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Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley).

The Government’s proposed recovery plan is woefully inadequate, completely underestimates the scale of the recovery required and provides nothing to boost children’s mental health, wellbeing or social development through the creative arts, sports or simply play, despite parents saying that that is their top concern after the isolation of lockdown. The Prime Minister’s own education recovery commissioner, Kevan Collins, called for an investment of £15 billion—the equivalent of £700 per pupil over three years—to support children’s recovery, yet the Government’s package is 10 times less, offering only £50 extra per student per year.

What Kevan Collins has described as a “half-hearted approach” that

“risks failing hundreds of thousands of pupils”,

I would describe as shameful and an insult to the hardworking pupils, parents, teachers and school staff in Luton South, who have gone above and beyond over the past 15 months. If Conservative Members truly believe that the level of ambition in the Government’s plan is sufficient, it means that they are happy to neglect the future of the children in our country. Kevan Collins’s resignation is a damning indictment of the Government’s meagre proposals, and it demonstrates that the Government will fail to deliver the bold action that our children deserve.

The public deserve answers: why are Ministers and the Chancellor acting as obstacles to our young people’s recovery? The Government must come clean and explain why the substantial recovery plan proposed by the Prime Minister’s own education recovery commissioner was blocked. If the Government will not provide an adequate explanation as to why they rejected Kevan Collins’s proposals, they should publish all Treasury correspondence, and the official evaluations and impact assessments of the proposals, so that the public can make their own assessment. I hope that the Minister, in her closing remarks, will explain what urgent steps will be taken to address Kevan Collins’s concerns by increasing the investment in the recovery package.

The Labour party’s children’s recovery plan will match young people’s ambition for their own futures, give schools the resources to transform the extracurricular and enrichment opportunities available to every child, and invest in targeted learning for the children who need it most. Our comprehensive plan would deliver breakfast clubs for every child, quality mental health support in every school, additional investment for children who have struggled the most and support to help teachers develop, and it would guarantee that eligible children receive free school meals every day this summer. Will the Minister explain which part of that plan she opposes?

The long-term costs of not pursuing such a plan will be much higher than the upfront investment that is required. The Education Policy Institute has said that doing nothing would cost our economy £142 billion in the long term. That is almost 30 times more than the cost of our package. We must pursue a bold, ambitious strategy. Our young people’s futures and the future of our country depend on it.