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Mr. Raynsford: Hon. Members should wait and hear what I have to say. Tory North Somerset has chosen to increase its council tax by 15.4 per cent., compared with increases of less than half that set by the other three councils in the area—Bath and North East Somerset, which is under no overall control; Bristol, which is Labour-controlled; and South Gloucestershire, which is under Liberal Democrat control. The Conservative council alone pushed up its council tax by disproportionate amounts. The conclusion is clear—Tory councils cost people more. Look at the average council tax this year. In Tory authorities, it is £1,008; in Liberal Democrat councils, it is £934; in Labour authorities, it is £818. This year, council tax increases in Tory authorities are 16.1 per cent.; in Liberal Democrat councils, 10.5 per cent.; and in Labour councils, 10.7 per cent. That tells a story—Tory councils cost people more.
It is clear that today's motion smacks of desperation on the part of the Opposition—desperation to score a few points in advance of Thursday's elections. But the facts tell a different story of recovery from the bleak inheritance left by the Conservatives in 1997. They tell a story of progress, not just this year but over the past six years, and they reveal a clear path for progress in the future. Of course, there are still huge challenges and a need to do much more, but, unlike the Opposition, we in government are proud of our past and present and are confident of our future. They, by contrast, live for today's press conference, afraid to face up to their past misdeeds or admit their plans for future felonies. They have no credible prospects. I can empathise with the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden and perhaps even feel a little sorry for him. [Hon. Members: "No!"] Well, perhaps that is going a little too far, but I do know what he and his colleagues are going through. I know what it is like to endure years of fruitless opposition only to see yet more years of it stretched out in front of you. Reading the Opposition motion I was struck by the utter futility of its language and its mindless, ill-informed and badly argued irrelevance, curiously reminiscent of the far-left Trotskyist reaches
of the early 1980s Labour party. Today's motion will go the same way as all the motions of those years, except that these days the paper that it is written on stands a better chance of being recycled and put to constructive use.Opposition is a tricky old business—I should know, I did enough of it. Many say that it is not healthy for democracy to tolerate an incompetent Opposition for any significant length of time, let alone six years. Of course that is right, but worse still would be to allow the incompetent Tory Opposition to become another incompetent Tory Government. The British people paid a big enough price last time around. The Opposition wanted the debate to offer a wide-reaching showcase for their policies in advance of Thursday's elections, but in their motion they have merely highlighted their deplorable past, their incompetent present and their lack of confidence in the future. The motion invites the contempt of the House. The Tories have nothing to offer, and no one believes that they can form a Government in the foreseeable future. As the House will surely reject this Tory motion later this evening, so the electorate will reject this unprincipled and opportunist Tory party on Thursday.
1.43 pm
Mr. Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton): On behalf of my right hon. and hon. Friends, I extend our condolences to the Deputy Prime Minister. Taking up the Minister's final remarks, I agree that the Conservative motion could have been tabled by Opposition parties active in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a lot of truth in it—there are problems in our communities up and down the country, and Conservatives are right to point them out. However, the problem for the Conservatives is that they caused many of those difficulties when they were in government. The problem for the Government is that they are copying many Conservative policies and are not addressing those difficulties. In their bare-faced cheek in tabling the motion, the Conservatives demonstrate that they want completely to reinvent history. They talk about centralisation in the motion, but one must remember what Conservative Governments succeeded in doing to local government financial settlements—rate-capping, ring-fencing, compulsory competitive tendering, the uniform business rate, standard spending assessments, credit approvals in the borrowing regime, supplementary credit approvals and, of course, the poll tax. That plethora of measures introduced by the Tory party centralised the way in which local councils are funded and caused many problems that the Government have not yet addressed.
In other areas, the Conservatives were the first people to start the centralisation that, regrettably, has continued in recent years. It was the Conservative party that introduced national targets in education, and it is interesting that their spokesman is beginning to row back on that. I listened to the speech of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), but failed to detect a constructive alternative to, for example, council tax, an issue to which I shall return later. It was interesting to hear what the shadow Chancellor would do about that tax. He was asked in an
interview in The Daily Telegraph on 9 April what the Conservatives would do about the council tax, and said:
- "we would change the system when we come back to office".
The purpose of this debate is, quite rightly, to hold the Government to account for the way in which they are managing public service policy. I welcome both the debate and many aspects of the Conservative motion. It is right that we should focus in particular on education. I am glad that the Minister for School Standards is in the Chamber, because there is concern throughout the country about the effects of the Government's policy on education, particularly the impact of this year's local government financial settlement on schools. Interestingly, today the Office for National Statistics published new figures that show that the number of teachers in England is falling.
So when the Minister for Local Government and the Regions told the House about an increase in new teachers he was not telling the full story. There is a difference between what Ministers are telling the House and what the Office for National Statistics is telling the public, because they count teachers in different ways. Ministers say that even if someone is not qualified but works in the classroom they are a teacher. On that basis, the Government could include almost anyone in the classroom in their definition of teachers. We should therefore be debating the definition of teachers used by the Office for National Statistics, as it includes only qualified teachers. I am surprised that the Government are peddling the line that the number of teachers is increasing when the ONS has shown today that it is going down.
The Minister for School Standards (Mr. David Miliband): On a point of information, although there is a category of qualified teachers, other teachers are counted, including teachers from foreign countries with qualifications equivalent to English qualifications.
Mr. Davey: I am grateful to the Minister, but that is not the whole story, as I think he knows. The Government include some unqualified teachers in the definition that they are using and I hope that they will make that clear later.
I had an interesting exchange with the Minister for Local Government and the Regions about whether the new money that all local authorities are getting is helping schools. We see the other side of the equation in our constituencies. The Minister always talks about the extra money, but never about the extra costs, which are severe. It is important that he admit that. I do not necessarily think that he should conduct a school-by-school analysis of the extra cost, but it is important for democratic debate that we have more information on those huge costs, details of which I shall give later.
Mr. Cameron: The hon. Gentleman is getting to the nub of the argument and has highlighted a great
mystery. On the one hand, the Government are talking about massive increases in education spending, but on the other hand, all our schools are facing a crisis. Does not the Government amendment provide a clue to where the money has gone, as it talks about £2.6 billion or 11.6 per cent. extra for education, but then talks about
- "more than £250 million greater than pressures"?
Mr. Davey: The hon. Gentleman is right. We must see those figures in order to judge the Government's performance. We in the House are not very good at analysing budgets. I am concerned about the lack of financial scrutiny in the House. On this occasion, we must demand to see the figures. The underlying causes of the cost pressures are many. The national insurance increases and the pension transfers alone are adding an extra 5 per cent. to most school budgets.
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