Local Government Finance Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Anna Turley and Gareth Thomas

Tuesday 21st February 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Thomas]

I am very grateful to you, Sir David. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West has long experience on Public Bill Committees and, out of respect for him and the experience that I suffered at his hands on a previous occasion, I always try to respond to him. However, I am grateful for your help on this occasion.

Let me turn, as I was about to before my hon. Friend’s intervention, to the second element of the new clause, which is the issue of whether schools, too, should receive business rates relief. I was minded to make a case to my hon. Friends in the closed room to which my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton has alluded. We thought about issues to raise in amendments and discussed the problems with school funding. The Conservative party is overseeing the first real-terms cut in school budgets for more than two decades and the steepest cuts our schools have faced since the 1970s.

You might reasonably wonder, Sir David, whether the new clause is needed. I would point to a National Audit Office report on the financial sustainability of schools. It said there will be an 8% real-terms reduction in per-pupil funding for mainstream schools between 2014-15 and 2019-20 “due to cost pressures”. Those are the words of the National Audit Office—no one can fault its impartiality. It is not a Labour body, a Conservative body or a Liberal Democrat body; it is an independent, impartial body, and it has set out clearly and explicitly the scale of the funding cuts that our schools will experience. Were Ministers willing to protect funding for pupils in the future, they might be tempted to use business rates relief as one part of the package to help our schools.

[Anna Turley]

Does my hon. Friend share my view that it is absurd to the point of offensive that private schools in this country get business rates relief, on the basis of being a charity, of up to 80% of their costs? Those schools are educating children on the basis of their parents’ ability to pay, not the child’s right to an education. They are reinforcing social inequality in this country and are getting rates relief of up to 80%. Would the new clause not go some way to creating a level playing field for our maintained schools to compete on?