School Funding Formula

Nick Harvey Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Nick Harvey (North Devon) (LD)]

This problem has grown up over several decades. It is not something which has sprung up under this coalition, nor even under the last Labour Government. It has come on over a period of decades—since the second world war, really—and I am delighted that this Government, and the two parties represented in this Government, have committed themselves to a new funding formula to be implemented in the next Parliament, and I hope we will hear from the Labour Front-Bench team that they are committed to that as well.

As this has not happened in this Parliament, we are reliant, as a short-term measure to get ourselves through the interim, on the down-payment colleagues have talked about of some £390 million for the coming year. That is most welcome. My local authority of Devon is the sixth-worst funded in the country, and it will receive about £200 per pupil as a result of this uplift. I mention in passing that F40 put to the Department for Education some alternative proposals on how this money might have been dispensed, which would have given pupils in Devon £400 per head, but the money is nevertheless welcome.

It is essential that this money is now baked into the formula for the years between now and a new formula coming in, first, to ensure that the baseline is in a healthier place, but secondly, so that the schools that will now receive this money can have the confidence that it will be there not just one year at a time but for the next few years, so they can with confidence go out and employ additional staff with the resources available.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend, and we are both co-signatories of this timely motion, but does he share my frustration that this gap widened at a time when schools were receiving the more generous settlements and that it is hard to conceive how a set of Ministers will be able to rapidly close this gap in the context of flat cash per pupil funding settlements in the future?

[Sir Nick Harvey]

There will be a continued period of tough public finance and that undoubtedly makes it even more difficult to perform these sorts of adjustment, but it is vital that these changes take place. To have the confidence to do that we need to get them right and ensure that sparsity actually means something and does not have a completely perverse set of effects, as it does at the moment, and that the money will be there to phase this in until it can be completely done.