Energy Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Graham Stuart

Monday 18th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I am not one who is keen to cast back into history to appoint blame, but what I will say to him and to the Secretary of State is that a 10-year promise was made not just to industries and companies, but to the communities that stood to benefit and to gain a huge amount from CCS. Given that the Government have announced £250 million of investment in a competition for nuclear small modular reactors, we seem to be creating a complete lack of confidence that any of the other schemes will proceed. Such decisions and the way in which they are taken damage our energy security, not just in the short term but in the long term. We have to give a signal that Britain is open for business, but the Chancellor’s decision has done precisely the opposite.

That brings me to the part of the Bill relating to wind farms. There was once a time when the Prime Minister was so keen on wind turbines that he even put one on the roof of his house. Now his Government are trying to legislate to close a scheme that has successfully driven investment into the cheapest low-carbon energy source available. Wind farms already provide power to more than 8 million homes in Britain, and once again it will be energy bill payers who pay the price for the Government’s short-term decision. The Institute for Public Policy Research has estimated that ruling out onshore wind farms and relying on other low-carbon technologies to achieve our energy targets could increase costs for bill payers to up to £3 billion through to 2030. There will also be a cost to jobs and growth in an important clean-energy industry.

There is one area on which we agree with the Government, and that is that wind farms should not be imposed on communities that do not want them. That is why we support the Government’s proposals to put local authorities in charge of approvals for such projects. Yet the reality is that the Government are using the Bill to try to block wind farms even where they enjoy strong local support, and they are taking powers away from local authorities in relation to other areas.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

I am glad that the Labour party has effected a U-turn, because I argued for years under a Labour Government that imposing wind farms on communities against their will would lead to a backlash and to the project being brought to a halt. That is what has happened, so it is a bit late for the hon. Lady to say that she wants to listen to local communities. If we had listened to local communities all along, we could have had more onshore wind turbines where they were desired, rather than the backlash that has resulted in the current situation.

[Lisa Nandy]

As the hon. Gentleman often reminded me when I served on his Select Committee, he is always right, and usually long before everybody else. We very much support the right of local communities to decide, but we do not understand why the Government do not. The real-time actions they are taking in this Bill will, in effect, block wind farms where there is strong local support for them. Moreover, the Government are taking exactly the opposite approach to fracking applications and seeking to deny local communities the right to decide what happens in their areas.

Sixth-Form Colleges (VAT)

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Graham Stuart

Tuesday 17th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and his expertise on sixth-form colleges is well known; not only does he sit on the governing body of a local sixth-form college but he is chair of the all-party group on sixth-form colleges, which has done so much good work on this issue. I have to say to him that when he was first raising issues about sixth-form colleges in this place, I was actually at a sixth-form college in the constituency of the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall). That shows that nothing changes.

As I was saying, Ministers have accepted that this situation is unfair, so will the Minister take steps to create a level playing field for sixth-form colleges? Will he make this important sector a promise that there are no more of these cuts to come? And will he join me in paying tribute to the extraordinary contribution that sixth-form colleges, such as my local one, make to young people and communities across the country?

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

rose—

Child Protection

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Graham Stuart

Thursday 12th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) for consistently pushing hard to ensure that the House does not forget these important issues and that we make progress on them.

I echo the concern of the hon. Members for East Worthing and Shoreham and for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) that the Department for Education is not responding to this debate. However, I am pleased to see that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), has arrived on the Front Bench and is listening to the debate.

Since the tragic death of Victoria Climbié nearly a decade ago, it has been widely accepted that child protection is everybody’s responsibility and that, necessarily, all central and local government departments have a role in keeping children safe. Child protection policy is fragmented across different Departments including the Department for Education, the Department of Health, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is important that there is a strong lead Department so that a drive comes from somewhere in Government to ensure that the voices, needs and views of children are never forgotten.

I agree with the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, who said that child protection is primarily about education, awareness, early intervention and prevention, and that it should therefore sit with the Minister with responsibility for child protection in the Department that is responsible for children. Will the Minister confirm that the Department for Education is still responsible for such children or whether it has abandoned its child protection responsibilities altogether? The confusion is deeply concerning. Is the Home Office now the lead Department or not?

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Under the heading, “Who is responsible for child protection?” the Education Committee report stated:

“It is everyone’s responsibility…In Government terms, child protection in England is the overall responsibility of the Department for Education, which issues both statutory and non-statutory guidance”.

Would the hon. Lady, like me, welcome an intervention from a Minister to confirm that that is still the case or whether the situation has changed?

[Lisa Nandy]

I would welcome that.

It is my view that we must start with the child if we are to tackle child protection. I have a huge amount of respect for the work that the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice has done on children in the immigration detention system over several years. He will know from that experience that some children are at higher risk of harm, including migrant and trafficked children, children with disabilities, child offenders and children in care, to name just a few of the groups that I have worked with over the years. It is important that there is a focus on those children from a Department whose primary focus is the protection and welfare of children. Many of the Departments that come into contact with those children have responsibilities that conflict with children’s welfare and safety. It is therefore essential that the Department for Education takes the lead on child protection. I would be grateful for that assurance from the Ministers who are present.

I endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport said so compellingly about the importance of communicating with children, listening to them and believing them. I spoke recently to a group of brave, articulate and inspiring teenage girls in Bradford who had been through the court process. The stories that they told me about what had happened to them and how they had been treated by some, although not all, front-line professionals will stay with me for the rest of my life. It had scarred them deeply.

I endorse what my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) said about support for parents. One young girl told me, in heartbreaking terms, about how she still cannot talk to her mum, who is a single mum, about what happened to her because her mum cannot believe that it happened to her child without her knowledge. We need to do much more to support parents if we are to support children.

I also endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport said about the courts. I recently met a group of young boys and girls in Nottingham who had been through the court process. One of them had repeatedly been called a liar on the witness stand. When I asked her what she had said to the barrister who was calling her a liar, she said, “You weren’t there. You can shut up.” I endorse those words. I am proud that she had the courage to say that to him. I could not have put it better myself.

The court process had put those children through hell. They had seen the collapse of their cases. They had been called to court several times not knowing what to expect and had then found that the case would not be heard. They had also been told that they would be able to use separate entrances and exits, only to find that they were next to the entrances and exits the people who had abused them were using, and that they were coming face to face with them and their families on the way in and out of court. We should, and must, do better.

I want to mention briefly the explosion of victim blaming we saw over the summer. A 13-year-old girl was labelled

“predatory in all her actions…sexually experienced”

by the lawyer Robert Colover after she was sexually abused by a 41-year-old man, and the judge took into account that she looked older than her age. A former newspaper owner said that under-age girls were throwing themselves at adult men, and newspaper columnists dismissed a 31-year-old teacher’s sexual abuse of a child in his care because she was just a few months away from turning 16. We have to start challenging these attitudes in public.

There are many things we can do. First, we need to support the social work profession better. In a recent survey of 3,000 social workers, a stark picture was painted of intolerable work loads, unqualified staff assessing children, social workers unable to spend time with the children they were tasked with protecting, and thresholds being revised upwards so that, as one social worker said, “Amber is the new green: children who need and ask for our help are being taken away.” We have to take this issue seriously.

I was disappointed that the Government did not take on board our call for sex and relationship education to be made available in every school. We need to equip young people with the knowledge, skills and resilience to withstand pressure, and to understand what constitutes acceptable behaviour, including online. We have to get better at preventing, rather than tackling, child abuse. Only 6% of funding in this area is spent on prevention. That is not a smart use of money—it is also an absolute waste of children’s lives and we need to sort it out.

The role of hotels and bed-and-breakfast establishments in the abuse of children has recently come to public attention. Many Members will know this from their own constituency experience. When police and local councils strongly suspect that abuse is happening, they do not always have the tools they need to tackle it. There have been a number of reports of on-street grooming across the country, including in Oxfordshire and Rochdale, in which young people’s accounts of sexual abuse contain repeated references to hotels and B&Bs. In one case, the police came across reports from other guests at a hotel on the website TripAdvisor of young girls being abused by older men. That abuse had not been reported to the police by the hotel or anyone else.

Hotels and B&Bs were also the location for child sexual exploitation in up to one third of sites visited by the deputy Children’s Commissioner, in her inquiry into sexual exploitation which reported last November. I checked with the Library and it seems that hotels have no specific legal responsibility to register guests under the age of 16—only guests over the age of 16. All they have to do is ask for their name and nationality, so it is hard to track who is using them and when. They do not require a licence to operate unless they sell alcohol, and are under no specific obligation to report child abuse, although they do have general health and safety obligations. That is not good enough.

Tackling this issue is essential, but not straightforward. It would make no sense to tie up the hotel industry in a complex system of regulation that may not protect children. We know that those who do not recognise their responsibilities will often find ways to avoid them. However, we cannot continue with a situation where some businesses are turning a blind eye to child abuse without any redress whatever. I would like the Minister to make a commitment today for the Department for Education to establish a cross-departmental working group alongside those who work in the industry—hotels, child protection experts, the police, local councils and others—to explore how the legal regulatory framework can sensibly be strengthened to protect children. We know that we have to do more to protect children, and this is one area where we can and should do more.

Static Caravans (VAT)

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Graham Stuart

Thursday 26th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stuart]

My right hon. Friend is right. He and many other Members on the Government Benches who would not dream of opposing the Government’s general strategy, or even most of the specifics, have such profound doubts about this one policy that they are asking the Treasury to think again.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the point made to me by Pemberton Leisure Homes in my constituency that the measure will also have a profoundly damaging effect on apprenticeships? That firm employs 160 people, but it also has many apprentices. I know that the Government are keen to boost the number of apprenticeships. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that this measure could be problematic for that policy objective too?

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Lady is right. I may have a chance to get to that issue later in my speech.

Services for Young People

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Graham Stuart

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Nandy]

I am acutely aware that in this place we often talk about young people, but we do not often talk to them. An important feature of our report was the fact that we heard a great deal from young people about the effect of youth services on them.

I spent nearly a decade in the voluntary sector before I came into the House of Commons, and I am a firm believer in the value of youth work and services, having seen for myself the dramatic transformation possible in many young people’s lives. In the Committee, we were glad to have the opportunity to give deeper thought to the value, structure and funding of youth work, and to how outcomes are measured. It has long struck me that the strength of the service is also a weakness—by its very nature, it is flexible, dynamic, youth led and localised, but that can create some of the problems discussed by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) in his introductory speech. When we began to hear evidence, we had to consider what we meant by youth work, and it soon struck us that there was no definition of youth work or of the youth service, and no job description for youth workers. That is a strength, but it also creates problems.

Inevitably and unfortunately, we spent a great deal of time and energy during our inquiry looking at the effect of cuts, in particular to local authority budgets, and what that has meant for youth services. It emerged that the nature, scale and impact of the cuts have been dramatic and, in some areas, extremely stark. The 10.9% cut to the value of funds into the early intervention grant and the removal of ring-fencing for youth provision seem to have had dramatic effect. Local authorities understandably seem to be prioritising statutory and high-risk services such as child protection. It is easy to understand why, faced with such dramatic cuts, but it is extremely worrying when we consider the hon. Gentleman’s comments on early intervention and the need to prioritise particular groups of young people.

Concern and criticism were aired in evidence to our inquiry, from local authorities and charities. The chief executive of NCVYS—the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services—the former Children’s Commissioner, talked about what the cuts will mean for young people in the long term, if they fall through the net. What will that mean for their future life chances? The former commissioner, Al Aynsley-Green, called it “the end of hope”. I hope that that is not the case, but when the union Unite made a request under the Freedom of Information Act to a number of local authorities, it found that, on average, funding to youth services was down 12% in only one year. The reality of that for young people is stark indeed.

When the Minister gave evidence to the Select Committee, he said that although the Government would be prepared to intervene if local authorities were failing in their statutory duty to provide services, what local authorities spent their money on was largely a matter for them. Ministers, however, need to acknowledge the serious reality of what is happening out there throughout the country as a consequence of the huge cuts being made to local authority budgets. My own local authority, Wigan, has prioritised youth services. In the past three years—between 2008 and 2011—investment in youth work has gone up 4%, but the question is how long that high spend can be sustained, given that the local authority has suffered a £66 million cut and that many services are, therefore, inevitably disappearing, in particular because the cuts were front-loaded, giving us little time to prepare, plan or find alternatives or efficiencies.

Ministers told us that youth services should rely on different sources of funding and should not be overly reliant on the state. In reality, as the Committee’s report and the evidence we were given show, that was already the case. The vast majority of organisations we took evidence from got their funding from a variety of trusts, grants and charitable and public sources, as well as from statutory sources; indeed, one organisation—the Scout Association—was 100% non-funded by the state.

In my constituency, there is a good example of the partnership working that Ministers said they wanted to encourage. Wigan Youth Zone, which is opening in 2013, will provide a huge range of facilities for young people, including climbing walls, sports halls, cinemas, cafes, music rooms and training facilities. The focus is on helping young people to improve not only their softer skills, such as confidence and resilience, but the harder skills that they will need to find what work there is and do it.

The organisation will be 10% funded by the young people themselves, who will pay 50p a time to visit, although there will be additional help for those for whom that is too much. The organisation’s running costs will also be 40% funded by the local authority and 50% funded by the private sector and local fundraising initiatives, which the whole town has got behind. The board is chaired by Martin Ainscough, a local business man with a strong commitment to, and passion for, young people. He was inspired to contribute a significant proportion of the capital costs after visiting the Bolton lads and girls club and coming away feeling strongly that we should have similar provision in Wigan.

There are many such examples around the country, but there is a significant issue about the loss of statutory funding. In many places, alternative sources of funding are simply not available, because they are already being utilised. I strongly disagree with the Minister that spending £77 of statutory funding per young person is a large slug of public money, as he told us when he gave evidence to the Committee. This is really important, considering how much time young people spend outside the classroom and how few resources are spent on activities for young people outside the classroom.

It will be particularly hard for smaller charities to find alternative sources of funding. When I worked for the Children’s Society, we, like many other larger charities, had huge teams of fundraisers, whose job it was to look for sources of funding and to navigate complex regulations and processes to ensure that our funding applications were successful. Smaller charities will not be able to compete, and the Committee heard about many that had only one paid employee, who was trying to keep the whole thing going and whose real passion was working with young people, not filling in forms. It is not enough to say that organisations need to look for alternative sources of funding; they need help and, in particular, signposting from the Government if they are to do that.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

There are positives from having a more big-society approach to youth services. I was speaking to a youth worker from Hull the other day, and he said that he and his colleagues were working more closely with the voluntary sector, in a way he felt they should have been years ago. We should also not send out too negative a message about small charities. They can sometimes be vulnerable, and they are threatened, but they are resilient, and they have an ability to innovate and find ways through. One tends to overstate how desperate things will be, but small charities are good at levering in additional support.

[Lisa Nandy]

I take the point that those youth workers should have been working closely with the voluntary sector, but the point I am making is that such things are already happening up and down the country. People are innovative and they are seeking partnerships. In my constituency, people know each other, they work together and they have built relationships over a long period. I am saying not that those charities are not resourceful, energetic and passionate, but that we are stacking the odds against them, and we should give them more support.

Multiple funding streams can be a bureaucratic nightmare, even for large organisations. I say that as someone who, over 10 years in the voluntary sector, suffered the extreme pain of having to report regularly on such things and to demonstrate impacts and outcomes to funders. I filled in the forms, went to the meetings and prioritised that work, because it is important for funders to see what they are getting for their money, but what about smaller organisations with perhaps one member of staff? The Committee came across an organisation with one paid member of staff and 27 funders, which is not unusual, in my experience. What does that mean? It means 27 regular reports.

Such an arrangement also means that people never get the opportunity to catch their breath, because they constantly have to reinvent or repackage the service they offer. In my experience—I think it was shared by a lot of the organisations that gave evidence to us—funders are not keen to fund something that is not new; they generally want to fund something new, not the continuation of a service. As a result, charities are constantly repackaging and reinventing something they already know works. Removing statutory funding at an accelerated rate will therefore have a dramatic impact, which will be felt most by those organisations that are often closest to the ground and that are doing some dynamic and important work with young people.

In the light of all that, I very much welcome the national citizen service, but as an addition to existing youth services, not as an alternative. As we heard during our inquiry, youth services are a lifeline for some young people; they are a source of stability when there is no other source of stability. Many young people talked about the youth service or the youth club they accessed being a family or a home to them, and many had been accessing those services for years. I had a conversation with a young woman who had acted as a National Children’s Bureau mentor for a young man since he was nine years old—he is now 18. She said that, during all that time, she had been the only adult who had remained constant in his life. Everyone else—social workers, of whom there had been many, foster carers and parents—had come and gone, but she had been the one source of stability for that young man. We must not forget how important that is.

A girl called Chloe posted a comment on the inquiry site about her youth centre:

“It’s like a second home to some of us... I’ve been coming to this youth centre for two years now. I’d be lost without it”.

We heard that from so many young people. I am therefore concerned about the cost of the NCS—£37 million this year and £13 million the year before. It cannot be right to prioritise a six-week scheme for young people from different backgrounds, including more affluent ones, when youth services that are a lifeline to young people such as Chloe are disappearing up and down the country.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said the Committee was concerned by the cost of NCS, given what it is delivering, and I would associate myself with those remarks. The Committee visited Germany and saw some excellent youth services, but the cost of those services per person for 12 months was the same as the cost of the NCS per person for six weeks. I cannot understand why there is such a huge disparity, and I urge Ministers to look at the issue.

I want to question the Government’s vision on youth services. Over the past few years—this predates the coalition’s coming to power—we have seen the gradual prioritisation of targeted services over open-access services. What I am about to say might sound a little counter-intuitive, given that I have just made a strong case for ensuring that we reach young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and that we prioritise them above all others, but, as I have seen for myself, and as the Committee heard in a lot of evidence, open-access services work with many of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people, whom targeted services sometimes find it hard to get through their doors. They work precisely because there is no stigma around open-access services, and because a lot of young people who have been through various systems, including the care system and the criminal justice system, and who often have a deep distrust of services that label them and that are targeted at them, will go to open-access services when they will not go to targeted services. At a time when not enough funding is available, it concerns me that we will prioritise targeted services along with the NCS.

When young people from the backgrounds I described access open-access services, which do not necessarily have a label attached, staff can also identify the fact that those young people have problems, which goes back to the point about early intervention. The Committee heard strong evidence that such young people often go on a journey: they go to an open-access service, such as a youth club, and get talking to a member of staff. They build a relationship of trust, and it emerges that they have significant barriers to overcome. They are then referred to a targeted service and end up going full circle—coming back to the open-access service, having had the support they desperately needed. We need to be careful about prioritising targeted services, because the evidence that we heard shows that there is a need for open access and for targeted services that work.

The question of what works—the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness referred to it earlier—exercised the Committee. A witness to the inquiry described the measuring of outcomes as the Holy Grail, and I could not agree more. That can be difficult to do, and it is necessary to be incredibly careful, think about what is being measured and avoid setting up perverse incentives. With the increase in payment by results and targets under the previous Government, organisations cherry-picked the easiest cases and left the remainder, so resources were directed precisely where they were needed least. Often, the targets set for us in the voluntary sector, and for others, completely ignored the reality that many young people face.

In the youth justice system at the moment, for example, the Government are rolling out a system of payment by results, which is about trying to get young offenders into work as soon as they leave an institution. I applaud the focus on getting young people into structured work and giving them a reason to carry on, but the way those targets are set will be important. I worked at Centrepoint, the youth homelessness charity, for several years, and there were some young people for whom just getting out of bed and having breakfast every morning was a significant achievement that constituted real progress; it took months of work, support and encouragement from the staff. That is something we need to be careful about.

I am also quite concerned about measuring outcomes and the focus on payment by results. Constructing intelligent frameworks for what is measured and how that is done involves more than skill. When I worked for the Children’s Society, it constructed a well-being index, which took several years to complete, and while such frameworks can usefully be shared with other organisations—the Government have commissioned work on that, which I welcome—I also urge them to pay attention to the fact that it also takes time to collect and record information in a meaningful way. Many of the young people I worked with in the voluntary sector were sick and tired of being part of the system and of being asked questions, quizzed and grilled. It is important to find useful, meaningful, non-harmful ways to engage young people in the framework, and to get the right information from them, so that the process does not turn into a tick-box exercise.

We heard a lot of evidence that measuring soft outcomes was important, and I completely agree with that; confidence and resilience are examples. Often, causal links are too complicated. It is difficult to say, “This young person came to us and has gone on to commit crime. That is because we failed.” That would be to ignore every other thing going on in the young person’s life at the time. There are so many influences on young people, and it is difficult to measure the direct impact. I was encouraged by the focus on positives in the plan that the Government have produced. If outcome measures are constructed in a negative way, the focus on positives, which is so valuable to youth work, and which we should value and prize above all else, is lost.

Having read the Government’s plan for young people, I thought it was long on policy, which I welcomed, but short on vision. It did not seem to consider the future impact on young people of many of the things in question. The creation of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, instead of an education Department, was a significant step forward for children. It meant that, for once, all Departments had to work together to deliver for young people. Things were brought under one umbrella, with a strong Secretary of State who drove through improvements for young people. I saw that for myself, particularly in areas where children had traditionally been left outside the system. For example, refugee and migrant children came under the umbrella of the Children Act 1989 and the UN convention on the rights of the child for the first time as a direct consequence of the fact that the Department brought things together. If the Minister wants to consider the long-term future of young people and what the decisions we take will mean for them, he needs to look at youth work and immediate support and intervention, but he also needs to look closely at what his colleagues are doing in housing, pensions and care for the elderly—a host of things. Our failure, as a country, to tackle those things will affect young people for the rest of their lives.

A generation is growing up who are losing youth services and support, particularly for the most disadvantaged, but who also face the prospect of high unemployment, with a million young people out of work. They face depressed wages for the rest of their lives, and interrupted work patterns. They also face high debt if they manage to get through university, difficulty getting on the housing ladder and having to fund care for their elderly parents while paying hefty funds into their pension schemes and bringing up their children. The Minister needs to consider what he does for young people now, but needs also to look carefully at his colleagues’ failure to act. Otherwise, young people will feel the results for many years to come.

Education Bill

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Graham Stuart

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. Where the institution feels that it best serves its mission to improve education by becoming a comprehensive, it would be free to do so. If I have read it correctly, which I hope that I have, the proposal does not insist that schools should retain their existing selection or non-selection criteria, so the tone of what the hon. Gentleman has said is perhaps unfair.

My new clause 22 would impose an obligation on the Secretary of State to issue guidance to local authorities on how they handle families who seek to home educate their children ahead of changes in the regulations. However, my new clause has been overtaken by events. The Government have let me know today that they have decided not to go ahead with those regulations, which would have changed the rules on what happens when a parent deregisters their child from a school in order to home educate.

The Badman review, which many hon. Members will remember, under the previous Government recommended a 20-day period in which a child’s name should remain on a school’s register, so that if the parents had been pushed into home education because of failures on the part of the school or local authority to meet the needs of their child, they would not automatically lose a place at school, but would have time to think through the implications of home education.

That recommendation by the Badman inquiry was accepted by the then Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families. I always thought that that was right, because it seemed to place no restrictions on the rights of parents and families, but seemed to restrict the rights of schools and local authorities, which, according to Badman, if I recollect correctly, were in some cases using home education to push away children whose needs they were failing to meet, finding it easier to push that responsibility on to parents who did not really wish to pursue it.

On the face of it, that recommendation seemed reasonable, which I am sure is why the Government came forward with proposals to implement it, having seen that both Badman and the Select Committee supported it. However, it was not recognised that the Government’s formal consultation on the Badman recommendations had shown that, far from being uncontroversial, the proposal had attracted opposition from 75% of those who responded, with only 13% agreeing. Why would that be the case? Why would families be concerned about having the power to return their children to school within 20 days, with no restriction whatever on their freedoms and no delay forced on the start of their home education? The answer lies in the behaviour of local authorities.

Many home educators expressed alarm and horror at the proposal when it came out recently—those home educators were not formally consulted by the Government, because the proposal was supposedly uncontroversial—because, they said, it would lead to bullying and intimidation of parents who had decided to home educate. Those home educators said that the proposal would serve as another excuse for local authorities to misinform parents and tell them that the local authority would decide on the quality of the education provided by parents and that it should sit in judgment on whether they were fit and proper people to educate their children. That would be an entire reversal of the long-standing legal settlement in this country, which says that it is the parents’ duty to educate their child. Most parents choose to delegate that to the state, through state schools, and some to private schools, with a small number choosing to carry it out themselves. It is a fundamental basis of education in this country that the parent remains the No. 1 decider of how their child is educated.

In case that response was just overly paranoid home educators who felt that properly caring local authorities would be asking them impertinent questions or who had misread or misunderstood what they were doing or saying, I can share with the House the fruits of my labour last night, which I spent on the internet looking at various local authority websites. A colleague texted me at 6 o’clock to say that we were going to be let go unusually early, and that a night of fun and frolics could lie ahead. I had to say, “No, my fun will involve looking at local authority websites.” Tameside metropolitan borough council’s elective home education guidelines say:

“It is up to parents to show the local education authority that they have a programme of work in place that is helping their child to develop according to his/her age, ability and aptitude and any special educational needs he/she may have.”

But it is not up to parents to justify that to the local authority; all too often, it is the local authority that has let down that family and those children through its failure to provide proper education. The local authority should be the servant of the family; the family should not have to answer to the needs of the local authority.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I absolutely agree that it is important for parents to be involved and in control of decisions about their own children, but I am dismayed that I have heard very little from the hon. Gentleman about the children themselves. The reason that we have frameworks is not to create unnecessary bureaucracy but to make absolutely certain that we are protecting our children and ensuring the best outcome for them. I would like to hear his response to that point, because before coming to the House, I worked for many years with children, some of whom had suffered the most appalling neglect and abuse at home, and for whom the state was a real lifeline.

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Lady makes some fair points. Certainly the right of the child is central, but I believe that the parent is the best protector of that child’s needs. Of course, the local authority has a role in intervening when there is problem. However, fewer than half the children in this country get five good GCSEs as a result of compulsory state schooling for 11 years, so the state is hardly in a position to lecture parents who make a massive sacrifice to find ways of educating their children themselves. Furthermore, according to all the evidence that I have seen, there is no suggestion that home-educating parents—although they might be rather radical and act in ways that would not fit with my idea of how to educate a child—do a worse job for their children educationally than the state; quite the opposite, in fact.

It is interesting that, although Badman selectively quoted evidence from New Zealand, he failed to mention that, just before he produced his report, New Zealand scrapped the registration guidelines that formed a central part of the report.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I cannot let what the hon. Lady has just said pass. People from lower-income families can afford to go to university, as they pay nothing up front. People pay only when they earn £21,000; they pay 9% above that, when they are earning the money. Do not send the message to young people from lower-income families in your constituency or mine that they cannot afford to go to college—they can, and they should if they want to. Do not scaremonger.

[Lisa Nandy]

First, it is absolutely clear who is sending a message to young people in this country that we do not value them, will not support them and will not back them, and it is the hon. Gentleman’s party. It is an absolute disgrace that on the things that we are discussing today—Aimhigher, the EMA and tuition fees—all the progress that has been made is being unravelled, with very little humility or apology from the Government. On the hon. Gentleman’s accusations that my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe is overstating his case, I simply ask where on earth the hon. Gentleman has been for the past 12 months. The outcry has not just come from young people in Wigan and Scunthorpe, because there has been a national outcry at the removal of the EMA, which is one of the most successful things introduced by the previous Government. I simply ask him to spend a bit more time outside this place listening to young people who are experiencing serious hardship and a bit less time trying to support his Front-Bench team.

That brings me to the subject of enrichment funding, on which my hon. Friend and I have tabled a provision as we are seeking to protect it today. The withdrawal of enrichment funding will have an astonishing impact in my constituency—my local college, Winstanley college, is losing £200,000 of its funding next year, which represents a 10% cut—yet we have heard so little about this. Over the past year, I have heard Ministers talk a lot in the Select Committee about trying to improve the situation of the most disadvantaged young people, but the withdrawal of enrichment funding is doing a great deal to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Winstanley college is being forced to say that only students whose parents can afford to send them on trips will be able to go on them as part of their course. That is just one of many examples that the college gave me and is distraught about. The withdrawal of this funding will have a real impact, and I urge Ministers to think again.

The withdrawal of enrichment funding will clearly hit hardest those schools that already have a disadvantaged intake. St John Rigby college, which is just down the road from me in my constituency, will take a funding hit next year, because of the withdrawal of £300,000. Half its students receive the EMA and only 2% of the students who come into that college average an A-grade at GCSE. Its very hard-working and talented principal has told me that enrichment funding is not an optional extra, but an essential part of giving its hard-working and talented students the chance to reach their full potential. It cannot replace that enrichment funding, so it must do other things. It is planning to halve the tutorial hours for all students, so that it can ensure that it protects those essential services. Like Winstanley college, which I mentioned earlier, class sizes will go up, which will disadvantage all students but will have a particular impact on the most disadvantaged.

I join my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe in supporting the new clause because unless the Government think again, sports, arts, drama, counselling and career opportunities will be denied to precisely those young people who need them most. Surely that is not the intended consequence of the Government’s policies. I urge the Minister to think again.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Graham Stuart

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady makes a powerful case. None the less, in the past 13 years, we have seen the gap between rich and poor, and the lead that independent schools have over state schools, widen. Labour policies failed in 13 years in government. I know she will be a very thoughtful and good member of my Committee, but what positive prescriptions can we use to make up for the failures of the past 13 years?

[Lisa Nandy]

I do not in any sense accept the hon. Gentleman’s point, distinguished though he is as the newly elected Chair of the Education Committee. I certainly do not hope to upset him at this juncture, having just been elected to that Committee. I worked for the past five years with some of the most disadvantaged children in this country at the Children’s Society, and I can tell him that the Bill will not help at all; it will hinder. I do not accept his characterisation of how the education system has worked for those children in the past 13 years. I hope he is satisfied with that, because I have given my word to my constituents that I will raise their concerns in the House, because they cannot get a hearing directly with the Minister.

It is therefore important for those schools that might opt for academy status to understand what they and the children they represent might lose. I have looked closely at the proposals—such as they are—and it is clear that the Education Secretary is replacing democratic local control with direct control of new academies. That is not devolution of power, but centralisation, and we have heard what that could mean for local schools.

The role of the New Schools Network has been touched on only very briefly so far in the debate. The NSN has been given the contract to advise schools on becoming academies. I have asked a number of questions of the Education Secretary about the NSN, and it merits further attention. It was established in December 2009 and appears to be run by former advisers to him. It was recently awarded a £500,000 contract, but I cannot get clarity on how that came to be awarded. It is incredibly important that we understand how that happened and the role of the NSN, because that goes to the heart of whether people can have confidence in the system that he proposes and the underlying motives behind it.

I also wish to sound another note of caution for schools that may be considering opting for academy status. The Department has offered £25,000 to schools for start-up costs, but acknowledges that they will be more than that, and that schools are expected to contribute. As a school governor, I am aware that those costs can be enormous. The NUT says that it knows of schools that converted to trust status and had to spend more than £75,000 to do so. It is no wonder that in the many briefings that I was sent before this debate so many concerns were expressed by such a diverse range of groups. It is also why this Bill merits further consideration in this House and outside before it becomes law.

I do not believe, on the basis of what has been produced so far, that the measures in the Bill will do anything other than create greater social segregation, in which those who can afford to may do better, but will do so under the state system with subsidy from the state. I am appalled by that prospect and I have given my word to the parents, staff, governors and children in Wigan that I will oppose it all the way.