Finance Bill

Charlie Dewhirst Excerpts

Committee of the whole House
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Wild]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes the point very well. The knock-on impact and the damage to those children’s education will be considerable.

More than 40% of independent schools are small schools. They are at the heart of their local communities. They do not have big endowments. They operate on wafer-thin margins and simply cannot absorb changes of this magnitude, so it is likely that those schools will cut bursary places that exist due to this new tax that puts their viability at risk.

[Charlie Dewhirst (Bridlington and The Wolds) (Con)]

On SEND funding, the East Riding of Yorkshire is the lowest funded local authority for SEND per pupil. Children in the Prime Minister’s constituency get three times more funding than children in mine, which is a travesty in itself. This policy will put even more strain on my local authority and the children who desperately need support from it.

[James Wild]

Absolutely; I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The Government hide behind the cloak of saying, “If you have an EHCP, everything is okay,” but 100,000 children in schools across our country will be impacted.

The next area we are concerned about is faith schools, which tend to be smaller and charge lower fees. The Independent Schools Council has warned that

“Low-cost faith schools will be faced with deficit and closure, communities will lose vital assets”.

There are small religious groups that do not have any state sector provision that can meet their needs as a denomination. Religious groups are mounting legal challenges as a result, battling for the right to educate their children and battling for the right to choose, which we on the Conservative Benches certainly support.

New clause 8(3) refers to the music and dance scheme, which provides grants to talented young people who could not otherwise attend world-class institutions such as the Royal Ballet school. We welcome the Government’s decision, under pressure, to delay taxing schools in this scheme until September next year, but that exemption should be made permanent.

To return to one of the points that has been made, in the Budget statement the Chancellor said:

“94% of children in the UK attend state schools. To provide the highest-quality support and teaching that they deserve, we will introduce VAT on private school fees”.—[Official Report, 30 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 821.]

That is a deliberately divisive approach. The Opposition support 100% of pupils. We care about all children. We simply believe that parents should be able to choose.

We have consistently raised the situation of military families, to which the Minister referred, and argued that they should be exempt from this tax. The Government did not agree to that, but in response to our campaign they said:

“We will uprate the continuity of education allowance to reflect the increase in school fees from January.”—[Official Report, 18 November 2024; Vol. 757, c. 3.]

Well, the new continuity of education allowances have been announced and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst) pointed out, they fall short of protecting service families from the changes. That will have a direct impact on the retention and recruitment of our armed forces. There are 4,200 children who benefit. The allowance is in place to meet the needs of the armed forces when they have to move around the country or serve overseas and boarding schools or other provision is the only available option. Given the importance of this allowance for the retention of military personnel, why have the Government not met the commitment that they made to our armed forces?