Infant Class Sizes

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Justin Tomlinson

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who had the great benefit of being educated in my wonderful constituency. I think that that shone through the whole of her speech.

I asked to speak in today’s debate. I am normally ruthlessly positive in my speeches—I always try to focus on “looking on the bright side of life”—but when I saw the motion, I was staggered. Indeed, I have been disgusted by the absolute cheek of some of the points that have been made. I speak from experience not only of membership of the Public Accounts Committee—to which I shall refer later—but of 10 years at the coal face as a ward councillor in a new build area, fighting the crazy views of Labour councillors who hated parental choice and did everything they could to force parents to send their children to schools that they did not support.

Let me return to my time as borough councillor. The incompetent, useless Labour council in Swindon, which was so bad the Labour Government had to step in and put it into special measures, managed to rack up a staggering £68 million backlog of repairs in schools. We had schools such as the Moredon primary school where not only were the roofs leaking, but the windows did not fit properly, and kids had to come to school in coats and bring their own buckets—as featured on the TV. It was an absolute disaster and it was a relief that the last Labour Government at least took it away from that hopeless Labour council. Thankfully, we seized control of the council and we immediately started tackling that £68 million backlog for schools.

I represented a new development—an area that, when I first got elected in 2000, had 1,800 houses, but which by the time I was elevated to become the MP 10 years later had 10,000 houses, and every single time we needed a brand-new school Labour councillors blocked it. They blocked it for the same reason that Labour MPs today are putting forward in their interventions and speeches—namely, that there are surplus places in other schools. These were schools that were not good; they were not exceptional, they were not acceptable to parents, and they were a long way away, but Labour councillors, determined to remove parental choice—[Interruption.] The shadow Secretary of State can chunter away on the Front Bench, but this is about parental choice. I have met many angry parents, and having had the biggest swing in the last general election in the south-west, I can assure him that a lot of that was driven by very angry people who were denied the basic right of parental choice in terms of schools.

Continuously, the Labour Government and council sought to build schools after houses were in place, not as part of the infrastructure plan for new developments, because, they kept saying, there were spare places in other schools. That is absolute nonsense.

[Heidi Alexander]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about parental choice. Does he accept that the constituents I described in my speech have zero parental choice? They may choose five or six schools to send their children to, but then be offered none of them. Does he not acknowledge this is a real issue in certain parts of the country?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the hon. Lady for that important intervention, and I can say, absolutely, that is where my anger is coming from. The hon. Lady is experiencing what I went through for 10 years in Swindon. Luckily, in my constituency now 90% of parents get their preferred choice; we are in the top quartile in that respect, and we have done very well as we have expanded, as we saw in the Public Accounts Committee. The underlying point here is that the last Labour Government robbed this country of 200,000 places in the middle of a baby boom. It is an absolute disgrace, and the hon. Lady’s residents are now paying the price. I will come back to this and address in detail what is being done about it because parents are absolutely furious.

We have always had finite resources, but we also had the ludicrous Building Schools for the Future costs. We said to local authorities, “You can go ahead and build schools, but I want every single bid to be unique. I want you to redesign the wheel every single time.” Each and every single bid was costing £5 million in order to reinvent the wheel—money that should have been going to front-line services. The bids took a long time to deliver, they were slow, they were complex and many of them failed, and that, again, caused huge delays in delivering new schools.

The last Labour Government, determined to make sure the current generation did not pay for infrastructure facilities, were obsessed with promoting private finance initiatives, as we covered extensively in the PAC. It was the only show in town. Anyone who wanted to build new schools had to have very expensive PFI schemes. The two flaws with that are that future generations will continue to pay for them—again, robbing money from front-line schools budgets—and that they are incredibly inflexible. As we have started to release additional money to expand the number of school places, we are finding that it is an absolute nightmare to renegotiate the schools with PFIs. Also, because they were privately built, they were often landlocked and space was very limited, even if a deal could have been thrashed out, at great expense to local rate payers.

I was staggered that developers were given the green light to press ahead with developments without providing these places, so time and again people were paying high premiums for new houses—they could see in the plans that a school should be built, but those schools would get further and further behind, creating yet more chaos.

Things are changing, but it takes time—when we have had such a shock to the system, with 200,000 places ripped out of the system, it takes time. I pay tribute to the Conservative council in Swindon, which I was proud to be part of for 10 years. We have expanded Orchid vale, St Francis, Abbey Meads and Haydonleigh primary schools and Even Swindon school; we have incorporated Penhill primary school in Swindon academy and completely rebuilt Seven Fields primary school; and the new Tadpole Farm school opened today for its first wave of new children. That is because our councillors have completely understood and supported parental choice. This Government have helped by doubling the amount of funding available for new school places, and my local authority has ensured that it has been at the front of the queue to get it. This goes hand in hand with other education funding, especially the fantastic decision to deliver fairer funding, from which my local authority has benefited greatly.

The free schools programme has been covered extensively by the Public Accounts Committee, which has been very selectively quoted by the shadow Minister, who clearly does not understand how the free school principle works. It is driven by parental demand. It is not about a top-down approach; it is about local communities having the ability to apply to have a school. The hon. Member for Lewisham East rightly highlighted the next challenges to secondary schools, and we are looking at that in the same way in my constituency. We are using the free school model, which involves parental demand and the need to get 900 signatures from local parents.

It is convenient for Labour MPs to ignore the fact that those involved have to prove that there are no surplus places in either good or exceptional schools within a natural catchment area. We are not building schools in areas where there are already good places. If there are surplus places in failing schools, parents have the right to an alternative. It is fine for those who can afford to choose a private school, but the vast majority of parents cannot do so, and neither they nor their children should be robbed of the opportunity to have the very best education. Let me remind the House that they get only one opportunity.

We have also started to be a lot tougher with developers, and as new infrastructure proposals are brought forward, schools are being built at the beginning of the process. An example is the Tadpole development in Swindon. Before the first house has been moved into, the Tadpole Farm primary school has already opened. It has been completed ahead of the development, rather than afterwards, when demand might have exceeded supply.

Given the failure of Building Schools for the Future, in which each and every school had to spend £5 million reinventing the wheel, we are rightly encouraging the use of modular school buildings. Schools can be the same right across the country; we can use set designs. We have reduced the cost of building a new primary school from £7 million to £3.5 million. The shadow Minister seems to find that amusing, but halving the cost of building a school means that we can build twice as many. That is elementary mathematics.

I am incredibly proud that we have achieved a figure of 90% for preferred choices, and I should like to offer MPs a piece of practical advice that they can take back to their constituencies. Whenever parents do not get their child into the school of their choice, they are incredibly angry. I know of no other issue that has such an effect; it is even more emotive than the threat of a library closure. We started to take schools admissions staff out to parents in the community in the weeks leading up to the parents having to fill in their three choices. For example, a parent might come in and say, “I live on Queen Elizabeth drive, and I would like my child to go to St Francis primary school.” The admissions staff would then be able to tell the parent that, given previous years’ data, that application would be unlikely to succeed. They would tell them still to apply, but also advise them on where the best available schools with surplus places were likely to be, so that they could put them down as their second and third choices. In that way, they would at least be defaulted to a school that they would deem acceptable. By going that extra mile before the applications went in, we were able to work with parents to ensure that alternatives were in place.

I am normally incredibly positive in my speeches. I try not to get involved in party politics, but given that the Opposition have tried to gloss over the fact that the last Labour Government stole 200,000 places in the midst of a baby boom and have the cheek to complain about the results of their actions, I felt that I had to contribute to the debate today, and I have done that.

Localism Bill

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Justin Tomlinson

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander]

I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman was listening. I said that I accepted pay transparency is a good thing at both the top and the bottom of an organisation. I accept that the previous Government could have brought forward measures to insist on pay transparency and I know that some local authorities were transparent. Many have independent remuneration panels that would take decisions about councillor pay. I know that my own local authority is certainly looking at having an independent panel to review executive pay. My point is that we should shine a light on abuses, but that this constant barrage is disproportionate.

These measures are, in my view, all about the Secretary of State getting a headline. Listening to him, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that if only 600-odd council chief executives were paid less, the national budget deficit would be dealt with. It will not. This is a complete red herring. Let us take the example of my local authority of Lewisham. The council’s overall pay bill is £280 million, which pays for thousands of staff. The top 32 jobs of senior management account for £4.1 million; the five executive directors and the chief executive cost the council in the region of £1 million. Yes, £1 million is a huge amount of money, but we have to take account of these individuals’ responsibilities and the repercussions they might face if they gave bad advice, took bad decisions or implemented bad management. When politicians make a bad decision, they might lose an election, but council officers doing the same could end up in prison.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

The responsibility of chief officers has not changed. The last Government actively encouraged councils to be rewarded in inspections for being seen to pay high salaries, because that appeared to make the same officers better officers.