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12.50 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Ms Estelle Morris): I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) for bringing this matter to the House. It is clearly an issue of great concern in his constituency, not only to people who have been residents and their families, but to others who may, as he says, find themselves in a similar situation. As he says, the case that he has quoted spans legislation that is covered by both the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Employment. I welcome the opportunity to respond to his concerns and to set out the Government's views on the subject.
There are clearly two issues: the registration of the residential home and the registration of nurseries and child care establishments, which is perhaps of greater importance, given the work that the Government are doing.
I understand my hon. Friend's concern about the history of the Cherry Tree day nursery. He has set out important details relating to the nursery's former existence as a residential care home for the elderly, which was closed at short notice by the owner, causing considerable distress to the residents of the home at the time. As he is aware, such homes are registered under the Registered Homes Act 1984, which is the responsibility of the Department of Health.
I assure my hon. Friend that registration authorities can decide to cancel a home's registration if the home is considered to be seriously in breach of registration conditions. Emergency powers are also available. He will also be aware that there are occasions when, for a variety of personal reasons, a home owner may choose to cease trading and that it is very difficult for the Government or local authorities to intervene in such a decision.
I understand from contacts that my officials have had with Wakefield metropolitan council that the closure of Garden house was at the owner's instigation, and that, at that time, the local authority had no evidence of any impropriety or serious risk to the home's residents to cause it to consider closure itself. However, my hon. Friend paints a disturbing picture of the events surrounding the closure of Garden house and hints at misconduct by the owner. He will agree that local authorities should take action only when clear evidence is put before them and that, in the interests of fairness, it would not be reasonable to do otherwise. However, the general fitness of a person and their ability to care for children should be taken into account when deciding not only on original registration, but on matters that might be brought before local authorities subsequently.
I turn to the process of registration for the Cherry Tree day nursery, as carried out by Wakefield metropolitan council. I understand that, in December 1997, an application was made to the council for registration under the Children Act to provide full day care at Cherry Tree day nursery, at the site of the previous residential home. Primary responsibility for making judgments on those issues rests with the local authority.
In deciding whether to register the nursery, the authority considered carefully the fitness of the people who were applying for registration. I shall return to that matter because I accept that it is at the core of what my hon. Friend has been speaking about. The authority's consideration covers the fitness of the person who seeks registration to care for children, the fitness of anyone likely to be working or living at the premises where care is provided, and the fitness of the premises.
The authority concluded at that time that it had no evidence or other grounds to refuse registration. If such evidence were forthcoming, the authority would have ample scope within the legislation to refuse registration for the nursery. Indeed, if there is concrete evidence or serious concern that any person is not fit to care for young children, the authority has ample powers under the Children Act to cancel registration. It is important to note that it is not only initial registration that ensures use; the authority has powers to cancel that registration as well. If the evidence suggests that any child who uses the service is at risk of serious harm, emergency powers are available for the immediate cancellation of registration. I understand that no such evidence has been brought to the local authority's attention, so it has not felt able to act.
Let me outline what we have done and are doing to help to reassure families and to improve services for children. We know that early years services have evolved considerably over the past few years. As well as an increasing number and variety of providers, there is a strong move towards the integration of early education and day care. Indeed, for all children, particularly the youngest, the two concepts cannot sensibly be separated. Regulating the provision of early education and day care is essential to ensure the safety and welfare of children; to provide additional assurance to parents; and to ensure that public funds are well spent.
It is crucial that any parent who puts their child in any caring establishment that claims to provide care, education or both has the reassurance that their child will
be well protected. The system of regulation and inspection for both child care and early years education that we inherited from the previous Government leaves a lot to be desired. As both those sectors have grown in importance, there has been no cohesive action to make sense of the different regulatory and inspection frameworks that operate.
That is why, on 27 March, we issued an important consultation paper on the way forward for inspecting and regulating establishments such as the Cherry Tree day nursery. I reassure my hon. Friend about the five principles on which the consultation paper is based. They are those identified by the better regulation task force: consistency, transparency, proportionality, targeting and accountability.
The paper is out for consultation. Because we do not want to prejudge the issue, it asks a series of questions about what we have identified as the key issues. I reassure my hon. Friend that one of the questions that is specifically raised is what we should do when we consider fit people and premises requirements in relation to the regulations. We look forward to receiving many constructive and thoughtful responses, which will help us to devise a more appropriate regulatory regime. I will take his comments as a response to that consultation, but, given his wide experience in this matter and his clear constituency interest, I hope that he will feel able to respond further and in greater detail to the specific questions that we have asked.
My hon. Friend has raised a crucial issue: the care of those who are often the most vulnerable in our community. They have a right to be protected, and that will happen only if we have a regulatory and inspection framework that enables that inspection to be robust. His debate is timely not only because the Department of Health is reviewing its inspection arrangements for residential homes, but because we are reviewing our regulatory framework for people who look after young children.
I shall consider the questions that my hon. Friend has raised, in particular whether owners are included in the category of fit people. I shall ensure that, in further consultation, we emphasise the need, as my hon. Friend rightly did, to ensure the appropriateness of the owner of an establishment, as well as those who run it. I thank him for bringing the matters to the attention of the House, and I look forward to hearing his further comments as part of our consultation.
Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham):
I am grateful for the opportunity to hold this debate. Its subject is very familiar to the Minister. I do not want to repeat the mantras about the Greenwich judgment; I want to try to update the problem in the light of new developments, particularly the effect of the School Standards and Framework Bill and the requirements for smaller primary classes, which materially affect the issue. I want also to make practical proposals as to how we can make headway on the matter, which I know the Minister has discussed.
I come here in the hopeful expectation that the Minister of State is in a listening mode. I am encouraged by the fact that I wrote to him a few weeks ago on the more specialised subject of the lighting deficiencies of one of my local secondary schools and I was pleasantly surprised to receive a letter from him informing me that the money would be available in the capital budget for the following year. I realise that this is a much wider issue, but none the less, that suggested that I should have some hope and faith in ministerial attention.
The starting point for my remarks is parochial because I want to make initial references to my borough, Richmond. I do not do so in a narrowly parochial way because my points relate to a substantial number of boroughs. Around nine boroughs in London, which is roughly 20 constituencies, and about six in other parts of the country--probably more now that we are changing from county councils to unitary authorities--face the same problem in different ways. Richmond's experience is instructive and, I hope, from the Government's standpoint, positive in several ways.
First, Richmond, perhaps more than any other council, has taken seriously the Government's edict of regarding education, education, education as the main priority in expenditure, so much so that the borough has made painful decisions to give overriding priority to schools. It has taken standards extremely seriously to the extent that in the primary sector, and to a lesser degree in the secondary sector, it is probably pre-eminent in the country. Perhaps most important, the borough ignored all the blandishments of the Conservative era and not a single school opted out of local authority control and became grant-maintained. Parents, teachers and the council maintained faith in the local authority principle, so the authority has many positive features that the Government would find attractive.
The Greenwich judgment problem has affected Richmond in several key respects. We have roughly 10 per cent. of the primary intake from other boroughs and almost 45 per cent. of the secondary intake. That is partly a function of geography. Richmond is a small, elongated borough, and there are probably several natural neighbourhood movements across the border, but the school intake is far in excess of what would be achieved simply as a result of neighbourhood concentration.
What causes strong feeling in the area is the process of migration from low council tax, low service standard boroughs such as Wandsworth into my borough, where council taxes are relatively high, partly as a result of very high expenditure on education. If that were happening in international trade, it would be called an unfair trading
practice, but it is a practice that we must accommodate as a result of the way in which the legislation gives the authority no discretion to favour local residents.
That practice is causing specific problems, of which I know the Minister of State is well aware. First, there is a great deal of parental frustration. During the past couple of years, more than 100 parents in the primary sector, which is the least affected, were unable to get their first choice, and most of them appealed. There were many more such cases in the secondary sector.
There is a problem of physical overcrowding. The projections undertaken as part of the council's forward planning exercise show that about seven and a half additional classes at first-form entry will be required to meet additional demand, much of which comes from outside the borough. That figure will increase as a result of the class size reduction planned by the Government.
Apart from those purely statistical problems, there is a deeper political problem that I have sensed during the year in which I have been a Member of Parliament. I have tried to justify to electors on the doorstep an overriding priority for education as an expenditure and a social objective. I often get from residents, particularly older ones with grown-up children, the riposte, "Why are we in this borough spending so much on education? What benefit do we receive from that? We pay high council tax for our schools, but so much of the capacity is used up by people from outside the borough. Why do we bother?" Our commitment to education is being eroded because under the current law, the council is not allowed to give its own residents and council tax payers preference in the allocation of school places.
That is the problem, but there are two new considerations, which I hope will advance the debate a little. The first is the passage of the School Standards and Framework Bill. One of its key features--of which the Minister, as the Bill's architect, is well aware--is that it gives local education authorities responsibilities for school standards and enhances their role. However, it gives them the end without giving them the means to achieve it. A local education authority's additional responsibility should be reflected in greater authority and discretion in admissions policy.
The other development, which quantification suggests will have a significant impact, is the decrease in class sizes as a result of the maximum of 30 in a class that the Government want to introduce. In broad terms, that aim is absolutely right and we have fought and argued for it. It represents considerable progress. Research shows that class sizes, particularly in the primary sector, should be as small as possible, probably much smaller than 30. Therefore, the Government's aim is an admirable advance, and we fully support it. However, it presents practical problems because it will require a considerable increase in the number of classes that have to be accommodated. The early calculations in Richmond suggest that the shortage of classes in 2000 will increase from the present seven and a half to 10. Those classes must be accommodated.
The spirit in which the Government propose to approach that problem is reflected in the draft regulations, which have been put out to consultation. A key phrase in the draft regulations says that
I stress that when we speak of abolishing the Greenwich judgment or changing the law, we are making a modest suggestion. No one who is concerned with the problem seriously expects the Government to introduce primary legislation. Indeed, in the letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park, the Minister of State specifically rules out legislative change, and we understand that.
There are probably two ways in which secondary legislation and regulations could be used to deal with many of our problems. First, written into the admission regulations issued after the passage of the new legislation could be the right of local education authorities to consider an authority's boundaries as a legitimate criterion in admissions policy. I imagine that the Government might well respond to that proposal by saying that allowing such a criterion could be open to abuse, and by saying, "We might have a leafy shire borough trying to exclude all the yobs from across the boundary. We must not allow that to happen."
I envisage that such abuse could be avoided by building into the legislation a proviso that the local education authority's policy must in the final analysis provide for an appeal to the Secretary of State, who would have overriding powers to ensure that the more flexible admissions approach was not abused. However, with that proviso, the local education authority should be recognised as having a status in consideration of preference--so that, when pupils are competing for a place, a pupil's origination in the tax-paying authority should be regarded as a legitimate basis of preference.
We are therefore talking about overturning the Greenwich judgment not in any very grand way, but simply by allowing authorities where the judgment is a problem to take local residents into consideration in their admissions policy. That would be one way of dealing with the problem.
Another way of dealing with the problem, within broadly the same framework, would be the independent appeals system, admirably introduced by the new legislation, with a higher authority to that appeals system. If the appeals system had incorporated within it the provision that appropriate weight should be given to someone's residence in the tax-paying authority in considering an appeal against rejection of an application for a school place, it would go some of the way in meeting our concerns.
Therefore, many of the concerns of my borough and of boroughs like it could be met appropriately through admissions regulations, appeal regulations or a combination of the two.
I suspect that the other way of dealing with the problem--through financial flows--is probably less palatable to the Government, although it certainly follows from the logic of a free-for-all, if that is what the Government wish to allow to continue. In the past few years, under the standard spending assessment system, money has effectively followed pupils, as the Minister knows. However, the system does not take into account capital costs.
12.59 pm
"where extra places are needed, they should be created in popular, over-subscribed schools with high standards".
20 May 1998 : Column 923
Those are exactly the schools that Richmond has and where the additional pressure will be felt. In our borough, we are extremely conscious that the Government's requirements, which I stress we strongly favour in principle, and the methods to fulfil them suggested in the draft consultation document will greatly accentuate the practical problems of dealing with cross-border migration.
I have a few suggestions as to how we might find a solution. I am well aware that the Minister of State has taken part in several debates with my colleagues on this matter. He has been approached by national associations, the subject has been raised at teachers union conferences and there has been extensive correspondence. I have recently been shown a helpful letter on the subject from the Minister to my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge).
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