Schools White Paper

Debate between John Redwood and Nadhim Zahawi

Monday 28th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Lady is right to say that there are many pressures on schools at the moment. The funding we secured at the spending review was £7 billion, with much of it—£4 billion—frontloaded to this year and next year. Energy costs are rising—they are 1.4% of the schools budget. A big part of the budget is obviously wages. We are keeping an eye on what is happening to energy costs in schools. On SEND, we have put in an additional £1 billion, so the total budget now stands at £9.1 billion, plus an additional £2.6 billion to ensure that we deliver the specialist provision that we need in the system, because there has been a lack of confidence among parents as to whether their child will get the right provision. Today’s White Paper supports mainstream schools to all be great SEND schools as well.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

How will the poorly performing schools get the brilliant teachers and better professional development that the Secretary of State rightly wants, because that is what they need?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We endowed the Education Endowment Foundation when the coalition Government came into office, and I have just announced a further endowment for the next 10 years. It has evidenced the qualifications and quality of teacher training that are required, whether in the early careers framework, initial teacher training or later in life in professional development, and we are following that evidence and scaling up half a million teacher training opportunities. That has never been attempted, certainly in my time in Parliament; it is a huge scale-up of teacher training and that is what we will deliver.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between John Redwood and Nadhim Zahawi

Tuesday 31st January 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

People in the UK voted to take back control. They voted to take back control of their laws, their borders and their money. They showed great bravery, a huge passion for democracy and enormous engagement with the many complex issues that were put before them by the two campaigns. They voted by a majority to leave, despite being told that that course would be fraught with danger. They were told that the EU would bully us on the way out, and their answer was, “We will stand up to the bullies.” They were told that the economy would immediately be badly damaged and plunged into a recession this winter; they said that they did not believe the experts. Fortunately, they were right and the experts were wrong.

Now is the time for all of us here to do the difficult task of speaking up for those many constituents who did agree with us and those many constituents who did not. Both sides come together around two central propositions. The first is that we are all democrats. Everyone who is fair-minded knows, in the words of the Government leaflet that was sent to every household, that the people made the decision. That was our offer. That was what our Parliament voted to provide, and that is what the people expect. They also expect us to be greatly respectful of each other’s views. In a democracy, people do not automatically change their view when they have lost the argument and the vote. It is incumbent on those of us on the majority side to listen carefully and to do all that we can to ensure that the genuine worries as well as the inaccurate worries of the remain side can be handled. We all want economic success. Many of us believe that we can deliver that economic success by leaving. Many remain voters will be relieved and will come our way if we can show, in a good spirit, that that is exactly what we will do.

[Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that our interlocutors on the other side are listening to and watching this debate very carefully and that sending mixed messages would be against the national interest of this country if we want to get a good deal for both the 52% and the 48%?

[John Redwood]

Indeed. I believe in free speech, but it is in the national interest that we share our worst doubts privately and make a strong presentation to our former partners in the European Union. I believe that business now wants us to do that. The message from business now is, “Get on with it!” It accepts the verdict.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between John Redwood and Nadhim Zahawi

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Redwood]

I think that we now need to be positive, and I want to try to engage the Labour party in the process. I understand that the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) used to work at the Bank of England, and we may have learnt from her speech why it is a good thing that her advice is no longer available to the Bank; I do not think that she would have helped to get us out of the mess. From now on, however, we need to ask ourselves what we should do about banking regulations, because I do not believe that the current system is right. It is all very well for us to say that it was wrong under the previous Government, as it clearly was, but it is our duty now to try to ensure that we do a better job. Unless we change the system, it will not be much better under the present Government.

I believe, and I think Treasury Ministers believe, that we should now have counter-cyclical rather than pro-cyclical regulation. What does that mean? It means that when times are tough and we are in recession, we should allow banks to lend more money on easier terms, and when times are really good—as in 2006-07—we should rein in the banks and say, “You cannot go on lending like this.” In the immortal words of the Governor of the Bank of England, we should remove the punchbowl before the party has everyone blind drunk. It is a pity that we did not do that in 2007.

Some of my critics say to me, “That is all very well, but how do we know where we are in the cycle?” We can never be sure where we are in the cycle, but I should have thought that it was fairly easy at the moment to agree that we are somewhere near the bottom of it. Heaven help us if this is not the bottom of it. I do not believe that all the figures in the Red Book about growth from this point are wrong, and I do not believe that all the independent forecasters are wrong. I think it quite likely that there will be some growth, but not as much as I would like and not as much as we will need.

The main reason that there will not be enough growth is that we do not have easy enough money for the private sector to refuel the recovery. The overall money supply figures are pretty dire, and we should bear in mind how much of the money is circulated around the system from the Bank of England to the Treasury to the spending Departments. Labour left a perfectly good money machine to put relatively low-cost money into the public sector, but at the cost of the private sector, which—particularly small and medium-sized enterprises—is still shivering in a world in which there is not enough sensible credit.

I do not want to stoke a new unsustainable boom, but there must be a judgment about whether the recovery is too fast or too slow, too hot or too cold. At present, it is most people’s judgment that in the private sector is too cold. It is not going quickly enough, and it is not easy enough. We need to make it easier for ordinary, run-of-the-mill entrepreneurs to succeed. It should not be necessary to be a complete genius who is prepared to take on all the odds in order to establish a company. We want people to be able to do that who have reasonable skills and do not want to have to fight the jungle all the time.

[Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. He has heard me speak passionately about start-ups, and I was pleased that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor provided some incentives for them today, but given the reality of where we are today in the economy, the recovery will be fuelled less by start-ups than by medium-sized businesses that are already exporting to countries such as China and Brazil, where our record is currently abysmal. We export more to Ireland than to those countries. It is those type of companies that have a more mature business that are not investing at present. They are not retrenching, but they are not investing. Banks need to send a message to them that there is money available to them to make that investment and to grow their business from medium to large.

[Mr Redwood]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I agree exactly with what he said.

My conclusion on this is that to promote a proper recovery the Government need to have words with their financial regulators to say that at this stage of the cycle they should not be demanding more cash and capital from here. The banks are now perfectly solvent. They are perfectly liquid; they are lending huge sums of money to the Government, and that counts as liquid resources because they hold it in the form of Government bonds and Treasury bills. Job done, therefore, but by all means start to tighten things again in a year or two if we have a really good recovery going on and if credit is beginning to build up.

The economy is still anaemic, however; it is still short of credit. It does not have the oomph behind it that we need, and the answer lies in the banks. So my plea to the Chancellor is that in order to make his strategy successful he needs to do something about the way we approach banks, credit and money supply in this country.

The overall Budget strategy takes the risk of doing rather more by tax and rather less by public spending reductions than the Chancellor himself was suggesting when he first looked at this problem, but I wish it well. It is very important for all of us that it works. Every Member in this House wants their constituents to have more chance of a decent job, more chance of getting off benefit if they are unemployed, and more chance of keeping good-quality schools and hospitals.

We have seen what happens in extreme situations in countries that did not take their deficit seriously. They not only end up with a worse economy; they end up with much bigger slashes in public services because they literally run out of money. The previous Government very helpfully advised us that all the money had gone. We know where it went and who took it. The Red Book today gives a pathway to get back from that, so I hope that we will get behind it and try to make it work.