argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
European Commission: National Parliaments — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Government Operations
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who knows only too well about that by-election. It is extraordinary that other people within government try to subvert the will of the Prime Minister. Our constitution works well as the Prime Minister, as the head of the Government, shows leadership. However, there are then people, minions—I do not know who they are, as they will not emerge or admit the role they play in undermining parliamentary scrutiny—who deliberately undermine what the Prime Minister has promised. That is the most extraordinary state of affairs, Mr Speaker, as the Prime Minister needs your help to deliver on his promises. Your impartial help is needed to get the Prime Minister out of a hole dug for him by his own officials. This is a quite extraordinary and regrettable state of affairs.
European Commission: National Parliaments — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: International Affairs
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I would hardly have begun my speech if I were going to go through all the intricacies it might be necessary to cover, but I do not want to upset my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester, who has a serious matter to discuss that concerns my constituency. The Government must bear in mind the fact that the debate is truncated thanks to the good nature of members of the European Scrutiny Committee and the Whips scurrying around asking whether we would be kindly. It has not been truncated because there is not a great deal to discuss. When the answer comes back that we are not interested as we do not take the full time, that will be an untruth. I am glad to see that the Minister for Europe is looking in my direction and notes that, because he never says anything other than the truth. I have great confidence in his intellect, if not always in the answers that come from it Proportionality and subsidiarity are of considerable importance. I am slightly suspicious of subsidiarity because, as the shadow Minister the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) has said, it comes from the teaching of the Catholic Church. The holy mother Church, to which I belong, is a great, illustrious and historic institution, but if it is known for one thing other than its piety, it is its centralisation of power. It therefore strikes me that, if subsidiarity has been thought up by the holy mother Church, it is more likely to be to do with reinforcing the authority of the Holy See and of the papacy in particular than with spreading it far and wide. I happen to think that, in the case of the Church, that is a thoroughly good thing.
European Commission: National Parliaments — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: International Affairs
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): I am so sorry. I do indeed mean the Council. The Council has that thin thread to the Parliaments, which provides that democratic accountability We then look at what those Parliaments can do. They can have a limited amount of scrutiny but, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Mr Walter) said, that mainly comes after things have been decided; the European Scrutiny Committee gets to look at things that have already reached a far stage in the approval process within the whole European system. It is very hard to stop anything at that point, so we then move on to yellow cards.
European Commission: National Parliaments — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: International Affairs
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That is part of the control of the Commission and part of the anti-democratic set-up of the European Union, and I do not think that is accidental; were it genuinely democratic, it would never have evolved to its current state We get these sops, with this business of the yellow cards, of which only two have been accepted by the Commission, and one of those was immediately dismissed—it said that the one for the public prosecutor was not a matter of subsidiarity anyway and so it would push ahead regardless. We have a threshold that is very hard to reach, and as a result of which nothing need happen, and a two-month period that makes it incredibly difficult for national Parliaments to get their responses in within the limited time available. The red card would be little better What we actually need is for our constituents—the people of the United Kingdom—to take back control of their own Government. That might be possible through renegotiation if the Government are robust, but the problem is that at the moment the Government show no sign of being robust or willing to push back to the European Union. They come out with platitudes that support the continuing accretion of power to the EU. They come forward with the fine words I have mentioned but never push on the difficult decisions. Yesterday the Minister for Europe told us that Switzerland wants to pull out of one of the treaties and that it has to take it all or leave it all, but that is an outrageous position to take if we are in favour of renegotiating for ourselves I urge the Government to be robust, to support democracy and to make sure that, for once, what they say and what they do match.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Robin Caspar Walker (Conservative, Centre-right): I beg to move, That this House believes that, given the continued fiscal pressure on the schools budget in the next Parliament, the speedy implementation of a fair and transparent school funding formula is more urgent than ever It is a pleasure to open this debate and to speak on an issue that I have raised during each year of my time in Parliament, and one that still needs addressing and never more urgently than in the run-up to a crucial general election. I hope today’s debate can inform the manifestos of all the main parties and lay down a challenge for the next Government to deliver on Today’s motion has cross-party support: more than 64 Back Benchers from across the House have signed it. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for recognising that it is an urgent and important enough matter to merit debate in the main Chamber. I am also very grateful to the two vice-chairs of the F40 campaign, who are both in their places: the hon. Members for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) and for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin). We are here to correct a long-standing injustice, and it is a credit to Parliament that there is such a strong turnout We have seen some progress on this issue, but the key decisions on the shape of a new national funding formula have been delayed until after the 2015 spending review. To say that that was disappointing in a place such as Worcestershire, which has lingered at the bottom of the funding table for far too long, would be an understatement. One local head teacher, in a letter to our local paper, recently described it as "immoral" that the issue of fair funding has been unaddressed for so long Local MPs have repeatedly made the case for a new formula that is based more on activity and the characteristics of schools and their catchments, and less on accidents of geography. We have attended debate after debate on this issue, and not just in the current Parliament. Colleagues with experience of previous Parliaments have often regaled me with their efforts to press this issue and point out the glaring disparities that affect their schools and constituents.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my hon. Friend for leading this debate. In Devon, we have now seen £193 in extra funding per pupil. That is great news, but there is still a big gap to fill, especially with so many small rural schools and a sparse population. We do a very good job with very poor funding. I look to the next Parliament to do better.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Robin Caspar Walker (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who has always been a great champion for rural areas F40, the cross-party campaign formed more than 20 years ago to represent the lowest-funded areas, used to rail against a gap of hundreds of pounds in funding between rural areas and their urban areas, and in Worcestershire, local MPs spoke out against a gap that doubled during the 13 years of the previous Labour Government. Until the current year, it had never once narrowed. When the gap started, there was no justice in the fact that similar schools serving similar catchments with similar levels of deprivation on different sides of a random border could receive wildly different funding. As the gap has widened, so the challenge for schools to raise the attainment of all their pupils has become greater and the challenge to hold on to their best teachers bigger. Although the pupil premium has helped some schools in F40 areas, it has also added to the disparities by piling targeted funding for deprivation on top of the untargeted funding that went before.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Macroeconomics
Graham Charles Stuart (Conservative, Centre-right): Yet again, my hon. Friend is leading off the debate—in 10 years in the House, I have raised this matter only eight times, so I stand behind him in that respect. Does he agree that the Government did the right thing last year by closing the gap a little but that we need all parties to commit to a new funding formula in the next Parliament, as the Conservative party has done, to ensure that we have a fair and just settlement, not just in rhetoric but in reality?
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Guy Thomas Opperman (Conservative, Centre-right): The other point that surely needs addressing is the pupil premium. Although we all support it as a principle and in its effects, is it not a blunt instrument, because it skews an already unfair system? Does that not need reviewing?
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Robin Caspar Walker (Conservative, Centre-right): What needs reviewing is the underlying system of school funding to create something fairer and more transparent. I believe that the pupil premium can play a role in such a system, but my hon. Friend makes a good point I welcome the fact that last year saw the first real step forward. The schools Minister, with help from the Chancellor, was the first person to provide funding to address the funding gap. His announcement of what started as £350 million and then grew to £390 million of extra funding to help the lowest-funded areas was a genuine step forward and the first concrete sign that real change was on its way. At the time, Members spoke of a down payment and welcomed the benefits for those who stood to gain. We queried elements of the allocation and pushed for F40 areas to receive more of it, and between the initial allocation and the second, the F40 areas did indeed receive more—so the parliamentary pressure made a difference This first small step will mean £6.7 million for Worcestershire schools this year—an additional £97 per pupil—which will make a real difference from April onwards, and it will mean that this year, for the first time in decades, the gap between schools on our side of the border with Birmingham and those on the other side will grow smaller rather than wider. However, cost pressures on our schools will make these victories seem minor. We will all have heard from teachers and head teachers in underfunded areas who say that costs are running ahead of their funding. I have written to Secretaries of State and Ministers countless times with local examples There is not time in this debate to enter into the complexities of the funding system itself—a system so devilishly complex that my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) compared it to the Schleswig-Holstein question—but fortunately, F40 has a dedicated team of governors, teachers, heads, councillors and council officers who have worked up their own proposed changes to the funding formula. Their analytical work has been robust, and their proposals would achieve a formula based on the nature of the school and its catchment, funding a small lump sum for secondary schools and a slightly larger one for primary schools to help smaller schools; providing a proportion of funding for deprivation; and providing smaller proportions for low prior attainment, English as an additional language and sparsity—there is more work to do on sparsity.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax (Conservative, Centre-right): On the question of sparsity, the rural schools of South Dorset are trying to form multi-academy trusts, and what is so extraordinary is that the funding is different for each pupil, depending on which local authority they come from. This is another anomaly that we must sort out.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Macroeconomics
Heather Kay Wheeler (Conservative, Centre-right): Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, as we now have an extra chunk of money from the last Budget, it should be put on the baseline, as was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker)? At least that would give future Governments a fairer point from which to start.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Richard Michael John Ogilvie Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is hardest for schools with sixth forms, and those that do not have a very large percentage of disadvantaged pupils who receive the pupil premium. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is essential to get the core funding right for the F40 group, so that those schools can balance their books in the next few years?
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Graham Charles Stuart (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow both the excellent speakers whom we have heard so far. We all agree on the need for a fair and transparent system. As has been said, much of that is in the eye of the beholder. However, the Ministers in the last Government whom I lobbied knew perfectly well that the system was not fair, although they did not have the political courage to face down their own people and say, "We are going to have to redistribute your funds to areas that we do not typically represent, because that is obviously fair." This is not just about perception. I have never heard anyone attempt to explain why the present system is fair, because they cannot do so. The system is not fair. It is time for someone to recognise the need to do the right thing regardless of party-political interest, which may be something of a challenge I am delighted that the Conservative party is committed to a new national funding formula, and I am also pleased that the F40 group is presenting detailed proposals. Its members have worked out who will be losers and who will be winners, to narrow the gaps. Whichever party is in government, whichever system is used to fund schools and regardless of whether 16 to 19-year-olds are protected, money will be tight, so we must have the courage to do the right thing, and then find a way of explaining it to people and carrying them with us The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) was right to say that we must do what all fair-minded people would recognise as the right thing. I say that on behalf of the people in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the area I represent. It is rural, coastal and absolutely has the problems the chief inspector of Ofsted has identified, yet from this coming year, although it will have slightly more money thanks to the £390 million, it will be the lowest-funded area in the country. If the Minister gets a chance to do so in his time-limited five-minute speech, perhaps he will say something about the technicality by which, because of our high needs block funding, we got a disproportionately small amount of that £390 million, to add to our existing inequities.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Caroline Alice Spelman (Conservative, Centre-right): I just want to make one point building on the description of my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) of the disparities between local authorities. My local authority, Solihull, has £1,300 less per capita than neighbouring Birmingham, but we school 7,000 pupils over our borders from Birmingham and Coventry, and unlike the principle in health where the money follows the patient, the money does not follow the pupils over the border. I fully support F40’s pursuit of a fair funding formula, but I specifically impress upon the Minister that this irregularity between health and education needs to be sorted out in the short term before the schools that are trying to educate pupils from over their borders with less money find it impossible to do so.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Geoffrey Robert Clifton-Brown (Conservative, Centre-right): May I very briefly, in the two minutes available to me, pay tribute to my teachers and governing bodies in the schools in Gloucestershire, that often with very little money and at the bottom of the F40 league, achieve outstanding Ofsted results? Gloucestershire gets a dedicated schools grant of £4,200, compared with nearly £6,700 for Camden. That cannot be equitable We have to end this system. We should have a national funding formula with special needs and all the other factors—rurality, deprivation—taken into account, arguing up from the minimum. Unless we start somewhere and start soon with a floors and ceiling system, we are never going to get an equitable system. To enshrine the current system under a capped budget is simply unfair, and I ask the Minister to recognise that unfairness. It is quite wrong that there is a postal code lottery, so that where someone lives determines how much funding their child has. Please can he end this unfairness?
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax (Conservative, Centre-right): I shall be very brief. First, may I, too, pay tribute to all the local teachers in my constituency, who do a fantastic job in a lovely rural area? My local education authority has three points that it is especially concerned about and it agrees with all the points raised by F40. First, on sparsity, our area contains little schools struggling to survive in rural parts of the country, and if those schools went, our children would simply not get the education that they deserve or need. Let us not forget that children are the next generation; they are the future of this country and we must value them equally. Secondly, fairer funding should be achieved by the end of the next Parliament, at the latest. Lastly, opportunities should be equal for all children. The children in South Dorset, wherever they come from, should be valued the same as every other child in the country, and the money that goes towards them should represent that fact.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Guy Thomas Opperman (Conservative, Centre-right): As I walk out of Heddon-on-the-Wall St Andrew’s Church of England first school and go down the hill into Newcastle, I lose £1,000 per pupil over the course of 300 yards. That is utterly illogical, and the disparity cannot be continued. I endorse all the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) and others. On the pupil premium, I make the point that although we all of course support it, it is genuinely skewing an unfair system and giving us a system that is manifestly not acceptable. I pay tribute to all the schools, governors and teachers in my region of Tynedale and Ponteland, who produce outstanding education, despite the great disparity. They helped me to lobby Ministers, not least the Minister for Schools, who came to Hexham and met many of them approximately 18 months ago. The additional £390 million allocation of minimum funding levels resulted in £12 million-plus going to Northumberland, which is genuinely a lifesaver for our schools. We need a firm commitment from all parties in this House that that level of minimum funding increase will form part of the baseline funding for 2015-16, so that at the very least all schools can then plan for the future.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Marcus Charles Jones (Conservative, Centre-right): I completely agree with my hon. Friend. There is a massive disparity in my area, which is sandwiched between Leicester, Coventry and Birmingham which get hundreds of pounds extra in funding a year per pupil. Does he agree that that needs to change—it is vital that that happens—because my local schools are trying to get staff in a market where those other schools have far higher levels of funding?
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Guy Thomas Opperman (Conservative, Centre-right): I endorse what my hon. Friend says. He should try coming to the most rural and sparsely populated constituency in England, Hexham, in Northumberland, where he would understand the complex difficulties we face; the situation he describes is exacerbated in spades there Although the 7% budget increase that the schools will enjoy on 31 March or 1 April is clearly very helpful, we need to plan and go forward. We have yet to hear from the Labour party, which was in government for 13 years and did nothing about this, but the argument appears to be won, because when we look at the co-signatories of F40, we find that they come from across the House. While strongly urging that we get an increase and that the sparsity factor is addressed, I entirely endorse the motion.
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Anne Marie Morris (Conservative, Centre-right): I shall be brief. Every child deserves a fair level of funding. The fact that so many Devon MPs are here today demonstrates how strongly we feel about being the sixth lowest funded authority. We get £4,602 per pupil, which compares with a national average of £5,082—there is a funding gap of £41 million. We face specific problems and I wish to mention two. First, the existing formula contains no recognition of high-growth areas, of which Devon is one. As a result, Devon has to set aside £1.5 million to deal with growth every year for the next seven years. Secondly, the transport costs are completely ignored. We have 16,051 children being bused to school every day—that is 33% of the transport budget. I thoroughly recommend the F40 proposals. They need to be introduced as a matter of urgency. If they were, Devon’s children would be better off by £205.64 per pupil by 2015-16. Roll on the change!
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
Richard Michael John Ogilvie Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): That is very kind of the shadow Minister. The reason why I used the Schleswig-Holstein analogy was that if one looks at the funding for Gloucestershire at £4,195 per head and compares the schools that we have, which are multicultural, urban, inner-city schools, with those of Birmingham, which get £5,210—over £1,000 more per pupil—it brooketh no understanding. Does the shadow Minister agree?
School Funding Formula — House of Commons, 2015-03-10
Topic: Education
John Alan Redwood (Conservative, Centre-right): Would the Minister suggest that there should be a limit on how big the gap can be between the best and the worst per pupil level of funding, as that would be a starting point for getting some justice?