Education Maintenance Allowance

Nicholas Dakin Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I will not give way now, as the speech by the hon. Gentleman’s Front-Bench colleague, the hon. Member for Hartlepool, went over time slightly.

We have been determined to protect the money that goes to schools and the front line, and we have managed to ensure that school funding is protected in cash terms and will rise to cover increases in pupil numbers.

Perhaps the Opposition are arguing that there should be no cuts elsewhere, however. Perhaps they are arguing that they would cut the deficit more slowly, and allow it to remain a little longer—another half a billion pounds here, another billion there—so ensuring that we continue to pay enormous interest charges, which now stand at £120 million every day. That could be the Labour party’s approach: challenging the capital markets and calling the bluff of the people who invest the pension funds in sovereign debt to pull the plug or downgrade Britain’s credit rating.

That is not a risk that the coalition Government are prepared to take. Greece provides an example from not too far away, and Ireland is nearer still. We are not prepared to risk this country’s future. We are not prepared to plunge Britain into a currency and debt crisis, and we are not prepared to delay our economic recovery by failing to take the action that is necessary to get the public finances back under control. If we were to do so, young people—the people whom the Opposition purport to be representing today—would bear the brunt of the consequences of this failure. It is young people who suffer when companies freeze recruitment, and it is ensuring that our recovery happens sooner rather than later that lies at the heart of every difficult decision on spending taken by every Minister in this Government.

The overriding tenet of the coalition Government is to close the attainment gap between those from the poorest backgrounds and those from the wealthiest, so in making these changes to EMA we have been determined to ensure that no student is prevented from staying on in education because of genuine financial hardship. The hon. Member for Wigan made a passionate and thoughtful speech, but all her arguments can and will be addressed by the replacement support that we intend to put in place. It is wrong to undermine the research that was commissioned by the last Labour Government and carried out by the highly respectable National Foundation for Educational Research. It had a representative sample size of more than 2,000.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Gibb]

I will not give way.

We are targeting some of the savings from EMA to those young people who the NFER survey showed might not have stayed in education but for EMA.