VAT: Independent Schools

Andrew Snowden Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Snowden (Fylde) (Con)]

From listening to contributions made by Members from across the House, it is clear that these measures represent ideology over reality. The policy is economically illiterate, new consequences and implications are being discovered by the minute, and it will make worse every problem that Government Members say they perceive in the state system. They keep saying that they need to find more money to fill the black holes that they have magically found, yet the headlines show that they keep finding billions for pet projects every week.

I was recently asked to go to a public meeting with over 100 concerned parents in my constituency. I listened to their stories and heard about their circumstances. From that evening alone, before we even got to this debate, it was clear that this policy was an ill-conceived disaster waiting to happen.

Some 1,800 children in Fylde attend independent schools, hundreds of whom receive provision for SEND. Schools, including AKS Lytham and Kirkham Grammar, as well as smaller, specialist independent schools, are major employers and have been at the heart of local communities for generations. The parents of the children at those schools are often not rich. They scrimp and scrape, take on extra jobs, miss holidays and do not buy new cars because they have made personal decisions about their children’s education. Every parent should have that right and should not face a tax on the education of their children. The idea that such parents are all just rich and can take the hit, or that the schools spend 20% of their income on embossed stationery and swimming pools, is simply nonsense.

This policy is fighting the class wars of the past with the future of the children of today. Lancashire county council has already said it cannot get close to meeting the forecast increase in places that will be needed, even before we get to the most acute SEND provision. This tax on education will not just hit independent schools, some of which are already facing closure; it will hurt the state sector more—I say this as someone who was proudly educated at a state school. The policy is clearly the politics of envy done badly—so much for the supposed “grown-ups” being back in charge.