Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Baroness Lawlor Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, and I congratulate him on tabling this Motion for us to debate. I am very concerned about the impact it will have on independent schools. I oppose the plan and I hope that we and the Government will think again, given all the reasons we have heard today about the impact on parents, schools who face closure and the wider benefits to the community, which will be lost.

This matters more than ever before. Independent schools show not only what can be achieved. They offer competition and an alternative to the state sector. I believe this is, more than ever, important. We are confronted today, not just in this country but in others too, by the total state and its domination over life and liberty, over every area of our lives and our children’s lives, through ever-higher tax, the arrogation to itself of ever greater powers, and ever more spending on what the state, rather than the people, decrees.

That will now be extended to independent schools which, unless the Government change their intended policy, will be obliged to pay VAT. Many are charities that originated in municipal, private and church charity under, and helped by, the historic charity laws of Elizabeth I when education was specifically mentioned as one of the purposes of charity, along with three others.

Indeed, in 1870, when the state itself moved in to provide for public elementary schooling where previously there had been a grant system, the Prime Minister of the day, William Gladstone, insisted that parental freedom and freedom of conscience must continue to be catered for, and that the state should supplement not supersede existing voluntary schools, which were independent of the state. He was a Liberal Prime Minister who led a debate against the left—the ideologues—in his own party, who wanted a uniform, Prussian-type military system of education as a state system. He would not sacrifice parental choice to a uniform system. He won the day and the law provided that the state with its board schools would supplement not replace voluntary schools of all persuasions—Anglican, Catholic and Dissenter.

In today’s secular world, your Lordships may no longer think such freedom of conscience matters, but we face an ever bigger state. We also face threats not only to freedom of conscience but to the academic and intellectual freedom of those who teach. The Government now appear intent on suspending indefinitely the operation of freedom of speech in universities, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. They are intent on reviewing a national curriculum which the coalition worked so hard to ensure would provide a minimum of knowledge in each subject on which teachers themselves would be free to build and develop. They also intend to get rid of the Ofsted snapshot.

These matters are more important than ever; we are confronted by the total state. I urge the Government to treat this measure in the spirit of all Governments of the past: to encourage diversity and to leave it alone. The Labour Party under Mr Blair, the Liberals under Gladstone and the Conservative Party have all championed diversity, not uniformity.