| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Blunkett: The hon. Gentleman has the cheek of the devil. His Government have been pressing local authorities to sell their land and property to raise capital
receipts. The notes to the Gracious Speech on the issue of grant-maintained schools show that the Government are so keen on grant-maintained schools that they will allow them to keep 100 per cent. of the receipts from the sale of land, property and playing fields, whereas local authorities can use only 50 per cent. of such proceeds.
If the hon. Gentleman is so keen to ensure that the people of Ealing are protected from his Government, he should approach the Secretary of State for the Environment and persuade him to ensure that Ealing gets sufficient allocation under the borrowing permission to ensure that it would not have to sell land and property in the borough.
The centrepiece of the Government's proposals on education, training and employment are the nursery voucher proposals which were floated by the Prime Minister at the Conservative party conference in autumn last year. He said that the delivery of the places through the voucher scheme would be "a cast-iron commitment".
On 2 November this year, when the Department for Education and Employment issued its consultative guidance notes on the delivery of the voucher scheme and the pilot project, it said that it could not give a cast-iron guarantee to provide places under the system for four-year-olds. Therefore, while the Prime Minister guarantees it, the Secretary of State denies it. But that is not surprising, because she is on record as saying that she thinks the scheme would be "unwieldy" and "a dead weight", and that it was not the appropriate way to proceed with the delivery of the promise on nursery places.
Who could have invented such a scheme? Some
£545 million of existing local authority resources which are already providing places for four-year-olds are to be recycled at public expense under an expensive administrative procedure. It will be delivered through a piece of paper called a voucher that will provide £1,100 by way of a promissory note for a part-time nursery place, which in a nursery class costs an average of £1,300 to
£1,500 and in a nursery school an average of £1,600 to
£1,800.
Who could have invented a scheme that spends
£11 million on the administration simply of circulating the vouchers, of clawing back the money? Who could possibly have invented a scheme that takes from those who already have, recycles it theoretically to places that do not have provision, provides no capital resources for the provision of facilities, invests no money in training teachers or nursery nurses, and results in recycling the money from those who are providing to those who cannot provide because they do not have the places? That subsidises only those who have the places because they are buying them with their own resources in the private sector.
The only people who could possibly gain from such a scheme are those who can afford to pay for places and are already paying. They will now receive a subsidy of
£1,100, while everyone else will pay through the nose for the most convoluted administrative nightmare, which was invented not to deliver places for four-year-olds but to satisfy the right-wing ideologues who dreamed up the scheme in the first place. The whole thing is absolute nonsense.
Mr. Michael Fabricant (Mid-Staffordshire):
Does the hon. Gentleman not realise that, in the little villages of
Mr. Blunkett:
With all due respect, it sounds as though the hon. Gentleman knows as much about the operation of the provision of nursery education as he knows about parliamentary procedure, as exemplified in "The Final Cut".
Mr. Fabricant:
On a point of order, Madam Speaker. The hon. Gentleman calls one hon. Member a prat. He makes an insult to me. Is it not in order that, just occasionally, he should give an answer?
Madam Speaker:
All hon. Members are responsible for their comments in this House. I cannot put words into their mouths. It might be a good thing if I could sometimes.
Mr. Blunkett:
Fortunately, the hon. Member for Mid-Staffordshire (Mr. Fabricant) does not get three bites of the cherry, as he advises Members can in the television programme.
This is a tawdry little scheme. The pilot project alone will cost £5 million, operating in just four local authorities--£5 million that could have bought 4,000 part-time nursery places. The final scheme will cost
£11 million to administer, which could have bought 8,500 part-time nursery places across the country, ensuring that children who are already getting nursery places are not threatened; that three-year-olds who are currently threatened by the scheme can continue to get them; and that special needs children are not denied the support they deserve because they receive no extra funding through the voucher scheme.
I am prepared not simply to criticise an administrative nonsense, not simply to say that the Opposition would provide an entitlement so that we would set targets for all three as well as four-year-olds to have a nursery place, whose parents wished it, but to offer the Secretary of State a way out. I would like to offer her this afternoon the opportunity to sit down with me, with the Pre-School Learning Alliance, with the private sector and with local education authorities up and down the country to work out a way, within the amount of money that the Government have declared they are prepared to allocate, of offering in the next two years a method of delivering a nursery place to every four-year-old.
I offer her the opportunity, without the voucher scheme, without capita management having to take up public expenditure that could go on nursery places, without the problems that she knows exist in the present proposals, to ensure that every child of four gets the opportunity that she and the Prime Minister have offered them and that we are totally committed to providing.
I will guarantee the co-operation of every Labour education authority in this country in planning the delivery of those places and in ensuring that those resources are put directly into nursery schooling, and that every parent is guaranteed that basic entitlement. I ask the Secretary of State this afternoon to take up that opportunity.
Mr. Fabricant:
What about the rural areas?
Mr. Blunkett:
All the Secretary of State's Back Benchers can do is shout, "What about rural areas?" The proposal that I have just made, the guarantee that we are giving, and the entitlement that we are offering to all parents, stand for rural areas just as they do for urban areas.
Mr. Fabricant:
How will the hon. Gentleman pay for that?
Mr. Blunkett:
It will, of course, be funded. We will fund it not only with the money that already exists in the system, but with the money that the Government have laid on the table.
We will do so not simply with the £150 million that is directly available but with all the administrative costs-- the additional £20 million-plus that is available to operate and supervise the scheme. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Mid-Staffordshire, who is still burbling away, does not believe that that money can deliver the promise to all four-year-olds, how does he think the voucher system, using the same money--in fact, less than I am proposing--would be able to offer that cast-iron guarantee? Either he cannot add up, he is being mischievous or he is just very stupid.
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough and Horncastle):
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman thinks that private education has a useful role to play. He has just given a commitment on behalf of the Labour party. Will he ensure that, under his new funding proposals, people will be able to cash his form of voucher at private nursery schools?
Mr. Blunkett:
Nobody will have to cash anything except their entitlement to a free nursery place. It is as simple as that. There is money on the table. We are told that a paper promise will deliver the same pledge. We are told that it can be delivered without the money that will be spent on the administration of the scheme. If we would have £20 million more available through my proposal, presumably it will be accepted that there is £20 million more to ensure that the guarantee can be met.
The entitlement is absolute, but the availability of places can be guaranteed only by planning the facilities and by ensuring that there is a crash programme to train the teachers and nursery nurses. Without that, the paper promise that will be delivered through the door of every family with a four-year-old child just before a potential general election would not be worth the paper it was written on. That is the truth. I am calling the Secretary of State's bluff--either one believes that the scheme can work, in which case the places can be delivered, or one does not. It is as simple as that.
Mr. Jacques Arnold:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?
Mr. Blunkett:
No, I will not give way again.
Let us be clear about it. The entire sorry little package of measures in the Queen's Speech--which includes the off-balance-sheet student loans provision, which does nothing for access or opening up new opportunities and nothing to deal with the crisis that exists for students now with the Student Loans Company Ltd., which we will be debating next Monday--does nothing to address the future needs of our country or our education, training and employment systems.
This is a tired, worn-out and washed-up Government. They are a spent force, who ran out of steam a long time ago. They are a rudderless ship drifting starboard. The man in charge is issuing orders from the safe distance of the Admiralty, while the first mate expands his cabin as the decks are awash with the seas of fate. Captain Pugwash, blind-eyed and missing the signals from the port side, sails blissfully on into the rocks of Blair Point.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |