Oral Answers to Questions

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart]

We have a range of independent assessors going through the process. The consultation process will last the next few months, and we intend to publish the final list of qualifications to be defunded to make way for our world-class, gold-standard T-levels in September, thereby giving colleges two years to prepare.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I was reminded, on a recent visit to the excellent Warrender Primary School in my constituency, how important schools are to safeguarding. Can my right hon. Friend tell me what plans will be put in place, through the schools White Paper, to ensure that schools continue to play a central part in statutory safeguarding arrangements?

[Mr Robin Walker]

Schools are under a statutory duty to co-operate with the arrangements set out by local safeguarding partners, and we have asked safeguarding partners to review how they work with schools in all their areas. We requested that all local areas review that following the Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges. We will actively look at this issue as part of our response to today’s care review.

Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

The Queen’s Speech contains a wealth of proposals that broadly fall between how we best support the vast majority of our people for whom things such as state-funded education and state-funded healthcare are important, and how we support and focus on those who need the intervention of the state to thrive.

I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) in congratulating our colleagues, the re-elected leader of Hillingdon Council, Ian Edwards, and the newly elected leader of Harrow Council, Paul Osborn. Local government is often the vehicle through which the state supports both the most vulnerable and our communities, which is the theme I hope to develop in my brief contribution tonight.

I commend Ministers for their work on special educational needs and disabilities in the Schools Bill. I know they spend a lot of time engaging with people across the sector, and it is clear to us all that, if we are to make sure that every child has the chance to thrive, a change is urgently required. Despite the welcome reforms that have been introduced, the system remains enormously challenged.

The Schools Bill will also begin to create a more level playing field between different types of schools, and it offers an opportunity to ensure that state-funded education gives every child in England the best start in life. This will be debated, but I particularly welcome the Government’s proposals to enable local authorities to set up multi-academy trusts. Research by the Local Government Association, based on previous research by organisations such as Watchsted, shows that there remains a significant advantage for maintained schools and that local authorities remain more effective than academy trusts in improving the attainment of struggling schools. We need to make sure we can harness that to the best advantage of all our communities.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) spoke about the importance of the human rights review. As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I have heard a lot of representations on the review over the past few months. It is very important that we get it right and that we reflect the need to update our human rights legislation to take account of, for example, the growing impact of the online world on how people live their lives, but I echo the concerns about ensuring that we do not displace the problem by sending cases to Strasbourg that we could more effectively deal with at UK level.

For many aspects of our economy, education, local government and healthcare, we need to recognise that the trend of working from home has been embraced by the most productive, most efficient and most profitable parts of our economy, particularly in professional services. We can help the money we spend on taxpayer-funded services go even further by making sure that people who can work from home most efficiently do so, while making sure that those who need to be in the office to provide frontline face-to-face public services are where they are required.

It is important the House recognises that for the local authority with the greatest proportion of residents accessing some form of social care, at any stage of their life’s journey, the figure is less than one in five residents, but those residents are often the most vulnerable. Ministers in the Department for Education have been considering how to review and improve our children’s social care system and update safeguarding to reflect the challenges of the modern world. I urge them to look at the Crocker review of private equity, which considers the cost of providing children’s social care, and I hope they will find time to answer the call from the Children’s Commissioner that England should follow Wales and Scotland in abolishing the reasonable chastisement defence in respect of the disciplining of children.

Finally, on growing old, I encourage the Government to look in all their endeavours at a public health approach to ageing, so that we consider how local authorities can encourage activity such as walking football, bowls and swimming to keep our older citizens active. There is so much potential to show our pride in our communities and our ambition for them. The public will find much of that on the Conservative Benches tonight.

Foster Carers

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Robertson.

A wide range of issues to do with children’s services have been raised in the debate, but for me an important starting point is to recognise that the UK care system is among the highest performing in the world. In all the debate that goes on, especially when a distressing case hits the headlines, it is often easy to forget that our foster carers, our adoptive parents and our children’s social workers are all part of something that research demonstrates is among the safest care systems in which to grow up anywhere in the developed world.

We know that the drivers of children coming into that care system are many and complex, with neglect continuing to be the No. 1 driver, but as we have seen over the years, the crises of confidence that follow cases like that of Victoria Climbié and Baby Peter Connelly and the consequent toughening of Ofsted criteria result in a consistent pattern of local authorities becoming more risk averse and taking more children than before into the care system; and in due course, the Government begin to look at whether those criteria are correct. As we consider the system as a whole, we must recognise that foster carers are a crucial part of it, and that they, child protection investigations and organisations such as the police and schools, where my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) spent many years, are all part a system through which the state has eyes on children and seeks to keep them safe.

In my contribution, I will draw on my experience with the Local Government Association and with a variety of local authorities, both as a lead member and as one who has done a good deal of work in this space over the years. It is clear that recruitment and retention of foster carers throw up different sets of issues that the Government need to consider. I have met many, many foster carers over the years. I have met people who have been fostering for 30 or 40 years and who have fostered dozens of children. Some talk of specialising in children who are violent and who have been through difficult times, or children who may be sexual abusers of other children and require very intensive and specialist support.

It is clear to me that they are owed a huge amount of respect by our society for the work that they do. I acknowledge that foster carers are paid for that work, but they provide support not just by fostering a child but, in some cases, by fostering a parent as well, so that a parent who is struggling can learn from a foster family how to nurture and support a child, preventing that child going elsewhere in the care system or even into adoption. The job should rightly command a huge amount of respect.

Pretty much every local authority that I have come across tends to have regular opportunities to celebrate the contribution that foster carers make and to thank them for that work, and it is important that we do so here at a national level. There is a national leadership board for adoption, but we have not seen the same focus on fostering by central Government over many decades, despite the fact that a much greater population of our children are in foster care.

From conversations with foster carers, it is clear that their experiences of being foster carers vary enormously. Some are engaged by local authorities; some are engaged by agencies; and some will change between those two types of engagement during their time as foster carers. A number of Members have highlighted reasonable concerns about the role that agencies have played over the years.

Most local authorities use independent fostering agencies to a significant degree, and many agencies provide a high-quality service to vulnerable children in the system, but it is striking that, as a recent report highlighted, the 10 largest children’s services providers have made £300 million in profits from that market in the last year. As a Tory who likes taxpayer’s money, I am concerned that taxpayers are paying £300 million in profits for something that is part of the care market.

I thank BBC journalist Sanchia Berg for the work that she has done over the years to bring to wider attention the role that private equity has played both in foster care specifically and in the children’s care market generally. We need to ensure that, as we develop the quality, we are able to have an effective handle on how good that market is at providing support for children. It is important not to criticise independent fostering agencies, or IFAs, as simply profit-seeking providers. We need to ensure that a limited resource is being spent as effectively as possible, with a real eye on quality of experience for the children who are fostered.

When it comes to recruitment, foster carers have told me many times that the key thing for them has been word of mouth. Although most local authorities have stands in shopping centres, put out leaflets and put things on their websites, hearing what the system is like from somebody who has been through it is crucial. The more central Government promote the stories of foster carers at a national level—so that other people can hear what an attractive opportunity it can be—the better. Those who go to local authorities as potential adopters but are perhaps not ready to take that step are often people who might consider fostering and perhaps go on to do it for a long time.

Fostering is one of those unusual roles. I am aware that there has been legal action in Scotland about whether foster carers should have the status of employees. They are paid to do it, but at the same time, it is flexible and, depending on the circumstances of the child being fostered, some foster carers are able to hold down a full-time job. For others, fostering the child is absolutely a full-time job because of the child’s complex needs. It is crucial to recognise that complexity and what it means to a family and a household to become foster carers, without putting people off.

On retention, I pay particular tribute to my soon-to-be-former Hillingdon Council colleague Councillor Alan Deville, who has fostered many children, some of whom are from very difficult backgrounds. He also been active in creating a foster carers’ association; it is independent of the local authority, but it is there to support foster carers in that local authority area by organising events for the children and opportunities for foster parents and families to get together and share their experiences, and by providing really effective feedback to the local authority and IFAs about the things that make a real difference.

Often, those things were quite simple things. They were about making the “job” part of being a foster carer more straightforward, including knowing that there was someone there who could help them if they had an emergency situation with a fostered child in their household, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. It was also about a foster carer knowing very quickly how they could get consent if a child brought home a form from school to go on a school trip, or if the child needed a haircut or some expenditure over and above the costs that would normally be incurred, or how to get a bank account set up, so that the child’s savings element contained within the fostering allowance could be secured for their future. It was about making sure that those basics were taken care of really well. We hear stories, both from foster carers who have been engaged by local authorities and from IFAs, about how that aspect of fostering could be improved to make the role so much more straightforward.

In conclusion, I have several asks of the Minister and of Government. As we know, the care review is looking at our care system and will come forward with some recommendations. However, the comments that a number of other Members have made certainly resonate with the experience I had during my time in local government and it seems to me that it would be helpful for us to have a more strategic approach to the way we support foster carers, rather in the way that we support those who adopt.

The issues include things such as access to appropriate housing. Local authorities are quite tightly controlled under local government finance rules in terms of what can be done for people who want social housing and assessing their level of need versus the cost of supporting children. We have to make sure that that resource can be deployed as flexibly as possible, so that foster carers who need an extra room, for example, are able to have larger accommodation within the local authority area, thereby removing the need for a high-cost care placement.

Council tax is another example of where the need for flexibility comes to mind. Again, complexities may arise where a local authority offers to pay the council tax for a foster carer; the foster carer may be resident in another local authority area. So how does it pay out?

Of course we must also recognise that sometimes young people are placed 20 miles or more from home, which I appreciate is an issue that the Department keeps a very close eye on. That situation may well arise because the child is being taken away from risks proximate to their local area—from their family, from a drug dealer or from somebody else who is targeting them. So there may be good reasons for such a move.

I hope that a strategic approach will come from the care review. If it does, it will make a transformational difference in the next few years to the quality of the experience that our foster carers have.

Kinship Care for Babies

David Simmonds Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) on securing this debate.

It is very striking, when we look at the care system in England, that the earlier a child goes into care and the longer they stay, the better their outcomes are. We also know that the cost of failure is enormously high. On average, a local authority spends in excess of £55,000 per year to support a looked-after child; for a child with a significant level of care needs, it is on average over £130,000 per year. When the local authority takes that very difficult decision to go to court to safeguard a child’s interests, it seems absolutely critical that planning and seeking the best available option for that child are an early part of the work that is done.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) described, a kinship care placement can be the very best option for any child, for a whole host of reasons. My ask of the Minister is to look at how local authorities can, in that initial decision-making process, when a child first comes into the care system very early in life, think about how to plan effectively. They need to be able to explore kinship care options alongside other things that may need to be considered as part of safeguarding, so that we can ensure children are placed in a safe and familial environment.

The concept of kinship care seems to have grown very much in the last two decades. That has arisen partly from a recognition that box-ticking does not ensure a quality experience for a child. We have seen Governments of all stripes seeking to improve the quality of children’s experience in care. The key thing that emerges from the feedback of children who have been through that system—as well as from relatives, social workers and professionals—is that always having a stable, enduring and loving relationship is the most important thing if a child is to thrive. We can have foster carers who are incredibly well trained and social workers who are immensely highly qualified, but if each of those is dipping in and out of a child’s life, that simply is not going to bring about the quality of outcome that a loving grandparent, aunt, uncle or other family member could provide.

[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

I want to develop that point slightly. There are long-term, systemic issues that might arise for any new kinship carer, although there may just be a nasty shock. Does my hon. Friend agree that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom)—whom I commend for securing this debate—is right to highlight the role that employers can play, in advance of legislation or local authority care, to support family members coping with that shock event, as well as with some of the long-term structural needs that Members have spoken about?

[David Simmonds]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, which I was going to develop next. We need to look at the practicalities and logistics of making kinship care a much more effective system and to address some of the challenges described by the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne).

The support of employers is clearly vital for family members to be able to take on that caring responsibility. Entitlements that exist in law for adoption and parenting are often very difficult to access for a whole host of reasons, which is something that needs to be explored. We need to consider the issue of finance and what it means to a family taking on a child with potentially very expensive needs that have to be met, when they themselves might not be in a position financially to do that directly. We need to recognise that this process saves the local authority potentially significant costs that would be incurred through a foster or residential placement, which is also an incentive to look at the way we provide support. The manifest benefits of kinship care placements, such as the sense of stability a child experiences being with a family member instead of with strangers at that stage in their life, are critical.

Yesterday, I went to the Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to visit an acquaintance of mine, Dr Jideofor Menakaya, who is a leading national expert on care of neonatal children. It was an opportunity to see how Hillingdon Hospital is working with a local authority, through a family hub model, to develop a package of different kinds of support to address the care needs of children with significant medical challenges. Some children going through the care system have suffered disruption and may have health problems arising from what happened to them before birth. It is striking that when children are in an environment with supportive and loving family members around them, it is much more straightforward to address those medical and health challenges. I know that Members present have often spoken about that, and seeing it in action is fantastic. Recognising how the placement of a child with a kinship carer can make a real difference to addressing significant medical needs right at the start of life is a good example of why this care is so important.

To conclude, it is important to recognise that a degree of moral hazard is perceived in the wider public debate. Having been in local authorities and seen kinship care developing as an option that is often explored, I am certainly aware that people ask why we would pay family members to care for a child who is a member of their own family, especially when, historically, many people would do that voluntarily. We need to recognise that, as a country, we have high expectations of the experience that children will have. In order to make sure that the outcomes we want are achieved, we need to make sure we have system that supports children. Alongside adoption, fostering and special guardianship orders, the kinship care model is an excellent way of managing the risks to a child, ensuring a nurturing environment and doing so in a way that is good value and efficient for taxpayers.

Early Years Educators

David Simmonds Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I would like to add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) for securing today’s debate.

We know from all the research that attention from adults is a crucial factor in the earliest part of a child’s life. That fact has a long history in public policy, dating in the modern era back to the Plowden Report of 1967 and reflected in decisions taken by Governments ever since, in respect of both primary education and the provision of initiatives such as the neighbourhood nurseries, children’s centres, early years centres, and now family hubs.

It seems to be a point that underpins the issue highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester in respect of ratios: the need to ensure that we have sufficient adults in any particular setting to have an effective relationship and to give sufficient attention to the children. However, it is also incredibly important as we consider the future role and shape of our early years education. As has been highlighted today, we see a mixed economy of provision in which there are examples of outstandingly good practice that make a fundamental, evidence-based difference to the lives of children.

The nursery schools we see around the country and the excellent childminders, many of whom I see in my own constituency of Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, are part of a bigger picture, where research done in the world of academia drawing on the experience of other countries—the United States, for example—in developing new initiatives designed specifically to tackle disadvantage and drive social mobility has been applied here, in the UK. I would like to focus my contribution primarily on the considerations that that brings forward for public policy as we begin to shape it for the coming years.

When we consider the shape of the system we have today, we see that our earliest educators are operating in a system of funding that is very much dominated by the needs and demands of our big secondary schools. It is a common piece of feedback from early years practitioners and those who own early years businesses—those who lead in this area—that the allocation of resources to early year settings in any given area tends to be an afterthought. It comes after the distribution of funding: first, to secondary schools; secondly, to primary schools; thirdly, to further education settings; and, finally, early years settings are thought of just before the tea break. We need to change that. Research that has come from the What Works Network, funded by the Department for Education and done over many years, shows that the funding that we allocate to the early years of a child’s life has the biggest impact on social mobility and in challenging disadvantage. It is very telling that Leon Feinstein, formerly head of evidence at the Early Intervention Foundation, where I served as a trustee, now with the Children’s Commissioner, has highlighted that the indicators from the early years foundation stage outcomes for children are extremely good predictors of how a child will do in their A-levels. We can tell pretty accurately from how a child is developing academically in their nursery school how they will do in their A-levels as they leave school at 18. We know there is very good evidence of the difference that it makes when we get this right.

In the past we have seen the Government beginning to look at not just the professionalisation of early years educators but the greater professionalisation of the workforce as a whole, for example, with the Children’s Workforce Development Council. A number of Members have referred to early years education becoming more of a graduate profession. We have seen, in respect of the teaching profession, consistency brought in to ensure that teachers are educated to master’s degree level, as a minimum. That is all part of an agenda that is about raising the attainment level of the people who are undertaking this crucial work. Clearly, the cross-party points that have been made about funding and what that means for rates of pay are also significant.

It seems to me that, as we survey the scene within the context of Government levelling-up policy, investment in doing the right things in the early years educator workforce is something that will pay dividends. It is unlikely, perhaps, to pay dividends in the short term—in two or three years—but we can see the contribution that this will make, especially to economic opportunity, in parts of our country that currently fall behind.

We have an opportunity to build on some real strengths within this overall workforce. One of the striking things is that in most parts of the country there is a significant local authority-run early years service. I am aware that in the London borough of Hillingdon, which covers about two thirds of my constituency, it is conspicuous that staff who work in that environment tend to be people who have 30 or 40 years’ experience and the highest levels of training and development. We need to make sure that, where we have access to that kind of resource, the benefits are spread so that those smaller, private voluntary providers—new entrants to the market—can learn from people who have been providing child care to a very high standard for 30 or 40 years. These are the people who have seen different trends come in and out and who know how to support parents who may be struggling with the challenges of bringing up extremely young children. It is an opportunity to connect what happens in the early years education workforce with our family hubs, our children’s centres, our nursery schools and into primary education and childminding. It would mean the skills and insights that we see in some settings are able to be shared effectively.

It is worth recognising that as we face this future we know—there is a cross-party acknowledgment—that this is not just about freeing parents to be more economically active. We have gone through periods in the past when the primary purpose of Government intervention in this area was intended, in particular, to make it possible for mums to return to work or to increase their working hours. That is important; we know that the mother’s level of both education and income is very important to a child’s life chances—to a greater degree than is the case with fathers. We also know that all this research demonstrates that the quality of early education really can drive a child’s opportunity later on.

As we see more Government interventions, such as the growth of tax-free childcare—something that I personally benefit from, having two young children—there is a need to ensure that ratios continue to support a high-quality offer. There is also a need to ensure that childcare is not something that arises as a consideration in a parent’s life only once the child is born and they need to think about going back to work. As my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) said, it should instead be something that is considered during antenatal care. That way, parents will know what to expect and how to make sure they are getting the right support for their child. All those things are incredibly important.

If I may offer a final suggestion to the Minister as a way of beginning to join some of these ideas up, we know that all local authorities have a sufficiency duty around childcare, which was introduced by the last Labour Government. That duty is often misunderstood. It is not about ensuring a sufficient supply; it is about having a plan to reflect the needs of the local population. How that happens varies quite a lot around the country, according to local demographics and local resources. However, there is an opportunity to use that sufficiency duty as a vehicle to bring together so many of these issues that affect not just the workforce but the future of children. We should consider how it can become more of a driver to share good practice and ways of addressing some of the financial challenges that individual settings of different kinds may face. It can be used to ensure that the research funded by the Department for Education and the research taking place in universities is brought together in a way that supports the agenda that we all share.

I hope that my contribution has been useful, and in particular that it has highlighted my experience in a local authority. I will finish by welcoming the continued focus that my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester brings to this issue. Often, the Government are rightly accused of thinking only about things that will make a difference in the next two or three years, but if we get early years right, it will make a difference to the lives of children and to their future as adults for decades ahead.

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I would respectfully say that I do not think anybody in this House would ever disrespect the social work workforce or any social worker. I also think that evidence-based strategy is important, and that is why the MacAlister review is so important. It is worth remembering that local government’s core spending is increasing by an average of 3% in real terms each year for the spending review period. So more money is going into local government, but, depending on what the MacAlister review delivers, I would certainly be the first to make the argument for properly resourcing children’s social care.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

May I, like others, thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the tone of the statement? Does he agree that the Children Act 1989, which provides the main legislative and operational underpinning of children’s social care, is perhaps in need of updating? Does he have a view about how that might happen?

Further, picking up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight), does he agree that it is a weakness in our local safeguarding partnership model that schools and education are not a statutory safeguarding partner?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who I know has deep experience in the area. He is right that we need to carefully consider all possible routes to help ensure that children’s social care has the powers that it needs to protect vulnerable children like Arthur. It is important that we wait for both reviews before we look to make specific legislative improvements. We obviously need to ensure that the national panel report and the findings of the joint targeted area inspection come back. Of course, we also have the independent MacAlister review. I will not rule out legislative changes if we need to make them.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

7. What steps his Department is taking to support disadvantaged pupils during the 2022-23 academic year.

[Jane Stevenson (Wolverhampton North East) (Con)]

12. What steps his Department is taking to support disadvantaged pupils during the 2022-23 academic year.

[The Minister for School Standards (Mr Robin Walker)]

The Government have announced an additional £1 billion recovery premium over the academic years 2022-23 and 2023-24, building on this year’s recovery premium. It will help schools to deliver evidence-based approaches to support the most disadvantaged pupils. This funding is in addition to the dedicated schools grant pupil premium, which was £2.5 billion this year, and the national tutoring programme.

[David Simmonds]

There are significant budgetary pressures within the dedicated schools grant, which affect a number of Government Departments. What discussions is my hon. Friend having to ensure that those challenges are properly addressed?

[Mr Walker]

I often discuss with colleagues across Government areas of mutual interest, including how best we can support young people with special educational needs and disabilities. The autumn spending review committed an additional £4.7 billion to the core schools budget, including funding for SEND to help the sector respond to the pressures that it is facing. I am sure my hon. Friend will join me in welcoming the trebling of the budget for high needs capital, and the continuation of our safety valve programme.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Eleventh sitting)

David Simmonds Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Western]

It is pretty obvious what little faith we have in the potential appointment of a director of free speech. Often in life, it is not a case of what is said but who says it. We can look at this legislation and then try to interpret what is behind it. It seems obvious that this is a clear next stage in the Government’s power grab over the supposedly independent Office for Students. Until recently, the OfS was genuinely independent, but that power grab is laid bare for all to see in the Bill.

To put that in a wider context, it is fair to say that the Government have widely abused the public appointments process. It is not clear whether the director of free speech will be recruited through open competition or essentially appointed by the Prime Minister. On numerous occasions, I have raised the appointment of Lord Wharton as chair of the Office for Students. He is a Conservative party donor and takes the Conservative party Whip. He is a political appointee, so it is not a good record. To clarify, people can of course be donors. But in this case a person is appointed to the independent Office for Students one month, and the next month, having taken a pay cheque from the Government, he pays £8,000 to the Conservative party.

I would like to see the director of free speech appointed through the Committee on Standards in Public Life. On the wider problem of political appointees, I read just a few weeks ago that another of the Prime Minister’s mates, Ewen Fergusson, who happens to be another Bullingdon lad, was appointed to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The pattern that is emerging is not good for anyone across the political spectrum. It is vital that trust in all these systems is maintained, irrespective of who happens to be in power. That trust can be eroded quickly and we have to ensure that all of us do our best to uphold it.

Many academics view what is happening as a creeping appointment of Government Members, not just to these sorts of bodies but to museums as well. I mentioned earlier the resignation of Sir Charles Dunstone as chair of the Royal Museums Greenwich, which was prompted by the Government’s refusal to reappoint an allegedly decolonising trustee, Aminul Hoque.

Our cluster of amendments seek to limit the interventionist role of Government in supposedly independent positions in public bodies. The concern about that role was highlighted by Professor Biggar in oral evidence, when he said:

“someone like me, who thinks there is a problem—and I guess the Government do, given the legislation—wants a director who has a certain partiality of that kind.”––[Official Report, Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Public Bill Committee, 7 September 2021; c. 22, Q40.]

That is clear then, isn’t? We want a partial person to be going into the independent Office for Students to preside over this important role of the director of free speech.

Dr Ahmed said:

“There are always concerns with the regulator—that it has to be impartial—and there are also concerns in this particular case.”––[Official Report, Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Public Bill Committee, 7 September 2021; c. 20, Q36.]

Dr Ahmed was a Government witness, and I think he was referring to the case of Lord Wharton. Another witness, Smita Jamdar, a lawyer from Shakespeare Martineau, said:

“you could end up with somebody who is effectively an appointment of whatever Government is in place at the time, and who does not necessarily have any skills or expertise to make those judgments but is the last word on them. Again, in terms of freedom, that does not feel terribly free.”––[Official Report, Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Public Bill Committee, 7 September 2021; c. 57, Q111.]

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

Does the hon. Member agree that it is important that, although these individuals are independent, they are also accountable? Does he recognise, as I do, having been part of a number of confirmation hearings for individuals appointed by the Government to significant roles in which they are expected to exercise independence, that that public, cross-party scrutiny—in this case, through the Education Committee—ensures that individuals can be questioned, and that the concerns that have been highlighted can be addressed, before the person assumes office, and that that happens in public and in a transparent manner?

[Matt Western]

Of course, we all want to believe in those processes, but when the processes end up consistently with mates of the Prime Minister being appointed, it is pretty disturbing.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Ninth sitting)

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 20th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

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

I wish to place on the record the fact that my wife works at a university.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I am an honorary fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

The same.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Eighth sitting)

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

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

My wife works at a higher education firm.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I am an honorary fellow at Birkbeck.

[The Chair]

Thank you.

Clause 1

Duties of registered higher education providers

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[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The reason the new clause is important is that it would include all bodies that students might interact with in their role as students, to ensure that the promotion of freedom of speech happens. I will come on to rebut some points that I think the Minister incorrectly made about JCRs, but I first want to talk about the chilling effect. We have heard a lot about it, but if we are to believe what we hear about the chilling effect, it is because a culture has set in—particularly in the student body—in which it is allowed to run rife.

As we know, large parts of student activity are not necessarily in the classroom or lecture theatre; in fact, many students complain that they do not have enough lecture and seminar time. That is a regular complaint of students nowadays because fees are so high. We could have an interesting argument around what the purpose of university is—whether it is instruction, or to enable students to have a wider experience of intellectual endeavour—but I will put that to one side.

However, if the effect is to exclude a swathe of student life and to allow that chilling effect to continue to circulate, the whole point of the student part of the Bill is defeated. The education part or university part? Okay, that is fine. But with the student part, what will still happen, of course, is that students will still be afraid to speak up in lecture theatres, because in the non-regulated part of their student experience they will still not have the culture of free speech and they will be shunned if they do speak up. They will not speak up and feel like they can have their own views, because in one part of their life the chilling effect is not because of formal institutions, but partly because of informal cultures. And if we are not tackling those cultures in all aspects, then we will not deal with this issue. That is why, for example, this measure should extend to JCRs and MCRs.

Earlier, the Minister said that JCRs do not run their own booking systems. That is not correct for all JCRs. St Mary’s College at Durham University runs its own booking system for its JCR. When a student wants to make a booking, they go on to the JCR website and fill in a JCR form, and the JCR allocates a booking. With some of the Oxford colleges, students have to go into the Oxford system, for the whole university, and I have just found that out after 10 minutes of Google research into how the booking systems work. I am sure that a fuller analysis would show that the picture is more complicated, which is why we need to include JCRs and similar facilities explicitly in this measure, so that it is clear.

[David Simmonds]

It may be that there is a degree of misunderstanding. When I was a student at a college that had a structure with a JCR, MCR and senior common room, the president of the JCR was someone who would become a future Labour Member for Corby.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

A good man.

[David Simmonds]

He was a very good man, and is a good friend of mine. However, a key point about that organisation is that it is not autonomous. So although the JCR has its own bar, the JCR, the MCR and the SCR—the three academic components of the college—are all supervised by, and under the control of, the college’s governing body. So they are not autonomous.

Therefore, although it is the case that a student could book a room, rent a tennis court or something like that, if it is in the ownership of that JCR, the college—as a constituent part of a university—supervises and controls the JCR’s activities. So the JCR is directly accountable, as a part of the college and a part of the university, and it is not autonomous in its own right.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Neither are student unions. The Education Act 1994, which I am probably the only Member of Parliament to bang on about, because most MPs will talk about previous Education Acts, requires universities to supervise all student unions, just as they would JCRs. It requires universities to ensure that the finances of student unions are conducted fairly and to oversee the policy of the student unions, so that the universities fulfil their duties under other Education Acts, such as ensuring freedom of speech. So what the hon. Gentleman just said is the case with all student unions.

However, this Bill sees fit to mention student unions specifically, even though they are regulated—in terms of their policies, their funding, their use and their terms regarding discrimination—by the university and by the Charity Commission.

--- Later in debate ---

This new clause is saying that the same status should be given to JCRs. Yes, JCRs have some regulatory oversight of the institution, and so do student unions, but this Bill only takes account of student unions. Not only that, but it means that, just as we heard from the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, the danger is that the institution in the first place will bat it off and say, “It is not our responsibility; it is the junior common room’s responsibility. Go through their complaints procedure.” If the JCR does not have a complaints procedure that is in line with the existing legislation, there is a danger that it will give people the runaround. It would just be clearer if everyone had complaints procedures in line with the legislation.

[David Simmonds]

Without wishing to labour the point, I think the Minister is absolutely correct in the position she has taken. The junior common room is a component part of the college, so all its complaints processes and its supervision are inherent in its nature as a component part of the college. There is not a requirement to bring it within the purview of the legislation in the same way as there is for a student union, which is a separate institution with its own governance. It is already covered by its very nature.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

That may be, but the Minister said that JCRs do not have control of their own bookings, their own policies or their own finances, and that is not quite true, if we compare them with student unions. I do take the hon. Gentleman’s point that junior common rooms are not automatically registered with the Charities Commission, for example, but I am not sure that, legally, there is anything preventing them from registering. That would be an interesting legal point.

Each junior common room, again, is slightly separate. We had a quasi-junior common room system set up at Lancaster University when that was created, to model the Oxford system, but it was significantly different, because the system of Lancaster University was different and was based in halls and housing, much of which is now run by private institutions based at the university campus because of the private finance initiative systems and so on that we have in many universities. Again, for those junior common rooms that are now often in private student halls because they had a residential-based junior common room system, how is it regulated? They are on campus, but they are private blocks now, run by private service providers. It would be clearer if we included everyone.