Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alex Cunningham and Gavin Williamson(2 years, 11 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
This is an incredibly important area. At the very start of the pandemic, we set up the regional education and children’s teams—REACT—which were a co-operation between schools, local government, the Department for Education and the police in order to target some of the youngsters who struggle the most and are most likely not to be in school. We continue to expand that work through the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to help the families who struggle the most, and recognise that it is children in that category who are most vulnerable and possibly the most likely to have persistent absence from schools. We will continue to work across Government, recognising that it is not just about schools, but about local authorities, the police, health and social care coming together to bring children back into the classroom and to ensure that they are not missing out on school.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
Education and Local Government
Debate between Alex Cunningham and Gavin Williamson(4 years, 4 months ago)
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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.
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
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.
Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill
Debate between Alex Cunningham and Gavin Williamson(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Alex Cunningham
I think that the point that the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) made was that perhaps families such as his do not need that sort of income. If he wants to forgo it, that is all well and good, but there are hard-working families in my community that need that money.
Let us add to all that the impact of the 27% cuts on local authorities and the effect that will have on services, including initiatives such as breakfast clubs, and again we see the family under attack. In the north-east, we already know that family dependency on benefits will grow, with some 43,000 public and private sector jobs lost over the next few years. People will see few jobs for them to chase as unemployment undoubtedly soars.
Today, the Government attack again. I object to the scrapping of both the child trust fund and the saving gateway and I believe the Government are making a big mistake by getting rid of them.
Gavin Williamson
The hon. Gentleman strikes me as a very enlightened individual, and I am sure that he is very aware that every Government have to make difficult choices. If he were to keep these areas of expenditure going to fund the benefit, what areas of Government expenditure would he cut?
Alex Cunningham
Personally, I would raise taxes in order to ensure that we could maintain this provision, and the bankers are a good place for us to start.
Alex Cunningham
No, I will not.
Both the child trust fund and the saving gateway were Labour initiatives, put in place by a party that understands the importance of fostering a culture of saving. Asset-based welfare can make a huge difference to the opportunities of the least well off in this country who often do not have access to the resources that many others are lucky enough to have, whether through inheritance or the generosity of family or because they recognise the importance of saving a little of their salary each and every month for a rainy day. The saving gateway aimed to encourage those from low-income households who do not save, for whatever reason, by promising the incentive of a Government contribution of 50p for every pound saved over the two-year life of the account. It had been trialled, and was due to be rolled out across the country in July.
We will not see the difference that the saving gateway would have made to thousands of low-income families at the relatively tiny cost to the Government of £100 million a year. The response to the trials was largely positive—one pilot saw the number of people saving rise from 16% to nearly 80%. In total, more than 22,000 people took part in two successful pilots, achieving more than £15 million in savings. Those people demonstrated that the scheme could generate both new savers and new saving, because individuals continued to save beyond the end of their gateway accounts.
Encouraging people to save promotes self-reliance and stability, allows long-term planning and provides security from sudden financial shocks. Saving just a few pounds a month makes a person feel in greater control of their life, and it can be transformative and provide a psychological boost. The difference that that can make to families and their quality of life should not be underestimated.
Alex Cunningham
I have never had a problem with taxing the rich a little bit more. If that means a penny on income tax, I would be fine with it, although I do not know what encouragement I would get from my Front Benchers.
Alex Cunningham
No, I will not. We need to raise taxes and target the results at the poorest people.
I hoped that the saving gateway would squeeze some of the doorstep lenders out of low-income communities, which is an issue close to my heart. Those companies charge outrageous interest rates, and if people had some money saved for a rainy day, such monsters would see their customer base shrink.
I also want to speak out in defence of the child trust fund, which acts as an incentive to save by adding to a Government contribution of either £250 or £500 at birth depending on a family’s income. The child trust fund was well established, having been introduced for all children born since September 2002. At a cost of around £500 million a year, including additional contributions when a child reaches the age of seven, this universal yet progressive fund ensures that all children, regardless of their family income, have a pot of money that they can access at the age of 18.
According to the Save Child Savings alliance, some industry data suggest that the child trust fund has seen the number of people saving for their children’s futures almost treble. More than £2 billion is currently being held in child trust funds. That form of asset welfare opens doors to young adults, particularly those from low-income families. No young person has yet benefited from this fund—the first recipients are just eight years old today—but I would have hoped that when they can start accessing it in 10 years’ time, that money would go some way to improving social mobility, which is an issue that some hon. Members highlighted earlier.
A policy that spreads wealth to the asset poor should be backed by anyone who is dismayed by the lack of social mobility in the UK today. Yes, education plays a major role in tackling that problem, but so do assets, which is something that the Liberal Democrats have failed to address in recent years. The Deputy Prime Minister spent some of the summer discussing the Government’s programme for social mobility, but this measure goes against it. The child trust fund was one way in which the previous Labour Government hoped to tackle this issue, and scrapping it will be a step backwards.
At a time when the coalition proposes to increase university tuition fees, I would have thought it wise to defend child trust funds as one way in which young people could choose to shoulder at least a tiny bit of the burden of those costs. Even if they do not go to university, any funds available to 18-year-olds must give them a better start in life, which the better-off take entirely for granted. It may only help to fund their driving lessons, but that will give them the mobility and employability which would otherwise be denied.
Instead, having promised huge and unnecessary cuts over the next four years, the Government must cancel valuable programmes that are relatively inexpensive. Scrapping the child trust fund is a decision made with an eye on the short-term political goal of cutting the deficit, not the long-term responsible goal of encouraging families to save for their children’s future. The age group facing the most debt is 16 to 34-year-olds. Surely a responsible Government should be seriously considering measures to help the next generation of young people, particularly given that university fees are set to rise to eye-wateringly high levels.
The Government are intent on pressing ahead with these family cuts, but when will the Minister tell us how the plans to fund and retain the infrastructure of the fund, to enable contributions to be restarted when the economic position improves, will work? I am told by the Save Child Savings alliance that it would cost £2 million a year to do so—a very small fraction of the total overall cost. There is an alternative to these draconian cuts, despite what the coalition says. Labour would deal with the deficit by halving it over four years. Yes, there would still be cuts, but we could cut carefully and always with an eye on the human impact. I am not confident that I can say the same about the coalition.