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Dr. Harris: The Government must not only show evidence that the proposal can work, but explain clearly what the price will be. If it means public sector funds going to shareholders in well padded companies, or another Railtrack--this time for the NHS--the Government should make it clear that that is the case or explain what lessons are going to be learned from previous privatisations. I fear that those lessons will not have been learned.
In higher education, there is good evidence of the effect of the Government's policies.
Mr. Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale, West) rose--
Dr. Harris: I shall give way in a moment.
The then Department for Education and Employment funded South Bank university to carry out research into higher education, which found that
- "most full-time students, however, did think that their friends might have decided against university because of the changes in student funding and finances. 61 per cent. of full-time students agreed with the statement that 'Changes to student funding have deterred some of my friends from coming to university'. The proportion of students agreeing with the statement was highest among students from social classes IV and V . . . black students . . . and women aged 25"--
- "the very focus of widening participation strategies."
The then Select Committee on Education and Employment, with its majority of able but loyal Labour Back Benchers, joined in, too. It stated:
- "We recommend that the Government should tackle the consequences of student poverty for retention by improving access to financial support for less well-off students, raising very substantially the income threshold at which graduates have to begin repayment and addressing concerns about debt escalation."
Dr. Fox: May I take the hon. Gentleman back to private finance initiatives? Is it not simplistic either to reject PFI out of hand or to pretend that PFI is in itself a generic solution? Surely the success or otherwise of any PFI project will be determined by the quality of the contract that has been negotiated. Is not the real worry over recent PFI contracts, particularly in the health service, the rate of return being given to get projects off the ground quickly to suit political timetables?
Dr. Harris: If one accepts PFI, clearly the quality of the contract will be important. The Deputy Prime Minister
was asked about that on Radio 4 yesterday and I have to say that, even having read the transcript, I do not know what he was trying to say. Even with a translation it was unclear.I remember that, during the passage of the National Health Service (Private Finance) Act 1997, there was huge competition between the new Labour Front Bench and the then Conservative Front Bench as to who had invented the idea of PFI, amid claims that whoever had done so must be right. If the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) considers those debates, he will regret the enthusiasm with which his party, as well as the Government, decided that PFI was the only way.
David Davis: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Dr. Harris: No, I want to make progress on schools. If the right hon. Gentleman seeks to intervene at another time, it might be appropriate.
On the proposals in the Green Paper on schools, will the Minister tell us what empirical evidence there is to back up the idea that they constitute improvements? A study by Professor Gorard from the Cardiff university school of social sciences was published recently--perhaps even today. I hope that my quoting his academic research in aid of my argument will not lead to his being disparaged by the Government. He says in his abstract:
- "The specialist schools programme is seen as a key way of transforming the 'bog standard' comprehensive education system. This has been portrayed as meeting the local needs of parents. However, there is little evidence that such a programme can make such an impact . . . In particular, it is shown, schools that have control of their own admission arrangements will benefit the most and lead to the creation of a two-tier education system".
- "Our study has suggested that schools that are selective, or are their own admissions authorities, or are specialist tend to increase the socio-economic segregation of school intakes . . . When schools have two or more of these characteristics together--foundation specialist or selective specialist for example--this tendency is far stronger . . . Simply allowing more schools to become specialist, and perhaps allocate a proportion of their places to students on the basis of that specialism, cannot bring such changes about."
- "Rather, specialisation could lead to several clear disadvantages without any obvious compensation for most families."
In terms of ensuring that the Government make plans, parents and their children want to know where this is all going to end. They want to know whether the gimmick-based, initiative-led reforms to our school system are going to mean the end of the comprehensive school. They also want to know how a selection system that could increase at any time beyond the Government's control, although only 7 per cent. of schools choose to select at the moment, is going to lead to more choice for parents.
When schools select, it is parents and their children who are selected against. If specialist schools select on the basis of ability, as they are effectively being invited to do, and if faith schools select on the basis of the faith--or the presumed or alleged faith--of the child's parents, a pool of students will be selected against. If more
resources are given to schools that have the freedom to select, the children who most need additional teachers will be left in schools without the resources and without the kudos to be able to select and recruit the teachers who are needed. That will not benefit the students who most need help.On the Government's proposed reforms of the health care system, they seem to have decided that health authorities are going to be abolished without any planning or forethought as to where the public health function is going to rest. It is critical that public health is thought about at a local level, and that it does not all come out by diktat from the Department of Health.
There is no way in which the broad range of public health specialisms--for example, in environmental health, partnership building with local authorities, communicable disease control, health promotion and advice to commissioners--most of which are carried out by separate specialist public health consultants at health authority level, can possibly be delivered by a single public health consultant or trainee at primary care trust level. According to the Public Health Alliance, it is not yet clear what is going to happen to the public health function, which is possibly the most important function of health authorities--in value-added terms--in relation to health and quality of life.
In higher education, there has been an underfunded over-expansion of places, to the extent that when the clawback occurs for the universities that cannot fill their places, departments and campuses are closing. In NHS recruitment, the Government staged the nurses pay award in their first year in office in 1997, then fretted and wondered why so many nurses were leaving the health service.
The Government failed to plan early, in that they waited three years before expanding the number of places in medical schools--training places that were desperately needed and should have been filled at least three years earlier. The Conservatives were certainly complacent about our work force planning needs when they were in power. However, to delay for three years before starting to train the new doctors and nurses that we need for the future was a disaster of planning that will come back to haunt the Government.
Why do the Government claim that for schools to be diverse, they need to have different titles? We do not need a new structure for schools to offer different things. They do not need a specialism to be special. It is wrong that schools can buy higher quality with extra funding given to them only if they opt for one of these initiative-driven proposals.
A further question is, are the Government being honest? The Secretary of State's predecessor said clearly before the 1997 general election:
- "Watch my lips. No selection by interview or examination under a Labour Government."
If the Government cannot be honest with the electorate and with the House, at least they could be honest with their own party. However, nowhere in the education section of the briefing to Labour Members alluded to in yesterday's debate on the Queen's Speech does it mention the extent to which there will be freedom to engage the private sector in the delivery of services. There are five main bullet points and it simply is not referred to. Yes, the Secretary of State developed the point today, but she would not take interventions, so we are left dangling to consider the idea, which is tantalising for some, perhaps, that there might be extensive freedom for the private sector to be involved.
On free schools, I wonder whether the Conservatives won the election. They did not deserve to win it and the electorate did not give them that victory, but it appears to me that the drive to free schools, an admissions free-for-all and freedom to employ the private sector, despite there being no evidential backing for that, show that Ministers are delivering to the Conservatives an election victory on education that is most undeserved, unplanned and lacking in an evidential base.
The Government talk, semi-honestly, of there being more teachers. Of course there are more teachers, but there are more children. If we are to examine the figures sensibly, it is the ratio that counts. Simply saying that there are more teachers does not address whether quality is improving if class sizes are rising.
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