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Sir Sydney Chapman (Chipping Barnet) (Con): It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Roger Casale). I am told that London's population is rising again; it has certainly gone up by about 400,000 over the past 25 years and the hon. Gentleman is clearly playing his part in that happy event.
I should be interested to learn whether the school population is rising, too. I have not been able to find statistics on that so it would be helpful if the Minister
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could tell us, as I understand that people are having fewer children, and at a later age. We used to think of the typical British family as a couple with 2.4 children, but the number is now nearer 1.6.
I come from a family of teachers, at least on my late mother's side. She was the head teacher of a state primary school, as was each of her two sisters and two brothers. It is with great pride that I tell the House that my daughter, too, has recently become a teacher and teaches in the state system in Puckeridge in Hertfordshire. It will thus come as no surprise to the House to hear that I believe that teaching is the most underpaid and undervalued of our professions and that that is a bad thing. I am also tempted to observe that my family has changed George Bernard Shaw's untrue, outdated and overworn adage; in my family, those who can, teach and those who cannot are sent into politics, although I must admit that I was for six years a teacher in a technical college.
We were almost assaulted by statistics from the two Front-Bench speakers, but one or two of those figures are worth repeating because, to put it neutrally, great challenges face the education system in London. The population is rising. There are 2,300 maintained schools, of which more than 400 are secondary schools, catering for 1 million pupils—a fair number.
I want to pick up on a point on which I have heard the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) wax eloquent—the extremes of wealth and poverty in our capital city. In some cases, a ward of immense wealth is cheek by jowl with a poverty-stricken area. Again, I shall rehearse one or two statistics to indicate the wealth of parts of London. Nearly a quarter—24 per cent.—of all households in London have a weekly income of more than £750, whereas the national average is 16 per cent. To take the obverse face of that coin, parts of London have the country's highest levels of child poverty and, as we have heard from both sides of the House, 43 per cent. of secondary school pupils in London are entitled to free meals, while the national average is well under 20 per cent.
Another important point is the unequalled ethnic diversity of our capital. I understand that 42 per cent. of children in inner London speak English as a second or additional language and I am told—although I cannot believe it—that 275 languages are spoken in London's schools. To be perfectly honest, I did not know that there were 275 languages in the whole world. Those points underline the immense challenges facing our capital city in the education of its children and the special need for extra consideration and extra financial resources.
One tends to get one's information and experience, and to draw one's conclusions, from one's own community and there is nothing wrong in that. We have teacher shortages and vacancies, although in fairness the situation has improved and the problem has lessened over the past year. However, the number of vacancies went up by 36 per cent. between 1997 and 2003, although I think the Minister will confirm that the problem has eased off. However, teacher turnover is well above the national average and in some schools it can be more than 50 per cent. a year, which brings particular problems.
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Truancy remains a problem. The Minister said that there had been a slight improvement over the past year and I am glad to hear it but, on average, 50,000 London children are not going to school every day. Sadly, the Government have failed to meet the target for reducing truancy that they set a few years ago.
There are literacy problems. I am told that one in three of London's 14-year-olds is unable to read, write or count properly. That is an appalling statistic and it demands urgent action. Furthermore, one in four of London's 11-year-olds leaves primary school unable to read, write and count. However we look at those figures, even allowing for the ethnic diversity of London schoolchildren, they are appalling.
London has an extremely mobile population, which is reflected in the fact that the number of children changing from one school to another, whether in the primary or secondary sector, is double the national average. The Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), said that he was very much against the Greenwich judgment and made representations to the Government to overturn it.
My current view of the Greenwich judgment is equivocal. I certainly was against it and thought that action should be taken to legislate, because in my constituency it seemed that a high proportion of secondary schools were close to the borough boundary. As the Minister knows, Ashmole school is literally on the border; his constituency encloses two sides of the school's curtilage, while my constituency encloses the other two sides. More than half the pupils are from Enfield, with slightly less from Barnet. I can understand the argument that it is better for pupils to go to a school in their own community, which is peopled from their community, but sometimes London borough boundaries cut across communities. If the Greenwich judgment was got rid of and Barnetonians were given priority to attend schools such as Ashmole, which is essentially in Southgate, although its address is Barnet, there is a strong argument that the community would be split. So it is horses for courses, and I continue to remain ambivalent about the issue.
I am not here to score petty political points—education is a very serious issue, and we want to find out how far we can achieve consensus—and I very much welcome what the Government have called the London business challenge to ensure that every secondary school has a link with a leading London business. For far too long in my political career, I have felt that our country's education system has been totally divorced from what children do when they grow up and, I hope, go into employment. I do not think that the linkage started with the London business challenge, but I very much welcome the greater social intercourse—I think that that is the unhappy phrase to use—between schools, business and, indeed, the rest of the community in which they exist.
I feel very deeply, and I am somewhat critical about this, that my borough has had a very bad deal in education funding from the Government, if not this year, particularly last year, but the problems remain this year. I want to rehearse the crisis that we faced at the beginning of the 2003–04 financial year, and I honestly do not believe that the Government realised the bad
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impact it would have on our schools in Barnet. Just to use the simplest statistics that I can, Barnet received from the Government an additional £8.1 million in revenue support grant for all services last year. That £8.1 million may be a meaningless figure, but it represents an increase of 3.5 per cent.—slightly above the then rate of inflation.
Although we received £8.1 million extra, we were required to pass an additional £14.5 million to the schools—equivalent to a 7.6 per cent. increase in funding. We did so because we value education very highly, but much of the huge, 24 per cent. increase in council tax was caused by the need to ensure that Barnet's schools received that extra £14.5 million. However, even that was not enough. The schools told me in no uncertain terms that they needed not a 7.6 per cent. increase, but at least an 8.1 per cent. increase to stand still. In other words, Barnet had to cover not just inflation and the above-inflation increase in teachers' pay, but find another £4.4 million for the increase in their contribution to teachers' pensions, and it had to find another £1 million on top of that in employer's national insurance contributions. All that happened when the previous year's specific grants were withdrawn and when the Government, rightly or wrongly, decided to change the schools revenue formula. So whatever happened in Barnet, some schools were less worse off, but other schools were even more worse off. Frankly, it was very difficult to find a solution to the problem.
When Barnet was criticised by Ministers, the local education authority called in independent experts who confirmed the state of play and that Barnet was in no way to be blamed. Of course, Ministers will also recall that the Audit Commission considered the problem and discovered that places such as Barnet—I do not know how many other London boroughs were affected—had a bad deal because of the policy to transfer funds from London and the south-east to the midlands and the north. So that was a very great problem indeed, and it resulted in the schools finding in April last year that they had a budget shortfall totalling £3.7 million, even though Barnet passed on the £14.5 million extra.
Twenty schools were forced to set deficit budgets, and the consequences were threefold. There had to be staff reductions. Although 34 redundancies are 34 too many, fortunately in one sense, 32 of them involved support staff, rather than teachers, but the tremors reverberated for many months. The schools had to resort to using so-called devolved capital, with the Secretary of State's permission. In other words, they spent less or nothing on capital development to pay for running and maintenance costs. Of course, there were reductions in school repairs and the training programme to prevent more redundancies. All that was very unfortunate. Things have improved slightly this year. The shortfall is only £1.9 million this year, but even so, 15 schools have set deficit budgets. The local education authority is working closely and carefully with those schools to discover whether those deficits can be got rid of over the next three years, but I shall return to that point shortly.
The Minister kindly let me intervene on his speech to mention this, but the staffing problem in Barnet relates to London weighting and it is exacerbated by the fact that it is not only too low, but not so high as it is inner London. I realise that that is an immensely difficult issue. In Potters Bar, which is just down the road from
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the Minister's constituency and mine, people do not get any London allowance. Lines have to be drawn somewhere, but we need a much more sophisticated approach to that issue. I just repeat what my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) said from the Conservative Front Bench: the tremendous increase in the costs of living and housing in London are playing havoc with ensuring that the vital public services have an adequate number of people. The only way to deal with that problem is to consider the whole weighting system.
The House will know that that average price of a house in the United Kingdom is now into six figures, but it is £250,000 in London and, indeed, it is £289,000 in the borough of Barnet and it is approaching £750,000 in Kensington and Chelsea. I welcome the housing initiatives, but they are only a start. The problem with London weighting must be tackled, as it is far too inadequate today, as compared with yesteryear. Of course this may be obvious, but pensioners in London receive just the same state pension as equivalent people in any other part of the United Kingdom, even though costs are much greater in London. I can only implore the Government to consider the growing problem of London weighting, especially in view of the fact that the number of applicants for teaching posts in Barnet has fallen.
I do not know whether other London Members have experienced a problem involving out-of-year children that has surfaced in Barnet and caused a great deal of anxiety. Some parents are told that if they want their children to attend a specific secondary school, the children must either go into the second year of secondary school, or miss a year of primary school. That is caused by the 1 September factor, because if children are born before 1 September, they may go to school at the age of five, but children who are born in the middle of September effectively miss a year. That is not the fault of parents, although I concede that some make a deliberate choice to keep little Johnny back from school for a year. However, it is wrong for local education authority policy to say that a child born after 1 September cannot start in his or her peer year and to insist that such a child must miss a year of primary or secondary school. The Government and local education authorities must work with schools to resolve the problem, and I know that the Minister received a delegation from the borough of Barnet last week.
I understand that the Government use broad indicators of deprivation and exam results to target capital funding, and there is nothing wrong with that, in theory. However, I would have thought that a major component behind decisions on capital funding levels and grants should be the state of the fabric of schools in a LEA. There is a desperate need to renovate or replace large parts of Barnet's primary school estate.
The Government have the right to boast that they have increased expenditure on education. Although that had increased during previous years, they have accelerated the rate of increase. However, when I look at the problems in Barnet, I sometimes think that the money is not reaching the coal face. The extra finance does not seem to be getting into the schools. The situation in the classroom is the all-important matter, and that will be the litmus test that my constituents and the people of the country will use when the Government
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try to persuade them that they are increasing funding in education, as well as in the health service and in public transport.
There is a London-wide problem that Governments of whatever hue must address in the years to come. The Minister will know that each year the people of London collectively put into the Exchequer through taxes £20 billion—the figure is certainly £15 billion, but it is £20 billion by my calculations—more than they receive for London's public services. If we say that we have a fair tax system, the situation occurs because London is richer than many other regions throughout the country, if not the south-east. However, in the interests of the whole nation, London, as its capital city, needs a decent system of infrastructure, and decent hospitals and schools. The £20 billion gap is becoming unfair on London, and Londoners are beginning to mind the gap—if I may use that phrase—between what they contribute to the rest of the country and what they receive to make their public services and transport systems work properly. Given the tremendous contribution that London makes, it deserves better from the Government, which is surely emphasised by the great disparity between wealth and poverty in our capital city. I started my speech by talking about that point, and I thank the House for listening to me.
3.15 pm
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