| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Andrew Selous (South-West Bedfordshire): The hon. Gentleman mentioned the importance of honesty and giving clear messages in the House. I wonder whether he shares the anxiety of a chairman of resources at one of my lower schools who sent me a copy of column 558 of Hansard for 17 April 2002. The Chancellor, in his Budget speech, said that direct payments would be made to every school in the country. He stated that
- "payments to a typical primary school will rise from £33,700 last year to £39,300 this year—money that can be spent on the school's priorities, by the school and by the head teacher and the staff themselves."—[Official Report, 17 April 2002; Vol. 383, c. 588.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. That is rather a long intervention.
Mr. Willis: The hon. Gentleman has made his point. I am sure that the Minister who responds will pick up the point and provide the answer, which I do not know.
There is a lack of joined-up thinking, of which I hope the Secretary of State will take account. When things went disastrously wrong, Ministers did not go back to LEAs or schools and say what had happened. They engaged in a process of misinformation that would have embarrassed the Iraqi Information Minister. The Minister for School Standards told the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference on 15 April that LEAs were withholding £500 million from schools, but he did not have a shred of evidence to back that up. He had not spoken to a single local authority to get the details. His statement was predicated on returns from 70 local authorities, which he made up to get out of the conference with his life.
When the Secretary of State attended the National Association of School Teachers and Union of Women Teachers conference, at which the hon. Member for Ashford and I preceded him—[Interruption.] We went down brilliantly. The hon. Member for Ashford nods. We were a duo of great quality. However, the Secretary of State made the same assertions about the missing £500 million. He then said, to great cheers, that if he did not find the answers to his questions, he would clip wings. He has the answers, and at this point he needs to clip someone else's wings.
An article in this morning's Yorkshire Post, which is my local paper, reported that the Secretary of State had attacked the chief officer of East Yorkshire council for being explicitly political in attacking the Government for the Budget settlement. Yet the Secretary of State went through the whole pre-local election programme on a party-political ticket, attacking local authorities for not passporting money.
We now know from a leaked memo from the Secretary of State's office to the No. 10 office, which appeared in The Times Educational Supplement on
Friday 2 May, that the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister both knew that this record investment was an illusion, yet they continued with the charade. They knew that, of the £2.7 billion that was promised to schools, £2.44 billion had already been earmarked to meet additional costs imposed on the schools by the Government. Indeed, the Secretary of State acknowledged this morning on BBC television that that was exactly the case, and that this huge sum of money did not exist. The Government knew that those LEAs with a 3.2 per cent. floor in their budgets would not be able to meet the financial pressures imposed on them. That is the level of dishonesty that lies at the heart of this debate today.
Mr. Hancock: I would like to support my hon. Friend's argument. Is he aware that on 2 May, the same day that the Secretary of State published a press release condemning LEAs, his colleagues in the Department were writing to LEAs asking them to clarify their position? He was making a statement condemning them without even giving them the benefit of allowing them to state their position with regard to section 52. How on earth could it be right for the Secretary of State to make such comments when he and his Department were far from clear as to the true position?
Mr. Willis: My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. We are used to such behaviour from every Minister who appears. They attack people without proper evidence, yet it is a different matter if anyone attacks the Government without evidence. [Interruption.] With respect, we have only to look at the Labour party's parliamentary briefing for this debate to see the level of misinformation that is fed to Labour Back Benchers. That is presumably why so few of them have come to support the Secretary of State today.
Mr. Parmjit Dhanda (Gloucester): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Willis: I will in a minute, but I want to make a bit of progress. I am enjoying this.
I want to make a further point to the Secretary of State and to the schools Minister. When we went through the charade of debating the Education Bill in 2002—we debated only a third of it—one crucial element that the Secretary of State insisted should go into the Bill was the setting up of school forums. Those forums were to be a mandatory device to discuss the resources coming into schools from the Department. There was to be no question of "could" or "should"—they were to be a mandatory requirement.
What is more, according to that legislation, before local authorities could set their budgets, they had to lodge with the Secretary of State a draft budget showing how they were going to spend the money. Having got those two devices in place, the Secretary of State now has the audacity to accuse local authorities of using their budgets improperly without any evidence, having had all the evidence sent to him earlier this year in order to make those decisions.
David Wright: We have now been waiting for 13 minutes, and we have not heard a single policy proposal from the Liberal Democrats' Front Bench. Is that
because the Liberal Democrats' shadow Chancellor has instructed his team not to make any further tax and spend commitments, because they would be "unrealistic"?
Mr. Willis: I saw that in the Labour Members' brief as well; they trot these things out. I say to the hon. Gentleman, whose company in the House I enjoy enormously: have no worries, I shall come to that in a second.
Mr. Dhanda: I do not have a brief in my hand, but I recall a Liberal Democrat brief in my own patch in Gloucestershire calling desperately for the changes to the funding formulae that the hon. Gentleman seems to be implying should not have come about, stating that they have added to the complications this year. The Liberal Democrats in Gloucestershire called for changes, and they got a 6.7 per cent. increase in the funding formula. After that, they said, "Well, we did not really want any changes this year. Could we have a little bit longer to think about it?" That is the Liberal Democrat brief.
Mr. Willis: I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman can be so complacent that, in his schools, everybody has the budget that they require and no teachers or classroom assistants are being made redundant. If that is the case, hallelujah, I am delighted for you, brother! For many people, however, that is not the case.
The Secretary of State challenged the hon. Member for Ashford and me to say what we would do about passporting. I am convinced—and the Secretary of State has brought no evidence to the Dispatch Box today to persuade me otherwise—that, having got in the section 52 returns and having got the letters back from the local authorities, every local authority has been able to account positively for every penny in its budget. That is the issue, rather than whether the Secretary of State should tell every local authority how to spend every penny.
Mr. Charles Clarke: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Willis: I will just finish this point, then of course I will give way. The Secretary of State is always generous in giving way.
The Secretary of State has his school forums, his legislation saying that schools have to lodge their budgets and his section 52 returns. He can challenge every element of those budgets. Surely that is enough for him, without having to tell every local authority how they should spend every single penny. They are accountable to their local electorate for what they do, not simply to the Secretary of State.
Mr. Clarke: My point is that the local electorate should ask themselves this question. If, in Knowsley, 104.4 per cent. can be passported; in Labour St. Helen's, 120.6 per cent. can be passported; and in Sefton, 100.3 per cent. can be passported, why is it that in Liverpool only 94.9 per cent. can be passported? That is a matter for the electorate and the council in Liverpool.
Mr. Willis: Of course it is a matter for the electorate in Liverpool. That is why they elect Liberal Democrats
year after year, following the most decadent Labour local government ever seen in the history of local government.May we talk about some of the non-passporting of which the Government accuse local authorities? Let us take the issue of special educational needs. The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 put huge pressures on local authorities to fund those provisions properly, because they now have a legal duty to do so. We fought in the House for a quantifiable code of practice. Yet now, when local authorities agree, through the school forum, to use their money in that way, they are pilloried by the Secretary of State.
Let us look at capital. Local authorities have to retain capital within the schools section of the budget for the national grid for learning and the rollout of broadband. They cannot do it any other way, yet they are pilloried for doing so. Let us look at money that has been kept back in individual schools' budgets for newly qualified teachers. How can they possibly allocate money for newly qualified teachers in April when they will not be appointed until September? How can they allocate money to a new school that is not due to open until September, or to a nursery unit that will not open until September, when the Secretary of State has transferred the money for nurseries from the standards fund through to local authorities? The Secretary of State is accusing local authorities of withdrawing money in circumstances such as these.
Money is released from the standards fund throughout the year to finance, for instance, advanced skills teachers, national literacy strategies, behaviour improvements, training for support staff—although there will not be any—beacon school awards and summer schools. It is shameful that a Secretary of State should know so little about his own funding arrangements. Rather than attacking local authorities as he has continued to do today, the Secretary of State should congratulate them on not only carrying out the Government's wishes, not only setting up the forums, not only lodging budgets, but trying to help schools deal with the current crisis.
Let us contrast that with what the Department is doing. Last year it failed to spend £1 billion. Can anyone imagine what would happen if that amount were allocated to local authorities and they did not spend it? No doubt their wings would be clipped, and there would be naming and shaming.
Why did Ministers fail to anticipate this year's budget problems? There were plenty of signs that things would go wrong. Surely the whole House will unite in resisting the Secretary of State's crude attempts to threaten local authorities with taking away their powers and saying that he will manage 24,000 schools centrally. If he cannot manage his own Department, how on earth will he be able to manage 24,000 departments?
Even today the Secretary of State claimed that since the issue had first begun to embarrass him some of the missing £500 million had arrived in schools. In fact, it was always in schools; it was being held in bank accounts, ready to be spent. It will continue to find its way into school budgets, and I am not aware—certainly the Secretary of State failed to give us an example—of a
single local education authority that is changing its timetable for the distribution of allocations as a result of the right hon. Gentleman's threats and intimidation.The tragedy of this crisis is that while the Secretary of State tries to blame LEAs for his funding crisis, our schools, teachers and teaching assistants are paying the price. According to research by the professional associations, more than 1,000 teaching posts will be axed in the coming months; and while not all will be axed as a direct result of budget cuts, a great many will. What is more, the redundancies are not confined to a particular type of authority. We have heard about redundancies in Norfolk, but Cumbria has issued 50 redundancy notices, Northumberland 17, Leeds 43, Shropshire 20, Staffordshire 60, Kent nine, Westminster 70, Plymouth 40 and Devon 30. In Wiltshire, 53 teachers and 26 teaching assistants face redundancy. That is the human cost that the Secretary of State must face up to. This is not just a personal crisis; it is having a serious impact on the education of our children.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |