HC Deb 27 February 1990 vol 168 cc129-31
9. Mrs. Maureen Hicks

To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Science how many local authorities have surplus school accommodation.

Mr. Alan Howarth

Information about the number of surplus places in individual local education authorities is not held centrally.

Mrs. Hicks

Does my hon. Friend agree that the priority for resources going into education should be to educate pupils through books, equipment and teachers' salaries, and not to prop up empty desks and classrooms? Does he agree that it is a most awful waste of taxpayers' and community chargepayers' money if local authorities fail to exercise their responsibility to close those schools which have to be closed and to eliminate waste? In Wolverhampton alone, there are 11,000 surplus places and community chargepayers will be paying to keep them open.

Mr. Howarth

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to make those points. I very much hope that authorities in Wolverhampton and elsewhere will recognise that failure to grasp the nettle of surplus places means that children are consigned to inferior education in inadequate schools, that money is wasted rather than being spent positively on other valuable educational projects in the area, and that community charge payers are asked to bear a cost to no good purpose.

Mr. Alfred Morris

How many local education authorities have accommodation which, owing to lack of capital expenditure even for essential repairs, they cannot use? Is it not a shocking response to the crying need in Manchester that next year we shall receive barely one tenth of the amount needed even to repair old and poor school buildings in some of the most deprived parts of the city?

Mr. Howarth

I remind the right hon. Gentleman that under the last Labour Government capital spending on schools was cut by 50 per cent. after the International Monetary Fund took charge of our economy in 1976. Since then, capital expenditure per pupil in our schools has risen by 10 per cent. and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has secured an increase in the money available for capital expenditure from £352 million under the capital allocation system last year to £485 million under the capital guidelines system this year. We shall, of course, look as sympathetically as we can at the needs of Manchester. As I said in response to an earlier question, however, the guidelines that we have issued to individual authorities are based on well-understood and well-established criteria. If the bids from Manchester did not match those criteria this year, it was a matter of regret to us that we were not able to give more help. I hope very much that next year Manchester will make bids more closely related to the priorities that we have indicated. Then, of course, we shall look as sympathetically as we can at Manchester's needs.

Mr. Patrick Thompson

Regarding school accommodation, will my hon. Friend do all that he can to continue to support parental choice and the open entry policy provided for in the Education Reform Act 1988? Will he do all that he can to support good schools which have room for more pupils against local authorities which for bureaucratic reasons restrict entry to those schools?

Mr. Howarth

I agree very much with my hon. Friend. It is a matter of satisfaction that the system of more open enrolment will start to operate from next September and parents will have a greatly enhanced right to determine the schools to which their children go. That factor, combined with the pupil-based element of formula funding of local management of schools, will mean that parental choice is the principal determinant of the financial resources that go into schools.

Mr. Straw

As the learned judge pointed out last Friday when he declared unlawful the Secretary of State's decision in the case of Beechen Cliff school in Bath, the Government, by their policy of allowing schools to opt out, are wilfully sabotaging the ability of local education' authorities rationally to reorganise their schools provision in the light of surplus places. Will the Under-Secretary and the Secretary of State now abandon this most cynical and amoral abuse of power, by which local education authorities are encouraged—indeed, forced—by the Government to name schools for closure or reorganisation but as soon as local authorities name them the Secretary of State allows the schools to opt out?

Mr. Howarth

The Bath judgment is about the procedure used in determining this particular grant-maintained application in relation to other reorganisation proposals put forward by the authority. It does not affect the overall policy of making available to schools the option of grant-maintained status. The availability of the grant-maintained option is certainly no bar to authorities' bringing forward sensible reorganisation schemes. Authorities have always been required to take proper account of the views of local people. Ballots on grant-maintained status are one way in which such views may be expressed. We have always made it clear that grant-maintained status cannot be a refuge for unviable schools. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has turned down 11 applications.