Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Justine Greening and Neil Parish

Monday 20th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

15. What steps her Department is taking to support the expansion of grammar schools.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Justine Greening)]

Under our national funding proposals, more money will follow students, particularly to schools that are educating pupils who are disadvantaged and from lower-income families. On the roll of one of the schools my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) has highlighted, 25% of the young people are on free school meals, whereas the proportion in the other school is less than 1%. That accounts for the majority of the difference.

[Justine Greening]

As my hon. Friend points out, I do not get to write my own cheques and I have to live within my departmental budget. We are looking carefully at how to get the fair funding approach right. I agree that we have to make sure that similar children facing similar challenges and with similar needs are consistently funded, wherever in the UK they live, and of course we want to support successful schools.

[Neil Parish]

Colyton Grammar School in my constituency has a great headteacher, wonderful staff and pupils with huge levels of attainment. The school would very much like to expand. How can the Secretary of State help it to expand more than it can at the moment?

[Justine Greening]

To build on my previous point, the consultation, “Schools that work for everyone”, also covered our proposals to allow expanding existing selective schools to be able to offer more choice to parents and our proposals to increase the number of school places at good and outstanding schools. We will make available dedicated funding of up to £50 million a year to support those schools to expand.

M5 Motorway Accident

Debate between Justine Greening and Neil Parish

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Lady is right to point out that the Highways Agency must manage risks. The crash barriers are on the side of that particular stretch of motorway because there is a steep bank. She raises the issue of the compression of vehicles, but alternatively, had the barrier not been there, the risk is that vehicles would have gone down the bank. Nevertheless, the police were quite careful to ensure that they looked around the banks to see whether there were any injured people or fatalities who were not on the motorway itself. The Highways Agency takes a risk-based approach to such things, which is what it had done on that particular stretch of motorway.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

I agree with the whole House on our heartfelt sympathy for those who lost loved ones in this absolutely terrible crash. I congratulate the emergency services, which were there within four minutes, which is an excellent response. As other hon. Members have said, the M5 is the great arterial road into the south-west. However, we need to look not only at the M5, but at the A30 and A303, because they are also major roads into the west country.

[Justine Greening]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments. It is important that we look across the road network to ensure that roads are maintained safely. As I have said, it is important that we wait for the police to go through their investigation into this particular incident, which could take some weeks, before we can draw conclusions on any actions that need to be taken.

Court of Auditors 2009 Report

Debate between Justine Greening and Neil Parish

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Gentleman is right that in some areas things are getting worse, but in others they are getting better. The problem is that there is no clear pace of improvement at a rate that will make a big enough difference fast enough. The key challenge that we have to debate tonight and that the Government are keen to push within Europe is how to get that step change. What will it take to make sure that core financial management of EU funds is further up the agenda in the European Union than it has been? I will discuss later how to manage that more effectively.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

There is one way: we could say to the EU, “If you don’t balance your books, we won’t pay our contributions.” Will the Government consider taking that position?

[Justine Greening]

My hon. Friend echoes a sentiment that many people in the country will feel. Clearly, we have a legal obligation in terms of our payments to the EU budget, but the challenge is sorting out the underlying problem and even doing what he suggests would not do that. We have to address the underlying problem now, and there are ways in which we can do that.

If I can make a little progress, I shall provide some context and talk about the steps that we are taking and are planning to take. It is important to have this debate, because the views of Members across the House and their constituents on the budget are key in pointing out how important this matter is not only for the UK Government but to represent in Europe, which we plan to do. To give some background, the European Court of Auditors report on the 2009 EU budget was published on 9 November 2010. As hon. Members will know, at that time the Government were taking extremely tough decisions domestically, having just published the spending review that was our plan to deal with the largest peacetime deficit in British history. At home, we are taking the steps needed to cut the deficit and start tackling our debt. Actually, the experience is the same for most people and most countries across Europe—member states bringing their deficits under control by cutting spending.