Finance Bill

Jonathan Brash Excerpts

Committee of the whole House
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. I will come to exactly where the money to meet the costs will come from. We have talked about revenue costs, and the policy paper from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs covers that, but what about capital costs? What if whole new places need to be created? What if entire new year groups need to be created—or even entire new schools in some cities or local authority areas? Where is the allowance for the capital costs? Then there is, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, the question of how the costs will be met. The money follows the pupil, so a school will be reimbursed for any pupil who presents there—but after the census date, so it depends on exactly when the pupil turns up—but the question is: from where does the money come? Does it come out of central Treasury coffers, or will the Department for Education be told, “No, we have given you your annual budget, so if more children come into the state sector, you must fund them”?

Will councils be reimbursed additionally if more children come out of independent schools and get EHCPs, or will they also be told that they have to absorb the cost of that, and meet it from their already stretched budgets? Then there are the indirect costs, as trade unions have pointed out, such as teachers being made redundant and, because it is not the turn of the academic year, potentially dropping out of the profession altogether.

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman has spoken eloquently and at great length about the needs of children with special educational needs. Does he regret the state of special educational needs provision in this country, and that some people feel that they have to pay because they cannot otherwise get the service that they would like for their children? Does he regret that legacy of the previous Government?

[Damian Hinds]

Look, I want every child to have the best education available to them. When I was working at the Department for Education, I regarded it as part of my job to ensure that nobody thought, “I have to send my children to a private school”—but I would not have denied them the choice. State school improvement over that time will be one of the things that drove the figure I mentioned from 7% to 6%. A huge amount of additional money is going into high needs. The hon. Member for Dartford (Jim Dickson) shakes his head, but it is true; that is in the Treasury’s own figures. It is also true that demand has greatly increased. There is much more to do to ensure that we have the high-needs system and resourcing that we all want.

On the equalities impacts, it may surprise some people to learn that Independent Schools Council census figures show that the proportion of children from ethnic minorities, and, as we have been discussing, the proportion of children with special educational needs, is higher at independent schools than in the state sector. However, the really big equalities issue relates to faith. I am pleased that the Treasury seems to have dropped its earlier assertion that people of faith will not be disproportionately affected by the measures. That assertion can only have been based on the notion that most children of a religious faith are in state education anyway, and are mostly Catholic or Church of England and in denominational or non-denominational schools. However, we cannot pretend for a moment that families of the Haredi Jewish community, or who have children in Muslim independent schools, or who are of certain Christian traditions, will not be affected more than others.

To come to a close, this is a bad policy overall. Education is a public good that simply should not be taxed. That principle is observed by Governments of the left and right all but universally, right across the world. In this country, in education, there is no tax break; in fact, families whose children go to independent school save the state money. Independent schools cater for some needs, such as those met through the music and dance scheme and the needs of small faith groups, that the state sector simply does not. In any case, parents are entitled to choose what they think will be right for their child, whatever the reason.

This measure does not even do what we think gets Labour MPs excited about it. It does not hit its target, because not every parent with a child at a private school is rich, and believe it or not, in some of those schools, including some of the fee-paying Muslim or Jewish Haredi schools I mentioned, the cost of a place is less than the average cost at a state school. Here is the bigger point: there are plenty of parents with children at state schools who are wealthy. If Labour Members really wanted to soak the rich, to tax the wealthy, there are more efficient ways of doing so—and more honest ways of doing so.

Most importantly of all, this policy will have an adverse effect on state education, especially in places where secondary schools are already or almost full. Labour challenges us to say whose side we are on—do we stand with the 94%, or with the 6%? We refuse to choose, because they are all children. There is no need to set one part of our education system against the other, and this tax will be bad for both.