Coeliac Disease and Prescriptions

Debate between Kevin Foster and David Mowat

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Foster]

The Minister is making valid point about supermarkets. Will he suggest to CCGs such as Torbay in south Devon that there is a halfway house and that instead of scrapping the prescription of gluten-free products they could provide vouchers that could be taken to a local supermarket?

[David Mowat]

That is an interesting idea, which I will consider, but I am not briefed to talk about it. The position of most Members on this issue is very clear from the tone of this debate and the points being made, and we will respond to that.

School Funding

Debate between Kevin Foster and David Mowat

Thursday 5th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[David Mowat]

We are doing our best for my hon. Friend’s nephew and niece.

[Kevin Foster]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[David Mowat]

Let me just answer the question. Actually, I want to make one further point to the Minister. I support free schools, and I support a number of our initiatives, including academy consolidation, studio schools, university technical colleges, free school dinners and the pupil premium. They are all good things, yet for my community in Warrington, they are all second-tier issues compared with funding. The situation is not acceptable. Some of these things are almost like a displacement activity for Ministers. What matters to my community is that the Government put a fair funding formula in place, rather than just acknowledging the problem again or saying, “We know it’s wrong, but it’s too hard to fix.” We need to get on with it.

What the Government do is produce league tables. There is a sort of covenant: the Government fund, the schools have to educate, and league tables exist to compare how they are getting on. At some point, unless funding is done fairly, league tables will break down. Maybe there should be funding-adjusted league tables. My hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey) talked about the two S’s, Southwark and Somerset. My two are Westminster and Warrington, where the same issue exists—a £2,000 discrepancy. In the correction that took place with the £390 million, oddly, Westminster got more than Warrington, for reasons that were opaque and hard to explain.

Yet there is a way forward. The F40 has set out the criteria for a new formula in a very good paper: age weighting, deprivation, special educational needs, proportion of children whose first language is not English and sparsity. As I said, if as the result of all that Warrington ended up getting £2,000 less than Tower Hamlets, I would be content, because I could explain to my headteachers the reasons why they are having to cut back and make teaching assistants and teachers redundant. At the moment, I cannot do that, and it really is not good enough.

Here is where I give the Minister some encouragement. I do not expect everything to be fixed immediately once a formula is introduced, but the direction of travel must be set. F40 suggested that it should happen over three years, although it could be longer. The direction of travel could take three, five or even 10 years to unwind. We have been talking about it for an awfully long time; it has been an issue for 20 years. However, it is not acceptable for us not even to take the first step of setting up an audit trail so that we can explain to our headteachers why schools in my constituency, such as Bridgewater and St Monica’s, are under huge pressure, partly due to centrally organised salary adjustments.

If, after the consultation—which will apparently be next year, so we will be a year into this Parliament before it ends—the Minister comes back with an approach that means it takes longer than three years to fix the problem, I will not necessarily be upset, but I want the first step to be taken, so that we do not continue to acknowledge the problem while doing nothing. We are talking about the life chances of many children.