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Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I am responding to that point of order. I have already said that anyone who catches my eye will be eligible to speak in this debate.
Mr. Rendel: If that carries on, this will be one of the longest speeches I have made, but I hope that we will have fewer interruptions from now on.
As I was saying, I would be interested to know how the Conservative party intends to fund the extra £2 billion that it will need for its free tuition policy. We have, of course, explained how we would do that. The Conservatives also need an extra £l billion to provide the skills training for the army of plumbers that they regularly promise us.
Let us get back to reality. The Liberal Democrats cautiously welcome what, on the surface, appears to be a good deal for the majority of the UK's education system. My hon. Friend made that point earlier. Certainly, the global figures showing a rise in total spending from £59 billion this year to £77 billion in 2007–08 are impressive, but what most sectors want to hear from the Secretary of State is how the resources will be allocated and what strings will be attached to spending. In the past, the strings have caused all the difficulty, especially for schools.
It is also important that alongside the seemingly dramatic reduction in the Department's staff—some 30 per cent. by 2008—we see a commensurate reduction in the targets, initiatives and ministerial interference that have bedevilled our education system since 1997. It would be a good start if the Secretary of State were to cancel his plans for the Office for Fair Access before they got off the ground. That is one expense that the HE sector could well do without.
The Liberal Democrats welcome the continued real-terms investment in education and broadly agree with the Government's priorities. The extension of pre-school education and the roll-out of children's centres to the 20 per cent. most deprived wards by 2008 are welcome, but 80 per cent. of the nation will still be without a centre. In particular, rural areas will be largely ignored. Indeed, given the high-profile speeches by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State at last year's Labour party conference about the need to put early years education before further investment in higher education, the response in the Budget appears to lack the resources to match the rhetoric. We should compare the additional £669 million to be spent on early years education with the extravagant and ill-targeted funding of the children's trust fund. Scrapping that fund, as the Liberal Democrats would do, would save the £l billion to be spent on the Chancellor's gimmick between now and 2008. How many more children's centres could be established for that money, and how much greater would be the impact on our most vulnerable children, for whom we should care the most?
Talking of vulnerable children, where is the commitment in the Budget to support the outcomes from the Children Bill? Successive crises in child protection have pointed to severe resource deprivation, the failure to train and retain staff and the inability of local authorities to make appropriate physical support available when it is most needed. Child protection must not be compromised, as care for the elderly has been, by the fluctuation of local authority budgets. The scale of change envisaged by the Children Bill requires not one-off resources but secure funding from the Government in the longer term. Perhaps when he sums up, the Minister might say whether he envisages that the local safeguarding children boards proposed in the Bill will be funded directly through the Department for Education and Skills, like Ofsted, in order to give them independence and allow them to fulfil their scrutiny functions more effectively.
The Liberal Democrats welcome the continued investment in our schools. It would be unfair to ignore the considerable additional resources that have been promised for the coming comprehensive spending review, but it has to be said that schools have been here before. The current CSR was expected to provide riches beyond belief but, rather like the emperor's new clothes, many schools found that the increases were illusionary. Last year, many of the new resources simply went to fund Treasury or Department-inspired inflationary increases. The changes to pensions, national insurance and the standards fund all took money from baseline budgets, making it increasingly difficult to manage change at an individual school level, as many schools found to their cost.
The Budget, however, again makes much of Government-initiated spending despite the claim of getting more money to schools. Another 1,000 specialist schools will require revenue support to the tune of £500 million, which, when added to the current programme, means considerably less to distribute to the remaining non-specialist schools. There is no mention of how much is to be earmarked for the new academies movement or of the impact that publicly funded
independent schools will have on the secondary school sector. There is no reference to the moves by the Secretary of State to allow for-profit schools to enter the marketplace. In winding-up, perhaps the Minister will tell the House what discussions there have been with Sunny Varkey about his plans to provide for-profit, independent school education at the cost of average state-funded education. Perhaps the Minister will explain what the difference would be between such a policy and that proposed by the Tories for vouchers to spend in the independent sector.At this point my notes, which were calmly passed on by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, say:
- "Having spent much of my time as a head teacher bemoaning the state of school buildings".
Mr. Sheerman: If the hon. Gentleman moves to the next paragraph—I know the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough—he will probably find that it says, "Now, you're on your own."
Mr. Rendel: Luckily, I have read through what my hon. Friend offered me, and I know that it does not say that. However, the hon. Gentleman may well have been right; it could have said that.
My hon. Friend said that, as a head teacher, he had often bemoaned the state of school buildings. He wanted to place on record—I echo this—his and our party's appreciation of the continued investment in refurbishment and in new school buildings. Many of us have seen that in our constituencies.
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall) (LD): Does my hon. Friend agree that an awful lot of the pilot projects under the school building improvement scheme are now being undertaken in urban areas and that there is no rural equivalent? That is extremely unfortunate, and echoes his earlier comment about the extent to which deprived areas and rural communities do not seem to receive the same support as the major cities.
Mr. Rendel: I assume that those on the Government Front Bench will have taken on board that remark with reference particularly to Cornwall. I have no doubt that it is true for a number of other rural areas.
Mr. Mark Todd (South Derbyshire) (Lab): It is fortunate that the hon. Gentleman allowed an intervention from his colleague, because I can disagree and say that rural schools in South Derbyshire have particularly benefited over the past few years. Does he accept that the considerable success that his colleague has prompted me to repeat was based on the new deal funding mechanism that the Liberal Democrats opposed?
Mr. Rendel: As I remember it, my party opposed not the new deal but the way in which it was funded, which was through a special tax at the time. We certainly supported the new deal itself. I could also answer the hon. Gentleman's intervention by pointing out to Ministers that it appears that there is now a serious
reason for moving some funding from South Derbyshire to Cornwall, which is clearly where the need now is. If Members from the south Derbyshire area feel that they have had plenty, perhaps some of the money could be moved to other areas. No doubt, that would be very welcome.We continue to have reservations about the private finance initiative as the preferred and, sadly, often the only method of procurement. However, that should not diminish our support for the ambitious plans to rebuild or refurbish all our secondary schools by 2015. Our concerns, however, are that, by designing the schools of tomorrow to meet the needs of today, we may be in danger of building in obsolescence. The Tomlinson reforms, the 16-to-19 curriculum, the national skills strategy and the concept of lifelong learning should make us stop and ask, "What is the vision we are trying to accommodate?" We should not simply build on the basis of today's requirements. In 15 years' time, it will not be a case of removing surplus places; it will be a case of trying to decide what use redundant buildings locked into long-term PFI contracts can be put to. We will not be able simply to get rid of those buildings.
What surprised the Liberal Democrats about the Budget statement and the Secretary of State's comments today is the fact that our secondary schools continue to be viewed separately from the further education sector, the skills sector and the higher education sector. When Government policy is rightly demanding that all those come out of their silos and work together, why plan future secondary provision in isolation? When overall capital investment in education is to rise from £6 billion to £8.1 billion by 2008, why are we not seeking to look at investment in the FE sector alongside investment in secondary schools?
By 2008, some 200,000 14 to 16-year-olds will be using the training environment of our colleges as their classrooms, and those same facilities will be providing for the majority of the 16 to 18-year-olds in full-time or part-time education, as well as delivering the skills training for a significant proportion of the adult work force. How can the Secretary of State justify a capital investment programme in our schools that is 10 times more generous than that in our colleges? Surely the time has come to extend what some would describe as an "architectural adventure fund" from our schools to the FE colleges. Given that we are about to see a far closer interchange of staff between schools and the FE colleges teaching 14 to 19-year-olds, it is surely about time that the Secretary of State announced a timetable to close the unacceptable gap in funding between the sectors.
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