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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Before I call the next hon. Member, it may be helpful if I remind the House that, under our current arrangements, the clock is stopped if an intervention is taken. Hon. Members are thus not prejudiced and do not lose any speaking time if they take an intervention.
3.47 pm
Mr. Phil Willis (Harrogate and Knaresborough): The hon. Member for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell), who is no longer in her place, referred to a school in her constituency that had agreed, with the support of the Liberal Democrats, to pay for an additional teacher. I think it is fair to put it on record that that agreement--which many of us regret--was supported by all parties, including the Labour party in Cambridge.
In my 10 minutes, I do not intend to waste the time of the House by rehearsing the comments made by other hon. Members, either for or against the Budget. I come from a practical education background, and I wish to explore how the Budget will affect people on the ground. I have spent a fair amount of time in the past two days consulting the local education authority in North Yorkshire and schools
in my constituency to discover what the Budget means to them. The reality is that, from the director of education downwards and upwards, the Budget will have little, if any, effect on them.
North Yorkshire has passported all £12.9 million into schools, as it did last year. It has seen a provisional increase in its tax rate of 9.6 per cent., which is a significant figure, on top of 14 per cent. last year. Despite that, every school in my constituency and throughout the LEA area will lose at least 0.75 per cent. of its budget. The Budget proposals may sound marvellous in the House and in some of the press releases, but they will make absolutely no difference to the vast majority of schools in North Yorkshire. I challenge Ministers to contradict that statement.
As a result of the Budget, libraries, which are part of our education service in North Yorkshire--I know that that is not the case elsewhere--will face real cuts. It is no use saying that the odd library will have computers when most libraries are able to buy fewer and fewer books--another major resource that some people quite like--to lend. More important, libraries are having to cut staff--the very people who will be needed to teach people to use the computers to access the internet and the learning age initiative.
I want to raise the major issue of a group of people who were not mentioned in the Budget, or by the Secretary of State or other hon. Members. They are the army of people who support our local authority and school services. They include special needs assistants, those who work in the music service and library and office staff. The single status agreement, which was made in 1997 under this Government, will cost the local authority in North Yorkshire £2.27 million. The net result is that the Tory administration in North Yorkshire has decided that it cannot afford that cost and it will therefore be paid by the very poorest people in our system--the care assistants in local authority homes and the teaching assistants in our schools, who will lose 24 per cent. of their pay as a result of the agreement.
I ask the Financial Secretary, when she winds up the debate, to address that issue. How can a national agreement such as the single status agreement, which impacts on every local authority in Britain, be ignored in the Budget and the departmental totals when some of the most lowly paid staff in the country are having to pay for the agreement with their jobs?
Another issue that has not been mentioned today is the further education sector. Baroness Kennedy called it the Cinderella service, and there was to be a revolution in FE. It is the engine room of lifelong learning, but did the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, in his statement, or the Chancellor, in his Budget, announce a single extra penny for information and computer technology in FE? Is there not to be a learning revolution in our colleges? There is no money for the infrastructure, or to deal with the chronic debt that so many of our colleges have.
Mr. St. Aubyn:
Will the hon. Gentleman agree that, compared with the increase in the numbers of people going through further education that was achieved in the previous Parliament, this Government's claims and ambitions are pathetic?
Mr. Willis:
I am coming to your lot in a minute.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. The hon. Gentleman is not coming to my lot in any way, shape or form.
Mr. Willis:
I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for that unfortunate slip. I shall answer the hon. Gentleman's question in due course.
The hon. Gentleman has hinted at one of the issues for FE--the growth in the number of students. The Government are making available an extra £1.1 billion for FE and HE and most of that will be used to cope with the 700,000 extra students whom FE colleges are asked to deal with during this Parliament. The Budget and the Education Secretary's statement completely ignore the plight of FE staff and lecturers. Since incorporation, they have been utterly demoralised.
There were 60,000 full-time FE lecturers in 1993, and 21,500 have either been made redundant or taken early voluntary retirement packages. We now have an army of agency staff working in our colleges. They do not have the same commitment to those colleges and to delivering their programme as do the full-time staff. Yet there is nothing in the statement to deal with the huge problem of demoralisation.
The hon. Member for Guildford (Mr. St. Aubyn) referred to the success of the previous Government. They were successful in productivity terms because they got rid of a third of the staff and increased the number of students by a third, but they also wrecked the FE system.
Mr. St. Aubyn:
The hon. Gentleman will recall that the report of the Select Committee on Education and Employment, of which the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) is a member, agreed with recent findings that there was no significant change in the quality of teaching as a result of those productivity gains. There was a real saving, and a real increase in the numbers being taught.
Mr. Willis:
I have to disagree with the hon. Gentleman and point him to the Further Education Funding Council inspections. The council's latest report makes it absolutely clear that the poorest-quality teaching in our colleges is by part-time staff. Why is that? The hon. Gentleman knows the answer. So highly valued were FE staff under the previous Government's regime that one in five full-time permanent FE staff now have no teaching qualifications, and 60 per cent. of the part-time agency staff--the bogus self-employed staff, as the Secretary of State once called them--have no qualifications at all. That is an absolute disgrace. The Secretary of State today had no answers, no proposals and no funding to deal with the under-qualification of our FE staff or to rebuild their morale by investing in them.
Dr. George Turner (North-West Norfolk):
There is much to welcome in the detail of the Budget, but I am particularly pleased about the extra commitment being
I was delighted to hear about the better deal that the Budget delivers for the more than 20,000 pensioners in my constituency, for children and for business. I entirely endorse the modernisation theme and the Government's attempt to encourage and coerce people, throughout society, into making better use of new technology.
At Budget time, we look more broadly at the direction that the Government are taking. Although I understand that the role of the Opposition is to whinge and to find details to complain about, we must occasionally stand back from the detail of the Budget.
It was no accident that the Chancellor referred to measures that are being introduced over a period of at least three years. The right hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor) made much of the fact that the Chancellor was in his statement discussing three years of Budget changes. The Chancellor should be congratulated on that, rather than condemned for it. Having spent many years in local government, I know that the greatest problems were caused by lack of certainty and the fact that only from year to year did one know what it would be possible to achieve within the budget.
Mr. Grieve:
I certainly share the hon. Gentleman's view that projecting budgetary proposals over three years may have a great deal to commend it. Is it not therefore incumbent on the Chancellor clearly to spell out in his statement and accompanying documentation the year-by-year impact on total tax over the same period?
Dr. Turner:
As one who spends no more than the average amount of time on these issues, I must say that I am much less confused than some Opposition Members tell us that they are. I heard the confirmation of previous announcements. I knew that it was confirmation because I had heard the earlier announcements. I heard the Chancellor refer to confirmation of some of the detail, and have seen it in the documentation.
The Chancellor and the Government are displaying a welcome element of vision. They are saying, "We intend to introduce reform". They are acknowledging that they cannot reform in one Budget but that telling people where they will be in a year or two's time is helpful, and are saying, "We do not want to be pulling rabbits out of the hat on Budget day." That is a helpful development in the running of our nation's finances.
The reforms that we are introducing are necessary. We inherited an unacceptable situation. When Opposition Members refer to some golden inheritance, they entirely ignore the reality of the problems that the nation faced when this Government were elected. It was necessary to change the direction of the ship of state, and when one is changing direction, one faces problems and difficulties. The Government have none the less been right to do as they have. It would not have been right to continue with a business taxation system that was not in the best interests of the future of business--despite the difficulties that that change caused, particularly in the pensions industry. I congratulate the Government on the way in
which they have withstood the flak over such changes. It was essential in the long-term interests of business that we reformed the taxation system under which it operated.
As a constituency Member of Parliament, I should like to raise with the Government two points on more detailed issues. I know that the Chancellor has recognised that the impact on the rural environment, from which most of my constituents come, of changes in the fuel escalator is dramatically different from that on more urban environments. That has been accepted by the Government, and was acknowledged in last year's Budget by the introduction of special measures to encourage better provision of rural transport, which was very welcome.
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