parents come from ordinary backgrounds. We are not talking about rich kids getting an unfair subsidy at the expense of poor deprived children in inner-city areas. Those children come from less well-off families who, for one reason or another, have concluded that the education offered at an independent school is appropriate for their children. I see no reason why that perfectly legitimate choice should be denied to those parents.
The parrot cry we get from the Labour party is that the assisted places scheme subsidises private schools. That is absolute nonsense. They will survive perfectly comfortably without the assisted places scheme, but they will lose some of that cultural diversity and mix of socio-economic backgrounds that make them more vibrant and less elitist. I bitterly regret the fact that, because of the Labour party's dogmatic assertion that that scheme is equivalent to a subsidy to such schools, we will lose that scheme.
Four schools in my area of Worcestershire benefit from assisted places. Two of them were state schools--the Worcester Royal grammar school, and King's school, which is direct grant. They became independent because they did not want to go comprehensive. Most of the children at those schools would otherwise have been educated at the state's expense, but many parents have found the resources to send their children to those schools because the schools have maintained their reputation for excellence. The fact that quite a large number of children attend Worcester Royal grammar school on assisted places is something that we should welcome, because the scheme has maintained access to that school for children from less well-off backgrounds. I am absolutely delighted about that, particularly because those four schools are the only ones in that part of Worcestershire that offer sixth forms. Those who live near Worcester who want to send their children to a sixth form must opt for the private independent sector. Under the state system, one is forced into the tertiary sector, which many parents do not like. I, too, prefer sixth forms in schools.
The assisted places scheme has extended choice and broken down barriers. To me, that is entirely in line with the spirit that the Prime Minister seems to wish to claim that he has set before the British people both in the manifesto on which he won the election and in the Gracious Speech. I am extremely surprised at his insistence on pursuing the dogmatic policy to abolish assisted places.
As for the arithmetic behind the abolition of the assisted places scheme and the pledge to reduce class sizes in primary schools, I would be tempted to describe that with an unparliamentary word. You would call me to account, Mr. Deputy Speaker, if I used the word that I would like to use. I do not know whether you will allow me to say that it is deliberately misleading--that expression may also be a little tendentious and I may have to withdraw it, but that is what I feel about the estimate.
The abolition of the assisted places scheme will save a pittance. In one respect, I am glad that it is to be phased out over seven years, but that means that the pittance that it does save will become available only very slowly. The estimate that I heard my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition use yesterday was that an extra £250 million would be required to meet the pledge on primary school sizes. That is a huge sum of money over and above the money from the abolition of the assisted places scheme.
I was intrigued by the arithmetic of the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) when he made his remarks yesterday--and Hansard has done him an even greater injustice. According to Hansard, he says that £2,250 million will go to assisted places at three
schools in his constituency, benefiting 95 of his constituents. If that were right, it would mean that the figure per child would be £23.7 million, so that is probably not the figure. I think that he said that £2.25 million would benefit 95 children. Unless my calculator has let me down, that means £23,700 per child. I do not believe that figure either, because I am not aware of any schools in the country that charge £23,700 per year--£13,000 is a pretty healthy whack to pay for a private school, and schools in Worcester charge a fraction of that.
I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman has got his figures wrong by an order of magnitude and the cost per child of the assisted places scheme in his constituency is in the order of £2,300. That fact is important because, according to figures provided by the Audit Commission, the 1995-96 figure for spending per secondary school pupil in metropolitan council areas averages £2,194--so it will save about £100 per child on average. The figures for expenditure in Manchester show that it spends above the average. It is difficult to tell from the table what the exact amount is, but it is probably about £2,300 or £2,400. Therefore, if the figures are right, the abolition of the assisted places scheme in Manchester could cost the people of Manchester money because the children who would have replaced pupils with assisted places in later years will not be able to afford to go to those independent schools; they will return to the state sector, where they will have to be paid for at that rate. Therefore, the policy could cost money, not save money, in Manchester.
Savings around the country will be very modest--nugatory even. The average cost of the assisted places scheme, including the most expensive schools, is only £3,800 per pupil. We are therefore looking at small savings to fuel a regrettable sense of dogma on the part of the Labour party.
That same label of dogma applies to the abolition of the nursery voucher scheme. It is a difficult subject; I fully agree that the policy has not had the effect intended, but that is no fault of the previous Government. It is the fault of county councils up and down the country that have set about amending their entrance policies to schools deliberately to ensure that they can maximise their revenue from the nursery voucher scheme at the cost of the pre-school playgroups and the private nursery schools. They have sought to shuffle off the blame on to the Government in a very skilful public relations exercise mounted by the burgeoning PR departments of Labour and Liberal Democrat-controlled county councils. It will not do.
I understand that in Wandsworth, where there is a Conservative-controlled local education authority, pre-school playgroup provision has increased since the introduction of nursery vouchers. The authority was determined to use the scheme to produce choice and diversity. Here we see the true Labour colours: an absolute obsession with obtaining a monopoly of state provision for public services. That is what the Labour party wants and that is what it seeks to achieve.
I fully admit that the Conservative party underestimated the passionate desire of Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians to get their hands on the monopoly of public provision. We underestimated the deviousness that they would use to squeeze the pre-school playgroups out of
existence, so perhaps we must bear a share of the blame for the tragedy that is unfolding in too many areas of the country.
I visited several pre-school playgroups in Mid-Worcestershire and watched the difficulties that they face. But I blame no one but the politicians at county hall: it is they who set out on this mischievous path. I sincerely hope that the Government can be persuaded to think again about nursery vouchers. The Government should not abolish them, but should encourage Labour colleagues who run the local education authorities to use the vouchers constructively to produce the choice and diversity that parents want.
Yesterday, we heard the Prime Minister's traditional claim that education was his priority. Why has he not been saying that to the Labour local education authorities the length and breadth of the country? It is they who bear the heavy burden of blame for failure, particularly in our inner-city areas. It is no coincidence that Islington comes at the bottom of the pile and is the worst of all the local education authorities. We know the Prime Minister's response to that problem for his own family. I do not blame him for doing what he did; he made the right decision, faced with the appalling disaster that is Islington's education. But it is the Labour party's fault that education is so bad in Islington. It is a cheek for the Labour party, having failed so many generations of children, now to say that education is its priority. I suppose that one should rejoice over a death-bed conversion--that at last the Labour party has seen the light--but it is a bit late when so many children have paid the price for the Labour party's failure.
Another example of dogma guiding education policy in the Queen's Speech is the effective abolition of grant-maintained schools. There are weasel words about developing
I have one final point, on a more optimistic note, to make on education. The Gracious Speech mentions the review of higher education that Sir Ron Dearing has been conducting. I have high hopes for that review in relation to dance and drama students, but I understand from talking to the Under-Secretary of State for National Heritage, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher), that I may be disappointed. I hope that the Government will look in detail at the Dearing review and consider the future for the funding of higher education, which is a difficult issue for any Government to grapple with. The Labour party has been more honest about the problems that they will face over this issue than it has been over other matters. If the Dearing report does not deal with the problems of dance and drama students who rely on discretionary awards from their local education
authorities to receive the training they deserve, I hope that the Government will set up their own review to address the problem.
"To be a good member of parliament, is, let me tell you, no easy task; especially at this time, when there is so strong a disposition to run into the perilous extremes of servile compliance or wild popularity."
I wonder whether he was foreseeing the regrettable arrogance that is creeping into the Labour party's treatment of this place and its rush to overpopular legislation when he said:
"government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide".
Were you not now on the other side, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you would agree that those are strangely prescient words. I am sure that, in your previous incarnation, you would have agreed.
"opt into the Social Chapter".
That is simply untenable. The opt-in to the social chapter will inevitably increase unemployment. It is another example of dogma triumphing over reason.
"a new role for local education authorities and parents"
and establishing
"a new framework for the decentralised and equitable organisation of schools".
Those are wonderful words, but what do they actually mean? They mean taking power away from parents, governors and teachers and giving them to politicians and bureaucrats instead. In the process, funding for grant-maintained schools such as Flyford Flavell first school in my area or Prince Henry's high school will be cut. That is a scandal and I urge the Government to think again.
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