Department for Education

Mike Kane Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

I want to apologise to you straight away, Mr Deputy Speaker. I prepared diligently for this debate, but I had not realised the importance of estimates day debates to the House. I woke up today to headlines in all the newspapers talking about Kane for England, “Go Kane” and Kane for Harry, England and St George. It was not until the shadow Secretary of State turned up in her England top that the penny dropped. However, I am sure that the one thing that the Minister and I would agree on is that we wish our team all the best for tonight. Straight out of the gate, the Chair of the Education Committee, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), got the tone right for the debate. He also came up with the best soundbite of the day when he talked about funding “textbooks, not tanks”. I shall carry on with the alliteration and say that textbooks, not Tories, are the best thing for our education system.

There is a great deal to discuss in the Department’s spending review, but as colleagues have had to be brief, I will follow suit. I will start with schools, where the Department does the majority of its spending. In particular, I would like to focus on a claim that the Minister made over the weekend that is particularly relevant to this debate. He took to Twitter to say that

“claims that schools would lose money next year are inaccurate. School funding is protected in real terms per pupil—contrary to some inaccurate and misleading claims”.

I for one am glad that the Minister has decided he has a problem with inaccurate and misleading claims. With that in mind, does he believe that every school is going to get more money in the coming financial year? After all, it was the Secretary of State who said that under the current spending plans,

“each school will see at least a small cash increase.”—[Official Report, 29 January 2018; Vol. 635, c. 536.]

Unfortunately for his Department, this has been queried by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies and the UK Statistics Authority. So I ask the Minister to offer us some clarification and to state clearly whether schools will lose money or whether they will see a cash increase.

[Nick Gibb]

I should just like to point out that in the hon. Gentleman’s own constituency, his local authority has been funded to enable schools in Wythenshawe and Sale East to be funded with an increase of 2.3% once the national funding formula is implemented.

[Mike Kane]

I was so looking forward to that! The Prime Minister came to my constituency a few weeks ago to visit a school in Brooklands, in Trafford. That seat had never turned Labour in the history of municipal authority, but it did so that night and Labour took Trafford, because Trafford is losing £3.3 million in spending power for its schools.

Under the Department’s spending plans, schools will see cuts to their budgets for the third year in a row. I know that the Minister will be tempted to rehearse his prepared rebuttal and tell us how the Government have protected per-pupil spending in real terms, despite the fact that £2.7 billion in real terms has been cut since 2015. Those were the first schools cuts in a generation. Despite all the shallow talk of protecting budgets and extra funding, the future of our schools is not safe under the Tories.

While we are talking about the Department’s spending plans for next year, I know that there is one issue that teachers and school leavers across the country need an answer on, and that is pay. The Government’s own research has shown that their pay policy has left teachers nearly £4,000 worse off in real terms since they came into office. It is hardly a surprise that the Government are overseeing a crisis in the recruitment and retention of the teachers that our children and country need. Will the Minister admit that his pay policies have played a role in driving teachers out of the profession? If not, will he tell us why they are leaving the classroom in record numbers? For every teacher coming in, one is leaving the profession.

Teachers and other public sector staff have been repeatedly promised that the public sector pay cap has come to an end, but schools have been given no certainty about any pay rise or how it will be funded. So, will the Minister tell the House when the School Teachers’ Review Body will be publishing its annual report? Surely the Minister agrees that, without enough money to pay for higher wages, anything he utters from the Dispatch Box about an end to the pay cap is absolutely meaningless to the thousands of hard-working teachers who have not seen a real pay rise in years.

Before I end my speech, I want to discuss our student finance system. The Department’s estimates show that spending on the payment of student loans will be over £21 billion this year. They also show that the Department will be considering over £3 billion of interest payments on student debt as revenue. My hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has already shown that the Government’s use of an unreliable inflation measure for these debts costs students around £16,000, and they will now discover that that is being done to line the Treasury’s coffers. Will the Minister tell us how that £3.2 billion is going to be spent? Will he tell us whether the fact that his Department has a vested financial interest in keeping interest rates high means that it will not be acting to address the fact that students are paying more than 6% in interest before they are even able to repay their debts?

It is traditional for the Opposition spokesman to thank Opposition Members for their speeches, but not today. I want to thank all the Government Members for their speeches—[Hon. Members: “Ahh.”] Isn’t that nice of me? The hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Craig Tracey) made a fine speech, but he failed to mention that North Warwickshire Borough Council is losing £12.5 million from its schools budget. We had the most supportive unsupportive speech that I have ever heard in this House from the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg). He is right to say that Manchester teachers are the some of the best in the world—I was one of them—but Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council is losing £5.9 million over the funding period. What a fine speech it was from the hon. Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin). I believe that Horsham is in West Sussex, where primary schools are losing £8.9 million over this Parliament. I have already had it out with the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) about Derbyshire, which is facing an £11.5 million cut. Who else do we have? The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton)—

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mike Kane]

I have very little time left. Stoke-on-Trent is having £2.8 million taken away from its budgets. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman), which is in East Sussex, will see £6.4 million of funding removed.

It is eight years since the former Chancellor delivered the first austerity budget. After eight years of cuts and the usual platitudes, can Government Members really say it is working for them and their schools in their constituencies? As we approach the summer recess, I call on them to contemplate what austerity has done to our country and to the schools in their communities. I ask them to think deeply about whether they can continue in all conscience to support their Ministers in this great decimation of our education system.