School Funding: Gloucestershire

Debate between Laurence Robertson and David Drew

Wednesday 30th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr Drew]

There is a need to raise this issue for all our colleagues, which is what I am trying to do. I agree; it is not a party political issue, but crosses the spectrum, and we must all work together to do something. I am sure the Minister will have something to say about that in a minute.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way. Is not one of the problems the fact that Gloucestershire is viewed as being a very rich county, but, although there certainly are areas of affluence, there are many that have special needs and deprivation? We need only look at the very different reading levels between schools even within one constituency. It seems to me that the current formulas do not take that properly into account.

[Dr Drew]

I agree; we know our county has areas of deprivation, which I will touch on. The new national funding formula suggests that about half of Gloucestershire’s 40 secondary schools will receive the minimum per pupil spend of £4,600 in 2019-20 and then £4,800 in 2020-21. We are not really catching up. That does not take into account the broad spectrum of need across our county.

I will move on to the acute problem of SEND. Gloucestershire has a special needs crisis; I do not use that word in anything other than its genuine definition. Gloucestershire’s predicted overspend on SEND is now set to be £4.7 million, up from £3.3 million last year. The number of children with education, health and care plans in Gloucestershire has almost doubled since 2015. The Government’s announcement in December of extra funding for SEND resulted in £1.35 million for Gloucestershire and led the council to withdraw its request to transfer funds from the schools block into high needs, which had led to some controversy, as my Conservative colleagues will know.

However, that was only a sticking-plaster; it is not a long-term strategy for addressing high needs overspend. As Gloucestershire County Council’s lead education officer, Stewart King, told the schools forum in January, the overspend puts Gloucestershire in

“a very serious and challenging position”.

GCC has also now reduced the financial support it provides for individual children with SEND. Schools are forced to pick up the financial burden of SEND support and are using general funds to meet additional needs, or are unable to meet the need of individual children. Even the Conservative-run county council has identified the problem. Councillor Richard Boyles, in letters that I have now received, identifies how much of a problem this is, and the council continues to ask us as MPs to lobby for a fairer funding formula. The impact of this funding crisis is clear: increased class sizes; a reduction in the number of teaching assistants; less support for SEND students; and a reduced curriculum. Many schools will also not be able to implement the full 3.5% pay rise, or if they are able to, they will have to make redundancies.

The pressure on places and rising class sizes, particularly in special schools, is where the acute need is most felt, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) said. We have to be sympathetic to that. However, there is also an issue with inclusivity, with schools that have taken the most vulnerable children facing the most difficult consequences, because we do not fund those children. High numbers of SEND children are hidden in the system.

The reality, as we now know, is that the majority of our primary schools are likely to face an in-year deficit. Quite simply, Minister, the schools do not have enough money. We can argue about the distribution issue, but at the moment the acute problem is that we need more money, particularly for SEND education.

Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Debate between Laurence Robertson and David Drew

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered housing, planning and the green belt.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this debate and the Minister for attending. He is a new Minister, so I absolve him of all blame, and I wish him well in his new role. I look forward to working with him constructively on the issues that I am about to raise. I also thank the 33 hon. Members who supported me in obtaining this debate. It demonstrates how much interest there is in the subject.

I have chosen three topics for debate: housing, planning and the green belt. I have long had an interest in these areas—protecting the countryside was one of my motivations for entering Parliament in the first place—but my interest and concern have been heightened by my constituency experiences, so although this debate is not about my area entirely, I will seek to offer examples from Tewkesbury to illustrate my points. I know that other hon. Members will feel free to do similarly.

As with most things in life, we must always seek to find a balance. In this instance, we must ensure that everyone has a decent home to live in, while also recognising that we are not the owners but merely the custodians of the countryside, who have a duty to pass it on intact so that future generations can enjoy all that it has to afford in the same way as past generations. I fear, however, that we are in danger of failing to achieve that balance.

Let me begin with housing. This Government, like previous Governments, have committed themselves to building more houses to address the so-called housing crisis, and, as reflected in the name of the most recent housing White Paper, to fix the “broken housing market”. I want to challenge, or at least put in context, the Government’s characterisation of this crisis. I also want to ask whether it is accepted that what is happening in London, and possibly in the wider south-east, is somewhat different from what is happening in many other parts of the country.

I am concerned about what seems to be a belief that supply is the sole answer to the so-called housing crisis. I believe that there are several factors at play, and I shall say more about that later. I would argue that the issue is not the availability of housing as such, but its affordability. Even with that in mind, however, I am not convinced that increasing supply will substantially drive down costs. I have done some research on the matter. According to evidence given to the Redfern review by Oxford Economics, supply is unlikely to bring house prices down except in the very long term. Even boosting UK housing supply to 310,000 homes per annum brings only a 5% fall in the baseline forecast of house prices.

I think that we need to look beyond the issue of building more houses to what sort of houses we are building. As I will explain later, the planning system is producing four and five-bedroom houses, which are often out of the price range of first-time buyers, when what we need are two-bedroom houses, bungalows for older people and housing that is accessible to people with disabilities.

There is no doubt that housing in London is very expensive, and London has that in common with major cities across the world. Hotels are also expensive in London, as they are in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and many other international cities. However, that is not necessarily because there is a shortage of houses or hotels. It could be said that the UK would be better served not by attracting more and more people to live and work in London, but by spreading the wealth-creating sector and financial opportunities across the country rather than allowing London to act as a magnet. Members should not get me wrong—London is a fantastic city, probably the greatest city in the world, and I want to do nothing to diminish its status—but we should not think that what is happening in London must automatically shape policies across the UK, because sometimes the problems are different.

The Government seem to be describing the housing situation as broken and in crisis on the basis of their analysis of the fall in property ownership among young people, and there has indeed been such a fall. Home ownership among 25 to 34-year-olds has fallen from 59% just over a decade ago to 37% today. Moreover, house building has fallen by 40% since the 1980s. I recognise that there are problems in the housing market, but, again, to reduce them to an issue of supply is an over-simplification.

My analysis suggests that the falls in ownership and house building have in large part been caused by the crash in 2007-08 and the financial fallout from it. Before 2007, we were living in an artificial financial boom. Personal debt was increasing, and some companies were offering applicants mortgages that were worth up to 125% of the value of the houses that they were seeking to buy. Self-certification of income also still existed. All that changed with the crash. Mortgage applicants then had to provide documentary evidence of income, and, while the fall in interest rates should have helped buyers, the affordability of a house was assessed not at the prevailing mortgage rate at the time, but at an assumed rate that would be reached should interest rates be increased.

For example, at the moment the standard mortgage rate is 4.5% and there are many better offers than that available, but applicants are assessed on the basis of whether they could afford to pay their mortgages if rates reached 6% or 6.5%. As was the case 40 years ago, significant deposits are now required by lenders before they will release the mortgage. That has brought about a very significant change.

I am not saying that the Government’s insistence on stronger capital bases for banks is a bad thing; nor is such a requirement a tightening up of lending practice. What I am saying is that it has had a significant impact on the ability of young people to buy their first houses. The fall in ownership, particularly among young people, and the fall in the number of new constructions did not come about because of a change in planning guidance in 2007-08, because there was no such change. These falls came about because of the change in the financial position of banks and building societies. We therefore have to be careful that we do not respond to a change in lending practice with an easing of planning regulation.

We also need to recognise that at the same time as describing the housing market as in crisis and broken, the Government have set up an inquiry into why developers land bank, which is something of a contradictory position. Estimates suggest that 320,000 homes granted planning permission over the past five years have not been built. In my constituency, I have seen developers having to obtain an extension to their planning permission because they have reached the end of the statutory five-year period before starting to build. Developers will not deny themselves the profits that would come from building on land for which they have planning permission without good reason, so perhaps we ought to consider that they might be failing to develop the land because there is not quite the demand for housing in some areas that is assumed.

The determination to build ever more houses has led to some councils being persuaded that they need to build on the green belt to meet what is assumed to be their assessed housing need. That points to a confusion and contradiction in green-belt policy. The Government’s planning guidance states that the green belt should not be developed other than in “exceptional circumstances”, yet it fails to describe what constitutes “exceptional circumstances”. The housing White Paper goes on to say:

“Green Belt boundaries should be amended only in exceptional circumstances when local authorities can demonstrate that they have fully examined all other reasonable options for meeting their identified housing requirements.”

However, crucially for the point I am making, planning guidance also says:

“Unmet housing need…is unlikely to outweigh the harm to the Green Belt and other harm to constitute the ‘very special circumstances’ justifying inappropriate development on a site within the Green Belt.”

Planning guidance is going around in circles, because in effect it says that the green belt should not be built on unless nowhere else can be found to build the houses, but that unmet housing need is unlikely to outweigh harm to the green belt in importance.

This confusion and contradiction in planning guidance, along with the assumption that we have a housing crisis across the whole country, has led to proposals to build around 10,000 houses in my constituency on green-belt land, including 1,000 on land which floods. Indeed, in 2014 the then Prime Minister David Cameron visited my area to look at those very fields that were flooded, as well as the roads and some houses. I can assure the House that he did not visit to look at dry, green fields, yet permission has been granted, on appeal, to build on that very land.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I apologise for arriving a little late for this debate; I was talking about the Cotswolds national park, which I know is close to the hon. Gentleman’s heart. He will be aware that, under the Government’s new methodology for housing needs, Tewkesbury is expected to take an additional 21% increase and Stroud a 39% increase. Does he share my concern? I do not know where this methodology has come from or what the implications are, but it will cause a lot more grief in the Stroud and Tewkesbury areas.