Children’s Social Care
Lord Balfe Excerpts(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes an important point, taking us even further back in the process to the situations that families find themselves in that put them under the sort of pressure that sometimes—not always—brings potential harm to their children. Of course it is important that we think about child poverty in a holistic manner, which is what the task force with my right honourable friends the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is working on now. It is also important that we support local government in providing some of those broader services. At the moment, we are seeing enormous increases in spending on children’s social care but relatively small increases in benefits for children. That is why we need to reform the system, alongside ensuring that the money is there.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I first declare an interest: I grew up in a children’s home, so I have a bit of knowledge about it. The system is broken. Not by the last Government: it has gradually been broken over 50 years since we got rid of children’s departments. My one criticism of this document, which is a very good step forward, is that it mentions virtually everything except talking to the children about what they want.
Secondly, as I have said before, you cannot devolve compassion. You have to get the private sector out of this business. There is no other way forward. When we had children’s departments, we had university departments backing them up; we had a profession devoted to children, not profit. Will the Minister go back to the department to see how she can get this service back into the public, municipal care that it thrived quite well under from the Curtis report of the 1940s to the Seebohm Rowntree changes in the early 1970s, which undid it because the Treasury got greedy?
Independent Schools: VAT Exemption
Lord Balfe Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for initiating this debate which, of course, was tabled before the election. We are now catching up. I agree with noble Lords who said that this was in the manifesto, but it is still a very vindictive policy and the way in which it is being introduced worsens things. Top schools will still be okay. Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the like will not go under. They will stay there. The only schools that will go under are those that are on the margin anyway.
There are good schools in places such as Woking, Guildford and Kent, in areas where there are grammar schools. We already have a lot of schools in the state sector which are as good as public schools.
Two of my children went to public school. I observed the huge struggle that parents had in paying fees. It was quite common for there not to be a summer holiday. They went to a very average public school in Ely. We used to know it in slang terms as “Farmers’ Comprehensive” because it catered for the rural community of the north part of East Anglia. However, many of the parents there struggled very much. Not only that, when two parents sent their children to the school, for one of those parents nearly all their income was spent on those school fees.
I was lucky because my wife earned more than me for a good period of our early marriage. Most of that money went on childcare, first on nannies, then on schooling. It was very beneficial because I was working in Brussels, and we felt that my son would benefit from having male teachers around and not being in a totally female environment. However, we also felt that my daughter, who had mild dyslexia, would benefit from the dyslexia programme of the King’s School in Ely, which she did. She went on to university, got a 2.1 and now holds down a very good job.
There are a thousand stories behind all this. Look at the family reasons. I am the president of BALPA, the pilots’ union. Pilots are often away for a week at a time. Sending their children to weekly boarding helps to round them and to give them a start in life.
The same was true for my wife, who is the daughter of a Foreign Office diplomat. She went to public school at 10 and did not see her parents, apart from during the holidays, until she was at university. This is the sacrifice that many people make for their country and the schooling system helps with that.
Finally, I have one question for the Minister. King’s Ely has a burgeoning group of Asian children. It is likely that, if their numbers go down, the school will pull it up by bringing in more migrants. Have the Government made any assessment of this? How many migrants are we to expect? Will there be visas for parents, noting that health service workers can no longer have family visas? Will the children be able to bring their parents in to help look after them, or is this yet another bit of the puzzle that has not been thought out?