Universal Infant Free School Meals

Debate between James Gray and Steve Brine

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

Order. Interventions should be brief.

[Steve Brine]

We can go down this rabbit hole. The funding can be found up front, as it was for the free bus pass entitlement, but it can then tail away. It is a matter of whether it is sustained, as the hon. Member mentioned; that is the key point.

I have two other examples. A Winchester city centre school contacted me predicting a shortfall of about £4,000 in the financial year that we have just entered. A larger infant school told me of an £11,000 deficit on school meals last year. The head told me:

“This is having a significant impact on an already very pressured budget; we have an in-year deficit of around £25,000 this year and nearly half of that is caused by the infant school meals offer.”

That is not easy listening, but these are real figures from real schools and real headteachers in my patch.

To conclude the examples, one headteacher put it to me:

“My point is that Universal Free School Meals are not free. Parents believe they are. Therefore, quite rightly they opt for their children to have school meals. I know of schools who are now writing to their parents explaining the situation and asking them for a donation to cover the cost of their child’s meal. Personally, I do not want to be forced down this route. If the meals are advertised as free, then they should be free (there’s a clue in the name!).”

She concludes:

“When this Government policy came in, it was not meant to have a financial impact on schools and, indeed, it means that schools like ours will be forced to set a deficit budget and hence make staffing cuts.”

There is perhaps hope in the story. It is only right to report that, during my research for the debate, I heard from one school in my area—I do not doubt that there could be others—that is taking matters into its own hands and moving away from Hampshire County Council Catering Services, or H3CS, which is the main provider of food to Hampshire’s schools.

One school told me that it had made the switch to another provider where meals are

“better quality, with wider choice, and at a reasonable price for families.”

It tells me that the food is seasonal and locally and sustainably sourced, with zero single-use plastic. As MPs, we all know that when we go into our schools, the No. 1 issue that children want to talk to us about is plastics, the environment and sustainability, so it ticks lots of boxes. Yet 82% of Hampshire’s schools—mostly primary schools—use H3CS, despite support being available to move providers if that is what they want.

For some schoolchildren, the school meal will be their only hot meal that day. It might be their only meal that day. We know that the provision of good-quality food is key to pupils’ wellbeing and ensuring that they can fully engage in teaching and learning. We also know that school budgets are under pressure, but I hope that the Minister recognises from the examples I have given that there is an issue.

We must ensure that the provision of a good-quality meal does not need to be subsidised by funds intended to support core education. It is therefore essential that the rate is adjusted to reflect rising costs. Will the Minister update the House on that? Will he also update me on any moves afoot to reform school meal funding and simplify the equitable flow of money from Government to school kitchen? Lastly, what can the Government do to promote a more diverse, competitive marketplace in school food? What support does the Department provide to local authorities, and therefore headteachers, to make it easy for schools to switch when they deem a change is to the advantage of their setting?

I am grateful to those who contacted me ahead of the debate, especially the headteachers in Winchester and Chandler’s Ford. This aspect of school food is not much discussed in the House—I have not taken part in a debate on the issue, and I have been here for almost 13 years—so I am pleased to raise some of the issues brought to me through my constituency casework. I thank colleagues for their interventions and look forward to hearing from my good friend the excellent Schools Minister.

Early Years Educators

Debate between James Gray and Steve Brine

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

Before we start this afternoon’s proceedings, I remind Members that Mr Speaker enjoins us to wear our masks when we are not speaking, to maintain social distancing and to do all of those things that I know Members want to do anyhow.

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of early years educators.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Gray. Looking around me, I also see many friends and supporters of our early years sector. I thank them for taking time out of their schedules to come to debate this issue; I know that there are a lot of important competing issues in Parliament today.

I start with two declarations of interest. First, I am married to a hard-working early years educator, who will be arriving home very shortly to pick up the school run and then juggle all the different things that working mums do while working dads are in Parliament—or vice versa. Secondly, for the last couple of years it has been my pleasure to chair the all-party parliamentary group on childcare and early education; we held our annual general meeting in the last hour, actually. I want to extend my thanks to parliamentary colleagues who have supported our work over the last year and have committed to do so for the year ahead. I was somehow re-elected chairman of the group for the next year. I also thank many colleagues old and new who have agreed to serve as officers for the coming year: we have much to do.

This afternoon’s debate is timely. It rather wonderfully coincides with the all-party group’s annual childcare and early education week, which celebrates and promotes the hard work of our early years educators and sector. Our theme for this year is celebrating the role of the early years workforce as educators, which is what I wanted to place at the heart of my chairmanship of the group, and seeking to explore the challenges that the workforce faces and celebrate the good work that it does.

Last week, the all-party group held a forum for parents to share their experiences of early years educators and settings. It was chaired by the brilliant Professor Kathy Sylva of Oxford University. Professor Sylva is at this very moment providing an update to the meeting of our all-party group, which is being chaired in my absence by the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley). The session is being recorded, and I urge any colleagues who would like to catch up on it to follow our social media channels. Parents provided some incredible examples. I see this as an example of the very best work that we can do in Westminster, and I am sure that Professor Sylva will not mind me touching on some of the things that were said. One parent spoke about the empathy, patience and humour an early years educator shows when working with both her and her child, who has significant special educational needs. Another reminded us of the little freedoms that early years settings empower families to have. One lady said she occasionally has lunch with her partner; that may sound frivolous, but one the best things that we can do for our children is provide them with a loving, secure home environment—and making sure that mum and dad stay mum and dad is rather important, too. One phrase that touched me was from a parent discussing the key worker in their child’s early years setting, who said:

“Simply, we would be lost without these people. They are truly amazing.”

Of course, there are areas for development in the early years workforce as we strive for its continued betterment. At our forum, parents raised the issues of settings’ opening hours and, overwhelmingly, the need to ensure that early years educators are properly paid, a subject to which I will return.

I commend the Government for acting on this issue in the spending review. Following a meeting that my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) and I had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), he placed early years at the centre of some of his announcements in this area in the Budget. He quadrupled the funding for early years settings over the next three years. That was most welcome, and an important step towards shoring up a sector that has been heavily hit, it is fair to say, during the pandemic.

However, as I have said before, this is not just about money. The early years sector faces an existential crisis as settings are being forced to close, and the valued early years educators that we are talking about are then lost to other lines of work, often due to remuneration. Most worryingly of all, bright young prospects are put off a career as an early years educator. At a meeting of our all-party group in December, two apprentices spoke compellingly about their work with children under five. However, those brilliant talents were pursuing careers in social care and not in early years. Social care is an important vocation, but they are a great loss to the potential early years workforce of tomorrow, and we need them. So more must be done to draw the early years educators of tomorrow towards the profession, and not push them away.

NHS Pensions

Debate between James Gray and Steve Brine

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I add my congratulations to my good friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Sir Robert Syms), on securing the debate, kicking things off and so clearly setting out the challenge that we face. In recent weeks, we have worked as a tag team between Winchester and Poole— earlier this month I raised the issue in the Chamber during an urgent question on the NHS people plan, which is a logical place for the subject to sit, and he, obviously, is leading the debate today—and that is entirely appropriate given that we are relatively near constituency neighbours and that many of our constituents work in Winchester, Bournemouth, Poole and Southampton NHS trusts and do shared work across those trusts.

I must say that the debate should be responded to by a Minister from Her Majesty’s Treasury. That is no criticism of the excellent hospitals and workforce Minister, who until very recently I was honoured to call a ministerial colleague in the Department of Health and Social Care. This is the first debate being responded to by a Minister from the Department of Health and Social Care that I have spoken in since I left office. However, seeing as we have a Health and Social Care Minister here, I will focus my remarks on patient care, which my hon. Friend the Member for Poole has discussed.

Over the past few weeks, I have spoken on a number of occasions to the chief executive of Hampshire Hospitals NHS Trust, Alex Whitfield, and I have spoken either through her or directly to numerous consultants and senior clinicians about this challenge. I am aware how serious it is, both for the individuals adversely affected—as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and the hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones)—and for patient care and wellbeing, because the NHS is about its people if it is anything.

When I first spoke to my local trust about this, the chief executive told me that

“the pension situation is having a significant impact on our people”

in Winchester and Basingstoke, and:

“The NHS scheme is particularly affected by changes to the pension tax system relating to the Annual Allowance and the Life Time Allowance.”

She is not wrong when she says:

“These changes are complicated and for individuals in the NHS defined benefit pension scheme the implications are not at all transparent.”

That point was well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Poole. She says:

“As a result, individuals are receiving unexpected tax bills of tens of thousands of pounds. It particularly impacts on consultant doctors, senior nurses and managers. Individuals are making different decisions as a result of these bills.”

I will pause on that point, about the senior NHS staff on whom this is having an impact.

I was privileged to be part of a Department that, under the previous Secretary of State, who is now the Foreign Secretary, and under the current Secretary of State, has delivered a record funding settlement for the NHS—£20.5 billion a year. I saw that play out in Winchester a few weeks ago, when I opened the new emergency department of the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in the heart of the city. That is excellent news. In my opinion, the challenge for the NHS will not be too little money, as a result of the settlement and the excellent long-term plan, but having the right people, who can spend that money in the right way to deliver the patient care outcomes that we want. If we are losing senior people, we have a senior problem.

As well as speaking to the leadership at my local trust, I wanted to find out more from the horse’s mouth, so I asked members of the local clinical community to come forward with their own stories and, if I may, I shall put a few of them on the record. One consultant set the scene very clearly. He told me that the issue is the annual allowance pension tax taper, which I will come back to, and the inflexibility of the NHS pension, which is landing consultants with huge tax bills for doing extra work on top of their contracted hours. The consultant was clear—and I agree, not least as a former Health Minister—that that extra work keeps the NHS running in the face of ever increasing demand.

I was told that, in certain circumstances, the marginal tax rate on earnings for the extra work is greater than 100%, which means that senior doctors working in my local hospital are in effect having to pay to do extra work. They are some of the most committed individuals in public service in our country, and I have had the privilege of working closely with many of them, but that is taking things a bit too far. It is clearly not a sustainable situation and, now that the huge tax bills are landing on doorsteps, it is causing a huge change in the behaviour of consultants at all levels in my local trust.

Another consultant told me that she has been an NHS doctor for 19 years and has worked as a consultant in my local trust for the last seven. She is employed on a full-time contract, with additional out-of-hours cover. Moreover, she regularly covers additional lists and shifts that require cover, sometimes at very short notice. She could not have been clearer with me that she is happy to provide that cover in the interest of safe patient care, which is of course what this is all about, as everyone has said. However, she has now been hit with a £30,000 tax bill, and she tells me that the only way she can avoid regular large tax charges, which may be for tens of thousands of pounds a year and which of course are in addition to her not insignificant income tax payments, is seriously to reduce the hours that she works for the NHS and not to take on any additional duties. As has been said, that goes to the heart of the issue. The consultant fears, as does her MP, that that is the conclusion that many of her colleagues will be forced to accept.

Let me again give some facts from trust level. Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust recently ran a survey on the pension issue and received a healthy 2,500 responses. It is the case that 42% of all the respondents have reduced their work commitment; 20% have avoided promotion; and, critically, when the people were asked who might change working practices in the future, the figure goes up to 80%, including 33% considering early retirement and just over a quarter considering leaving the NHS altogether.

I have no doubt that the changes were introduced in good faith. They are aimed at top rate earners, as my hon. Friend the Member for Poole said, but in practice this has had a damaging effect on key people in the NHS, and if it is not sorted quickly, we will see that escalate further, and it will become harder and harder to retrieve the position. The suggestions put to me for fixing it include removing the annual allowance tapering. When I spoke during the urgent question earlier this month, a number of consultants from across my local trust and Poole and Southampton contacted me. They are pleased that the consultation, which I am sure my hon. Friend the Minister will say more about, is imminent, but what they fear from that is that the 50:50 fudge will just not work. We need wholesale reform, and the taper really does need to be scrapped.

In addition, I ask the Minister whether it is worth considering removal of the annual allowance taper for public sector workers. Of course, that is a decision not for him but for the Treasury and for whoever is inhabiting No. 10 in a few weeks’ time—I may be well placed to influence that, or I may be not at all placed. The point is this. If we want to make the NHS a great place to work, why not provide a tax benefit to working for the public sector—one of the biggest employers in the world? That is food for thought.

Let me finish in the same way as I have tried to make the whole of my contribution this morning—with a real-life example from Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust of what we are seeing at trust level. In Winchester, like everywhere else and as I have set out, the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, one of the three hospitals in the trust, relies on many doctors and other senior staff doing additional sessions over and above their timetabled work in order to fill gaps in the medical workforce. Locally, we have seen that especially in radiology, where the additional sessions are used for radiologists to review scans and write the reports about what they see. The reporting of scans is clearly required so that patients can be told what the scan shows and clinical staff can work with patients on the most appropriate treatment.

My good friend from the Scottish National party, the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), whom we will hear from shortly, and I spent many hours in this Chamber when I was the Minister with responsibility for cancer, and I was extremely proud to get the 75% stage 1 or 2 diagnosis ambition into the long-term plan, as announced by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. That is critical: early diagnosis is cancer’s magic key, as has been said by me and others many times in this Chamber. If we are to get anywhere near realising that ambition, we have to have a functioning, improved and expanded radiology service. Any reduction in radiology and the diagnosis stage will have an adverse impact and make that ambition unattainable, in my opinion. I am reliably told by my local trust that it has seen the backlog of scans waiting to be reported growing each week over the last few months. That concerns me greatly. It is of course just one department—it is an area that I know a little about—but it is a sobering example and one that we simply cannot ignore.

I shall finish by saying that we must act. I have so much respect for this Minister, but we need the Treasury to take this issue seriously and we need the next Prime Minister to act. If we do not, it will only get worse. We need to grip it, and we need to grip it fast.

[James Gray (in the Chair)]

Despite his late arrival to the debate, I call Mr Paul Sweeney.

House of Lords Reform Bill

Debate between James Gray and Steve Brine

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt). I listened carefully to the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech this afternoon—I listened dutifully and did not intervene. He seems to have become the Andy Murray of this House; he has gone from being a set up and at break point two years ago to being in deep trouble in the fourth set this afternoon. I suggest that part of the reason is that his arguments seem to centre on the point that we do not want to spend a huge amount of Government time on the Bill and just need to get on with it and get it through—we basically just need to agree with Nick. However, from what I have heard over the last few hours, very few of the Members who have spoken so far seem to agree with Nick, but there is still time and, of course, there is tomorrow.

Many Members have said that the Government should not be spending time on this issue right now and that no one cares about Lords reform, but I do not entirely agree. Governments multi-task all the time, so the Bill takes its place alongside many others, and that is the choice of Ministers this time. I also do not think that it is fair to say that no one cares about Lords reform. The truth is that those who care about it do so passionately. I suspect that they come predominantly from one political tradition, but that does not make their views any less valid, and I certainly do not dismiss them. I have received a huge number of e-mails from constituents over the past few weeks putting both sides of the argument, and I do not dismiss any of their points.

I agree with what so many Members have said today, but let me also state from the outset that I believe in the reform of Parliament, including the House of Lords. I stand by the manifesto commitment I stood on two years ago to work to build a consensus and deeply regret that we have been unable to do so.

[Mr Gray]

My hon. Friend alleges that no consensus has been achieved, but surely the real feeling in this afternoon’s debate shows that there is a strong consensus that the Bill should be consigned to the dustbin of history?

[Steve Brine]

Although it is tempting to agree with my hon. Friend, there is quite a long way to go on Second Reading, but I certainly feel that there are straws in the wind.

I think that there is plenty we can do to reform the other place. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) touched on a number of things we could do without abolishing the House of Lords or jamming up Parliament for months, if not years, with a clumsy Bill that seems to get worse the more times I read it.

To be blunt, I think that we are approaching the whole business the wrong way round. Reform of Parliament should start with a simple question: what do we want this House and the other place to do? I think that we want a second Chamber that acts as a revising Chamber, largely free from the politics of the first Chamber and, ultimately, always subservient to it. In other words, purely with regard to the roles performed and the way we make the laws of this land, I think that we have it about right in the United Kingdom. We can argue until the cows come home, and no doubt until they go out again, about who should sit in this bicameral Parliament but, when it come to the system of checks and balances on the Government of the day, I think that most of the sensible people I represent would say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Let me turn to who sits in the upper House. What is proposed in the Bill is a host of senators—let us call them that for now—who would sit for an unrepeatable term of 15 years. From what I have heard so far this afternoon, that seems to be at the heart of the concerns right across this House. The record will show that I asked the Deputy Prime Minister in this House on 20 March whether he thought that

“a 15-year senator who is unable to stand for re-election is more or less accountable than a current Member of the other place”.—[Official Report, 20 March 2012; Vol. 542, c. 639.]

I have to say that the answer I received was hardly convincing. The current Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde, helped greatly when he told the BBC recently:

“They’re not accountable… there will be no power of de-selection. Once they’re there, they’re there for 15 years.”

I accept that it is absolutely the case that under current rules, without the power of recall, Members of this House could leave the election night count, jump in a cab and go to Heathrow, take a flight direct to Barbados, sit on a deckchair on a white sandy beach for five years and that decision would catch up with them only if ultimately they sought re-election to this place at the next general election. I take that seriously. The point is that I am accountable to the people of Winchester only if or when I seek re-election to this place. A guaranteed job on £300 a day, with zero accountability—why on earth are we even considering creating such a gravy train? If it were not so serious, it would be funny.