Education and Local Services

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

It is great to be called at this stage and to have had the opportunity to hear so many fine maiden speeches on both sides of the House. I congratulate all the new Members on making them.

The Queen’s Speech was clearly overshadowed by the tragedy at Grenfell Tower. It is a disaster that shocked the nation. Across the country, local authorities are responding with the seriousness that the disaster deserves. My constituency has most of Sheffield’s high-rise housing and the council has acted promptly to check the safety of properties. Indeed, the cladding of one, Hanover Tower in Broomhall, has failed the test. The council has met tenants and taken immediate action, but the issue will cost money to resolve. Beyond that one block, the council is also putting in place the further measures needed to reassure tenants. Across the city it is retrofitting sprinklers in all tower blocks, but the question is: who is going to foot the bill?

Local councils have been the hardest-hit by Government cuts since 2010 across the entire public sector, and those in our big cities hardest of all. Local services across the board have been hit, from youth services to adult social care, with deep cuts deeply affecting local services. It is therefore all very well for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to say, as he did yesterday, that local authorities should just spend the money on fire safety and then contact him for help. What we need is a guarantee that help will be forthcoming—a clear statement that the funds needed to put Hanover Tower right will be provided, and a guarantee to fund the sprinkler systems across Sheffield, and indeed the same response across the whole country.

But the problem goes much wider than that. Much of the high-rise in my constituency is in the private rented sector. The council does not own the properties but it has a responsibility for the safety of those living in them, and there are fire safety issues there too. We have seen an explosion in numbers in the private rented sector in recent years, but at the same time, in Sheffield as in so many parts of the country, we have seen a fall, driven by the cuts, in the number of local government staff responsible for compliance in the sector, causing real risk to people in terms of fire and other issues. Do the Government accept that that is one of the issues that needs to be considered as part of any review of fire safety, not simply in high-rise but in accommodation generally in this country?

In the minute that I have left, let me turn to schools and the crisis they are facing. I have 24 state schools in my constituency. Every one of them has faced challenges in making ends meet over the last few years. Headteachers were right—I am disappointed that they have been attacked in the way they have during this debate—to highlight the combined threat of Government cuts and the new funding formula. From 2015-16 to 2019-20, every one of my schools faces cuts of between 6% and 19%—a loss of 103 teachers. Conservative Members seem to be in denial, as the Government are, about the crisis facing our schools.

If the statement that no school will lose out means anything, it must mean it in real terms. If that is the case, perhaps the Secretary of State could write quickly to the headteachers in my constituency to tell them that they need not worry about the redundancies that they are planning or the courses that they are proposing to remove, and to give them the guarantee that they want and that all our children deserve.