Social Mobility: Treasury Reform

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I was going to wait until my contribution to respond to the right hon. Lady, but it is quite clear that that is not the policy of the Labour party or of my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). We want as many people as possible to do well, not just a chosen few in a grammar-school society of the type the right hon. Lady proposes.

[Justine Greening]

I thought the hon. Lady would probably say that. Unfortunately, that illustrates that the Opposition have not understood what social mobility means. It means equality of opportunity. It would probably be better—this is why I raised the point—if we stopped arguing about semantics and started talking about finding common ground on how to get change for the better for millions of young people and communities currently disconnected from opportunity or too far from it. If this just becomes a debate on semantics, which is what I worry the right hon. Member for Islington North is trying to turn it into, we will not get anywhere fast. I will come on to why that is a problem, but the topic of this debate is that, while there are broader problems around how we debate achieving social mobility, which is why it has not happened, there is a bigger problem, which is about how the Government approach social mobility and the Treasury’s place within that.

Let us be absolutely clear: achieving social mobility means we achieve equality of opportunity for everyone in our country, irrespective of where they start, who they are and what their background is. It is not—I repeat, not—just about the gifted few.

I want to see system change. I have talked about the practical work I am doing on the ground with businesses and organisations through the social mobility pledge, outside of the Government, but if we are to finally crack the nut—unlike the Labour party, I do not believe we should give up trying to achieve social mobility—we have to ensure change inside the Government. To my mind, that starts with the Treasury, and that is why I called this debate.

After eight years in government, overwhelmingly as a Cabinet Minister and running three different Departments, my conclusion is that we effectively need to abolish the Treasury in its current form. What we have right now is dysfunctional and not fit for purpose. It does not achieve the transformation in opportunity and social mobility that Britain needs.

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[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is an absolute privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. This has been a good debate; it is nice to watch friendly fire and I enjoyed listening to the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) make an excoriating attack on the Treasury. I will come to her comments about social mobility later, but the fundamental truth is that when she talks about the current Tory Treasury, she is absolutely right. This Government do not treat spending on social infrastructure as the investment in our future that it should be. Unsurprisingly, as she says, this Government have failed to invest in our children, our young people and in all of us.

During the last year of the Labour Government, we spent almost 6% of our GDP on publicly funded education and training. By last year, that had fallen to just over 4%—a cut of more than a quarter. Given the challenges we face, we clearly need far more investment in skills and knowledge, to transform our economy, to deal with the climate crisis and to make the fourth industrial revolution prosperous and fair. Instead, as we know, during Tory rule school funding per pupil has fallen by 8% in real terms.

The consequences are blindingly obvious. More than 1,000 schools have had to rely on crowdfunding for basics such as pencils and textbooks. At least 26 schools are closing their classrooms early because they do not have the money to keep teaching. The proportion of pupils in supersized classes with more than 31 pupils to a single teacher is at its highest level for 36 years. The number of pupils doing a GCSE in music has fallen by almost a quarter since 2010, just as industry is asking us for more creativity and collaboration in education, because those are the skills needed. Can the Minister honestly say his Government have put in the investment that our schools need?

Our further education providers have been cut by even more: sixth forms by 21% and colleges by 8%. The Social Mobility Commission found that 41% of FE providers had reduced their careers guidance and 48% their mental health support. In its report, it also cited evidence that 51% of colleges had stopped teaching modern languages courses. What about the notion of a global Britain post Brexit? Some 38% of schools and colleges have dropped courses in science, technology, engineering and maths—the courses our economy needs to prepare for the fourth industrial revolution. It is jaw-dropping that schools and colleges have been forced into that.

We have a recruitment crisis in nursing thanks to the Government’s scrapping of bursaries. We have a productivity crisis linked to a skills deficit and a lack of progression during people’s careers. Surely, the Government must have invested in adult education, given that we know people have to change course in their careers—nobody goes into a job at 18 and stays till they are 67 any longer—but no: that has been cut almost in half since 2009-10. Apprenticeship spending has fallen by 44%. The Open University, which has given a second chance to millions of people, is on its knees because of the Government’s tuition fees regime. It could not be clearer that older and part-time learners are simply scared off by the level of debt they are now expected to take on if they want to improve their education and change their course in life.

That is the situation in schools, colleges and adult education—cuts, not investment. What about early years? Sure Start has been cut by two thirds since 2010, with 1,000 centres closed. We know about the amazing benefits of Sure Start—we heard about them again this month—so it is not that the Government do not know about Sure Start’s value to society and the economy. Children are almost 20% less likely to be hospitalised by the age of 11 if their family has access to a Sure Start centre—that is massive—and the most disadvantaged children benefit the most. The impact on the NHS of fewer children being hospitalised is enough by itself to pay for 6% of Sure Start’s costs, and it is one impact among many.

The 2010 evaluation of Sure Start found that access to Sure Start increased children’s physical health, including their chance of being a healthy weight. We all know that childhood obesity, apart from causing misery, costs the state money. The 2012 evaluation found improvements in parenting and the home learning environment. The 2015 evaluation found improvements in children’s behaviour and more. All those evaluations were funded by the Government, but this Government have not learned that investing in Sure Start saves money. It pays off. Even looking at it from this Government’s ideological position, it saves money. It does not just improve lives.

The story is the same with youth centres, which have been cut by 40% on average across the country and by as much as 91% in some places. I understand that Tory Treasury Ministers might not understand that making a bat and a ball and a table tennis table available to young people creates wealth; it is hard enough to get them to understand that that is what happens when they open a Sure Start centre or invest in teachers in our schools. When investment in youth services is taken away, young people are far more likely to have their lives blighted and their potential wasted by becoming victims of exploitation.

In east London, we know that only too well. Youth centres and youth workers provide young people with spaces away from the county lines groomers on our streets. Youth centres are places where young people know they can find an adult to talk to—somebody who can listen to their problems, offer them real resilience against the troubles on our streets and point them towards opportunity. What is so essential is not the bat and ball and the table tennis table in the youth club, but the professional who stands by the young person’s side and can give them different ways of dealing with the man on the street who offers them chicken to be a lookout for him while he sells his drugs.

Good youth work stops children being groomed, stops children’s potential being wasted and stops children’s future contributions to our economy and our society being stifled. Ultimately, it stops the young people I have been speaking about ending up in prison, which I am sure the Minister knows is massively expensive—more than £3,000 per prisoner per month.

If we had invested earlier, how many of the lives that have been blighted by county lines exploitation could have been saved, and how much money would the Treasury have saved? How much more would have been contributed to our economy? Investment in social infrastructure benefits our economy and our society in so many ways for decades into the future. This pro-austerity Tory Treasury just does not get it. It is a barrier to the investment our communities need. The right hon. Member for Putney knows that from her first-hand experience as Education Secretary.

The situation is no different on other issues, such as the climate change crisis: the Chancellor is still trying to obstruct the green investment we need. Thankfully, the right hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond) will not be at the Treasury much longer. Unfortunately, the reckless, regressive and plain idiotic pledges of the Tory leadership contenders do not inspire confidence that anything will change. It is a great pity that the right hon. Lady did not throw her hat in the ring. I have watched what she has been doing over the past few months—I have even watched her videos online—and I thought she might be building up to a bid, but sadly not.

Instead, we have the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), who has promised £10 billion of tax cuts. That money would pay for more than 400,000 new teachers, but of course it is not teachers or nurses who would benefit from those tax cuts. More than 80% of the financial gains would go to the highest earning 10% of families. It is clear where his priorities lie, and it ain’t in investing in our children.

A Labour Treasury would be totally different. At the last election, we committed to providing over £6 billion more for schools and over £5 billion more for free childcare, as well as nearly £14 billion for post-school education, including free further education and higher education tuition. But this is not just about individual pledges; it is about how we will work across Government to ensure that our investments build social justice as we rebuild Britain.

We will support cumulative impact assessments of our Budgets to ensure that they help the many and not the few, and we will adopt the Select Committee on Education’s recommendations for reform of the Social Mobility Commission. The right hon. Member for Putney will know that that Committee is chaired by one of her hon. Friends. I have not seen him of late; I wonder whether he, too, is suffering from friendly fire. I share that Committee’s diagnosis of the problem. We have had many years of initiatives to improve social mobility that simply have not succeeded. I think the right hon. Lady agrees that sometimes, in the case of opportunity areas, those initiatives have been just a bit too small. At other times, they have had to fight against the headwind of austerity Budgets that have increased poverty and inequality while cutting the public services that protect us from them. Even when Budgets have been progressive and investment significant, focusing on social mobility has not made our country just, because the aim has been to help only a few to get on, and not to make our country fairer for all.

The right hon. Lady disagrees with that as a definition of social mobility, but from what she has said in the past about how we have never actually had social mobility in this country, I do not think she disagrees with that as a description of reality. I agree we should not get too caught up in semantics, but talking about social justice does not do that. Instead, it expands the debate back out to where we both agree it should be.

When I introduce myself I do not know what title to use. I say, “I’m the shadow Minister for social mobility, kind of against social injustice. I’m anti-poverty and for social justice.” I do it all the time because we do not have a term that adequately explains where we think we should be going. I do not want to argue about words with the right hon. Lady. I think we should focus not just on narrow, voluntary programmes that are based in the Department for Education, but on joined-up strategies to transform our country and make it fairer and more just for all. That should be backed by the investment that only the Treasury can provide.

Labour would appoint a social justice Minister, despite the problems that the definition of that term might cause, and we will ensure that that Minister co-ordinates action across Government, drives forward our social justice agenda, and ensures it is matched by needed investment. The Treasury must properly support all the actions that should be taken by Departments—not just the Department for Education or the Department for Work and Pensions, but the Department of Health and Social Care, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and even the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport—so as to tackle the injustice and poverty that this Government have effectively created through their austerity measures. That new Minister will have the full support of the Treasury because they will be based there. There will be no separation between the wider Labour agenda and Treasury strategy, such as that described by the right hon. Lady. We are talking about serious investment and long-term commitment to social justice, and that is what Labour will offer.

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[Jesse Norman]

It certainly has been; if the hon. Lady looks at the record, she can see that. I also pointed out that Scottish schools had performed worse than ever before in the PISA rankings in 2016. She can check that; it is an objective fact, not a matter for debate. She is entitled to her views, but not to the facts.

The Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for East Ham—I apologise, I mean the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown); I am sure many footballers will not thank me for that. The hon. Lady mentioned table tennis tables; having been a director of the Roundhouse in London for many years, I know the value of local social involvement and engagement. I agree with it, and the Government have invested significantly in it. She seems to have forgotten that the Government will have spent almost £6 billion in 2019-20 on childcare, which is a record amount. They have doubled the amount of free childcare available for working parents of three and four-year-olds to 30 hours. The Government have a tremendous record in this area in many ways. I am glad she mentioned table tennis tables; I was playing at a free table tennis table, provided through public funding, only last weekend, in the village of Little Dewchurch in my constituency.

[Lyn Brown]

Will the Minister give way?

[Jesse Norman]

I am sorry; I have no time. If the hon. Lady had spoken for less time, I would have had more time to respond.

I will respond to the question raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney. It is a very interesting attack, not just on the Treasury but on the model of Government that we have in this country. It deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness. The point has often been made before, although not quite in the same terms. Historically, there is a tension in British Government between the Treasury as a finance ministry and the Treasury as an economics ministry; that is well understood.

My right hon. Friend’s concerns about short-termism in public policy making are also criticisms that have often been made. The extent to which this Government, their immediate predecessor and the one before that, have taken steps to attempt to ameliorate and address some of these issues is interesting. For example, we now have multi-year funding strategies for road and rail infrastructure, which we did not have before; there is a separate independent economics ministry, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which is specifically designed to provide an economic counterpart to the Treasury; and, other steps have been taken to try to combat embedded institutional concerns about short-termism in public funding. Undoubtedly, there is more to do. The criticisms have weight, as has been shown by the responses that the Government have made; it is a point that the Government have well taken and are making significant progress.

There is an embedded tension between the desire for longevity in funding and the desire for democracy. If we lived in China, we would operate according to a 100-year economic plan; we cannot do that because this country has always been bound by the principle that no Government can bind their successors. It is right that we should try to build more longevity into public policy; I have touched on some of the ways in which that can be done, but I have no doubt there are many areas in which it can be done better. This embedded tension between cash constraints, managing the public exchequer, the democratic accountability of Ministers and long-term funding is one that will not be removed by abolishing the Treasury.

My right hon. Friend said that no company would ever see a contradiction between the chief executive and the financial director; I think she is mistaken. There are many companies in which the chief executive would like to spend money and the finance director, in league with the chair, prevents him from doing so. There have been many points in British government when that has been true. It is often true in a Labour Government, when the wisdom of having an independent Treasury, with a degree of control over public finances, stops a Labour Government from thoroughly spendthrift public spending policies. I close by saying that I encourage my right hon. Friend to be careful what she wishes for.