Summer Adjournment

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to raise the concerns that have been expressed on both sides of the House about the impact of the Government’s plans to reduce funding for English for speakers of other languages courses, plans which undermine the Prime Minister’s own vision for community cohesion. Members will remember that earlier this year he said in Prime Minister’s questions

“we will be putting in place…tougher rules”

to ensure that

“husbands and wives, particularly from the Indian sub-continent”

do

“learn English, so that…they can be more integrated into our country.”—[Official Report, 2 February 2011; Vol. 522, c. 856.]

It is deeply irresponsible to talk tough on language skills while removing the opportunities to develop them.

When the Government’s decision on ESOL funding was announced in the skills White Paper, the accompanying equality impact assessment said of ESOL that the changes

“should result in a very small overall impact on protected groups.”

That is not an assessment that those of us who are familiar with ESOL provision would have made and I welcome the fact that the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning did not accept that either and commissioned an equality impact assessment.

We have been wanting that impact assessment to be published for quite some time and were assured in the Westminster Hall debate on 3 May that it would be

“published in good time—certainly before the summer recess”.—[Official Report, 3 May 2011; Vol. 527, c. 211WH.]

I am sure that the Minister would have wished it otherwise, but the assessment was published only yesterday, 24 hours before the start of the recess. Better late than never, but what does it tell us? On gender, nationally 68% of ESOL learners over the age of 19 are women and in my city, Sheffield, the figure is even higher, with 83% of the 3,310 ESOL learners being women. That is a much higher proportion than the 50% of women learners in further education as a whole. On ethnicity, as would be expected a higher proportion of ESOL learners identify themselves as black or minority ethnic than those in FE overall.

In Sheffield, our local college is advertising a 34-week ESOL course, starting in September, at a cost of £715. Contributing half of that sum, as would be expected under the new rules, is simply unaffordable to those who depend on those courses so the college is planning for a “huge drop” —these are the college’s words—in numbers. Women who will be affected have written to me and they describe movingly how they rely on ESOL courses to interact with each other, with society and with their children.

I am pleased that the Minister has acknowledged the negative impact, reflected in his Department’s own assessment, of the introduction of the changes. I welcome the fact that he is considering, in partnership with the Department for Communities and Local Government and in consultation with the Association of Colleges, ways in which the Government can mitigate that impact. I hope he will explain more about his plans to the House today and, crucially, the timetable for their introduction.

The problem is that the new rules for ESOL funding take effect in just 12 days, so I urge the Minister to give us an assurance that before the start of the new college year he will put in place measures to avert the unfair impact—or, if he cannot do that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth) said, I hope that he will tell us that the new rules will be put on hold.