---

4.6 pm

Alistair Burt (North-East Bedfordshire): I am delighted to contribute to the debate and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Green). He

15 May 2003 : Column 524

led the debate extremely ably and exposed yet another Government crisis in education. The Secretary of State can be changed, but the Government do not seem to be able to solve the problems. I am also pleased to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry), who made an excellent contribution.

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor). He spoke with his customary seriousness and thoughtfulness on education, although I am not sure whether his assertion that the Opposition have manufactured the crisis will be truly welcomed by teachers, governors, parents and Labour local authorities. They would attribute their problems not to Conservative Members, but to the Government. I shall speak on behalf of many people in Bedfordshire who are connected with education—parents, teachers, governors and pupils—by expressing their deep disappointment, anger and concern about the current situation, which they consider to have been a shabby business.

There are two fundamental issues. First, the Government's miscalculation is at the heart of the crisis. The funding required to cover wage rises, superannuation rises and national insurance increases was miscalculated. No Conservative Member believes that the Government deliberately precipitated the crisis. They pulled the lever to ensure that adequate funding went through, but that patently did not work.

Secondly, after making that miscalculation, we saw the Government make what has been their continual error: after making a mistake, they never admit to it. They make only a desperate attempt to cover it up and then blame somebody else. On this occasion, their failure to admit their error led to local authorities being blamed.

There are two sides to the Secretary of State. [Interruption.] Well, there are many sides to quite a rounded Secretary of State, but I want to talk about his political characteristics. I saw his first side when I recently shared a television studio with him to discuss the local election results as they came in. We saw a contrite Secretary of State. He made no attempt to claim that it was a great night for Labour as the results of seats and councils lost came in from throughout the country. He was quiet and well mannered. He appreciated the scale of what had happened and presented a rather decent impression of a politician facing reality. That might well have been practice for the many nights in the next few years when he will be doing exactly the same thing.

The second side to the Secretary of State, which is probably more familiar to most of us, is shown by his extraordinary bluster when things go wrong but he cannot possibly admit it. The Secretary of State made a desperate attempt to blame local education authorities, but when that patently failed he used a subtle change in language to suggest that perhaps it was not local authorities that were at fault for holding on to the Government money, but the schools for being so wicked over the years to have built up reserves and to have capital moneys available that they should be spending. Either way, the crisis was manufactured in the Department for Education and Skills, and it is a shabby

15 May 2003 : Column 525

way to treat those who have been on the wrong end of that crisis to blame them rather than to accept the blame himself.

On Bedfordshire's specific problems, the county spends way above its standard spending assessment for education, which means that it spends more on education than the Government anticipate it should. The authority has a 100.1 per cent. passporting record, so it cannot be criticised for not doing its job properly. The problem in the county's schools was first made manifest when one or two other MPs for Bedfordshire and I recently met representatives of the local county council. We were told that some of our schools were thinking of losing teachers or were facing deficit budgets. That was quickly followed up by representations from those schools.

I can do little better than quote extensively from a letter from the head teacher, Colin Phelps, of St. Mary's V C lower school in Stotfold, who wrote to me on 24 April. He said:

"I am writing on behalf of Staff and Governors at St Mary's V C Lower School, Stotfold with regard to the predicament we find ourselves in concerning our budget allocation for 2003/04.


You will be aware that this issue is causing great concern in many schools across the country, and we at St Mary's have been particularly badly hit by the increase in National Insurance and Superannuation costs . . . In early March, when we received our budget allocation, there was no real hint that things would be so bad. My first draft Budget, merely a standstill budget, revealed that we would have a deficit of £69,000, around 9 per cent. of our overall budget. This is due to staff costs representing a greater proportion of the budget than previously. Even though we are a popular school, often oversubscribed, we are having to make several cuts, making one teacher and probably two support staff redundant. Even these cuts will not allow us to set a viable budget. Any further cuts in teaching staff would mean that we could not meet the Class Size requirements or 30 Key Stage 1 classes.


We are a school which has received national recognition for excellence in Community Education and in our educational achievements over many years, but it is difficult to see how we can retain these high standards in the light of these savage cuts. There is no doubt that children's education will suffer . . . As a Headteacher of some 14 years experience, I can affirm that things have never been so bad. It gives me little comfort to know that many schools are experiencing difficulties, and I am concerned that staff morale, already low, is going to be severely affected. The very idea that the Government proposes to lighten Heads' and Teachers' workloads by providing extra funds, is like a macabre joke at our expense. We will be stretched as never before during the next year, and probably beyond."

Almost as soon I received those details from the head of that lower school, I received representations from an upper school. Its head told me this morning that its argument is not with the local authority, with which it has discussed the problem in depth, but with overall national funding. The school reckons that every school in the county could set a deficit budget ranging from £80,000 to £140,000. Wootton upper school has a deficit budget this year of £120,000. It could consider using grants to help it, but it does not think that it should have to go outside core funding for essential basic needs. For Wootton, staffing costs have increased by 9.7 per cent., whereas its budget has increased by only 3.2 per cent. That is the real reason for the cash crisis. It should not be dealt with by asking schools to go into reserves and the like.

15 May 2003 : Column 526

After concerns were expressed and the Government's consciousness was raised to such an extent that they became aware that there were real problems, their response was to blame local authorities, as the House well knows. They tried to fix the blame by writing a detailed letter to them on 2 May asking for their responses to a series of questions that revealed an extraordinary micro-interest in the budgets of devolved local authorities. I do not criticise the Government for that—it is important for them to know what is going on—but the exercise was designed not to gain information, but to shift the blame.

Let me pick out three things for which my county council was blamed which it rebutted, and I am grateful for its assistance in this matter. The first charge was that the percentage increase in devolved funding for schools in Bedfordshire was less than the overall schools' budget percentage increase. The council explained that that was caused by the reduction of Government support for standards fund projects, as other hon. Members have mentioned. I am sure that by the end of the debate, the Minister will have a copy of the letter from Bedfordshire available to him, as it is easily found. The local authority states:

"In 2002/2003 Bedfordshire's contribution to devolved Standards Funds was £5.293 million. In 2003/2004 this has reduced to £4.216 million due mainly to the LEA needing to find £1.472 million to support the continuation of Standards Fund projects for which government support has been withdrawn."

Funding for the targeted intervention strategy, LEA school improvement and intervention and newly qualified teachers are now recorded in a different pot, and all the extra money needed is due to the Government withdrawing their previous support. The LEA goes on to say that if these sums were properly accounted for as part of the devolved funding, a 7.5 per cent. increase in devolved funding would have been shown, as opposed to the 6.6 per cent. shown by Government.

The LEA's letter continues:

"This would also consequently impact on the £2.9 million suggested as increased funding not devolved to schools. On the basis of the revisions referred to above this sum would reduce to £1.3 million . . . all of this expenditure can be accounted for by the increased support for children with Special Educational Needs, none of it has been retained for other purposes."

The local authority was taken to task by the Government for spending more on special educational needs. That, the LEA tells me, was for

"new specialist provision for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties or with autism, increased funding for statements, covering reduced recoupment income where the number of children from other LEAs attending our special schools has decreased, and picking up the increased staffing costs associated with both teacher threshold payments and the teachers' pensions schemes."

Why should not the local authority spend its money on supporting special educational needs in that way? Do the Government think that that is wrong? If not, why did they criticise it for spending more money on such provision?

15 May 2003 : Column 527

---