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8.22 pm
Mr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test): I am grateful for this opportunity to make my maiden speech. I congratulate the hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) on an excellent maiden speech, some of which I agreed with. I especially agreed with his comments about the beauty of his constituency. I have spent many weekends in the Lyme Regis area and I can vouch for the accuracy of his remarks. I hope that the next time the hon. Gentleman sees me sitting on the Cobb at Lyme Regis he will, in a spirit of inter-party friendliness, buy me a cup of tea.
Some 130 years ago, John Ruskin spoke about the duty of the state. He said:
Hampshire and Southampton are by no means the worst areas of the country in terms of educational opportunity, but 25 per cent. of Hampshire's infant schools and30 per cent. of its infant and junior schools have classes of more than 30. In Southampton, 1,221 infant school pupils and 2,123 junior school pupils are being educated in classes of more than 30. Whatever we think about the arguments on the quality of teaching, common sense tells us that the larger the class the less the individual attention, particularly in the early years. That means that pupils are more likely to under achieve.
As a child of the state system and the father of two children who attend the comprehensive school nearest to my home, I am passionately concerned to ensure that the state system works in the best interests of everybody. Class sizes are important, and their reduction will make a difference even if in the beginning the classes are only a little smaller. I was astonished by some of the speeches of Conservative Members on Second Reading, particularly that of the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington), who suggested that we should reduce class sizes only if the reductions are huge. He said that we could keep assisted places because the difference that their abolition would make to class sizes would not be very great.
The true import of that statement is revealed by changing some of the characters. It is like saying that a small increase in the number of policemen on the beat would not make an enormous difference to crime; only a huge increase would have that effect. Therefore, it is said, we should keep many police on one or two estates so that at least a few people can have a good quality of life and be free from crime. That example may help us to understand what Conservative Members are talking about.
Much about the Opposition's case is suspect. They quote the case advanced by the Institute of Public Finance in its 1996 paper on reducing class sizes. I am not sure how many Opposition Members have read that paper. The assumption is that the only saving that is available to the Government is the difference between the aggregate cost of an assisted place and the aggregate cost of a secondary school place. Using that calculation, the savings will amount to only £13 million in 1998-99. It is interesting to note that, by the end of the Government's first term, even the IPF suggests that they will be only £16 million short of their target if they use the aggregate amount that is saved by abolishing the assisted places scheme to reduce class sizes of five, six and seven-year-olds.
The Government say that those figures are incorrect. In a written reply on 22 May, it was stated that there are 800,000 empty places in existing LEA provision. Therefore, there is ample scope to accommodate pupils without assisted places. Who is right? The Minister's case seems to be strong, and we can carry out a test by examining the number of assisted places per local education authority. The hon. Member for Guildford (Mr. St. Aubyn) spoke about that. A more accurate picture can be obtained by using places in counties as the yardstick, because many people in London boroughs and metropolitan boroughs who take up assisted places come from outside those areas.
As we have heard, the discrepancies are huge. People in some parts of the country are more likely to gain access to assisted places than people in areas where there are few such places. That in itself is a scandal, and anyone who attempts to defend assisted places must explain the enormous disparity in the availability of assisted places in different parts of the country. A written answer of 27 January reveals the interesting fact that, even if we take, county by county, the number of places presently provided by the assisted places scheme and set that against the number of vacancies county by county, not in one case is the number of places potentially lost by the scheme anywhere near the number of vacancies. Therefore, even on a local level, the numbers can be accommodated within the state system at very little additional cost. The IPF figures are simply wrong; the savings are not as it suggests, and they are far more likely to be close to what my hon. Friend the Minister suggests.
I like to think that Southampton is a city of educational opportunity. It is certainly a centre for business. It has enormous European connections, a fine university and a thriving institute of higher education. One in seven citizens of Southampton is a student. Its port has links with the whole world. Its football team generously lets in goals to visitors the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, although it sometimes scores itself.
Oddly enough, the city was represented by my namesake, Colonel Whitehead, between 1642 and 1644. In between his parliamentary duties, he besieged and captured Bishops Waltham palace, which was, I suppose, an early example of business interests outside one's parliamentary duties. The city was also represented, Mr. Deputy Speaker, by your illustrious predecessor, Dr. Horace King, later Lord Maybray King. In his maiden speech in the House in March 1950, he spent much time describing the devastation wrought on Southampton by the blitz. I have not, of course, had to endure such trials. Instead I have lived for almost 30 years in a rapidly changing and prospering city that has been kind and generous to me. I hope that I can repay some of that by my endeavours here on its behalf.
You will also recall, Mr. Deputy Speaker, my predecessor Sir James Hill for his particular hard work in chairing many Commons Committees as a member of the Chairmen's Panel. I understand that he was an habitue of the many fine restaurants in the House, only some of which I have discovered so far. I wish him a long and healthy retirement from politics and thank him for his work on behalf of my city.
In a recent debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, West (Mr. Salter) said that Oscar Wilde lived in Reading under enforced conditions for some time, but I discovered recently that, for some years, he lived freely of his own accord in a house on the edge of Southampton common. He is not just a pretty epigrammatist. In an essay in 1895 entitled "Socialism and the Soul of Man", he made a profound description of the many and the few:
Mr. Boswell:
It is my pleasant duty, on behalf of colleagues, to thank the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Mr. Whitehead). His maiden speech contained some light touches about the city that he is clearly proud to represent and, in its substance, reflected a degree of preparation and passion that we shall remember and note. May I also be the first from the Conservative Benches to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) on his speech. He showed a remarkable blend of both fluency and cogency in advancing his argument.
Clearly the Government may claim a mandate for the passage of the Bill, but just because they claim a mandate does not mean that it is of itself sensible. I advise the House to reject its Third Reading tonight. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and others have spoken both this evening and earlier of the Bill's flaws. I sum them up simply by saying that it displays misplaced opportunism and suggests that the problems that our schools have undoubtedly faced and continue to face will, in some way, be solved by the Bill's passage. It is dangling a false and shining prospectus before us.
The Bill contains neither the adequate financial means nor the mechanism to secure the class size reductions and the improvements of standards that Labour and indeed Conservative Members want. The substance of the Bill is very much less about class size and, sadly, reverts to the class war, but rather than go on about the overall sweep of the Bill, I should like to leave the House with one or two points for it to consider.
In my speeches in Committee, I have emphasised both the Bill's impact on individuals--on parents and pupils--and, to some extent, the institutional impact. I am concerned--I say this after receiving a sensitive and, in certain respects, helpful response from the Under-Secretary--that the way the Bill is structured will still create problems for individuals at age 11, who will find themselves caught in the transition from private education through the assisted places scheme to the maintained sector when they would typically have expected to remain in their prep school until the age of 13.
That is a human problem. The Minister sought to justify it by saying that she felt and had received advice that the settling in for those children would be less traumatic at age 11 than at 13. Clearly, that was not the view of her
colleague, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle), a former shadow education spokesman, who made his views clear in his pledge to the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools and later in April. However, whether it is her view or not, the House needs to consider the views of parents and the interests of the children.
I hope that, either in subsequent consideration of the Bill in another place, in regulations or at least in advice to local education authorities, the Government will bring forward the principles that, first, the interests of the child, the individual pupil, should be paramount and, secondly, that parents' views should be taken into account by the Secretary of State in exercising his discretion on when the transfer should take place or assisted places funding should be withdrawn.
That is the personal and human side of this, but I should like to close on the Bill's overall impact. Last week, I told the House that I was concerned that, just as the move to comprehensive schools in the 1960s and 1970s, however well intentioned, had driven apart the state and private sectors of education, the Bill too ran that risk.
The hon. Member for Walton has featured extensively in our debates. I have already referred to his pledge. He has been the Banquo's ghost of the Committee stage, Report and Third Reading. One thing that he was quoted as saying, however, struck me as interesting; I hope that it is an earnest of the Government's intentions. He was quoted as saying that he wanted to build bridges to the private sector. I agree with that, but I fear that the Bill may build wedges dividing the state and private sectors rather than bridges linking them.
"the first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attain years of discretion."
That is a good yardstick by which to judge the government of the United Kingdom. How are we to do that, and how well are we doing 130 years on from Ruskin in terms of my constituency and my city of Southampton? I cannot say hand on heart that, if John Ruskin visited us now, he would say that we had succeeded. What would
he make of our homelessness and of the gross inequality in educational opportunity that we tolerate, although we have the technical and organisational capacity to realise Ruskin's vision?
"Socialism will be of value simply because it will lead to individualism. Under the new conditions individualism will be far freer, far finer and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great actual individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual individualism latent and potential in mankind generally."
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As I have illustrated, the socialism that Oscar Wilde proclaimed considered all human potential: not just the dazzling achievements of the few, but the unleashing of the potential of the many.
I cannot find a better vision of the socialism of the Government I believe in than the observations of Ruskin and Wilde. However, the figures that I have quoted on the children denied the opportunity to make the best of their individuality bear witness against that vision. We have a choice and I am proud to make my maiden speech in this debate to advocate that choice--to keep the faith, albeit in a small way, with the vision of potential in everyone, which we in society can unlock, instead of giving privileges to some children while allowing others to fall by the wayside. I know what I want for the children of Southampton. That is why I have been proud to support the Bill.
8.34 pm
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