Public Services

Stephen Lloyd Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), who I know shares my passion for public services.

We are doing this in the context of a potential general election, and we have to address the elephant in the room: what will happen if we go ahead with a no-deal Brexit, or indeed any Brexit at all. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that if we go off the cliff edge of no deal, we will be looking at this country’s borrowing rising to a 50-year high. The finances of this country will pale into insignificance compared with even the worst of the financial crash. There is only one way to ensure that we properly fund our public services, and that is to stop Brexit altogether, which is what the Liberal Democrats want to do. We want to do that because we care deeply about our NHS and our schools and about the day-to-day things that make a real difference to people and that save their lives. Unless we stop Brexit, we will not have the money to pay for all that, but I am sure that we all agree across the House that what we want to do is fully fund our public services.

We have a short amount of time today, and it will perhaps be unsurprising that I shall focus my remarks specifically on schools. As ever on such occasions, I have looked at the text of the Queen’s Speech. I looked and looked for a mention of schools, but I found only one “motherhood and apple pie” statement about them. Just one, at a time when our schools are going through an incredible funding crisis. I like to judge people by their words, but given that there were so few, let us instead judge this Government by their actions.

Even this year, even now, with all the funding announcements that this Government have made, schools are under enormous financial pressure. They include my own, where I am a governor, and all the others in the surrounding areas. I had an email from Liz from Botley, who is the mother of a child at a local school. She said of the headteacher:

“They have now asked parents to contribute a recommended donation of £10 per month per child. What a disgraceful state of affairs that the education of our young people is just left for parents who can afford it to pick up the bill. This is obviously totally unfair, and if allowed to continue, this will lead to a disastrous two-tier system where parents that can afford the top-up will be ‘buying’ into better-funded schools. No one cares as deeply as the parents that the education is the very best it can be, so we are unfairly pressured into filling the hole left by central government.”

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (Ind)]

Does my hon. Friend share my frustration that so many of the Government’s policy pledges on education in the past few weeks appear to be so much more about electioneering than actual meat on the bone? That is certainly the case for education, but also in many other areas.

[Layla Moran]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Yes, as a maths teacher, I have been rather frustrated by the headlines coming out of this Government, such as “£14 billion over three years,” when we will not get back to former levels until 2020. In fact, the money that schools are seeing right now is not enough. This year’s OECD teaching and learning international survey shows that the top thing that schools spend money on is more teachers. We heard that there would be a welcome rise in the amount of money available to first-year teachers, but that needs to come out of school budgets, as and when they are increased. The state gives with one hand, but it takes with the other.

Importantly, where the state has taken, it has taken from the most vulnerable and poorest areas. According to the National Education Union, the National Association of Head Teachers and the Association of School and College Leaders, 90% of secondary schools in the highest free school meals band will still face a funding shortfall in 2020-21, and funding cuts were above average in seven of the 10 poorest local authorities in England. Schools need the money now, not later. As a result of not providing that money, the Government are failing our children.

Teaching assistants are being sacked, with 50% of schools either considering it or already having done so in the past three years. Cash-strapped councils are struggling to support children with the most complex needs. Education, health and care plans increased by 16% between 2017 to 2018, yet schools need to make up the first £6,000 and so are penalised for doing the right thing. More than 200 schools in England have cut short the school week or are actively consulting on it, including schools in my area. We want and deserve world-class schools, but this Government will not be able to deliver them. They have not done that so far, and even with more money, where are the ideas to do it?

This is not just about funding. In fact, we are above average on the OECD funding table, so why are other countries leaping ahead? This Government are ideologically driven to deliver an education system that may have worked 50 years ago, but it is not based on the evidence of what works now. It is about high-stakes testing with little care for actual learning. We know about the narrowing of the curriculum, and we know that high-stakes tests cause anxiety for our children. In fact, I was written to in May by Aoife, who was in year 6 at the time, and she told me that her school prepares her for SATs with

“huge numbers of SATs practices that I have to do, sometimes up to two a day… since Christmas! I feel as though we often spend more time on practices than we do on actual lessons… Please can you do something in government to try and make the focus more on the teachers and less on us, so that we do not have to do so many practices and can do some fun learning.”

I could not agree more with Aoife. In fact, looking across the world at high-performing systems, that is exactly what they do.

The Liberal Democrats demand better. We would let our teachers get on with their jobs, rather than make them have to penny-pinch to buy the basics. We would invest in the most disadvantaged children and give councils the first £6,000 of any EHCP, so that schools are not penalised for taking the children that they want. We would spend £1 billion to save our colleges. By the way, “Love Our Colleges” badges are in all the Whips Offices, and I hope that everyone will wear them today, because colleges have been the Cinderella service of our education system. We would extend the pupil premium to age 19, because deprivation does not stop at 16. We would scrap SATs and replace Ofsted with an even more rigorous system that puts at its heart what the data is showing drives real attainment and wellbeing. We need a bolder agenda for education—not just paltry funding pledges, but real reform of the whole system, led by evidence, that will make the most of every child in our country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin). One area on which I certainly agree with him is that I think the Queen’s Speech was clearly a party political broadcast for the Conservatives. I was inclined to think, as I read it, that perhaps Her Majesty should bill Conservative central office for services rendered.

There are three areas I would like to touch on, and which I was disappointed were not covered in the Queen’s Speech, even though I am quite sure that after the election there will be a completely different one.

The first area relates to the WASPI women. As has already been said, some are in Parliament today talking to a number of MPs. I have been very involved with the issue ever since my re-election in 2017. We all understand the challenges and the issues around the extension of the retirement age. We understand the rationale behind it. I was just disappointed that the Government did not use the opportunity in the Queen’s Speech to at least come up with some compensation and money that could perhaps assuage the frustration, anxiety and anger that a lot of WASPI women feel. I have been pressing the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman for nine months or so to conduct an inquiry into maladministration. I will keep pressing, but I regret there was nothing in the Queen’s Speech that recognised the frustration and anger felt by many millions of WASPI women around the country.

There are two more areas that I would like to concentrate on. I have been here since the beginning of the debate—a joy of six hours—and originally the Home Secretary was on the Front Bench. I am very disappointed that two areas in particular that are covered by her Department were not touched on in the Queen’s Speech: the first is to do with injustice and the second with the public’s lack of trust.

Colleagues may not be aware that a British citizen who is affected by an act of terror does not automatically get the support from the Government, either legally or otherwise—including through legal aid—that a French citizen would. If someone is a French citizen, the French state immediately moves in to look after and protect them and provide legal aid, so that as they go through the coroner’s inquiry they are absolutely supported. We do not get that as British citizens and that is an anomaly. As we saw recently in the London Bridge and Westminster attacks and the Manchester bombing, British citizens who are affected by an act of terror often have to crowdfund so that they can be represented adequately and properly at the inquiries. That is completely wrong.

I have been pressing this issue for a while, including through an early-day motion—I thank many colleagues across the House and across parties who supported it—urging the Home Secretary and the Ministry of Justice to ensure that British citizens who are affected by acts of terror should be properly looked after and protected, both legally and otherwise. I am also well aware that many hundreds of thousands of people have supported this campaign on change.org. I was disappointed that such a measure was not in the Queen’s Speech. After the election, when there is another Queen’s Speech, I urge whoever is in government to look at that. Who knows? Maybe it will be the Lib Dems—I am one of nature’s optimists, folks.

On the lack of trust, I appreciate that the Home Secretary talked about the additional funds that were promised in the Queen’s Speech, but, again, I will believe that only after the election, because I think that that is just flannel at the minute. None the less, there is an understanding across the House that we need more police. It has now been around 60 or 70 years since the last police royal commission—since there was an independent exploration by a royal commission of what we want our police to do. Policing has changed hugely in the intervening period. Every Government tweak things here and there, cut this, expand that, promise the earth and often do not deliver, and I believe that it is time for another royal commission.

I offer the Government that suggestion in the spirit of optimism, because I think it makes for good politics. I say to both Front-Bench teams: the public no longer trust politicians on policing—I mean all parties, and I am not casting any particular aspersions. They have lost that trust, so I urge both Front-Bench teams to implement a police royal commission. It would be independent— I would have no politicians or tabloid press on it, and I would have it properly exploring exactly what policing should look like and how it should be funded for the next 40 or 50 years. Then, whichever Government are in charge should implement that report, and I believe that that would improve policing and the public’s trust in the police.