Westminster Hall

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

Tuesday 10 January 2012

[Mr Christopher Chope in the Chair]

Regional Pay (Public Sector)

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—(Angela Watkinson.)

09:30

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Diolch, Mr Chope. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning and to have the honour of beginning the first Westminster Hall debate of 2012. I thank right hon. and hon. Friends for making the effort to come here on the first morning of Parliament’s return.

The topic of regional pay will increasingly dominate relations between the UK Government and the public sector over the coming year, perhaps even more than the still unsolved dispute over public sector pensions. Back in November, I labelled the autumn statement a panicked response to worsening economic forecasts, rising unemployment and increasing deficit payments. The statement included many interventionist measures for which my party had been calling, particularly increased capital infrastructure investment. The signature policy of the statement was the capital investment programme, which seems remarkably similar to my party’s proposals at the last Welsh general election. I hope that the £25 billion of funds to be raised from pension funds over the coming years will be shared equitably across the nations and regions of the state.

The fine print of the autumn statement contained a deeply worrying request for pay review bodies to investigate how public sector pay can be made

“more responsive to local…markets”,

with the aim that they should report in July this year. After the flurry of announcements that we heard at the beginning of the autumn statement, it took a while for the significance of that announcement to sink in. What the Chancellor was announcing was a wholesale review of the introduction of regional pay in the public sector to be introduced as early as the 2013-14 pay round. I do not want to accuse the Chancellor of being deliberately antagonistic—

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Oh, why not?

[Jonathan Edwards]

Well, it is the first day back. However, the fact that that announcement was made on the eve of the biggest industrial strike in the UK since 1926 smacks of deliberate bad timing. If the Government think that the proposals for public sector pensions have got state employees and their representatives worked up, they have not seen anything yet. As the debate rages over such proposals, I fear that we are likely to witness increased industrial strife.

After making the announcement in the autumn statement, the Chancellor explained that the review would be a significant step towards the creation of a more balanced economy in the nations and regions of the state that does not squeeze out the private sector. The claim—the theory, at least—is that depressing public sector wages where they are currently higher than those in the private sector will lead to the brightest and best choosing a private sector career over public service and that such an approach will boost the private sector.

What are the Treasury’s intentions? Is it considering a system that extends the London weighting, or is it considering something altogether more far-reaching? In June 2008, the Minister for the Cabinet Office was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that it is the intention of the new UK Government to lower rates of pay in the civil service outside London. That is on top of redundancies and a two-year pay freeze, with the autumn statement freezing public sector pay at 1% for a further two years. May I remind Ministers that a pay freeze at 1% is essentially a further real-terms pay cut for the next two years? My fear is that the Treasury’s proposals are all about saving costs. I therefore cannot see it topping up payments for public sector workers in more affluent areas of the state or reallocating resources. My concern is that the Government’s intention is to reduce pay in the poorest parts of the state across the public sector and to introduce market conditions into public sector workers’ pay and remuneration.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that the public sector pay bill for 2009 was around £182 billion, which represents around 30% of UK Government expenditure and around 13.1% of UK national income. However, based on the 2010 comprehensive spending review, we know that the public wage bill will be significantly reduced by the projected reduction of 400,000 public sector jobs by 2017. In winding up today, it would be helpful if the Minister informed us what the savings will be of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s new projections of more than 710,000 public sector job losses by 2017.

At the risk of offending my friends in the Labour party, based on the policy direction of the previous Government, the Treasury should have the full support of Her Majesty’s official Opposition. What strikes me about politics in this place is that, despite the sporadic changing of the guard at No. 10 Downing street, more things stay the same. The previous Prime Minister had obviously spent too much time in his former post at the Treasury, as he was an avid exponent of regional pay. Indeed, the previous Labour Government introduced regional pay for court workers and the Prison Service.

In the teeth of the trade union movement’s opposition over the coming months to these proposals, the Treasury will justifiably be able to say that the previous Labour Government introduced the principle of differential pay, using the Courts Service as a pathfinder for its wider introduction across the whole public sector. Indeed, the Chancellor made that point repeatedly to the Treasury Committee during the evidence session on the autumn statement last month. To the Public and Commercial Services Union’s credit, it warned exactly of that during the debate surrounding the proposals for the Courts Service in 2007. It said at the time:

“There was a need for a pay and regrading review as workers from the magistrates’ courts have recently been brought into the civil service. But the Department of Constitutional Affairs has gone for the cheapest possible option. If the government brings regional pay in here, it will try to implement it in the rest of the civil service, and then across the public sector.”

I would be grateful to the Minister if she informed hon. Members about the Government’s assessment of the impact on recruitment and quality of service in south-east England of introducing regional pay in the Courts Service. More importantly from my constituents’ perspective, what has been the impact on recruitment, performance and, crucially, morale in those areas where lower rates of pay are offered?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is in general making an excellent case this morning, and I congratulate him on securing the debate. Does he agree that there is a real problem surrounding the quality of public services as a result of the fact that, for example, doctors might come out of university with five, six or seven years of debt and be paid less in regions such as the north-east or Wales than in London?

[Jonathan Edwards]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point, and I thank her for that intervention. I will come on to talk about the brain-drain element and the polarisation of wealth across the British state.

I say to the Minister that, with the policy in operation across some parts of the public sector already, the Treasury should have the information about its impact at its disposal. That leads us to ask why the autumn statement pledged to hold an investigation into the issue. There is already a wealth of evidence from trade unions about the problems of the policy in the courts and prison services.

Without having sight of the Minister’s speech, I presume that her counter-argument might include saying that it is the Government’s intention to equalise the standard of living for public sector workers. Such an argument might go along the lines that a teacher working in Carlisle or Carmarthenshire has more disposable income than a colleague working in Reading, because of the difference in the cost of living and that that is morally unjustifiable. Superficially, that seems a seductive and attractive argument, but it is essentially a policy aimed towards a race to the bottom.

I hope that the Government do not embark on a divide-and-rule strategy and play public sector workers off against each other, as they have during the public sector pensions debate. Under the proposals, both public and private sector workers in the regions and locations concerned would be losers. The impact of such a policy would not be a geographical or sectoral rebalancing of the economy; it would be a sobering experience, with public sector workers already in fear of their jobs having their pockets picked for pension payments and suffering a prolonged period of wage freezes and real-term cuts.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the arguments about differential costs of living in some areas are sometimes bogus? He will know as well as I do that, for example, transport costs in rural areas are astronomical. People might have to run two cars, as they struggle to maintain a lifestyle that involves travelling to two jobs in different directions.

[Jonathan Edwards]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent argument. Indeed, following the autumn statement, he tabled an early-day motion on the topic, which I think has been supported by about 18 Members to date. I urge those Members who support the campaign on this issue to sign that early-day motion at the very least.

Public sector workers are facing real-term cuts and that is before we consider the impact on the private sector. In many places, the private sector is reliant on the trade generated by the public sector and the money circulated through public sector employees. In constituencies such as mine, where more than 30% of people work in the public sector, there is a direct correlation between their wages and the cash circulating in the local economy.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Surely, his point about the direct correlation between socio-economic difficulties in geographical areas—particularly those that are some distance from the south-east such as Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the north of England—and the high dependency on public sector employment is key. Many of those areas have only managed to get through the recession at the moment because of their high dependency on the public sector. If we were to go down this route now, we would find that the problem would be multiplied even more.

[Jonathan Edwards]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. We should be considering not depressing the public sector in those areas where the economy is weakest, but improving the private sector.

Since the general election, we have heard a lot about the UK Government’s ambition to geographically rebalance the economy. They have the full support of my party, including the national insurance holiday proposals for small businesses, which I think shows the Treasury’s intent, despite the evidence showing a lack of success. The policy indicates that the Treasury, at long last, realises that countervailing measures are required to address the so-called north-south economic divide. We will, however, need a far more comprehensive approach than we have seen to date. My fear is that this policy on regional pay goes in a completely different economic direction.

One of our major criticisms of UK Governments of whatever colour in the past 30 years has been that the emphasis has been far too concentrated on one small geographical part of the state. Successive Governments have been guilty of allowing regional and individual wealth polarisation at an incredible rate. The average gross value added per person in inner London is 10 times that of workers in the Gwent valley. Inner London is the richest part of the European Union, whereas the communities that I represent—only a few hours down the M4; longer on the train—qualify for the highest form of European convergence aid. Such are the imbalances in the British state that it is now by far the most unequal of all EU member states. Considering the unification legacy in Germany, that is a damning indictment of all successive Governments.

Far from addressing that record of shame, these proposals will further depress those economies that are in desperate need of investment. It is no surprise to anyone that the fiscal consolidation pursued by the UK Government will hit the poorest parts of the state most. The statement by the Prime Minister that we are all in this together is rivalled in its degree of preposterousness only by the previous Prime Minister’s assertion, when Chancellor, that he would abolish boom and bust. My country has the lowest average gross weekly wages in the whole UK. On average, workers in Wales earn approximately £519.40, compared with £629.10 in the south-east of England and £826.40 in London. Take away the consistency of public sector pay—a point made by many hon. Members in interventions to date—and those discrepancies will be far worse.

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for securing the debate. Aside from the unfairness, will he tell hon. Members whether the ability of the fire service, for example, to be resilient in the event of major incidents such as terrorist threats—or flooding, which happens in my region—is likely to be undermined by such a national pay structure? Remember, firefighters will often cross borders to help brigades in other areas.

[Jonathan Edwards]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point about morale and about where public sector workers choose their profession as a vocation. They do so as a lifetime commitment and are more likely to move to areas where they will get better pay. This is a pressing issue about the effect that this proposal will have on the quality of our public services in those areas where we need to be pumping up the public sector because there are problems with the economy.

It would be indefensible, considering that public expenditure per head is far higher in London than other parts of the state, for the Treasury to introduce a policy that further exacerbates the wealth divide. The spending power of people in the poorest parts of the state is obviously far lower, and that has an impact on private sector growth in those areas. In the communities that I represent, more than 30% of the population work in the public sector. Their disposable income correlates directly to cash circulating in the local economy. The move towards regional pay, therefore, is deeply worrying, as it will institutionalise lower pay in poorer areas. It will entrench those deeply socially divisive economic variances that exist within the British state and fundamentally undermine a supposed key objective of the current UK Government.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate, because this is a very important issue. What would have been the consequence if regional pay had already been instituted and police officers from my area in Cleveland were sent down to London, Birmingham or Manchester during last year’s summer riots? What would have been the consequences for the pensions of those police officers if their annual pay was reduced in certain regions of the country?

[Jonathan Edwards]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very informative intervention, which shows some of the problems. He is right to point to the recent riots in London, because police forces from his area and mine were sent down to London to deal with those problems. What would the morale in the police force be if there was differential pay in different parts of the British state? In fact, I cannot think of many other policy interventions that would undermine completely attempts to rebalance the economy geographically.

Returning to some of the arguments used to promote the idea, the notion that depressing public sector pay would lead to the brightest and the best leaving the public sector to generate wealth seems a slightly strange one. Public sector workers often make a lifetime commitment to joining a profession and to public service. Rather than seeking work in the local private sector, they are far more likely to seek similar employment in other areas where they will receive better pay. That will result in speeding up the brain drain that has caused so much damage to the communities that I represent.

There are a number of technical problems with the introduction of regional public sector pay. One obvious problem is how to calculate pay. Is the idea to link it with private sector pay? If so, the huge disparities in pay in the private sector between different parts of the UK would be replicated in the public sector. Generally, private sector wages in Wales are only half those in London. Are we seriously saying that a public sector worker in Southwark who does exactly the same job as an individual in Carmarthenshire should be paid twice the rate?

How many different regions will there be? How will boundaries be set, and how often will pay and boundaries be reviewed? In an unusual sign of activity, the First Minister of Wales announced within hours of the autumn statement that if the UK Treasury introduced the policy, the Welsh Government would seek to assume responsibility for public sector pay. I remember being interviewed by the BBC on the steps of St Stephen’s entrance on my response to the autumn statement. I was asked to respond to the First Minister’s comments, which I had not heard previously, that regional pay was

“a code for cutting pay in Wales”.

He continued:

“Ultimately we may have to look at taking over pay and conditions here in Wales. It’s not as easy as it sounds. There are real issues in terms of how that’s done. But if we’re forced into that situation, better that than have people’s pay cut by the UK Government in London.”

That sort of fighting talk, with an alternative course of action, is extremely unlike the current Welsh Government. We normally get a pile of hot air based on Labour-Tory tribalism, but with even the Welsh Government awakening from its slumber, perhaps Ministers here in London should be very wary of the strength of opposition that these proposals will generate.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

As usual, my Plaid friends always make the case better when they do not mention the word “independence”. Going back to the better part of the hon. Gentleman’s argument, we have a Secretary of State for Wales who happens to represent a Buckinghamshire constituency. Surely, if these proposals were considered logically, the rate of pay for that Secretary of State—if she is still Secretary of State at the end of the week—would be rather different if she represented a Welsh seat. That would be absolute nonsense, and it illustrates how nonsensical this policy is.

[Jonathan Edwards]

That is a fantastic intervention, if I am honest. Obviously, if we were to think this policy through rationally, it would mean that Members of Parliament should receive differential pay, and I can imagine how that might go down with hon. Members if we had to vote on it.

[Hywel Williams]

To return to the practical problems that we have in Wales, we share a long land border with England that is rather different from Scotland. There is much less traffic. I am very glad to see that link with England and both sides should profit from it, but it means that public sector pay in the Courts Service in Mold, for example, is different from that in Chester, which is just a few miles down the road, and that is ludicrous.

[Jonathan Edwards]

That is one of the practical problems that will come from this policy.

As a Welsh nationalist, I of course welcome the statements of the Government of my country that they will look into devolving public sector pay and conditions. Let us hope that if the UK Government continue with this policy, they match their words with actions. My only word of warning is: how will the Welsh Government fund this policy, given that they are reliant on block grant funding, which has been depressed by the Treasury, and that they are paralysed by an inability to raise their own revenue? If we go down this road, we will have to reform the funding formula, which the Labour party was previously cautious about doing.

Every hon. Member will acknowledge that the cost of living—particularly housing—for public sector workers in some parts of the UK is a problem. The chasm between private sector and public sector wages in London, for example, needs to be addressed. That is why my party previously made the case for a maximum wage to tackle the ridiculous earnings and bonuses paid to people in the square mile that do so much to inflate prices for ordinary working people in both public and private sectors. We must consider introducing innovative ideas, such as rent caps, as in New York, to reduce the housing benefit bill and ensure that public sector workers are not priced out of housing.

Rather than take such bold measures, the UK Government prefer to hammer hard-working people in the poorest parts of the state in an attempt to remedy the problems caused by the obsession of successive Westminster Governments with the economic elite here in London. That policy response, based on dealing with the consequences of macro-economic policy, has led to such imbalances across the state, rather than tackling the causes of those imbalances. The argument is that, through regional pay, the differences between public and private sector pay will disappear, but that claim comes about through looking at problems through the wrong end of the microscope. That is the same perspective from which people argued that cutting public sector jobs would lead automatically to their replacement with private sector jobs—and that has since been proven quite wrong, especially in areas such as the one that I represent.

In Wales, as in other parts of the UK, the private sector is undoubtedly too small, and that is sometimes misrepresented by people saying that there is too large a public sector, but that is not the case. The private sector in Wales needs to be given encouragement to grow through tax breaks, Government support for specific industries and infrastructure improvements. My party has been championing such intervention in response to the economic turmoil of the financial crisis in the past four years. I need not remind hon. Members that the Welsh economy under Plaid Cymru was growing faster than in any other part of the UK when we left office.

Sharp cuts in the pay available to public sector workers would have a hugely negative impact upon their ability to spend in the private sector and would probably lead to a vicious downward spiral, with job losses in the private sector and then a further downward impact upon public sector pay to again realign. This is what Blanchflower calls a “death spiral”. The effect of regional pay may be to institutionalise lower pay and create employment ghettos. I am concerned that, despite such significant problems, the twin siren calls of saving money and dismantling the public sector may be too much for the Chancellor to ignore. I hope that I am wrong. Diolch yn fawr.

09:53

[Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Chope, for calling me to speak on this complex, interesting issue. This is the first time that I have spoken under your chairmanship, and it is a great pleasure to do so. I congratulate my good friend, the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards). We have discussed this matter once, briefly, on Welsh radio, and I said then that I wanted to speak in this debate. The gist of what I said then, and shall say now, is that we are facing a complex issue. It is difficult to understand how the hon. Gentleman could be so definitive about a response.

There are serious issues here. On 29 November, the Chancellor announced a review of the case for regional pay. We are talking about an announcement that there will be an inquiry reviewing the case; that is not sufficiently definitive to be described as proposals. A number of hon. Members who intervened mentioned proposals, but we are considering something that could have a damaging effect and could distort local markets.

The issue is not new. I first became involved in it 30 years ago, and it was a chastening experience. I am talking about the general, in-principle case for looking at regional pay. I had just become chairman of Montgomeryshire district council, and had very little experience of public work; I had probably been put in that position a little earlier than I should have been. I was a local farmer—a small businessman—and it seemed to me that the local authority was distorting the local market. It was paying a significantly higher rate than the local market. People were being transferred, and local businesses were complaining about losing their best staff.

I went to a conference in Kensington town hall; I was very green and new. My chief executive, who came with me, put me down to speak. When I was on the platform, I made what I thought was an entirely rational point, but I was booed off the platform. I was an independent chairman; I was speaking with a local businessman’s logic about how we could run the business—the local authority—more efficiently and not distort local markets, but I was booed off. That was more than 30 years ago, so there is nothing new about this debate.

I have read some quotes made by the previous Prime Minister when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and they were incredibly positive about regional pay. I am sure that when we have this debate in July after the inquiry reports, which will be the obvious time to discuss what might then be considered proposals, his quotes will be mentioned; there are legions of them, strongly supporting regional pay and saying how vital it is for the future of our economy.

[Helen Goodman]

Labour Members are concerned that there is not an open inquiry, but a collecting of arguments for doing something that the Chancellor already wants to do. Will the hon. Gentleman say who is on the commission, who is undertaking the review, and whether the trade unions are involved with it?

[Glyn Davies]

No, I cannot say.

[Hywel Williams]

The hon. Gentleman says that the debate is on a long-standing, old question from 30 years ago. I thought that the Conservative position on it in Wales was made clear in a debate on 30 September 2008, when Mr William Graham—some hon. Members might not know that he is a senior Conservative Assembly Member—said:

“First Minister, you will know that the Welsh Conservatives firmly oppose the introduction of regional pay for civil servants.”

What has changed?

[Glyn Davies]

I am sure that Mr William Graham will be extremely honoured to be quoted in a debate in this House. I will tell him about that when I speak to him later today, as I have arranged to do—[Interruption.]—not on this issue, but on another one that will be of particular interest to Welsh Members across the board.

This issue has the potential to distort local markets. That was my view 30 years ago, and I still see that potential now. I should have thought that I would have found a measure of agreement with the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in our discussions on Sunday morning, because there are significant questions about the difficulty of transferring from one area to another, for example, and whether inflexibilities will be introduced into the market. There are a host of other issues to consider, too.

We need an inquiry. I understand that one or two Opposition Members feel that the inquiry may not look across the board. I would be disappointed if that were so. We need an inquiry that will bring forward the information that all of us, including the Chancellor, need to make a balanced judgment. The appropriate time for that to happen that will be in six months.

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman undertake to speak to his boss, the Secretary of State for Wales, and perhaps even the Chancellor, because, as he just learned from my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), there is not a review? A series of letters have been sent to the national pay review bodies, asking them to consider the matter. Will he take up the challenge and tell the Chancellor that there ought to be a public review, and that trade unions and other bodies absolutely ought to be involved?

[Glyn Davies]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Wales, I reassure him that all the issues that I am involved with in the House feature in our discussions. When I am asked tomorrow what I have been doing since Christmas, I will certainly point to the debate that I am involved in today. I hope that that satisfies him on his request.

The only point that I want to make in my contribution is that the debate is too early. We need to have it in July, and we will. It will be an issue for the Floor of the House—an important and possibly contentious issue; I do not know. We will have to wait and see what the report says. It is possible that the issue will be contentious, but we must wait to see any proposals. In principle, I do not have any objection to the idea of a flexible labour market. Clearly, however, it must work and must not have a negative impact, and that can be decided only when we see the results of the inquiry, and information on which we can base a proper judgment.

10:01

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, which is important for my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards), in that we have large numbers of public sector workers. I am glad that my hon. Friend was successful in securing the debate, and I draw hon. Members’ attention to my early-day motion.

Regional pay would institutionalise lower pay in countries and regions of the UK such as Wales compared with London and south-east England, and it would magnify the unfairness of the current economic situation. Whether it is called zonal pay, local pay or regional pay, in the present constitutional position and economic climate, it would go completely against the supposed policy of the UK Government to rebalance the UK economy, which is sorely needed. Regional pay would badly impact on Wales and other countries and regions with a weaker private sector, which is certainly the case in my constituency, as well as in other parts of Wales, the north-east and north-west of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

When the Government refer to rebalancing, they are referring to something different from what my party means by rebalancing. When the UK Government refer to rebalancing, they are referring to growth in the south-east, as we have seen from the implementation of various policies such as the huge high-speed rail proposal, which will be outlined today, the Olympics or a number of others, which I will not go into this morning.

Our version of rebalancing is to increase support to sectors of industry and locations that have not benefited in the past from Government benevolence and support, which means support for countries and regions that have lost out over previous decades. As my hon. Friend has said, the economic situation has led to the growth of the financial sector in the City of London to the cost of other industries; in Wales, we look in particular at the decline of manufacturing. We have a much more fragile and non-diversified economy because of the centralisation of the UK economy on London, which has produced the overheating of housing costs and pressures in and around London. Anyone who lives in the south-east knows what I mean, and we have seen an increase in inequality between London and the south-east of England compared with the rest of the UK. If the proposals go through—if they are discussed and decided upon—I fear that that inequality will be exacerbated.

The annual survey of hours and earnings published by the Office for National Statistics last month showed that Welsh workers are already among the lowest paid in the UK, while workers in many parts of London and the south-east earn double our average salary. I would be the first to complain about the large pockets of inner-city poverty that I come across when down here in London, and they are scattered throughout the inner cities of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but generally we have seen the north and west of the UK suffering, while the south-east has benefited. That leads me to what might be a soundbite but which has a certain truth: we have regional pay already, but in favour of the south-east. In part, that is because we have too weak a private sector, which needs support and investment to develop, as we in Plaid recommended in our economic renewal plan.

Support for the private sector in Wales may seem a peculiar position for a lefty nationalist to take, and I can see some eyebrows rising around the Chamber already. Unlike the Unionist parties, however, we see no long-term benefits in being continually tied to fiscal transfers from London. That is not the position in which we want to see our country. We want to be as successful as any other part of the UK or of Europe. It is a mark of the failure of the current Unionist settlement that parts of Wales have a gross value added that is low enough to take advantage of European convergence funding. Many parts of Wales have a GVA of less than 75% of the average, so we get large transfers from Brussels. Such transfers are welcome, but we do not want to be in that position at all. That situation is the result of the major economic decisions made in London, where the main economic levers are held. To thrive, the private sector in Wales needs support for it to grow. We need much better infrastructure and the Government to give the support and advantages that will allow companies the opportunity to develop. That has not happened over a long period, and it requires a broad mix of Government policy and a fair economic wind.

Chopping back the public sector in all the guises introduced by the Government—real-terms pay cuts, 710,000 job cuts according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the pickpocketing of pension contributions—will not improve the private sector in Wales one jot. Clearly, as anyone who has looked locally at the economy in Wales or elsewhere knows, there is a strong relationship between the public sector in our areas and the private sector. Cut the public sector and the private sector is hit hard.

The effect of any regional pay policy would be to depress wages in the public sector throughout Wales, which will have a strong knock-on effect on the private sector, because families will have less disposable income. Families with less income will purchase fewer goods and services locally, therefore providing less circulation of income for the local private sector.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) for securing the debate. As well as depressing salaries in the public sector and therefore in the private sector, and given that many of the people affected are already not well paid, will not regional pay cost the state more in working tax credit, housing benefit and the other benefits with which we subsidise low-paid workers?

[Hywel Williams]

The hon. Lady makes a fine point. As so often with the policies of this Government and at times, I fear, of her own Government previously, there is no apparent understanding that the system is such that if we cut off a large branch, the tree itself will be affected. I agree with her entirely.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. In the north-east, the proposal has the potential to take between £500 million and £1 billion out of our regional economy every year, and yet the switch in capital to our regional economy under the Chancellor’s autumn statement was 0.1% or £4.1 million, which is completely unbalanced.

[Hywel Williams]

Indeed. The hon. Lady’s point is pertinent to the debate.

When cuts were made to wider public sector budgets, the effects were largely on the public sector, of course, but also on the para-private sector—companies that have contracts with the public sector—which is integral to local economies. Similarly, those whose livelihoods depend on services to those in employment will be at risk from the proposals. As well as the local economy, a whole host of small companies that service the public sector in our regions will be affected.

I have great sympathy with Labour Members—I am pleased to see some of them here today—but I appreciate that they will be fighting the proposals with one hand tied behind their backs. It does not please me to make the point about the introduction of regional pay by the previous Government, but the Labour Government promoted the idea. They floated it in 2003, and they introduced it in the Courts Service in England and Wales in 2008, when it was not entirely successful. The Public and Commercial Services Union has told me that regional and local pay in the Ministry of Justice has not been a success, and that with the introduction of local pay in the Courts Service in 2007, there were problems with regional pay zones in the Ministry of Justice. The policy created inequalities and tensions, and it was ultimately unsuccessful and had to be reformed. I hope that lessons have been learned, but I worry that the wrong ones might have been learned.

I conclude by saying that the effect of regional pay will be far-reaching and negative and that it will not improve the private sector. There is a strong likelihood that it will lead to institutionalisation of low pay in some places, and it will certainly make it much more difficult to attract new workers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr has said. The Treasury must reconsider its stance, and I will certainly contribute to the debate as it develops, as will my hon. Friend and my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd).

I apologise if my final point sounds light. I am pleased to see that Conservatives in Wales are represented here. The comments of the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) were interesting. I appreciate that Scottish Tories may have problems in mustering manpower. It has been said that there are more pandas in Scotland than Tory MPs, and if the London Conservative and Liberal Democrat Government push the regional pay issue through, Tory MSPs in Edinburgh will be rarer than polar bears on the Clyde.

[Mr Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. Some hon. Members have indicated to me informally that they wish to participate in the debate. However, I will not call anyone if they do not rise and seek to catch my eye. This is the new year, a time to exercise the muscles and become fitter, so perhaps hon. Members who wish to speak will rise in their place.

10:13

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I congratulate the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) on securing this debate, and on the many excellent points he made in his introduction. Other excellent points were made by my hon. Friends the Members for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), for Easington (Grahame M. Morris), and for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop), and by the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams). I do not intend to speak for long, or to repeat the many points made about the implications for regional pay and the regional economy. I intend to focus on what the plans say about the economic policies of this Tory-led Government.

The Tory-led Government talk a good talk about the key challenges facing our economy: the rebalancing away from the service sector towards manufacturing, and away from the south and London towards the regions, including the north-east, where my constituency is. Those challenges are important because of the huge consequences of the financial crisis, which was brought about by an over-focus and over-concentration of the economy on financial services. It will be remembered that when we went into the financial crisis, we had the second lowest deficit in the OECD, but we suffered more greatly because of over-dependence on financial services.

What do the proposals mean for the economy, and particularly for rebalancing it towards manufacturing and the regions? My hon. Friends have made some excellent points about driving higher-paid workers in the public sector away from the regions, and about the impact on the ability of the regions to attract higher-paid private sector workers. I want to focus on what the proposals will mean for those on lower pay.

The evidence shows that the disparity between public and private sector wages, such as it is, is focused on the lower section. The Policy Exchange, in its analysis, admits that the pay advantage, as it calls it, is not evenly distributed and is higher in lower grades, particularly among the bottom 10% of public sector workers. From my experience of working in the public sector as a chartered engineer, I know very well that at the higher end, professional engineers, for example, are much better paid in the private sector than in the public sector. Seeking to equalise pay rates in the private and public sectors in the regions will inevitably reduce the wages of the poorest-paid. What does that say about the Government’s policies and intentions?

We may disagree about the exact causes of the financial crisis, and where the blame for it should lie, but I think we all agree that the poorest people in the country did not cause it, so why are Government policies again targeting the poorest people? The poorest people will pay because, as the hon. Member for Arfon said, depressing wages at the lower end of the public sector will inevitably have an impact on the private sector. Indeed, in their proposals, the Government intend to reduce salaries in the public sector, which must have a knock-on effect on the private sector.

We should remember that salaries at the lower end of the public sector, as in the private sector, are not those on which a family—or often even an individual—can live. The minimum wage is not a living wage, and for that reason, Newcastle city council is working towards a living wage in the most difficult economic circumstances. Low-wage and minimum-wage employers often have to be subsidised by the state, in that working tax credit and housing benefit are needed to enable their employees to live decently, so depressing private sector salaries will cost the state more in benefits.

Let us consider how the private sector will react. We know that the ideological basis of much of the Government’s approach to the economy is that destroying the public sector will provide space for the private sector to leap in, create jobs and new opportunities, and drive the economic recovery forward. I believe that the economic recovery must come from a growth in private sector jobs, but it is clear, after more than a year and a half of this Government, that the private sector cannot create the necessary jobs and growth without the support and partnership of an active public sector, which, by its very nature, includes experienced, well-paid and secure employees who are able to support private sector activities.

I speak regularly to local businesses in my constituency, and they all want to play a part in driving forward growth and creating a resurgence of jobs in the region. People tell me not that wages are too high, but that they need: more public sector support in areas such as skills; investment in shared resources, infrastructure, and transport; and measures to increase confidence and buying power among the public. Reducing the salaries of public sector workers in Newcastle will reduce people’s confidence and lessen the prospect of private sector employers increasing employment and stoking growth.

How can the Minister justify targeting the poorest people in our society to pay back a deficit that is due to a crisis caused by a rampant financial sector? We have had 18 months of an ideological experiment, on a national basis, that clearly has not worked. Depressing local wages will not only drive out more skilled constituents, but will hit the private sector in regions that are already vulnerable and most greatly affected by public sector cuts. This ideological experiment has run its course, and the Government’s proposal yet again takes it too far.

10:19

[Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) on securing the debate. The issue of regional pay is important for people living in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and in regions such as the north-east of England.

I spoke about regional pay, or the localisation of pay, in a debate on 6 December 2011, and the issue has been on the agenda for Governments since at least the 1980s, when I was a civil servant in Durham. The Megaw report wanted to devolve public sector pay in the civil service on a regional basis, but that proposal did not get anywhere. Introducing local rates of pay is difficult. The previous Government looked at the issue with regard to the public sector, and a Treasury guidance note from 2003 stated:

“At the extreme, local pay in theory could mean devolved pay…to local bodies. In practice, extremely devolved arrangements are not desirable. There are risks of workers being treated differently for no good reason. There could be dangers of leapfrogging and parts of the public sector competing against each other for the best staff.”

That is the basic, fundamental reason why devolution of levels of pay in the public sector has not been introduced.

This is a time of austerity. Public sector pay has been restricted and will not be increased for two years, and then it will increase by just 1% for two years. Let us look at markets in the north-east of England; if we had devolved local pay bargaining, people might say that pay should be frozen in that region for another year because of the difference between the public and private sectors. Do the Government believe that public sector workers in some parts of the country should have a pay rise, while those in other places should not receive one, because, according to Government analysis, the pay difference between the public and private sectors is too big?

We should not look at only one region. The difference in pay in the north-east and in the south-east of England is 10%, and we should try to decrease that. Why is it right for a nurse working at St Thomas’ hospital, across the way from here, to be on a different pay rate from a nurse who works at the university hospital of North Tees in my constituency, or in Bishop Auckland or Hartlepool? I cannot see how that can be right if both nurses are doing the same job. Many private sector companies, especially supermarkets and some banks such as Santander, have national pay agreements. There may be some flexibility within those agreements, but they have national pay systems. To say that some public sector workers should suffer austerity measures for longer than others because of where they live is divisive. How can we encourage a public sector worker to move from south-east England to the north-east to do exactly the same job if the rates of pay in the north-east are completely different from those in London?

[Tom Blenkinsop]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent case. There are institutionalised national bodies that survey and assess prices in supermarkets. How on earth would regionalised public sector pay work in an economy with five or six big supermarkets that are supposed to have national rates for pricing their goods?

[Phil Wilson]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. One reason why the previous Government did not introduce such measures is because the complexity of having different pay bodies, boards and regions would create unnecessary bureaucracy, which any Government should want to keep to a minimum.

In north-east England, average pay is £19,000 per year, but it is only that high because of public sector workers in the area. How low does the Minister want pay in north-east England to be? Public sector workers maintain the average salary at £19,000; without them it would be much lower. The differential in rates of pay is not a reason for cutting pay or suspending pay rises in the public sector. Instead, we should see how we can increase pay in the private sector.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

Again, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and it would be good to see the Minister thank and congratulate north-east England: although in the rest of the country the manufacturing economy is in the doldrums, the north-east is bucking that trend. Workers in the steel and chemical processing industries would undoubtedly be affected by any reduction in public sector pay.

[Phil Wilson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and those workers will soon be joined by workers in the train building sector, in the factory in Newton Aycliffe. As I understand, the north-east exports more manufacturing goods than it imports.

The private sector has a major role to play, and we need an increase in private sector jobs. At the moment, however, 67,000 public sector jobs have been lost in north-east England, and unemployment has risen to 11.6%. Where are the private sector jobs? How can we say that the public sector is crowding out private sector jobs when unemployment is rising and there is no growth to make up for the loss of 67,000 public sector jobs? Figures from the third quarter of last year show that the number of private sector jobs in the UK increased by only 5,000. Many regions such as the north-east are losing out.

I am very worried about what will happen. There is a big pay differential between the south-east and the rest of the country. The differential between regions other than the south-east is minor; it is only 1% or 2%, depending on what goods we compare. We talk about social mobility, and about people getting on and wanting to move to different parts of the country; how will that be possible if pay rates are so different across the country?

Also, we will not create regions as we know them; we will create silos. If people work in the public sector in the north-east, that is where they will have to work, because if they want to move to south-east England or somewhere else, they probably will not be able to afford to buy a house there. There is great difficulty with that at the moment. Let us not forget that in London, where there is London weighting, there is a big problem with recruitment in the public sector as well.

The proposal is a knee-jerk reaction that has not been thought through. I know that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said that this will not be regional pay as perhaps it was outlined in the past, and that it will be based on zones or localities. That may be so, and it may have been tried out in the Courts Service; let us say that it has been tried there. The fundamental point is that the previous Government did not want to implement it anywhere else, because they knew about the inherent contradictions involved in doing that.

North-east England is a great place to live. I have lived there all my life. I see it as a region of the country with a great identity. I do not want it to become a silo, such that if people work there in the public sector, they cannot work anywhere else. I do not want public sector workers in north-east England to have to face extended periods of austerity because they happen to be working in the wrong part of the country.

We need to look at the private sector. I want private sector jobs to come to the north-east of England, and I want those private sector jobs to have good pay rates. This week and over the weekend, every party has been going on about high pay among senior executives. Okay, let us consider that, but let us also consider low pay in the private sector and not just in the public sector, because private sector workers make up the majority of workers in the country. The answer to the problem is not regional pay or localised pay—it is a living wage for all our people.

10:32

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Chope; happy new year.

I, too, offer my congratulations to the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) on securing this important debate, which, as he has rightly pointed out, will be one of the defining debates in respect of economic policy over the coming period. He made a series of telling and well argued points. It was slightly ironic to hear a nationalist Member of the House arguing in effect in favour of collective bargaining on a national, British basis right across the UK. Nevertheless, it was a very interesting point.

[Jonathan Edwards]

I make no apologies for what I said, because at the moment sovereignty over these issues resides in this place, and as someone who has been sent here to represent the ordinary working people of Carmarthenshire, I will continue to do so as long as that is the case.

[Owen Smith]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention and pleased that he makes no apologies for what he said. I entirely agree with the arguments that he made in respect of solidarity and collaboration right across the UK for people who have similar interests across Britain, whichever area of the country they live in. I wholeheartedly share his views about that, which is why I am a Unionist, not a nationalist, on today of all days.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) and for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson), who made a powerful speech, and of course the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies), who I am delighted is taking up the challenge of telling the Secretary of State for Wales and the Chancellor of the Exchequer that we need a proper review to address this very complex issue—as he described it—as opposed to a couple of private letters to the heads of the national pay review bodies.

Public sector workers must wake up every morning wondering what this Government will do to them next. We have seen the continuing pay freeze; we have seen additional cuts in wages when inflation is taken into account for the next two years; we have seen the 3% additional effective cut in wages as a result of the changes in public sector pensions; and 710,000 public sector workers, up from the 400,000 previously admitted to, are waiting to see whether they will be in a job at the end of this spending period.

Against that backdrop, there was the bombshell in the Chancellor’s autumn statement that regional pay will be re-examined. The Chancellor said that the evidence suggests that regional pay should be considered, because there are disparities between pay bands in the public sector across the UK. As we know, the Chancellor is very keen on evidence-based policy, so I thought that I would assess the evidence in respect of regional pay to date, because we have some experience of it.

London weighting is well established. It is a means of trying to deal with the problems, particularly in respect of housing, for people working in London on lower public sector wages. The previous Government sought to expand that by looking at key worker status and further help for key workers in London. As several hon. Members have said today, and as the Chancellor said repeatedly when he appeared before the Treasury Select Committee, we also have the experience of the Courts Service. However, the Chancellor has been slightly less than fair with the facts in respect of the Courts Service. The fact is that the Courts Service changes that were introduced in 2008—the previous Labour Government introduced zonal pay and five zones across the UK—were a significant improvement on the disparities that existed hitherto. The Courts Service came together in 2005. There was a merger involving the magistrates courts, the county courts, the Crown court and the Supreme Court. Before that point, more than 50 rates of pay were being applied across the Courts Service, so we went from 50 to five. The reality is that despite protestations by some of the unions at the time, most members happily opted into that service; indeed, more than 95% did so.

Opposition Members, who believe in evidence-based policy, would like the Government properly to review the experience of workers in the Courts Service. They should consider retention, rates of pay and the way in which the system has facilitated movement or otherwise across the country, and bring that to the table as part of the evidence for the current proposal.

[Glyn Davies]

It has become fashionable for Opposition Members to disown the policies of the previous Government and, in fact, to disown their own policies at the start of this Government. I have listened to the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith), who has discussed the five regional zones and evidence-based policy. He has described the current proposal as a bombshell, which indicates to me that he has no interest in the results of the inquiry. All we are hearing is knee-jerk opposition to make a point before we have even heard the facts.

[Owen Smith]

For the third time, I have to tell the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire that there is no inquiry. A couple of letters have gone from the Chancellor to the heads of the pay review bodies asking them to come forward with evidence on how local pay might reflect local market conditions, which is not an open inquiry. I thought that the hon. Gentleman had taken up the challenge to appeal for an inquiry.

The world has changed since the policies were implemented in 2008 on the Courts Service, which took place in an economy that was growing right across the UK. The world has changed. When the facts change, we reconsider our views, and we are doing that right now. We are thinking about the meaning of the Government’s proposals on regional pay and what the evidence shows us. We will come to a considered view when we know what the Government are proposing, but let us look at the evidence.

Of course, it was a previous Tory Chancellor, in the 1990s, who first talked about introducing regional pay on a much wider scale. What happened in the NHS? Local bits of the NHS were given the right to conduct local bargaining, but they lacked the necessary experience and were unable properly to assess local market conditions. As a consequence, there was more than a year’s delay before regional pay bands were set. When regional pay bands were set, the differential across the country was 0.1%. The rationale for that was, of course, that managers understood that, given the problems and complexity that widespread differentials would throw up, a collective agreement right across the country was the best possible option. The Chancellor agreed, and a year later he took back the power, concerned that there might have been spiralling costs had the situation continued.

[Hywel Williams]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Owen Smith]

I will give way in a moment.

NHS trusts have the capacity to engage in a greater degree of differentiation, but by and large they do not do so, because they accept that it would be unfair and lead to unintended consequences. We saw some such unintended consequences when the police looked into regional pay. In the London Metropolitan area, there was an agreement a few years ago to offer a much higher rate of pay to Metropolitan police officers. The unintended consequence was that officers transferred in droves from the areas around central London, and outer metropolitan boroughs consequently had to set higher rates themselves. Such a policy leads to unintended consequences and involves significant risks, so the Government need to think carefully before they pursue it.

[Hywel Williams]

I do not want to dwell on the policies of the previous Government, because I think that those of the current one are infinitely more damaging, but before we leave 2008, will the hon. Gentleman confirm that the previous Government were not considering regional pay in any other part of the public sector apart from HM Courts Service? Was it just the Courts Service?

[Owen Smith]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I was not in the House in 2008, but as far as I am aware, we introduced the policy in the Courts Service and there was further consideration. The former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), certainly talked about regional pay, but we did not introduce it in other areas. At the end of our period in government, there had been some experimentation in respect of the Courts Service, but we did not introduce the policy elsewhere.

Let us look at what happened at the Courts Service and consider where we go from here, because there are significant risks. At the time, the Government, and certainly the Treasury, understood that there were risks. My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield has mentioned the Treasury paper in 2004-05, which stated that

“extremely devolved arrangements are not desirable. There are risks of workers being treated differently for no good reason. There could be dangers of leapfrogging and parts of the public sector competing against each other for the best staff.”

That takes us to the motive: why have the Government now decided to bring this forward? If it was not a good idea a few years ago, why is it a good idea now? The reason is, of course, found in the two issues that they have with the public and private sectors. First, they believe in a totally outmoded, almost Manichean split—the public sector is bad, bloated and inefficient and the private sector is good, lean, hungry and eager to work. That is their understanding.

Secondly, the Government have a thoroughly outmoded notion that cutting the public sector and effectively forcing people to transfer to the private sector—through actively cutting jobs, as we heard was the strategy in the Budget, or through reducing regional pay, as we now hear might be the strategy—will somehow inflate the private sector. There is absolutely no evidence to support that. It is a totally misguided prescription, and one I fear that the Government will repeat.

The Treasury has said that the reason for looking at getting rid of national pay bargaining is to produce

“an economic reform to boost regions of the economy that are over-dependent on the public sector. All the evidence is that flexible public sector pay to reflect local labour market conditions will allow the private sector to flourish.”

Show us the money and show us the evidence, because we cannot see it at the moment. We can see a pamphlet with a lot of inflammatory language about the Manichean split between the fat public sector and the lean and hungry private sector from a think-tank which is pretty close to the Prime Minister and which some would say is a free-market, right-wing organisation, but apart from that I do not see a lot of evidence to support the position.

I suspect that the Minister will come out with some inflammatory comparisons, but I hope that she will not. We have heard so often about paramedics earning 16% more in the public sector than in the private sector, and I hope that we will not hear such unnecessary and unfair comparisons now. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies itself has said, such comparisons do not take into account the fact that there are invariably older and more experienced workers with better qualifications in the public sector. When such factors are taken into account, the differential between the public sector and their private sector counterparts is perhaps only 2%.

[Jonathan Edwards]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. This morning, the Bevan Foundation responded to the debate by stating that the IFS figures do not compare like with like and that it is deeply misleading to use the figures in that way.

[Owen Smith]

I entirely agree. The evidence is shaky and a leap of faith is required—just as we were meant to believe that cutting the public sector would lead to a flourishing private sector. As we have heard, there is no reasonable basis for making that leap of faith. On job creation in the public versus private sector, we learned that in the last quarter, for every 13 jobs lost in the public sector, only one was created in the private sector. That is the reality of what is happening in the economy. We should not take, with any degree of faith, the Government’s reassurances that changing regional pay will make a key difference.

On both sides of the House, we have come to understand that fairness is an important theme in modern politics. In politics, we seem to be tussling daily over who can be the fairest, and the Government have to stand against the test of fairness on this issue. They need to answer the question whether it is fair to target public sector workers once more to pick up the bill for a crisis in our economy that they did not cause. Is it fair for the Government to implement a policy that will once more impact disproportionately on less affluent areas that have greater health problems due to the legacy of heavy industry and other issues? Is it fair to implement a policy that will suck demand out of their economies and further reduce the incomes of people living there?

The Government have a manifestly failing economic strategy to reduce the deficit that has led, on their admission, to an increased level of borrowing— £158 billion extra is being borrowed as a result of the their policy. That is why they are thrashing around looking for extra savings and why they are countenancing further unfair and destructive measures. They need to think hard about the policy, conduct a proper review and provide evidence to substantiate their dangerous claims.

10:49

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Miss Chloe Smith)]

Happy new year, Mr Chope. I am sure that it is an honour for us all to take part in the first debate of 2012, so let us enjoy ourselves for that reason. I thank the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) for securing what has been a thorough and interesting debate. It might not be a new debate, as my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) said, but it is extremely important none the less.

The policy is not about saving money—I shall pause for the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) to draw breath—but about supporting economic growth, and I will go through the reasons why the Government believe that the policy could do that. A simple fact of life that needs to enter the debate is that public and private sector organisations compete for employees in different markets across the UK. There is no way around that fact. Equally, there is no way around the fact that private sector pay is, on the whole, set locally and that public sector pay is usually set nationally. I will set out two effects that those differences can have before going on to the meat of the debate.

The differences can do three things. First, they can hurt private sector businesses that have to compete in certain places with higher public sector wages. Secondly, they can also lead to unfair variations in the quality of public services—something on which I am sure that we would all have more to say, had we another hour and half in which to debate it. Thirdly—this is crucial—if a higher than locally desirable wage bill is set, public sector money is not always allocated as effectively as it could be within local areas. That has a knock-on effect on what the public sector can do with its remaining budget, which has a further knock-on effect on the number of jobs that the public sector can support.

[Hywel Williams]

To the contrary, given the problems of mobility of public service workers that would inevitably arise with regional pay, what consideration are the Government giving to the direction of labour in the public sector?

[Miss Smith]

If I have understood that correctly, it is about what definition the Government are giving to labour in the market. I beg the hon. Gentleman’s pardon—

[Hywel Williams]

The direction of labour. It is a good old-fashioned socialist policy.

[Miss Smith]

Absolutely—which I am clearly not ready for at 10 to 11 on a Tuesday morning.

The point that I was going to make, which is the most important one that I want to leave behind in this debate, is that the Government have set out no detailed proposals at this stage. As I think all hon. Members know, the proposal that has been made so far, through the autumn statement and subsequently, is only to ask the experts how public sector pay might better reflect local markets. I, for one, do not have a problem with that being done by letter. I hear what hon. Members have said about that. However, I am also particularly delighted that the hon. Member for Pontypridd changes his mind when facts change. I hope that in this case also he will wait for the evidence.

[Owen Smith]

Does the Minister accept that the Chancellor has clearly indicated that he is in favour of the reform? He spoke before the Treasury Committee, and no one can be in any doubt that he thinks it is a good idea.

[Miss Smith]

It is perfectly possible to think that something is a good idea and then to ask experts how it could happen.

[Helen Goodman]

Does the Minister therefore accept that all that has happened is that the Chancellor has asked how the idea could be implemented and how it would work and that no consideration is being given to the proposal’s overall economic impact?

[Miss Smith]

The best possibility of dealing with the overall economic impact will be when facts and data have been received. That is the point of the process that the Chancellor has laid out.

To move on to the content that we need to get through, hon. Members should be in no doubt about how important the public sector is and about the fact that the Government share that view and the desire for all parts of the economy to do well in the coming years. However, fiscal consolidation is a vital precondition for growth and part of the sustainable foundation that will let all sectors and all parts of industry do well and do what they need to. It is also part of achieving even growth across the country. It is right that public sector pay restraint should play a part in that fiscal consolidation. Public servants do a crucial job in delivering the high-quality services that we all look for, and it is right that we continue to offer the kind of rewards that attract the most skilled people to the public sector. However, it is incontrovertible that public sector wages on average continue to compare extremely generously to those of private sector workers. The Institute of Fiscal Studies, which has already featured in the debate, suggested that there is on average a 7.5% premium to working in the public sector over comparable jobs in the private sector. That makes a strong case for public sector pay bill restraint.

I want to discuss the rationale for the policy suggestion that has been made and the Chancellor’s effort to seek views on how it can be carried out. We must ensure that public sector pay is set at the right level for each labour market in the long term. I want to make it clear again that the proposals are not about generating savings, but about supporting economic growth by ensuring that wages are set at the level in individual localities. Indeed, a significant reason for the disparity between public and private sector pay is due, as I have mentioned, to the difference between pay that is set locally and pay that is set nationally. Typically, private sector pay is more subject to the rates paid by local competitors, the local cost of living and perhaps, in some cases, local turnover rates. However, public sector pay is usually set on a one-size-fits-all basis nationally. Accordingly, public sector workers can often be paid more than private sector workers in similar jobs in the same area. That has potentially damaging consequences for the economy. For example, private sector businesses, perhaps such as the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire once ran, which are looking for staff to help them to set up or grow, need to compete with much higher public sector wages in the same area. That is the ultimate crowding-out argument within the debate.

I want to refer briefly to the system of zonal pay in the Courts Service, which has been mentioned. It demonstrates that it is possible for pay to be responsive to local labour markets within a national bargaining framework. Of course, those zones did not simply conform to regional boundaries, but took into account the local economy by, for example, putting Norwich, Exeter and Newcastle in the same zone. The debate has a misnomer at its heart. In the autumn statement, the Chancellor announced local pay, not regional pay, so we are not talking about something that might take effect at the level of Wales. We are talking about something that may, depending on what the experts say, happen at a lower level.

[Phil Wilson]

How local is local?

[Miss Smith]

I will just have to repeat myself on this point: depending on what the experts say, it will be at a more local level. That is what I, for one, look forward to from those experts, as, no doubt, do all those people who like facts.

The Government are not setting out detailed and prescriptive proposals. The hon. Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) would no doubt like me to give a quote, but I shall not give him that pleasure this morning. Public sector work forces have a variety of pay structures, as has been mentioned. The Chancellor has therefore written to the independent pay review bodies to ask them to consider how to make public sector pay more responsive to local labour markets. They will report back with interim findings by July. That will include union evidence, to answer the question of the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). I shall be absolutely clear about who will be included in the scope of the relevant body: it will be the NHS, excluding doctors and dentists—again, to respond to a point made by the hon. Lady—and it will include teachers, prison officers and the senior civil service. To respond to the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop), it will not include the police, who, as he knows, will be subject to the Winsor review.

The Minister for the Cabinet Office will co-ordinate and assist Secretaries of State in exploring how local, market-facing pay could be introduced in civil service Departments. As to the devolved Administrations, public sector pay in devolved areas is a matter for them, except for those areas where workers are covered by a national pay review body. That said, we are keen to see local market-facing pay introduced across the UK, and we urge all devolved Administrations to consider issuing separate remits for the relevant pay review bodies within devolved areas.

The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr asked me about an impact assessment on how the approach taken in the Courts Service turned out. Very speedily, I can offer him a couple of points about what happened across that experience. First, staff adoption was at 97% over a year later. Secondly and more broadly, analysis conducted after the reforms showed that the majority of locations had a healthy turnover and that the Ministry of Justice was able to recruit and retain staff throughout the country. He also asked me about the Office for Budget Responsibility costs of the public sector work force. If he would let me have that question in writing, in more detail, so that I can answer him as accurately as I can, I would be happy to do so; but I must finish a couple of other points in a very short time.

Public sector pay restraint and reforms to local pay policy are a key step to supporting local economic recovery and growth. Indeed, supporting regional private sector growth has been at the heart of the Government’s growth strategy. Hon. Members may want to consider, for example, the £30 billion of investment in infrastructure projects across the UK set out in the autumn statement, enterprise zones and the regional growth fund. We need to look at the aims and the areas and communities that are dependent so far on the public sector to support them in making the transition to private sector-led growth and prosperity.

Hon. Members have rightly talked about the need for fairness. As we all know, many families face difficult prospects. That is why the Government have taken practical steps to provide support, including—as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) will welcome—having gained more from a tax on bankers every year than the previous Government did in a single year. She will also welcome the protections for the lowest paid during the public sector pay freeze, the deferring of January’s scheduled fuel duty increase and the decisions that have lifted more than 1 million out of income tax altogether.

The Government have already taken considerable action to achieve strong, sustainable and balanced growth that is more evenly shared across the country. By moving towards local public sector pay, we can ensure that we have high-quality public services across the UK and do not crowd out private sector recovery.

History Teaching

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

11:00

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I thank the Speaker for selecting this subject for debate and am grateful to have a second opportunity to talk about history in schools. When I raised the topic during the Christmas Adjournment debate, I said that if I were to choose one Christmas present, it would be to make history compulsory to the age of 16 in schools. I might have been a bit too hasty in making that wish, however, because the national curriculum review is set to continue for another two years.

Today is a good opportunity for Members to discuss the teaching of history in schools and whether it should be compulsory to the age of 16, as it is in most other countries in Europe. As I said in the Adjournment debate, it is a mark of shame that we, along with Albania, are the only European country that does not teach history in some form beyond the age of 14.

In the Adjournment debate, I mentioned a report that I have written, “History in Schools: A School Report”. I am happy to give a copy to any Member who is interested in reading it; the Minister already has one to hand. Essentially, my report highlights the state of history in schools today, and it does not seek to make party political points. In 1997, a paltry 36% of pupils studied history GCSE. Last year, the number dropped below 30% to 29.5%. Those figures, however, hide what is happening with history across the country. Instead of uniting us as one nation and allowing us to have a coherent national identity, the subject has divided us into two nations of haves and have-nots.

In my report, I break down all the figures by local authority and show the number of pupils taking and passing history at GCSE. In 77 local authorities, fewer than one in five pupils is passing history GCSE. However, the situation is even worse than that. In local authorities such as Knowsley, fewer than 8% of pupils are passing history GCSE.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman has given us the headlines. Does he share my concern that at local history level, the figures are even worse? Pupils do not know what has gone on historically in their own local areas.

[Chris Skidmore]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I will come on to that topic later. First, as a good historian, I want to set out a narrative of what has gone on in the country so far and then to debate what we should do about it. I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that local history should feature more prominently in the curriculum, but more on that anon.

In 77 local authorities, fewer than one in five pupils are passing history GCSE. In one local authority, Knowsley, the figure has gone down to 8%, with just four pupils out of 2,000 passing history A-level.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Let me understand what the hon. Gentleman is proposing. Does he think that the teaching of history post-14 should be compulsory in academies?

[Chris Skidmore]

I was going to get on to another figure. In 159 schools, not a single pupil is being entered for history GCSE, which includes academies and comprehensives—it is roughly balanced between the two. We must have an honest debate about the curriculum. The national curriculum in the 1990s intended to make history compulsory to 16, and we should be looking to do that in academies, comprehensives and all other schools.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Is it my hon. Friend’s intention to make sure that every student studies history until GCSE level? If students are taking GCSEs, which presumably most of them are, they will therefore take history at GCSE, which is something that I totally support.

[Chris Skidmore]

I want history to be compulsory in some form to 16. I will come on to the important issue of the qualification later. Just as maths, English and science are compulsory in all schools, so too should history. Education is about not simply providing skills, knowledge and requirements for jobs, professions and universities—or whatever route or career a pupil may decide to take—but creating a canon of knowledge. I want every pupil to leave school not only with the basics but with an understanding of the basic principles of our constitution and history. They should have a rounded education and history plays a vital role in that.

[Kevin Brennan]

By what mechanism would the hon. Gentleman like to make history compulsory in academies, given that academies are exempt from the national curriculum?

[Chris Skidmore]

I am startled by the hon. Gentleman’s response. He was a Minister once.

[Kevin Brennan]

And a teacher.

[Chris Skidmore]

The hon. Gentleman knows very well that although academies are exempt from other subjects in the national curriculum, pupils still have to study maths, English and science. Those subjects are compulsory, and academies are bound by law in academy frameworks and agreements to provide them. Under my proposals, history would be included in the same way.

[Kevin Brennan]

In the agreement?

[Chris Skidmore]

Yes. Let me take a few more interventions.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this very important debate. I studied history at A-level. Let me suggest where we should go from here. Certain schools, such as Chatham grammar school where I am currently a governor, have now brought in the E-bac system in which the humanities, history or geography, have to be taken by students up to the age of 16 for GCSE. That is the way forward. Under this Government, people are being pushed to take history and there is a recognition of its importance in our curriculum and in our understanding of our country.

[Chris Skidmore]

The E-bac is a welcome development, but we must go further. When looking at grammar schools and selective schools, it is interesting to look beneath the statistics. In comprehensive schools in 1997, 169,298 pupils took history GCSE. That figure has now dropped to 155,982. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) is chuntering. Would she like to say something?

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman tell us why there has been this decline in the study of history? What is his analysis of why this has come about? Is it to do with the interest of the pupils?

[Chris Skidmore]

The decline has been a slow one. I do not wish to make party political points during this debate. David Cannadine’s excellent new book, “The Right Kind of History”, shows that these debates have been going round in circles since the early part of the 20th century and that lamenting the decline of history is nothing new. What is new is that we are competing in an international market against other countries, the pupils of which are being rigorously taught and assessed in all subjects and are driving forward in a way that our pupils are not.

There are some schools in which pupils take history to 16. My hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) has mentioned a grammar school in his constituency. It is of interest to me that while the numbers taking history GCSE have been declining in comprehensive schools, they have been increasing in grammar schools since 1997. Although we have 29.5% of pupils in comprehensive schools taking history GCSE, we have 55% of pupils in grammar schools taking history and 48% in independent schools. The gap between grammar schools and comprehensive schools in terms of the proportion of pupils who are taking history GCSE has increased from 17.4% in 1997 to 24.9% in 2010, which is a real problem. The growing divide in education is no longer just about standards in different parts of the country but about the subjects that we choose to take at school. I worry how that will affect our national identity.

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate and pursuing the topic. Does he agree that part of the decline began in the 1970s? Let me declare an interest here; I was a teacher in the 1970s. History teachers were almost compelled to change the nature of what they were teaching to encompass what is known today as the schools history project. Instead of teaching the narrative, teachers were forced to try to teach 11, 12 and 13-year-olds to become historians. What happened then was a loss of confidence and interest in what history teachers were trying to do.

[Chris Skidmore]

When we look at the nature of the curriculum itself, we see that there have been historical problems. My hon. Friend was a secondary school history teacher before he entered this House and therefore has a wealth of experience—probably more than me—of what actually happens in schools with teaching history. He also knows that, although we may talk about the curriculum and assessment and examination structures, if we are going to make history compulsory to 16, for pupils themselves history will only be as good as the teachers who teach it, which is obviously a crucial issue. We all remember our great teachers when we were at school. I had great history teachers, which was one reason why I ended up on the road to becoming a historian before I entered this place.

The Ofsted report, “History for all”, showed that history teaching was “good” or “outstanding” in 63 out of the 83 primary schools that Ofsted assessed, and “good” or “outstanding” in 59 out of 83 secondary schools that it assessed. Nevertheless, the report expressed genuine concerns about the quality of the subject training for teachers.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this issue to Westminster Hall today. As he has said, history is not just about dates and events, because it is about more than those things. It is also about learning the lessons of lives that were well lived and the lessons of lives that were poorly lived, and perhaps about telling the difference between the two. Does he agree that education in history is much more important than just teaching the facts, figures and dates of history?

[Chris Skidmore]

One of the reasons why I wanted to secure this debate was to try to get some form of agreement and to have a discussion about more than the nature of history. We can talk about “what” history or “whose” history—whether it is local or national history—and we need to talk about history in terms of the curriculum and examinations, but let us start from a baseline that we can never deny, namely “why” history. Historians have probably come at things from the wrong end, in that they are, as Isaiah Berlin would have put it, foxes rather than hedgehogs. We often focus on the minutiae, and so we start focusing on what should be in the curriculum and how we should frame it without coming to an agreement that we should have history to 16, as most other countries in the world do. That is where I want to get to, and then let us fill out things and colour in the blanks.

[Rehman Chishti]

I want to follow the question put by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). With regard to teaching history, it is linked to the use of essays, in promoting critical thinking, vocabulary and one’s communication skills. Nowadays, however, modern assessments are much shorter and therefore essays are not used, so the communication skills and increased vocabulary that a student would otherwise have got from writing history essays are not there.

[Chris Skidmore]

That is a very good point. When we look at the curriculum and the historical content that is being taught, at the moment history teaching obviously finishes for most people at 14. The problem with that approach is that trying to fit into the syllabus the broad span of British history becomes almost impossible and in fact we get a situation where, instead of having a narrative and chronological approach, there is a sort of “Dr Who” time travel fantasy of going from the Tudors back to ancient Egypt, forward to the Romans and then to the Victorians. As a Tudor historian myself, I know that the wars of the roses are rarely taught in schools. Equally, I see that we have a civil war historian in our midst today, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), and he will probably agree that the protectorate is rarely taught in schools and neither is the Glorious Revolution. Unless students have some broad form of a chronology, it is impossible for teachers to get across a genuine interest in history. If history is taught in bite-sized chunks, we are not only doing history a disservice but history students, because they cannot understand the very framework of history itself.

We need to look at that issue, and I believe that making history compulsory to 16 would aid that process of creating a chronology, because for the first time we would then be able to integrate key stage 3 and key stage 4. When we were at school, we actually learned more British history in key stage 3 and even in key stage 2 than we did later on. At the moment, I am writing a book about the battle of Bosworth, an event that is a compulsory part of the curriculum in key stage 2; students have to learn the dates, the framework and what happened then. However, the battle of Bosworth is not part of key stage 3; instead, in key stage 3 students go back again to the mediaeval period. I think that key stage 3 covers the iron age to mediaeval times, with no reference to the Anglo-Saxons or to the Vikings. We need to look at that issue. We should leave the detail up to the national curriculum review within the framework of history being compulsory up to the age of 16.

[Helen Goodman]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way to me for a second time. I am interested in the examples that he has given, because the interesting thing about Britain and our modern identity is surely the fact that, for the past four centuries, our history has been an imperial one and that is one of the most important things about Britain. I am not denying that 1066 matters, but the hon. Gentleman did not mention that whole imperial period, and he needs to foreground it.

[Chris Skidmore]

Yes—absolutely. I now want to talk about the GCSE itself with that point in mind, because we currently have a situation where students stop studying history as a compulsory subject at the end of key stage 3, and then some pupils start their history GCSE as an option. However, the GCSE itself does not necessarily focus on British history; often it focuses on the Third Reich and Stalin’s Russia. There is also the schools history project, which is the history of medicine, but that is a very narrow subject to be assessed on.

Although we can debate what should be in the curriculum, we cannot get away from the fact that in our age examination and assessment drive learning in schools. In addition to history being made compulsory to 16, what we need is a narrative British history GCSE that teaches the whole span of British history, and our imperial history to boot, right up to whatever we would like to call the cut-off period of history. Such a GCSE would give pupils the option to study in depth every period of British history and to be assessed on their knowledge of those periods. Again, I do not want to say what the exact nature of the exam for such a GCSE would be, and a lot of work would need to go into preparing it. However, the GCSE in its current form does not allow narrative British history to be taught. So, in addition to making history compulsory to 16, we also need qualification reform.

I will conclude now, as I am sure that other Members want to speak in this debate; I am delighted to see so many Members in Westminster Hall today—happy new year! This is the first debate for me in this new parliamentary term. We should come to a common conclusion and common ground, so that we can discuss what should be in the history curriculum and what type of examination we should have. We cannot deny that there is a serious problem in our nation. As I said earlier, a subject that should unite us as one nation is becoming a subject for two nations—the haves and have-nots, or whatever one wants to call them. In certain areas of the country, history is becoming a dead subject in schools. I want that situation to end, and I therefore propose that history should be compulsory in schools until the age of 16.

11:17

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Chope, for allowing me to speak. I congratulate the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on securing this valuable debate, which has really put into practice his excellent skills of research, data analysis, econometrics and geography. All those skills have been brought together today, showing that he is a superb historian.

It seems to me that what we are discussing today is not really geography; we are discussing the two-nation divide in terms not of the north and south, but of a class divide, based on the traditional Disraelian notion of two nations.

I agree with the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) that history has a particular locus and place within schools. In many ways, I was opposed to the push under the last Government for citizenship teaching, because it seemed to me that, first, citizenship teaching took a chunk out of the syllabus and more often than not history teachers were forced to teach citizenship and that, secondly, we should teach citizenship through history. A study of the past is the best mechanism for understanding one’s role in the present. Obviously, one can divert into the constitution, the judiciary and all the rest in terms of the modern world, but in terms of understanding both our place as citizens and the role of Britain, it seems to me that history is the best place to do that. At one point, we actually had a review that said we should teach history as part of citizenship, which seemed to me to get things slightly the wrong way round.

As we have heard, history is also a very effective academic subject. The Education Secretary likes to draw on the case of Mark Zuckerberg studying ancient Hebrew and then founding Facebook, but one can also point to many innovative entrepreneurs, successful public servants and business people who studied history and benefited from the rigours that studying history brings.

It seems to me that the subject is not necessarily in crisis. The hon. Member for Kingswood mentioned David Cannadine’s new book, which points to this perpetual debate about the nature of history and, without being too partisan on the first day back after the break, I suggest that this is a crisis within the Conservative party. The party likes to talk about the teaching of Britishness and of British history and our understanding of it, partly because of its own various problems with the nature of modern Britain, and it retreats into a debate about the teaching of British history often, it seems, as a vehicle for other more contemporary debates. Of course, historically, the role of history is to retreat into the past to analyse the present.

Figures for the take-up of history at GCSE level hover around 30% to 35%. The percentage has gone up and down over the years, and I think it stands at around 33% at the moment.

[Chris Skidmore]

I will send the hon. Gentleman a copy of my report, so that he has the accurate figures. I came to this debate not wanting to make party political points, but the percentage has not hovered; it has gone down consistently every year in comprehensive schools since 1997, and it has just gone below 30%, which was partly the trigger for my calling this debate and writing the report.

[Tristram Hunt]

I am grateful for that intervention. I was referring to the national figures, and let me now come on to the specificities of the hon. Gentleman’s debate.

There seems to be a class divide—a worrying schism in what our children are taught. As the hon. Gentleman suggested, it is more than the loss of an academic subject; it is the loss of a patrimony and of a broader understanding of citizenship and identity. By not teaching history in many of our disadvantaged communities, we could be losing some brilliant future historians. We are very good at history in this country. Indeed, we are often accused of being too obsessed with the past, but we produce a good number of scholars, often from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, we have faced an unacceptable shunting of children from disadvantaged communities away from academic subjects and, more often than not, on to semi-vocational ones. That has boosted grades for schools but has sold these kids, who have wanted to go on to sixth form and university, a pup. There has been an ethos that in certain communities such subjects are too difficult, and that has presaged league table results.

We can all relate anecdotes of young people being pushed away from subjects that they should be encouraged to take up. We need a rethink. We are all in favour of proper training in vocational subjects, but it should come after a detailed and solid academic training. That is the German model, and the Alison Wolf report importantly suggested that we should get the grounding right and then allow young people to make the decision about which way to go, with either businesses taking on the training or it being continued in schools.

We should not shunt children from disadvantaged communities off academic subjects; nor should we allow schools to merge history and geography into a humanities subject in which pupils appreciate no element of the discipline. That is particularly a problem in certain academies, and Ministers are slightly shifty on the subject, not least because it is very difficult to get data out of the academies about what is being taught. I have tabled endless questions, which have been answered in different ways, but it seems that in the push for league table results certain academies are disfranchising children.

This also raises an interesting point about the ambition of the Secretary of State for Education for a national story of Britain and Britishness. If the Government’s policy is for ever greater pluralism in educational provision, with free schools and academies, where will we get the national cohesive story from if every school tells a different story about history and if every school is encouraged to talk to its own student make-up? The Government have an interesting tension between a traditional conservative belief in a national narrative and their open-market approach to schools and what they teach.

The problem is not the syllabus. Key stage 3 teaches empire, industrialisation and a narrative story of British history. It is a pretty good syllabus if it is done well and, crucially, if it is given the time, but the average 13-year-old in a British school gets only one hour a week to study history, and with such timetabling—only 33 or 34 hours a year—it might not be possible to develop the skills, understanding and narrative. There are cries about there being no Nelson, Wellington or Churchill in the syllabus. That is not true, but there needs to be the space and context within which those characters and their history can be taught.

History teachers do not regard the syllabus as the problem, and the old divide between skills and narrative is not so much the problem any more either, because the best history teachers combine them—one of the advantages of modern information technology and teaching mechanisms. It is exciting if teachers can get kids to use the internet to look at mediaeval roles, the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, and that also teaches a narrative history.

[Chris Skidmore]

Ofsted’s “History for all” report found that the quality of subject training for teachers was inadequate in one in three schools and that teachers in those schools did not fully appreciate progression in historical thinking.

[Tristram Hunt]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. We all know that inspired and inspiring teachers are key. With numeracy and literacy over the past 10 years, it seems that in certain circumstances teachers got bored and that children could sense it. If teachers are not inspired and children are not inspired by them, we do not get the learning, and we need much more focus on ensuring that teachers are inspired and that they are up to date with the latest scholarship and understand progression.

In Stoke-on-Trent, I would like to get Keele and Staffordshire universities together with the local teachers to ensure that the latter are up to date with the scholarship and are still inspired by it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) said, if a teacher is inspiring—as he was in his classroom—the children come alive, and are passionate and interested in the subject.

I will end here because I know that many other Members want to speak, and I apologise for doing so, because I have to meet a constituent later this morning. I am still in two minds about the push towards compulsory history to 16. I have an open mind about it. We risk damaging interest in pursuing the subject if we make it compulsory for huge swathes of children who are simply not interested. That will affect learning in the classroom.

I appreciate the broader issue about history’s role in citizenship. I also understand the point about learning and over-learning certain elements of our national past, such as the Third Reich and dictators. That has much to do with the commerce of education. Once we have history textbooks and the machinery of learning, it is difficult to get out of the rut of learning and teaching the same things over and again. It is challenging to get undergraduates who are almost trauma victims, having studied the Third Reich three times, to appreciate broader European or British history.

[Jim Shannon]

When I was at school, I had the opportunity to learn Irish history, which is probably most unusual for a person from a Unionist tradition. It did not make me any less of a Unionist; indeed, it cemented my Unionism and made me stronger in my beliefs. That is an example. I learned something else, but remained a Unionist.

[Tristram Hunt]

Those of us who are privileged to have read W. E. H. Lecky’s “A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century” will know that, although we might think that studying the history of Ireland will push us one way, it can take us in a very different direction.

I conclude by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Kingswood for his research and for bringing the matter to national prominence. Class and social division are an issue. We must ensure that schools in disadvantaged communities and areas allow their pupils the opportunity to study history in all its wonderful manifestations.

11:32

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on his well-chosen topic to start off the year. I am slightly in awe of the two fantastic historians in the room. It makes me rather nervous to offer any contribution, but in for a penny, in for a pound is the only attitude to take.

People with an interest in history cannot help realising that discussions about why we study it and what we should study inspire more vitriol among the historian community and more ink on the pages of our opinion magazines and newspapers than almost any other subject. My hon. Friend has set his topic commendably wide, but rather than rehearsing the undergraduate essays on “Why study history?” that I wrote for my Oxbridge preparations, I will focus on why and how we should study it.

We all have a personal view on what history is, why we study it and why we learn it. After 10 years of studying it, just as I was about to leave university, it finally taught me how to think properly—a useful lesson that I like to think that I have carried with me into this place, although opponents may disagree. History is also a study of the consequences of human nature. As a subject, it is not unique in teaching us how to think properly, form an argument and judge and assess evidence—other topics can do that, too—but it brings an additional benefit: it comes with a body of knowledge that allows us to understand why we are where we are, which is fundamental.

I realise that there are some, perhaps wishing to make mischief, who define the Conservative party as a bunch of conservatives with a small c obsessed by our narrative history and constantly seeking that golden thread. That does not interest me. I would far rather focus on what history should not consist of. I have no desire to see children sitting in a classroom chanting their regnal dates as though they were times tables. It is like having a wardrobe full of coat hangers with no clothes hanging on them. I am not sure that I could recite the kings and queens of England with any great accuracy.

Sir Lewis Namier identified elections as the locks on the great canal of British history. He was right, but there is no point in being able to recite every significant general election if we cannot talk about the water that flowed through those locks and the changes that came with them. I would love to see Sir Lewis Namier applying his comparative biography techniques to the current Government and Opposition Front Benchers. He might show some interesting comparisons with what we occasionally read in the press.

Nor should history be only about entertainment—horrible histories, blood and gore, and who killed whom in the Tower of London. That is entertaining, but what does it teach us? I am not sure that it teaches us much, other than how to have fun. History is not about teleology, a national story or just a narrative, and it is certainly not about emoting. I despair when students who visit the House of Commons are asked to write essays about what it might have felt like to be a roundhead, a cavalier or a soldier in the trenches and so on, but have no idea of the context of what they are being asked to empathise with. If they are writing as a soldier in the trenches, they do not know why they are there, what led them there or the end result; it is all about empathising. I sometimes suspect that it is almost an excuse to go on a day trip to the Imperial War museum.

History can be a useful tool. It should not just be about great men and personalities. I hold my hand up as being guilty of studying Weimar Germany for GCSE, A-level and my degree. By the time I took my degree, I could almost recite the name of every Reichstag member in 1932. That was not exactly helpful; it simply showed that it is possible to end up as an anorak, knowing more and more about less and less.

What we admire in good history writing or a good university history course is not necessarily what we should admire in a school syllabus. Often, it is hard to throw off what we acquired in our later years when thinking what we should be trying to achieve in our school system. I spent a happy Christmas indulging myself in the 24-hour existence of Carpatho-Ruthenia, which lasted for most of my Boxing day reading. Although it is a fantastic piece of historical research from Norman Davies, it is not something that I would want to inflict on a group of 11-year-olds.

The question then becomes: should we compel certain periods or topics on a history syllabus? Do we believe that history has a didactic purpose? It is fair to say that many people who teach history have strong, often political views and that, naturally, part of what they want to communicate to their pupils is an enthusiasm for the topic and the period. I cannot remember a single one of my history teachers who did not allow a slight degree of political opinion to sneak out in whatever period they were teaching. Perhaps that is understandable, and it is not always a bad thing, but there are dangers in trying to use school history teaching to communicate values. That is my big fear. Ultimately, history is not about communicating values; it is about communicating skills.

The first, last and only time that I ever studied Anglo-Saxon history was during my first week at secondary school, when we spent a week trying to work out who was buried at Sutton Hoo. I think I came down in favour of King Raedwald. I was probably wrong; we still have no idea, I am sure. I have no desire to go back and read anything more about Anglo-Saxon history, but that one week reminded me that what we are trying to do is assess evidence, reach conclusions and construct an argument. Those are the basic and essential skills that we must absorb when we teach history in schools.

[Rehman Chishti]

I support my hon. Friend’s point. In society now, a fundamental concern is the failure in literacy over the years. Does he agree that history provides a vital opportunity to develop a sustained, lengthy argument, which helps improve literacy?

[Paul Maynard]

I entirely agree. One of my great frustrations in life is that I discovered how to write an essay only in my last term at university. Unfortunately, it came a bit too late to enhance fully my learning experience during my entire education.

We have to be careful that we do not turn our history lessons and our final history exams—after all, what matters ultimately is what we test—into some sort of quiz or series of multiple choice questions. I have grave reservations about some A-levels. It is to my eternal shame that I got a grade A at A-level politics by just walking in off the street and sitting the exam. I failed to study the subject during the sixth form; I just took it for the fun of it and thought I might get a grade E. It seemed like a fun thing to do. I shocked both myself and the school’s head of politics by getting an A, largely because the exam was based entirely on general knowledge as far as I could make out. It asked questions like, “Tick next to the date of the last general election,” but I do not think that that was something that needed to be studied.

I think that the skills that history teaches us should be made compulsory up to the age of 16. I support my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood entirely on that point. It is a tragedy that far too many children miss out on the opportunity to study history. We do not need to make history frightening or scary, or obsess about the clichés and the grand narrative of the golden thread of British history.

I represent two seaside towns, the history of which, if we tried to comprise the whole of British history, would not start until 1800, because before that not much was built on Blackpool North and Cleveleys, other than a few mud huts here or there. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) is pulling a face at me as though to say that I am wrong—that would not surprise me—so perhaps the correct date is 1730. None the less, there is immense enthusiasm in Blackpool for local history. We have community heritage champions who, although they are often older people who did not have the chance to study history in the way that we would all perhaps like to do so, get really excited at the chance to learn new oral history techniques.

My constituency has a Jewish cemetery. We no longer have a Jewish community to speak of, but people are fascinated by the cemetery and what it tells them about the sort of people who were active in Blackpool in its heyday. It would be a fantastic tool for local children to learn about the area in which they live. I am a strong supporter of using local history as a way of making history interesting for those who study it.

As ever, however, we cannot look at just the baubles on the Christmas tree. There is no point in teaching children about the things that interest and entertain them unless they understand those lock gates on the canals of both British and European history. Until we understand how it all links together, I do not believe that history will achieve the goal that it should be setting itself. We should interest people, but we should not exclude them from fully understanding what makes the country in which they live what it is today.

11:42

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on securing the debate and on setting the scene, along with the other two previous speakers. Following on from my intervention, I want to emphasise the importance of local history. We have just heard the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) say that although his area has only been in existence for some 200 years, it has its own rich, distinct history. I represent Britain’s oldest recorded town. Indeed, parts of the western boundary of my constituency are ancient earthworks that predate the Roman invasion.

I pay tribute to all those schools and history teachers who enthuse young people; the issue is that too few do. I want to place on record my appreciation for my history teacher at St Helena school 55 years ago, Mr Brian Barton, who for some reason was known to his contemporaries as Dick Barton, and who, 55 years later, is a tour guide in Colchester. He is not the only one. We are blessed with contemporary historians, such as Andrew Phillips and Patrick Denney, and Philip Crummy of the Colchester Archaeological Trust, who bring history alive. Two thousand years ago, we had the only Roman chariot circus in Britain; Philip Crummy discovered its remains only in November 2004. That is local history in a national context, and in the context of the Roman empire. I want such aspects of local history to be introduced in schools throughout the country, because I passionately believe, as the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys said, that if we can enthuse young people about local history they are more likely to develop an interest in history as a whole. I share the concern that linking history and geography under the heading of humanities dilutes both.

My town is bidding for city status, so perhaps I will be allowed the opportunity to fly its flag. Colchester was the first capital of Roman Britain, and it is the only city of the Roman era that is not a city today. There is no record of that city status ever having been removed, so I hope that Parliament will conclude that we should keep it.

[Rehman Chishti]

On history, places and future city status, Medway was home to Lord Nelson, and the flagship Victory was built in the historic dockyard in Gillingham. There is a lot of responsibility not only on schools to promote local history, but on local authorities to promote it in partnership with those schools. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, along with Colchester, there are other richly historic places, such as Medway?

[Sir Bob Russell]

There are indeed. I am grateful for that intervention. If I were a Norfolk MP, I would point out that Nelson came from the royal county of Norfolk long before he ended up in Kent.

I am concerned that, in my home town, not everybody is aware of our patron saint, St Helena, whose badge I proudly wear, or indeed of the history behind her; that is a bit of local history. We are also the home of the fictional character, Moll Flanders—a local girl who did quite well. In fact, she came from the very part of Colchester in which I grew up, Mile End. I think it is time that my home town promoted Moll Flanders, because she was a lively lass and I think she would attract tourism to the town.

Another local historian, Joan Soole, unearthed incredible Colchester connections with the battle of Waterloo, and those local connections brought alive the history of that battle for a completely new generation. We are a famous garrison town and one of the four super-garrisons, but before we became a garrison town, we had a strong Royal Navy connection with that famous battle. We are also the town in which the world’s most famous nursery rhyme was written. In 1805, the Taylor sisters wrote “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. Again, these things should be promoted locally. Every community has local history to promote.

[Chris Skidmore]

I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s brief potted history of Colchester, but with respect, I called for this debate to talk about whether history should be compulsory in schools at age 16 or not. I do not know about the views of other Members, but I would appreciate it if the hon. Gentleman would stick to the subject.

[Sir Bob Russell]

As the three previous speakers have said, the point that needs to be made is that we need to instil enthusiasm in our young people and get the education system to embrace history, because I regret to say—the hon. Gentleman’s statistics prove this, and it has not been denied—that interest in history has declined over the past 30, 40 or 50 years. I was lucky with my schoolteachers, first in my Mile End primary school and then at secondary school, and with my parents. It is all to do with giving encouragement, and getting teachers to be enthusiastic about teaching history.

[Tristram Hunt]

There is an important point to make about how we attract primary school and early secondary school pupils to the subject, so that they have a passion about the past. At its best, local history is not parochial; it goes from a local story to a national and then international story, but it is very difficult to begin to tell and teach children an international story without those building blocks. Colchester seems a good example of a story about a global imperium.

[Sir Bob Russell]

I will conclude in a moment, because with one intervention, the hon. Gentleman, to whom I am grateful, has embraced precisely the point that I have been trying to make. We can have anything we like in post-14 or post-16 history, but unless the foundations are there, the rest will not happen. It is up to the Government to provide the enthusiasm and direction. Since my education, experience has shown me that many teachers can be enthused and are enthusiastic. They provide that enthusiasm, and they must not be stopped.

11:50

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I add my congratulations to those given to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) for securing the debate. It is certainly a very interesting subject, and it has given rise to different opinions around the Chamber.

We have heard about people’s experiences with their history teachers, and how teaching particular subjects can create the opposite effect to that intended. Perhaps I should prefix my speech by saying that I was taught not only history but politics by my local Labour party leader. Consequently, I am a Conservative Member of Parliament who knows very little about history. It is perhaps surprising that although we are in the most historic place in the United Kingdom, we are having to remind ourselves about the importance and relevance of history in education. It is something of a cliché, but I strongly feel that it is only by learning from the past that we can understand the present and plan for the future.

Much has been said about the approaches of different countries. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood talked about the teaching of history in Albania and other countries. It is right for history to be taught in different ways in different countries, because that enables each country to see history from its own perspective. It is therefore right that we should learn history from a British perspective. Unfortunately, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) is no longer in this Chamber, but I take issue with his concerns about the patriotism that Conservative MPs often display when talking about history. It is not just Conservative MPs who take a sense of pride in their British heritage; it cuts right across the political spectrum. Britain has the richest history in the world. If any country needs to prioritise history teaching, it is ours, because an understanding of history helps us to formulate national identity, pride and confidence in who we are.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am as patriotic as the next man, but does the hon. Gentleman not see that the statement that Britain has the richest history in the world is ludicrous and would not be made by anyone who knew anything about history?

[Gareth Johnson]

No, I do not agree it is ludicrous at all. More than any other country, Britain has had influence across the entire globe; the fact that English is spoken in more countries than any other language demonstrates the influence that this country has had throughout history. Some of that history is good, and we are very proud of it, and some of it we perhaps do not talk about as much as we should. However, nevertheless, we should be proud of our heritage because it is very distinct. It is certainly the richest of any country I have ever studied and it has influenced more countries than that of any other nation.

Yet it is right to say that the teaching of history in this country is patchy. In some areas, more than three quarters of students do not learn history after they are 14 years of age. We heard about the difference between classes that some people claim exists in relation to the teaching of history. Certainly there are differences between, for example, grammar schools and some comprehensive schools; the teaching levels are not comparable. The teaching of history varies around the countries, too. Although more people are passing GCSE history, fewer students are taking up the subject, which is a great shame.

The treatment of the subject is less patchy around Europe; it is compulsory in most European countries. As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood mentioned Albania. That keeps cropping up, because it appears to be the only country in Europe that takes a similar approach to England with regard to history teaching. I do not know whether it is a fair comparison, but it certainly seems that there is less mandatory teaching of history in England than anywhere else in Europe. The rest of the UK fares little better.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that part of the problem is trying to ensure that history is relevant to young people? Often the teaching of the subject leaves young people either ostracised or simply feeling that it is not relevant to them today. This is not an either/or. Local history needs to be taught, based on its relevance to young people, so that they can understand their place in the national psyche and get a grasp of history.

[Gareth Johnson]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. It is a case of ensuring that students understand that history, and what has gone on in the past, is relevant to what they are doing now. I think that we would all accept that history at its best is the most fascinating subject on the educational spectrum. However, at its worst, it can be one of the dullest. A lot depends on the person in the classroom, and whether they can inspire pupils and convince them that history is relevant to them, as the hon. Gentleman correctly points out.

[Jim Sheridan in the Chair]

To be fair, the Department for Education is doing a lot of good work. The academy innovation goes from strength to strength. We have more protection and support for teachers, with regard to the anonymity that is extended when there are unfounded allegations; also, there has been a withdrawal of the requirement to give notice of periods of detention. In addition, spelling tests are coming back, and we are allowing grammar schools to be expanded.

I would like “more history teaching” to be added to that list of achievements. However, I am the first to accept that the Department for Education faces a dilemma, because it rightly does not wish to be too prescriptive about the curriculum. One of the Department’s aims is to make the curriculum more streamlined. Clearly, the challenge is for the Department to give good schools as much autonomy as it can while ensuring a structured education system for children. Therein lies the future difficulty for the Department in relation to history teaching.

The desire for more British history teaching is not about misplaced patriotism; there is no xenophobic agenda. However, we should not shy away from teaching British history with a sense of pride. For example, the history of the British empire should not be taught with any sense of shame or vitriol. We should allow students to embrace history as seen from a British context, because we will fully understand ourselves only when we learn where we have come from. National identity is incredibly important, and much of that identity is determined by our history.

11:58

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on initiating the debate. He rather gallantly tried to separate two issues: first, how much history should be taught and, secondly, what is taught. However, I do not think he can do that because the case for more time must be related to the subject’s inherent value and the contribution that it makes to pupils.

When I was a young man, I had a passionate interest in history; in fact, it was the only subject that I was particularly good at in school. I lost my enthusiasm when I discovered that the more facts that I managed to acquire to settle historical disputes, the less availing they were as they were assimilated to different theories. I became generally interested in theory and fact, lost my passion for history and acquired a passion for philosophy.

I never taught history when I was a teacher, although I might have had the opportunity to do so, but I was appalled by what I saw and the narrowness of the curriculum. One of my sordid secrets is that I taught for many years in an independent school. Lots of people did history. They just did the Third Reich over and over again. Therefore, what a subject contains has a lot to do with whether it should be taught or taught to everyone. The reasons for that were quite crude in many respects. Putting the Third Reich on the syllabus meant more pupils and more sets. The headmaster often found that there were better results, too. Therefore, there was an incentive that had nothing to do with teaching history; it was all to do with the promotion of teaching careers, if I can put it as crudely as that.

As a result, some people who have done history leave school knowing very little history. They know very little about the development of their own culture and the nation’s culture, and have to pick it up through TV or books later on in life. There is an enormous and insatiable appetite out there for history as a form of entertainment—we all know that there is a history channel—but it is regrettable that people who study history can do very little on the Tudors and Stuarts, do nothing on the 18th century and have the most prejudiced views about the mediaeval period.

I think that we all have to accept that, within the space of a school year, people need to be selective. There has to be a selection about which bits of history will be taught. Any full story will, perforce, be something of an outline, but I am concerned about the principles that dominate selection in the school curriculum. Selection is often done on dubious grounds. We moved, slightly, on to that ground in the previous contribution. It can be done simply to reflect a nation’s favoured narrative of itself. History then becomes, to some extent, an exercise in self-justification. History can be a bit like autobiography—just a representation of what one would like the world and oneself to believe about the past. Many Governments in the world fall into the trap of sanitising their history curriculum, so that it becomes a very pleasing narrative about how all the things great and good came from their nation. I am sure that if we were in the French Parliament talking about history, we would have similar perceptions—different perceptions, but similar kinds of perception.

Moving away from the Nazis and the Third Reich, therefore, does not necessarily solve what should be in the curriculum. I have concerns about bolting back to what I was familiar with in my schooldays—the Whig narrative of history, where British history is represented as a seamless path to freedom, starting with Magna Carta, which, regrettably, very few people have actually read. When one actually studies it, it entrenches baronial privileges to provide their own courts and armies. A case was made in those days for choice and diversity. There was choice and diversity in who could provide the army, or who could provide the court, and that is found within Magna Carta. History can be selective in omitting all sorts of things that we would rather not touch on, such as the British role in slavery, or working-class history—the worst aspects of the industrial revolution. They are touched on, but they can be omitted, if we choose from the curriculum.

There are therefore inherent dangers in being too prescriptive about what sort of narrative falls into the curriculum. It may be unusual for me in this context, but that is why I genuinely favour choice and diversity in the history curriculum and making children self-conscious about the whole process of the writing of history—how these stories come about and how we reflect our narrative. History is very rarely written by the losers. The history of the mediaeval period was written by the Church and therefore those kings who gave the Church a bad time—King John is a classic example—got a very bad press.

History should contain an outline, but it should also contain opportunities for intelligent history teachers who care for their subject to choose selectively in a way that suits their candidate interest and aptitudes, but also covers what they think good history should be. I am in favour of making children, through the history curriculum, critically sceptical. If it does that, it is no bad thing.

12:04

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

What an interesting seminar we have had this morning on teaching history in schools. There has been a very high standard, as one might expect with so many eminent historians and hon. Members present here to debate the subject. As was revealed earlier, it is true that I taught history, alongside economics, in a comprehensive school for 10 years. In fact, I tweeted that I was going to participate in this debate and one of my former pupils, Cerys Furlong, who is now a Labour councillor in Cardiff—she was indoctrinated well when I was teaching history—tweeted back that she remembered the days when I was an actual history teacher.

I took O-level—as it was in those days—history back in 1976, and I took A-level history in 1978. I always remember one teacher saying to me that I would prefer A-level to O-level because it is about not only regurgitating facts, but understanding, interpretation and so on. I still have, in a cupboard at home, several green exercise books containing the notes from my history A-level lessons, which consisted mainly of our teacher—I will not name him unfairly—standing up for the first half of the lesson and giving an A.J.P. Taylor-type lecture. The second half of the lesson consisted of our writing down the notes that he dictated into those green exercise books. I sometimes wonder whether that is what the Minister with responsibility for schools has in mind when he talks about the sorts of changes he would like to see in our schools and whether, in his mind’s eye, he sees rows of pupils sitting down at their individual desks in their short trousers writing down whatever it is that the teacher has asked them to copy down off the board—perhaps in the manner which the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) deprecated in his speech of copying down facts about the kings and queens of England from the board. I accept that that is a parody, but the reason why I love history, and I think the reason why a lot of people love history, is not because of rote learning, but because of the interest in finding out that people in the past were just like us.

The idea that a diet of key facts and an officially sanctioned version of state history will inspire people or serve their interests is fanciful. We need to ensure that we do not go back to the approach taken when I was learning history at A-level in the 1970s. It was not the regurgitation of facts that caught my imagination about history, but the fascination of how people in the past, who were exactly the same as us biologically, acted in the face of the beliefs, culture, values and political power structures of the time, and what that told us about ourselves now. For me, that was the reason to study history.

As has been said, by the time I came to do a PGCE in history in 1984, the subject had changed a lot, which has been reflected in today’s debate. The Oxford history project and various other initiatives that were taken at the time involved talking about the skills needed to be a historian, assessing the reliability of evidence and, even for young pupils, thinking about what being a historian involves—being a kind of detective of the past. All those initiatives had come into the teaching of history, which was for the good. I looked recently at a careers guidance page for the university of Kent. One interview question for potential history teachers asked how they felt about a skills-based approach versus a factual approach to teaching history. That question, which seems to dominate a lot of the debate about the teaching of history in our schools at the moment, is fairly ludicrous, because teaching history cannot be skills versus facts. It has to be about having the skills to be able to learn, understand and interpret the facts. There is a legitimate concern about a loss of the sense of the narrative of history, which has been picked up in several of the contributions today. However, it would be a big mistake to turn history teaching into the dissemination of a patriotic narrative. It is interesting that there was not unanimity between colleagues from all parties on that.

We should not look at history as a way to mould our citizens into compliant people. We need to go beyond a simple glorification of the past, which I felt the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) might have suggested. We need students to be able critically to engage with the past and understand how it affects them now, as individuals, and their community and country. In respect of studying history, the emphasis should not be placed on a particular narrative based merely on a political agenda. We should study history to have a sense of identity beyond race and religion and understand something of a common culture, so that we learn about the past and ourselves as individuals and members of British society.

[Sir Bob Russell]

I was hoping that the hon. Gentleman would touch on local history, because clearly national exams will only deal with national history. Where does he think that local history fits into the teaching of history in schools, bearing in mind that we are a diverse country and within a county there will be different local history characteristics?

[Kevin Brennan]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman said, and with what my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who is no longer here, said: local history is a way of engaging the interest of pupils and students and enables them to spread out beyond that into a much wider historical context. Like the hon. Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell), I come from a town—in south Wales—where there are powerful remnants of the Roman empire, including an amphitheatre and a barracks of the second Augustan legion based at the Roman town of Isca, which is now Caerleon. Some 5,000 Roman troops were stationed there in a town that probably does not have a population as large today. It was fascinating for me, as a young person, to think about what it must have been like 2,000 years earlier in the area in which I grew up.

Although the title of the debate is not, “Should we make history compulsory to 16”, I think that is what the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) wanted to focus on in his speech. I congratulate him on securing the debate and on raising that important subject.

One problem with, and paradox of, the Government’s approach to this matter is revealed, in a sense, by what the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Dartford said. The Government say that they are seeking to decentralise education and to have schools that are effectively autonomous and exempted, with choice about what they teach, and if the Government get their way, by the end of this Parliament most schools will be exempt from a national curriculum. Yet they are undertaking a review of the national curriculum and will, presumably, at some point, advance detailed proposals about the national curriculum. Some interim information on that has been provided by the Government. However, by the end of this Parliament, if the Government proceed in the way that they are going at the moment, most schools will not be compelled to teach the national curriculum. If the hon. Gentleman is advocating, on top of that, that more subjects should be made compulsory up to 16—in this case, history—I do not understand the transmission mechanism by which his ambition might be achieved. Exultation is fine, as are nudge-theory approaches, such as the English baccalaureate, but ultimately the hon. Gentleman will not achieve his aim of making history compulsory if it is not possible to implement a transmission mechanism to compel schools to teach that subject.

[Chris Skidmore]

On transmission—I agree in part with the hon. Gentleman on the curriculum—the point of the curriculum is secondary to assessment, which is increasingly becoming the driver of standards in schools. Parents and their children will look at schools offering high-quality examinations and at the standard that is achieved in those examinations. This relates to my point about creating a narrative of British history GCSE, because I believe that that would be the lever by which parents would be able to look at all schools offering history GCSE—just as they can in respect of GCSE maths, English and science, which all schools have to offer. If history joined that cadre and we were able to ensure that all pupils studied the equivalent of a western canon, instead of a GSCE that focuses only on the Third Reich or Stalin’s Russia, we would have one that allowed pupils to study the narrative of British history.

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman is right. Many parents will do what he described, but not all of them will. That is why education itself is compulsory: it will not happen just through exhortation or because the Government say that they would like it to happen, or even by the Government employing little nudge mechanisms, such as the English baccalaureate.

I am reserving judgment on whether history should be taught compulsorily up to 16, because I, too, have a fairly open mind about that. History has never been compulsory. When I was 14 years of age, we had to do either history or geography, and we could not opt for both because of the tightness of the options in the school that I attended.

[Sir Bob Russell]

indicated assent.

[Kevin Brennan]

That was common, as I can see from the reaction of the hon. Member for Colchester.

[Gareth Johnson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Kevin Brennan]

I took a long intervention and do not want to eat into the Minister’s time. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman for not being able to give way one more time.

The Third Reich came up quite a bit during our debate. I confess that teaching that subject started during the time when I was teaching history. I taught up to about the end of 1994 and even back then the Third Reich was a major component of O-level history, which then became GCSE during the time I was teaching. It seems to have generated itself into a kind of educational industry over that period. My daughter, who is doing A-level history, is studying the Third Reich, having studied it at GCSE as well. I share the frustration of other hon. Members about that. Really, schools should not be doing that. I understand why they do it—teachers gain expertise and resources, and so on, and want to give their pupils the best opportunity to pass exams, which is only natural—but it should not be studied over and over, as hon. Members have described.

I shall conclude, because I want to give the Minister an opportunity to respond. We have had an interesting debate with some excellent contributions. First, I am interested to hear the Minister set out his plans and say whether he has any intention of making teaching history compulsory up to 16. If that is not his intention, perhaps he will make it clear. Secondly, what is the transmission mechanism by which he is going to get the national curriculum taught if most schools are exempt from it?

12:17

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on securing this debate, which has been of high quality throughout. All contributions to it were valuable. My hon. Friend is a firm supporter of recognising the importance of history in schools and has played an active role in highlighting some key issues relating to this subject, including in his excellent recent report, which paints a worrying picture of the decline of history in our schools.

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend’s view that teaching history should form a key part of a child’s education. As young people develop, taking on the rights and responsibilities of adulthood, they need a good understanding and appreciation of how and why our systems of democracy and justice were developed and established. They also need to understand the aspirations and values that motivated our predecessors to create the society in which we live today.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who made an excellent, gripping contribution to this debate, that history is a body of knowledge that allows us to understand where we are. The study of history is also an important academic discipline in primary schools and at key stages 3 and 4 at secondary school. As well as providing knowledge, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) set out in interventions, it helps to develop pupils’ skills at reading, précising text and essay writing, which cannot just be left to the English curriculum in a school. It is about developing the skills of scholarship, which are important in a school career.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood has written a number of excellent history books, including studies of Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth I. He would therefore have been as shocked as me to find that, in a survey of history undergraduates entering a Russell group university, only one in three knew who the monarch was during the armada. In the same survey, almost 90% of the undergraduates could not name a single British Prime Minister from the 19th century. Professor Matthews, who conducted the survey, said that the students were

“studying at one of the Russell group of universities, on courses where the entry requirement is an A and two Bs at A level, which probably places them in the top 15% of their generation in terms of educational qualifications. This implies that, all things being equal, 85% of my undergraduates’ age group know even less than they do. In other words, we are looking at a whole generation that knows almost nothing about the history of their (or anyone else’s) country.”

As my hon. Friend highlighted in his report, the decline in the number of pupils taking history GCSE in this country is a matter of concern. In 1995, more than 223,000 pupils, representing nearly 40% of pupils, were taking history GCSE. By 2010, this figure had dropped by more than 25,000, so it is now only 31% of pupils, or just less than a third, taking the subject. If we scrutinise that decline further, as my hon. Friend has, we see a worrying trend around the clear divisions in GCSE take-up between different types of school and pupil background and in whether they are eligible for free school meals. As the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) said, a potential class divide is being created in this country with the subjects that are being studied.

For example, nearly 20% more pupils in the independent sector study history than pupils in maintained schools. My hon. Friend’s report also highlighted the links to deprivation reflected in the take-up of history at GCSE. For example, in 2010 only 25% of black pupils took history GCSE compared with 31% of white pupils; only 18% of pupils eligible for free school meals studied the subject at GCSE level, which is 13% less than the percentage take-up for pupils overall, at 31%. The decline in the study of history has also been reflected in further and higher education, with the proportion of students opting for A-level history remaining static for a number of years. Enrolments in history at university are well below the average compared with other subjects.

I agree with my hon. Friend that the current history curriculum does not give pupils a grasp of the narrative of the past. Last year’s Ofsted survey of history teaching in schools, to which he referred, supports that view. It found that in primary schools, although pupils generally had good knowledge of particular topics and episodes in history, chronological understanding and the ability to make links across the knowledge gained were significantly weaker. It is also clear that many schools are spending less time teaching history. In the recent Historical Association survey of secondary school history teachers, lack of teaching time was the most frequently cited issue that teachers raised about key stage 3, which the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central, who I am glad to see is back in the Chamber having met his constituent, mentioned in his excellent contribution. Part of the problem is that GCSE history is too narrowly focused, with exam choices clustering around certain topics such as the American west 1840 to 1895 or the Third Reich, which has been referred to by many hon. Members. Exams have a significant influence over what is taught, so it is no surprise that pupils have huge gaps in their knowledge of our national story and a disconnected sense of narrative.

There are also issues with teacher training. Last year’s Ofsted report also cited that in most of the primary schools visited, there was not enough subject-specific expertise or professional development to help teachers to be clearer about the standards expected in the subject. I hope that we agree that it is fundamental that a greater emphasis is needed on knowledge and content in the current school curriculum, which is why we have launched a review of the national curriculum.

[John Pugh]

The Minister has mostly outlined the decline in history as taught in all sorts of schools. Will he touch on the causal factors? He has not explained what appears to be an appreciable decline, as documented by the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore).

[Mr Gibb]

There are all kinds of reasons why the decline has happened. It could be, for example, because of the move to a more skills-based approach. History might be regarded as a tougher subject in which to achieve the grades that a school feels that it needs to achieve to maintain or increase its position in the school league tables. We have had a concern for a number of years about the move to what are called softer subjects in order to boost league table positions, and history could well have been a victim of that process.

The new national curriculum will be based on a body of essential knowledge that children should be expected to acquire in key subjects during the course of their school career. It will embody for all children their cultural and scientific inheritance, and it will enhance their understanding of the world around them and expose them to the best that has been thought and written. We are engaging with a wide range of academics, teachers and other interested parties to ensure that the new national curriculum compares favourably with those of the highest performing countries in the world.

[Sir Bob Russell]

As yet there has been no reference to the importance of local history being taught in our schools. How will that fit in, when schools are clearly being directed towards history that fits the exams?

[Mr Gibb]

Those are precisely the issues for consideration by the national curriculum review.

I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood would like history to be compulsory to 16, which is one of the things that the national curriculum review will consider. As I said at the outset, it is clear that some subjects, such as history, which all pupils should have a good grasp of, have been less popular choices at GCSE. The Government therefore want to encourage more children to take up history beyond the age of 14, particularly among disadvantaged pupils and certain ethnic groups. That is why we introduced the English baccalaureate, which will recognise the work of pupils who achieve an A* to C in maths, English, two sciences, a language and either history or geography, to encourage more widespread take-up of those core subjects, which provide a sound basis for academic progress.

The English baccalaureate has already had a significant impact on the take-up of history: according to a NatCen survey of nearly 700 schools, 39% of pupils sitting GCSEs in 2013 in the schools responding will be taking history GCSE, up eight percentage points and back to the 1995 level of history uptake. There are clear benefits to pupils in taking the subjects combined in the E-bac. Pupils who have achieved that combination of subjects have proved more likely to progress to A-level than those with similar attainment in different subjects in the past. They have also attempted a greater number of A-levels and achieved better results. We are also committed to restoring confidence in GCSEs as rigorous and valued qualifications. We will reform GCSEs to ensure that they are more keenly focused on essential knowledge in those key subjects, and with exams at the end of the course to support good teaching and in-depth study.

To refer to the questions of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), what we want to achieve from the national curriculum review is a curriculum that is so good that the academies will want to adopt it, albeit not being compulsory. The national curriculum also does feed in to statutory testing, in maths and English at the end of key stage 2 and the GCSE specifications.

[Kevin Brennan]

Is the Minister considering writing into funding agreements the requirement that academy schools should teach the national curriculum?

[Mr Gibb]

No, that would obviate some of the freedoms and the whole essence of academy schools. The funding agreements require the teaching of maths, science and English to 16, thus making them compulsory, but the application of the national curriculum is not compulsory for academies, although it feeds into the specification that determines what is tested and assessed through the GCSE system. In that sense, there is an imperative for schools to teach those subjects.

The essence of the national curriculum review is to produce a curriculum that is on a par with the best in the world, based on evidence of what is taught in those jurisdictions that have the best education systems and against whom graduates from this country’s schools will be competing for jobs in the future. The national curriculum, which will be published and available to parents, will be of such a quality that it will become the norm and the benchmark against which parents will judge the quality of their schools.

Finally, I want to touch on the part that teachers play in our school systems as far as history is concerned.

[Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)]

Order. We now come to the next debate.

Millennium Development Goals

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

12:30

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I secured this debate because I am interested in finding out: what the Government are doing to help galvanise international action to secure a global development agreement for 2015 onwards; what they are doing to engage European Governments, not least through the upcoming EU budget negotiations; and their view of the process proposals and goal ideas in circulation at the moment.

I understand that a task team of senior technical experts from the United Nations Development Programme and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs have begun preparing work on the UN’s vision and road map for post-2015. Similarly, I understand that the UN Secretary-General is expected to appoint a high-level panel of eminent people to advise on the post-2015 framework, so the agenda is likely to gather momentum in New York. Next year, Britain will chair the G8. With the UN millennium review summit due in September 2013, which is arguably the key moment for agreeing a post millennium development goals agreement, UK Ministers will bear a heavy responsibility for progress—or a lack of progress—on achieving a post-MDGs accord. Thus far—I say this gently—there has been little sign from the Government of serious political leadership or engagement on the issue.

As the Government’s policies are putting a considerable squeeze on family incomes in the UK, and as Ministers are so obviously out of touch with the consequences, a debate about poverty in poor countries—and particularly about whether new targets for tackling poverty overseas are required—will seem to some people to be misplaced. However, tackling poverty in the world’s poorest countries is surely not just morally right, but fundamental to Britain’s long-term interests. We live in an interdependent world, and jobs in the UK, the level and types of disease in Britain, and migration patterns to the UK are all affected by what happens to the world’s poorest people. Indeed, the rise of the Taliban and their decision to shelter al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is a powerful example of what can happen when progress in tackling poverty is going in the wrong direction, when states are fragile, and when those for whom poverty is an irrelevance are what passes for being in charge.

The millennium development goals have been remarkably successful in galvanising political leaders, civil society organisations, parts of the private sector, trade unions and donors in the pursuit of tackling poverty. They were launched back in 2000 and are due to be achieved by 2015, and it is likely that the headline goal of halving extreme poverty will be achieved. There has been substantial progress in many countries towards achieving many of the individual goals.

[Tony Cunningham (Workington) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that a key to those goals is education? It is difficult for young people in developing countries to get an education. It is more difficult for a girl, and almost impossible for disabled people. We must get to grips with the issue.

[Mr Thomas]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I hope that the Minister will take advantage of his intervention to bring the House up to date with what the Government are doing to drive progress towards meeting the education millennium development goals.

Some countries have achieved all the millennium development goal targets, and others will have made significant progress by 2015. Clearly, not all countries will achieve all the goals, and some of the poorest—usually but not exclusively those that are, or have been, affected by conflict—are a long way from achieving them. Significant shortfalls remain in the delivery of international commitments to support the achievement of the goals. However, a joint report by the Overseas Development Institute and the Millennium Campaign on progress on the MDGs concluded that although it is not uniform across all countries,

“the rate of progress in reducing poverty and in increasing access to basic health, education, water, and other essential services is unparalleled in many countries’ histories.”

Britain undoubtedly played a significant role in galvanising the progress made towards meeting the MDGs through its ministerial support for, and engagement in, the process that saw the MDGs adopted. It maintained pressure for progress up to and beyond the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, and in the UN General Assembly discussions in 2008 and 2009. That support has continued in more recent years, and I acknowledge the role that the Minister and his colleagues have played while in office.

Britain played a crucial role in keeping European aid directed at achievement of the millennium development goals, with the European development framework clearly targeted at the needs of the poorest.

[Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. In the spirit of co-operation that he has shown in his work with me on my private Member’s Bill, does he agree that four years is a very short time in international politics, and that it is crucial that the UK starts to lead the debate on the formation of post-2015 goals for global development, and particularly on putting more emphasis on millennium development goal 8?

[Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)]

Order. That is a long intervention. Does the hon. Gentleman have a question?

[Chris White]

Does the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) agree that particular attention should be paid to goal 8, which is specifically about creating better governance so that we maximise the impact of aid spending and ensure that the gains that we make are not undermined by poor planning and corruption?

[Mr Thomas]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Governance is crucial, and I believe strongly that it needs to be part of a post-MDGs framework. The key question for this debate is what comes after the millennium development goals, from 2015 onwards. Where do Ministers stand on that agenda? Do they support the UN Secretary-General’s ambition for a new generation of sustainable development goals, and if they do, what action are they taking to make such an agenda happen?

The Minister will be cautious, understandably, about saying today what should be included among a new set of international goals, but Ministers could help to galvanise the process of agreeing an accord by supporting and encouraging international debate on what a post-MDGs agenda might look like. To date, we have heard remarkably little from the Secretary of State on this issue. Has a policy team of civil servants been set up within the Department to corral ideas, and to engage with those in civil society, the UN and other national Governments, particularly in Europe, to drive the UK’s involvement in the preparation of such an agenda?

Elsewhere in the UK, among the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development, the Overseas Development Institute, the Institute for Development Studies, Christian Aid, and the Beyond 2015 coalition of non-governmental organisations, there has been real interest in the question. Indeed, the Beyond 2015 coalition has published an interesting and thoughtful set of essential must-haves for a new global development framework, focusing on how a process might work and stressing the importance of the MDGs review summit next year, and the Rio plus 20 process in June this year. That interest in UK civil society is mirrored by a growing interest throughout civil society in developing countries.

Both CAFOD and the excellent Overseas Development Institute have noted how significant the “how” will be in reaching an agreement, and the importance of “what”—that is, what such an agreement should contain. I would welcome hearing how the Minister thinks an agreement could be reached, and what he plans to do to assist.

Civil society interest is clearly key in framing debate, and in involving those in developing countries and developed countries, but Governments must reach agreement. Vital to that is active dialogue within Government, between Governments and their civil society groups and, crucially, at intergovernmental level. That is where the British Government could do more. Although in recent years the G20 has become more prominent, discussions between G8 leaders still matter hugely. Britain will chair the G8 next year in the run-up to the review summit, and it could put a post-MDGs agreement at the centre of the debate between the richest nations in the world.

International negotiations require considerable time and effort, and they make progress only when leaders and national politicians are engaged. A G8-driven agenda to replace MDGs is likely to stir up scepticism and concern, so any agreement must be—and I believe will be—UN-led. It would, however, be a mistake to think that an agreement will be reached without the richest nations on board. As a result of its record and its forthcoming role, Britain is uniquely placed in the G8 to support the UN more visibly in working towards a post-MDGs accord.

There have been a series of initiatives to consider the post-2015 framework. Early suggestions included the roll-over of existing MDGs to 2020 or 2025, or an “MDG plus” agreement that could take some existing core goals in education, health or nutrition, and add three or four new, locally defined, goals. The so-called one world approach would have new goals based on issues such as resilience and climate change. More recent proposals include a gross national happiness index, such as that currently used by Bhutan, for measuring national progress; the UN General Assembly has expressed qualified interest in that. Measuring happiness has begun to be of interest in the UK and in France, and in a series of state governments in the US. A Sri Lankan economist has proposed a series of consumption goals to target under-consumption by the poorest countries and over-consumption in richer countries. The Colombian Government have proposed a series of sustainable development goals that I understand also have the support of Brazil. Those are due to be discussed at the forthcoming Rio plus 20 meeting in June, and focus on addressing global climate change and development. I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks about those ideas.

The Overseas Development Institute has suggested three principles for a new post-MDGs agreement. First, the principle of universality and inclusiveness goes with the grain of existing anti-poverty measures in developing countries such as Mexico, Kenya or Sierra Leone that deal with social protection, education and health care. Such measures create minimum standards of provision that are now within range of many more developing countries than was the case when the MDGs were originally conceived.

The ODI’s second principle is that of building resilience and reducing vulnerability. That could provide a focus for the use of renewed G8 and G20 development interest in growth and infrastructure to help tackle inequality and address issues such as capital flight and tax avoidance, as well as other critical environmental issues such as climate change, which reduce a community’s resilience and increase vulnerability. Finally, the ODI suggests a principle of building national economies—a key concern of Governments in developing countries, and one that increasingly reflects debate in many developed countries about what should be the priorities for overseas aid.

Perhaps the most interesting specific proposals come from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Centre for International Governance Innovation. They have proposed 12 new goals that seek to build on existing MDGs while reflecting the changed international context, and they include new methods for devising targets and accounting for progress. As well as arguing for the inclusion of further indicators to improve the living standards of the poor, reduce diseases, eradicate hunger and ensure access to safe water supplies, they also suggest new indicators concerning access to and quality of education—that point will be of interest to my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham). They urge a new focus on the reduction of violence, particularly against women and children, the promotion of gender equality, and better access to basic infrastructure, such as energy, information and financial services. They also support indicators of environmental sustainability, access to justice, trade rules and the transparency of Government budgets—that will be of interest to the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White).

At the moment, that list contains too many suggestions to achieve the simplicity that has helped to drive the continuing appeal of the MDGs, and there is perhaps not enough focus on job creation and growth. In my view, however, the proposals merit further serious debate and attention, and in that spirit, I commend them to the House.

Time is ticking, and a new post-MDGs agreement would be a huge prize, with regard to our efforts to tackle global poverty and improve sustainability. Britain could—and I believe should—once again occupy a pivotal place in the debates, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s plans to achieve that goal.

12:45

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Stephen O'Brien)]

I thank the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) for securing this debate on an important topic. Securing global agreement on a framework that updates the millennium development goals is a major priority for the coalition Government and the Secretary of State for International Development. We are now in 2012, and I welcome the chance to begin talking more openly about the key leadership role that the UK is playing—and will continue to play—on that agenda. Just as MDGs are at the heart of Government development policy, a successor framework should be central to all that we do, which means shaping it to ensure that any future global agreement reflects what we know about achieving results in the fight against global poverty. As one of the leading countries on development issues and with the legitimacy that comes from the coalition Government’s commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on overseas development from 2013, the UK will play a leading role.

The MDGs set a benchmark for global development policy, and over the past decade they have helped to galvanise efforts to improve the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people. The coalition has augmented and built on the previous Government’s commitment to put the achievement of MDGs at the centre of the UK’s development efforts.

[Tony Cunningham]

We have spoken a lot about international dialogue and my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) mentioned the G8 and G20. Will the Minister touch on our relationship with Europe and the European Union? Europe has a key role to play and the dialogue between the UK and the European Union will be crucially important.

[Mr O'Brien]

I do not plan to talk about Europe on the basis that the hon. Member for Harrow West—quite rightly—focused the debate on the UN. This is an international issue. There will, of course, be continuing discussions vis-à-vis Europe, but the primary focus must be on the UN and driven by the broad international community, not least because of the focus on moving to the post-MDG world and the emerging powers and other bodies that can be brought into a greater international political consensus to help in the battle against poverty.

The coalition is making every effort to accelerate progress with the current set of eight MDGs and particularly with those most off track. The UK’s aid effort has been designed, particularly over the past 18 months, to deliver the following key results by 2015, the first of which is to secure schooling for 11 million children—more than we educate in the UK but at 2.5% of the cost. That aim is particularly important for girls, as noted by the hon. Member for Workington. Other aims include vaccinating more children against preventable diseases than there are people in the whole of England; providing access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation to more people than live in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; saving the lives of 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth; stopping 250,000 newborn babies from dying needlessly; and helping 10 million more women get access to modern family planning.

[Tony Cunningham]

rose—

[Mr O'Brien]

I will not give way, as I want to make some progress and there is a lot to get through.

Tremendous progress with MDGs has been made globally. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development and the USA’s Raj Shah showed in the MDG countdown event at the UN last September, countries such as Brazil, Zambia, Peru and Nepal have demonstrated how political commitment, good policies and targeted resources can make a real difference to the lives of the poorest people.

Over the next four years, we will continue to showcase and celebrate the successes that have been achieved. Of course, that is very important in building and maintaining broad public confidence and consent. However, in 2015, millions of people around the world will still be living in conditions of extreme poverty. It is important that we do not lose the momentum created by the MDGs: 2015 will be the moment to update the framework, building on the success of the current one, so that it can reflect the new challenges and opportunities that we face in a world that has changed dramatically since 2000. The process of building global consensus on that updated framework is starting now.

The MDGs have played an important role in generating global political consensus on development and worked well as a communication and advocacy tool, both with the UK public and internationally. The framework, with its tightly focused set of targets and indicators, has also helped to strengthen the availability of data in developing countries and thereby made it easier to put a greater focus on results. However, the MDG framework has had its limitations.

A number of critical themes and issues were not included—the importance of economic growth or conflict and fragility, for instance. There are concerns that in some cases the poorest and most vulnerable have been neglected and not even explicitly referred to or focused on. An example is people with disabilities—another point mentioned by the hon. Member for Workington. There are concerns that the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable has often been masked by the average success rates in countries where progress has been very uneven.

Ownership of the MDGs at country level has been patchy and has not always been closely linked to a country’s own plans and objectives. In some cases, the framework has also created perverse incentives. For example, it has incentivised a focus on measuring school attendance, rather than the quality of education or retention of students in education. It has also made it more difficult to deal with critical problems that are best tackled multi-sectorally.

An updated framework will need to deal with the weaknesses, while capitalising on the strengths of the current MDGs, ensuring that we retain the simplicity of the current goals, intensifying the political imperative to focus on poverty reduction and building on the progress achieved so far. An updated framework needs to reflect the new global context. Of course, the world has changed since the original MDGs were created: it is no longer as easy to divide the world into countries that we would classify as either developed or developing. India alone has more poor people than all of sub-Saharan Africa, but India faces rich-world and poor-world problems at the same time.

An updated framework will need to resonate with the Governments and citizens of emerging powers such as India, as well as dealing with the needs of low-income countries. Moreover, in parts of the world, aid is likely to become a much smaller share of external financing for development in the future. As aid dependence falls in certain countries, a development framework that focuses mainly on targeting aid will be less relevant.

The principles for an updated framework are fourfold, so people are not being quite as cautious as the hon. Member for Harrow West feared. Four principles seem to be emerging from the discussions about post-MDGs. The Secretary of State is considering whether those principles would help to take forward the revision of the framework. I can confirm that we have already set up a team of officials in the Department for International Development’s policy division. That involves the most senior officials. Ministers are already having regular discussions with international counterparts on the post-MDG question.

The first principle is that the process to agree an updated framework needs to involve new powers and engage citizens, especially those who are most vulnerable and marginalised. Last time, the OECD-led process meant that ownership at country level was weaker than it should have been.

Secondly, there is a need to retain a simple set of global goals, but to enable greater ownership and accountability at national level, allowing nationally defined indicators and targets. National targets should still link into a global agenda that enables us to get a sense of overall progress.

To pick up one of the ODI points referred to, the third principle is universality. There is a strong view that, after 2015, we will need goals that resonate with the aspirations and challenges of citizens in emerging powers and OECD countries, as well as those in poor countries. However, there is also the view that we need to seek universal outcomes to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable are not neglected and, indeed, that inclusiveness applies.

Fourthly, an updated framework must incentivise action beyond aid. Goals should recognise that we are talking not only about aid transfers, but about all financial flows, including domestic public and private revenues—a framework that incentivises better resource allocation and helps to measure results. That is vital to the points on governance and anti-corruption measures that my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) rightfully highlighted. It is a useful point to make that the international Open Government Partnership, which the UK is chairing with Brazil, will provide opportunities to build alliances to ensure that governance and transparency are incentivised as part of the successor framework to the MDGs.

The discussions about what should happen to the MDGs after 2015 are getting going on the international stage. We are in the early stages of the process, but the coalition Government are already actively engaging with old and new partners to shape the debate. Thanks to the all-party consensus on the 0.7% and the UK’s broader credibility and status on development issues, we have the potential to play a critical leadership role on this agenda internationally.

The Secretary of State has spoken to the UN Secretary-General, indicating our readiness to continue to play a leadership role. The Rio plus 20 sustainable development conference in June will provide a key occasion for the UK to further the debate. We are seeking opportunities on every occasion to develop consensus on a post-MDG framework. We are doing that with others in the UN and the G8, with other Governments, with foundations and with the private sector.

[Mr Thomas]

I specifically asked the Minister what discussions he has had with colleagues in Europe. Let me ask him even more specifically whether European International Development Ministers, at the regular formal meetings that take place, have discussed the post-MDGs summit and whether a British Minister from the Department for International Development will go to Rio plus 20. One would expect someone from the Department of Energy and Climate Change to go, but surely a Minister from DFID should attend as well.

[Mr O’Brien]

Of course, discussions have been happening both at the formal level and in the informal like-minded group—the hon. Gentleman will be aware that those are also very important meetings. They are broad discussions, but in relation to establishing the principles for the post-MDG framework, the primary focus has been on the more international, UN-driven bodies. Of course, he is right to identify—to some degree, this answers the point raised by the hon. Member for Workington—that discussions are going on around Europe, but as yet it has not become a critical focus. It is something that we are trying to lead and push on, as we have those various meetings.

Particularly with regard to the UN, it is important to recognise that the discussions are held with other bilaterals, groups of countries and key Governments such as Brazil to ensure that the interest in the sustainable development goals, to which the hon. Member for Harrow West referred, and the post-MDG agenda are brought together. That is a cross-Government agenda involving DFID, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Given that cross-Government basis, the hon. Gentleman is quite right: of course there will be ministerial attendance at Rio. I am not in a position at the moment to confirm which of the Ministers will attend—that would be premature—but I can certainly assure the hon. Gentleman that the matter is being given the very high importance that he would expect.

We hope that there will be broader engagement by all interested parties, the UK public, the private sector and others to help us to define the agenda for international development for the next generation, not least because the MDGs were very useful in setting not just the advocacy but the aspirational drivers that supported it politically.

The four principles that I articulated, which are the key to ensuring that the post-MDGs are framed in the correct way, are the ones that the Secretary of State in particular and personally is taking forward. Those principles are that the updated framework on development needs to be legitimate, that it needs to balance better the relationship between the global and the national, that there needs to be universality and inclusiveness and that the updated framework must incentivise action that will be owned at country level.

I am thinking about the example that the hon. Member for Workington gave about education. Looking at education in relation to the post-MDGs, we will want to build on the dramatic progress on enrolment, but also to shift the focus on to incentivising learning outcomes. This is not just about retention and particularly getting girls into school and enabling them to sustain their education to secondary level, but about ensuring the quality of education and the attendance of the teachers and ensuring that that is sustained throughout. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Workington would like to make a short intervention now; there is about two seconds to go.

[Tony Cunningham]

I wanted the Minister to deal with the issue of disabled children; that was all.

[Mr O’Brien]

I covered the disablement point, which was one of the few notable absences in the original drafting of the MDGs. I hope that that can be rectified in the post-MDG framework, with a focus on the most vulnerable and the poorest. All of us who have travelled around various countries in the poorest parts of the world will know that one of the hidden but great concerns relates to the access to services that disabled children have.

School Transport

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

12:59

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to lead today’s debate under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. After my question to the Minister in November on school transport, I am sure that he was not entirely surprised to see my name associated with the topic today, and I am pleased that he is here to answer this afternoon’s debate.

If all politics is local, nowhere does that seem to be more true than on the vexed issue of home-to-school transport. My interest in school transport policy arises from the decision of Leicestershire county council on the provision of a bus service to take pupils from the village of Sileby to Humphrey Perkins school in Barrow upon Soar in my constituency. A smaller number of families in Mountsorrel are also affected, but I will particularly focus on Sileby today. The objection in my case arises from the council’s view that the proposed walking route from Sileby to Barrow is safe and the strongly held view of almost everyone else that it is not.

Before I dwell on local matters, I feel duty bound to explore why the Minister and the Department for Education should have an interest in the subject despite the fact that the assessment of walking routes and decisions about the provision of home-to-school transport and on appeals made by affected families are all matters for local authorities. I firmly believe in localism and that local authorities and elected local members should make decisions about school transport routes—as long as they are made fairly and transparently.

National legislation, namely the Education Act 1996, as amended, governs the duties and powers of local authorities in England to provide home-to-school transport. In addition, case law on school transport and “Home to School Travel and Transport Guidance”, published by the then Department for Education and Skills in 2007, contains detailed guidance on the provision of school transport. In March 2011, the Department for Education commissioned a review of efficiency and practice in the procurement, planning and provision of school transport across England. Section 509 of the 1996 Act states:

“A local education authority shall make such arrangements for the provision of transport and otherwise as they consider necessary, or as the Secretary of State may direct, for the purpose of facilitating the attendance of persons not of sixth form age receiving education…at schools”.

The 1986 case of Rogers v. Essex County Council was one of the most significant brought in recent years on available walking routes. In its ruling, the House of Lords stated that for a route to be available within the meaning of the 1996 Act, it must be a route

“along which a child accompanied as necessary can walk and walk with reasonable safety to school”.

A route does not fail to qualify as “available” because of dangers that would arise if the child remained unaccompanied, but the Court also held that a route is available even if the child would need to be accompanied along the route, as long as it is reasonably practicable for the child to be accompanied. Local education authorities can therefore take into account parents’ capacity to accompany their child. Following that judgment, the law was changed so that in considering whether a local education authority is required to make arrangements in relation to a particular pupil, it shall have regard to, among other things, the age of the pupil and the nature of the route or alternative routes that they could reasonably be expected to take.

Hon. Members must forgive me, because I am afraid that I am showing my background as a lawyer, but the history is helpful. In George v. Devon county council 1988, the High Court took the view that

“For an ordinary child whose home is within walking distance, but who applies under”

the relevant section

“a local education authority should consider: the age of the child and the nature of the route which he could reasonably be expected to take; the question should the child be accompanied on the route or alternative routes? If the answer is ‘no’, then normally there”

is

“no case for free transport. If the answer is ‘yes’, then”

the next question is

“whether the nature of the route or alternative routes is dangerous for the child if accompanied. If the answer is ‘yes’, then normally there would be a case for free transport. If the answer is ‘no’, then: the question”

is

“whether it is reasonably practicable for the child to be accompanied. If the answer is ‘no’, then normally there would be a case for free transport.”

Consequently, local education authorities must consider section 509, together with the various legal rulings, in defining their policies on the provision of school transport and the eligibility of individual pupils for free transport. Pupils, parents and families are encouraged to turn to the Directgov website for views on national policy. It states on its home-to-school transport page that

“Safe walking routes are those which usually include road crossings, good lighting and well maintained pavements and footpaths. LAs are required to assess the suitability of walking routes.”

Having set out the national policy background, I will turn to my local issue. Leicestershire county council stated its view on the Directgov approach in a letter to me dated 20 July 2011 from the assistant director of transport:

“‘Safe’ is a very absolute term and it is not possible to guarantee that anything is absolutely safe, so it is an unreasonable stipulation. The law requires that a walking route be ‘available’ for a child accompanied as necessary by a responsible adult and it is this criterion that we apply.”

As I have mentioned, however, a route also has to be reasonably safe, and therefore the dangers of a particular route should be taken into account.

In February 2011, a Leicestershire county council scrutiny review panel reported to the council’s cabinet on the council’s home-to-school transport policy. The panel was asked to consider, first, how available walking routes are assessed and the appropriateness of the current method of assessment, and, secondly, what are known in Leicestershire as “historic exceptions” and whether such services are still justified. Historic exceptions are bus services provided free to children despite the route length being under the statutory distance and despite a route having subsequently been assessed as available for children to walk. Children using services on those historic exception routes will continue to receive free transport until September 2012. The Sileby to Barrow route is not an historic exception.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend and neighbour for securing the debate on school transport, which is also a major issue in my constituency. Does she agree that under current guidelines common sense sometimes appears to go out of the window? In my constituency, there have been instances of older children retaining free bus passes, while younger children in the same household are asked to walk to school. Does she appreciate how frustrating it can be when a household is judged to be outside the three-mile limit and gets free bus travel, but the next-door neighbour is judged to be within the limit and their children are asked to walk to school? Surely we need discretion and common sense in such cases.

[Nicky Morgan]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Common sense has been lost as part of the debate and in reviewing the routes. I have exactly the same situation in Mountsorrel, where apparently older children already at the Humphrey Perkins school will continue to receive free bus passes and younger children starting at the school will not.

In undertaking the review, the scrutiny review panel was asked to have regard to the financial, environmental and health implications of any proposed changes to existing policies in the context of the legal obligations placed on the county council. The overall review was conducted as part of the council’s medium-term financial strategy. The panel did not consider the Sileby to Barrow route and nobody with an interest in the route, such as the headmaster, the families or local councillors, was asked to give evidence to the panel. In reaching its conclusions, the panel decided that the width of a footpath and the lighting of a route did not need to be considered when a route is assessed, which is where common sense has gone out of the window.

In May 2011, parents of pupils in Sileby and Mountsorrel due to start at Humphrey Perkins school in September 2011 were written to and told that free school transport would be available for their child. Imagine their surprise, and the surprise of the head teacher, who also knew nothing about this, when in late June last year they and the families of children already receiving free transport, because the route was deemed to be unavailable, received a letter saying that that would no longer be the case and that because they lived less than three miles from the school and there would now be an available walking route, they would not be eligible for free transport and instead would have to pay for a school bus service. It was at that point that a campaign group was formed and I was made aware of the problems that the 53 parents in Sileby face.

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. We have many problems in Dorset, and I want briefly to share some similar stories. I consider age to be a vital factor, in so far as a 13-year-old would not wish to be accompanied, so it is not a matter of the availability of somebody to accompany them. A rural lane with fast traffic is incredibly unsafe. I hope that she will expand on the point that notifying parents at the last possible moment or halfway through a sixth-form course, given that a choice will have been based on previous information, is unacceptable.

[Nicky Morgan]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend and congratulate her on the early-day motion on the topic, which has been signed by hon. Members from across the House. She is right that the safety of routes has not been considered and another frustrating point is the manner in which notifications have been sent out.

As I have said, a campaign group was formed in Sileby. To cut a long story short, the council admitted shortly afterwards that insufficient notice of the change had been given. The decision to withdraw transport was postponed for a term, and I was promised that a new assessment of the route would be conducted once the clocks had gone back in the autumn.

Why do we all consider the route to be dangerous? My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) has mentioned some of the dangers of such routes, but much of the Sileby to Barrow route has a footpath on only one side of the road, so that children—and adults—returning from school have their back to oncoming traffic. The footpath is narrow and there are several pinch points where everyone has to walk in single file—we are talking about 11-year-old children not messing about on the way to and from school. The speed limit along the road is 40 mph, and it is regularly exceeded. There are industrial estates, a deep ditch and a conveyor belt for a nearby quarry. The road is also so narrow at points that if two large vehicles pass each other the wing mirrors overhang into the footpath at head height.

Alas, the promise to wait for the next assessment to be conducted after British summer time ended and before any further decisions were taken was not fulfilled, and parents received further letters in October to say that as the necessary cutting back of vegetation had now happened along the walking route the free bus service would no longer be offered to them from this month. Meanwhile, despite my urging the county council to work with the school to examine alternative services, no contact was made with the headmaster between July and late October 2011. The council has since then had contact with the school about an alternative service, but that would be at almost double the cost of the service now procured by the headmaster. The council has also indicated that, when the school becomes an academy, home-to-school transport will no longer be its concern. I hope that the Minister can address that point. On a practical level, today, on the second day of term, the service for children living less than three miles from the school has been withdrawn, and some will now be using the train to get from Sileby to Barrow. I expect that others will be driven to school, which will increase congestion, and some will walk that route.

The walking route that some children will have to use remains, in my opinion, highly dangerous and therefore not “available” as the legislation requires, because even an accompanied child cannot walk along it with reasonable safety. The real question for us, as a national legislature, is whether the national legislation and guidance reflects the realities of modern Britain, or whether the safety of our children is at risk, when a route can be deemed to be available when it is clearly unsafe.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree, having touched on the safety of children going to school, that parents of children with special educational needs, in particular, are deeply worried? A case of mine concerns Melanie Green, whose 7-year-old son Aaron Green is given no support in going to school. I would welcome it if the Minister were to look at that case. In modern Britain, with our children’s changing needs, the area in question is one that must be considered thoroughly. Local authorities in particular must pay more attention to it.

[Nicky Morgan]

I entirely agree. I am sure that the Minister has heard and will hear representations about the particular case that my hon. Friend has mentioned. She is right about the need to return to a common-sense approach and consider the needs of individual families, whether it is the parents or pupils who are affected. There are parents with disabilities who cannot accompany their children to school, because they just do not have the physical ability to do so, yet somehow they are deemed to be able to accompany their children. This is a huge issue for many hon. Members, across the House, and I am glad to have the opportunity to allow them to express their frustrations and views today.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that at the heart of the question is the issue of one size not fitting all, and legislation not working in rural areas in the same way that it does in urban ones? In cities, many of us will have seen happy gangs of schoolchildren walking and cycling safely to school in a morning. In rural areas, increasingly both members of couples are working, and at rush hour families who commute are affected by the cost of fuel and the higher speed of traffic. There is much more traffic on rural roads, and many people in mid-Norfolk live more than two or three miles from a local school. School rush hour in rural areas is a real problem. Norfolk now provides 24,000 free journeys a day, which has been described as the tip of the iceberg. That is a problem across rural areas, and I urge the Minister to see whether the criteria can be reviewed to take account of the important change that has taken place in the past 40 years.

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend is right. He is concerned for parents, I am sure, across the country, but rural areas are particularly badly hit. My constituency example involves two villages and the route between them, which is rural and unlit. I shall discuss working hours as well, and I am sure that the Minister has taken my hon. Friend’s comments on board.

As I mentioned at the start of the debate, the Leicestershire county council test is that

“a route is available if it is a route which a child, accompanied as necessary, can walk with reasonable safety to school.”

We have talked about the reasonable safety point, and I will not labour it, in view of the time, but I want to deal with the question of the child being accompanied. To assume that children will be accompanied is surely to ignore the reality of much of family life—many parents now work—and the way in which the school day interacts with the working day. To walk three or more miles to a school will take an adult at least 45 minutes. When I walked the Sileby to Barrow route with the head teacher, the local PCSO, a parent, the leader of the county council and local councillors, it took us more than an hour, and we had no children with us. The policy therefore assumes that the relevant adult has between three and four hours spare walking time a day to accompany the child. Clearly that is totally unachievable.

My example in Leicestershire is not an isolated one. The Campaign for Better Transport has revealed that 38% of councils are reviewing or cutting transport to faith schools, and 46% are reviewing or cutting transport to schools other than faith schools. I fully understand the need to make savings in light of the appalling economic legacy left by the previous Government and the tough choices that that means for our local authorities, but there are some changes in services that have potentially devastating consequences.

I want to ask the Minister to address the following points: first, will he update the Chamber on the progress made on his Department’s review of efficiency and practice in the procurement, planning and provision of school transport across England? Depending on the stage that has been reached, will the review team consider how the safety of travelling children is being assessed by councils?

Secondly, will the Minister, perhaps in conjunction with the Department for Communities and Local Government, consider whether there is scope for issuing advice or guidance on how local authorities should handle decision making around the withdrawal of transport services? In particular, I think there should be advance consultation requirements, minimum notice periods and an obligation on local authorities to work with schools and colleges in relation to the provision of alternative services before services are withdrawn or fundamentally changed.

Thirdly, what is the position of those schools that become academies? Does conversion mean that an LEA is relieved of all its obligations in relation to home-to-school transport?

Finally, will the Minister, perhaps as part of his consideration of the responses to the review, consider whether the time has come for a clearer statutory test on whether a route is or is not available? In particular, is it time to drop the assumption that children will be accompanied, and should not child safety be considered above all other factors when considering whether a walking route is now available?

I am grateful to all the hon. Members who have attended today for their attention and for their support.

00:00

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

I have barely 12 minutes in which to take up all those questions, and I have a horrible feeling that I am not going to finish what is a fairly long and technical speech. If that happens, I shall give my unsaid comments to my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan). I congratulate her on bringing this important subject to the Chamber. I agree with all the considerations that she raises. She made some important points, and I pay tribute to the way that she has rolled up her sleeves and seen the situation in her constituency, as a good MP should.

Other hon. Members presented their points well. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) described the inconsistencies over the three-mile limit and different treatment of people in the same family and said that common sense was required. That is a fair point.

The point about late notification made by the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) is particularly relevant. I have come across that problem in my constituency, when parents have been told at the very end of term that, from the following term, the bus will not be available. We must do a lot better on that front.

My hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) mentioned considerations about special educational needs, which I shall discuss if I have time. We need greater flexibility there. There are examples of local authorities that will pay or subsidise parents, where they can, to provide the transport for those children themselves, rather than using expensive chaperoned taxis or school buses. Certainly flexibility is a requirement with SEN.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) also talked about considerations in rural constituencies in particular and the one-size-fits-all approach, which clearly will not work. We must ensure that we have a school transport system that reflects people’s lifestyles in the 21st century, as well as changes in education and educational establishments.

By saying all that, I have eaten into my time. My hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough has asked for clarity on four key points, and I will endeavour to provide that during my response. I agree with the broad thrust of her remarks. First, school transport is one of those areas where local decisions really do affect local people, and it should not be for Whitehall to dictate such decisions.

Secondly, in my position as Minister for Children, I hear from parents that the safety of their children is one of their paramount concerns. I have been holding discussions with my colleagues from the Department for Transport, particularly with the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), because we have a joint interest in this matter. This is clearly an area in which more work needs to be done, and this debate will be a useful addition to the wider discussion. I shall include hon. Members who are present today and others in the work that we will undertake in the coming weeks and months.

Thirdly, local authorities are having to make difficult decisions and to prioritise the services that they provide, but that cannot and should not be at the cost of the safety of children and young people.

In responding to my hon. Friend’s points, I intend to set out the legal basis for home-to-school transport, including the status of guidance available from Government. I want to give details on how it is funded, what routes of redress are available to parents and others and briefly to update the rather slow progress of the review of efficiency and practice commissioned by the Department.

We are debating the Government’s policy on home-to-school transport. Like many areas of education policy that we have inherited, this policy has grown over the past 20 years into a bureaucratic, costly source of frustration for many parents. Local authorities are now spending well in excess of £1 billion a year, yet some are not able to say exactly how many pupils they support or whether that support is meeting the needs of the children who need it most.

As communities have grown and evolved, the links between schools, transport and communities have, if anything, become more fragmented. yet I do not wish to paint too bleak a picture. Some authorities have risen above the challenges and are making savings to their budgets, but without the fuss and furore described by my hon. Friend and other colleagues in the Chamber today. The East Riding of Yorkshire, a predominantly rural authority, has developed an in-house software system combined with Ordnance Survey’s geographical information system to review the efficiency of all its bus routes. The resulting efficiencies arising from the planning and rerouting of a number of existing services, over three years, led to more than £1 million of savings.

The Department decided to start a review to identify and promulgate those very learning points from and for local authorities. Before launching the external review, officials from the Department undertook a review of the legal position to examine whether it required any amendment. The coalition has at its heart an ambition to reduce the inequalities in attainment that we still see in our education system. Too many young people’s destiny is governed by their family background and too few quality places are available to all parents. Only when every school is a good school can parents feel that they have a real choice from which to express a preference. Obviously, school choice is relevant to the transport issue, especially for people who do not live in urban areas.

Increasing the supply of good places is paramount to the coalition, which is why we have expanded the academies’ programme and established the free schools programme, with the first 24 schools now operational. The theory is quite simple: rather than bus the child to the school, bring the school to the child, and give parents and teachers the power to establish a school in their community and reduce the reliance on transport as far as possible. With that rather simple mantra, we concluded that the current legislative basis, while not perfect, is sufficient to meet the Government’s policy ambitions. Our decision was further strengthened by the experience in Northern Ireland, where changes such as revising the statutory walking distances were considered but not proceeded with on the basis that they would have significant funding implications—communications, assessments and so on. Given our economic situation, we were not willing to commit to such a cost.

The legal basis of school transport remains unchanged. Local authorities must provide free home-to-school transport where a child is attending a school beyond the statutory walking distances of two miles for pupils below the age of eight and three miles for those aged eight and over and no suitable arrangements have been made by the local authority for the child to attend a school closer to their home.

The Education and Inspections Act 2006 amended the legislative framework by inserting a number of transport provisions into the Education Act 1996. Of relevance for today’s debate are sections 508B and 508C and schedule 35B of the Act. Section 508B places a duty on local authorities to provide transport for eligible children. Eligible children are defined in schedule 35B. They include those children who are unable to walk to school because of their special educational needs, mobility problems or where they cannot reasonably be expected to walk because the nature of the route. Certain children from low-income families are also eligible under schedule 35B. Such provisions are often referred to as the extended rights.

Section 508C of the Education Act 1996 provides local authorities with discretionary powers to make travel arrangements for those not covered in 508B and make financial provision, in full or in part, for travel under such arrangements. Those provisions apply irrespective of whether the school the child attends is a maintained school, a foundation school, or as my hon. Friend has asked, an academy.

I have told hon. Members that my contribution would be technical, so I will have to continue at this pace. How is this duty funded? Without going into copious details, local authority transport duties are funded through a combination of revenue support grant and local generated council tax. In respect of the extended rights, the Secretary of State for Education provides an additional funding stream which for 2011-12 and 2012-13 amounts to £85 million. As this funding is not ring-fenced, it allows local authorities to work with their communities and set their priorities accordingly.

As my hon. Friend has stated, local authorities have already begun to tackle their spending. However, not all have approached it in the same methodological manner, and I have had a number of letters from concerned families who say that bus routes have been changed or cut and that they have to find, in relative terms, quite significant sums of money. Many decisions are driven solely by financial constraints, but there are examples where the local authority has saved money, managed the communications well and established a sustainable process for future changes. Departmental officials are now working hard to finalise the report and shine a light on those case studies. It is clear from the review that local authorities must make savings and can do so without the effects on provision that many of us have seen and heard about.

Leicestershire’s allocations were £640,000 in 2011-12 and £795,000 this year. Those are not insignificant sums. I am aware that in some authorities this non-ring-fenced funding is proving to be generous, and having met their statutory responsibilities, some authorities are using their discretion in how they meet any demands that they face. That has included making transport arrangements for children who are not entitled to free transport.

I also want to set out the legal basis in respect of safety. I want it to be clear that responsibility for road safety, even in school transport, actually rests with my ministerial colleagues at the Department for Transport. We are as one in our determination to make our roads as safe as possible, while ensuring that common sense is applied. There is a statutory duty on local authorities to ensure that suitable travel arrangements are made for eligible children for the purpose of facilitating their attendance at school. We are quite clear in our statutory guidance that local authorities are under a duty to make travel arrangements where the nature of the route is such that children cannot walk along it in reasonable safety—accompanied as necessary—where the distance is within the statutory walking limit.

In assessing route availability, authorities are obliged to conduct an assessment of the risks that children may encounter on the route. They include the volume and speed of traffic along roads, overhanging trees or branches and ditches, rivers and so on. The age of the children must also be considered and any assessment should take place at the time of day that children are expected to use the route. That is common sense, but it does not always happen. Many local authorities follow the guidelines provided by Road Safety GB, which is the national organisation that represents local government road safety teams across the UK and works with them in fulfilling their statutory role.

While ensuring that children remain safe, local authorities should, quite properly, take advantage of improved measuring technology and route availability that takes into account new building and infrastructure developments, in identifying new and suitable walking routes where previously there was no right of way. That is where the use of new technology, such as the public sector mapping agreement, which provides authorities with free digital geographic mapping data, has resulted in authorities being able to plan more efficient walking and school bus routes. That has led to significant efficiency savings without authorities having to withdraw services. The draft report will recommend better use of freely available public sector data to build a picture of service provision and use.

The processes followed by Road Safety GB are accepted as the industry norm, and that best practice has been built up over many years. Indeed, Road Safety GB is in the process of refreshing its guidance, and although we await the final outcome, I am informed that substantial changes are unlikely. The guidance will continue to reflect both case law and education legislation requirements. It will be amended to be easier to use and follow and to accommodate legislation changes, but there will be no additional pressure on assessors to make walking routes available.

In conducting an assessment of a walking route, there will be an element of subjectivity, given the wide range and mix of roads and surrounding terrain. That makes it difficult to advise on every eventuality and capture the subtleties in a definitive statutory instruction. However, Road Safety GB considers that the guidance sets the parameters appropriately, drawing on case law and education legislation, so that any personal judgment required by assessors is not too great. In the light of those safeguards, further intervention by the Government into assessment practice will simply be a bureaucratic burden, which is something that we are actively trying to resist.

On the subject of local consultation and local decisions, I understand that when proposing changes there is a need for sensitivity and reassurance over children’s safety and that there is an opportunity for parents to challenge and debate with the authority. That is why the statutory guidance states that local authorities should consult widely on proposed policy changes and that at least 28 days, in term time, should be set aside for the process to be completed. Local authorities should also have in place, and publish, a robust appeals procedure for parents to follow should they have a disagreement with regard to the provision of transport. As I am not satisfied that we have such a procedure, I will take the matter away and reconsider it.

[Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)]

Order. We must move on to the next debate.

Deregulation

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

13:30

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Sheridan, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in this important debate about Government policy on deregulation.

I secured this debate partly to publicise the Government’s desire to slash red tape for businesses—and, indeed, in every walk of life—but also to encourage businesses to be very specific, and to participate in the review of red tape so that we do as much as we can to get rid of the red tape that is strangling parts of our industry.

If I were giving a termly report, I would say to the Minister and his colleagues, “Good progress so far, but could do even better.” I agree with others that many huge strides have been made. Understandably, the topic of red tape has the full attention of the Prime Minister and No. 10 Downing street, but it is important that it has the attention of all Departments, covering every industry possible.

My challenge to the Minister and his colleagues is to go further and faster, because in many cases deregulation is free; in fact, it will often save businesses and Government money. Even more importantly, however, we all know that regulation often drives cost. That relates not only to implementation by businesses of measures such as the waste electrical and electronic equipment directive, but the bureaucracy, including inspection to check that measures have been implemented. Regulation is a self-perpetuating industry. We know that the forces of conservatism are entrenched when it comes to ensuring that we have good regulation, which often means a lot of regulation. However, the Minister and I know, as do many other Members, that it is not a case of having no regulation; often, it is a case of having better regulation and less regulation.

It will take great will-power to wrench aspects of bureaucracy into the post-bureaucratic age. Take a simple thing like the requirement for companies to keep six years’ accounts or VAT records. If there are not going to be tax losses, why do we not trim that requirement down to two or three years? There is a desire by Government to make sure that companies have information, just in case. There are other aspects of administration that require businesses to provide information constantly to the Government, whether it is to the Office for National Statistics or other bodies. Frankly, all those things add very little value to a business in its own microcosm; basically, they provide information for free to the Government; they are a way of generating data. In the macro-economic sphere, they may seem good, but if businesses are employing people just to generate statistics or other information for the Government, just in case it is needed, or to comply with a policy, or to satisfy an insurer, and so on, the risk is that businesses will use that talent and those resources not seeking to grow, but seeking to comply.

Of course the European Union has been a huge source of the regulations that have been brought into British law. The majority of the regulations imported from the EU have been generated as a result of the single market and the EU continuing to issue directives. Although I think that we are all great supporters of the single market, I am sure that many of us are not particularly enamoured of how much regulation the single market has brought to our shores. In particular, I am thinking of aspects of certain environmental directives, such as the habitats directive or the water directive.

In a recent statement, the Chancellor said that we want to review quite a lot of those directives, not only to check that they are having the desired effects—the UK Government would not have signed up to them if they did not wish to see a more general approach in particular areas—but to ask whether we are being over-zealous in our interpretation of the directives. Are we getting the balance right between what is in the interests of people and what is in the interests of nature? Are we getting the balance right between consumer and producer? It is critical that we ensure that we have a harmonised approach to understanding how directives should be implemented; we certainly should not gold-plate them in their implementation.

Just last week, I met farmers from my community who are worried about the water directives, how they have been implemented, and the risk that implementation causes in terms of abstraction. That matters because Suffolk is a great producer of many of the crops that we all enjoy around the UK. Suffolk has three potato seasons a year, and it also produces other root vegetables. If Suffolk was not producing that quantity and quality of food, we would basically have to start importing a lot more food. We must ensure that we get the balance right. Elements of food security matter, but so does the environment. We have to respect the environment, sustaining it for the future, and our own farmers know that better than anybody else; they do not want to put themselves out of business overnight. A balanced, sensible, common-sense approach, which involves farmers as much as possible, is needed.

There is another community initiative in my area that has recently been affected by regulation. Plans for a community transport bus are being frustrated at the moment because of a restriction that means that people who passed their driving test after 1995 can carry only a certain amount of weight. That is another European directive that was probably common sense when it was introduced, but it has meant that fewer and fewer people can volunteer to be drivers, or can get their expenses back. That is because the allowable driving weight limit was set some time ago. Of course, those who drive people in wheelchairs, or something similar, around will know that those pieces of equipment have often since become heavier as more technologies are installed in them. As a consequence, fewer people than we would like are able to fill the important role of volunteer driver.

Of course, it is not only European directives that we have put into our regulation; many directives are home-grown, and they often come about in reaction to particular events. Dare I say that the “something must be done” brigade see something happen, and may react by saying, “Something must be done about it; let’s regulate to try and change this behaviour”? We all know that it is not necessarily possible to change behaviour by legislating. We can try to criminalise certain activities, but what is really important is having more positive indications of how we want people, companies and indeed our own councils to behave, rather than simply having a rule whereby they must do something.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that quite often the regulations that we are discussing have a disproportionate effect on small businesses? For example, farmers in South West Norfolk who are struggling with the natural habitats directive have had to have endless meetings with the local council, Natural England and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to sort things out, which is a huge burden on their administrative time. Moreover, quite often, large businesses, particularly in the banking and energy sectors, lobby Government and support them in introducing more regulation, because they see regulation as a barrier to entry for smaller businesses that are trying to enter those important markets.

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point, and on the subject of energy, the energy red tape challenge will close in less than an hour, according to the Twitter feed on the red tape challenge.

I understand my hon. Friend’s point completely. There is an interesting balance to be struck in legislating for safety by introducing regulations. I agree with her that we do not want unnecessary regulations introduced to try to keep cartels or oligopolies going. Whether it is in response to the REACH—registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals—directive or the herbal products directive, which we are busy trying to implement at the moment in response to European laws that have been passed, there is an argument for allowing people to make their own decisions and choices, rather than having regulation decide things for them.

I also wanted to refer to my hon. Friend’s work on child care. She has done quite a lot of policy work about the cost of child care, and how costs that have been driven into the industry mean that child care becomes exceptionally expensive for parents who want to go to work, but who sometimes cannot afford to, or for whom work seems only to pay for the costs of child care. The question is rightly being asked: what is driving that cost? Looking after children of course takes skill, but it need not take a graduate degree. Over the years, we have ended up with various regulations, leading to a situation in 2009 when two police officers were told that they could not look after each other’s children for more than so many hours at a time because, as they were not registered as child minders, the activity was deemed illegal. The Government looked into the matter, but this is another example of common sense being replaced by some bright spark’s desire to ensure that children are looked after only by child minders, rather than by their parents’ friends or colleagues.

Another issue that comes up regularly is the portability of the Criminal Records Bureau check. Someone going into a school might need five different CRB checks, depending on the activity they want to do. I know that the Government are looking into such issues but, as I said at the start of my speech, I encourage them to go much further, much faster. Not only will that help their constituents, but it will free up Government time to focus on what really matters—assisting people at home and helping businesses to grow and to employ people.

The Prime Minister is reported to have said in the past few days that he is looking for Ministers to ensure that their Bills pass the U-turn test—in other words, to ensure that there are no U-turns. Some of this is about drafting simpler legislation, but a lot of it is about not trying to regulate for every possible scenario. One of the challenges that our country has been facing—this is no criticism of the people involved—is that an openness to having everything in regulation means that measures can become a lawyers’ picnic, with everything open to judicial review. The constant desire to put everything in statute is a huge challenge, because people almost cannot turn for the risk of being taken to court or to judicial review. That is not to say, of course, that people should not have recourse to action when something is patently unfair, but we all, as Members of Parliament, need to consider whether we will end up with lawyers and judges deciding what is right and wrong, rather than Parliament deciding on that through better laws.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Businesses, certainly in my constituency but also across the country, definitely welcome the Government’s agenda of deregulating much more, but does she agree that small and medium-sized businesses are still deeply sceptical and concerned about the constant battles they face, including legal judgments and even with local authorities, which seem to think they know best, when it is the businesses themselves that know how to get on and make the right decisions to thrive and grow?

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, especially about the role of local authorities. With her pedigree in a family business and through her subsequent work, she knows about the challenges that people in our constituencies face every day. I will mention one case.

To my surprise, my local district council has responded in an over-the-top way to a deemed health and safety risk. In one part of the country, problems were identified with a commercial building’s liquefied petroleum gas tank, and that led to a measure, across the country, to investigate every such LPG tank. That led to a series of visits, and to changes having to be made. Tanks have not exploded and no risk has been identified, but the tanks must now have cages and there must be a clearing away from the site. There was also a two-page detailed submission by the council officer, essentially telling people that they had to provide details, written instructions, training, and a sign to explain how to call the emergency services, instead of allowing our local pub to use common sense: “If there’s a fire, I’ll tell you what: you just call 999.” I was told: “Well, that business might not have mainly English-speaking people working in it.” For God’s sake, let us use our common sense, so that council officers are talking to their businesses and not issuing two-page template instructions about how to dial 999.

I appreciate that setting out laws represents an ambition—a way of ensuring that we do things in a certain manner—but I encourage the Government to try to not only take the scissors to red tape, as they are already doing, but to get out the shears and really start hacking back. This is about supporting common sense and having simpler legislation. I have every confidence in the Minister, but please, let us go for as short a haircut as we can.

13:39

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Mr Mark Prisk)]

I certainly need a haircut. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) on securing this debate and on her excellent contribution. In particular, I accept the argument, “Good progress, could do better,” not because I am unambitious, but because it is important to be realistic. Businesses have heard a lot of rhetoric from politicians of all parties on this issue, but the reality on the ground has often been of a lesser degree, so wanting to ensure a consistent approach has been crucial to our stance.

This issue has vexed Governments for many years—throughout my lifetime, in fact. The previous Administration had a strong rhetoric on the issue, but in the end were delivering the equivalent of six new regulations every working day, which is a daunting inheritance. As my hon. Friend rightly pointed out, the problem lies partly in that natural tension between the wider social and political agenda of any Government and how we deregulate. It is true that when a tragedy occurs—my hon. Friend alluded to this when she talked about something needing to be done—the public pressure on parliamentarians and Government can often be overwhelming, even when, looked at objectively, evidence for new laws is thin. This debate is constantly held in Government.

We as a Government have taken a different approach. Rather than find 200 or 300 regulations that we should get rid of and leave it at that, we are trying to be systematic. Our approach recognises the tension between the wider goals of any Government and the purpose of deregulation and seeks to change the very culture of Whitehall, so that regulation becomes the last resort and not the first option. To do that, we first sought to establish a system to cap the cost of new domestic regulation—the one-in, one-out system, which I will discuss in a moment. We then matched it with a systematic review of all existing regulations, through the red tape challenge, which I will update Members on in a moment.

Those policies are supplemented by an intention to sunset new regulations, to establish a regulatory moratorium on micro-enterprises—that addresses the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel)—and by our recently announced review of regulators and local enforcement. I will come on to that as well, because very often it is not the legislation but how it is enforced that drives the small business crazy. Alongside that domestic agenda, we have sought to reduce the burden of regulation coming from Brussels, first by ending the routine habit of gold-plating everything that comes from there and, secondly, by actively seeking an exemption from EU legislation for small businesses, and I would like to update Members on that point.

I shall look at each element, to bring the core points together and to answer some of the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal. Turning to new regulations, last January we introduced the one-in, one-out system to cap their cost, so Ministers have to balance the cost of new regulations by making a commensurate reduction in the existing regulatory burden. We think, as businesses have to, about the picture in the round, not just about the single measure that we have been charged with getting through Westminster. That is important, because when running a business it is not the single measure that breaks one’s back but the cumulative burden of regulations.

When we began the process in January of last year, 157 regulations were in preparation, 119 of which would have imposed a cost on business, and many more have come through the system in the past 12 months. The one-in, one-out system has had the effect of rejecting many of those measures and forcing Whitehall to change its habits, and by the end of last year, we had got to the point of only 89 new measures being agreed, only 19 of which would impose any cost on business.

In the first year—I say this with caution—one-in, one-out has started to have an impact on the flow of new regulations, although it is far from perfect. I want to ensure that the message from the Better Regulation Executive and me, as the Minister with responsibility, is clear. We have made an encouraging start, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal rightly said, we could do better. We need to strengthen and enhance that.

There have been substantial changes in some areas. One-in, one-out has helped to get Departments to think about the picture in the round. For example, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has launched its own employment law review. There has been a package of changes on employment tribunals, on commissioning an independent review of managing sickness absence, which is a critical issue for business, and on launching an employers’ charter to rebalance the agenda.

We have agreed to create a universally portable Criminal Records Bureau check that employers can view online instantly, thus reducing the duplication in the process and making it easier to access. Naturally, it will maintain the minimum check that we want to ensure that children are safe, but it will reduce the ridiculous paperwork embroiled in the process.

Similarly, on health and safety, we intend to implement all Professor Löfstedt’s recommendations, which include exempting up to 1 million self-employed people from many health and safety rules designed for multi-nationals. My hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) made an excellent point about rules being set, possibly conveniently for large businesses, that are disproportionate for the self-employed and for smaller firms.

The red tape challenge and the question of Europe are related. The red tape challenge matches the wish of the one-in, one-out policy to examine systematically what is already on the statute book. It is not easy to be exact, but we think that the statute book incorporates approximately 21,000 measures, 11,000 or so of which have a direct bearing on business. It is a mammoth task, as Members will appreciate. We intend systematically to review and cull unnecessary, burdensome or ineffective regulations.

We have grouped regulations into themes to make it easier to see the picture in the round. The website has featured 13 themes, and the Star Chamber, which goes through regulations item by item with civil servants from all the relevant Departments, has examined five themes completely. The environmental themes, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal referred, are before us at the moment. The points that she made have been mirrored in many of our discussions. I welcome her contribution. If she wants to add to it after the debate, I shall be happy to ensure that her comments are incorporated into the process.

Of the 1,200 measures that we have considered so far, more than half will be either scrapped or substantially improved. On 15 December last year, 84 defunct regulations were removed from the statute book by the House. The process in law has begun in Westminster, not just in Whitehall. To reverse the situation, we must ensure that the sausage machine is put into reverse and that we regularly remove measures from the statute book. Key measures include overhauling employment tribunals, replacing 12 sets of consumer rules and laws with a single consumer Bill of Rights, implementing a wholesale deregulation of entertainment licensing and simplifying poisons licensing. Some of the most serious poisons are on the same list as fly spray. My hon. Friend rightly described the rather crude way in which significant and minor risks are lumped together, sometimes for all the wrong historical reasons. That must be addressed, and poisons are a classic example.

We are cutting the number of different sets of food labelling regulations from a rather dazzling 31 to 17, and maybe we need to do a little more. We are removing needless energy rules that currently tie up the process of short-term holiday letting, which is important in East Anglia. We are also scrapping 80 of the 107 regulations considered in the hospitality, food and drinks sector. Those are important changes.

We have incorporated the habitat and wildlife directive into our consideration of environmental law under the red tape challenge. How could we not? However, the red tape challenge cannot rewrite set European legislation. What we can do is ask ourselves, “Are we implementing this in a minimal way and a way that is reasonable for those whom we seek to regulate? Is the information that we seek from those organisations in a form and of a scale that it is reasonable to expect them to fulfil?” It is easy for a large department of 2,000 people not to realise that a three-person business finds it a heck of a challenge to fill in endless survey forms and still earn a living.

On Europe, we recognise that we need to deal with the issue fundamentally. That is why we started last year with a new set of guiding principles. The first was to end the routine gold-plating of EU laws. My hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk is absolutely right that large, well-established lobbying voices can argue that it would be really good for Britain to have enhanced rules—just slightly more than the minimum standard, as they might describe it, in Europe. “It would be good, Minister,” they say, “to make things crystal clear by setting out all 74 possible circumstances in legislation. That would be really helpful. Clarity would be brought.” That is the natural argument presented.

To prevent that, we have put in place a principle saying that the default position is that we will simply copy what is in the agreed directive into UK law unless that would clearly affect UK interests adversely. That is a fundamental shift from the default position. It does not mean that no measure will ever be gold-plated, but it does mean that the Minister in question will have to bring it before their Cabinet colleagues to justify why. That is an important deterrent.

We also need to go back further in the policy-making process in Europe. That is why, last March, the Prime Minister wrote to President Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, calling for new burdens on business to be offset by savings elsewhere. Members can see that the principle of the cumulative burden has been introduced. Since then, we have secured a commitment from the European Commission to reverse the burden of proof when including micro-businesses in the scope of EU legislation. The EU must justify why a micro-business should be included, rather than assuming that it should. That is an important first principle. To illustrate, we have agreed with EU Ministers to exempt micro-businesses from certain EU accounting rules. We think that that will save UK small businesses approximately £150 million to £300 million in annual costs. That is an important shift, and it sets a precedent. Once it is seen that that can be done in that field, there is no reason why it cannot be explored elsewhere.

It is not just the Commission or the Council with which we must concern ourselves; often, it is also the European Parliament, where there are also strong voices similarly in favour of saying “Something must be done.” That is why, working with Members of the European Parliament across the coalition, we have secured the European Parliament’s agreement that it will conduct independent impact assessments on its substantive amendments. It has also set up a specific unit to consider that work. In other words, when a measure is introduced, the European Parliament can now say, “Hang on a moment. What will that cost?” The cost can be judged independently. That is an important start, although we need to go a lot further. Now that we have those matrices, the next step is to ensure that they are implemented.

In conclusion, rather than just finding 50 popular measures to get rid of and leaving it at that, we have tried to address the root problem. During the next week or so, I will set out for the House the details of what we did in 2011, so that people can see measure for measure, item for item and cost for cost exactly what has gone, what is going and what will stay. Over the past 12 months, we have sought to turn the oil tanker around, change direction and ensure that we not only cap the cost of new regulation and reduce the burden of existing regulations, but tackle the burden of EU regulations and how the UK implements them. Together, those things will make a good start, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal rightly said, we recognise that there is much more to be done.

Question put and agreed to.

13:59

Sitting adjourned.