Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Alex Chalk and Huw Merriman

Monday 13th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

3. What steps her Department is taking to help people with disabilities into work.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

8. What steps her Department is taking to help people with disabilities into work.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding

Debate between Alex Chalk and Huw Merriman

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Sir Vince Cable) on securing this important debate. In my three minutes, I will touch on school funding, school choices and another area that I passionately support.

On school funding, I ask the Minister to focus particularly on recent changes to the allocations between school block, early years block and high needs block. Previously, it was a notional figure that could be switched across blocks, and now the limit is just 0.5%. I am concerned about the knock-on effect, as it creates a perverse incentive for mainstream schools to see children moved out of mainstream into specialist schools. Previously, they would have complained that they would be salami-sliced and would have to pay for that—now, they would not have to. I ask the Minister if it would be possible to see data on whether that is actually forcing more young people out of mainstream into specialist schools. Mainstream should be where we start. It is where these young people will return to after they have finished school, in their communities and workplace. Anything that creates an incentive away from that is a concern to me.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Balcarras School in my constituency takes a number of SEND children—more than 20—yet because of a quirk of the system that means it has to pay the first £6,000, it is disincentivised from doing the right thing. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be helpful if the Government looked constructively at changing that funding arrangement?

[Huw Merriman]

I do indeed. My constituents living in east Sussex are less likely to be in a maintained mainstream school than children living in any other county around us, so I absolutely agree. The difficulty is that we have received a 3% real-terms cut to school funding in my constituency of Bexhill and Battle. We are at 4,334, whereas the figure is 5,157 in Birmingham, Edgbaston, and 5,123 in Nottingham North. I am afraid that my constituents are worse off living in my constituency. I have some fantastic primary schools that do an amazing job with young pupils with EHCPs, but in reality they are now reaching into a deficit. If it costs an extra £8,000 to £10,000 for those schools to educate those pupils, the incentive is moving away from their doing so.

On school choice, I absolutely support the belief that mainstream is best, but I am very concerned that my constituents are reporting that they almost have to fail in a mainstream in order to get to the school of their choice. As I think has been touched on, there is real difficulty in having a system in which the local authority is incentivised financially to put the child in a mainstream school, the mainstream school is incentivised financially to put them in a specialist school, and independent schools are incentivised to have the pupil in that particular setting. It is no wonder that we end up in a tribunal system as a result. Surely through reform we could have more independent assessment at the very outset, perhaps more informally, rather than waiting for a tribunal.

Finally, I am grateful to the Department for Education for accepting the recommendations of “Autism and education in England 2017”, the report of an inquiry that I co-chaired last year. We made some recommendations, and the Government have listened and announced that they will extend the autism strategy to young pupils in education. That is a great step forward—it is all about the training of staff. My last ask is whether it is possible for every new specialist school to be built within a mainstream perimeter, rather than having the apartheid system that we have at the moment.

Stalking Protection Bill

Debate between Alex Chalk and Huw Merriman

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 23rd November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

The hon. Gentleman absolutely puts his finger on it. I will develop that point in a moment. One thing that I have experienced in my time in practice, particularly in relation to this kind of offence, is that the approach and the attitude of the officer in the case is absolutely crucial. If an officer understands precisely the point that the hon. Gentleman makes, which is that individual instances are not necessarily picked up and allows them to slide, then it can become a problem. On the other hand, if a police officer, because he has been properly trained or is particularly engaged in the case, is excellent at collating that evidence and material to build that picture, that can have a dramatically different impact, first, on the way the victim feels about it, and, secondly, on the remedy that they are likely to get.

I want to develop this other point. One thing that we have not dealt with in this piece of legislation, and that we need to go on to, is to look at the role of technology in all this. What do I mean? An individual victim will always be better and more effective at recording the litany of instances than the bureaucracy of the police. That is not a criticism of the police, but a statement, I would imagine, of the blindingly obvious. What we need to do is to put into the power of individuals the right, in appropriate circumstances, to record and list episodes as they take place. We might say, “Well, hang on, why don’t you just do that on a sheet of paper?” No, what we should be doing is potentially looking at an app, so that when the police, for example, authorise an app and say that they are going to open an investigation, the complainant or victim can, when there is an incident, record it on this app—what happened, the time that it took place and any photographs that go with it—and that can then be reviewed and assessed by police officers in due course. Otherwise, the danger is that if a person has to go down to a local police station every time their stalker walks past their house, it is terribly bureaucratic and inefficient.

I do not want to go down a rabbit hole, but there is an important role in ensuring that victims are best able to record and collate what, ultimately, will make the difference to an effective prosecution in due course. It becomes 10 times more powerful if the individual can say, “I remember that, at that precise moment, he walked past my house, or he knocked on the door, or he put the letter through my door, or he terrified my children and I will record it at that precise moment, and this is the evidence that I have collated.” That is powerful evidence and we should be helping to facilitate that.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a very persuasive speech. Of course, what will be required is for the police to prioritise their resources to police this new offence. What that will also mean is that they may have to deprioritise other areas, or receive additional resources. I understand that an extra £410,000 is being allocated. Does he think that that will be enough to deliver the measures that he rightly talks about this morning?

[Alex Chalk]

It is an extremely important point, and it does build on the point that I was making just now. There is no doubt that if this is not handled correctly—if it is not arranged correctly—there is a danger that it becomes more onerous than it needs to be. The example that I want to develop is the one on which I have just briefly touched. Principally, the old analogue techniques are that if somebody is robbed in the street, the police officer will say, “You are making a complaint, I understand that. Please come to the police station on a certain date and we will sit down and prepare a statement. You, the complainant, will make the allegation of what happened to you in the street. I, the police officer, will write it down. It will be in longhand, running to various sides of paper. You will then sign each page and so on.” That process could easily take an hour and a half. It then gets logged onto a system and so on.

That might be perfectly appropriate where the allegation relates to an incident that took five minutes in, say, a high street, but where the allegation relates to a cumulative total of ongoing events, innocuous in isolation but insidious in combination—to coin a phrase—we need to have a more digital approach. That is why I invite the Home Office to consider digital techniques to allow the police to work as effectively—and to take up my hon. Friend’s point—and efficiently as possible, otherwise there is, of course, the danger of resources being mopped up. The only point that I would say on this resource issue is that there can be few more compelling priorities in circumstances where the evidence suggests, compellingly, that if we do not address this behaviour early it can have very serious consequences. In other words, this is a worthy candidate, I respectfully suggest, for the prioritisation to which my hon. Friend refers.