Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams); it has been a while since I have heard the words “Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke”, which used to be bellowed out by our former hon. Friend and his predecessor Jonathan Gullis, who was a great schools Minister—briefly—in a previous Government. I pay tribute to him and his memory—much lamented. I also pay tribute to David Johnston, another former Member, who was children’s Minister in the last Government and was responsible for many of the important reforms that my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) mentioned.

I welcome this debate on what I think is a cross-party agenda. I recognise much of what the Minister said about the importance of early years and the sorts of interventions that the Government are talking about. I welcome the impending child poverty strategy, which is an important step forward for us.

I want to make a simple and straightforward point. I have heard a lot in this afternoon’s debate about the importance of investment and support for the different professionals who support children and families. That is all absolutely right, and I agree that that is important. Nevertheless, surely the most important resource available to us to support children and young people is their families and the communities that they grow up in. I implore the Government to think very seriously in preparing their strategy to support the conditions for success in childhood, which is about not simply the public sector professionals, agencies and institutions that are available but the strength of the informal social institutions that children and young people grow up in.

I welcome the Minister’s mention of the importance of social investment, philanthropy and civil society in providing support for children and young people. This is a big boast, but I can claim some credit for the announcement that the Chancellor made on Monday. She happened to be at a charity called AllChild in Wigan, which I claim credit for having founded—although that was not on the press release, I note. The charity began life as the West London Zone, which supports children and young people and which I started back in the early 2010s, having visited the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York with the then Secretary of State Michael Gove. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a tremendously successful project aiming at much of the agenda that we are debating this afternoon, including early identification of children at risk, the provision of intensive support for those children and their families on a community basis, and a place-based model for support for children and families in disadvantage.

We set up the West London Zone with the help of significant philanthropy from Paul Marshall, noted philanthropist and founder of the Ark school chain, who said that we should start one here. We did it on a slightly different model from Harlem’s, which is a monolithic, single entity that provides all services for children and young people. The model we introduced in West London and is now being expanded across the country under the banner of AllChild. I pay tribute to the AllChild team, including Louisa Mitchell, who I got in early to deliver the project, because I would not have been very good at actually running it. Louisa has been a genius, and she is still running it now. This goes to the point I am trying to make: what Louisa did was recognise that in our communities there is an enormous array of really amazing resources in the form of local projects—large and small, formal and informal—that can help with the great task of bringing up a child as a village should.

The mission of the project is to identify in schools—with the help of teachers and, crucially, by using the data available on attainment and attendance—those children who are likely to struggle later. Then it is about ensuring that they get the support that they need, and very much on a personalised basis. That support should come not just from the statutory system around the school—because that will never be adequate for the range of needs and different challenges that a population of children will have—but draw on the resources of the community. We started in west London, which obviously has lots of pockets of wealth but significant pockets of disadvantage as well. Even in those disadvantaged places, and certainly across the country—the project is working in Wigan and elsewhere now—we see tremendous institutions that can support children and young people. The challenge is to do so in a co-ordinated way.

There is a huge opportunity not just to look to the state, schools, local authorities or health—even though bringing all those agencies together around children is important—but to think about the real resource we have, which is in our communities. We should put in place real support and resource for those foundations, whether faith groups, professional bodies of all sorts or community organisations.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

Does the hon. Member agree that the foundation of early years starts in the home with parents and the mother’s antenatal and post-natal health, and that the Government should include in their strategy a review of current services and what support can be provided to improve children’s outcomes?

[Danny Kruger]

It is funny: I often find myself in agreement with the hon. Gentleman, which is great, and not what I expected when he was elected to this place.

I was about to come to my final point: the importance of family life. I do not know to what extent that really is on the Government’s agenda when it comes to the child poverty strategy. There will obviously be lots of talk of families, maternal health and so on, but the crucial determinant of success for children is the quality of the relationships they grow up in.

We know that from all the research done into children’s brain development. Human beings are unique among mammals in that we emerge very unformed: our brains are really blank as we emerge from the womb. The strength and health of our brains and our futures are laid down in those early years by the quality of the relationships we grow up with and experience. I know the Government recognise that because of their emphasis on early years, but the quality of the relationship in the home matters so much. I really hope that the Government will be brave enough to recognise the value of stability in the home and the value of two-parent families as a source of real strength. They are a protective factor and a predictor of success for children and young people.

We should, of course, do all we can to support single-parent families—they are crucial and necessary and do amazing work, and we should give them all our support—but to tackle child poverty we must do more to support family formation and family stability. That means recognising the household as a unit. We are way too individualistic in our approach to public policy. We need to think about family health and family strength, and that means supporting couples. I welcome what the Government are trying to do, and I hope that there will be recognition of the importance of community and family life in the child poverty strategy.

Young Carers: Educational Opportunities

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) for securing the debate, for his very good speech and also for the work he has done in support of young carers over the years. It was good to hear about that. I also pay tribute to other hon. Members who have spoken today and brought a wealth of insight to our debate, particularly the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis). He and I serve on a certain Bill Committee and I feel I am getting to know his family very well. The more I hear of them, the more I like them. I pay enormous tribute to him and his family for what they do in often very difficult circumstances and I am grateful to him for what he said.

I particularly pay tribute to young carers across our country. As the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett) has just said, it is absolutely inspiring and humbling when we hear the testimonies of the unsung, often unacknowledged work—even by themselves, as she says—that they do. It is always great to have the opportunity to hear about them and from them. If any of the young people in the Gallery today are young carers, I pay tribute to them and thank them for what they do. I hope they feel that they are being properly acknowledged in Parliament today.

As we have heard, it is not just the additional responsibility and the weight of caring for a family member or relative that is all-consuming for young people. It is the sacrifices that come with that. For young carers, it often means missing out on social plans with their friends, not being able to commit to extracurricular activities outside the school day, and too often having to miss school in order to fulfil their duty as a carer. We have heard that point made.

The Carers Trust surveyed over 1,000 young carers and the results were saddening. A key finding was that almost a third of young carers reported that they always or usually struggle to balance their caring responsibilities with school, college or university work. We understand that there are 54,000 young carers in England and Wales, and their overall absence rate is 12%, compared with just 7% for pupils who are not young carers. That means that a young carer misses more than one school day per fortnight on average. This commonly leads to persistent absence: 39% of young carers were persistently absent in 2022-23, compared with 21% of those who are not young carers. That is twice as many. The impact is undeniable, not only on the educational attainment and opportunities of young carers, but on their sense of being included in the school community, which is so important.

I was saddened to read in the survey that 28% of young carers report that they either never had, or did not often have, someone at school, college or university who understood that they were an unpaid carer. An even higher rate—40%—said that they never got, or did not often get, help from their school, college or university, so even when it is acknowledged that they have caring responsibilities, many of them do not feel that they get any support from their institution.

As hon. Members have said, there is no doubt that more support needs to be instilled in schools, local authorities and communities. A point was made about the record of the last Government. I do not want to go too much into defensive mode, because I very much acknowledge the points made by the hon. Member for Mid Sussex—she is clearly speaking the truth on behalf of young carers, as other hon. Members have—but in government, we were determined that all young carers should receive the support they need to succeed in all stages of education. The pupil premium, which was introduced under the last Government in 2011, gave schools in England additional funding to improve outcomes for children facing disadvantages. It has supported the roll-out of support for many young carers.

I take the hon. Lady’s point—she may well be right—that it would be appropriate to have a targeted pupil premium for young carers, by making them automatically eligible for the pupil premium, and I would be interested in the Minister’s view. I understand that 60% of young carers are eligible for the pupil premium at the moment—that speaks to the disadvantage that many of them face—but it might be appropriate to be more targeted and specific about their eligibility.

[Alison Bennett]

It struck me as the hon. Member was speaking that an advantage of the proposal is that it would incentivise schools to identify carers. One of the problems we have spoken about this afternoon is the fact that many schools say they have no young carers. Does he agree that it would provide that incentive?

[Danny Kruger]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right: it would be a helpful incentive to identify young carers among the school population. I will come in a moment to further support that schools need to do that work.

As has been mentioned, there are bursaries, introduced by the last Government, to help with the costs of education, such as travel and books, childcare and residential costs when required. In the 2023-24 academic year, more than £160 million of bursary funding was allocated to institutions to help disadvantaged 16 to 19-year-olds with the cost of taking part in education. I recognise the hon. Lady’s point that those bursaries can come quite late in a child’s education, and that it would be good to be more proactive. It might well be that more work can be done to ensure that children and their families get the opportunity to apply for the bursaries, and to encourage schools to support them to apply earlier on, because I bet loads of families do not know that these bursary opportunities exist.

Another programme introduced by the last Government, in 2014, was the Young Carers in Schools programme, which addresses the need to ensure that schools do more to identify young carers and increase their engagement in school. The programme set out 10 key steps to help schools to identify and support young carers. Each step provides key practical tools that can be adapted to support the individual school. The hon. Lady made the point that provision can be quite patchy across the country, and I dare say she is right. Again, national schemes are great, but only in so far as they are properly applied, uniformly, to the best possible standard. I hope that the Department is working on ensuring that there is greater coverage of that useful programme.

The Young Carers in Schools award allows schools to gain recognition for their success in supporting young carers. I would be interested to hear from the Minister to what extent that programme has been successful. It also enables schools to share good practice. My understanding is that its impact is positive: 94% of schools said in response to a survey that their staff were more likely to know what to do if they identified a young carer and how to support them. That sounds improbably good, and it might be that that is a somewhat superficial response; nevertheless, it is encouraging to hear that schools are positive about that programme. There is also encouraging evidence about the impact on young carers themselves.

On higher education, there is depressing research, cited by the hon. Member for Mid Sussex, that shows that young carers are significantly less likely to graduate than young people without caring responsibilities. I understand that the Office for Students launched an equality of opportunity risk register, which identified 12 sector-wide risks that may affect a student’s opportunity to access and succeed in higher education. It made reference to young carers in six of those key sector risks, so there is obviously recognition of the extent to which caring responsibilities can impact on one’s opportunities in higher education.

More needs to be done to set out how education providers will improve equality of opportunity for students from disadvantaged backgrounds so that they succeed and progress in higher education and onwards. There is clearly more to do to ensure that all young carers get the support they need to succeed. I urge the Minister to engage with young carers—I am sure she is doing so—schools and local authorities to identify what additional support young carers need, to ensure true equality of opportunity for every pupil.

Early Years Childcare

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I thank the Chairman of the Select Committee for opening the debate. I also add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Selby and Ainsty (Keir Mather), who gave an absolutely tremendous speech, full of patriotism and love of community, which is just what we need to hear from the Labour party. He is already an asset to this place, so I welcome him and look forward to the contribution that he will make.

It is a very good thing that the Government are committing such a significant amount of money to the early years. Normally, I do not want to boast about Government spending as if it is a sort of proxy for good work on its own. In this case, however, doubling the contribution that is being made, from £4 billion to £8 billion, is a tremendous demonstration of the Government’s belief in early years and family policy, so I welcome it.

I echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) about the importance of the birth rate and fertility, which is a great challenge facing countries around the world, and something that our country will have to grapple with. With that in mind, it is very important that we do put money into families. My anxiety, though, is about the method of implementation and the effect on pre-schools. We are talking about institutions that deliver perhaps 30 hours of education and childcare per week. Increasing the funded hours effectively makes the state the sole buyer of those places at pre-schools. Effectively, we are nationalising these schools and making them clients of the Government. That might be okay. There is nothing wrong with that in principle, except for the fact that the Government are traditionally not very good at setting prices. If, as we see in Wiltshire, the price that is set is way below the actual amount of money that it costs to run the pre-school, then we have a problem. We are distorting the market to the point of destruction. I am very concerned about the effect of that on pre-schools.

Nurseries are able to do better. They run throughout the year and are able to cross-subsidise and to charge for private places. I am afraid the effect might well be that we are driving parents into nursery provision, which is often of a lower quality and out of the pre-school sector. I received a letter from Little Dragons pre-school in Devizes, which I went to see the other day. It said that the current direction of Government policy is towards the state-funded, impersonal supervision of children by profit-motivated businesses from the age of two. I am not saying that is the case for all nurseries, but it is a concern.

I just want to make a simple suggestion—probably an oversimplistic one—to the Minister. We massively over-complicate the provision of childcare and the way that funding works, to the great distress of families and, of course, these providers. We are now putting £8 billion a year into early years. That is £6,500 per family. Why do we not just give that money, by some means or another, directly to families to use as they see fit? In the very early years, up to the age of two, I think that could be in the form of cash—a direct entitlement to parents to spend as they see fit, whether in a formal or informal setting. For three and four-year-olds, there could be a voucher system, redeemable at any registered institution, and it should be allowed to be topped up.

It is wrong that there should be a complete monopoly of state funding in these institutions. Why can a charity like Little Dragons not charge a bit extra if it needs to? Of course, it will also provide a free place to a child of a family who could not afford any additional fee. These schools should be allowed to work that out themselves with their community. Of course there is also quite a significant universal credit childcare entitlement that should enable people to support that cost.

I think we can be more imaginative, more flexible and more respectful of the choices that parents themselves want to make, both for the sake of their own family finances and the way they want to live their lives, but also in order to sustain a healthy and vibrant early years sector.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Let me start my remarks with the word “otiose”. Occasionally the words that frequent a debate come to symbolise the essence of that issue, and for our debate on Lords amendments to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill the word is otiose. It is not a word I had had the privilege of encountering before, but it is a word that will forever be linked to this Bill.

This legislation is now almost worthy of two candles in the making and baking. It is almost two years to the day that the former Education Secretary but five laid the foundations for the debate we are still having on how freedom of speech should be protected on university campuses. I deeply regret that we are still having that debate, not least because every hour of parliamentary time spent debating the Bill and its provisions is an hour not spent debating the real issues faced by students and wider society.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I would be grateful for some clarity from the hon. Member. He says that the whole Bill is otiose, but does he not recognise any challenge to free speech on university campuses in this country?

[Matt Western]

We are talking about the Lords amendments, and what is otiose is the debate that was had in the Lords specifically about the tort I am about to speak to.

Every time I visit a university campus, I not only talk to vice-chancellors and senior leadership teams or tour a new teaching block, but insist on meeting students. I meet them, often on my own, to hear their concerns—the unvarnished truth of what is happening on our campuses—and, above all, to listen to their priorities. I can categorically say that not once has a student ever told me that the risk to freedom of speech on campus is their most pressing concern. Why would it be when three out of every four students are currently worried about managing financially, one in four has less than £50 a month to live on after rent and bills, and 10% of students are using food banks to get by. These insights and statistics are all gleaned from a recent survey by the National Union of Students.

It is now a sobering 637 days since the Bill was introduced in this House—incidentally, the longest that any Bill sponsored by the Department for Education has taken to progress through the House since 2010—and during that period we have had three Prime Ministers and five Education Secretaries. The higher education brief has been bounced around the portfolios of five different Ministers like a political pinball but without the wizard—so much so that I find myself in the somewhat absurd position of debating a Bill about freedom of speech on campuses and academic freedom with a Minister for children, families and wellbeing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I rise to oppose the motion to disagree with Lords amendment 10.

There ought to be a basis for cross-party agreement, as there was in the Lords. I sense from many of the contributions so far that there will not be cross-party agreement, and that wiser heads are not prevailing on the Conservative Benches—those wiser heads are being kept below the parapet.

I read the letter that the Minister circulated yesterday, in which she acknowledged that creating a statutory tort

“has been a contentious measure throughout the passage of the Bill”.

That is something of an understatement. She went on to acknowledge that, in what she must recognise was a thoughtful and serious debate in the other place, many peers had

“raised concerns that the measure would subject higher education providers, colleges and students’ unions to costly, time consuming and unmeritorious or vexatious claims”.

But in her letter she just brushed that aside, on the basis that she had spoken to many academics who agreed with her, which is a rather interesting example of cancel culture at work, as she casually disregarded views that do not fit with her own.

We should be clear in this debate that, on both sides of the House, we all strongly believe in freedom of speech within the framework of the law. We should particularly cherish it in our universities, but we should also recognise the difficulties associated with legislating to that end. The right hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), the former universities Minister and, as of today, the new Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, saw those difficulties for herself when she explained the Bill’s operation at the start of its long life.

The hon. Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon), who is no longer in his place, said he is concerned that we have reached the point at which this sort of legislation is necessary. How we manage the rights and obligations of free speech has been a live issue of concern for many years, and not simply in relation to universities. That is why Parliament has framed the limits of free speech.

In a previous life, I was responsible for co-drafting the University of Sheffield’s code of practice to ensure compliance with section 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, and I oversaw its operation in providing a platform for speakers with whom I profoundly disagreed. There is an irony in that, because the Government soon came to regret the way the Act’s provisions were used to secure platforms for those with whom they profoundly disagreed, and they raised those concerns with universities and students’ unions.

Some of the invitations to speakers after the passage of the 1986 Act were made vexatiously by those who were more interested in testing the legislation, or in trying to create embarrassment for a university and its students’ union, than in the issue under discussion. The fact that 36 years on we are debating the same issue is a reflection of the difficulties of making laws in this area, and that is something we should think about carefully when there are good alternatives.

More recently, I served on the Public Bill Committee for the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, and I recall expressing my concerns over aspects of the Government’s proposals for the creation of the Office for Students. I argued with the then Conservative Universities Minister, now Lord Johnson of Marylebone, who made the case for the Office for Students as the way of regulating the sector. So I was interested to read his contribution to the debate in the House of Lords, where he argued that clause 4 was not only unnecessary but would “undermine the regulator”—the regulator that the Conservative Government have put at the centre of the higher education architecture in this country. He powerfully made the case that the OfS can deal with these issues more effectively than civil litigation by imposing

“conditions of registration on any provider that falls short of the enhanced duties created by this Bill.”

He went on to say that those conditions of registration provide a wide range of

regulatory tools…from simply seeking an action plan from a university…through to imposing fines on an institution if it does not deliver”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 November 2022; Vol. 825, c. 716.]

I was also struck by the contribution of another Conservative former Universities Minister, Lord Willetts, who highlighted the role of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, in addition to the OfS, in providing a “clear process” to which any student can turn with a concern about any potential suppression of freedom of speech. But far more importantly—this point has been made and Ministers would do well to pay regard to it—Lord Willetts argued that the provisions of clause 4

“could have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended.”

He set out two ways in which this might be the case. The first was that

“people who are thinking of…inviting speakers or organising events—

would be—

“inhibited from doing so for fear that they could potentially find themselves caught up in complicated and demanding legal action”.

I have to say that in a different way I saw that chill factor in operation as a result of the 1986 Act.

Secondly, Lord Willetts highlighted the costs of litigation and the uneven resources available to those taking and defending action, pointing out that there is a “real risk” for student unions that would not have the resources to defend themselves against litigation. As he said, student unions

“are an important place in which students with a wide range of political views have their first experience of organising debates, exchanging ideas and disputing.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 November 2022; Vol. 825, c. 713.]

He pointed out that the “threat” of potential litigation that could bankrupt a student union would not serve the interests of freedom of speech in our universities.

So two former Conservative Universities Ministers—the two who have arguably had the most impact on our higher education system over the last 13 years—are both saying that the tort provided by clause 4 is wrong and both back Lords amendment 10. It did not stop there. Lord Pannick argued that effective regulation from the OfS is quicker and cheaper than civil litigation. My good friend Lord Blunkett, who has talked about his experience of being no-platformed as a Secretary of State, made the case that the tort will cause “more confusion” and “difficulty”. Lord Grabiner has been mentioned and, as somebody who should know, he said that High Court judges are less well placed than the regulator to deal with these issues. Lord Macdonald, as a former Director of Public Prosecutions, said that the clause, far from encouraging free speech, will have a “chilling effect”.

The case could not be clearer. Creating the tort would cause confusion, slow down redress, open the terrain to vexatious claims, waste resources, undermine the regulator that this Government have put in place and, above all, create a chill factor that would undermine free speech. We should come together tonight to reject clause 4 and support Lords amendment 10.

[Danny Kruger]

I rise in support of the Government and am pleased that they have decided to reinstate the clause that includes the tort. I was taken aback by the shadow Minister’s suggestion that such a provision was otiose. He suggested that there are much larger issues that the House should be debating. I think that this is where we see a real difference between our parties. The fact is that we think that few things are more important than the quality of cultural and academic debate in our country, and the context in which young people are educated and brought up. But a spirit of oppressive cultural conformity has taken root across the institutions of the United Kingdom and, worst of all, it has taken root in our universities, where freedom of speech should be protected.

Oral Answers to Questions

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

If the hon. Lady had been listening, she would know that I just said we will be publishing early in the new year; if she was not just reading out a scripted question, she might have cottoned on to that point. This is an important area. I have many affected constituents so have seen all of this first hand, as I have in previous roles and from talking to parents across the country. We want to make sure that we are delivering for parents and children with SEND. We will set out that paper early in the new year addressing many of the challenges they are currently facing.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

5. What steps her Department is taking to increase the number of school places for pupils with (a) special educational needs and (b) disabilities.

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

7. What steps her Department is taking to increase the number of school places for pupils with (a) special educational needs and (b) disabilities.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Claire Coutinho)]

We are making a transformational investment in SEND places by investing £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to help deliver new places and improve existing provision for children and young people with SEND or who require alternative provision as well as up to 60 new special and AP free schools.

[Danny Kruger]

I welcome that news and investment. Wiltshire Council has a policy of investing, particularly in mainstream places for children with special needs, and I applaud that. Does the Minister agree that that means parents need proper accountability for the performance of the schools their children are going to, and will she encourage Ofsted to do more to appraise mainstream schools on the support they give to children with special needs?

[Claire Coutinho]

My hon. Friend is a doughty campaigner for Wiltshire and I applaud the council on the work it is doing. Ofsted is revising its framework on this area, which was set out in the Green Paper earlier this year. My hon. Friend might be interested to know that we are also looking at better local and national dashboards to improve local accountability.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I cannot commit to implementing the entire report in full; there are more than 80 recommendations and it is right that we take it away, stress-test it, consider all the aspects of the proposals and their consequences, intended and otherwise, and speak with the sector and stakeholders. I recognise the level of ambition and I support huge aspects of the review.

Funding is important, and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor is as committed as I am to ensuring that all children are given an equal chance to succeed by supporting the most vulnerable in our society. Look at the evidence from “The Case for Change”, which set out the initial findings of the care review: more than £2 billion into children’s social care; £695 million into the supporting families programme, a 40% increase which I know the hon. Lady will welcome; £259 million into building new children’s homes, secure and open; and the £300 million investment in family hubs in half the local authorities in our country.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I too welcome the report wholeheartedly. In my view, Josh MacAlister has set out a template for social policy in general, not just for children’s social care. Too often, our interventions in the social space are too late, too siloed and too statist, whereas what Mr MacAlister suggests is a framework around building stronger families and stronger communities that also funds prevention, in the knowledge that that will save money later, as well as distress. I see my right hon. Friends the Minister for Crime and Policing and the Home Secretary on the Treasury Bench, and we are talking about saving their budgets too. Does the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), accept the argument that up-front investment in a good system will save money later and pay for itself?

[Will Quince]

I certainly do accept that argument, but it is a case that we all will have to make to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is a significant spend-to-save argument in the review. It is important to stress that we have already invested significantly in early intervention. I talked about the package for families—family hubs, start for life services in more than 75 local authorities across our country, and the expansion of the supporting families programme. That is all part of the mix, but we will continue to consider carefully those issues on which the review suggests we should go further—in particular issues around early help and making the case for it. As I say, we have an ambitious implementation strategy and implementation plan, which I will report on by the end of the year.

Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

How to follow that! Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will try to just use the microphone for amplification.

I am grateful to the Opposition for choosing this subject. It is a very good way of framing the mission that we have as a country. A nation in which it is good to grow up and grow old is one that is also ready for the threats of our times. I am with Edmund Burke who said that

“the sources the commonwealth are in the households”.

The strength of our country is found in our families and in our communities.

The threats are very real. We have seen in this century already how precarious our financial system is. We have seen very recently what a pandemic can do to global health and economic systems. We are witnessing now the appalling reality of war in Europe and the real threat of nuclear war. I think also of the threat of technological collapse triggered by accident or sabotage, and of the prospect, even if we do not fully believe the prophets of the apocalypse, of what climate change could do to the developing world, inducing extraordinary upheaval and the prospect of hundreds of millions of people on the move, heading for our safe and temperate continent. We face a series of very real threats to our country and to our civilisation.



There is a lot to be confident about in the UK, though, such is the strength of our institutions, including our democracy and, for all our disputes, the strength of this place—our Parliament. I think also of the dedication of those who serve the state on the frontline, not least in the British Army. I mention those who form the largest garrison in the UK in my constituency in Wiltshire.

Some of our country’s greatest assets are not found in the agencies of the British state. I think of two recent crises that did us proud as a country: the situation of millions of isolating people during the covid lockdowns and the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. For all the efforts of Ministers and officials in both those situations, it is fair to say that the apparatus of the state struggled to manage fast enough to help. But society did not: millions of people stepped forward spontaneously during covid to organise mutual aid groups to support their neighbours, and hundreds of thousands of people have offered homes in support of refugees. In both cases, the state enabled and helped to fund the work of communities, but it was communities that took the initiative and did the work.

That brings me to the nub of my argument: if we are to rise to the threats of our time, the crucial thing—the watchword of our whole strategy—should be resilience. That of course means national security, and yes, we need to modernise the British state and to invest even more than we currently do in our national defence. We also need real security in our energy supplies, in our food supplies and in technology. The system we really need to be strong, though, is not the state or the economy but society itself. That is the real foundation of national resilience and national security: the security of our communities and families.

How do we strengthen our communities and families? Communities need the plans outlined in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill in the Queen’s Speech: more devolution and more community power. I also want to see more reform of our public services to put them in the hands of local people, rather than have them as outposts of the central state. Families need more power and resources, too. We need more family-sized homes, including the affordable and social housing that has been announced. I also welcome the plans for the expansion of the community hubs programme.

When it comes to childcare and social care, the answer does not lie in ever greater, larger provision, large-scale warehousing of children and the elderly, trying to arrange for the home and the family to do as little as possible. We must help people to live as they would prefer, to work closer to home and to have time for meaningful family life. We need people to be able to spend the money that is available for childcare and residential social care in the way that is best for them, to look after their children or their parents at home if they wish, or to pay for informal support among friends and family. To put it bluntly, it should not be possible to get Government money only if you put your dependants in an institution.

While I am at it, we need taxes and benefits that reward couples rather than penalising them. The family is the best and most important welfare agency that we have or possibly could have. We should invest in it and trust in it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I think I will decide whether something is in order or not, but thanks for that little lesson for me. Just to say, I do laugh when you talk about policy when the Government have been in power, so I try to balance out the political issues and objections on both sides.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is one of the most important Bills now before Parliament. When does my right hon. Friend expect the Bill to come back before the House?

[Michelle Donelan]

I can inform the House that the Bill will be back in due course, and we can guarantee this Government’s commitment to honour our manifesto pledge to strengthen free speech in our universities, because of how important we believe it to be.

Oral Answers to Questions

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

This is an important area of work within both the computing curriculum and the advice on keeping children safe in education. We certainly want to ensure that children are safe whether they are learning in the classroom or online.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

2. What steps his Department is taking to tackle the provision of low-quality university courses.

[The Minister for Higher and Further Education (Michelle Donelan)]

I believe that every student has the right to a high-quality education. The Government are committed to tackling low-quality courses and ensuring that students and the taxpayer see a return on their investment. We have worked with the Office for Students to tackle low-quality higher education courses and it will now, for the first time, impose stringent minimum standards for drop-out rates and progression to graduate jobs.

[Danny Kruger]

Wiltshire has no university, as my right hon. Friend knows, but we have something better in the form of Wiltshire College, which provides a fantastic range of courses for young people and adults, including at the great agricultural campus at Lackham. Will she join me in congratulating Wiltshire College on its retention of students and the progression that they achieve? It does that by working with employers to design courses that work for the local economy. Does she encourage universities to learn from the college sector how it does that?

[Michelle Donelan]

I agree completely with my hon. Friend’s assessment of Wiltshire College. Like so many further education colleges, it works closely with local businesses to ensure that residents get the skills that local employers need. That is why the Government are investing in further education. We are providing investment to transform the Lackham campus into an agritech hub, with £1.2 million of capital funding for Wiltshire College, as well as £4 million for the delivery of T-levels to ensure that learners continue to have high-class learning facilities.

Coronavirus: Education Setting Attendance and Support for Pupils

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Thursday 23rd September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart]

Absolutely, and I thank not only my hon. Friend’s school but all schools across the country that have gone above and beyond at this very difficult time. We have asked a great deal of our teachers and school leaders, and they have risen to the challenge.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I am delighted to see my hon. Friend in his place. Will he join me in congratulating schools across Wiltshire, and particularly in my constituency, on getting back to work so effectively and educating all their children once again? Now that 12 to 15-year-olds are eligible for the vaccine, does he agree it is important that all children, and their parents, get the proper information, so that they can make the right decision for themselves and their community?

[Alex Burghart]

It sounds like Devizes is doing a cracking job in meeting the challenges of covid, and I say again to all parents, teachers and pupils who are looking for advice that the NHS is the place to go, and we are in safe hands when we take its advice.