Independent Schools: VAT
Lord Naseby Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, nowhere else in the world is education taxed in this manner. Thousands of our children are to be basically left behind in the middle of the year, just at the time they need to prepare for exams and just after they have been through Covid. Boarding is vital to the military, our diplomats, and those who work abroad. I went boarding at Bedford School because my father was working in Pakistan. No, we cannot have envy being the determinant of the education, and indeed the future, of our country.
Independent Schools: VAT Exemption
Lord Naseby Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, I think it is plain to all noble Lords that it is wrong to put a burden on certain families who, faced with increased fees caused by a policy of introducing VAT, find themselves totally adrift. Those children will undoubtedly suffer.
Frankly, independent education has been with us for centuries. I declare an interest as having been at Bedford School, which was founded in 1552. It is a boys’ school of just over 1,000 boys, the best part of 25% of whom board. They do so because their families work somewhere abroad and there is no alternative. There is no state boarding. We must reflect on that dimension.
We also need to recognise that children today, whether in independent or state education, have been through a shattering experience with Covid. I do not know whether noble Lords saw what happened in individual homes; I certainly saw what happened in my daughter’s home and my son’s home. Sections were set aside for remote education for my two granddaughters. That sort of thing was done throughout my former constituency in Northampton South. Whether we like it or not, those children suffered. That must be recognised.
I was a boarder. My parents worked in Lahore and Ottawa. Where else could I go other than to a boarding school? We are an exporting, trading country. For heaven’s sake, there are thousands of parents abroad supporting this country. We must remember that. On top of that there is also the military and everybody else. Boarding is vital.
The Harpur Trust, which looks after the three major independent schools and one small one in Bedfordshire, says that £2.7 million is spent on bursaries, as well as for 52 disadvantaged young people from Bedford to go to university. There are school uniform grants to every young person in Bedford on free school meals moving from primary to secondary school. That is a terrific achievement. My own school has a partnership with Mark Rutherford School and a new project in the last few years, Ready2Lead, covering eight secondary schools. The school’s Quarry Theatre opened to the public in 2015 and will celebrate 1,200 shows in July. So it goes on. Here is a small quote from a Mrs Barker, the head teacher at Scott Primary School:
“We are so grateful for the opportunity that Bedford School are offering”.
This is not the right policy. We need to be practical, exempt boarding fees from whatever comes out, and be sensible and move this to the end of the school year —it is pretty difficult to change course in the middle. If we are really short of money, why is gambling—bingo and betting—exempt from VAT? Is that more important than the education of the young people of this nation?
School Funding: Special Educational Needs
Lord Naseby Excerpts(6 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am not sure where £60.7 billion relates to £3.50, as they are quite a way apart. I point the noble Lord to where our children are in the international league tables and the improvements we have made. He can roll his eyes, but facts are facts.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, what, if anything, in this highly respected report suggests that putting VAT on any form of education would be beneficial to our young people in this country?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The report focused on the state-funded sector and is therefore not related to VAT in education.
Initial Teacher Training Providers
Lord Naseby Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I hear the noble Lord’s concerns. We believe that the accreditation process was thorough and fair, but I would be delighted to meet the group, as he suggests.
Lord Naseby (Con)
Can my noble friend clarify whether accreditation is still taking place, or just on appeal? If it is just on appeal, what help is her department giving to those organisations to make sure they come up to standard? Presumably, they have been working for years in this subject area.
Baroness Barran (Con)
If I understood my noble friend’s question correctly, I can tell him that there has been a reaccreditation of all providers in the field. Some providers chose not to apply to be reaccredited, some new providers applied, and the majority of both university and school-based providers were successful—80% of universities and 83% of school-based providers. We have been looking at supporting those successful organisations to work, where appropriate, with those that were not successful, to make sure that we can build those partnerships and ensure we have the capacity we need.
Fire Safety: Schools
Lord Naseby Excerpts(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Naseby (Con)
I, too, am a member of the all-party fire group. Is it not right that Members of this House and others who comment from outside should now take a deep breath and hold back a little and allow those who are competent in this world to tell us what action is needed? These actions should flow from proper, deep investigation—and hopefully we as a House will be told as soon as possible what changes are to be made.
Lord Nash
My noble friend makes an extremely sensible suggestion. We will have to wait on this, but the DCLG has set up an independent expert advisory panel to advise the Government on any immediate measures needed to make buildings safe. That panel met for a full day last Thursday.
Schools
Lord Naseby Excerpts(8 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. London has been a great success story. It started under the Labour Government with the London Challenge and their academies programme, which we have sought to continue. Of course, there are quite a few schools in London that are selective in one way or another. It is also fair to say that it is much easier to attract teachers in London than in many of the areas of the country where we see these underperforming schools. Although there are many lessons to be learned from London, there are still many coastal towns and former mining villages in this country that seem to have struggled, partly because of intergenerational unemployment and partly because they struggle to attract really good teachers. It is those kinds of issues that we are really keen to focus on.
Lord Naseby
This is about English schools. Does my noble friend recognise that the phrase “schools that work for everyone” applies to the majority of independent schools? I declare an interest, having been chairman of the governors of Bedford School, under the Harpur Trust, which runs three secondary schools in which well over 200 pupils receive substantial bursaries. The trust is the main financial promoter of the Bedford Academy. All the schools make their facilities available in different ways. My own school makes its planetarium available to every primary school in Bedfordshire. Against that sort of background, I have to say to my noble friend that it is not helpful to read in the papers of a quote, allegedly from the Prime Minister, that independent schools are “divorced from normal life”. They are not. Furthermore, does my noble friend recognise that every parent who goes to an independent school has already paid the cost of state education through the community charge? People who come to the independent sector make great sacrifices and come from all classes. They believe in good education and they are prepared to pay for it.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Naseby Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, I, too, welcome the gracious Speech. I note that there are 21 Bills—too many in my judgment—but I can applaud the vast majority since they are focused on one-nation Conservatism. En passant, I note that there is a key Bill on prison reform. I am a man of Bedford, where John Howard was the great prison reformer. John Bunyan was put in Bedford jail and Hanratty was the last man to be hanged there, following the A6 murders. I hope that we have done enough thorough, in-detail, pre-research in relation to the all-important reform of our prisons.
In my judgment, the Chancellor has set a clear financial strategy which I greatly applaud. Now is the time for implementation. I will comment on business and health matters. An element of business is the situation with Tata and British Steel. I want to thank the Secretary of State and the Minister of State for the time, energy, work and commitment they have put in to finding a solution. I had the privilege of working in India for a couple of years. I know the Tata company and I know in some depth the way in which the Indian community negotiates. I say to my noble friend who has to do a lot of it that I hope she has plenty of patience. She will need it. But the longer you sit there, the more likely you are to be successful. If the pension area is a problem, as a trustee of the parliamentary pension fund, I can say that no one particular format is a solution that can be implemented anywhere. There is flexibility and I hope that we will find an answer there, too.
I turn to exports. The House will recognise that, certainly in my judgment, five Ministers in charge of our exports over five years is not a good strategy. It is not one likely to produce any consistency. We can see the results in the balance of trade. Now we have a new Member of our House to take over that role, my plea to my own Government is that he will stay in position for at least three years and agree a strategy with the CBI and other relevant parties so that we can move forward and reduce what is really a pretty poor situation on the balance of trade.
London airport has been mentioned. Here is a golden opportunity to have a bigger hub airport to assist all our exporters, be they the SME Export Track 100 group, the City, or anybody else. The third runway is a must. I speak as someone who was only an RAF pilot but, by the time this runway is implemented, we will have a new generation of aircraft, with better fuel consumption, lower noise, a lighter carbon footprint from sustainable fuels and better air traffic control allowing better and less-noisy stacking. The people of south-west London should welcome all this.
Moving from high-tech to low-tech, I declare an interest in that my daughter has two shops in Bedford. There has been some progress on business rates but why does the poor, hard-pushed retailer have to wait until 2020 to move from increases based on RPI to increases based on CPI? Why can that not be done next year to help them a bit? We have a situation where 40% of trade is now done online. No business rates are paid by online traders. We have to find a way to bring about a balance between high-street and online trading. In my judgment, we should learn from the United States and look long and hard at a sales tax.
Thirdly, in the business area, I turn to the PM’s conference on fraud and the effect it may have on the Overseas Territories. Again, I declare an interest in that my youngest son is a lawyer in the Cayman Islands. That part of the Overseas Territories has worked really hard over the last three or four years to produce a register that is legitimate and to build up a financial infrastructure with it. It is available to the authorities here in the UK at 24 hours’ notice. I believe that that is as much as we can ask them to do.
This brings me to the USA, which is not co-operating at all but just siphoning off business from our Overseas Territories. Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada and now South Dakota are proudly advertising in the Financial Times and they are all taking business from our legitimate Overseas Territories. I do not think that is acceptable. If we are to have a global conference in 2017 with the USA as co-host, it is time that was sorted out.
I will mention three issues in relation to health. I ask Her Majesty’s Government to think again about changing the position of the specialist Cancer Drugs Fund to one where it is controlled by NICE and the commissioning committees. I suggest to the House that it should stay where it is because it is working well and we have a long way to go to equal what is done in the rest of Europe.
Secondly, palliative care is a disgrace. No GP—or very few—visits dying people. Young doctors are not even taught any element of palliative care. That whole area needs urgent attention.
Thirdly, as regards GP numbers and work patterns, the King’s Fund has just produced a report showing that 90% of trainee GPs and 70% of women GPs want to work part-time. On top of that, we have a shortage of GPs. This situation needs urgent review in terms of both numbers at our medical schools and rebalancing the figure from the 60%—and growing—female intake to somewhere nearer a 50-50 intake. Given our expenditure on health and on their training, we need to ensure that they commit to work full-time in the National Health Service. I declare a past interest in that my wife ran a large GP practice, had three children and helped me in my work as a Member of Parliament. That was not out of the ordinary in the days when she was a GP, which was not so long ago. If my suggestion is not taken up, I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that there is no hope of having seven-day care.
I conclude with a very serious subject, which is prompted by just seven words in the gracious Speech—namely,
“the primacy of the House of Commons”.
Your Lordships will recall that I was Chairman of Ways and Means in another place from 1992 to 1997, charged with running all the committees and taking all the constitutional debates on the Floor of the House, including 25 days on Maastricht. I am acutely aware of the angst felt by the Government over the treatment of amendments to the welfare Bill. I warned the Government at the time that the amendments sent to your Lordships’ House should never have come here as they involved major changes involving billions of pounds and were in effect money Bill matters. I trust, therefore, that in the cold light of day and upon further reflection, Her Majesty’s Government will not be tempted to put any new check on your Lordships’ legitimate role to revise as we see fit any Bill that is sent to this House.
Schools: Academies
Lord Naseby Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Naseby (Con)
Is it not enormously sensible for the governors of our academies to hold reserves at the end of a Parliament, when they have no idea what the policy may be in the future? We also have low inflation at this time, and I imagine that a fair number of them are preparing for capital works based on their reserves.
Ofsted: Academy Chains
Lord Naseby Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Naseby (Con)
Is my noble friend aware that he is surely right? Local authority inspections are one thing but, in addition, there are a whole host of charitable foundations that have Ofsted inspections—but that is, again, in a different framework.