Education Maintenance Allowance

John Cryer Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate about scrapping the education maintenance allowance. I share the frustration of many Opposition Members about the potential impact of abolishing it. However, although they may deny the relevance of the deficit, my anger is directed at the Labour party and the state in which the previous Government left the public finances.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

You should remember you’re the Chair of the Committee.

[Mr Stuart]

I am entirely happy to chair a Committee and to bear witness to the reality of education funding. I am involved in education and serve on the Committee because I care passionately about improving the quality of education and opportunity in this country. We may hear from others later, but the shadow Secretary of State did at least have the goodness to recognise that there was room for reducing the deficit. However, he would not tell us where, what, when or how. When I consider the attempt to make more effective interventions in the early years and I look at the nursery education opportunities for two-year-olds, I ask myself whether I would prefer to cut that or keep the EMA.

A Labour Member suggested that there might be differences between Members. In my constituency, some students travel for an hour and 40 minutes each way to attend Bishop Burton further education college. That is a real issue for a rural area such as mine. However, I know that half of all 17 and 18-year-old full-time students are eligible for EMA, and I am aware of the chronic crisis and pressure on education budgets—the desperate desire to deliver the outcomes that we have struggled to provide from our system. I have said it before, and I will risk repeating it: I know that the Labour Government were utterly committed to trying to close the gap. They had will and they had resource—a resource which has sadly gone—yet too often the gap widened rather than narrowed. I do not blame the Opposition for using this issue today, but I hope that we will collectively, not in a party political way, take the limited funds that are available—the deficit is not an irrelevant fact but the fundamental elephant in the room—and look to do what is best. We had a lot of spending previously, and we have a diet of hard decisions now. They must be faced.

The shadow Secretary of State suggested that the best approach was to cut everything by the same amount. Is that really the strategically sensible way to ensure that we improve outcomes for people in our society, not least those with least? I do not think that it is. So I am interested to know how the discretionary learner fund—the replacement for EMA—will work, because of the realities faced by my constituents, who travel over three hours a day to get to an FE college, and who then achieve at the end of that. If those people manage to do that in the face of great difficulty and personal inconvenience, I want to be sure that colleges such as Bishop Burton, which run private enterprises to make profits so that they can have a fleet of vehicles, are not disadvantaged. Despite those vehicles, the college is worried that the students, who often live in small hamlets, need to travel from their home to the pick-up point for the college bus. We need to ensure that we have a system—whether financed by local authorities or the replacement for EMA—that covers that.

It is hard to believe that EMA as it stands is the most sensible use of scarce resource. I am not trying to make a party political point, and I am mindful of my position as Chair of the Select Committee, but I want us to devise the system that works most effectively and yet does not deny the reality.

When I was first elected as a councillor—in Cambridge—many years ago, I went to a budget survey meeting with the public in a local shopping centre, which the then Labour council had arranged. I was handed a form which gave a list of spending areas for the budget debate. It said, “Please tick all those areas where you would like to see more spending.” I am a small-state Conservative in some ways, and I found many items on which I wanted to spend more. I was terribly aware of what went on in my ward—the lack of provision for young people, the need to do more in many areas—and I wanted to tick many boxes. However, the Labour council had sensibly included a proviso, which said, “All we ask is that for every box you tick to give more money, you identify another item on which you want to spend less.”

That is the challenge that faces the Select Committee, which will look under the bonnet of the new fund. It will examine engagement and participation by 16 to 19-year-olds. We want to ensure that the dire warnings by the shadow Secretary of State are not fulfilled and that young people are not put off education, but we must realise that we are in a highly constrained position because of this Government’s financial inheritance. Like that wise Labour council many years ago, every time we say, “Let’s save EMA”—Opposition Members have not made it clear so far whether they want to save all or half of EMA—we should ask, “What will we cut?” Just as, in that shopping centre, members of the public, like me, were told, “It’s not enough to say you want better youth services; you’ve got to tell us where to save the money too,” if hon. Members are to do justice to the young people, whom we all want to see given decent and proper opportunity, we must ensure that we do so in a financially responsible manner.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

There have been times this afternoon when, apart from losing the will to live while listening to speeches from Government Members, I thought I must have slipped through a glitch in the space-time continuum and landed on another planet. We have been told that, because £30 is too small an amount, we need to abolish EMA; and someone from a sedentary position on the Liberal Benches told us that because the Labour Government refused to extend school dinners, we should abolish EMA. I have heard many Liberal MPs speak. They in particular have an important decision to make, because when they talk about the 90% dead-weight they should worry not about offending us but about offending those people outside who are included in that 90%.

Last week, I was at a meeting with about 120 students from throughout Britain and the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) indicated clearly that if the Opposition motion was moderately worded and—as I think he phrased it—sufficiently friendly, he would consider going into the Lobby to vote with us. It will be interesting to see whether he does, because if he does not he will have misled those students last week and others at other meetings over the past few weeks. He has a consistent record of doing so, and I shall be interested to hear what he says when he returns to the Chamber.

I was under the impression that today’s debate was about EMA, but according to the Secretary of State it is really about the economy, so let us get one or two facts straight. The real spark for the financial crisis was when BNP Paribas posted its figures on the north American market in autumn 2007. At that point, the British deficit was below 3% of GDP, which I mention because it is the figure in one of the convergence criteria written into the Maastricht treaty by Conservative Ministers, who at the time said that it was quite tight—but achievable. We achieved it year after year, as we did the 60% debt figure that is also in the criteria, but, after the events involving BNP Paribas, followed by Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock, the deficit had to mount because we had to intervene continually. That was the root of the financial crisis

[Gavin Barwell]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Cryer]

I am not going to give way, because I am short of time.

In my borough, I note that 63% of students at Leyton sixth-form college in my constituency receive EMA, and well over 1,000—1,100—receive the top rate of £30 a week. In the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Dr Creasy), who was in the Chamber earlier, 47% of students at Waltham Forest college receive EMA, and more than 800 are on the top rate. Those students and their college principals have told us not to get rid of EMA.

Principals from other boroughs have said the same thing. Eddie Playfair, who has been on television and radio repeatedly over the past few weeks, lives in my constituency but is the head of Newham sixth-form college in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). He has one of the highest numbers of students on EMA, and he has consistently said, “Don’t get rid of it.” My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) said the same in her remarks, yet the Government say, “We know best; we’re going to get rid of it.”

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way.

[John Cryer]

No, I will not, because I need to crack on.

The “enhanced discretionary learner support fund”—if ever I heard an Orwellian phrase, that is it—is so far unclear. We have not been told how it will work, but we do know that funding will drop from half a billion—£575 million—a year to £75 million a year, and it is absolute fantasy to suggest that with such funding we will be able to cover all the students who need assistance. I have attended meeting after meeting with students, principals and lecturers, and they all say the same thing: “This will deter people, particularly from poorer backgrounds, from continuing in education.” Yet the Government, and Liberal and Tory MPs, have engaged in a process of mendacity and misinformation, saying, “We’ll work together and do our best to come up with some scheme that will actually work.” The way to send a signal to the Secretary of State, however, is to join us in the Lobby tonight and vote for our motion.

At a time when bankers’ bonuses are being doled out to the tune of £7 billion, it is an obscenity to see a Government refusing to intervene with the banks yet at the same time taking money away from some of the poorest students in this country. However, there is one thing that we should be grateful for, and that is that the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are managing to do what many of us have wanted to do for a long time by politicising a generation of students. I can promise the House that those students who are being politicised by the abolition of EMA and by the tuition fees debacle will not be voting Liberal Democrat and will not be voting Conservative.