Oral Answers to Questions

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend. He is absolutely right. The need to ensure that we are providing for children with special educational needs is very important. We are already seeing £6 billion this year going towards children with complex special educational needs; that is the highest level on record. We are also investing £265 million through to 2021 to create new school places and improve the existing facilities for children with special educational needs and those with disabilities. But it is also about the programme we have with our free schools: 34 special schools have opened so far with a further 55 in the pipeline. That is providing for children with special educational needs and we will continue to do so.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q6. Yesterday, within hours of the Prime Minister greenlighting the no-deal preparations, a constituent contacted me to say that he had been sent a redundancy notice by his work directly as a result of the chaos that this will cause. Her own figures show that any Brexit deal will leave us poorer, but no deal means a £24 billion hit to our public finances. [Interruption.] The Chancellor barracks—these are his own figures. Can the Prime Minister tell my now unemployed constituent what public services she is going to cut, or what taxes she is planning to raise to deal with that hole? Or is she just going to leave it to one of her successors to deal with these problems?

[The Prime Minister]

While the Government are making contingency arrangements for no deal, of course, what they are working for is to get the agreement on the deal that has been negotiated with the European Union such that we leave with a good deal for the United Kingdom that ensures that jobs are increased in this country, as they have been over the last eight years under a Conservative Government.