Public Services

Bambos Charalambous Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

Like many hon. Members, I am bitterly disappointed by the Queen’s Speech for a number of reasons. For a start, it has nothing to offer on education. Despite making various pronouncements, such as on the schools level funding formula, there is no new legislation or policy to improve our education system. Although any future schools funding is welcome, there is a serious funding crisis now.

In my constituency, 22 schools and academies have faced extreme budget cuts in the last year under the Government’s plans. For them, austerity has not ended. Headteachers, governors and parents contact me regularly to tell me that extracurricular activities are being cut. Parents are being asked for money, teachers and support staff are dipping into their own pockets to pay for supplies, and staff are being made redundant or are not being replaced if they leave. Do the Government realise that there is a teacher recruitment and retention crisis, with demoralised teachers leaving the profession in droves as a result of the lack of investment?

Support for children with special educational needs and disabilities is being slashed and local authority funding has been severely reduced, which affects schools’ key support services. A Labour Government will not neglect education. It will be at the heart of our programme in government as we deliver a national education service for the many, not the few.

Another area of great concern to my constituents is policing. As all hon. Members know, the police and preventive public services have been slashed in the last nine years under the Tories, while violent crime has soared. Meanwhile, cuts to youth and other services are linked to the shocking violence that has led to the loss of too many young lives. My constituents know the impact of that only too well, so why are the Government not looking at long-term preventive measures to tackle youth violence, instead of punitive measures? Every week, in my surgery, someone raises the issue of increasing crime in the area. Is that any wonder, when we are reduced to three police officers per 10,000 in each of the seven wards in my constituency?

The funding promised by the Government—if it materialises—will only start to reverse the extreme cuts that have taken place on their watch and put us back to where we were in 2010. It will not be enough to repair the damage done through crime that has blighted lives in my constituency and beyond, nor the damage to morale among police officers and to the trust and confidence of the public.

The Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill, which has rolled over from the previous Session, does not deal with the areas that really affect my constituents, such as leave to remain applications that take months and months, during which people are left with uncertainty while they work. Another problem is the settled status scheme, which is causing irreparable damage to the daily lives of many of my constituents, as they have to pore over documents to prove that they have been here for a number of years. More money needs to be invested in the Home Office to deal with those issues, rather than that punitive Bill being introduced.

The Queen’s Speech offers scant comfort on the Windrush scandal. The tortuous process for setting up a compensation scheme for its victims has added insult to injury. The scheme is wholly inadequate, the compensation is paltry, and some injuries, such as being unlawfully excluded from the country, have not been compensated for at all. Meanwhile, there are hardly any interim hardship payments, even though elderly Windrush victims are dying.

One of my constituents has been caught in the Kafkaesque situation created by the Government. She has lived in the UK since she was a child and now, in the latter part of her life, is suffering from dementia. As a direct result of the hostile environment policy, she was denied any benefits at all for three years. Having been told that her benefits would be backdated only to last August, she now has to embark on the arduous task of submitting a claim for the loss she has suffered. That is insulting and is not good enough for my constituent, or for the many others in situations like hers.

This Queen’s Speech is nothing more than a thinly veiled manifesto pitch. It does not address the impact of the serious erosion of our public services, it does not provide any detail on the publicly announced key commitments and it makes no rational sense. Some might say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating; it seems to me that this pudding is an Eton mess.