Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Friday 12th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Lewer (Northampton South) (Con) [V]]

As I outlined in my speech when the Bill was first introduced, it was clear from the cross-party support it attracted that many Members were keen to address the concern that families faced undue financial pressure when buying school uniforms. While there are differing opinions on how this issue should most effectively be addressed, it is important, at the stage the Bill is now at, that all efforts are put into ensuring that the guidance that will be put on a statutory footing works in the interests of all parties involved. My hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and for Shipley (Philip Davies) have tabled several amendments, which seek clarity on a number of important issues. I will speak particularly about amendments 4 and 16.

On amendment 4, a range of factors, alongside price, contribute to an effective school uniform policy, including quality, durability, sustainability and availability. It is important, therefore, that the guidance the Department formulates, if it is truly to seek to promote a fair and value-for-money approach to uniform, considers and balances all those considerations.

Over the last year, I have met many specialist school uniform suppliers, in my constituency and across the country, and it is clear that they understand and care about the price pressures their customers face. As a sector, they seek to address those through innovative business models that prioritise sustainability and ethical material sourcing, producing uniforms that are high-quality and long-lasting.

It is imperative that the way this specialised sector works is properly understood in formulating the guidance, so that those sustainable British SMEs are supported. That is why I take issue with the request that we have just heard to demand that different suppliers are available to parents. That is not how a large section of this sector works; nor, in fact, does it ensure value. That is a very important distinction.

Amendment 16 seeks to ensure that the Bill does not apply to the 2021-22 academic year. It is also important that, in the light of the covid-19 pandemic, the guidance is brought in gradually. That will give families, schools and schoolwear providers time to adjust, helping to avoid unnecessary and unintended expense.

If the guidance is brought in too quickly, many families will feel the need to purchase new uniform items before current ones are outgrown, and schools may feel the need to push out a rush for new tenders, having made agreements prior to the Bill being discussed or enacted that might have been drawn up in a different way from that now desired. The schoolwear providers, many of which are family-run businesses on our high streets in small towns and communities, will have to throw away high levels of stocked clothing that they have been unable to sell over the last year, as we have asked them to keep their doors shut during the pandemic.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

We have had a very thorough debate on the amendments, which fall into two categories. The majority cover areas that really ought to be covered as part of the statutory guidance proposed in the Bill. I am sure that the Minister will have heard the contributions in that spirit and will take them into consideration when drawing up the Department’s statutory guidance.

Reasonable points have been made about the importance of consultation and the range of stakeholders who ought to be consulted, and the statutory guidance will be subject to consultation when such issues can be raised. As my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) highlighted, at least one amendment would go against the entire thrust of the Bill and undermine the importance of having any statutory guidance at all.

The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) mentioned the response of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale to the amendments, and the degree of sympathy that he has for them. We all know that the passage of a private Member’s Bill into statute is a rare occasion, and particularly when a Bill is brought forward from the Opposition Benches, an inevitable degree of compromise is necessary. In that spirit Her Majesty’s official Opposition have no desire to undermine the huge amount of work that has taken place to get the Bill to this stage. I congratulate all members of the Committee on their work in scrutinising the Bill, and I pay tribute to the Minister and his officials for their work. They put a great deal of time and consideration into these matters, not just on Second Reading and in Committee, but also in discussions with my hon. Friend.

Sitting Fridays can do one of two things. They can be an advertisement for the House of Commons at its best, where Members work on a cross-party basis to solve common problems of interest to our constituents, or they can be an advertisement for the worst of our politics—the game playing, the filibustering, and the attempts to prevent things that have an obvious common-sense value and widespread support from getting into statute. I hope that today will be an advertisement for the good, and for the House of Commons at its best. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale on his work. I am delighted to see him in his place, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) on successfully stewarding the Bill to Report and, I hope, shortly on to Third Reading. School uniforms are an important part of establishing an ethos and common identity in a school. They are a shared endeavour and a sense of belonging. School uniforms help to remove the inequalities caused by differences in the prosperity or disadvantage of a pupil’s family, and they help to ensure that schools are disciplined and safe places for students, where it is good to be ambitious, and admirable to be conscientious and hardworking.

For some families, the cost of purchasing school uniforms for growing children can be a financial worry. In 2015, the Government commissioned a cost of school uniforms survey, which found that, after adjusting for inflation and excluding the PE kit, the average cost of a school uniform had decreased since 2007 to £213. While two thirds of parents were happy with the cost of a school uniform and PE kit, nearly one fifth reported that they had suffered financial hardship because of having to buy school uniforms for their children. The Bill, which the Government wholeheartedly support, is designed to ensure that the costs of schools uniforms are reasonable, and that schools secure the best value for parents.

Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8 relate to the content of the statutory guidance to be issued under the Bill. It is important that such issues are considered in the statutory guidance rather than in primary legislation, as suggested by the amendments. That approach maintains a level of flexibility and responsiveness, so that over time, statutory guidance on uniform costs can be amended and improved. I welcome the way that the hon. Member for Weaver Vale has constructed the Bill.

On amendment 1, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) that every school should ensure that second-hand school uniform is available for parents to acquire. It is, however, important for this to be a matter for statutory guidance, rather than primary legislation, so we can get the details right and schools have some flexibility about how to do this.

On amendment 5, as we know, families already benefit from a zero rate of VAT on clothing designed for children under 14 years old. This is already a significant cost to the Exchequer, costing £2 billion each year in lost revenue. Expanding this to include a wider size of school uniforms would not specifically target low-income families. HMRC already provides guidance on this matter in VAT notice 714. However, my hon. Friend is right to point out that, having left the European Union, we are now free to make these changes if we wish, and I am sure the Chancellor of Exchequer will have heard his comments.

On amendment 8, we want to see schools providing clear information to parents about their uniform policies, but we consider that this is a matter for the statutory guidance to enable us to ensure that these requirements are flexible and responsive, rather than placing a requirement to publish in the Bill. My hon. Friend raised the issue of schools that do not have a school uniform policy. The current non-statutory guidance says:

“The Department strongly encourages schools to have a uniform as it can play a valuable role in contributing to the ethos of a school and setting an appropriate tone.”

That is in the current non-statutory guidance, so I will take my hon. Friend’s point in his speech as an exhortation to include that sentence or something similar in the statutory guidance, which we continue to work on.

On amendment 6, the crux of the phrasing in the Bill—“must have regard to”—is that schools must comply with the guidance unless they have a good reason for departing from it. Put simply, it means that schools cannot ignore this guidance. This amendment would in effect mean that schools would be able to disregard the guidance whenever they wished, which is the opposite of the intention behind the principal tenet of the Bill.

On amendment 7, it is important that the principles that will be set out in the statutory guidance on the costs aspects of uniform are considered by schools when they are developing or changing their uniform policies so that they are embedded right from the start. This amendment would mean that schools would not have to have regard to key factors that Members have raised as being crucial to the cost of a uniform when developing such a policy. This would severely undermine the reasons for introducing statutory guidance, as it would in effect mean that the application of the guidance would be limited and unlikely to be effective in keeping costs down.

On amendment 9, the Government will want to update the guidance as and when necessary, and as circumstances require it. The Government want the new statutory guidance to have time to bed in once issued and would not want to be looking to make arbitrary or unnecessary changes, but placing arbitrary restrictions on the Government’s ability to make changes to the guidance, even if schools were to make it clear that revisions would be welcome, would prevent us from being responsive to the needs of parents and schools, and risk schools being required to have regard to guidance that was out of date.

Amendments 10 to 14 seek to disapply certain types of school from the Bill. There is no good reason to treat these schools differently. For example, not all special schools and alternative provision schools have a school uniform, and that is appropriate. However, for those that do, it is important that this Bill applies to them, as well as to mainstream schools, to ensure that they also consider value for money for parents when setting their policy.

On amendment 15, I do not consider it appropriate to list selected external bodies to be consulted in primary legislation, but as I said in Committee, I am committed to engaging with representatives of schools, parents and other interested parties as we draft the statutory guidance.

On amendment 2, we are progressing well with the changes to the draft statutory guidance. We will reflect on the comments made during this debate and the debates in Committee as the Bill progresses through this House as we draft the statutory guidance. That includes the comments made by all hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), as well as, of course, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and other hon. Friends and hon. Members who have spoken in this debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

We have had a great debate this morning and into this afternoon, and I am delighted that it looks as though the Bill will be passed and will hopefully continue its passage on to the statute book.

I strongly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) on his leadership in bringing the Bill forward. I thank the Minister and his Department for their engagement with the Bill, and I am grateful for the engagement of so many others, particularly the Children’s Society, which has provided a strong bedrock of research that demonstrates why the Bill is needed and has engaged constructively throughout to make the Bill possible. The Schoolwear Association and school uniform manufacturers have also engaged constructively and made some important points about the value of domestic supply chains, of ethically produced and sourced products, and of good-quality, durable products. We should not lose sight of that.

School uniforms ought to be the great social leveller. Those of us who remember the struggles that our parents had affording uniforms when we grew up, and who looked ahead to non-uniform days with trepidation rather than rather than excitement because of the pressure of having the right trainers, the right clothes and the right brands, understand why school uniforms are so important from a social justice perspective. It is not just about the importance of a school’s ethos and identity—points made very well by the Minister.

Let us get the Bill passed and make progress, and let today be an advertisement to people right across the country about the good that this House and our politics can do when people come together in common cause.