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Mr. Collins: The hon. Gentleman is extremely generous. He will be delighted to hear that a substantial section of my speech deals expressly with pupil passports. I hope that he will feel by the end of my speech that I have answered his questions, but if he has further questions, we could talk about how best to answer them as well. If the hon. Gentleman would like to make the offer that he suggested closer to the general election, I would be delighted to accept it.

I was explaining why we were happy to welcome all the wonderful things that the Chancellor announced yesterday—because they were Conservative policy. I have to say that the list has not ended and I will continue with it. For example, there are to be far fewer civil servants working in the Department for Education and Skills, with the money saved to be distributed to the classroom instead. That was Conservative policy at the last general election, has remained Conservative policy throughout this Parliament and will be Conservative policy at the next election. We obviously welcome that announcement, too.

Mr. Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre) (Lab): While the hon. Gentleman is regaling us with Conservative policy, will he congratulate the Government on the investment that they have made, especially in small rural schools, and pay particular tribute to the work of beacon schools such as Quernmore in my constituency?

Mr. Collins: I gladly welcome the money that has been invested in the state system. As I shall say later, there is evidence of improvement in several areas—the hon.

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Gentleman has doubtless touched on one of them—such as new and improved school buildings and facilities, more teacher recruitment, and so forth. All that is outstanding, but since the hon. Gentleman mentions small rural schools, I would mention Settlebeck school—not small, but very rural—in my own constituency. In the last 12 months for the first time ever—the school has been around for decades under Governments of both political colours—that school has had to write to parents to ask for a direct cash subvention to buy books. That never happened under a Conservative Government, but has happened six years into a Labour Government. The hon. Gentleman should not therefore assume that everything is good news.

At the moment, I am being positive, cross party and bipartisan in welcoming all the wonderful things that the Government have accepted from Conservative suggestions, so let us proceed to the next example—arguably the most important of them all. The Chancellor announced that he proposes to increase overall education spending to about £77 billion by the end of the next comprehensive spending round period. You may recall, Mr. Speaker, that some weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor set out in some detail the overall public spending envelope that would apply under the Conservative Government after the next general election. Funnily enough, the £77 billion that the Chancellor suddenly discovered yesterday as the appropriate amount to spend overall on education in 2007 is essentially the same figure implied for that year by what my right hon. Friend said some weeks ago. So even on the overall level of education spending, as on all those other things, the Chancellor and the Secretary of State are Johnny-Come-Latelies, once again embracing pre-existing Conservative policy—and once again we welcome that announcement.

Indeed, so frequently, so assiduously, so repeatedly did the Chancellor yesterday announce that he was adopting Conservative policy that I wondered what on earth Ministers would do without Conservative Members here to give them all their ideas? Sadly, however, many voters will choose to judge the Government not on their new-found conversion to Tory principles for the next Parliament, but on their seven-year record of what they have actually done in the last two Parliaments.

What is the good of the Government saying that they now see the case for greater financial management by head teachers, when their first act on taking office was to take financial independence away from grant-maintained schools? What is the good of saying that they are now converted to the need for simplified funding and a single grant, when their never-ending flow of initiatives and paperwork has snowed schools under with three dozen different routes to get money? Why should they be trusted to get rid of 31 per cent. of officials at the Department for Education and Skills, when they have increased those numbers by 25 per cent. since 1997?

Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con) rose—

Mr. Collins: Before the 1997 election, Labour pretended to embrace the Conservative approach to the

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economy—enterprise and low tax. That proved, sadly, to be an entirely false conversion. Now, in the run-up to the next election, they pretend to embrace the Conservative approach to education—putting power and spending decisions in the hands of schools and parents, not bureaucrats. I fear that that will prove to be an equally false conversion.

I shall now deal with higher education. The Red Book devotes precisely two sentences to the funding of universities and other higher education institutions. It states that the Government

"will maintain per student spending levels in real terms over the 2004 Spending Review period".

However, current spending per student is lower than it was in 1997. In fact, it has been lower in every single year of Labour Government than it was in any year of the previous Conservative Government, and it is lower today than it was before the Government introduced tuition fees in 1998. So maintaining those low levels in real terms for the foreseeable future is hardly an act of extraordinary political generosity. On the contrary, it means maintaining public investment in higher education at levels that the university sector has repeatedly called unsustainable and deeply damaging.

Then, of course, there are the Government's plans for top-up fees. We shall see whether, at the end of this month, the Higher Education Bill survives Report and Third Reading. Contrary to the impression given in advance to many potential rebels that further important concessions would be made if a Second Reading were granted, the Bill left Committee almost entirely unamended, so its passage is by no means guaranteed.

What yesterday's Budget showed was that universities are already losing, not gaining, from the proposed introduction of top-up fees. Almost every other sector in education is to get more taxpayers' money under the Government's plans. Overall spending goes up by 4.4 per cent. in real terms. Early years and Sure Start funding get 17 per cent. annual rises, and spending per pupil in schools is to rise by nearly 20 per cent.—but real spending per student in higher education is not to rise at all. That demonstrates that the Government are using top-up fees in precisely the way we predicted—not to provide extra money per student, but to substitute for extra money per student.

Even the guarantee of a real-terms freeze in Government grant per student runs out in 2007, just a year after top-up fees come in, and well before income from them has grown to significant levels. That is why increasing numbers of vice-chancellors are beginning to wonder if the Government speak with forked tongue, and that is why we are confident that our alternative proposals, which we will publish later this year, will be welcomed not only by students who are understandably fearful of the much higher levels of debt involved in the Government's plans, but by universities and taxpayers who will both get a better deal than they will under the Government's scheme.

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Helen Jones (Warrington, North) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman is discussing the future of higher education, so will he be kind enough to inform the House what percentage of our young people he envisages going into higher education under his party's plans?

Mr. Collins: I am happy to point out to the hon. Lady that my party has said for some time that it is not desirable for politicians to set targets for participation. We believe that people should go to university on the basis of their ability to learn rather than their ability to pay. That will be reflected in the policies that we put to the electorate at the next election, but sadly not in Labour's policies.

What about school funding, the centrepiece of the Government's education drive and their proudest boast? Was not the last election campaign fought, as Labour told us, to get a mandate to put more money into schools and hospitals? What has been the result? Yes, as I said earlier, the taxpayer has put a lot more into the top of the funnel. Yes, there are undoubtedly many very welcome new school buildings in many parts of the country. However, anyone talking to teachers, head teachers and governors all over the country will hear that many of them seriously dispute claims about huge increases in resources that can actually be used. For example, the head teacher of the Kingsway school in Cheadle points out:

"Our pupil-teacher ratio has risen year on year so that I have seven and half fewer teachers funded now than 10 years ago."

He went on to say:

"It is only our own fund raising, for example through lettings, which has helped us to survive."

That is the scale of the problem that such schools face. The head of Guildford's George Abbott school said:

"My feeling is that secondary schools like ours are likely to need between 6 and 7 per cent. in order to stand still in the next financial year."

That is not what the Chancellor announced yesterday. The head of Newbury's Trinity school and performing arts college said:

"We don't have a balanced budget. Even with the extra £130,000 that we got in emergency funding from the Government, we are still expecting a fiscal year '03 deficit in excess of £100,000."

Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, says—[Interruption.] We shall come to the Government's attitude to the nation's largest teaching union in a moment. Ministers should put their groans on hold and hear what the general secretary has to say, which is that the increases announced yesterday are

"unlikely to make good the deficit and at the same time equip schools adequately to enable them to meet the demands made on them."

He went further. Pointing to the fiasco of funding for schools presided over by this set of Ministers just over a year ago, he said that

"in the past, what looked like an increase resulted in schools continuing to be underfunded."

I know that the Secretary of State and his Ministers do not like the NUT much. Indeed, for the second year running, the right hon. Gentleman has chosen not to speak at the union's conference. My hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) will speak, but the

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Secretary of State will not. Ministers may therefore like to hear a near-identical warning from John Dunford of the Secondary Heads Association. He says:

"The last spending review, when early joy turned to later grief for many schools facing unprecedented budget cuts, taught us a lesson that we have to wait for the small print."

Is not that true of every aspect of every Budget under this Chancellor? I met representatives of the Association of Colleges earlier this week, and they are less than ecstatic about the Chancellor's proposals. The association's chief executive, Dr. John Brennan, said:

"There simply is not enough money in the system to meet the targets which government has set."

He warned that colleges would have to cut courses for adults that the Chancellor was "guaranteeing".

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