Further Education Funding

Debate between Jim Shannon and Gordon Marsden

Tuesday 2nd April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and the Backbench Business Committee on securing this debate today. In the time I have available I cannot do justice to the multitude of speeches made, but Members have shown a sharp eye for details about travel, EMAs, keeping rural and other colleges going, unused space, capacity opportunities, FE in the global market and the drop in level 2 and 3 qualifications.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Gordon Marsden]

No, I am not taking any interventions.

It is hugely important that FE is getting the attention it deserves; it is heartening and unprecedented in this year. Members have spent half the Session raising FE funding and raised related issues in recent education questions. The excellent Westminster Hall debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), who is in his place, showed that not new challenges, not new issues, but new urgency was required from the Government, given the state of FE funding. The recent statistics from the Love Our Colleges and Raise the Rate campaigns have highlighted that brilliantly.

We know that the statistics are a standing rebuke to the failure of all three Governments in the past decade to fund FE adequately. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that spending and skills fell by £3 billion in real terms between 2010 and 2011. Those needing second and third chances have been hard hit and adult education has seen its budget cut by almost half. According to the Association of Colleges,

“Over the last ten years, colleges have had to deal with an average funding cut of 30%...Further education is the only part of the education budget to have had year-on-year cuts since 2010.”

The skills Minister knows all that and, to her credit, has tried to push her colleagues in Government, the Secretary of State and the Chancellor, on the funding envelope, but so far answer comes there none. This is at a time when the massive uncertainties around Brexit and its future impact on our economy make the role of FE in delivering new hope and skills all the more essential than at any time in the past 20 years.

Despite a unified sector lobby of the Government last autumn on the need for the Government to reverse their damaging cuts, the Chancellor has persistently failed to acknowledge it. In his financial Budget of October 2018 he talked about schools getting little extras, but FE did not even get the crumbs. Both he and the Education Secretary cannot be oblivious to the demands not only of the colleges but of everyone else involved in the world of FE—the training providers who make up 60% to 70% of delivery; the employers who see skills programmes, both highly specific and generic, as essential to their success; and the LEPs, combined authorities and mayors, all of whom see such things as essential to success in the 2020s. As a consequence, the fabric of sustainability for colleges has become fretted and threadbare. Last year, the Department stated that there could be a best-case scenario of 80 colleges at financial risk and a worst-case scenario of 150.

The National Education Union’s briefing states that colleges have suffered from cuts in activities such as tutorials, enrichment activities and additional courses. The Sixth Form Colleges Association has said similar things. Students have progressively had financial support reduced since the education maintenance allowance went, and the bursary fund that replaced it was insufficient. I know that the principal and teachers at the superb Blackpool and The Fylde College are moving qualifications across the piece, and they think action is overdue.

The Government must reassess urgently how they fund their apprenticeship programme. Last week Government stats showed that the apprenticeship starts between August 2018 and January 2019, two years from the levy launch, are still beneath the number of apprenticeship starts for 2016-17. A large part of that is because level 2 apprenticeship starts have fallen by more than a third in the space of a year. It is increasingly apparent that the Government levy is not designed or fit for purpose for SMEs or non-levy payers, as the Association of Employment and Learning Providers and Mark Dawe have consistently argued. We need to have a situation in which non-levy payers can train apprentices for small businesses, as some are having to turn them away.

We have seen apprenticeship figures go up, but the costs go up as well, so we have a Government, as the hon. Member for Gloucester emphasised in his speech, who need to take action at both ends of the cycle. Qualifications at levels 5 to 7 need to work. We need to sustain the fuel for them, but, as we have heard, levy payers and SMEs are starved of cash. The Government will seek to address some of the drops in qualifications through T-levels, but the money will not be seen in full until 2021-22 and we have no idea whether it will be sufficient. If there is a capacity issue, and, as we hope, T-levels take off, what capacity will the colleges have to deliver them if no additional funding is allocated by the Chancellor? Where are the institutions supposed to deliver them? Even more crucially, how will we bring them to fruition in the 2020s? Our concern is that setting T-levels simply as a competitor to A-levels will be counterproductive to their take-up and viability. We have to focus on 16 to 18-year-olds at level 3 standard whose preparation has been largely geared towards taking A-levels. Assuming that that will fly for T-levels is a risky strategy.

The AOC has said that the Government need to have a base rate increase of £1,000 per student as a minimum, so will the Government commit to that? Successful delivery requires teaching staff, as we have heard, with specialist industry expertise, up-to-date equipment and smaller class sizes. Average college pay is £30,000 compared with £37,000 in schools, and it significantly lags behind industry. The University and College Union, nationally and its many excellent campaigns countrywide, has said the same for years. Who will actually teach the T-levels? Existing teachers who have received very little in funding for years for CPD or new teachers?

The UCU spelt out in crisp terms in its submission to MPs for this debate what they ask Chancellor and the Education Secretary to do. Pay has fallen in value by 25% in real terms since 2009. Teachers in FE colleges earn on average £7,000 less than teachers in schools. We hear a lot about red lines these days, but will the Minister commit to a red line for her Department to get that changed? Since 2010, around 24,000 teachers have left the FE sector: a third of the total teaching workforce. What will the Minister do to ensure that colleges can increase the pay of teachers and ensure that we have a qualified workforce to teach T-levels after their introduction?

It is clear from what we have heard today that more and more Members across this House, especially in this Chamber, know that FE is an essential factor in delivering the fair, socially mobile, economic and community strategies that we will need in the 2020s. We in the Labour party, with our new national education service plans and now the launch of our lifelong learning commission, see FE as an essential building block to achieve that process. Progression, progression, progression is stamped through everything that we need to do in this area as through a stick of Blackpool rock. For now and for today, what Members in this House—all of them—require from the Government is something a little more short term and modest. If the Minster wills the ends, she must will the means. She must require from the Government something a little more. We must commit here and now to start to make good on the promises and the rhetoric that have so far not been backed up with the funding that FE needs, particularly from the Treasury. She and the Treasury must hear loud and clear all of the excellent speeches and demands, and praise for their colleges and training providers, that Members have spoken of here today.

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: Governance

Debate between Jim Shannon and Gordon Marsden

Wednesday 27th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

At the beginning of this year, it was announced that the chair of the Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Ian Johnson, would be stepping down at Easter. I had always found him approachable and helpful in my regular meetings with him to discuss the trust’s work. For the avoidance of doubt, I should say that although the trust is in the constituency of the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who is sitting on the Government Front Bench, it covers not just my constituency and his, but those of the hon. Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies), the right hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace) and my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith).

When it was subsequently announced that Mr Johnson had applied to become chair of the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Foundation Trust, I was mildly surprised, but thought nothing more of it. I was then interested, as I am sure others were—this was sent to myself and neighbouring MPs—to receive an email from the secretary of the trust encouraging us to go forward and talk about the process for Mr Johnson’s successor. I had no inkling then of the sequence of events that would lead me to seek this Adjournment debate.

What started to concern me about the circulation of this information was the extraordinarily short period of time that we were given. I did write to the secretary of the trust to ask why we had not been given earlier notice of the facts. When I found out that the advertisement had been placed in The Times, the date for the application was 16 April, which was within a very short period of time. I said that I would like more details on the shortlisting, the interviews and the interviewing panel. I said that I was sure that the trust would understand how important it was that there should be a strong transparency in the trust at such a critical point at this time. I got a slightly thin but soothing note from Michael Hearty, a governor of the trust, who announced himself as the chair of the nominations committee. He said:

“Let me first of all reassure you about the openness and transparency of the current Chair recruitment process.”

He took me through the process, and he did indeed confirm that it would be very speedy. He said that a long list of candidates had been presented to the nominations committee, but the list was not actually very long. It was a list of only eight, which makes me wonder why all the candidates were not interviewed.

There was then a very short process of presentations to stakeholders and final interviews. I wrote back to the governor and said that I thought there were still “serious questions” to be answered, particularly about the fact that there was no information about the closing date for applications. I asked him whether he would list the members of the nominations committee, and said that I was concerned that it had taken a week to provide me with merely a basic timeline regarding some of the questions that I had asked.

The second letter that I received from the governor was written in a rather smooth but slightly condescending fashion. He said:

“I am disappointed that my original response did not provide you with all the assurances that you were seeking and, as a consequence, you have found the need to ask further questions.”

As for the advertising of the process, he said that it was the first time that the trust had taken such a step, and that, in view of the progression, it thought that it would be open and transparent to let people know about it. He said:

“I am sure you will recognise its circulation as a well-intentioned act”,

although the closing date was an obvious piece of detail that could have been included in the original email.

At this point, I began to think of the old proverb that says:

“The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”

I said to the governor in response that I did not think that this was very transparent. I asked him who had appointed the nominations committee, and he told me that it was appointed by the governors. I am still at a loss to understand why the shortlisting involved such a hurry.

The other thing that bothered me was the inclusion of the chief executive of the trust, Wendy Swift, on the nominations committee. I laid out my concerns in an email to fellow MPs that I sent to them on 16 May, in which I said:

“the inclusion of the Chief Executive on that Committee, which effectively has overseen all aspects of this process, has prepared the short list of candidates and will presumably make a recommendation to Governors this Friday. I believe that to give any Chief Executive so prominent a role overseeing that process, as opposed to that person perfectly reasonably but separately giving thoughts and feedback to it, could be seen as anomalous in the context of the necessary future relationship of the new Chair to the Chief Exec.

I said that I had

“taken these steps to question what has gone on (with some reluctance and I think for the first time in my 20-years relationship with the Trust)”

because of my real concerns for the procedure, not for the individuals, because at that stage neither I nor anybody else knew who had applied or been shortlisted.

I then looked at the constitution of the trust and the manual of the council of governors. That manual made it very clear that the chief executive was not automatically one of the members of the committee. The role of the council of governors is, of course, to hold the executive to account, so the chief executive could have acted in an advisory capacity, but not as a member. The trust’s constitution said that she should be a member, so both of them could not be correct.

I wrote again to Mr Hearty on 17 May and said that the council of governors is

“responsible for establishing the Nominations Committee”.

I said that it is very clear that the chair’s appointment is its responsibility and that

“the only reference to the Chief Executive occurs in the section on Attendance at the Nominations Committee…It does not give any licence to the Chief Executive to sit as a fully-fledged member…determining all the processes, shortlisting candidates”

and so on. I asked him therefore to think very carefully as to whether this process should be “paused and recalibrated” because I believed that there was a significant danger that the clear protocols in the governors’ manual had been breached.

Well, he did not do that. In fact, an email was then sent by Sue Crouch, the lead governor, saying that although the constitution clearly indicated that the chief executive should be a member of the nominations committee, given the feedback from governors, Wendy had graciously offered to withdraw in the best interest of the process. But, of course, by that time she had taken part in three quarters of the process, and whether it was a gracious withdrawal or otherwise, I have no knowledge. That was not a very good situation.

I had become concerned about the situation with the trust and had therefore written to NHS Improvement to ask the same sorts of questions on what its role should be. I initially got back a letter from the director for the north region, Lyn Simpson, who said that NHS Improvement is not involved in the recruitment of chairs of foundation trusts, which, of course, was not what I had asked her. She said that the trust had given its assurances that this recruitment process was in line with the constitution, as well as open, transparent and governor-led, but she did not give any grounds for that advice.

I went back to Lyn Simpson, reminding her that I had had guidance from the House of Commons Library that foundation trusts are accountable to Monitor, which is now part of NHS Improvement. I had looked at the code of governance published by Monitor, which specifically referred to the appointment of chair, so I asked her to respond more fully. She did respond again, but said that there was no legal basis on which NHS Improvement could intervene in the appointment of a foundation trust chair. I did not find that very acceptable, but I did note that she said that Dr Kirkup’s recent governance report, published in February 2018, had highlighted the role that NHS Improvement plays in board appointments as “not sufficiently clear.”

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Quite clearly, if procedure has not been followed, as the hon. Gentleman has outlined, surely at some stage he has to refer this case to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. That must be a way of getting action given that this procedure has not been followed.

[Gordon Marsden]

It might be, but I am hoping that the Minister might be able to make some comments on these issues today, because NHS Improvement has to fulfil its duties under legislation, and I do not believe that it has done that very well.

I received another letter expressing pleasure that the trust had responded positively with the concerns on the point that I had raised, but that was really a question of shutting the door after the horse had bolted, for the reasons that I have explained. I then wrote again, asking for a response from Mr Hearty. I did not get that, but I did get a reply from Sue Crouch, who told me about the meeting to confirm the candidate who was going to be presented. That candidate turned out to be Mr Pearse Butler, who coincidentally had just stepped down as chair of the Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, to which the former chair of the Blackpool trust was about to go. I finally got to see the minutes of the process, and I was told that the discussion panels had worked well but that there had been a difference of opinion about the candidates.

I was also then told by a number of people that the proceedings at the confirmation were rather irregular. According to governors, not only did Michael Hearty ignore the request from three governors for a secret vote, but he said that abstentions would count as a yes vote, which struck me as a rather strange position. For obvious reasons, and because the trust has larded around a lot of “confidentials” and “highly confidentials” on various things, I am not going to name the governors who have spoken to me, although they are perfectly prepared to talk to people about it. I will just quote what one governor said:

“A few governors, including the Chief executive were involved in the recruitment process. The rest of the Governors were asked to attend presentations and panels as part of the recruitment process. I requested, on a number of occasions, the criteria and weighting for the presentations and the panels, including set questions. These were not sent. At the presentations, pieces of paper were presented on which we could make unstructured comments. These were supposed to be weighted, however there was no…criteria to do so…Candidate were questioned at each panel. No questions were pre set in advance…We were asked to choose a candidate based on the activities. There was disagreement from a number of people…about the preferred candidate for Chair…At the council of governors meeting called to ratify the appointment there was discussion about the process and the selection. A paper ballot was refused and a show of hands insisted on.”

I have a further comment from someone who will again remain nameless, but was a senior manager at Blackpool Vic and in other organisations in the past. He wrote to me to say that the council of governors had always been viewed as an inconvenient necessity rather than a valued part of the trust governance arrangement. I found that very disturbing and concerning.

One might have thought at that stage that the trust, and certainly the nominations committee, would have paused for thought, given all these criticisms from the governors, but we have had the same process for the appointment of a new non-executive director, not the clinical director. Again, there were two panels of candidates, who again included the chief executive, Wendy Swift. I understand that the chair-designate was present on this occasion as well. Let us call the two candidates X and Y. Panel 1 had preferred candidate X by four votes to two, and panel 2 had gone for the same candidate unanimously, but the nominations committee had recommended candidate Y. It is not surprising, therefore, that many trust governors have so far not gone back to ratify this appointment in any shape or form.

Those are some of the issues that have come out of this, and I want to make one or two observations in conclusion. The chair of any health trust is crucial, particularly in the difficult circumstances in which the Blackpool trust finds itself: still requiring improvement, according to the Care Quality Commission, and hit hard by the strains of morbidity and the impacts of transience and demography, which put extra pressure on. We therefore need the process for the appointment of a chair or non-executive director to be as transparent and reaching-out as possible, not a cosy old pals act reinforced by groupthink. That is what has sometimes come up through the bureaucracy.

I am forced to conclude that the nominations committee thought that it could get away with evading proper scrutiny and transparency—that a thin veneer of irritated politeness attempting to conceal a determined effort to override public governors unless they were rubber-stamped, and indeed delaying so as to block out others such as myself from discussing these things, would do the trick. Well, it does not do the trick, and it is frankly an insult to all the hard-working staff who have worked their socks off in the past few months in recent crises at Blackpool Victoria Hospital.

The use of the words “confidential” and “highly confidential” by the lead governor, Sue Crouch, could be seen as an attempt to intimidate or gag governors who had legitimate concerns about the process. I am very concerned about that. As I say, I have circulated this letter to all my neighbouring MPs. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) is unable to be here today, but she asked specifically for me to indicate that she shares my concern about the governance of the hospital. I understand that the hon. Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies), who is also away from Parliament, has said that he has a number of issues with the governance.

I ask the Minister to reflect on whether we need some form of inquiry into the process that went on at the Blackpool trust. I can assure him that some of the governors who have shared the concerns that I have are prepared to give evidence on that. We need some clarity as to the role of NHS Improvement, because it is supposed to be a backstop to addressing both stakeholder and individual concerns, but in this instance it seemed all too ready to accept the version of events from the people who had convened all this and the way they wanted it to go.

The principle that governors should not feel pressured or fettered is very important. If the Government want to encourage democratic involvement in the NHS—a real people’s NHS in its 70th year—there is a lot more to do to support and enable people to secure those rights of representation. Members of Parliament who raise legitimate issues of transparency should be able to get proper answers.

I have no idea whether Mr Pearse Butler, who was announced as the new chair on 18 May, will be a good, bad or indifferent chair of the trust, but I am clear that the process by which he was appointed was deeply flawed and not transparent.