Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Maggie Throup and Kit Malthouse

Monday 24th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

As the hon. Lady will know, we already have breakfast clubs in a number of schools across the country, which are targeted at where they are most needed. Our approach to such issues is to do exactly that: to look for vulnerabilities and the areas that require assistance and then to target funding accordingly. At the start of our hopefully long relationship across the Dispatch Box, I hope that as well as doing her job of challenging the Government to do ever better, she will recognise some of the significant achievements in education over the last decade, not least the fact that 87% of our schools are now good or outstanding and that we stand at our highest ever level in the international league tables for literacy.

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

T7. Despite years of extensive planning and hard work, the leadership team at Brackenfield SEND School in my constituency continue to be frustrated in their efforts to secure post-16 designation for the school. That means that students leave at the end of year 11 without the opportunity to undertake further education to prepare them for adulthood. Will my hon. Friend urgently investigate that matter with Derbyshire County Council to ensure that post-16 education is commissioned at Brackenfield without further delay?

NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc) Bill

Debate between Maggie Throup and Kit Malthouse

Friday 22nd January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

Fifteen years on the Public Accounts Committee—extraordinary! I therefore take his words seriously. He is right that the key is to get the governance entirely right.

I guess the point that I am making—maybe I am a lone voice, although perhaps I am joined by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset—is that even with the most ideal governance in the world, things occasionally go wrong. In that instance, the Secretary of State must have the power to step in, given the critical nature of the services these charities perform and their inextricable link to the national health service.

[Maggie Throup]

My hon. Friend’s amendments would undermine the whole purpose of the Bill, which is to give these charities their independence. As he rightly says, the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill, which is going through the House at the moment, will strengthen the protections and the governance arrangements for charities such as these.

[Kit Malthouse]

I acknowledge that point, but we have been round this carousel a couple of times. I pose just one question to those who are nervous about my amendments: in the event of something going wrong, who would fire and replace the trustees? No one. They become a self-governing group. One of the problems with charitable governance is that there are no shareholders to dispose of underperforming trustees. Charities have to acknowledge their own bad performance and fire themselves. In a situation where there is an inextricable link to a particular establishment, the Secretary of State needs to have the ability to step in, in extremis.

It is often forgotten that charities receive public money, and no charity is more likely to receive public money than an NHS hospital charity. Such charities are more likely to receive grants for their performance of services, projects, equipment and so on. We therefore have a particular interest in NHS charities.