HC Deb 02 April 1962 vol 657 cc171-82

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Hamilton.]

10.26 p.m.

Mr. Edward Short (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central)

I wish to raise tonight very briefly the question of the cuts made by the Minister of Education in the minor works programmes of local education authorities. On this occasion, I speak not only for my own local education authority but for those in the whole of the north of England, the five northern counties. I have taken the trouble to do some research into this matter and to get figures for all the local authorities in the five northern counties.

Minor works programmes are the capital items of expenditure by local education authorities up to about £20,000 in value. The main headings under which work is done in the minor works programmes include, first, the provision of additional accommodation. In these days of rising birth rate, this first priority for minor works is extremely important. It is largely under two sub-headings that this is done. First, there is the provision of portable, or I think the technical term is "demountable," classrooms. I do not know what we are doing to the English language in these days, but that is the terminology. It means classrooms which can be assembled and, when the need for them is no longer there, taken to pieces. Secondly, the provision of additional accommodation concerns permanent extensions to existing buildings in accordance with the development programmes. Then there are sanitation schemes, especially in the deep rural areas, and the provision of heating and lighting in the rural areas and the adaptation and replacement of old village schools.

Among the miscellaneous items come the provision of playing fields, improvements to clinics, school meals, further education projects, class-room accommodation, new electric wiring, the provision of larger windows in dark schools and, in one school, the removal of four old chimney breasts in classrooms in order to make more accommodation. Items such as these are of considerable importance in the five northern counties for two reasons. The first is that the five counties have a very large number of old, insanitary substandard schools in the rural areas. Secondly, old industrial cities such as Newcastle, Sunder land, Middlesbrough. Darlington and South Shields have a terrible legacy of schools dating almost from the days of the school board, when the conception was to put about 500 children on to an acre of ground in the middle of a city. In my constituency, there is a whole string of these schools stretching from one end to the other. They are completely building-locked sites. They are old and extremely dark, and the windows are high so that the children cannot look out of them. They are extremely inconvenient for modern educational practice.

Bearing in mind that educationists nowadays regard the environment of education as probably just as important as the content, and some say more important than the content, it is surely equally important to modernise old schools as it is to erect wonderful new schools on the peripheries of our cities or in the suburbs. But the old insanitary buildings which many villages are still using, by providing a depressing atmosphere for education, in my view do positive harm to the child's attitude towards education. I am certain that this has an effect on the attitude later towards further education. I think that environment is extremely important.

The timetable of what happened in respect of this educational provision started on 28th January, 1960. The Minister of Education answered a Question by my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Sydney Irving) about minor works, in which he said, … there may be ways of improving our procedures in this fiel —he was referring to approving minor works— and I shall have an opportunity to discuss this with the representatives of the Local Authority Associations next week."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 28th January, 1960; Vol. 616, c. 60.] Presumably as a result of those discussions with the local authority associations, in May, 1960, the Minister of Education asked the local authorities to submit a programme of minor works for two years, 1961.62 and 1962.3. They did so, and in December of that year, 1960, the Minister announced the allocations. Broadly speaking, though it is difficult to generalise, each local authority was allocated about two-thirds of the programme for which it had asked. For example, South Shields asked for a programme of £91,000 and was allocated £60,000. It varied, but over the whole of the five counties it was about two-thirds.

But in July, 1961, the Minister suddenly announced—and it came as a bombshell to local authorities—a moratorium on minor works. He said that the approval was revoked except for the minor works in the two-year programme for which contracts had been let. He said that he would approve a further allocation in October, 1961, so that there was a standstill from July to October except for the jobs for which contracts had been given out.

Most local authorities, as far as I can see—this is the average in the North—had let contracts for roughly 10 per cent. of their allocation. This, too, varied. Sunderland—my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, North (Mr. Willey) is present in the Chamber—had done rather well in letting contracts, but the average was about 10 per cent. For example, the North Riding of Yorkshire had let contracts for about £8,000 of work out of the £90,000 which it had been allocated for the year.

The revised allocations in the North were as follows—and I do not want to bore the House with many figures, but I must give some: in the North Riding the old allocation was £210,000, for the two years, and this was reduced to £75,000 for the eighteen months; Sunderland, from £110,000 reduced to £30,000—but Sunderland had done rather well in letting contracts; South Shields, reduced from £60,000 to £20,000; Cumberland, reduced from £220,000 to £80,000; Darlington, reduced from £40,000 to £20,000; Northumberland, reduced from £450,000 to £150,000; Durham, reduced from £785,000 to £220,000—they had a severe crack in Durham; Middlesbrough, reduced from £45,000 to £25,000; and Newcastle, reduced from £170,000 to £60,000. This represents a cut of over 50 per cent. in almost every case. In all fairness, I must make it clear that there were two alleviations. First, work put out to contract could be continued; and secondly, works costing less than £2,000 were not to count against the allocation.

I have gone into the position carefully. It is difficult to assess the effect of those two factors in the whole of the North, but, as far as I can see, they possibly reduce the Minister's cut from just over 50 per cent. to just over 30 per cent. I think that in saying that I am being quite fair. What it all amounts to, therefore, is that the Minister has made a cut of just over 30 per cent. in the sort of items that I enumerated at the beginning of my speech—for example, new sanitary arrangements, portable classrooms, bigger windows, and so on. There is so much ground to be made up in education in Northern England that a cut of 30 per cent. is extremely serious.

On 17th October, last year, the Director of Education for Durham—which, as I have said, was hit probably harder than anybody else—wrote to the Minister: I am directed to register a strong protest against the amount allocated, which represents a very serious curtailment in the authority's expenditure on the large improvement projects and complete adaptations of the smaller, substandard schools, thereby upsetting the authority's planning in connection with minor building programmes and necessitating a reversion to the policy of piecemeal improvements. The Director of Education for Middlesbrough is on record as saying that The main effect of the reduced size of the programme is that the authority have been obliged to defer remodelling of older school premises. the sort of premises of which there are many in my constituency.

The Director of Education for Northumberland, which has a great deal of work to do, said this: Prior to the cut, the authority had programmed 66 minor capital works. Under the revised allocation, it will only be possible to carry out ten projects in the period to 31st March, 1963. That is, ten projects as against the 66 which the authority wanted to carry out.

The modernising and revitalising of older schools which still have a useful life can make an enormous contribution to the mounting educational programme which faces the country. It is not only niggardly and mean to make these cuts, because the total saving is relatively small, but, in my view, it is much against the national interest to do so. It is, however, in keeping with the central theme of Conservative policy to permit unlimited expenditure in the private sector of the economy and, at the same time, to starve the public services.

If any hon. Member wants a visual illustration of that, the best way of getting it is to stand on the Terrace of this House and to look out at the new multiple-storey office buildings going up all over the place and then to look immediately in front at the hospital, which was bombed during the war and still has not been rebuilt. That is an example of over-provision in the private sector, and under-provision in the public sector.

What is happening, therefore, is in line with Conservative Party policy. This policy and many other aspects of Government policy represent a return to the 1930s, a return to pre-war Toryism. As my hon. Friend the Member for Durham (Mr. Grey) said earlier, the Prime Minister's visit to Stockton today is psychologically interesting, because it is a symptom of what is happening to the policy of his Government.

10.39 p.m.

Mr. Frederick Willey (Sunderland, North)

I wish, briefly, to say that I am sure all the local education authorities in the North-East will be greatly obliged to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) for taking his opportunity to raise this matter this evening. I have every sympathy for the Parliamentary Secretary. As he knows, he ought not to be replying to the debate; it should be a Treasury Minister. I am sure, however, that the hon. Gentleman realises that the only merit about these economies is that, from a Treasury point of view, they are easy to impose. From an education point of view, they are quite disastrous. They cause the maximum irritation and frustration amongst local authorities, who do not know where they are.

The Minister has, at any rate, to be congratulated on introducing the new procedures before the Treasury decided to impose these cuts. They cause an enormous waste of time to the scarce manpower employed by the local authorities, and they are scandalously unfair. I am sure that all hon. Members, when-even they enjoy a visit to a new school, are more acutely conscious of the contrast between the new and the old, and this is equally true in rural areas as it is in constituencies like my own in urban areas. One thing that I always feel when visiting a new school is that we must do all we can to improve the older schools—and this has been done dramatically by many authorities. This is just the sort of work that is now held up.

I know that the Parliamentary Secretary will be aggrieved to hear me say this, but it is not a question of materials and building labour not being available. The materials and labour are there, but they are being employed on other jobs. It is regrettable that this should happen. It is quite difficult to get the work going at full speed again, and I hope that the Minister will feel encouraged by the fact that my hon. Friend has vigorously raised this matter tonight, and will exercise, in turn, all the pressure he can against this automatic economy exercised by the Treasury to the great disadvantage of everyone interested in education.

Dame Irene Ward (Tynemouth) rose—

Mr. Speaker

Mr. Thompson.

Dame Irene Ward

I am sorry that I cannot "have a go."

10.43 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education (Mr. Kenneth Thompson)

Had my hon. Friend intimated that that was her pleasure, I have no doubt that she would have managed to catch your eye, Mr. Speaker.

Until we came to the few closing minutes of the speech of the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short), I was minded to congratulate him on the content of his remarks and to thank him for providing the House with an opportunity, however brief, for considering what is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects, of education.

I share his views almost completely, and also those expressed by the hon. Member for Sunderland, North (Mr. Willey), as to the importance of this part of the school building programme, if that is how one should describe it. I share his views of the need to do all we can to improve the conditions in some of our older schools. I am a north countryman myself, and although this is not the occasion to challenge the hon. Member's claim to speak for the whole of the north of England, I have shared his experience in visiting many old towns and cities in the North and seeing some of the problems which they still have to solve in providing the standards of education we all now seek to achieve.

The minor works programme has been very high in the catalogue of important enterprises to which my right hon. Friend has set his hand. I assure the House that it was not lightly that he accepted these restrictions on expenditure for minor capital projects, but the story would be incomplete if we did not consider the circumstances in which it became necessary to take the steps which have been described. In July last year, the Government decided that because of the state of the economy at the time it was necessary to take some steps—some important and far-reaching—to restrain public expenditure. We can have debates, as we have had, upon the wisdom of that decision, but the Government's decision was that that was essential in the national interest.

Education, one might reasonably have supposed—as being one of the biggest spending Departments within the whole public service—would be called upon to make some contribution to that reduction in public expenditure. My right hon. Friend carried out very lengthy negotiations on this matter and at the end of the day the educational building programme was called upon to make a contribution limited in size, by way of a reduction where it would do least lasting damage to the programme.

The House knows that the building programme in education is in two parts—the major building programme, for providing us with our new schools and colleges all over the country, and the minor works programme. To have touched the major works programme would have seriously damaged the education system and the progress which we have been making in the last ten or twelve years, and my right hon. Friend decided that it would be wrong to interfere with that part of the work. There we have slow moving long-range jobs which require a lot of planning and take a lot of time to bring to completion. In the minor works programme, which has been growing very rapidly over the years, as I shall show, there is a quick moving programme capable of adjustment up and down as the economic circumstances of the country dictate, and so it was in this sphere that my right hon. Friend thought it right that the cut should be imposed.

It is wrong to imagine that today everything is as black as it was many years ago and that nothing has been done to improve these old schools. I know that there are still a great many jobs to be done to benefit the schools and improve the climate in which children receive their early education. A great deal has been accomplished in the last eight years. As near as I can get accurate figures, because there is a great deal of difference in the interpretation, about £110 million has been spent on minor works in the schools of the country. This must have effected a considerable improvement. In addition, there is a separate minor works programme for the aided schools within the system.

Meanwhile we have had, and continue to have, the largest building programme ever in the history of the country. Even today, after we have gone through the process of examining and rearranging public expenditure, the major schools building programme, taking all its parts, is larger than at any time before, including the period immediately prior to the recent cuts. So it is wrong to take the view that educational building is going into some sort of decline and that this is a symptom of something else that is seriously wrong. The truth is that many local education authorities have been finding that the burden on their resources for both major and minor works programmes has been so great that they have been unable to keep pace, and some of the authorities to which the hon. Gentleman referred have found it impossible in the past to undertake all the work within the allocation allowed to them by my Department.

Mr. Short

All the authorities except one have protested about the cuts.

Mr. Thompson

My right hon. Friend is glad that there has been this demand for more work of this kind. I stated a simple fact, that in recent years many of the authorities referred to by the hon. Gentleman have not found it possible—I make no complaint or criticism, I merely state the fact—to carry out work within the allocation alloted to them by my Department. This is symptomatic of the troubles which we were trying to put right during the operations of last summer. Local authorities which are heavily overloaded with public work find that if they carry out many of the minor works they draw heavily on their skilled and scarce professional staffs to the detriment of other work of one kind or another. Unless we get the programmes in some sort of balance within the capacity of the local authorities and the building industry to execute, a great deal will go wrong.

Mr. Willey

I am not sure on what ground the hon. Gentleman is making his case. Is he now saying that the Minister made representations to the Treasury that this programme should be cut? I thought that it was the other way round.

Mr. Thompson

I do not see how that comment could arise out of anything that I have said. It would be the same either for the Treasury or my right hon. Friend. I do not think that I am revealing any Cabinet secret when I say that my right hon. Friend would not be the most enthusiastic cutter of the educational building programme.

If we add all these programmes together, it would be wrong for the hon. Gentleman—or for the House in general —to close his eyes to the fact that the local authority departments themselves and the building industry as a whole are today carrying as heavy a load as they can possibly bear. Certainly, it is true that some local authorities have not been able to keep pace with that side of their building work—

Mr. Short

How can that be one of the reasons, when the Minister approved these works only six months before they were cut?

Mr. Thompson

That remark, again, cannot possibly conflict with what I have said. It was when the economy showed signs of the strain that compelled the Government to take action that this programme, among others, had to submit to some adjustment—

Dame Irene Ward

Are we to understand from what my hon. Friend says that the actual proposals put in by the local authorities were in excess of what they themselves were able to carry out? Honestly, this is quite puzzling, and I agree with the hon. Gentleman opposite; we do not know on What basis my hon. Friend is really arguing.

Mr. Thompson

It cannot be any secret from my hon. Friend that local authorities do sometimes fall into the trap of putting forward programmes that are larger than they expect to get. That is a phenomenon familiar not only to the minor but to the major works programme, too. The Minister must judge What the available resources will allow him to authorise—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend, in her enthusiasm to support the hon. Member opposite, must allow me to make my case—

Dame Irene Ward

It is the North I am supporting.

Mr. Thompson

My right hon. Friend authorised the larger programme at the beginning of the period. It became necessary to make a change. The House may have many views on whether the necessity was quite as great as we said it was, or whether it was someone else's fault, but the Government made this judgment of the situation. My right hon. Friend judged that the minor works programme was the one that was most capable of variation from time to time, and it was in that programme that he made his adjustment, not just leaving the major programme going on under the impetus that had been established but seeing that it went even faster.

I therefore claim that the educational building programme as a whole has come extremely well out of the difficulty in which the country found itself during last year, and whilst we share the views that have been expressed about the need to press on, when we can, with all these minor projects, we must keep our enterprise within the limits of our resources, otherwise the whole of the jobs on which we are embarked, which are very great and very important, will suffer.

I very much hope that the hon. Gentleman, and the whole of the north of England—if he will take back a message to his "empire"—will be assured that as soon as it is possible for us to do better in this part of the work we will endeavour to do so, recognising, as we do, how important it is for the children who will be educated in schools less good than some of the new ones we are now putting up.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at six minutes to Eleven o'clock.