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Mrs. Gillan: My hon. Friend makes an extremely valid point. The Government have on their Back Benches many unknown quantities. I am sure that they have been busy finding out more about them. They never expected to be elected, and the Government never expected to have to deal with them. However, I am sure that the hon. Members who were surprised at their own election are still Members of
integrity, and they will start asking questions of the Government--questions which patently, from the Minister's performance tonight, he is unable to answer.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: My hon. Friend raised an important point about how we can ensure that the extra money granted by the SSA system will be given to individual schools. This year, £500,000 of the increase that the previous Government gave Gloucestershire LEA has not gone to the schools. If a similar thing happens in this regard, we shall be in difficulty.
Mrs. Gillan: My hon. Friend makes his point and reinforces it. I remember, in the dim and distant days when I was a Minister, a delegation from a Labour council from the north of England, who asked for more money for several schools in her area. She was surprised to find that the Department had already allocated money to those schools which, mysteriously, had never reached them.
The Minister still has so many questions to answer that I do not know how he has the gall to sit down after such a short speech.
Mr. Luff:
I did not receive an answer from the Minister. I sought to intervene, but he suggested that he would make a longer speech. I asked him about the phasing out of the assisted places scheme and the class sizes pledge. How much will the Minister have saved from the abolition of the assisted places scheme at the end of this Parliament to enable him to meet his class sizes pledge? Surely he will not have enough. I wanted to ask him that, but I was denied the opportunity.
Mrs. Gillan:
My hon. Friend is right, and I shall give the Minister the opportunity to answer that directly. How much money will be available at the end of this year?
Mr. Byers:
By the end of this century, £100 million will be available, and that will be enough to deliver on the class sizes pledge.
Mrs. Gillan:
I repeat the question to the Minister. How much money will be available at the end of the first year? The Minister is repeating parrot fashion the lines written by his officials. He does not have an original thought in his head. I ask him to answer the question directly.
Mr. Byers:
As we all know from our days in opposition, when the hon. Lady was a Minister, she certainly parroted the lines prepared for her by civil servants.
Mrs. Gillan:
That intervention really was not worth giving way to, was it, Mr. Lord?
Mr. Lidington:
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mrs. Gillan:
Yes, I think that my hon. Friend will have a worthwhile contribution to make.
Mr. Lidington:
As the Minister has just reasserted that the Government hope for savings of £100 million by the
Mrs. Gillan:
My hon. Friend has made the point, and I hope that the Minister has been listening to it. I shall give way to him if he would like to agree to put a detailed explanation in the Library. He does not want to intervene, so he obviously does not want to do that.
We have had some excellent speeches. My hon. Friends have spoken with great passion and feeling on the subject, compared with the derisory miniature speech delivered by the Minister just now. It is good to see so many Labour Members, because at one time so interested were the Government in education, education, education that about five Labour Members were listening to the debate. Yet the Government asked for this Committee stage to be taken on the Floor of the House. There was no interest in the debate, because they have closed their mind. The Government are just pushing the scheme aside, out of sight, out of mind. The guillotine is coming down.
What is the hurry? The amendments asked the Government to stop and think. Let us put in proportion what we are talking about. The Minister said time and again that by the end of the century the Government will have saved £100 million. That is less than 0.001 per cent. of the education budget. It is a derisory amount. For the sake of raising such a derisory amount, the Minister will end a system that is providing a first-class education to 40,000 of our children. Will that £100 million contribute to reducing class sizes to the level that the Minister wants? A little, but nowhere near enough to reduce class sizes to 30 by the end of the Government's life. He has failed to answer any of the questions that have been posed by me and my hon. Friends.
Mr. St. Aubyn:
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Minister's disgraceful response to my intervention shows that the Government will look after people on low incomes if they are in a Labour area, but that the Government have no care for the future benefit of people with low incomes in Conservative areas?
Mrs. Gillan:
That is obvious from everything that was said on Second Reading, and if my hon. Friend reads Hansard for that debate, he will see the theme of envy running through all the contributions from Labour Members.
The questions that the Minister has not answered are very serious. For example, how should local education authorities prepare for the increased number of children they will have to accept? Not all parents who would have an assisted place for their child will be able to make the sacrifice to spend the money and send their child to an independent school.
How should schools gear themselves up and make provision for the change? In a written answer to a question tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice), it is obvious that the Minister does not know. He was asked:
The Minister is being stupid. He should accept the amendments and proceed more slowly. I understand that the Government want to get rid of the assisted places scheme. I understand their hatred for it and the way in which they despise independent education, notwithstanding the fact that more than 40 Labour Members were educated in independent schools.
Had the Minister not been so pig-headed and slowed down, time would have solved his problems. The Girls Public Day Schools Trust would have had time to get its fund up and running, to try to replace the moneys from the assisted places scheme. Other schools throughout the country might have had time to make provision to replace what the Government will rob from the community. By proceeding so rapidly, the Minister will cause children to fall back on the local education authorities' provision, and, by his own admission, those authorities have not been consulted and are not prepared for what might happen.
By failing to accept the amendments, the Minister will damage individuals. He obviously does not care about the effect that the Bill will have on families, because he is not listening. What will happen to the families who expected, the year after next, that their child would have a good chance of getting an assisted place? He has dashed their hopes by not accepting our sensible proposals. We do not suggest stopping abolition, because we understand that that is what the Minister wants to do, but we ask him to take more time to do it for the sake of the children.
The Government obviously have no respect for children, and certainly they have no respect for the education of the 40,000 children we are discussing. We shall therefore press the amendment to a vote.
Question put, That the amendment be made:--
The Committee divided: Ayes 138, Noes 353.
"what estimate he has made of the number of extra primary teachers to be provided from the abolition of the assisted places scheme in each financial year from 1997-98 to 2001-02."
He replied:
"It will be for individual LEAs to judge what adjustments will be needed to primary teacher numbers to ensure smaller classes."
He obviously has not consulted LEAs about the numbers needed to provide smaller classes. He has therefore certainly not consulted the LEAs about how they will prepare for the increased numbers of children who will no longer attend independent schools.
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