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8.15 pm

Half the work has been done for the Minister. There have been answers to parliamentary questions showing class sizes by local education authority. What is missing is information on how many teachers would be needed in each education authority to fix the problem. If clause 1 is passed, the Government will be able to get hold of some money to fix the problem. Perhaps the Minister will tell us, in a written answer or a statement placed in the Library, how the scheme will work. I do not think that they can deliver on their promise.

We do not know how the money will be released, how it will be allocated to local authorities and whether it will ever reach the schools that it is intended to reach.

Mr. Clappison: Perhaps I can help my right hon. Friend. Some research was done before the election, showing that the cost of employing the teachers required to reduce class sizes by the necessary amount was about £68 million. By some miracle, that was the figure repeated by the Labour candidates as the anticipated savings.

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Now that the Labour party has come into government, I have asked the same question, and the answer has vanished. They cannot now say what the cost will be.

Mr. Jack: I am grateful for that contribution. The Minister should go back to the author of the information and inquire. The Committee is being invited to endorse the clause. We ought to have the information if we are to do so. How can we judge the validity of the measure without it?

Mr. Steen: Am I right in thinking that the money saved from the scheme will go to primary schools, but the savings will come from assisted places for children going to secondary schools?

Mr. Jack: My hon. Friend brings me neatly to a second area of concern--another reason why I do not believe that the assisted places scheme as defined in the clause should cease to have effect. Let me go back to the letter that I received from my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham. I was anxious to discover the relationship between the amount spent on secondary schools through the standard spending assessment formula and the costs of the assisted places scheme.

My hon. Friend made it clear that I could not make a one-to-one comparison, because the money that went through the standard spending assessment formula did not take into account capital and other expenses, but there was a relationship. I was surprised by how close the cost of an assisted place was to the amount of money allocated to secondary schools in Lancashire under the standard spending assessment. I could not understand how Lancashire education authority would find any extra money to reduce primary school class sizes. Unfortunately--perhaps this is a comment against me--Lancashire is towards the top of the table for class sizes.

We could have a debate on classroom assistants and other matters, but you would rightly bring back to order, Mr. Martin, so I shall not. The Minister said nothing about where Lancashire would find the extra money to deliver smaller class sizes when the education authority would be busy paying the money to the secondary schools, almost pound for pound.

It is incumbent on the Minister, if he wants the Committee to allow clause 1 to stand part, to convince us with some detail. It is rank arrogance for him to say that he will have the money by the turn of the century and that everything will be all right. Governments do not operate with blank cheques, and he knows that, when he presents his proposal to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Treasury, the Treasury officials--I know this, as, like my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), I have been there--will crawl over it and will have him for breakfast, lunch and tea unless he has the detail. The Minister is new to the job so I am giving give him fair warning that he needs that amount of detail.

My third concern relates to the state schools in my constituency for which I have fought tirelessly and for which I eventually won large sums of money to assist them in their expansion.

Mr. Patrick Nicholls (Teignbridge): A real hero.

Mr. Jack: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his acknowledgement of my singular efforts in that regard.

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I shall carry on fighting because I believe in choice and diversity and I think that all schools require the right resources to deliver education to our children. I shall fight for my state schools as hard as I shall for any other schools in my constituency. Those schools, however, would be the first to tell me that, because they did so well under the previous Government and because they are attractive schools, they are already bulging at the seams and struggling to meet demand. Where is the money coming from in Lancashire to expand those schools?

Mr. Forth: In case anyone should doubt what my right hon. Friend is saying, I should point out that I was the recipient of his assiduous and almost unending lobbying on behalf of schools in his constituency when I had the privilege to serve in the Department for Education and Employment. In case some newly elected colleagues imagine that what my right hon. Friend is saying is a routine or ritual statement, I happily confirm that he was indeed assiduous and persistent and very often, I am happy to say, successful in promoting the interests of state schools in his constituency.

Mr. Jack: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for acknowledging and underpinning the thrust of my argument. That leads me to a further strand of thinking on the subject and another reason why I do not want clause 1 to stand part. I want to make certain that the existing legislation remains in effect.

Mr. Maude: On the issue of where state schools will get the money from to accommodate children displaced from the independent system by the abolition of the assisted places scheme, will my right hon. Friend confirm that, under the proposal, successful schools that are already full to capacity will have to accept more children as a result of displacement and that the effect will be yet more destruction--in this case, the destruction of choice because more places will be taken up by default? Is that not yet more reckless damage caused by this irresponsible Government?

Mr. Jack: My right hon. Friend is correct. I wish that he could have been with me during the general election campaign. I remember walking along one particular road alongside the Royal Lytham golf club. It comprised a terrace of modest houses. A lady said that she wanted to talk to me about education, and I thought that I was going to get a right earful. She was a single mother worried about assisted places. She was a woman of modest means trying to do the best for her son and his future. I put our arguments to her, and I trust that she listened. That is the human dimension that the Minister of the people's party chooses to scorn. To put it bluntly, to judge from his performance so far, the Minister could not care less about some of the people whom his party claims to represent.

I now develop my next line of thought. The Government have established a task force comprising Professor Brighouse and Mr. Woodhead. There will be a head-to-head confrontation, and I am sure that tickets will sold. It will be interesting to see what happens. However, I accept its establishment in the right spirit and believe that it is intended to improve standards. It is as though the Government have adopted a Pontius Pilate approach--they wash their hands of decisions and pass them on to other people. That is the route that they have chosen.

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In the event of the task force--this august body--concluding that teaching standards and resources for teachers would contribute more to children's education at primary level than the abolition of the assisted places scheme, would the Minister be prepared to recognise that, if he gets the money, he may have other calls on it and therefore might not be able to deliver on primary school class size reductions? If the Minister is to be true to the Chancellor's edict that he stay within his departmental spending limit, I have a feeling in my bones that the money is not necessarily destined for the place about which the Minister has told us.

My final argument picks up a point already made by right hon. and hon. Friends and relates to a very real worry. In the last financial year, the county of Lancashire last year chose to keep back some £10 million of the additional funding provided by the former Government. The Government gave £26.3 million extra to Lancashire, but only £16 million reached the schools. The issue of class sizes in Lancashire could have been dealt with had the local authority remitted all the money to primary schools. Clause 1 should not stand part, because it provides no guarantee that the money will reach the schools.

There is a breathtaking lack of detail in the legislation. The research paper prepared by the Library contains the following sentence:

"Until the White Paper is published, no detail of the proposal is available although areas which might appear to require legislation include a duty on LEAs or governing bodies to reduce class sizes".

Even if the money gets where it is supposed to, we do not know that anyone will have to do anything with it, but the Minister is asking the Opposition and the Committee to agree to clause 1 stand part without providing any of the detail that he needs to win his argument.

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