Oral Answers to Questions

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Ford]

I thank my hon. Friend for his concern for children with autism and social, emotional and mental health needs. We do understand that there can be challenges for these children in achieving their potential in education, although the vast majority of them go to mainstream schools. Specialist bases within the schools can be a help. We have invested £365 million through the special provision capital fund. I am very happy to meet him to discuss the situation in Bury.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

What are the Government doing to ensure that there are enough educational psychologists to assess the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities?

[Vicky Ford]

I remind the hon. Lady that we are investing a further £780 million in the special educational needs area, and we do work in this area to improve the quality of these skills.

Education and Local Government

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

This ambitious Queen’s Speech lists a whole series of draft Bills on wide-ranging areas, but it raises more questions than answers, and there are glaring omissions in respect of local government and education.

The section on education makes much of increased funding for schools. Increased funding is welcome, but after years of austerity not enough is being offered to reverse the damage that has been done. There are now fewer enrichment classes on offer, fewer teaching assistants, fewer student services staff and less funding for building maintenance. Creative arts supplies have also been affected, although I was pleased to hear the Minister’s arts premium proposal, which I look forward to finding out more about.

The truth is that under the Government’s funding plans 83% of schools will be worse off in real terms in April 2020 than they were in 2015. The Government have failed to resolve the even greater crisis in further education and sixth-form colleges, which have suffered real-terms cuts that have run longer and deeper. They have failed even to mention the nursery school sector.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the failure to recognise the difference between a real-terms and cash increase is frustrating for headteachers? In schools in my constituency, headteachers tell me that they do not have a real-terms increase—they have a real-terms decrease, even if, in some schools, it looks like a cash increase. They are frustrated by the Government’s attitude of saying that everything in the garden is rosy because there has been an increase in funding. They have had years of cuts.

[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The Government should come clean—this is a smoke-and-mirrors trick—and put back the money that they took out, in real terms.

The Government must face up to the fact that not enough teachers want to stay in the job. Headteachers across my constituency of Enfield, Southgate regularly tell me how difficult it is to recruit and retain staff. The additional workload and stress generated as a result of being judged on SATs results and Ofsted inspections is one the main reasons given by teachers for leaving the profession, which is why Ofsted and SATs should be replaced by a new system of accountability that gives a true picture of schools and students.

The impact of child poverty on a child’s education is indisputable. Children cannot learn when they are hungry, surviving in cold or damp homes, or enduring severe overcrowding. When I see parents with their children coming to my surgery showing me pictures of serious damp and rodent-infested, overcrowded accommodation I know that unless action is taken their children’s future is at risk. An estimated 4.1 million children are still trapped in poverty, and that figure is expected to rise to 5.2 million by 2022. The Government can make as many promises as they like about school funding but unless they tackle child poverty head-on the education of children will suffer.

If Members want an example of how the Government behave towards schools they need look no further than the announcement last year that teachers would receive a 2.75% pay rise. On the last day before the summer recess, they sneaked out a statement proclaiming that they would fund only 0.75%, leaving schools with strained budgets to find the rest. That is what we have come to expect from Conservative Governments. Local government has been treated exactly the same. I remember the Tory-led coalition Government transferring a raft of responsibilities to local authorities, including the council tax support scheme. However, they gave local authorities only 90% of the funding needed to administer the scheme. Is that what we should expect from the Government under the new funding proposals?

The Queen’s Speech states that the

“Government will invest in the country’s public services and infrastructure”,

but there is little mention of funding for local government. Late last year, the Government released a technical consultation on the review of local authorities’ relative needs and resources—the next stage in the so-called fair funding review—which could be a precursor to the biggest single shift in money from the most deprived areas to the most affluent. That is because the fair funding review proposes to remove the consideration of deprivation from the core foundation formula, despite the Government’s own research, which shows that deprivation is the second-best predictor of the cost of basic services.

In my own area, Enfield Council is a good Labour council that continually strives to protect frontline services. It covers areas of severe deprivation, including some in my constituency of Enfield, Southgate. Central Government have cut funding to Enfield Council by 60% in real terms since 2010. When the Government make those extreme cuts to Enfield Council’s budget, they are making a clear choice—they do not see the needs of local people as a priority.

The Government have tried to mask the cuts by saying that councils can raise money through increases in council tax and the social care precept. First, the amounts that can be raised in that way are nowhere near enough to compensate for the cuts since 2010. Secondly, they hardwire regional inequality into the system, because it is the richer areas that are able to raise more through increases in council tax. Despite being one of the areas where the riots took place in 2011, Enfield Council has been forced by central Government cuts to slash its spending on youth services by 88%, from £3.5 million in 2011-12 to £411,000 in 2018-19. In its last budget, Enfield Council had to make further cuts of £18 million across all services. If Enfield had not had 60% of its budget cut since 2010, the council would be funding those services, our local crime figures would probably be lower and fewer young people in my constituency would feel that their futures had been thrown away before they had even begun. The Government must realise that by acting in haste to cut local government funding they will repent at leisure, because they will have to find more money for the burgeoning prison population and its after-effects.

In short, the Government can promise all they like, but unless they are prepared to fund local government properly again and to undo the damage that has been done since 2010, the promises in the Queen’s Speech ring hollow.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend, but a strategic intervention to address the needs of one company is very different from a generalised further additional subsidy to a carbon-emitting industry. We also ought to look, in a way that goes well beyond the ambition of this Government, at much more investment in rail to enable us to take more people out of the air and on to other modes of transport.

The students I spoke to were clearly concerned about their education and had very strong views about it. They did want to see more spent on schools. I know that the Queen’s Speech has a line about levels of funding per pupil in every school being increased, and the Secretary of State, who is now in his place, took that up in his opening comments. However, the Government’s ambition will fail Sheffield students unless, at the very least, they restore the funding for the 8% real cut that we have seen over the past nine years for our schools.

Last year, I brought a group of headteachers with a petition from every headteacher in the city to meet the Schools Minister. I am grateful for the time he gave to them and I am sure he will have seen the concerns that they expressed about the consequences of the funding cuts in their schools. They have had an opportunity to look at the money that they think will be available to them under the Government’s plans and believe that it will still leave 80% of Sheffield schools worse off in 2020 than they were in 2015.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the effect of these cuts has fallen particularly on funding and provision for children with special educational needs, and that no amount of protestations from the Government Benches changes the salient fact, which is that our headteachers are telling us that they simply do not have the money to do the job not only for children in general, but particularly for children with special educational needs, who are suffering and struggling as a result?

[Paul Blomfield]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point. That was one of the issues that we discussed with the Schools Minister and about which the headteachers from Sheffield felt passionately. I had a sense from many of the speeches on both sides of the House that there is a recognition that the Government’s proposals for special needs additional funding will fall well short of what is needed, and I hope that Ministers will pay full regard to that.

The students I spoke to also had concerns that went beyond funding and on to the content of their education. They wanted to see more time spent on citizenship education and on teaching life skills. I hope that Ministers will reflect on their concerns and ask themselves whether the straitjacket of the national curriculum, linked to the focus of Ofsted and the funding constraints on our schools that reduce diversity of subject choice, is enabling them to provide the rounded education and preparation that our young people want for the increasingly challenging world that they face.

There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech on young people’s mental health, but it was a significant concern for the students I talked to. The growth in mental health problems among young people is one of the most worrying issues that I have seen over my nine years in this place. We know that there is a crisis. Students talk to me about the difficulties in accessing support and about the long wait between going to their GP and getting their first appointment with child and adolescent mental health services. A YoungMinds report recently said that 75% of parents saw the mental health of their children deteriorate significantly during that period.

The students had a very helpful suggestion on how the Government could take a modest step towards tackling this area by providing a counsellor in every secondary school funded separately and additionally to the money that the schools currently get. That could make a difference by providing crucial early intervention and by reducing the pressure on school budgets; headteachers are already diverting money intended for teaching to address the crisis in mental health.

I see that you are urging me to wind up, Mr Speaker. I had been given the indication by Mr Deputy Speaker that some time was to be welcomed.

Relationship Education in Schools

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

Yes, and I pay tribute to that headteacher. There are teachers in thousands of schools up and down the country that are teaching these issues with no protests from any group outside their school gates. The hon. Lady should realise that this is the first time that we are requiring schools to teach about LGBT issues. That will not affect the school she referred to, but it will affect many thousands of schools up and down the country that will for the first time be teaching their pupils about the need to respect difference and to understand that families come in different types, including single parents or parents of the same sex. So this is a very important piece of legislation—a very important piece of statutory guidance. We should all be doing more to support and welcome it, as the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), who speaks for the Opposition, did in her response to this urgent question.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

In Bristol on Saturday the Pride event was a magnificent celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. I was there; it was wonderful. Many of the people in the parade and at the event afterwards were probably pupils at schools where they felt excluded or misunderstood. Most of the people marching either were parents or one day will be parents, and they, too, want to know that their children will have the security of having an educational experience that is better than theirs, where they feel included and wanted, and for them the word “encouraged” is not enough. I respect the Minister, but will he please reconsider that little word “encouraged”? Can he not see that the fear of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender parents in my constituency that their children will be left out of education about positive role models and positive relationships is real, not imaginary?

[Nick Gibb]

This is a transforming piece of legislation and statutory guidance. It will mean that in thousands of schools up and down the country—in fact, in every school up and down the country—there will be a change in the approach to teaching about relationships and teaching about RSE. And it will mean that in schools that have not been teaching about LGBT issues, those issues will be taught at some point during their pupils’ education. I also believe strongly that it will be taught in the vast majority of primary schools, because the Secretary of State and I have made it clear that we strongly encourage LGBT issues to be taught in primary schools and not to wait until children reach secondary school. However, had we taken the hon. Lady’s advice, this guidance would not be applying to the hundreds of faith schools in the private sector, and we took the view that pupils in those schools were equally deserving of being taught about LGBT issues and about modern life and respect for difference, which they would not be taught about had it not been for this guidance and the way that we have constructed it.

Murders in Northamptonshire: Serious Case Reviews

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. He spoke powerfully about the injuries that these poor souls sustained and about how they were well known to other services. We legislated in the Children and Social Work Act 2017 to require local areas to establish new, much stronger multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, which I think will enhance the protective net around our most vulnerable children. That includes the police and health as statutory partners. Safeguarding partners in Northamptonshire must publish a plan setting out how they will deliver those arrangements by 29 June and must implement them by 29 September. My Department is monitoring compliance, and we will be asking those partners to work swiftly and collectively to ensure that lessons have been learnt and implemented.

My hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not comment on the local political leadership. What I would like to see now is us moving forward with Malcolm Newsam’s recommendations and getting the trust up and running as quickly as possible.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) and the Minister for their approach and their responses to this horrific example of child abuse. The connections between the abuse of women and the abuse of children are unfortunately long known, and I am afraid that I could give several similar examples from when I was national children’s officer at Women’s Aid in the 1990s. I have heard previous Ministers and previous Governments say that lessons would be learnt and action taken, yet here we still are. I therefore ask the Minister respectfully, will he work with domestic violence organisations, as well as other organisations of course, to try to really learn the lessons that should be learnt about the connections between abuse by violent men of their children and abuse of their female partners?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Lady makes a powerful and well-made point. There is, if not causation, then certainly a correlation between people who abuse and hurt children and those who abuse and hurt women. I try to make sure that we learn as much as possible and that we act as quickly as possible, as I think we have in this case.

Sure Start: IFS Report

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Anne Milton]

I agree 100% with the hon. Lady. In some ways, these discussions should be more consensual given that we all want the same ends. I must repeat that there are more children’s centres now than at any time when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. It is not just about having centres either. In 2010, 68% of early years providers were good or outstanding and now 95% are. The presence of a centre in itself does not necessarily answer the question. Similarly, in 2013, 52% of children left reception with a good level of development; today, that figure is 72%. That is a marked increase. It is about the quality of care as much as the presence of a centre. I go back to what I said to the hon. Member for Batley and Spen: sticking in a dogmatic way to one thing will not work. We have improved quality, which is critical, and it is important that we are led by the evidence, including the IFS report, which—I say for a third time—I very much welcome. It is one of many things. The work that Public Health England is doing on modernising the healthy child programme is also critical to ensuring universal reach and a targeted response, but so too is looking at the team around the family.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

Following on from my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), I visited a lot of Sure Start centres in my capacity as a domestic violence practitioner and helped them with their work. We are talking about a woman’s ability to walk into a centre, without any stigma and without anyone knowing why she is there, and get help not just with childcare but with the domestic violence she is suffering, her mental health problems, and so on, and all that in her locality from people she trusts. What is it about that that the Minister seems to object to—in, I have to say, quite a dogmatic way?

[Anne Milton]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on her work at the domestic violence centre, and she is absolutely right: women—and men, because sometimes men suffer from domestic violence—need to feel free to go to some place where they feel they can report their situation. I do not have a dogmatic objection. This is the problem with our debate. We want the same ends. I am saying only that no silver bullet answers the question we all want answered by ensuring both sufficient universal support and a targeted approach.

Post-18 Education and Funding

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman and the work of his all-party parliamentary group. We must not allow different parts of our education system to be pitted against each other, and I can give him an absolute commitment not to do so. In fact, as he will know through his work, there is already a great deal of cross-over between what higher education institutions do and what further education institutions do, but they are both incredibly important parts of the overall system.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

Does the Secretary of State not agree with me that ensuring that free or low-cost high-quality childcare was available on demand for parents who need it to go to college or university would be transformative for women’s lives? If he does agree, will he commit to properly fund early years education and high-quality childcare for children of all ages, and to do so properly on the supply side, so that women can get training or qualifications and develop their potential and we can make progress in closing the gender earnings gap?

[Damian Hinds]

I was worried when I saw the hon. Lady pick up what looked like a novel, but it turned out only to be a question in a notebook, albeit a very important question about childcare. Of course this Government are investing more than ever before in early years and childcare. I will have to write to the hon. Lady on the specifics of support for students, but I absolutely agree that childcare is a very important consideration for many people.

Timpson Review of School Exclusion

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I will be happy to continue to update the hon. Lady. We have Education questions regularly, and there are other opportunities to be kept updated. She asked about the publication of lists. This report was a major piece of work to find out the reality of practice and how it varies in different places for different groups of children. It is a very valuable piece of work for that reason.

On the hon. Lady’s point about the small number of schools with a large number of exclusions, it is necessary to remember that that might be in one year, and in other years the school is not in that position. Sometimes it is because a school has a particularly troubled set of circumstances—a new headteacher comes in, or there is a change, and various measures have to be taken. As I say, I think all of us would like to see the number of exclusions be lower rather than higher, but that is not to say that there is never a role for exclusion.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

This afternoon, the Secretary of State has admitted that he knows school funding is tight and that the earlier we intervene with children who have special educational needs, the better. I agree with him. I am fed up of schools in my constituency telling me about the impact of real-terms cuts to their budgets, which tend to hit specialist services the most. Will the Secretary of State finally commit to reverse those real-terms funding cuts and stick to his word, to ensure that children with special educational needs get the support they need at an early stage?

[Damian Hinds]

I do say, as I said earlier, that funding is tight in schools, and managing school budgets can be challenging. It is also true that we are holding real-terms per pupil funding constant at the macro level. It is also true that, internationally, we have relatively high state spending at primary and secondary level. It is also true that the high-needs budget has risen from £5 billion to more than £6 billion. All those things are true simultaneously. There has been more money going in, but it is very difficult. There have been specific cost pressures for schools. I recognise that, and the hon. Lady has my continued commitment to ensure that we get the right level of resourcing that we need for an excellent education for everyone.

School Funding

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). I declare an interest: I come from a family of teachers, including a niece, who is still teaching.

As far as I know, no politician ever got elected saying, “I want to spend less money on schools,” but that is what we got. I am sure the Minister will tell us that the Government are spending more than ever on education, and of course that is true in cash terms, but as well as being able to add up, my constituents can do long division and they can observe what is happening in schools.

The Minister may wish to disagree with my arithmetic, or that of headteachers in Bristol, but I wonder whether he will accept that the chair of the UK Statistics Authority and the Institute for Fiscal Studies can do their numbers. Sir David Norgrove, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said last October in a letter to the Secretary of State, in response to a blog by the Department for Education about education funding, that

“figures were presented in such a way as to misrepresent changes in school funding…school spending figures were exaggerated by using a truncated axis, and by not adjusting for per pupil spend.”

Those are not my words; they are the words of the chair of the UK Statistics Authority. He also noted that the Department

“included a wide range of education expenditure unrelated to publicly funded schools”.

In his response, the Secretary of State said that his Department was looking into the issues and admitted that “pupil numbers are rising” and that

“we are asking schools to do more and schools are facing cost pressures”,

but that is precisely my point.

I have made the point several times in this place, including to the Prime Minister, that if we increase cash funding but costs and pupil numbers rise as well, we will quickly get, in effect, a real-terms cut, and that is where we are. National insurance, teacher pay and pensions, the apprenticeship levy, rising pupil numbers, rising levels of special needs—these are all increased costs. However, as other services are cut, such as mental health support and youth work, schools are forced to try to step into the breach, but again without the money. They are being held responsible for just about every other social problem, so more pressures on and more cuts to other local services lead to more yet costs to schools—a real-terms cut.

In my constituency, Redland Green School has said that special educational needs

“are getting greater but are not being matched with funding”.

The school also told me that it cannot refer students to childhood mental health services unless they have seen a school counsellor, but there is no funding for the school counsellor. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found last year that total spending per pupil fell by about 8% or about £500 per pupil between 2009-10 and 2017-18. The effects of those cuts—and yes, they are cuts—is that schools have been forced to cut to the bone and beyond. Schools in Bristol West have told me about cuts to support staff, cuts to learning support staff, increases in class sizes and cuts to the curriculum. They have told me that they have had to cut languages and creative subjects, as well as politics, which frankly I deeply deprecate. I do not think they should have to.

St Bonaventure’s School has told me of fears of its reading recovery scheme being cut, and St John’s Primary School has had to cut a successful maths intervention. There is no money to fund professional development and training, and replacing teaching staff now routinely involves sacrificing quality for lower pay offers. It is not that the teachers are not good; they just are not as experienced, and that is not good enough. Parents, children, teachers and other school staff in Bristol West tell me that schools are being forced to do very much more with very much less money, and that is not okay.

When this Government cut education, they limit life chances. When they fail to care for children’s mental health, they build up problems for the future. And when they hold schools responsible for just about everything and fund them only to the bare minimum or less, we all lose out. Among the pupils at St Bonaventure’s, St John’s, Cotham and all the other schools in my constituency, there might be one who is going to invent a cost-effective way of making tidal power work and fuel us all for the future so that we can give up fossil fuels, or a cure for cancer. In fact, I discovered recently that, thanks to an outstanding science project, some pupils at Cotham School are working on exactly that.

Compounding all that is this Government’s utter shamelessness. As the chair of the UK Statistics Authority and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have said, school funding is being cut, and this Government will not admit it. I said earlier that no politician got elected saying that they were going to spend less, but that is what is happening. This country needs a different Government. It needs a Labour Government who will put the education, care and mental health of children and young people at the top of their list, along with tackling climate change. For the children of Bristol West, that cannot come a moment too soon.

Free Childcare: Costs and Benefits

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Davies. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) and to other colleagues, who made excellent points. I will try to do what I always swore I would and not say things that others have covered.

Both parents and early years providers in Bristol West report problems with the current system, including the cost to the economy in lost work and skills when parents are unable to take up childcare because of the complexity of the system or its inappropriateness for their needs. However, I will focus on the social costs, in particular the social cost to gender equality and the social and economic cost to lone parents.

In 2015, the OECD published statistics on net childcare costs as a percentage of average wages for a two-earner, two-child couple. The eurozone average was 14%, but in Malta the cost was 0%, in Austria 3%, in Sweden 5%, in Iceland 5% and in Germany 5%. In the UK, the cost was 55%—higher even than the United States. I just put that down as a marker for two-parent families. For single parents, there are of course often benefits and benefits in kind that help even out the additional burden of being the sole provider and income earner, but there is no doubt that free or very low-cost childcare is a great contributor to gender equality and to single parents’ ability to provide for their families.

Other Members have mentioned parents using childcare for economic benefit, so I want to focus briefly on its impact on gender equality, and particularly on its use for training, job interviews and voluntary work, which are essential for women re-entering the workforce, leaving violent partners or needing to fit childcare around being a lone parent. A single parent cannot get free childcare to go to a job interview or just to clean up the house and go to the shops, which is unbelievably difficult for a lone parent with young children. Free childcare also helps those starting up in business. Again, that has a particular impact on women, who often choose that route into employment after having children. Of course, all that benefits the economy, but there are also social benefits, which include older relatives’ ability to participate in the workforce or in other activities when they no longer have to offer to provide free childcare to enable their daughters or female relatives to do training, job interviews and so on.

Continuing on the theme of gender equality, of course men and women love their children and want to be with them, but men and women also want to provide for them, contribute to the wider world and develop their skills. If high quality, affordable childcare is widely available—the OECD defines “low cost” as less than 10% of average wages, although in the United Kingdom it is nowhere near that—that allows men and women to make decisions based on what is best for them and their children, rather than on the probable inequality of their wages, which further reinforces the inequality of their wages.

I have friends in the Netherlands, where the childcare system is far from perfect, but where there is at least a cultural understanding that when someone becomes a parent, whether they are a man or a woman, they should work fewer hours, and that men and women have an equal responsibility for picking up children from childcare or school. I am constantly amazed that, when I pick up friends’ children from school in the Netherlands, there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, and nobody notices because it is not a thing. I have friends who moved to four-day working weeks after they became parents. That is the norm. That means that each child is in childcare for three days per week and with parents for a total of four, but it allows both parents to maintain their work and play a full and active role in their child’s life, as so many parents deeply want.

In my constituency of Bristol West, childcare providers and state-maintained nurseries report problems with the take-up of free childcare by families on low incomes in general, but particularly by single parents—usually women—who struggle to fit the complexity of the system around their needs and those of their families. The OECD has documented the consequent restrictions on their economic participation.

There are other social benefits involving gender. Childcare that is free at the point of delivery, such as Sure Start —a wonderful achievement of the previous Labour Government, of which I will always be proud to bear the legacy—provides many other benefits for women. My friend Jude Grant, who is now a Labour councillor, used to run a domestic abuse support service in the north-east out of a Sure Start centre. Why did that matter? She did that in parallel with a support service for women with post-natal depression, and both those services could operate completely confidentially. When a woman went through the door of that building, everybody—including, importantly, their partners—thought they were going in for a bit of a playgroup. It meant that they could get advice, information, support, guidance on developing a new life and economic support, which was often critical for those women.

Jude has told me of her memories of teaching women how to set up bank accounts and how to organise their finances—things that their abusive partners had never let them have any control over. Their domestic abuse support was not just about recovery from emotional, sexual and physical abuse, important though that was. Having free childcare on site provided both the practical support, so that the children were well cared-for, and the confidentiality and the reduction in stigma that allowed them to move on to safe lives. I pay tribute to my friend Jude and many others who did similar things in Sure Starts across the country. As a domestic abuse specialist, I was grieved greatly to see all those specialist services gradually shut down as Sure Starts across the country were reduced.

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend has tempted me to tell a story about a young woman who came to me when I was a member of the council. She had many of the problems that have just been described. I said, “One of the things you could do is go to the neighbourhood centre and meet people, because they have childcare people and things like that.” She said, “Okay, I might do that.” Her entire life was home, school, shop, home, and all of a sudden she had an extra place to go. She eventually got into employment. I found her at the till in Tesco, not buying but working, and she recounted the fact that she had come to see me. Such opportunities are absolutely critical.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for adding that example from his caseload. I could tell many a story of people I worked with in Sure Start centres across the country who had similar tales to tell about having that stigma-free, confidential safe space in which their children could be cared for, but with other services wrapped around it. That was transformative for women’s lives, and it grieves me greatly to see them gone.

I have several questions for the Minister. I believe he is an honourable gentleman who wants the best for children and families across the country. I have asked Treasury Ministers and other Children’s Ministers—not this Minister—about funding for early years, and I have not really got satisfaction. There is a tendency for each to refer me to the other side. I raised early years childcare funding two weeks ago on the Floor of the House when the Education Committee presented its report on the subject.

I will ask the Minister a few questions. First, what will his Department do about the exclusion and complexity of the current system, particularly for women and lone parents, that other hon. Members have described? Secondly, what will he do about the difficulties for lone parents in getting childcare and its impact on their getting training and job interviews? That is critical for getting lone parents, who are often skilled but unable to work owing to childcare problems, back into employment. Thirdly, has his Department carried out a gender impact assessment of the current childcare system? Fourthly, has his Department assessed the impact of the system specifically on low-income families? Fifthly, has his Department had time to review the Select Committee report? It is not all about funding; there are related issues.

I plead with the Minister to consider what has been said today. The impact on families of high quality childcare that is free or affordable at the point of delivery is immense.

[Chris Elmore]

As ever, my hon. Friend champions the people of Bristol West and those in our society who most need help and are most vulnerable. Does she agree that the Department for Education could learn from what is happening in Wales? The Welsh Government announced yesterday a 30-hour offer and investment in 150 new or redeveloped childcare centres, to ensure that all working families benefit. It will not be based on income but on genuine need, which will be met via Government intervention. That shows the difference that a forward-thinking and progressive Labour Government can make.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I applaud the Welsh Government and I look forward to seeing the impact of that, which may have lessons for the UK Government.

I believe that, like the Labour party, the UK Government want to champion people getting into work. We are the Labour party—the clue is in the name—but the Tory party also says that it wants people to be in good quality jobs and to be able to do those jobs without constantly worrying about what is going on at home or about childcare, or about not being able to make it to childcare. I have heard that as a Whip, when people I am whipping say to me that they need to leave before a vote otherwise they will not be able to pick their child up from childcare. That is manageable as a Member of Parliament—just.

I urge the Minister to answer my questions and those of other hon. Members, and to recognise the economic and social value of free childcare to the entire country.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

On behalf of the Scottish National party, in a late change, I call David Linden.

Oral Answers to Questions

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

Of course we recognise the importance of rural schools, the role they play in their communities and the challenges they face. That is why the national funding formula includes £25 million specifically to provide support to small schools in sparse areas. Early evidence from the pilot projects shows that school resource management advisers can help schools to review their longer-term budget and curriculum planning approach to help them adjust their costs over the long term if income falls due to declining pupil numbers.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

Schools in my constituency say there are simply no more efficiencies to be made—there are no more savings to be made, and there are no more teachers they can sack or make redundant without affecting children’s education and care. So what does the Minister have to say to schools in my constituency about the efficiencies they are supposed to make to keep functioning?

[Nick Gibb]

Since 2017, we have given every local authority more money for every pupil in every school. We are spending record amounts of money on our school system—the figure will be £43.5 billion next year, which is a record for those schools—but we do understand the cost pressures that schools are under, which is why we have this cadre of school resource management advisers, who can help those schools. We also have a series of national buying schemes, whereby we can buy things such as insurance, energy and computers far more efficiently to make savings in the non-staff expenditure that schools have to incur.