Education and Local Government

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making such an important intervention, and for his compliment on the spreadsheet, which is a compliment I have not received before. He makes an important point about making sure that money that has been allocated to schools is going to be properly passported through. It will be the Government’s intention to move a statutory instrument to ensure that the minimum funding of £5,000 for every secondary school and £3,750 for every primary school is passported through to schools in the next financial year. For primary schools, that will obviously be increased to £4,000.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Gavin Williamson]

If I may, I will take the opportunity to make some more progress. The hon. Gentleman always has lots of interventions that can be placed at any point in a speech, as they usually have very little relevance to the speech taking place.

Money spent on schools is an investment in our futures. I am pleased to say that we are going to deliver the biggest funding injection into schools in a decade. Over the next three years, we are going to put an additional £14.4 billion into schools in England, with areas in most need seeing the greatest gains. My Department is acutely aware of the huge responsibility we have for all our children, but none more so than the most vulnerable, especially those with special educational needs. That is why we announced £780 million additional high needs funding for the following financial year, an increase of 12% compared with this year. That will be the largest year-on-year increase since the high needs funding block was created in 2013, and I am sure it is something everyone will welcome.

[Alex Cunningham]

rose—

[Gavin Williamson]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman is about to welcome it.

[Alex Cunningham]

I always welcome additional finance for special needs, but schools in Stockton also know what they are going to get. They are going to get a £6.2 million reduction or shortfall by 2020, a loss of £210 a pupil. How is that fair?

[Gavin Williamson]

The hon. Gentleman has never been known for his skill at maths. If he were to look at the Confederation of School Trusts figures, an independent organisation that has done the calculations of what every school will receive, he will see that every school is getting a per pupil increase in funding. It is a shame that he did not take the opportunity to welcome that.

One of our most pressing priorities is to make sure that all children in care or in need of adoption are given a loving and stable home. We are providing councils with an additional £1 billion for adult and children’s social care in every year of this Parliament. That is alongside the £84 million to be spent over five years to keep more children at home safely. We are also going to review the care system to make sure that all care placements and settings provide children and young adults with the support that they need.

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[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

May I add my congratulations to those who have made maiden speeches? I, too, have loved the geography lesson.

I was a proud local councillor for 17 years and held senior roles in education, children and young people, so I know the important role that local government plays in people’s day-to-day lives, and the fundamental importance of education cannot and should not be ignored. However, I am worried that education does not seem to be a key concern for the Government. Most of my local schools face huge cuts to their budgets and are no longer able to provide the staff and resources our young people need.

Ministers over the past 10 years have paid lip service to equality issues, but if they truly believed in equality, they would not move funding away from the children in greatest need. They talk of fair funding, but some areas need more cash to make up for societal inequalities. It is tougher in areas such as mine for children to realise their full potential and tougher still for parents to subsidise their children’s education, as they are now often asked to do.

Pupil funding may well have gone up, but schools in Stockton-on-Tees will see a £6.2 billion shortfall this year, meaning a loss of about £210 per pupil. Yes, we need to invest in education, but we must also invest in public services, particularly those on the frontline, and we cannot ignore the role of local government in young people’s lives. The early years are incredibly important, being formative years of a person’s development, but the Tory and Lib Dem Governments of recent years have decimated our Sure Start programme. While Governments have done a little better on childcare in recent times, huge gaps in provision still exist, and it is those with the least who often get the least support. Yesterday, a Conservative Member talked about an increase in resources for social care, but they did not say that much of it had come from extra, buck-passed taxation in the form of council tax.

Despite warm words over the years, particularly in the 10 years that I have been an MP, areas such as mine have been left behind. Despite the Government patting themselves on the back about unemployment figures, the rate in my Stockton North constituency has gone up to 5.2%. It was 4.3% just a year ago. There is a lack of confidence in Britain, and it is the Government’s responsibility to fix it and to allow industry to flourish. Local authorities must be given the resources to build infrastructure, create jobs and rebuild that confidence.

We must also address health inequalities. Children in my town centre wards are more likely to live in poverty with smoking parents and to exist on a poor diet, and they achieve less as a result. However, public health budgets have been slashed under this and previous Governments, and programmes to reduce smoking, reduce obesity, and give people a better chance in life have largely disappeared. I recently advised the Prime Minister that the average man in my constituency dies at 64, before getting their pension, yet the average man in his constituency lives 14 years longer. For the 10th Queen’s Speech in a row, I ask the Government to provide us with the modern hospital we need in Stockton, a hospital that was cancelled 10 years ago despite being a national priority.

We need to do so much more. Many people in my area cannot get home at night because there are no buses, yet the Tory Mayor spent tens of millions of pounds buying Teesside airport. Under his stewardship, or lack of it, losses have tripled to nearly £6 million a year, and all we have so far for our taxpayers’ money is two holiday flights to Bulgaria. He still pays a fortune to a private company to run the airport for him—the debts continue to mount up.

I am proud of Stockton Borough Council, which has been held up as an example of how to redevelop town centres, and Ministers and others visit to see what the borough is doing. The town was featured on the BBC last night as an example of best practice. The council delivers innovative ideas across many other services, but it, too, worries about the future of children’s services and social care.

Industry also needs a Government who care and provide support, but this Government have failed on a grand scale, particularly when it comes to Teesside. When it came to the SSI site and British Steel, the Government failed to act and steel production ceased. When the Sirius mine asked for a Government guarantee to help it trigger international investment, the Government turned a blind eye. When it came to civil service jobs, this Government moved them from tax offices, the public landing right service and others in our area. And all the while their public spending cuts have cost thousands of jobs at Stockton Borough Council, and many more elsewhere.

We desperately need real investment in this country and in the infrastructure we need, but it is the inequalities that trouble me most of all. We need to address the inequalities, and areas like mine must have the support they need. We need the new Government to act.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Let me echo the comments that have been made by colleagues on both sides of the House about the many excellent maiden speeches that we have heard today. Some of those new Members are still here, and I think we can look forward to hearing more from a number of robust representatives of their constituencies over the years ahead.

One of the things I do each year in the conference recess in October is organise a community consultation, to give constituents the chance to set out their concerns to me and to shape my priorities in Parliament. There were something like 40 different events involving more than 1,000 people last year, but one of the things that I am always keen to prioritise is meeting young people who are not yet old enough to have a vote, but whose lives will be shaped by many of the decisions we make, so I met year 12 and 13 students at Sheffield Park Academy and King Edward VII School, students at the University Technical College Sheffield, and students in further education at Sheffield College. I have to say that these discussions are some of the liveliest and best informed meetings that I hold each year, and they are a great advert for why our democracy would be strengthened by extending voting rights to 16 and 17-year-olds.

It seemed to me that today’s debate was a good opportunity to raise some of the students’ concerns, as people who are at the very heart of our education system. Those concerns were not simply about education, although some were and I will come to those points. I represent a very diverse, socially mixed area, but right across the constituency the students I spoke to were overwhelmingly opposed to our departure from the European Union. I think they were widely representative of young people across the country, so I urge Government Members to recognise the views of that generation as we seek to navigate the difficult months ahead.

The top concern of these young people was the climate emergency. Some had been involved in the school students’ actions, although the majority had not and their concern was just as deep. They are looking for us to take the sort of radical measures needed to tackle the crisis that are absent from this Queen’s Speech, which repeats the 2050 net zero target; that commitment fails them. The Queen’s Speech also wrongly describes the Government’s policies on climate change as “world-leading”, which they simply are not.

I think that the students I talked with would be concerned about the Government’s reaction to the Flybe problems that we were talking about earlier. A strategic intervention to support a company is clearly something that the Government should be looking at, but I think that a general response to encourage and provide further financial subsidy to the most carbon-emitting mode of transport would worry those students. Aviation already enjoys the advantages of tax-free fuel, and offering a further general concession across the industry to deal with the problems of one company would be a mistake.

[Alex Cunningham]

I have just been reflecting on the fact that 44% of the flights at Teesside rely on Flybe, as do, as we heard earlier, 90% of those at Southampton and two thirds at another airport. It is absolutely critical for our country that that company survives, so intervention might be the way forward after all.

[Paul Blomfield]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend, but a strategic intervention to address the needs of one company is very different from a generalised further additional subsidy to a carbon-emitting industry. We also ought to look, in a way that goes well beyond the ambition of this Government, at much more investment in rail to enable us to take more people out of the air and on to other modes of transport.

The students I spoke to were clearly concerned about their education and had very strong views about it. They did want to see more spent on schools. I know that the Queen’s Speech has a line about levels of funding per pupil in every school being increased, and the Secretary of State, who is now in his place, took that up in his opening comments. However, the Government’s ambition will fail Sheffield students unless, at the very least, they restore the funding for the 8% real cut that we have seen over the past nine years for our schools.

Last year, I brought a group of headteachers with a petition from every headteacher in the city to meet the Schools Minister. I am grateful for the time he gave to them and I am sure he will have seen the concerns that they expressed about the consequences of the funding cuts in their schools. They have had an opportunity to look at the money that they think will be available to them under the Government’s plans and believe that it will still leave 80% of Sheffield schools worse off in 2020 than they were in 2015.