Department for Education

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and it is of course the local authorities that get the blame for not delivering the goods, even though we have not been giving them the money to do so in certain cases. There are also huge differentials in the way in which those local authorities use their money.

On children’s social care, I would like to hear more about sufficiency funding, which the Chair of the Education Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), mentioned, and also about a 10-year plan. Children’s most important years are the ones before they go to school—those years will shape their careers in school and beyond more than anything else—so, for goodness’ sake, if we cannot have a 10-year plan for the social care needs of our children as they grow up, what can we have one for?

I am not going to have time to talk about schools today—I shall have to reserve those comments for the debate on Monday—but I just want to make the point that all the ongoing cost pressures on schools are going to be compounded by the recent directive from the Department for Education that was sent to schools on 6 February recommending a 2% pay rise for teachers this year. That is fine, but the Department’s report stated that

“a pay increase for teachers of 2%, in line with forecast inflation, is affordable within the overall funding available to schools for 2019 to 2020, without placing further pressure on school budgets.”

I am afraid that that is just not the case. School budgets are under huge pressure, certainly in my constituency and elsewhere in West Sussex, where we have been at the bottom of the pile for funding for many years. The cumulative effect of that underfunding means that there is no fat left to cut. All the savings have been made, so even a 2% increase in teachers’ pay, if it is to be paid for by the schools, will have enormous impacts on those school budgets’ ability to provide all the other services, which I will go into in detail in the debate on Monday.

On children’s services, a report commissioned by Action for Children, the National Children’s Bureau, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Children’s Society and Barnardo’s has come out today, and it confirms what we all know about the huge shortfall in funding for children’s social care. That shortfall was also identified in the work that the all-party parliamentary group on children did in the report “Storing Up Trouble” that we produced last year. It is estimated that there will be a £3 billion funding gap by 2025. One of the alarming observations in today’s report is that spending on early intervention services for children and young people fell from £3.7 billion to £1.9 billion between 2010-11 and 2017-18. That is a 49% decrease in spending on early intervention. At the same time, local authority spending on late intervention services for children and young people has risen from £5.9 billion to £6.7 billion—a 12% increase.

This is not rocket science. If we do not spend early to prevent the problems from happening to these children, we will pay for it later. We will pay for it socially—most importantly—and also financially. It is such a false economy not to do more in those early years around perinatal mental health, around child neglect and around making children ready for school, for growing up and for society generally. Some of the biggest falls in spending have been in some of the most deprived authorities in the country, where the impact can be greater because the other support services, including family support services, are not available to help those children.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I have been in this House for eight and a half years. When I retired as deputy leader of Gateshead Council, it had an annual revenue account of £310 million, but now, eight and a half years later, it is down to £200 million despite the huge growth needs built into the system in Gateshead.

[Tim Loughton]

Well, I have been here for 22 years, and I have also seen a thing or two.

When I was a Minister at the Department for Education, we came up with the early intervention budget because it was the right thing to do on so many fronts. It alarms me that early intervention is seen as a luxury add-on rather than an essential part of everything that we should be doing for our children, and we should be planning for it over the long term. That is why, for all the reasons I have set out, I am pleased to see—I know that the Minister for Children supports this work—the inter-ministerial working party led by the Leader of the House trying to co-ordinate early years activities across Government.

Turning to schools, the big figures that we talk about in these reports—the big percentage increases—are meaningless until we translate them into their impact on the frontline. I have spent the past couple of years getting all the heads from all the schools in my constituency and all the chairs of governors together to ask them about the impact of funding challenges on their schools. I asked not what might happen, but what is happening now. I wrote a seven-page letter to the Secretary of State for Education with the findings from all those schools, which included impacts as a result of not replacing staff or replacing them with less expensive and therefore less qualified staff, of having to remove things from the curriculum, and of doing away with out-of-school visits. Alarmingly, counselling services have also been reduced—almost to zero in some cases—at a time when we all know the effect of mental health stresses on the younger generation. The Government have recognised that, and work is ongoing, but if people are not on hand in schools to help with the stresses and strains that lead to mental health problems, that will just store up expensive problems, both financially and socially, for children in those schools.

We have been generous and have planned for the long term in the national health service, and it is essential not to neglect early long-term planning in a preventive way for our babies, toddlers, children and young people. It is a complete false economy not to be doing that. While I appreciate the additional money that the Government have been putting in, I am afraid that the estimates that we are looking at today, when they are factored down to the impact that they will have in authorities such as mine in West Sussex, which has had severe underfunding for so many years, will have a detrimental effect on the life chances of our children. Frankly, we have to do better, or we will be picking up a much more expensive and complicated bill further down the line.