Employment Rights Bill (Thirteenth sitting)

Laurence Turner Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I really welcome the clause. Despite the fact that their uniforms, pensions and contracts said “NHS”, staff at a community hospital in my constituency only realised that they had been effectively TUPE-ed over to a private business when they failed to receive the £1,000 bonus that all their colleagues in the main hospitals got. One may say, “How naive of them; they should have read their contracts better,” but most of them had been NHS workers for 25 years, so they were completely unaware that this had happened to them and that they were no longer entitled. I must thank the then contractor, a charity, for lobbying hard to make sure that eventually they got some kind of bonus, but to be suddenly without those conditions was quite frightening for them. So I welcome these measures.

I take some issue with what the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire said. For many years, I served as part of Wiltshire council, which is a Conservative-led council. It was locked into a service contract for maintenance that was poor and used to lower wages, producing a system where we had very little maintenance. Our town councils are now having to pick up the bill for repairing grounds and play areas because the company, although it had the contract and was paid by the local authority, was not carrying out the works. Therefore, I welcome this measure and I am pleased to support it.

[Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. Merry Christmas, everyone. In that spirit of glad tidings, I draw the Committee’s attention to my declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my membership of the GMB and Unite trade unions.

Clause 25 enables the reinstatement of one of two bodies that are to be reinstated by the Bill—the other is the school support staff negotiating body, which I hope we will come to today. The clause stands in a long and proud tradition in this Parliament, and at its heart is a simple question: what duty does the state owe to people who perform services on its behalf? The phrase “two tier” has become highly charged in recent years, but I hope that we can channel some of that spirit of protest towards the iniquity of two-tier workforces.

The injustice is easy to describe—in fact, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire, described it. When a public service is outsourced, the original workers’ pay and terms and conditions are protected to a certain extent by TUPE, but those of the workers who are subsequently employed on that contract are not. Even when they carry out exactly the same duties, they will normally be paid inferior rates.

That is understandably a cause of tension and resentment at many sites where services continue to be performed on behalf of the public sector. The original workers who are TUPE-ed over can be singled out for victimisation and adverse treatment on the part of their new employer. We know from the labour force survey, in the days when that instrument was in better health, that many such workers continue to regard themselves as part of the public sector and are motivated by public service. The workers who tend to find themselves in this position are more likely to be women, on lower earnings and from non-white backgrounds.

The case for parity of treatment was made powerfully in the last Parliament by the Defence Committee, which at the time had a Conservative Chair. The Committee’s report on the treatment of contracted staff for ancillary services states:

“In general, the terms and conditions of outsourced employees are worse than those of their directly employed counterparts, with reduced wages and benefits…The Ministry of Defence should do more to ensure that contracted staff receive comparable employment contracts to staff directly employed by the MoD.”

That is precisely what the reinstated and strengthened two-tier code, enabled by this clause, will accomplish.

Two-tier workforces are not just unfair on workers; they represent a failure of public policy. When margins are tight, bidders can end up competing not on efficiency or innovation, but on a squeezing of wages. We need only look at Carillion for a prominent example of what can go wrong, and of the wider liability for taxpayers when a contractor loses sight of its wider operations. The direct cost to the public sector has been estimated at some £150 million, the wider debts to the private sector were in the region of £2 billion, and the National Audit Office has warned that we will not know the true cost for many years to come.

The shadow Minister referred to the sepia-tinted days—perhaps we should say the blue-rinse days— of 2006, but I was grateful for the contributions from the hon. Members for Chippenham and for Torbay, because there is a long-standing and cross-party record on this matter. We can go back to 1891, when the radical Liberal politician Sydney Buxton moved the fair wages resolution, a resolution of this House, which was carried unanimously—at that time, Parliament had a Conservative majority. He said:

“The Government is far the greatest letter-out of contracts in the country, and Government contracts are the most popular for three reasons. In the first place, the contractor makes no bad debts; secondly, he has quick returns; and, thirdly, a Government contract forms a good advertisement. The consequence is, that there is great competition, and tenders are cut down very much at the expense of the labour market. Such a state of things is unfair to the good employer…and injurious to the community. The fair employer is placed at a very great disadvantage as compared with the unfair.”—[Official Report, 13 February 1891; Vol. 350, c. 618.]

Those arguments hold true today. That fair wages resolution was adapted and improved down the years, and took its final form under the Attlee Government in 1946. It has subsequently been exported around the world, in the form of International Labour Organisation convention No. 94. Indeed, those great British protections, developed in this Parliament, apply now in Italy, Spain and such far-flung places as Brazil, but because of decisions taken in the 1980s, they do not apply to contracted-out workers in this country. I very much welcome the opportunity to put that right.

The two-tier code existed previously, between 2005 and 2006. It grew out of an earlier iteration in local government, and it has been in force subsequently in Wales, where the sky has not fallen in in terms of service provision. [Interruption.] If the shadow Minister wants to intervene, he is welcome to.

[Greg Smith]

How does the hon. Gentleman feel that the NHS in Wales is doing—better or worse than in England?

[Laurence Turner]

I would say better, having had some experience. The hon. Gentleman might want to return to that point.

On the substance of the clause, there were some concerns about the original incarnation of the two-tier code. It was purely voluntary and did not contain meaningful provisions for redress where an employer who had signed up to uphold the standards of the code did not follow through. I hope that that deficiency will be remedied when the associated regulations appear.

It is legitimate to have differences on points of principle. After the current Lord Maude abolished the two-tier code, the Secretary of State—now Baron Pickles—said that the Government of the time had

“Abolished the…two-tier code that…hindered the voluntary and independent sector from delivering better value for money.”—[Official Report, 26 March 2015; Vol. 594, c. 166WS.]

The shadow Minister has made much the same point. This was explicitly about driving down wages for the large number of people who are contracted out to deliver public services. I very much welcome the fact that this Government have a policy objective of making work pay. For a large number of people in the labour market who have been overlooked by politicians for too long, the clause represents an important step forward for remedying that deficiency.

[Justin Madders]

We have had a broad debate—very broad from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield, who took us on a canter through the history. He was right that it was the coalition Government who abolished the two-tier code, which is why it is welcome that the Liberal Democrats have realised the error of their ways; I welcome their support on this. Their spokesperson, the hon. Member for Chippenham, made the important point that the inherent unfairness of people doing exactly the same job for the same employer finding out that they are on different terms and conditions and are earning less is a big morale sapper. It is also a big issue in terms of workforce retention—one problem that we often see with outsourced contracts.

I will turn to the shadow Minister’s misty-eyed days at Hammersmith and Fulham, and I will raise him Ellesmere Port and Neston borough council, which was a great believer in direct provision of services; we certainly felt that was the best way to deliver value for the taxpayer and good-quality services. In his contribution, the shadow Minister alighted on the illusion of outsourcing—the fact that consultants can demonstrate that savings can be made, but when you drill into the detail, those savings are always off the back of the workforce. They are not some magical way of doing things differently. It is about cutting terms and conditions and it is about a race to the bottom, which we are determined to end.

[Justin Madders]

I take the shadow Minister’s point. I am not familiar with the machinations of Hammersmith and Fulham council in the 2010s, and it may well be that savings were made by doing things differently. But there is absolutely no reason why that cannot be done directly from a public body: if it is well led, if it is able to have constructive dialogue with its work force, savings can be made.

The difficulty with the shadow Minister’s analysis is that, while he may have been able to find savings for the taxpayer through those kinds of measures, too often the savings are made by cutting terms and conditions for new workers. That is why, as he said in his original contribution, the second or third outsourcing is usually where the savings happen, because it is when those new workers come in on lower terms and conditions that the savings begin to emerge. That is why the whole outsourcing trick is a con, because it is how those savings tend to be made.

When we add in the contract monitoring costs and the profit motivations for the outsourced company to make a living from these things, we can quickly see why it becomes a bad deal for the taxpayer. I certainly make no apologies for putting forward this proposal, because we think it is the right thing to do, to respect and value those who work in public service and ensure that they are paid the same as their colleagues for doing the same work. I therefore commend—

[Laurence Turner]

I thank the Minister for giving way at the death. Does he also recognise that one example of a council that tried to go down the wholesale outsourcing route was Northamptonshire? We all know how that story ended, and Eddie Martin, the Conservative former leader of Cumbria county council, stated that the then Government

“says that outsourcing is everything, but while it might get you an initial cheaper price, that price simply doesn’t last, you lose flexibility, and it causes a great deal of unrest.”

[The Chair]

I call the Minister to rise from the dead.

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[Greg Smith]

The clause builds on the gender pay gap reporting introduced by the last Government. Of course, in 2017 we were on the second of four female Conservative leaders, while the Labour party is still yet to show its commitment to gender equality in its leadership. Perhaps the Minister might be the first female leader of the Labour party—who knows? I gently and slightly naughtily make that point; it is the Conservative party that has shown a clear commitment to gender equality, particularly with the changes to gender pay gap reporting.

Expanding reporting to outsourced service providers does not seem a controversial move, but I urge the Minister to ensure that the provisions that the Government introduce do not create loopholes or miss anyone out; I can imagine various scenarios in which someone might argue that something is not outsourced, even though it is contracted. I urge her to double check that the specific language used does not create something that anyone can exploit or legally challenge. That is to ensure that the provisions build in spirit on the previous Government’s 2017 changes and do not create loopholes.

[Laurence Turner]

I will pick up the point just made about the changes made in 2017. Some of the opposition at that time came from the august institution of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which said that, if the regulations were introduced,

“they may encourage outsourcing of lower-paid jobs which happen to be taken by women (to avoid inclusion in a firm’s own return).”

That point has also been made by other organisations. King’s College London published a study on this matter three years ago, which said that

“focusing on the pay gap headline number can risk organisations seeking to window-dress their figures by outsourcing lower-paid jobs, which in turn worsens overall gender segregation within the labour market.”

Therefore, this extension of gender pay gap reporting to outsourced workers really does close that loophole and remove that perverse incentive—one example of many that we have heard about in this Committee.

We also heard from the Women’s Budget Group; Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, giving evidence, said:

“We welcome the move to include outsourced workers in gender pay gap reporting…We are very conscious that you will quite often see that the lowest paid workers, particularly in the public sector, are now outsourced.”––[Official Report, Employment Rights Public Bill Committee, 28 November 2024; c. 163, Q176.]

The measures as proposed would effectively link the outsourced employer’s reporting to the reporting of the primary contracting authority. I hope that, when the regulations are drafted, they will shed some light on the extent of outsourcing across the economy; these workers are often invisible in official statistics, which is a wider problem for our understanding of the labour market. However, this move within the Bill is welcome.

I will just come back on one point; the shadow Minister referred to elected leaders of the Labour party. He is quite right to point out that the Labour party has not elected a woman leader—I very much hope that that will happen—but, for completeness, under the Labour party rulebook there is no role of “acting” or “interim” leader. It is therefore important to say, for the record, that in the eyes of the rulebook the noble Baronesses Beckett and Harman were as much leaders of the Labour party as any men who have fulfilled that role, and they served with distinction.

[Sarah Gibson]

I am not sure that highlighting quite how quickly the Conservatives go through leaders is helpful, but we do have to recognise that they have had the highest number of female leaders of any of our parties here, which is to be commended.

On a serious note, I welcome the intentions of clause 27. It is incredibly important that we start to shine a light on outsourcing, especially in the public sector, which I have seen myself, as I highlighted earlier, regarding the Chippenham hospital. To a certain extent, it seems to be a way of hiding some of the less clear and sensible ways we employ people, especially when it comes to low-paid, often female workers. I will therefore be supporting this clause and I am very pleased to do so.

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[Dr Tidball]

I draw your attention to my declaration of interests, Mr Mundell. I am a member of the Community union, Unison and GMB.

I found it difficult to hear, in anything the shadow Minister just said, any rationale for getting rid of this body all those years ago. I missed three years of school as a child because of the surgeries I needed. Incredible classroom teaching assistants helped me to build my confidence and learn to mix with other children again when I returned—making education and learning an escape, a way to express myself, to overcome people’s assumptions about my disability and to feel free.

I stood in my constituency because I wanted to use my skills and experiences to give back to the communities that gave me so much. To know that, because of this Bill and the clause before us now, teaching assistants and other school support staff like the ones who made school a less daunting place for me will once again have a collective bargaining system for pay and conditions—which will ensure that those staff are finally valued and recognised for their vital work—is a very great privilege indeed.

The reinstatement of the school support staff negotiating body in England, previously scrapped by the coalition Government for reasons that still remain unclear, will be key to providing professional recognition for a group of staff who have been overlooked for far too long. As Unison, of which I am proudly a member, has highlighted, the proposals in this clause

“demonstrate that the Employment Rights Bill isn’t just tackling worker’s rights—it holds the key to tackling long standing public policy failures that have been ignored because they affect workers and service users whose voices are too often neglected by decision makers. Tackling this neglect and allowing trade unions to engage in constructive social partnership and better represent their members is long overdue”.

This clause therefore empowers that group of working people, who have been so long overlooked by the Government, to have a better life at work. It will help trade unions to raise standards and pay across the labour market.

[Laurence Turner]

In addition to the interest to which I drew attention earlier, my partner is a trustee of a multi-academy trust.

The reinstatement of the school support staff negotiating body is a hugely welcome measure and long overdue. It is a real shame to hear that there will be cross-party division on this question, because the consequences of the decision to abolish the SSSNB are negative, they are serious and they are now plain to see. We will come on to detailed discussion of the schedule and the amendments, but it is worth reflecting on the rationale that the then Government gave back in 2010 for abolishing the SSSNB. The Secretary of State at the time said—and he never went much beyond this—that the Government had

“concluded that the SSSNB does not fit well with the Government’s priorities for greater deregulation of the pay and conditions arrangement for the school workforce.”

What has been the consequence of that decision? We saw it last year, when the Low Pay Commission, for the first time, reclassified school support staff roles as low-paying occupations. That should be a mark of shame on the Governments that oversaw that unhappy outcome—which, as I said, was a consequence of the decision to abolish that body.

[Sarah Gibson]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman; I must make a declaration that my parents were a state headmaster and headmistress before their retirement. One issue that I strongly feel needs to be taken into consideration—though perhaps it is not relevant to this Committee—is that funding for education in general has driven down the pay of these roles. If there were good funding for the education sector in general, these roles would not need so much protection. While we are considering giving more bargaining power, we also need to ensure that there is enough funding for education so that those roles can be paid, otherwise there will merely be fewer of them. I think that is something we need to take into consideration, do you not?

[The Chair]

Mr Turner needs to take it into consideration, not me.

[Laurence Turner]

I thank the hon. Member for Chippenham for her intervention. I agree with her up to a point. Teaching assistants’ wages have increased by about 24% on average over the period that we are talking about, while the consumer prices index has increased by 40% over the same period, so there has been an erosion in wages. We could talk about funding at great length. However, as she said, it is beyond the scope of the Bill and the clauses that we are discussing.

The matter goes beyond funding and pay, as important and relevant as those two issues are, because it is also about contracts and about terms and conditions. There are real problems, which we will discuss, involving the construction of term-time only contracts as they currently exist. We saw in the Harpur Trust v. Brazel decision the liabilities created for employers, as well as for workers, by existing contracts inherited from negotiating arrangements that are not fit for purpose. There is a strong rationale for extending and separating the negotiation over terms and conditions, as well as over pay. That point has been recognised for a long time. Given the complaints that we have heard from the Opposition about what they see as the expeditious drafting of policies and clauses in the legislation, I hope they welcome having this matter before us, which has precedent and is the result of more than 20 years of policy development.

It was recognised as far back as the 2005 schools White Paper that an early challenge for the school workforce agreement at that time—signed, I think, in 2003—would be ensuring fair pay and rewards for support staff. We want to ensure that that is supported by a more coherent approach to union recognition at school level, clearer career paths and skills escalators, and a more standardised and benchmarked approach to grading, job descriptions, contract awards, deployments and school support staff training and development. Those are exactly the issues that we are talking about. It is sad to look back at those complaints from 20 years ago and to realise just how little progress has been made.

The decision to increase the number of school support staff workers, which was carried forward by Governments of all parties, was taken because at the time the workload of teachers was far too high. There were serious problems of classroom management and teachers found themselves undertaking a huge number of administrative duties, rather than teaching. Those complaints are current today, but it was worse then, and that was remedied by the introduction of more school support staff workers.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge spoke about her own experience. I can also speak from direct experience, having been a special educational needs and disabilities kid during that time, about the value to me of school support staff workers. I do not think I would be here in this Committee without them. However, for too long we collectively have not recognised their contribution.

The Minister made the point that the National Joint Council for local government services is not adequate for school support staff workers. The Green Book was never designed to accommodate those roles, and it is an anachronism that school support staff workers continue to fall under the Green Book. Indeed, while the Confederation of School Trusts has some wider concerns—I think one of the Opposition’s amendments is modelled on the submission that the CST made to the Committee—it has said that it agrees that the time is right to take school support staff negotiations out of the local government umbrella.

I know from representing school support staff workers in the past that they are some of the lowest paid workers in the public sector. I have represented some—primarily women—who have been forced to resort to food banks and payday loans to make ends meet, but they often still dip into their own pockets to provide educational essentials to children who do not have enough to get by. That record has led school support staff to be reclassified as being in low-paying occupations, which should really be a badge of shame for us. The logic of live and let be, and of deregulating and letting a thousand flowers bloom across schools, has not worked, and I would be interested to hear what the Opposition have to say on that.

[Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman says that the great educational experiment has not worked, but would he not acknowledge the significant improvement in our children’s ability to read, write and do mathematics over the past 14 years? Scores in the programme for international student assessment show that standards of reading, writing and mathematics have improved enormously in England—although they have regrettably fallen in Scotland, for reasons we can imagine. I am really proud of the achievements of the coalition and later Conservative Governments in improving educational standards. The freedom granted to academies—the freedom to innovate and to employ staff on the terms and conditions that they wish—has been critical in that, but the Government are rolling back those freedoms. Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge the educational achievements of the past 14 years?

[Laurence Turner]

That was quite a generous amount of time for an intervention. The hon. Member may wish to go back to the record, because the point I made was that the experiment over pay and terms and conditions has failed. The challenge to the Opposition was: do they recognise that there is a serious problem with school support staff remuneration and contracts? If they do, what are their proposals to fix it? I would be willing to take a second intervention on that point.

[Greg Smith]

Much as the hon. Member for Chippenham said, this is about political choices. If this new Labour Government, six months in, wish to make a political choice to fund schools to pay support staff more, why do they not make that political choice and make that money available? We all want people to earn more, to get more in their pay packet and to be richer.

[Laurence Turner]

I think we have it there: the Opposition do not see this as a political priority. They chose not to take steps or to put forward meaningful proposals to raise the employment standards of school support staff. My challenge was: do they have any proposals for this group of workers, particularly in light of the Low Pay Commission decision? We have not heard an answer.

[Greg Smith]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way again?

[Laurence Turner]

It is Christmas.

[Greg Smith]

I am glad the festive spirit is alive and well, but I remind the hon. Gentleman—there is no sugar coating it for Opposition Members—that the Labour party had a thumping victory in July. There is no general election on the horizon, and there is little chance of any change of Government before 2029, so it is on the Labour party to make political choices for the next four and a half years. Will the hon. Gentleman do that, or is he just going to deflect back to the Opposition?

[Laurence Turner]

I doubt I am going to do it personally; as with all these things, it is a collective endeavour. The hon. Member asked whether the Government are going to do this, but they are doing this—it is in the Bill. I ask again: what is the Opposition’s alternative? We are yet to hear it.

It is worth reflecting on the nature of these review bodies—not that this is a pay review body; it is a negotiation body—and the way in which we establish new agreements, because these things do not happen quickly. I think that the establishment of “Agenda for Change” in the NHS took seven years from initiation to completion. That exercise took a long time, but I do not think anyone would seriously argue for going back to the plethora of terms and conditions, and the mismatch between different grades of workers, that existed before, which created serious equal pay liabilities. That is the situation that we inherit in respect of school support staff.

These things do take time. If the shadow Minister goes back to the record of the original school support staff negotiating body—from 2009 to 2010—the progress made in that relatively short time was not on establishing the new pay system, but on drawing up model role profiles and moving towards a national handbook for terms and conditions. Those measures would be hugely welcome today. In fact, the Conservative Government acknowledged that some the school support staff negotiating body had done some important work during that time. They were on record as saying that there was a clear case for carrying forward some of it, but that never happened, and we have been left with an absence in that area of policy for almost 15 years. The changes to pay will be hugely welcome when they come. It will be a negotiation, so the outcomes will be a matter for the parties represented on the negotiating body, including the Department for Education.

We must go back to the problem: schools are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain skilled school support staff. A number of private sector employers, including supermarkets, are increasingly offering term-time only contracts, with the intention of attracting people out of schools and into alternative roles. Freedom of information requests show that, where data is held, teaching assistant vacancy rates run at around 10%. That is having a real impact on the ability of schools to deliver inclusive education, which is a shame.

[Nick Timothy]

On schools’ ability to deliver, my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater asked the hon. Gentleman a moment ago to acknowledge the significant rise in the performance of English schools in the PISA rankings and other international comparative studies. Will he clearly say whether he acknowledges or denies that rise?

[Laurence Turner]

That is a direct question. We could talk about the way the PISA rankings are constructed.

[The Chair]

Order. We are not going to talk about that; we are going to talk about the Bill.

[Laurence Turner]

That is fine—I think that applies to both the intervention and the response. A direct question had been put about whether there is an alternative proposition on pay and terms and conditions, which is the matter we are considering today. I hope we will have an opportunity to talk in much more detail about the matters the hon. Member for Bridgwater raised, but the Opposition could not answer that direct question.

It is a shame that there is not more agreement on what is a very real policy problem. We have a serious—dare I say it—road-tested proposal in the Bill to reinstate the school support staff negotiating body. I am none the wiser about what measures the Opposition propose, but it is important that the clause be part of the Bill.

[The Chair]

Order. Obviously, education matters are relevant to the context of the discussion, but this is not a debate about education policy as such.

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[Sir Ashley Fox]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. We are discussing clause 28 and schedule 3, and the hon. Member for Birmingham Northfield asked what the Opposition’s proposal would be. Well, nothing needs changing—the clause and schedule are completely unnecessary. I say that because it is my belief that the way the education system in England is delivered—mostly by academies—is a successful model. The Government’s proposals will harm our education system because they will take freedom away from schools and academies. There is a fixed amount to be spent on education, and the governors of schools and academies are best able to decide where those resources are allocated.

The hon. Member for Birmingham Northfield told us it was unfair that some teaching assistants have lower pay than others and that their terms and conditions are not identical. He also said it was difficult to retain and recruit teaching assistants. If that is the case, the governors of a school or the leaders of an academy can pay more to recruit the staff they need.

What we see from the Government is a belief that Whitehall knows best. They intend to centralise terms and conditions and will try to specify how much each teaching assistant in each school will work, because that suits their political agenda and the agenda of the trade unions that pay for their election campaigns.

[Laurence Turner]

Why does the hon. Gentleman’s argument against central direction-setting not apply to teachers? Is he arguing for the abolition of the School Teachers Review Body?

[Sir Ashley Fox]

Teachers are different because teaching is a profession that should certainly agree not to strike on pay and conditions, in return for the provision of the pay review bodies, which should play an integral part in ensuring that children’s education is not disrupted by industrial action. I would be happy to grant academies the freedom to pay a little more or less for scales, although perhaps that is not currently possible. I want the maximum freedom granted to academies and schools because, fundamentally, I believe they are best able to allocate the limited resources.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire said, if the Government really wanted to raise pay and improve conditions for teaching assistants, it is in their power to increase substantially the amount of money available for schools. They choose not to do that, but instead say that schools must stick to certain parameters on pay and conditions that will not enable schools to deliver the best education for children.

It is important that I talk briefly about the enormous improvement in educational standards for our children, which has been enabled by the freedom that academies have been granted. Clause 28 and schedule 3 start to roll back those freedoms. My fear is that this is the start of a process in which we will see educational standards in England deteriorate.

[Laurence Turner]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way a second time. He describes a picture of extraordinary success. Classroom-based support staff spend the majority of their time supporting SEND learners. Does he regard the SEND system as a success?

[The Chair]

Order. We are starting to stray back into a wider debate.