Budget Resolutions

Nadhim Zahawi Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)]

In 2019, we made a promise. We promised to give the people of this country world-class public services and to strengthen the entire fabric of this country so that everyone benefits. Everyone is entitled to have access to the same opportunities to make the most of their lives, whether they are at school, at work or whatever their personal circumstances. That is what we meant, and what we mean, by levelling up: making this country fairer for all who live in it.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

On the subject of levelling up, will the Secretary of State tell the House why he thinks it is acceptable for schools to be worse off in real terms now than they were in 2010?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Respectfully, it is quite the opposite. I will get to that point later. Schools will be £1,500 better off per pupil than in 2019-20—not even 2010— but we will return to that subject in a moment or two.

I was getting to the point about those who are more vulnerable. For those who are most vulnerable, levelling up means that extra support will always be there for them. The covid virus has put enormous pressure on all our public services, and I know the whole House will want to join me in again thanking our magnificent public heroes—our nurses and doctors, our teachers and nursery workers, our care home staff and our delivery workers—for how they have helped us all to weather the pandemic storm.

The national health service has been the frontline of this pandemic and we must build up its resources after an unprecedented 18 months. We are committing £5.9 billion to tackle the NHS backlog of non-emergency tests and procedures, which will include £2.3 billion for ensuring that there are at least 100 community diagnostic centres where people can get health checks, scans and tests closer to their homes.

Digital technology is transforming every aspect of our lives, so the package includes £2.1 billion over the next three years to support its use in hospitals and other care organisations to improve efficiency, freeing up valuable NHS staff time and ensuring the best care for patients, wherever they are. There will also be £1.5 billion from that package over the next three years for new surgical hubs, increased bed capacity and equipment to help elective services to recover, including surgeries and other medical procedures.

We have promised an overhaul of our adult social care system, improving social care outcomes through an affordable, high-quality and sustainable system. We are therefore allocating £3.6 billion for local government to reform adult social care provision, including capping personal care costs at £86,000.

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for giving way; he is always very generous. I draw his attention to the letter from the East Riding of Yorkshire Council, a Conservative-led authority, to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, stating that,

“the council has 302 assessed individuals requiring 4,114 hours of home care per week that we are currently unable to provide.”

The letter was dated in October. It identifies extra money that the Government have given, but says the council still does not have the funding needed to care for the people who need help in the East Riding.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, and I am sure the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care will take a careful look at her letter and respond in good time.

Nevertheless, it is this Government who have grasped the nettle of adult social care and will deliver on capping personal care costs, which can be so debilitating, at £86,000. While £1.7 billion will improve the wider social care system, including the East Riding of Yorkshire, as announced in September, at least £500 million of that will go towards improving qualifications, skills and wellbeing across the social care workforce.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is it not the case that the additional money for adult social care is on a promise that might come along in a few years’ time, and that most local authorities will not see a penny immediately to tackle the immediate problems that they have in adult social care? That is why I tabled my amendment; it was quite rightly not selected, but it would have brought in £15 billion extra and not harmed anyone earning under £50,000. Why will the Government not just make national insurance a flat rate for everyone?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful for the hon. Member’s question. I think he may have missed, while trying to catch your eye, Mr Speaker, what I just said about the £1.7 billion to improve the wider social care system that was announced in September. The additional £3.6 billion to local government that was announced in the Budget is more money. This is not an arms race on how much we can spend; this Government are interested in delivering outcomes. Covid has, no doubt, added extra challenges to our reforming agenda, but it has not deflected us from delivering our promises; it has made our commitment more focused as we deliver and build back better. For me, that means skills, schools and families.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I detect a hint of complacency on funding for social care. The Secretary of State mentioned £500 million to go towards workforce issues. That is nothing; it is a drop in the ocean for the issues with the social care workforce. There are more than 100,000 vacancies in social care and turnover is 30%. The money just will not touch the sides. The reaction to the Budget from the social care sector, which I hope to speak about today, has been one of profound disappointment and disbelief, really, that the Government do not understand what a crisis the sector is in. I really think it is about time for the Secretary of State to change his tone on that.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I have to respectfully disagree with the hon. Lady. In my time as vaccines Minister, I saw the social care sector rise to the challenge and deliver. I opened my remarks by reminding the House of that and thanking the workers on the frontline. Of course, money does make a difference, including the £500 million announced to make sure that we retain and inspire the social care workforce.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for giving way; he is being very generous with his time. He talks about the investment in social care, but does he not agree that there will still be a gaping hole of over £500 million in disabled children’s social care support?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I will return to children’s social care later in my speech. Mr Speaker, you will, I hope, recognise that I have given way several times. I would now like to make some headway in my speech and return to my theme, which hon. Members will hear from me and my team and from across Government: skills, schools and families.

World-class public services demand world-class skills, and in this country we are entering a new era—the era of the skills economy. We are investing over £3.8 billion over the course of this Parliament in further education and skills to make sure that people have access to the kind of high-quality training and education that will open the doors to good jobs, which in turn will boost productivity and support levelling up. For too long, employers have complained that young people just do not have the skills that their businesses need, particularly in science, technology, engineering and maths. For too long, students have studied subjects that will not result in a meaningful or satisfying career. That mismatch is not just bad for students; it is bad for business and it is catastrophic for our economy, especially as we try to rebuild after the pandemic.

We need people with the skills for tomorrow’s industries, so we are making the largest investment in skills in a decade, and it is going to deliver the technical education our economy needs. Our skills economy will power innovation and growth, and we will all feel the benefit.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Yesterday I was speaking with members of the tech industry, and they were lamenting the fact that there is only one hour a week for computing in secondary schools. Our growth will be in the technological sector. What will the Government do to improve computing education in schools?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful for the hon. Member’s question. I know that he cares passionately about this subject and the overhaul of information and communications technology in the curriculum. I think an £83 million investment in that is a signal to the sector of how important it is to the UK economy. I saw at first hand at Barnsley College how T-levels in technology are delivering for young people. We will invest £2.8 billion of capital funding in skills and further education, including to further expand our new T-levels, which are set to offer a new gold standard in technical education and will be more than a match for A-levels.

[Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)]

I recently visited the university technical college in Warrington, which is a great example of skills-based education, linking with employers such as Sellafield. Does the Secretary of State agree that that is exactly the sort of education we need to see across the UK?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the UTC and the work it is doing with Sellafield is exactly the sort of high-skilled, high-ambition, career-developing education that we need, giving those young people, when they become young adults, a real outcome. Of course, higher wages and a more successful economy will be by-products of that, but the real outcome is that rounded adult who has a real career path in the economy.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I welcome what my right hon. Friend is saying. Can he confirm that there is a 42% increase in the skills budget in cash terms? Does he not agree that if we spend that money right, we will create, for the first time, a parity of esteem between skills and higher education, and that rather than just “university, university, university”, our mantra should be “skills, skills, skills” and “apprenticeships, apprenticeships, apprenticeships”?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

There is no greater champion of this agenda than my right hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education. “Skills, skills, skills” runs through his veins, and I thank him for that point. I absolutely agree with him on the uplift in the investment that we are making.

I would like to take a moment to tell the House all about the visit I made to Barnsley College just a week or so ago. The college was the first in South Yorkshire to roll out T-levels. While I was there, I met several of its students, including one whose name is Greg. Honestly, I have rarely met a more inspiring individual. He told me that with his T-level—I will quote him word for word:

“I’m looking at unis now and thinking, ‘Which one am I picking?’ not ‘Which one of them is picking me?’”

Greg is living proof of the transformative effect our skills programme is having.

The same is true for apprentices. Apprenticeships funding will increase by £170 million to £2.7 billion, alongside other improvements to support more small businesses to hire new apprentices.

[Emma Hardy]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I want to make sure that others get a chance to participate in the debate, so I will make some headway. I hope that the hon. Lady will forgive me; I beg her indulgence.

These investments are putting employers at the heart of our skills economy so that education and training respond to local business needs. In this way, we will not only build one of the best technical education systems in the world, but drive local prosperity and levelling up.

Of course, we know that skills training is not just for the young. As technologies change and develop and businesses adapt, so people will find that they will need to reskill or retrain throughout their lives. Globalisation and automation are changing the modern workplace. Jobs and industries that are flourishing now might not be in five or 10 years. Our skills economy must be sufficiently agile to flex not just for today but for tomorrow and long into the future.

With our “Skills for Jobs” White Paper, we are committed to boosting the job prospects of adults across the country by making sure that they can get the training they need to adapt to a changing workforce. A total investment of over £550 million will make sure that adults at any age can retrain or upskill, and that is part of our national skills fund commitment. We will be investing more in boot camps, which offer free flexible courses of up to 16 weeks, giving people the opportunity to build up specific skills with a clear route to a job at the end. We are also investing more to help adults in England take advantage of our free courses for jobs offer. There are now more than 400 courses to help more adults gain the skills they need to boost their career prospects. There will be opportunities for adults across the whole of the UK to develop their numeracy skills through the multiply programme the Chancellor announced, funded by another £560 million through the UK shared prosperity fund. That means that wherever people live and whatever stage they are at in life, they will be able to access training and education that gives them the skills employers want and which can lead to good jobs and career progression.

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

This is a national effort. A lot of attention has quite rightly been placed on the areas in the north of England that are targets for levelling up, but will my right hon. Friend confirm to the House that levelling up is a national agenda and that there are poorer areas in the south of England and London that will receive priority funding from the Government?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Levelling up is at the heart of the Government’s agenda. Levelling up means empowering local leaders and communities to drive real change: boosting living standards, particularly where they are lowest; spreading opportunity and improving public services, particularly where they are weaker; and restoring local pride across the United Kingdom. Every local authority across the UK is eligible for the levelling up fund. In line with the Government’s mission to level up, it is right that we have prioritised areas that have been objectively assessed as most in need of the kind of investment that the levelling-up fund provides. That includes areas in the south of England which are most in need.

Schools are equally important and they have done well in the spending review. One of the biggest challenges we currently face is helping the young people who have suffered so much disruption to our schools during the pandemic. Those young people have been foremost in my mind and are central to the significant investment we announced this week. We know that world-class public services will help to turbocharge our economy. They will give us the skills, knowledge and technical excellence to drive productivity and growth. To deliver them, we have to begin with our schools.

All of us here, without exception, will owe a great debt to a teacher—maybe more than one—who helped us to get to where we are today. Colleagues will be aware that I have more reason to be grateful than most, having arrived here at the age of 11 as an immigrant without a word of English. I will always be grateful to the teachers who helped me on my way, which is why it gives me particular pleasure today, as Education Secretary in Her Majesty’s Government, to say that we are going to increase our spending on our country’s schools. Core funding will rise by £4.7 billion in 2024-25, building on the largest cash boost for a decade provided in the 2019 spending review. That equates to a total cash increase of £1,500 per pupil compared to 2019.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I will make some headway. I have taken many interventions.

Let us not forget that these are not normal times for any of our schools and colleges. The task in front of them, helping every young person to get back to where they need to be, requires all our teaching and education staff to continue to deal with the fallout from the pandemic. To reflect that, we will be allocating nearly £2 billion extra to support young people who are struggling to catch up on missed learning, following the existing investment in tutoring and training for teachers.

[Clive Efford]

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has described the increase in education funding over the past decade as the worst for 40 years. The Secretary of State says he is increasing funding for schools, but by next April, 12 years on, we are only about to achieve the same level of funding that existed in 2010. That is a damning indictment of the Conservative Government over the past decade. Why have young people in our schools been forced to pay the price of Tory austerity?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that question, but respectfully he is completely wrong. It is not the same level of funding as 2010. Let me try to explain it to him and his constituents. The £1,500 per pupil extra by 2024 is £1,500 more than in 2019-20. That is a significant investment in the future of this great country.

To reflect that, we will allocate—as I was saying on recovery—£2 billion extra to support young people who are struggling to catch up on missed learning, following the existing investment in tutoring and training for great teachers. That is in addition to the 6 million tutoring courses and 500,000 training opportunities we have already made, which takes overall investment specifically dedicated to pupils’ recovery to almost £5 billion. That includes an additional £1 billion of catch-up funding that goes direct to schools so that they can best decide how to support education recovery for those of their pupils who most need it. Teaching unions wanted that additional flexibility—I thank them for that—and I listened to them and made representations to my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. As they told me, this funding might pay for specialist small groups, or hiring staff to lead extra-curricular activities outside the school day. In that way, an average secondary school could receive about £70,000 a year in additional cash. That is money that can make a real difference to young lives. Evidence shows that the pandemic has had a significant impact on older pupils who have the least time left in education. We will be investing £800 million in extending the time they spend in colleges.

It is no secret that the most important person in any classroom is the one standing at the front of it, which is why this settlement enables us to raise teachers’ starting salaries to £30,000. We promised that in our manifesto and we are delivering on that promise. That is in addition to a salary boost of up to £3,000 tax free to teach maths, physics, chemistry and computing, which we have already announced, to increase the number of teachers in subjects that are facing the greatest shortfall. It will also build on our groundbreaking teacher recruitment and retention reforms. We want our brightest and best graduates to be queueing up to be teachers. We now have far more compelling reasons for them to do so.

As a former families Minister, I care passionately about giving children a great start in life. That means giving families every support. I have seen for myself on many occasions the incredible effect that our investment can make on helping struggling families. Around 300,000 of our most vulnerable families will be supported with an extra £200 million boost to the Government’s flagship supporting families programme, which supports families through complex issues that could lead to family break- down. That is an approximately 40% real-terms uplift in funding for the programme, taking total planned investment across the next three years to nearly £700 million. As I said, we are being driven by three things: skills, schools and families.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s commitment to the supporting families scheme. The certainty around that for the long term will be very beneficial. He will recognise, as a former families Minister, that the big pressure on local government budgets is not social care—I wish I could spend the money, but I cannot employ anybody—but children’s services. The cost is growing exponentially. We need to move to more proactive preventive services, such as supporting families. Will he make a commitment to ensure that the transition in local government to preventive services will continue beyond this Budget? It is very welcome, but it has to be a long-term trend. Will he commit to supporting local government to do that?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I thank him, not least because of his deep experience in local government. We will continue to engage with the MacAlister review and we will take very seriously the points that my hon. Friend made about the pressures on local government.

As I said, this is about skills, schools and families, which is why we are setting aside £50 million over three years—

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Let me make some headway, because hon. Members might find this interesting: we are setting aside £50 million over three years for parenting programmes to help parents and carers build positive relationships with their children and around £80 million to create a new network of family hubs—a one-stop shop where families can get help and support services when they need them in 75 local authorities across England. Almost half of local authorities will have a family hub. I will give way to the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne).

[Andrew Gwynne]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State. I welcome the Government’s new-found conversion to something that sounds particularly like the Sure Starts that we had in 2010, but I want to ask him about a practical point. The fact is that in large parts of the country—usually where the facilities are needed most— the Sure Start centres are just not there physically in the community, because of the reductions in the revenue support grant to local government. They have been subsumed into schools, removed or sold. Will he prioritise areas such as Tameside so that we can build back this network of family support in our communities? We do not have the Sure Start centres; we need capital funding to bring them back.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman will know that, as Children and Families Minister, I tried to follow the evidence, and I will do the same as the Secretary of State. I will always be evidence-led. My difficulty with his statement about Sure Starts is that when we look at the evidence, we see that much of the investment went into buildings rather than to the families that we really needed to access those services. The difference here, as I saw through the evidence from family hubs in Harlow and elsewhere, is that with this multi-agency, wraparound approach, we can get to the families that need to access the service. I am glad to hear that he welcomes this announcement, because I know that he will probably be an outlier in his party in wanting to work constructively to get the 75 centres up and running.

We also continue to invest in early education, with around £170 million every year—the sector was slightly confused, but I know that the Children and Families Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), set them straight—to increase the hourly rate for free early education entitlements, supporting families with the cost of childcare. As we would expect from a Government who are as committed to levelling up as this one, much of our focus is on those who need additional help, especially the most vulnerable in society.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I know that Mr Speaker is looking at his watch, so perhaps the hon. Lady will forgive me if I make some headway and let others into the debate.

[Mr Speaker]

It is not about headway—I think a mere finish might be helpful.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Indeed, Mr Speaker. We are investing £2.7 billion of capital funding to improve provision for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.[Official Report, 2 December 2021, Vol. 704, c. 10MC.] That funding represents a significant investment in high needs provision and will help to deliver tens of thousands of new places for some of the most vulnerable children in our country. Over the next three years, we will provide £259 million to expand the number of places available in secure and open residential children’s homes. That will provide high-quality, safe homes for some of our most vulnerable children and young people.

We will also support families through our adoption strategy. That will go a long way to improving the process of matching children who need a home with the adopters who are desperate to provide one for them. That means encouraging all those who can provide a loving home to come forward, not just those from a narrow, rather middle-class demographic. We will, in due course, see more centres of excellence for our regional adoption agencies.

Every child deserves to grow up in a secure and loving home and every single one of us, young and old alike, deserves to live in a community where we feel safe. The whole country has been shocked to the core by the recent violent attacks on people who have been walking home or out enjoying themselves, especially vulnerable young women. This is simply unacceptable. We promised to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers in 2022-23 and we are putting an extra £540 million into recruiting a further 8,000 additional police officers. We are allocating £42 million for new crime and drugs programmes. That will help to fund our Safer Streets programme and will help more people to improve home security, especially in areas that have a high incidence of burglary, car theft and robbery. We have always taken a zero-tolerance approach to crime, and tackling drugs is a priority, especially through our county lines programme. We will set up a national crime and justice lab to analyse crime reduction and prevention data.

Part and parcel of keeping our streets safe is making sure that those who threaten that security are dealt with quickly and efficiently through our criminal justice system. The covid pandemic has had a massive impact on this, so we are making an extra £2.2 billion available to manage the increased number of offenders being brought to justice and to reduce backlogs in criminal courts. There will be an extra 20,000 prison places, which builds on the additional 18,000 prison places that we announced at the last spending review, plus a further 2,000 temporary places. That represents the largest prison-building programme in a generation.

For those people who have been victims of crime, we will increase our support services to over £185 million a year. Security, safety and support are going to underpin our public services, but we must also take a proactive approach to make sure that all our communities are vibrant, resilient places where people can live, learn and work. One of the chief ways to make sure that everyone can get from A to B smoothly and efficiently is through world-class public services, and we will need world-class local transport systems. The investment there makes a huge difference across the board.

I know that you are anxious about the time, Mr Speaker, so I will conclude. This Budget will provide billions of pounds to deliver the public services that the British people deserve. It puts skills, schools and families at the centre of everything we do and it embeds levelling up throughout all our services and our national infrastructure. The Budget is a clear statement of intent: world-class public services backed by £150 billion a year in cash terms.