Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-03-09
Topic: Education
Jane Ellison (Conservative, Centre-right): No, I am not going to take another intervention—I will take the same time that the hon. Lady took The list is very long. Labour said in its 1997 manifesto that it would tackle this issue; there was a royal commission in 1999, a Green Paper in 2005 and the Wanless review; it was said that the issue would be resolved by the 2007 comprehensive spending review, and there was another Green Paper in 2009—13 wasted years. I am afraid that Opposition Members provoked me to embarrass them. Their long grass was very long indeed We are injecting not just new money into social care but an extra £425 million into the NHS to help A&E departments triage patients more effectively and to support local NHS organisations as they reform and improve for the long term the way services are provided to patients. By putting more money into social care and those specific parts of the NHS—triage and capital for A&E—we are addressing some of the very issues that Simon Stevens has talked about recently as immediate challenges of dealing with pressures in the system. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) asked about STPs. The investment that we set out will make a real difference by supporting regions with the strongest plans that are ready now to deliver their long-term visions. We will revisit STPs in the autumn to see whether there are further areas with strong cases for investment, but the NHS obviously also has a part to play in looking at how it can, for example, dispose of unused land and reinvest that money. I give my hon. Friend that assurance Let me talk a little about education and skills. We have already taken action to fundamentally reform and improve school education, with the result—this is never acknowledged by the Opposition—that 1.8 million more children are in good and outstanding schools compared with 2010. The simple fact is that vastly more children are getting a good or outstanding education. In this Budget, we further galvanised our schools with £320 million of investment in new schools and £216 million for the maintenance of existing schools My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government spoke compellingly about the sweeping reforms that we have introduced to put technical skills at the heart of our education system. I sense great cross-party consensus that that has been an undervalued part of our education system. That will give young adults a chance to develop new talents that will stand them and, of course, our country and economy in good stead as we work towards the high-skill, high-wage and hi-tech economy that will help us to be competitive in a global marketplace I have spoken about the importance of controlling our public finances, investing carefully in our public services and ensuring that our spending is sustainable. Alongside that, I want to make a few remarks about the importance of ensuring that our tax system is sustainable. We cannot talk about one side without talking about the other. The flipside of how we invest in public services is how we fund them. Let me address two issues First, a number of hon. Members have mentioned business rates. It is right that we update them to reflect today’s property values, but we recognise that this has meant a sudden jump for some. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) for his excellent speech. I am familiar with some of the pubs in his beautiful constituency. He mentioned the importance of supporting pubs. That was part of the £435 million package of support that the Chancellor outlined yesterday. He has been working on that with the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to help businesses manage the steepest increases following the business rates revaluation Secondly, there has been much discussion in this debate of the changes we have made to national insurance contributions, and I will respond directly to some of the points made. Let us be clear that the contributory benefits funded by national insurance contributions are very different from employment rights. Much of this debate and the public discourse has criss-crossed between those two important, but distinct, subjects. National insurance pays into a fund that pays out to the NHS and contributory benefits—principally the state pension, but also parental pay. We have announced that we are looking carefully at maternity and paternity rights.