LEICESTERSHIRE (SCHOOL BUILDING PROGRAMMES) (Hansard, 19 February 1971)

§ Mr. John Farr (Harborough)
I wish to raise the question of the educational allowance for Leicestershire's major and minor school building programmes. I do not seek to make a political point today because, as I shall demonstrate, the statistics which I am about to present condemn equally Governments of both parties for their inactivity and failure in recent years to meet the essential needs of Leicester's education.
Since my last debate on this subject, Leicestershire's share of money provided by Whitehall has declined and it is so low today as to be, in my view, outrageous. I do not normally use flamboyant terms or extravagant language in the House, but I can find no other description to suit the list of statistics which I shall give.
I wish, first, to refer to the latest available complete statistics which I have—namely, for the year 1969–70. According to the Registrar-General, the total population of England and Wales at 30th June, 1969, amounted to 48,827,000 persons. The same source showed the total population of Leicestershire as being 740,170 persons. That means that 1.516 per cent. of our total population is fortunate enough to live in Leicestershire.
The total amount of money allocated for school building programmes—that is, major and minor works—in England and Wales for the financial year 1969–70 was £147 million, of which a sum of £1,419,740 was allocated to Leicestershire—0.965 per cent. of the total. We therefore have what I have just described as an outrageous situation in which the county of Leicester, where 1.516 per cent. of the population live, received only 0.965 per cent. of the total school building money available from State sources in the last year for which information is available.
Many questions arise from this one disgraceful fact, and they can all be simply summed up in the one word: why? I should like to know whether my hon. Friend can give me the answer. The figures I have given to him cannot be 2398 contradicted or contested by him because they are most certainly accurate and the sources of information from which they have been collated are impeccable. My hon. Friend cannot tell me, for instance, that the year 1969–70 was exceptional—it was not. In fact, in the following year, 1970–71, although the county population increased, and the number of new pupils increased by no fewer than 3,540 over the year before, Leicestershire's total allocation for school major and minor programmes fell by over £35,000.
My hon. Friend cannot say, as he may well endeavour to say, that Leicestershire has an ageing population—it has not. Leicestershire is a county with more than its share of young people at school: there are over 83,000 pupils on the school roll at the moment—3,500 more on the roll than there were in the previous year. Ten years ago the annual rate of increase of pupils on the roll in Leicestershire was 1,200 a year and it has now, as I say, reached the staggering figure of 3,500 per annum. This represents one of the fastest increases in the country.
My hon. Friend, in whose knowledge of his work and his Department we all take pleasure, will no doubt confirm that I am right when I say that today it takes nearly £500 to provide one new school place. This means that just to cope with the annual rate of increase in the number of pupils in Leicestershire requires an expenditure of £1,750,000 per annum, but the total allotted to the county for 1971–72 for new major programme works is only £1 million. For minor works, the revised figure, with the latest increase, given last week is only £338,000, which makes a total available to the county for 1971–72 of £1,338,000, or getting on for half a million pounds less than required to cope with the increase in new pupils alone.
What is the Leicestershire education authority to do? What can it do? How can it even accommodate the new pupils without improving the accommodation for existing pupils? What about the many ageing primary schools in Leicestershire, many of which are a disgrace and about which I have received only nebulous promises from my hon. Friend's Department over the years? For instance, what about the Bell Street Infants School in Wigston, which my right hon. Friend the present Minister for Posts 2399 and Telecommunications told me in 1964 would be favourably considered for rebuilding? Still nothing has been done. What about the village school in Arnesby, two or three miles from Wigston, where the children still have to use earth closets as proper toilet accommodation is not available? Has the hon. Gentleman any idea of the number of primary school buildings in Leicestershire still in use which are over 100 years old? Why does the Leicestershire Education Authority have to hire over 120 sets of village halls and other unsuitable accommodation for teaching children in the 1970s?
When will the new primary school for Braunstone, which was approved in the 1968–69 programme and subsequently dropped, be built? What I am to tell the parents there who are writing to me daily complaining about the shortages of school places in the district of Braunstone?
These are a few of the facts and the problems. In whatever study my hon. Friend has made for this debate—we recognise that he is a conscientious man and will have made a considerable study —he must be frightened by the facts which he has unturned about Leicestershire. The allocation for schoolbuildings for Leicestershire is outrageous. The county is not getting its share of the national cake. I should like to know why.

§ The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. William van Straubenzee)
I thank my hon. Friend for his kindly and courteous personal references to me. I make no complaint whatever at the properly vigorous way in which he has represented his constituents in this matter.
I should like to deal with as many of the points he has made as I possibly can, I hope, at least in part, to his satisfaction.
I start by accepting his friendly challenge on the basis of the allocation of moneys in the major school building programme. If I may epitomise what he said, he was urging on the House the view that because Leicestershire has approximately 1 per cent. of the national school population —let us not argue to very small figures—it ought to have, 2400 equally, apprsoximately 1 per cent. of the money available for building programmes. If that were so, and if that were followed through, it would mean that the county part of which I represent in the House—Berkshire—which has an almost identical school population to that of Leicestershire, would also have 1 per cent. on his basis. It is an equally indisputable fact that the school population growth in Berkshire is very nearly twice that in Leicestershire.
These are circumstances beyond the control of my hon. Friend and myself. If money were to be allocated on that basis it would self-evidently be grossly unfair to areas like Berkshire, whose school population is almost exactly—certainly sufficiently so for the purpose of my illustration—the same as Leicestershire's, yet its population growth is nearly double that of Leicestershire's.
That is why, to answer my hon. Friend's question directly, because it was sincerely put and of course sincerely meant, the calculation he makes does not stand up to examination. It is helpful to have this on the record clearly, because obviously these matters are read and listened to closely far outside the House. I am as anxious as is my hon. Friend to ensure that we do better for Leicestershire, but I do not think that the basis of calculation with which my hon. Friend started is one that we can regard as a viable one, for precisely the reason that I have given.
Leicestershire is a name to conjure with in all educational circles. I was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then Minister of Education—now my noble Friend the Paymaster-General—at the time of the start of what is now known as and rightly renowned as the Leicestershire Plan. No one who had links with Leicestershire, even of that tenuous kind, all those years ago and who has tried to keep in touch with the subject subsequently could be in any doubt as to the vigorous nature of the educational advance in Leicestershire.
I am glad of the opportunity afforded by this occasion to pay an additional tribute to all those many things which have already rightly been said about the local educational authority. It takes an authority of great vigour and adventurous minds to be the one which, for example, 2401 in the 1968–69 programme took out of its own programme four primary schools to clear the way for the completion of the new upper school of revolutionary design at Countesthorpe. This is symbolic of the approach of the local education authority to the vast task that it has.
I must meet as squarely as I may one of my hon. Friend's charges about the major building programme, namely, that taken of itself it has failed to meet basic needs. I concede that Leicestershire's figures show that since 1959 the new places provided by each major programme exceeded the number of children on the school rolls in only four out of the 15 years. In a perfect world it might indeed be that the major building programme alone would be responsible for the basic need; but, alas, we do not live, certainly financially, in a perfect world and it is rare in any L.E.A. for the major programme by itself to provide sufficient new places to accommodate every new pupil enrolled.
The Leicestershire authority has done what other authorities have done. It has found room for the additional children by providing extra places through minor works, which is an integral part of the school building programme. In fact, as a result of that, over the last 10 years the total number of places provided in the county has been much greater than the increase in the school roll, and I must remind my hon. Friend that the major programme which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has approved for 1972–73 is the largest for five years.
I understand my hon. Friend's anxiety, for example, about the minor works allocations. Although he did not develop this at any length, he made a glancing reference to it. The main purpose, surely, of the minor works allocations is, first of all, to enable an authority to deal with its minor basic needs and then to carry out what improvements it can fit in without—and this is the great advantage—the central control exercised on the major programme.
My right hon. Friend has constantly reiterated, since priorities in matters of this sort are the essence of good government, that an increase in minor works programmes must take second place to the new replacement programmes. Ad- 2402 mittedly there are occasions when one can do better than that, and Leicestershire has been one to benefit more than once in the last few years. Its minor works allocation for 1972–73—the first one approved by my right hon. Friend—is larger than that of the previous year.
My hon. Friend was critical of the replacement programme. For example, he pointed to 1971–72, and it is quite true that I was asked by the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) recently why all the county's proposals for that year—I am talking about 1971–72—were rejected. The answer which I gave was that the last Government did not approve any of the replacement proposals for the 1971–72 programme.
However, I felt that my hon. Friend was a little less than his usual fair self to the present Government when he said that in this respect all he had received were nebulous promises. My right hon. Friend has just approved two replacement projects for 1972–73. It so happens that I was in that estimable institution Radio Leicester on the day on which this was done, and I remember, having been interviewed there by a disc jockey, which in itself was an interesting experience, hearing the vicar of Quorn on Leicester Radio say, I think very fairly and rightly, how delighted he was that after many years of struggle, the St. Bartholomew's aided primary school at Quorn was to be replaced. The other school in that programme, as my hon. Friend knows, is in Shepshed.
Therefore, I must defend the present Government against the charge that the promises had been purely nebulous. In the case of Leicestershire they have been much firmer than that. As a result we are seeing a start upon the very replacement programme which my hon. Friend would so much like to see improved.
I do not want my hon. Friend to leave this debate with the feeling that from this Dispatch Box I have given an impression of nothing but complacency. That would be the last sentiment in the world that I should want to convey. But I am entitled to point to what has been achieved over the years. I recognise the difficulties which face Leicestershire in such matters as the raising of the school-leaving age. Those difficulties are 2403 faced by some other education authorities. My hon. Friend did not refer to that point directly, but I know that in his county some people do not understand the reason for the lower allocation directed to raising the school-leaving age—the R.S.L.A. as we call it in shorthand—by reason of the postponement of the coming into operation of the raised school-leaving age. Speaking from memory, I believe that it is down by 35 per cent.
The reason is that during the intervening period Leicestershire—like other education authorities—has been remarkably successful in its scheme for persuading children to stay on voluntarily over the age of 15. It follows that the allocation requirement specifically directed to raising the school-leaving age is proportionately the less.
My hon. Friend is quite right; I did some very careful investigation on this point specially for this occasion, and I have satisfied myself that there are L.E.A.s whose reduction in this context is even greater, because they have a lower proportion of young people to cater for owing to their success in persuading young people to stay on voluntarily over the age of 15.
I respect the dogged determination with which my hon. Friend has assailed successive Governments. I not only make no complaint about that; it seems to me to be the proper function of an active local Member of Parliament, which my hon. Friend is. I should like him to feel that my right hon. Friend, my noble Friend and I are always at his disposal and will deal to the best of our ability with individual cases.
2404 I am well aware of the local problems at the Braunstone school. My hon. Friend knows of the flattening out of the increase in the local population. As a result of my hon. Friend's mentioning that school, when the next programme is submitted by Leicestershire close attention will be paid to the position, depending on the degree of priority that the local education authority gives to the school in its own programme.

§ Mr. Farr
Will my hon. Friend also consider the question of the Bell Street Infants School replacement? I understand that that is curently at the top of the Leicestershire Education Authority's replacement list.

§ Mr. van Straubenzee
In the brief moments that remain I have no opportunity of checking that fact, but I take it from my hon. Friend. If that is so, the same careful attention will be given to that matter as to other alterations of priorities by the local education authority.
I end as I began: I am afraid that I must contest, in all friendliness, the basis on which my hon. Friend sought to allocate the money. But that is the only substantial difference between us. We are both concerned that Leicestershire, together with other L.E.A.s, shall make progress, especially in primary school replacement. It will be the great contribution for which my right hon. Friend's long period of service—as it will turn out to be—at the Department of Education will chiefly be remembered.