Oral Answers to Questions
Meg Hillier Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Emma Reynolds
The ombudsman took six years to look into what is a serious, significant and complex set of cases. We need time to look at that seriously, and we are doing precisely that.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)
We are committed to supporting vulnerable customers into work. At jobcentres, for example, we can identify the support needed and signpost people to courses or organisations to help them overcome barriers. We will be saying more about our proposals in the forthcoming employment White Paper.
Dame Meg Hillier
In my local jobcentre on Mare Street in my constituency, there is an extremely good team of DWP staff who work closely with vulnerable constituents to help them overcome the hurdles to getting benefits and getting into work. However, for people with fluctuating conditions, and particularly mental health conditions, there are many barriers both for them and for prospective employers. I wonder whether the Minister could give us a taster of what might be in the White Paper in terms of support for employers in particular to encourage them to take on people with such challenges.
Sir Stephen Timms
I very much welcome my hon. Friend’s positive report of the work in her local jobcentre. She highlights a major challenge behind a significant proportion of increased inactivity over the past few years. We will set out our response in the “Getting Britain Working” White Paper, but we are already providing tailored support in partnership with NHS talking therapies and individual placement and support in primary care. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that there is a good deal more to be done.
Social Security
Meg Hillier Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Before I start, I want to thank the House for putting its confidence in me to chair the Treasury Committee for the term of this Parliament. I am the servant of this House, and I will question without fear or favour those who appear before us. I look forward to engaging with the new Members I have yet to get to know. I also declare an interest: my husband has been in receipt of the winter fuel allowance, but if the vote changes that today, he will no longer receive it. For his own vanity, I should add that it is the lower limit.
The decision that we are being asked to make today is a difficult one, but sadly it will not be the only difficult decision facing the new Labour Government. Before the general election, I had the privilege of chairing the Public Accounts Committee for nine years. In that role, I saw all of the impacts on public finances—current, past and future. When I heard my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves) talk about the challenges ahead and the dire consequences, I would say, “You think it’s that bad; I know it’s a lot worse.” We have heard of the Chuckle Brothers, but I described us as the Misery Sisters, because when she said it was bad, I said it was going to be worse. That is the reality. The chickens are coming home to roost on the spending of the previous Government.
We saw a number of problems, which I laid out in my last annual report as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee—factually accurate information. The NHS capital budget was raided to pay for day-to-day expenses, but the backlog of capital expenditure in the NHS was £10.2 billion in the year ending 2022.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
As I served with the hon. Lady on the PAC, I warmly congratulate her on her election as Chair of the Treasury Committee. The House has made a very good choice.
Members of the Rayleigh, Rochford and District Association for Voluntary Service, whom I met last Friday, were genuinely worried about this policy. In a nutshell, their argument was that if people on very modest incomes are now frightened to heat their homes, that could lead to illness for many of those people, who will then present themselves to hospital and increase the winter pressures on A&E. By that method, it would be a false economy. The game is not worth the candle. What does the hon. Lady, whom I respect, say to that?
Dame Meg Hillier
I thank the right hon. Gentleman, with whom I had the pleasure of serving on the Public Accounts Committee. That is an example of how the House works closely together; most people would not think that we would agree on many issues, but on that Committee we produced every report in tandem.
The right hon. Gentleman will know that the pressures on the NHS are legion, and that many of the same people who will be suffering this cut to their income—we will come on to some of the measures to ameliorate it—will be the same people queuing and waiting for a hospital appointment. I know too many pensioners who do not get that hip replacement if they cannot afford it, but many are cashing in their savings, when they have them, to pay for a hip replacement so they can have quality of life. That is not the NHS that the right hon. Gentleman or I want to see in this country, so we need to make choices. One choice that this Government are making is to ensure that we pull the NHS waiting lists back. I could digress into the NHS for a long time, but if he will forgive me, I will move on.
Looking at our schools estate, under the last Government the Department for Education asked the Treasury for capital funding for schools of £5.3 billion in 2020. It was allocated only £3.1 billion, so there is a big backlog there.
In the defence sector there are many examples, but I will pick just a couple. Not a single nuclear submarine that has come out of service has yet been decommissioned in this country. It will cost around £500 million in 2018 prices for a single one, amounting to nearly three quarters of a billion pounds in 2018 prices to complete all of those. It is getting to a critical point. These decisions have been delayed and deferred for too long—in this case, by Governments of all colours, not just the last Government—and there is a gap of at least £17 billion in the defence equipment plan over 10 years.
There is also a lack of transparency about local authority spending because of the crisis in local government audit, which was overseen by the last Government. Not enough was done to deal with it. I could go on: there is a long list of expensive things that this Government now need to put right because of neglect over a period of time.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dame Meg Hillier
Let me continue for a moment. There are budget challenges this year, and many decisions that were made in recent Budgets will hit the public finances in 2025, 2026 or beyond, because there was either huge optimism about the state of economic growth or a deferral of painful cuts. Different Members of the House will have their own views.
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member on the post to which she has been elected. She has just outlined a number of projects for which public money needs to be found. As the shadow Secretary of State outlined, the Government’s decision today will save £1.1 billion, and the replacements they are putting in place will cost £3 billion. How does that make economic sense, and how does it help the case that she is making?
Dame Meg Hillier
I give credit to the hon. Gentleman for his chutzpah in coming to the House today to say that it is this Government who have denuded pensioners of income. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) highlighted, the previous Government have a track record in that area, and there are 880,000 pensioners who, on the hon. Gentleman’s watch, deserved pension credit but did not get it. Those pensioners have lost out on £3,900 a year, in some cases for many years, because the last Government fell down on the job. They protected some pensioners, but not all. Where was the urgency then? These are crocodile tears when those people were suffering, but it is right that pensioners should get what they are entitled to, and pension credit is not being abolished by this Government. Rather, it is being promoted to make sure that the very poorest pensioners get that income.
One of the things that is absolutely apparent is that we cannot take this issue in isolation. We have a Budget coming on 30 October, and knowing what I knew a few months ago as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and what I know today, I am not going to change my tune about the dire state of public finances. However, we face a second challenge: at the same time that our public finances are in that dire state, many of our citizens face the same challenges in their personal finances. This Labour Government are rightly committed to growth, but that will require an approach to taxation that helps ensure growth. We will therefore hear many arguments about the need for a taxation system that will underpin growth.
Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)
I thank my honourable friend for giving way. I call her “friend” because we have worked together very closely over the past few years, and I welcome her election—I would have supported her for that role.
The difficulty is that the public are not buying it. The Government cannot claim that they need to take this money from vulnerable pensioners—over 20,000 in my constituency will lose the support they are currently getting—and then reward train drivers who work four days a week on 70 grand a year. That is the difficulty, so how is my hon. Friend explaining that to her constituents? I have not been able to give an answer.
Dame Meg Hillier
I could speak forever about the challenges that the last Government left. I have spoken about the NHS, but let us take the dire state of our train services. The previous Government refused to engage and stop the strikes, which meant that anybody travelling had no certainty about whether they could get to everything from work to a family funeral. Lives were put in havoc, so it is absolutely right that we begin to set right the chaos that the last Government left. Yes, there is a cost to that, so the challenge for my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West and Pudsey and this Government is how we address that, making decisions that will build up the future of Britain in the way that we all want to see.
We also need to address the issue of taxation. The biggest challenge in our taxation system is that those who face the greatest financial challenges often face the biggest challenges of all, because the greatest cliff edges in our taxation and benefits system affect not those who are starting to earn and accumulate wealth, but those who are most financially challenged. For those at the margin, we keep coming across examples—this is not the only one—where the marginal costs of a slight improvement in income can drastically outweigh that improvement, whether that is tax thresholds being frozen or the issues we have seen with child benefit. There are many more examples, and the debate we are having today is one of those. The solution is not to duck or defer the need for tough choices, so, for the record, I will be voting with the Government. Equally for the record, though, I want this Government to commit to tackling those cliff edges, because that is what progressive policy—including taxation policy—looks like.
Like many Members of this House, I know from bitter experience that rushed laws tend to be bad laws, so I do not expect some Houdini-like solution to be announced from the Front Bench by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) in her closing speech. Instead, I expect and trust that she will consider removing those chains of poverty as a key mission for this Government in a thoughtful, carefully planned way; one that is tied up with the next Budget but goes way beyond it.
I also know, as will many Members, that there are technical challenges in making changes. Look at what has happened with child benefit: the limits on income are dragging many people into tax returns, where households of the same income did or did not receive child benefit depending on who was earning the money. That is a lesson in why changes need to be made in a sustainable way and according to a plan. My right hon. Friend on the Front Bench and her colleagues have a plan, but the winter fuel allowance, which we are discussing now, is a prime example of the problems that those cliff edges create. Addressing those problems in isolation, however, will leave in place all the other cliff edges; we need to look at challenging poverty in the round.
I was honoured to be chosen yesterday to be Chair of the Treasury Committee. I do not yet have Committee members—they are yet to be elected, as is the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee—so I cannot speak for a Committee that does not yet exist on a cross-party basis, but I will be urging the Committee to consider this wider challenge of cliff edges as a matter of urgency. I look forward to working with Ministers to find some practical steps forward.
We have to make tough choices as a Government in-year, because one of the challenges is that the hole in the public finances is not just about the hole today. In previous Budgets, decisions were made to defer spending to later years, so the real challenge is now. Too often I have seen calls for efficiency savings and cuts in-year that end up being deferred. If we look at what happened to the defence equipment plan under the Conservative Government in 2010, we see that there was a desire to balance the books. In doing so, the Ministry of Defence deferred spending—moved it to the right—which left us with aircraft carriers without aircraft and a raft of other problems. Deferring decisions and spending does not solve things, and this Government and this Cabinet are making the tough choices to make those difficult decisions in-year, because that is financially literate and the right thing to do.
Oral Answers to Questions
Meg Hillier Excerpts(9 months ago)
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Jo Churchill
We are working with other Departments, employers and stakeholders to isolate where those vacancies are, and on sector-based work academy programmes. We have put over 266,000 people through construction, care, tourism, hospitality—all those gaps that we need to fill.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Of people currently claiming tax credits, 20% are not moving over to universal credit in the migration. The Department tells us that those who are not claiming would have got a median amount of £3,200 a year. Will the Minister assure me and the House that she is doing everything she can to ensure that people are getting the money that they are owed?
Jo Churchill
I assure the hon. Lady that we are keeping a close eye on the issue, but ultimately it is the customer’s responsibility to claim. I gently point out that we have been rolling out the migration in her constituency since May ’23, with not one complaint. There is plenty of help available to those people as they transition.
Draft Occupational Pension Schemes (Administration, Investment, Charges and Governance) (Amendment) Regulations 2021
Meg Hillier Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I should declare my interests as a trustee of the parliamentary contributory pension fund.
The regulations raise the issue of the fees for small pension funds. To echo the comments of the hon. Member for Glasgow South West, although the auto-enrolment scheme was a great leap forward in enrolling people in jobs that never had pensions before, many people will jump from small pension scheme to small pension scheme, with small pots in those different schemes. Some of the those schemes will survive and some will wither away over time. Does the Minister have any plans to look at the fees for the auto-enrolment scheme, and in particular the gender equality issues that affect that? Is he looking to transfer transparency from the proposed scheme to other schemes?
Universal Credit: Court of Appeal Judgment
Meg Hillier Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Will Quince
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. He is right. We have had more than 3 million claims to universal credit since the middle of March and more than 1 million applications for advances, getting support to people who need it quickly, often within just a couple of days. That support is important, but I would stress that, for the cohort coming on to universal credit at the moment, the take-up of advances is lower, which often reflects personal circumstances. Therefore, taking an advance is not for everybody. It is interest-free and repayable over 12 months—as of next year, that goes up to 24 months. We are making the changes, but I agree with him that we are supporting people who need it the most in a timely manner.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Understandably, the Minister wants to talk a lot about the people who have had to claim universal credit in recent months. I, too, pay tribute to the staff at Hackney jobcentre, who have worked very hard to make sure that people in need get it, but there is nothing wrong with being critical of this big failure by the Department. He said that 1,000 people have complained about mistreatment, but the court identifies 85,000 people who could be affected. Can he assure us that work is going on to identify them—perhaps through an algorithm with a human element added if something unusual is thrown up—so that people are treated fairly and do not have to complain, and the Department acknowledges its mistake and seeks them out?
Universal Credit: Delayed Roll-Out
Meg Hillier Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Will Quince
I thank my hon. Friend for that question and for his work on the Select Committee. He is right: help to claim, commissioned via the Department and run by Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland, is working really well. We are now in detailed discussions in relation to a second year, but I want to go further and in April we will launch a £10 million transitional fund for UC, in particular to support disadvantaged and vulnerable groups. It will also help Members, because organisations in their constituencies will be able to bid for that funding.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
The Public Accounts Committee is not in the business of scaremongering, but from the very beginning we have raised concerns about the pace and the over-ambitious nature of this policy. Only today, the Minister listed so many changes that have taken place since it was rolled out that it shows there is a problem. In our last session on this issue, we heard from local authorities about the millions of pounds they are having to put aside to help people. With this extra time, will he look at what support he can give local authorities who are having to backfill mistakes by his Department?
Oral Answers to Questions
Meg Hillier Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
One of the real concerns in my constituency is the inability of people who want to rent to do so privately with the money that is available. Will the Secretary of State look at local housing allowance rates to ensure that families who could be living in the private sector—because they cannot obtain social housing—are not living in single hostel rooms, as many of my constituents have been for many years?
Dr Coffey
I am sure that the hon. Lady will welcome the increase in the local housing allowance from April 2020. I am conscious of the fact that two thirds of the people who are homeless are in London, and I really wish that the Mayor of London and his devolved authorities would get on and help to sort this out.
Department for Education
Meg Hillier Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Let me put on record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate. For some newer Members of this House who may not realise this, thanks is also owed to the Procedure Committee. When I first arrived in Parliament, it was impossible to debate proper facts, figures and the Budget in the estimates debate without being ruled out of order. The Chair of the Procedure Committee and I decided that that was not good enough and we worked together to try to make sure that we could get these debates, which are now granted by the Backbench Business Committee. I warn the Minister that we are well prepared to go through the numbers in her budget. I am sure that, as an assiduous Minister, she is well prepared to take on board our concerns and to answer them. We have worked closely with the National Audit Office in preparing for today’s debate so that we can focus on the actual figures. I know the Minister is assiduous and will not try to give us smoke and mirrors in her answers. Hopefully, she will answer not in slogans, but in actual figures.
Today, I plan to discuss the overall schools budget. I know that the Chair of the Education Committee, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), will also pick up on some of these issues. Other colleagues will be highlighting concerns around the spending on academies and multi-academy trusts, which, of course, report directly to the Department, teacher recruitment and retention, potentially the student loan book sales—although I see that the Member concerned is held up in a Statutory Instrument Committee—funding for Ofsted and the inspection regime; further education and higher education; and early years and special educational needs. The Minister will have her work cut out to make sure that she is over the detail, as I am sure that she is.
One reason why we wanted this debate is that the Government often repeat that more money is going into schools than ever before. In March 2017—on one of many occasions—the Public Accounts Committee looked at the sustainability of school funding. This was at the point when schools were already implementing a Government set target of £3 billion of efficiency savings—£1.7 billion of which was through more efficient use of staff, and £1.3 billion through more efficient procurement.
The House would expect the Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, to be absolutely on board with the idea that schools should be as efficient as they can be, certainly with regard to procurement—where schools buy their paper or their electricity from. It is quite right that schools should be encouraged and supported to find the money that can be put into frontline teaching. We were concerned, however, that the Department did not really have a grip on what the impact of those efficiency savings would be, particularly on staff. It did not know what the impact would be in the classrooms and on the teaching in schools that had already found those efficiency savings, or on the outcomes for children.
I am delighted to see that the Secretary of State is in his place. I know that he feels passionately about the need to make sure that children are getting everything that they can from our schools. It is therefore important and incumbent on him and his Department to make sure that, when they are setting the budget or implementing efficiency savings or cuts, they understand what the impact is on school attainment. While we are discussing the budget, we must understand that, in the end, the education budget is for that range of services provided through his Department to support young people in our country.
We concluded that the Government had not done a proper assessment. It was also concerning to hear from headteachers on the frontline about the challenge of squeezing out that money in certain schools, particularly in small schools where a small percentage saving is a big chunk and could mean losing a whole member of staff even if it is not equivalent to a whole member of staff’s salary.
During the general election of 2017, I was absolutely amazed and heartened by parents in my constituency and up and down the country—not political activists and not driven by political parties—talking about the impact in their child’s classrooms of the squeeze on school funding.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I did a survey just before and after the 2017 general election. Out of 103 schools in Coventry, 102 were finding increases in class sizes. The cuts measured pupil by pupil amounted to £295. We had a debate yesterday about sex education in schools. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is another burden being loaded on to our schools? We have a situation in Coventry where schools badly need additional funding regardless of what the Government were going to allow because they are starting from a very low basis. In other words, the Government owe education £3.5 billion, despite the fact that they put in £1.5 billion.
Meg Hillier
My hon. Friend tees me up for my next point. He also raises an important point. It is a political disease to ask schools to do more all the time and very often assume that it can just be done without the additional funding. It is important that the Secretary of State and his ministerial team watch closely that, while other bits of Government suggest that schools do things, there is the funding in place for that and for the core of what they should be delivering. It was after the general election and as a result of that campaign and that pressure on the Government, who were then elected without a majority, that the Secretary of State announced £1.3 billion of additional funding, which was weighted towards next year. This year, schools are in the throes of receiving the £416 million that was announced for this year and will receive £884 million in aggregate across England for next year. But that—the £3 billion figure—does not even backfill those efficiency demands that were asked for before. It is important that we recognise—in fact, the Government have recognised this—that we need 599,000 school places, which is as a result of the increase between 2010 and 2015. We are very concerned about the pressure on school budgets.
Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)
I have often heard Ministers say in justification of restrictions on school budgets that there are large balances. In my own constituency of West Bromwich West, the cumulative shortfall in schools came to nearly £5 million between 2017-18 and 2018-19. The cumulative reserves of all the schools in Sandwell is £3 million. There is now hard evidence that the balances left in schools in local authorities are no longer adequate to meet the year-by-year shortfalls that are taking place in them.
Meg Hillier
I am going to move on, in particular, to the issue of capital funding where sometimes reserves are built up for capital funding purposes.
Looking at what is happening in schools, I really want to give the lie to the argument that more money is going into schools than ever before. The Government say that, and we can look at it in cash terms, but we need to look at it in terms of per-pupil funding. The Department is estimating that over the 2015 spending review period, pupil numbers will rise by 3.9%, or 174,000, for primary school pupils and 10.3%, or 284,000 for secondary school pupils. Therefore, funding per pupil will, on average, rise only from £5,447 in 2015-16 to £5,519 in 2019-20—next year. That is a real-terms reduction once inflation is taken into account.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The hon. Lady is making a very powerful case. Does she agree that these cuts are often hurting the most vulnerable people most? Headteachers in my constituency are really concerned about teaching for special educational needs, with heartbreaking stories about schools having to lose their SEN teachers because they simply cannot afford them any more. These cuts really are having massive effects on individuals as well.
Meg Hillier
The hon. Lady raises a significant point. In my own constituency, since 2011, special educational needs provision has been backed up by the local authority through other funds that are now being squeezed because of the other funding caps.
The other point I would make very firmly to the Secretary of State is that so much of what happens in our schools is not just reliant on the Department for Education. If there are cuts in other parts of government or reductions in spending, there is a real squeeze where schools are sometimes expected to fill the gap but without the funding. This needs to be looked at in the round. We on the Committee are repeatedly concerned about what we call cost-shunting, where a saving is made in one area but the costs fall on another. A teacher or a headteacher with children in front of them in a classroom has to deal with the reality of that, and they do so very ably but often with great difficulty.
It is not just the Public Accounts Committee or the National Audit Office that is concerned about per-pupil funding. In 2018, only last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies concluded:
“Between 2009-10 and 2017-18, total school spending per pupil in England fell by about 8% in real terms”.
In October last year, the UK Statistics Authority wrote to the DFE complaining about its misleading use of statistics on school funding. So I hope that we have nailed the lie about the funding. We need to acknowledge where we are and then we can have a debate about how much we should be funding our schools by.
In the time I have got—I do not want to take up colleagues’ time because I know that they have prepared hard for this debate—I want to touch on capital funding. I congratulate the Department and the permanent secretary on undertaking a stock conditions survey of the school estate. This is the first time that that has properly happened. It is quite shocking, really, that Governments, over time, have not done this. It is quite challenging because schools are under different ownerships. It is a good and welcome step, but of course, as the Secretary of State will know, it will throw up many issues for him. Some 60% of the school estate was built before 1976, which underlines, for those of us thinking of the schools in our constituencies, the amount of work involved. The National Audit Office estimates that £6.7 billion is needed to return all school buildings to satisfactory or better condition. They are not all to be fantastic and “all singing, all dancing” but just to be satisfactory or, in some cases, better. In 2015-16—the beginning of the spending review period—the DFE allocated £4.5 billion to capital funding, about half of which was spent on creating new school places. So there is a significant shortfall in what is needed and the amount of money that is being spent, and that has an ongoing impact.
Then there is the free schools agenda, where the Secretary of State is wedded to his manifesto commitment of 500 new free schools by 2020 from the 2017 base. I think that there will be just over 850 if that target is reached. We are concerned that those buildings are often not the best. Asbestos surveys are not often done. Local government treasurers tell me that they know of buildings in their own areas that have been sold at well over the odds. It is as though people see a blank cheque when the Government come along with their cheque book for a free school site: the price goes up. That is not good value for money, and it really does need looking at. I do not think that even those most wedded to the free schools principle would want to see money wasted. In my own constituency, where many secondary schools were rebuilt under the academies programme and we have fantastic buildings, it breaks my heart to see new schools opening in inadequate buildings without sports facilities, without proper access, and often with very little in the way of playground facilities. I do not have to time to go into all that, but I recommend to the Department the reports we have done on this, because it is a very big concern.
The biggest concern for me on capital funding is about asbestos. I have a very strong constituency link here. I have a constituent, Lucie Stephens, whose mother was a primary schoolteacher for 30 years and died from mesothelioma—the cancer that comes from exposure to asbestos. She should have been enjoying her retirement now, but instead she is not because she caught this disease from working in a school that had asbestos in it. We looked at this on the Public Accounts Committee. The Department for Education has reported that over 80% of the schools that have now responded to its survey have asbestos. It has estimated that it would cost at least £100 billion to replace the entire school estate—the only way, really, to eradicate asbestos from our school buildings—but in January this year, we found that nearly a quarter of schools had still not provided the information that the Department needs to understand the extent of asbestos in school buildings and how the risks will be managed. Three times now, the Department has had to go back with a different deadline to get those schools responding. The last deadline was 15 February—just over a week ago. Does the Minister have an update on that? We have suggested that it is perhaps time to name and shame those schools. I do not say that lightly, but it is a very serious issue for those concerned.
My big concern is that there is no real incentive for schools to acknowledge their asbestos and get the expensive surveys done without some understanding of where the money will then come from to resolve it. It is not something that will be urgent in every school, and some schools will last a bit longer without it. Clearly, there needs to be a long-term plan and everyone needs to know what it is. There must be a clear plan from central Government with a pot of funding that schools can bid for. As we have heard, reserves and capital funding are very squeezed—squeezed to nothing in many cases, and certainly not enough to pay for asbestos removal or for a new school building. I urge the Secretary of State to be the one who finally upgrades our school buildings so that they are all as good as those in my constituency and the one who does not allow bad free schools to open.
As I said, there are many other issues that many colleagues in all parts of the House will be raising—everything from early years through to higher education—and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. There is a real issue about how we debate school funding, particularly in how we talk about the numbers. We need to make sure that we are actually talking about the same numbers, and then we can move on to a discussion about policy. Unless we get the maths right, we are talking at cross-purposes.
Several hon. Members rose—
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I congratulate the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), on bringing forward this report. It is good that we have recently had more debating time on things to do with children in schools. We have another debate on schools funding on Monday, and we recently spoke about maintained nursery education and the false economy of not continuing to fund it sustainably. Yesterday, we had the announcement on sex and relationship education. All these things add to the pressures and costs on schools, and I am afraid that the budgets for schools just do not go up commensurately to make them possible. We have had an intelligent debate so far. It has concentrated almost exclusively on schools, but it is a little-known fact that children’s social care is an important part of the Department for Education, which comes within the scope of today’s debate, so I want to raise a few issues on this.
Meg Hillier
One of the challenges is that, while this is a policy responsibility for the Department for Education, the funding goes through the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and directly to local authorities. This is one of the instances in which the Government need to work together and not succumb to cost-shunting, where cuts in one area can have an impact on children’s achievement elsewhere.
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and it is of course the local authorities that get the blame for not delivering the goods, even though we have not been giving them the money to do so in certain cases. There are also huge differentials in the way in which those local authorities use their money.
On children’s social care, I would like to hear more about sufficiency funding, which the Chair of the Education Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), mentioned, and also about a 10-year plan. Children’s most important years are the ones before they go to school—those years will shape their careers in school and beyond more than anything else—so, for goodness’ sake, if we cannot have a 10-year plan for the social care needs of our children as they grow up, what can we have one for?
I am not going to have time to talk about schools today—I shall have to reserve those comments for the debate on Monday—but I just want to make the point that all the ongoing cost pressures on schools are going to be compounded by the recent directive from the Department for Education that was sent to schools on 6 February recommending a 2% pay rise for teachers this year. That is fine, but the Department’s report stated that
“a pay increase for teachers of 2%, in line with forecast inflation, is affordable within the overall funding available to schools for 2019 to 2020, without placing further pressure on school budgets.”
I am afraid that that is just not the case. School budgets are under huge pressure, certainly in my constituency and elsewhere in West Sussex, where we have been at the bottom of the pile for funding for many years. The cumulative effect of that underfunding means that there is no fat left to cut. All the savings have been made, so even a 2% increase in teachers’ pay, if it is to be paid for by the schools, will have enormous impacts on those school budgets’ ability to provide all the other services, which I will go into in detail in the debate on Monday.
On children’s services, a report commissioned by Action for Children, the National Children’s Bureau, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Children’s Society and Barnardo’s has come out today, and it confirms what we all know about the huge shortfall in funding for children’s social care. That shortfall was also identified in the work that the all-party parliamentary group on children did in the report “Storing Up Trouble” that we produced last year. It is estimated that there will be a £3 billion funding gap by 2025. One of the alarming observations in today’s report is that spending on early intervention services for children and young people fell from £3.7 billion to £1.9 billion between 2010-11 and 2017-18. That is a 49% decrease in spending on early intervention. At the same time, local authority spending on late intervention services for children and young people has risen from £5.9 billion to £6.7 billion—a 12% increase.
This is not rocket science. If we do not spend early to prevent the problems from happening to these children, we will pay for it later. We will pay for it socially—most importantly—and also financially. It is such a false economy not to do more in those early years around perinatal mental health, around child neglect and around making children ready for school, for growing up and for society generally. Some of the biggest falls in spending have been in some of the most deprived authorities in the country, where the impact can be greater because the other support services, including family support services, are not available to help those children.
Meg Hillier
I rise very briefly to thank all hon. Members who have contributed and put in such detailed preparation and to thank again the NAO for its work.
It is important that we debate the money, because ultimately that is what then shapes how policy can be delivered, and I reiterate my points made at the beginning: that we must look at the money and talk about the right baselines—per-pupil funding, not vast global amounts on different year bases, because that gives a confusing message.
The Government need to look at every area of spending and assess how effective they are being in delivering their outcomes. I may disagree with the outcomes, but it is right, as the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) said, that we focus on those outcomes.
I thank hon. Members for their contributions. This is not the end of this: the PAC will continuously look at education spending, value for money and outcomes, and I know the Select Committee on Education so ably chaired by the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) will do so as well. So the Minister will see a lot more of us, and I put the Secretary of State on alert that we will be poring over the numbers and challenging him at every step of the way to make sure he is getting as much value as possible for the taxpayer, for our pupils and for all those who work so hard in our education system from cradle to further education and higher education in order to deliver better outcomes for young people.
Question deferred, (Standing Order No. 54).
Supplementary Estimate
Department for Work and Pensions
[Relevant Documents: Twentieth Report of the Work and Pensions Committee, Universal Credit: managed migration, HC 1762; and the Government response, HC 1901; Twenty-first Report of the Work and Pensions Committee, Universal Credit: support for disabled people, HC 1770; Twenty-third Report of the Work and Pensions Committee, Two-child limit, HC 1540.]
Motion made, and Question proposed,
That, for the year ending with 31 March 2019, for expenditure by the Department for Work and Pensions:
(1) further resources, not exceeding £880,517,000 be authorised for use for current purposes as set out in HC 1966,
(2) further resources, not exceeding £170,914,000 be authorised for use for capital purposes as so set out, and
(3) a further sum, not exceeding £1,334,611,000 be granted to Her Majesty to be issued by the Treasury out of the Consolidated Fund and applied for expenditure on the use of resources authorised by Parliament.—(Rebecca Harris.)
Oral Answers to Questions
Meg Hillier Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Alok Sharma
The hon. Lady has raised an important point, but I should point out that there has been no particular increase in in-work poverty. Indeed, 1 million fewer people, and 300,000 fewer children, are living in absolute poverty. Ultimately, however, this is about helping people into work, and, as we have said, we are doing an enormous amount through universal credit to ensure that that happens.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Further to the question asked by the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith), will the Minister not acknowledge that there is a big challenge for many of my constituents who work in more than one job on low wages, who do not have the time or the money to progress to further training, and whose employers are not willing to invest? How will he help those people to move to better, long-term, secure jobs?
ESA Underpayments
Meg Hillier Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Sarah Newton
Yes, I can make that commitment. We have already started to contact people and we are already making payments. Once we have contacted someone, we will make the freephone telephone number available to them, and we will pay them as soon as possible, but certainly within 12 weeks.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the fact that the Minister took action to make sure that the wrong was righted for those people who would otherwise not have had this payment from 2011 to 2014. I congratulate her on that. However, the real concern is that there were warnings from 2013 onwards, both from her staff in the Department and from agencies dealing with these people. She says that the Department found this out, but it took a long time to act. Many people have still lost out on passported benefits, some easy to calculate, like free school meals. Will she, in the light of the recommendations in our report, look closely at the impact of the passported benefits that were lost and consider a compensation scheme?
Sarah Newton
I thank the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. Of course, the whole Department will take her report very seriously. The Secretary of State herself wanted to be here today, but she is making a very important speech elsewhere. That is the only reason she is not here herself to really underline the importance of what we are doing in the Department.
The hon. Lady raises a very good point about what more we can do to support frontline staff in the DWP who spot something wrong or feel uncomfortable with something that is happening—perhaps an unintended consequence—and to escalate their concerns so that they are heard by managers and those right at the top of the organisation. As a result of the work that the Secretary of State has been doing since she has been at the Department, with our new permanent secretary, new structures have been put in place to ensure that that escalation of concerns is appropriately considered across operations, policy and legal, and that appropriate action is taken. I believe that that action will prevent this from happening again.