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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Gentleman cannot have heard what Mr. Speaker just said.

Ruth Kelly: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but the hon. Gentleman does talk some common sense and it is a pleasure for me to answer him. He is right that we cannot roll back on accountability; that we cannot roll back on existing mechanisms for achieving standards; and that we must ensure that we place an emphasis on literacy and numeracy in primary schools, then continuing from the age of 11. We are going way beyond Tomlinson in considering the 11 to 14 curriculum as well as the 14 to 19 curriculum, so right from the word go there is space for catch-up on the basics of reading and writing. We will make getting that right a priority. If children are to have a real opportunity to benefit at 14, they must be educated by 14.

Mr. David Chaytor (Bury, North) (Lab): I welcome my right hon. Friend's analysis of the weaknesses of our current system, as I welcome much in her statement, particularly her rehabilitation of the concept of comprehensive education. Is she now placing the pupil's
 
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choice of different curricular pathways at the age of 14 at the heart of our system, and if so, is that not increasingly incompatible with our admissions system, which still allows schools to choose which pupils to admit at the age of 11? In giving further consideration to the development of proposals, will she return to consider that matter?

Ruth Kelly: I certainly think that it would be disastrous if we were to introduce selection at the age of five, which is the policy of the Conservative party. It will become more and more important as we develop this agenda for schools to work together in partnership to offer not just academic options but vocational and more practical ways of learning. They will have to work together in networks to deliver, and I suspect that each area will deliver a common prospectus for all students in the area, with the various options available to them at the age of 14. We will also need an intensive system of advice and guidance before that happens, to ensure that children really take the options that best meet their needs.

Mr. Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con): The Secretary of State's statement will go down well with the smarter tabloids, as it favours comprehensive systems over comprehensive schools, it is more Woodhead than Tomlinson, and it keeps A-levels and GCSEs. However, will she respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb), who asked about assessment? Will GCSEs be externally assessed or will there be a drift, as Tomlinson recommended, towards more internal assessments?

Ruth Kelly: I am sorry if I did not answer the question earlier, and I can confirm that there will be no moving away from external assessment of GCSEs and A-levels. Standards are here to stay and we want more students to continue to meet them. We also want to open up opportunities across the board so that more children can achieve their potential.

Mr. David Rendel (Newbury) (LD): Before the Secretary of State announced her policy of insisting that pupils needed A to C grades in maths and English to be counted in the league tables, she must have had some estimate of the difference that it would make. Will she remind us what proportion of pupils gained five A to C grades this year, and what the proportion would have been if the new policy had already been in place?

Ruth Kelly: I can tell the hon. Gentleman that this year 53.7 per cent. of pupils gained five A to C grades at GCSE, up from 45.1 per cent. in 1997. Had the new system been in place, 42.6 per cent. of pupils would have achieved a new diploma, compared with 35.6 per cent. in 1997.
 
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Banking Practices (Protection of the Elderly)

1.36 pm

Dr. Julian Lewis (New Forest, East) (Con): I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require banks to adopt and maintain specific practices in dealing with vulnerable elderly clients at risk from certain financial arrangements by institutions and from other forms of exploitation by individuals.

This Bill would have three provisions. The first is to ban ATM cash machine charges for pensioners who are in the process of gaining access to the accounts in which they are now obliged to receive their pensions. The second is that banks that operated the ill-fated shared appreciation mortgage schemes in the 1990s, which left elderly people unable to sell their homes without giving three quarters of the increase in their value to the banks, should be declared inequitable. The debt should be rescheduled to impose only a reasonable rate of interest on those loans. I have a direct interest in the third provision, which is that banks should have in place software that will automatically alert account managers, cashiers and, where appropriate, relatives and carers of elderly people, to untypically large or frequent withdrawals being made from a vulnerable client's account—irrespective of whether they are made personally by the account holder. The purpose is to improve safeguards against the activities of con men and other criminals who prey on the vulnerable and the suggestible.

The first provision is self-explanatory. It has been pointed out to me by Terry Cassels, the chief officer of Age Concern in Essex, that some cash machines charge as much as £5 per transaction for a pensioner to withdraw his or her own pension. That can amount to approximately 5 per cent. of what they receive. That is obviously unsatisfactory. It results from the bringing into being of a system that many pensioners did not want in the first place, and I would have thought that it should be made a condition of any cash machine being placed in a bank, whether owned by the bank itself or by another company working within the bank, that pensioners be exempted from any such charge.

The second provision of my Bill is more complex. Shared appreciation mortgage schemes were offered between April 1996 and July 1998, by Barclays bank and the then Bank of Scotland, which subsequently merged with the Halifax. About 15,000 people remain trapped in those arrangements.

I shall give some examples, without identifying the people concerned, from among my constituents. Mr. C. borrowed £44,000 in 1998, but must pay back £180,000 only six years later. Mr. T. borrowed £36,000 in 1998 and must now pay back £152,000. Such massive repayments arise from the nature of the gamble that people took in embarking on these schemes. Instead of paying an agreed rate of interest on the loans, borrowers undertook that three quarters of the increase in the value of their property when it was sold—either by them or by the people to whom they left it—would go to the bank in lieu of interest.
 
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We all know what happened—the value of houses shot up. As a result, the sums that must be repaid are grossly disproportionate to what a reasonable interest rate would have required. The daughter of another of my constituents, Mr. B., said that

"surely if a lending company were to charge this they would be considered to be a loan shark and would be treated accordingly. I find it impossible to believe that a High Street Bank can carry on in this manner".

I wrote to the Barclays bank group chief executive, Matthew Barratt, suggesting that the bank might surprise me, agree to reschedule the loans, and make available to the borrowers interest requirements proportionate to the amount of money borrowed. Sure enough, I got nowhere. I was told that the people involved had taken a risk and that the bank's shareholders could have lost out because the value of property might not have risen. The fact that new Financial Services Authority rules meant that such schemes would not be allowed was never mentioned, nor the fact that the schemes were wound up after only a couple of years.

Another factor needs to be considered. It is a falsehood for the banks to say that they did not know that property values were likely to rise. I am grateful to Miss Margaret Borwick, a specialist in these matters, who sent me a copy of an article that appeared in the February 1997 edition of the publication Housing Finance, which is the quarterly digest of the Council of Mortgage Lenders. The article shows that the value of property was forecast to increase by 9 per cent. in 1997, and by 7 per cent. in 1998. Both Barclays bank and the Bank of Scotland were members of the council at the time.

I come to the third and final provision of the Bill. I refer to an Adjournment debate that I held on 11 December 2003, about the activities of Mr. Paul Grey, a rogue builder in Swansea who managed to fleece my father out of £7,500 in cash withdrawals for building work that was never done. Subsequently, he admitted to me in a late-night telephone conversation laced with anti-Semitic abuse that he had been doing that sort of thing for 20 years and that there was nothing that people like me could do about it.

My proposal is simple, and has to do with the arrangements currently used by credit card companies to cover the situation when a person—like myself, or you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, or any other hon. Member—makes an untypically large withdrawal from an account. Straight away, we receive telephone calls asking us, "Was that really you? The amount being withdrawn seems untypical."

A similar arrangement should be in place for vulnerable elderly customers at risk of being conned by rogues like Paul Grey. I warned Lloyds bank in Swansea that I was afraid that my father would take out money to pay a builder when he should not. When such a warning is given in other cases, it ought to alert the people running the relevant branch that an untypical payment might occur.

I have had extensive argument and consultation with Lloyds bank on the matter. Although staff made a note on the bank's computerised database that they would
 
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ring me if they suspected that something was going on, they failed to do so because no automatic mechanism existed to alert tellers or initiate the warning process when my poor father started to withdraw money.

A recent agreement has tried to make banks and cashiers more alert to the dangers posed by con men. However, I am not satisfied, from my dealings with either Lloyds bank in the one case or Barclays bank in the other, that banks can be relied on to act without being forced to do so. That is why I have brought forward the Bill.

I commend the Bill to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Dr. Julian Lewis, Mr. Nigel Evans, Mr. Martin Salter, Andrew Selous, Mrs. Alice Mahon, Michael Fabricant, Mr. Mike Hancock, Mr. David Amess, Mr. Gordon Marsden, Mr. Desmond Swayne, Mr. David Chidgey and John Robertson.

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