Budget Resolutions

Ben Bradley Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that question, but respectfully he is completely wrong. It is not the same level of funding as 2010. Let me try to explain it to him and his constituents. The £1,500 per pupil extra by 2024 is £1,500 more than in 2019-20. That is a significant investment in the future of this great country.

To reflect that, we will allocate—as I was saying on recovery—£2 billion extra to support young people who are struggling to catch up on missed learning, following the existing investment in tutoring and training for great teachers. That is in addition to the 6 million tutoring courses and 500,000 training opportunities we have already made, which takes overall investment specifically dedicated to pupils’ recovery to almost £5 billion. That includes an additional £1 billion of catch-up funding that goes direct to schools so that they can best decide how to support education recovery for those of their pupils who most need it. Teaching unions wanted that additional flexibility—I thank them for that—and I listened to them and made representations to my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. As they told me, this funding might pay for specialist small groups, or hiring staff to lead extra-curricular activities outside the school day. In that way, an average secondary school could receive about £70,000 a year in additional cash. That is money that can make a real difference to young lives. Evidence shows that the pandemic has had a significant impact on older pupils who have the least time left in education. We will be investing £800 million in extending the time they spend in colleges.

It is no secret that the most important person in any classroom is the one standing at the front of it, which is why this settlement enables us to raise teachers’ starting salaries to £30,000. We promised that in our manifesto and we are delivering on that promise. That is in addition to a salary boost of up to £3,000 tax free to teach maths, physics, chemistry and computing, which we have already announced, to increase the number of teachers in subjects that are facing the greatest shortfall. It will also build on our groundbreaking teacher recruitment and retention reforms. We want our brightest and best graduates to be queueing up to be teachers. We now have far more compelling reasons for them to do so.

As a former families Minister, I care passionately about giving children a great start in life. That means giving families every support. I have seen for myself on many occasions the incredible effect that our investment can make on helping struggling families. Around 300,000 of our most vulnerable families will be supported with an extra £200 million boost to the Government’s flagship supporting families programme, which supports families through complex issues that could lead to family break- down. That is an approximately 40% real-terms uplift in funding for the programme, taking total planned investment across the next three years to nearly £700 million. As I said, we are being driven by three things: skills, schools and families.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s commitment to the supporting families scheme. The certainty around that for the long term will be very beneficial. He will recognise, as a former families Minister, that the big pressure on local government budgets is not social care—I wish I could spend the money, but I cannot employ anybody—but children’s services. The cost is growing exponentially. We need to move to more proactive preventive services, such as supporting families. Will he make a commitment to ensure that the transition in local government to preventive services will continue beyond this Budget? It is very welcome, but it has to be a long-term trend. Will he commit to supporting local government to do that?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I thank him, not least because of his deep experience in local government. We will continue to engage with the MacAlister review and we will take very seriously the points that my hon. Friend made about the pressures on local government.

As I said, this is about skills, schools and families, which is why we are setting aside £50 million over three years—

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[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate and endorse everything said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) about schools and education. On those issues, he is always bang-on. Since the Budget, I have had positive conversations in particular on the transition between BTECs and T-levels that I hope will be reflected by the Secretary of State’s comments tomorrow. There are many opportunities there.

I welcome the many positive announcements in the Budget, which has been largely well received by residents. It set a good and clear direction to help take the country forward post covid. In particular, I welcome the business support measures, business rates cuts, changes to alcohol duties, the freeze on fuel duty and other measures that will impact on the cost of living and support businesses to grow and innovate. At some stage, we will have to reform business rates fundamentally. The measures announced in the Budget are positive and will support businesses—high street businesses in particular—but business rates are not fit for purpose. I had positive conversations last week on that with the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and I understand that a review is to take place. I look forward to seeing that in due course.

I also welcome the personal support for the lowest paid, with a £1,000 pay rise and a tax cut for working people on universal credit. The average wage packet in Mansfield is way below the national average, and thousands of people will benefit from those changes. I am grateful for those announcements.

I welcome the significant capital commitments on transport and infrastructure, although I am slightly concerned that it seems that only areas with combined authorities and devolution deals are eligible to get the best of that support. We have some positive announcements for Nottinghamshire: Mansfield will submit a bid for the next round of the levelling-up fund, as will Nottinghamshire County Council, and we look forward to positive news, hopefully. There was a huge multibillion pound investment in devolved mayoral authorities. However, the east midlands does not have that, so the area that historically has had the lowest level of investment misses out.

Do not get me wrong—I am not moaning. I think that passing powers down to local level and giving capital funds to accountable local leaders is a good thing. If I do have a moan, it is that we do not have one, and we want one in Nottinghamshire. We have a plan for that, and I want the Government to get on and give Nottinghamshire a county deal so that we too can benefit from such support. I remind Ministers of the fantastic levelling-up package that the east midlands offers with our freeport, our development corporation and our huge plans around Toton supported by the integrated rail plan. Altogether, that is more than 100,000 jobs and £5 billion in gross value added. The plan exists and is all on track, and a devolution deal for Nottingham—which, by the way, is a bigger geography than the Tees Valley Combined Authority or the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority—would give us huge economic clout. It is a chance to invest for us, to get on a par with other parts of the country. We want a deal, we have the unanimous support of local leaders who have all made significant resource commitments for that, and we have a plan to deliver better public services. I will keep banging on about it until we get one—I am sure that Ministers will indulge me.

I turn to public services, which are the theme of the debate. There was positive news in the Budget, with £4.8 billion in grant funding to local authorities both very welcome and perhaps more generous than many had expected. That will help us to tackle things such as the cost of the minimum wage rise for care staff, which runs into the millions. I also welcome the commitment to new family hubs and the Start4Life programme that will benefit children and families who really need it.

I said in an intervention that certainty for the supporting families programme and investment in the development of early years staff is fantastic. In particular, early years staff development has been a problem for a long time, so the more we can do to support that sector, the better. We must continue the commitment to proactive and preventive services. In truth, children’s services, not social care, are causing every upper tier council leader in the land the biggest headache on budget setting. There are many challenges in social care, but, if I had loads of money, I could not spend it because I cannot recruit the staff. The challenges there are deep and long term.

[Emma Hardy]

The problems with recruiting were raised by East Riding of Yorkshire Council, and one reason why it is asking the Government for more money is that it wants to be able to offer higher wages to try to compete with organisations such as Amazon, which attract workers who would previously have worked in care.

[Ben Bradley]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, which pre-empts something I will come to. In effect, I will make the same point later in my speech. The truth is that next year we will underspend on social care, because we cannot recruit the staff to pay them, even if we had the money. In children’s services, demand is growing exponentially. The complexities and costs are becoming increasingly difficult. There are also significant additional needs for school places for children coming from Hong Kong, and significant care issues for asylum-seeking children. The children’s budget of every council in the land is overspent.

I therefore welcome measures focused on early intervention. I would love to talk to Ministers about supporting the transition towards a set of more preventive services. I welcome the announcement in the Budget, but we must continue the trend of having a better attitude to risk management and how we support families in their homes before we get to that acute stage. That change of approach and culture will save money in the end, but it will require more up-front resource.

The Government could support Nottinghamshire and the whole country by letting us pilot new proposals and ideas in the space through a county deal. We have thoughts about how we might like to do that, working with organisations such as the National Youth Agency, the charitable sector and our great Nottinghamshire universities to change the game and learn some lessons. I would welcome conversations with Ministers about that.

On social care, and the point made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), councils need teeth to get the money. More funding is welcome, but at the minute that funding is going to the NHS, whose backlog is in large parts due to the limits of social care. We cannot get people out of hospital and into appropriate homes or care packages, and we cannot offer sufficient preventive interventions. People end up in hospital, which is not the best place for them, because social care does not have the resources to provide emergency support or to fetch Mrs Miggins and put in place a care plan for her; instead, she ends up going off in an ambulance.

The Government could help tackle the NHS backlog by backing social care. As it stands, it appears that we must go with our begging bowl to the integrated care system to ask for funding from the national insurance rise for services such as supporting hospital discharge or response teams that can offer care in the home rather than an emergency response. The funding is aimed at the NHS backlog and, although it needs to fund those social care interventions to be successful, we seem to be at the NHS’s mercy on whether it gives us that funding. I hope that Ministers will tackle that imbalance in the White Paper. It is hugely important to the transition and new approach to social care that we get that right, because the two are not separate services; they interlink closely.

We will meet a cliff edge in a few weeks, when the requirement for care staff to be vaccinated begins. I have raised that issue a few times. In Nottinghamshire alone, 1,000 staff or more could be no longer eligible to work in a sector that already has a 12% vacancy rate. Is it riskier to have an unvaccinated care worker or not to have a care worker? We may face that challenge. I know that there are financial mitigations to try to help, but, as I have said, we cannot recruit. We do not set the wages—largely, services are commissioned from private providers—and people can get £1.50 an hour more at Amazon than working in the care sector. I have said to Ministers before that we need to consider carefully whether it is right in effect to force a lot of people out of a profession that is already struggling with recruitment and with getting the right staff in the right places.

That said, there are many fantastic interventions in the Budget. I touched on many of them. However, those challenges will not go away. I therefore look forward to conversations about them with Ministers across various Departments in due course. There are real positives to take, with the Government continuing to support jobs and individuals. The OBR tells us that the interventions throughout the pandemic made a huge impact on protecting people and keeping them in work over the last 18 months. The plan for jobs has been incredibly successful so far, and I trust that that will continue. I welcome the many measures in the Budget that will impact positively on my constituents and look forward in due course to discussing in more detail with Ministers some of the challenges that I raised.

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[Mr Clarke]

This Government remain fully committed to great care, free at the point of need, which of course is the founding principle of the health service. We remain fully committed to working to ensure that our healthcare system and our social care system are properly funded and staffed for the future. Our commitment to providing world-class public services extends to people of all ages, and that is reflected in our wider work on social care.

We have pledged an extra £4.7 billion by 2024-25 for schools, and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education on securing a good settlement that will include nearly £2 billion of new funding over the spending review period for education recovery. That brings total education recovery spending to almost £5 billion. We are also providing £500 million to support the very youngest and their carers and to invest in family help. Last week, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), who has been such a brilliant advocate for this cause, described those measures as fulfilling

“a fantastic pledge for every baby.”—[Official Report, 27 October 2021; Vol. 702, c. 317.]

I could not agree more.

[Ben Bradley]

I welcome the positive interventions in early years and for young people in the Budget in particular, which are meaningful. If we are going to support that change for the long term, we need to support local authorities to transition to that early intervention approach, as laid out by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom). I trust that the Minister will confirm the Government’s commitment to doing that.

[Mr Clarke]

I absolutely will, because there is sometimes said to be ambiguity about levelling up. It is clear to me that it is about life chances through life, from cradle to grave. It is about jobs, prospects, investment in skills and jobs, and all of that comes from the start of life. I know that my hon. Friend will be doing a fantastic job in Nottinghamshire to help to deliver that.