Westminster Hall Sitting of 23 March 2004

Preamble
[SIR NICHOLAS WINTERTON in the Chair]

Access to Justice (Rural Areas)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Derek Twigg.]
9.30 am
Gareth Thomas (Clwyd, West) (Lab): Good morning, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to take part once again in a debate under your most able and courteous chairmanship. It is also a pleasure to see my hon. Friend the Minister, as well as the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins), who shadows the Department for Constitutional Affairs as the Conservative spokesman on legal issues, and the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), who is the Liberal Democrat spokesman. Other hon. Members are also present.
I hope that the debate will focus on topical and important issues. Although I declare an interest at the outset as a member of the Bar, the debate is not about the need for lawyers to have their own trade union. Of course, they are not always the most popular section of the community, and there has been a fair amount of propaganda against them—not least, I am afraid to say, from Government Front Benchers. Some of that criticism is justified, but the issue of access to justice and legal aid is not about lawyers—it is about real, vulnerable people who are in difficulties. Regardless of whether those people have divorce, employment, or mental health problems, or are involved in civil or debt disputes, they are vulnerable and need help, and lawyers are still the main suppliers of legal help and representation.
I welcome the Government's reform of legal aid, which they introduced through the Access to Justice Act 1999; I sat on the Standing Committee that debated the Bill. However, we need to review the impact of those changes, including the introduction of the contract culture, particularly in more peripheral areas, such as my rural and semi-rural constituency in north Wales.
The Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs is currently conducting an inquiry into the issue, and various relevant parties have provided substantial evidence. Furthermore, in February, the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux published an important and rather critical report called "Geography of Advice", of which I am sure that the Minister is aware. It revealed that 40 per cent. of citizens advice bureaux thought that they were operating in an "advice desert", and my contribution will focus on that issue. In some parts of the country it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get a legal aid solicitor. That is causing hardship, and I want the Department to consider how its policies are being implemented.
There was a need to reform the old system, under which civil legal aid was demand led. There was also a need to control the budget and to ensure a more strategic approach to the provision of legal services so that need matched what suppliers could offer.
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Furthermore, there was a need to reconsider the issue of who provided those legal services. I entirely agree with the Government that we need a mixed economy of providers, to use the jargon. In other words, it is not just lawyers who should be able to give advice. In some cases, those involved in giving benefits advice should provide it. There is scope for giving advice over the telephone. There are different ways to go about it.
Expenditure had to be controlled. A bureaucracy was needed—after all, bureaucracy is essentially just a method of ensuring that public money is spent correctly, in accordance with a set of rules. However, I question whether it is proportionate. There has been much criticism of the dead hand of bureaucracy; many solicitors are said to find the auditing and reporting requirements a huge burden.
I welcome the philosophy behind the Access to Justice Act 1999. That is my starting point, and the debate is, from my point of view, primarily about civil legal aid, although there has been concern—and I know that the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) will refer to this—about magistrates court closures. I suppose that the title of the debate is wide enough to encompass them. They have caused difficulties in north Wales, although I accept the Government's case for some element of rationalisation. However, it needs to be done more flexibly and sensitively.
There has been a significant decline in the number of solicitors doing legal aid work. For example, 8,900 such solicitors practised family law—the backbone of civil legal aid—just before the implementation of the Access to Justice Act 1999, and the figure has now dropped to 3,800. That in itself is not alarming. It was to be expected. In so far as I accept that there has been an improvement in the quality of service offered by solicitors' firms, what has happened is none the less a warning signal. Perhaps the number of people leaving legal aid work has reached the stage at which it is becoming a bit of a crisis. The Government need to take notice.
I have already mentioned the NACAB "Geography of Advice" report, which refers to the figure that I have mentioned and states:
"In the economic context of cost cutting and contracting, solicitors have found cities the easiest and most profitable areas to serve because the greatest numbers of potential clients are concentrated within the smallest travelling distance. The consequence has been that the number of access points into the legal aid system has reduced."
I want the Minister to deal with that issue. Does he acknowledge that there is a problem, and that there are advice deserts?
The report goes on to say that the new contract regime appears to be ineffective at filling what are described as advice gaps, where there are shortages of competent advisers in specialist areas of law such as immigration and asylum. Therefore, over and above replying to my general point about the lack of practitioners providing civil legal aid, will the Minister tell me whether he has any worries about specialist areas of work?
The report also states that
"the trend towards clustering of services in urban centres combined with trends towards the increasing specialisation and economies of scale in legal business, has been accompanied by a decline in the number of legal practitioners bidding for CLS

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contract work. Within this broad analysis there are significant regional variations. However, the trend is clear—significant parts of the country are inadequately serviced by legal aid lawyers or other appropriate services, and this is likely to intensify."
I ask the Minister again to respond to those points. I share the concerns of the report's authors.
I conclude my references to the report by quoting from paragraph 2.39:
"There are critical problems in gaining access to legal services in rural areas with dispersed and small populations, which means that pockets of poverty are difficult to identify when planning services and poor and expensive public transport provides a significant barrier."
Rurality is difficult to assess. There are some sparsely populated areas in north Wales and other parts of the country: the west country, mid-Wales and north Yorkshire in particular. However, there are also reasonably sizeable market towns with a population of anything between 4,000 and 15,000, which are certainly not conurbations. The way in which the system operates tends to take work away not only from purely rural areas but from those market towns. A reasonably sized solicitors' practice for such a community might be anything between eight or 10 partners. That is small in the context of the bigger picture, and very small in comparison with larger practices.
The fact that such practices are small and generalist in nature, doing both legal aid and private work—indeed the legal aid work has traditionally been subsidised by the private work—means that the generalist high street practitioners in reasonably sized market towns such as Colwyn Bay and Abergele in my constituency, and I am sure that hon. Members could mention others, are being squeezed out. I would like the Minister to accept that that is an issue. I am asking for greater flexibility in the way in which the Legal Services Commission lets contracts and controls the budgets. I accept the need to control the budget.
While I am on the question of the budget, I would like the Minister to comment on the bigger picture. There are serious question marks over the extent to which the great idea of a community legal service is financially sustainable. The Minister will know that the service has operated under what is euphemistically called a standstill budget for the past three years. There has been a freeze on payment rates to legal aid solicitors. I am not weeping crocodile tears for solicitors; I am concerned about the economic effect. The freeze means that fewer solicitors are confident that they can make a sustainable business out of legal aid and they are getting out of it. We then have a social problem, as people cannot get legal aid easily.
Bearing in mind that the budget has been frozen for the past three years, can the Minister tell us whether it is likely to increase? The Minister has been on the record on the issue. If problems of a legal nature—domestic violence is a classic example, or problems with housing—are dealt with expeditiously by a competent solicitor and a remedy is sought. all sorts of difficulties can be avoided later on. That can have a benign effect on other budgets, not least that of the Department for Work and Pensions.
Lembit Öpik (): The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about saving money. A magistrate in my area by the name of Lynette Kretchner, who is the chair of the youth courts, is concerned that children from special schools constantly keep turning up in the youth courts. It seems that the special schools are referring those children to the youth courts for quite inappropriate matters. That is damaging to children in the long term. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if access to justice in rural areas was effectively resourced and properly planned, we could perhaps do something about that? At the moment, we are investing in a long-term problem—irreparable damage to those young people.
Gareth Thomas: I note what the hon. Gentleman has said, and I am sure that the Minister will respond to that.
To re-emphasise the point, the community legal service is a vital part of the Government's agenda to combat social exclusion. There is a good case for the Minister to go to the Treasury and ask for quite a lot more money. That would be prudence. Surely it is part of the Government's cross-cutting approach? While we are on the subject of cross-cutting approaches and joined-up government, does the Minister accept that there is a need for greater co-operation between his Department and other Departments, not least the Department for Work and Pensions, in providing legal advice and advice on benefits, particularly in this context? Does it not follow that the DWP and other Departments should be prepared to provide subventions to his Department? I make that point because several people involved in this matter believe that the Government should take note of it, particularly if they are committed to an holistic approach—if I may use that jargon—to the provision of legal advice and representation.
The other major question to ask the Minister is whether the Government acknowledge that there is a need to cut bureaucracy. I am sure that other hon. Members are also concerned about the disproportionate amount of bureaucracy. The Minister will be aware that the legal aid civil contract has no fewer than 250 pages, and that the guidance to it has 1,000 pages. Dealing with that and the auditing requirements is eating into solicitors' time—time that could be spent more effectively dealing with the vulnerable people who come to solicitors' offices, sometimes in despair, for immediate legal advice and representation.
Is the Minister satisfied that the community legal services partnerships are working effectively? I doubt that they are in north Wales. I want the local authorities to be more supportive. The community legal service needs to provide more financial assistance to the committees. The CLS partnerships, the profession and other providers do not communicate well enough with each other. Should local authorities have a duty to cooperate with a CLS partnership, which are, after all, critical to the objective of matching need and demand to the supplier base?
I am concerned about the lack of transparency of CLS decision-making. I recently met several legal aid solicitors who practise family law in my constituency and who received a terse letter from the Legal Services

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Commission dated 25 November 2003. I will quote from the letter sent to Mr. Dylan Rhys Jones of J. R. Williams, which is based in Abergele. It says:
"Thank you for your application to be included on the bid panel.
"The Legal Services Committee for Wales identified your zone as having a higher number of case starts than average in Wales and therefore as a zone where we could consider a reduction in the number of case starts authorised in order to free up some funding towards areas of higher priority.
"You will therefore have to be assessed against specified criteria so that we can give priority to certain areas of work and to the best suppliers."
That letter offended the solicitors who received it. They deal with a large number of family cases, only to be told that the LSC is prepared to pull the plug on them because they are busy doing their job as effectively as possible. That is unacceptable. I met Linda Summers, the chief executive of the Legal Services Commission in Wales, who told me that the decision had been reversed. I will, however, quote from a letter that I recently sent her following my meeting with the solicitors in my constituency, who said that there was a pressing need for stability of funding from the LSC to enable them to provide an effective service to the community. Will the Minister comment on the need for stability of funding? In my letter, I asked the LSC in Wales:
"In relation to the L.S.C.'s strategy, how are the 'priorities' established? Are you satisfied that the local partnerships are working effectively? You will recall that the solicitors present were very sceptical and I share that scepticism."
Other points were made, but the general feeling among solicitors in the part of Wales that I represent is that there is a problem with the provision of legal aid services in rural, semi-rural and peripheral areas outside the main conurbations.
I should like the Minister to acknowledge that that is a problem and to say that the Government will deal with it and will be flexible and imaginative in their approach. We will never achieve completely unrestricted access to justice in the real world, but the Government are striving to provide that and are on the right track, although they must consider specifically what is happening in rural areas.
9.51 am
Hywel Williams: I congratulate the hon. Member for Clwyd, West (Gareth Thomas) on securing this debate on a very important subject. I also convey to him congratulations from my hon. Friend the Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd). Unfortunately, he has been detained in Committee elsewhere this morning, but he would have liked to be here to discuss this extremely important subject on a normal rainy Tuesday. If I were the hon. Member for Clwyd, West, I would be pleased to have secured the debate, but I think that its importance will demand a more prominent slot if we return to the subject in future.
There has been a major programme of closures of magistrates courts in rural north Wales during the past 10 years; for example, I think that seven courts have closed in the past 10 years in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy. His constituency is approximately 100 miles north to south and 100 miles north-east to south-west. In the late 1970s, there were seven magistrates courts in the area, at
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Penrhyndeudraeth, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Barmouth, Bala, Llanrwst, Tywyn and Dolgellau. Those are small communities, but they are significant to that large rural area, and all the courts closed. Currently, there is only one court—at Dolgellau—and local people and legal professionals believe that it has been retained only because it is occasionally used as a Crown court. Meirionnydd Nant Conwy is the third-largest constituency in terms of geography, but it has only one magistrates court. Clearly, people are not well served by that situation.
I remember well the case that was made when the last magistrates court was closed, at Blaenau Ffestiniog. My hon. Friend made representations to the Lord Chancellor's Department, although he told me at the time that he believed that that was a waste of time. Many sensible arguments were proposed by members of various benches in Meirionnydd, but the then Under-Secretary at the Lord Chancellor's Department seemed to pay no heed whatever to those arguments.
The case for closing the magistrates court at Blaenau Ffestiniog was as thin as it could be. Two years before the closure, £20,000 had been spent to upgrade the facilities. Then came the debate about closure. The best case for closure proposed by the clerk was that £12,000 would be saved directly. However, that case did not take into consideration the cost of transport and of solicitors, defendants, who were perhaps on legal aid, and magistrates having to travel many miles. In north-west Wales, we are in the unfortunate position whereby justices sometimes have to travel to my constituency and the town of Pwllheli from south Meirionnydd. That is a round trip of between 150 and 160 miles, which is a long way for justices to travel, as they are not always the youngest of people, nor in the best of health for that matter.
Lembit Öpik: Is not the irony of closing magistrates courts for accessibility reasons that those enormously long return journeys make justice far less accessible? Perhaps the Government should think about investing some of the £350 million of unpaid parking tickets and court costs in reopening some of those courts, which would at least show that they are serious about access to justice.
Hywel Williams: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. We must ask ourselves what is economic in the delivery of justice to people in those dispersed and rural communities. I suspect that large pots of money are secreted in various parts of the system that could be more usefully deployed.
There is a serious point to be made about the delivery of justice. The justice of the peace system was devised to deliver justice locally through people who know the community well, but that is largely going by the board due to the closure programme. The hon. Gentleman will know that a similar process has being going on for several years in other parts of Powys and in rural Dyfed.
I propose the concept of justice miles. If it is unjustified—on both economic and environmental grounds—to transport green beans from Zimbabwe to a supermarket in Caernarfon, surely it is equally unjustified to transport defendants, witnesses and justices from the furthest reaches of Cwm Croesor to

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Dolgellau, or Caernarfon. That would take a day by bus, which is impractical. While we are on the subject of green beans, what about the baby sweetcorn that is transported from Colombia? I could go on, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I think that might try your patience.
Suffice it to say, it is difficult for people taking part in cases to arrive at the courts by 10 am, or even by 2 pm. My party is not against change for change's sake, but in this case the economic argument has been deployed insensitively and indiscriminately in rural areas of north Wales and elsewhere in the UK, as I am sure that other hon. Members will attest. Were we to accept that argument, it could then be applied elsewhere: there is a nice piece of real estate at the end of the Strand—I believe that it is called the royal courts of justice—that could easily be fashioned into a nice hotel. What if the royal courts of justice were to be relocated to north Wembley? I do not say that there is anything wrong with north Wembley, but I had the unfortunate experience of travelling there recently on the Bakerloo line—albeit with only a few changes.
We do not want members of the judiciary to trek to north Wembley, however easy that is. No one is seriously suggesting that, yet it seems just as reasonable as expecting defendants, lawyers and members of the bench to travel huge distances in rural areas. That is not access to justice, but the dismantling of a perfectly good system to cut costs, and it is detrimental to everyone involved.
9.59 am
Mr. John Grogan: I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West (Gareth Thomas) on initiating this debate. I will try to bring a little Yorkshire influence to the debate, to balance the Welsh influence. There have always been good relations between Yorkshire and Wales, and I am sure that that will be true this morning.
First, I want to address a point that my hon. Friend mentioned: he said that he is a little shy about promoting the cause of solicitors and their importance in rural areas. However, in many market towns such as Selby—one of the market towns that I represent—solicitors are an important part of the local economy. People take great pride in the fact that local legal advice is available.
I, too, intend to concentrate on magistrates courts. Often in Westminster Hall, I have to bring bad news from Selby, whether it be about floods or the closure of mines, but today I want to tell hon. Members about a successful campaign to save a magistrates court. I also want to draw out one or two general lessons and to ask my hon. Friend the Minister some questions.
The steady national decline of magistrates courts to which other hon. Members have referred has been reflected locally in North Yorkshire. The list of court closures during the past decade under successive Governments reads like an ode to the train stations closed by Beeching—Market Rasen, Newmarket, Christchurch, Windsor, Thirsk, Dover, Blyth and Loughborough. They are all small, market towns that took great pride in their courts. The court closure programme has gone on for 10 years, and it has had a massive impact on the delivery of local justice.
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The question of closing Selby magistrates court was first mooted in 2001—the year in which the Auld report into our criminal justice system was published. One reference to North Yorkshire was buried deep in the report. Auld referred to the notion of local justice being unreal in many rural counties, quoting North Yorkshire as an example:
"Similarly, in North Yorkshire, nine magistrates' courts serve a population of 742,000 spread over 3,000 square miles."
There have been three court closures in North Yorkshire since then, so we are now below the rump that in 2001 Auld said already made unreal any notion of local justice.
There was a massive campaign in Selby to try to save the courthouse. Most of the good citizens of Selby need never go near the court, yet local justice has an amazing resonance, and not just among solicitors. Local reporters and newspapers want justice delivered locally so that they can report it, which is sometimes a neglected aspect of the importance of local justice, and I received hundreds of letters from people to say that they could not possibly attend court in York, which would have been the alternative.
For example, I received a letter from someone in the village of Kirk Smeaton, who had recently been a witness in a case heard in Selby. They had been asked to arrive at the court in Selby at 10 o'clock. To get from Kirk Smeaton to York for that time, they would have had to take the 6.40 am bus to Pontefract, which arrives at 7.23. They would then have had to change to get to Selby at 8.10, before getting a bus to York at about half past 8, arriving at almost 10 o'clock. That person would have had to take three buses to get to York, and the proposed new courthouse would not even be in the city centre. Those practical reasons made people campaign strongly to keep the courthouse in Selby.
On 9 March, the North Yorkshire magistrates courts service issued a press release; it sounds a bit prosaic, but in Selby history it will be regarded like the Gettysburg address. It will resonate down the decades and centuries. The justices' chief executive, Paul Bradley, said that the magistrates courts committee's preferred option was to have
"two courthouses to serve the York/Selby area—a new courthouse in York and a separate courthouse in Selby."
He also said:
"In the coming months, I intend to hold discussions with officials in the Department for Constitutional Affairs to see how this can be achieved—either by the provision of a new courthouse in Selby or, probably more likely, by adapting and refurbishing the present courthouse."
I realise that we have been fortunate locally in many ways, but I want to end by making some points to my hon. Friend the Minister. Will he take a personal interest in the discussions that will be initiated by North Yorkshire to ensure that the story will have a happy ending for Selby? He is a high-flying Minister with a reputation for rethinking policy, and I detect that Ministers are starting to pause for thought and consider whether the process of efficiency and closing magistrates courts in rural areas has gone too far. On the one hand, Departments send me a leaflet a week on rural proofing and how we must consider services in terms of rural delivery, yet on the other hand, there has for years been a policy of magistrates court closures in rural areas.

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I get the impression that Ministers are allowing one or two more appeals and that there are signs of a rethink. This is an excellent opportunity for the Minister to nuance the policy and to state that it is worth making appeals because the Government recognise the importance of local magistrates courts in delivering local justice in rural areas in England and Wales.
10.5 am
Mr. Roger Williams: I apologise for being slightly late. I did not realise the severity of the affliction that had overcome my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), but I assure hon. Members that it is not stage fright—he has never been known to suffer from that.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Clwyd, West (Gareth Thomas) for securing the debate. The issue of access to justice in rural areas has affected my constituency and much of rural Wales over the past year or so, and I was privileged to secure a short debate in Westminster Hall, which was answered by the Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, the hon. Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie), in which I raised court closures in my constituency. I may refer to that debate later.
We all welcome the Government's commitment to making justice accessible to everyone. That lies at the heart of people's rights and of civil justice, but I fear that it is under threat in rural areas. There is no better deterrent to criminals than the certainty of detection and conviction, but many cases in rural areas are not pursued because of the difficulty of getting witnesses, and sometimes even victims—despite the assistance that they receive from Victim Support, to which I pay tribute—to attend court. Notwithstanding that support, it is often difficult for victims to attend court to see that justice is done and give evidence, because it is a stressful occasion and because of the difficulty of making the journey on public transport, if they do not have private transport.
As well as those problems, it has come to my attention lately that a number of rural solicitors firms have stopped accepting legal aid work. I spoke this week to a solicitor in my county town whose firm—the oldest established in the area—has regrettably decided against taking legal aid work despite realising the need for it. Therefore, people have less choice and less access to such support.
Yesterday morning, I was detained in my constituency by a lady who rang up and travelled 45 miles to my office because she could not get legal aid. She is the respondent in a divorce case and wanted advice on how to fill out forms. I did not feel able to give such advice, but I did what I could. She is on a low income, but has been refused legal aid because of the value of her house. Some people in rural areas who are on a low income live in relatively expensive residences.
My constituent was more concerned about the care of and contact with her children because she wants them educated at home, but her husband wants them to be educated in school. That is obviously not a run-of-the-mill situation and she desperately needed legal advice, but she was, as far as she could see, unable to get any. She asked me whether there is some system of pro bono work to help people facing such issues. I have great
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sympathy with the hon. Member for Clwyd, West on this: people in rural areas cannot get the specialised legal support that they need.
I am involved in an ongoing consultation with the Minister, and we are still fighting the closure of Ystradgynlais and Llandrindod magistrates courts. Things have become quite interesting. It was put to the local authority that unless it opposed the closure of Ystradgynlais and Llandrindod magistrates courts we could end up with no magistrates courts at all in Powys. That is recorded in the county council minutes. When the magistrates court committee presented its proposals that phrase was used. This is intolerable and the more I see of it, the more I am appalled.
Just across the border in Ceredigion, the council opposed the closure of Aberystwyth magistrates court. The Department, to its credit, overturned the decision and a new magistrates court will be built in Aberystwyth. The necessary funding has already been found. I congratulate the Department. I am fighting a rearguard action for the magistrates court system in my constituency and in Powys. I am pleased that the magistrates court in Newtown will go ahead shortly, subject to some planning problems being resolved and funding being found. Powys is the most sparsely populated local government area of England and Wales. People talk about Cumbria being sparsely populated, but Powys is three times more sparsely populated than that county, and people in Powys have to travel a huge distance to court and there is little public transport.
The debate is a wonderful opportunity to raise issues with the Minister. We all look forward to watching his career progress. Perhaps something he can do today will drive it forward.
Hywel Williams: A milestone.
Mr. Roger Williams: Yes, a milestone. We have raised two issues: legal aid, particularly in rural areas, and how we can strengthen the system while ensuring that it is readily available, and magistrates courts. I am pleased that the hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) was able to report on how a decision was overturned in his constituency. We look forward to the Government responding to our concerns about access to justice in rural areas and making similar decisions in future.
10.13 am
Mr. David Heath: I congratulate the hon. Member for Clwyd, West (Gareth Thomas) on securing the debate. It is an extraordinarily important debate. As the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) said, it is a matter to which we hope to be able to return on a larger stage. The principle of local justice is fundamental to our legal system. It goes back to the great charter and the idea that people are tried by their peers and that justice is administered locally by the people and the community affected by the crime.
There is a danger that that principle will be lost for the best possible reasons, reasons of efficiency, effectiveness and so-called rationalisation, while completely ignoring the impact on local, and especially rural, communities. Rural areas often seem to be forgotten in the formation of policy, but the real effect of court closures is on communities in rural areas, who feel that the criminal

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justice system is retreating from them and that the police services do not recognise their needs because for good, operational reasons they concentrate their activities on the higher empirical levels of crime in the big cities. Court closures make people in the rural communities feel abandoned by the criminal justice system, which is a dangerous position for them to be in.
Gareth Thomas: The hon. Gentleman may want to make a stab at defining a rural area. Does he agree that lots of people live in rural communities of one sort or another? Does he accept that the issue of access to justice embraces many different types of communities in rural areas, not necessarily those in the back of beyond?
Mr. Heath: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I will not attempt a definition because I do not think that there is a satisfactory one; it will vary in different parts of the country. I entirely embrace his position, that the key to the issue is the market town, which is the hub of rural areas. Of course, people do not expect every village to have its own court, but they expect every community, in the wider sense, to have one, and that is what is being lost.
There are two principal strands to this well-informed and passionate debate: first, the provision of legal services, the main bone of contention in the speech of the hon. Member for Clwyd, West, which I commend; and secondly, the closure of magistrates courts, to which the hon. Members for Caernarfon and for Selby (Mr. Grogan) and my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) drew attention.
I am not a lawyer, but I agree with the hon. Member for Clwyd, West on the provision of legal services. I am sick and tired of the easy and rather lazy caricature of all lawyers as fat-cat, city types who make a packet from legal aid. I see lawyers working at the other end of the system—not fat cats, but general practitioners of the legal service working in family practices in rural areas, and trying to provide a service to their community. They are unfortunately being caught in the backwash of an attitude that is increasingly shown by Ministers, who should know better, and peddled in the press, that the entire legal profession is simply trying to maximise its profits at the expense of others. I put it on the record that I do not believe that that is the case. It worries me that there is a contraction of those practices.
The hon. Member for Clwyd, West mentioned family law, which needs to be bound up with, and close to, rural communities if it is to be effective. It is no good if those who provide advice on family law and other specialist matters are remote from those communities, as that simply does not work. He also talked about advice deserts, which, perversely, are common in rural areas and in some of the most affluent parts of the country. The worst news is for people who do not have much money but live in an area that is considered affluent, because they will be cut off from every sort of support. They will not have the advantages that people who live in urban areas receive.
The hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) may be able to expand on the fact that some parts of Surrey, which are thought of as desirable, affluent areas, are
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precisely those where the provision of advice support is at its lowest, because no one imagines that people living there may be in trouble and unable to afford legal advice.
What worries me—I do not think it has been mentioned yet—is the contraction of criminal defence work. The availability of criminal defence lawyers is a problem in large parts of the country; in an area such as mine, very few are willing to undertake criminal defence work. In Frome, a single practitioner—a partner in a local firm—does 99 per cent. of the criminal defence work in the local courts. He freely admits that he is cross-subsidised by his partners' work, because they are prepared to humour him by allowing him to continue what he thinks—as do I—is important work in providing defence services for the local community. However, any monopoly provider in any area poses problems. He often has prospective conflicts of interest, because if one young thug beats up another, he can bet his life that he has represented them both in the same courts. It is difficult—I am not sure that he accepts this—to make the same speeches before the same magistrates in support of the same individuals time after time. That is not good for the interests of justice either. He has said, worryingly, that if the local court closes, it will no longer be sustainable for him to make a 30 or 40-mile trip to a court to represent his clients, and he will not do it. That means that nobody will be providing criminal defence work in my area.
Mr. Humfrey Malins: The hon. Gentleman has made a good point about travel. He will know that under legal aid rates, the money paid to lawyers for travelling time is so poor that it utterly discourages them from travelling for more than, say, 20 minutes to anywhere.
Mr. Heath: The hon. Gentleman is right. Other professionals are not put in that position. There is a direct analogy between the provision of general legal and general medical services. Every town with a medical practice should have a legal practice providing a range of services to local people, but that is not currently the case. Sadly, it is increasingly not the case because there has been an unfortunate continuation, and in some cases acceleration, of court closure programmes across the country.
Since the Government came to power, 115 courts have been closed. That is not unique to this Government—it happened under the previous one, too—but it is a continuation of a trend that has not abated until a recent policy change. It would be welcome if the Minister could confirm that there has been a change of policy. The hon. Member for Caernarfon and my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire talked about Wales, which, with 10 court closures since 1997, has been worst hit of all.
With the closure of a court, not only do the services go, but the physical entity is closed. That has huge symbolic importance: the court in a market town is often a prominent building, and is the community's guarantee that crimes committed locally are dealt with locally. Sometimes, the buildings themselves are equally important, and some closures have left fine buildings empty. The court in Keswick comes to mind: it is a listed building and has stood empty for four years. Presteigne,

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in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire, has another fine building that now has no effective use. I do not think that sufficient attention has been paid to how those courts are made usable. I accept the argument that courts should have easy access and be safe for the users, as nobody should be forced to use buildings that are entirely unsuitable, but we should make them appropriate for use, rather than making the easy and lazy assumption that the best solution is to close a court and replace it with a concrete monstrosity on the edge of the nearest big city.
There are also practical reasons why courts need to be kept open—transport, for instance, has already been mentioned. Convenience for court users is a key factor. It is not acceptable to have to travel long distances to act as a witness, solicitor, social worker or defendant.
Mr. Roger Williams: The magistrates court committee in Powys tried to use the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 to close Llandrindod court. However, it was told firmly that the purpose of the Act was to make facilities accessible, not to close them when it is difficult to do so.
Mr. Heath: That is a clear illustration of what I have in mind. The fact that the police must travel long distances to get to courts has operational significance. There are already far too few police officers in many rural areas, because of operational reasons to which I have alluded. If the magistrates court is 30 miles away, the police are also 30 miles away attending court cases, which takes them out of area. That is not acceptable, and the same goes for the other professionals involved.
The hon. Member for Selby made an important point about reporting. If justice is to be seen to be done, reports of proceedings in the magistrates court need to be in the local newspaper. We need to be able to see that X has received a fine, a community sentence or a spell in prison for the crimes that he has committed in that community. That will not happen if the magistrates court is in a nearby big city that the local newspaper does not cover.
I want to refer to some parochial matters. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire talked about Ystradgynlais court and the hon. Member for Selby talked about Selby. I want to talk, briefly, about Frome. My constituency covers about 900 square miles but has only one magistrates court, which is under threat of closure, as is the court in the city of Wells, which is not in my constituency. The magistrates court committee firmly believes that the new unified courts system will result in the loss of both courts. The committee argues that it would therefore be better to pre-empt that by closing two courts and opening another court, which would not be convenient for the people of Frome, Wells or Shepton Mallet, as an alternative.
I cannot speak for Wells, but Frome court serves a town of about 20,000 or 22,000 and a large rural hinterland. It is the only court remaining in my constituency, which is large by English standards, if not by Welsh or Scottish standards. It is not in the interests of justice for that court to close. I hope that, with the new unified courts system, we shall take a new look not only at magistrates courts but, where appropriate, at the
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Crown court, and most importantly, family courts and the youth court system. We should start from a different basis and ask how such communities can best be served. How do we ensure that there is a network of courts in the unified court system that will help access in rural areas, maintain the presence of the criminal justice system and employ rural-proofing? We hear so much about that, but it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Often we do not see the effect of rural-proofing on the Government's policies.
I hope that I am not being unkind to either civil servants or the Minister here, but at times I think that some civil servants and Ministers simply do not understand what it is like to live in a village in the middle of Somerset and have huge difficulties in moving about, because there is no public transport system. They do not appear to understand the problems in relating to a criminal justice system that even now seems remote, even before the further depredations that we expect. I hope that he will say explicitly that the Government's policy will be to maintain a courts presence in rural areas, and that they will support those courts. I hope that we will not see further closures without replacement, and that the courts will continue to serve the communities that need to be served by our criminal justice system.
10.30 am
Mr. Humfrey Matins: I congratulate the hon. Member for Clwyd, West (Gareth Thomas) on securing the debate and on the thoughtful way in which he introduced the subject. I also thank the hon. Members for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams), for Selby (Mr. Grogan), for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) and for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) for their contributions to this excellent debate.
I declare an interest. My background is as a solicitor, a recorder of the Crown court, and a district judge operating in magistrates courts—formerly a stipendiary magistrate. The topic is therefore close to my heart. I agree with the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome and with other hon. Members who have said that justice is better justice when it is local. The less local it is, the worse it becomes in many respects.
The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, through a series of questions, has elicited the fact that since 1997, 115 magistrates courts in England and Wales have closed, a fact that I regret greatly. However, it is right not to make too much of a party political point of the matter, because it is a world trend, even though it has accelerated somewhat since 1997.
The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire referred to his Adjournment debate in February 2004, during which the Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, the hon. Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie) made a statement with which we would all agree, saying
"we expect magistrates to have a strong local connection and to live or work in the area in which they serve."—[Official Report, Westminster Hall, 3 February 2004; Vol. 417, c. 235WH.]
I say hear, hear to that. However, I am not sure that it fits the current trend.
I am very disappointed that so many magistrates courts are closing. I am not remotely persuaded by the argument that some of the buildings are slightly old-

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fashioned and that a more modern building 30 miles away would bring better justice. I preferred the days when the court was local, even if the interview arrangements were not ideal, and there were local magistrates. Moreover, in those days, there was a fair chance that the clerk to the justice would be legally qualified, whereas currently few of them are. Such clerks to the justices often did a splendid job in representing the interests of the unrepresented defendant in the courts—one does not see that so often now.
If we close courts, we lose a great deal. We lose magistrates who know their own area like the back of their hand. Magistrates who know an area well are a real plus. We lose magistrates who know the prevalent crimes in their area, which is important when it comes to sentencing. Currently, when I sit as a judge, I look at local guidelines on prevalent crime, because there may be a sentencing proposal that is slightly off the norm to deal with the prevalence of a crime in a particular area. We would lose that expertise.
If we close courts, we also lose magistrates who know, for example, their pubs and licensed premises well, which is often important in relation to licensing matters and crime. We also lose magistrates who know the local police force and local advocates well, and know which advocates they can trust and rely on.
Gareth Thomas: It is interesting that the subject of the debate has moved from access to justice to access to courts, which is a different concept. The hon. Gentleman has mentioned that he is a district judge—what used to be called a stipendiary magistrate. What is his view on the trend towards the greater use of stipendiaries rather than lay magistrates? What effect is that having on the delivery of local justice by lay people?
Mr. Malins: I was going to make that point, and the hon. Gentleman is right to raise it. Having declared an interest, I should say that magistrates and justices of the peace play a vital role, and I would be unhappy if the long-term trend were towards placing district judges in remote centres to deal with crime. The role of the magistracy is very important, especially in rural areas.
To return to an earlier point, if one closes local courts, one loses the vital connection between the crime and the local newspaper. Currently, when someone commits a crime on Monday, they are in court on Wednesday, the story is in the local newspaper by Thursday, and everyone knows about it. That is an important aspect of community life.
What problems confront judges and magistrates when local courts close, and defendants and witnesses have to travel vast distances? I can tell hon. Members that the problems are immense. In truth, many defendants simply will not travel a long way to court, and, indeed, many cannot afford to do so. The same applies to witnesses, who are critical to trials, because many are reluctant or unable to travel great distances.
More often than not, I grant bail. When I grant it to defendants who live 30 miles from the court, it is my practice to tell them that I will bail them not until 10 am the following day but until 12 noon or even 2 pm. That is the only way in which I can give them a real chance of
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making it back to court. My mind boggles at the prospect of a defendant being bailed for 10 am, when the magistrates court is in a remote area 30 miles from where he or she lives. There will be no rural transport, so, for many people, the chance of getting there for 10 am is almost zero. That would not be the case for you or me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because, to be blunt, we could afford a taxi and ensure that we got there. However, many disadvantaged people—whether defendants or witnesses—cannot do that, and a defendant would commit an offence under the Bail Act 1976 if they did not appear in court. Trials are cracked or collapse because people do not turn up, and thousands of pounds are wasted when they could have been better used elsewhere.
What does the community lose if there is no local court? It loses a lot. It probably will not have in its midst quite as many trainee solicitors as it used to. Does that matter? Well, many of those young men and women contribute to their communities in different ways. They take an active role in church life, local government and sporting clubs. They take an interest in and are committed to local matters. Between them, they would probably do more pro bono work if they were present in numbers. If courts are closed, however, there will be fewer such people in the community.
There will also be fewer local probation staff and fewer people interested in joining Victim Support. In addition, people will be much discouraged from joining the magistracy, particularly if they are told that they will have to travel 20 or 30 miles for their sittings. As the hon. Member for Clwyd, West said, the long-term trend is potentially damaging not only to local communities and those affected by the administration of justice but to the lay bench. Finally, as I mentioned in passing, another result of such changes is that fewer people will be interested in joining the clerks profession, and the role of the qualified justice's clerk is a vital aspect of our society.
So, local courts are good news for reasons of expense, justice and sheer efficiency and high standards. Courts a long way from where defendants and witnesses live are bad news.
Legal aid rates and money are an aspect of local justice, and access to justice, that has been mentioned in several speeches. I think that it was the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome who drew an analogy between health provision and legal provision in a town, and it was a good one. Every town should have lawyers who are capable of giving advice to the underprivileged. It is all very well for me to get in my motor car and travel 40 miles to London. I can do that.
However, the people who need the system are, more often than not, those who cannot jump into a smart motor car to travel 40 miles for advice. Those are the sort of people we should look after. They need advice on housing and benefits; and what about matrimonial matters, including the urgent injunctions that are quite often needed? Thirty years ago, when I was in practice, when someone under the threat of attack—usually a woman—came to the office, she could see a partner in the legal firm under the green form legal aid scheme. How good it was then, to be able to be at court in 10 minutes, to get her some form of relief. However, all that disappears in areas where people cannot find access to justice.

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Much of the change boils down to money. Legal aid rates have been held and cut in successive years. The National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux has referred to legal aid as a postcode lottery. One in four bureaux apparently now operates in an "advice desert" and the availability of competent legal advice around the country is extraordinarily patchy. That is not a surprise—for the principal reason that legal aid rates have been cut dramatically, in real terms, in the past few years.
My father, who is 86, sent for a plumber a month ago. The plumber who turned up had travelled for an hour and was at my father's house for an hour before travelling home for another hour. My father paid £180 for that. Now, one might have thought that a solicitor's rate would be as good as a plumber's£far from it. My understanding is that a solicitor receives £12 an hour for travel and approximately £60 for the time spent with the client. In truth, there is heavier and heavier discouragement to lawyers to undertake legal aid work, and few are doing it. If fewer do it, who suffers? The poor, not the rich, suffer more than anyone else.
I have lost count of the number of times I have talked to solicitor friends who have said that one of their other major problems is the bureaucracy and form-filling that they must deal with all the time. Compliance audits and form-filling make for such a depressing life, they say, because they cannot spend enough of their time doing what they should be doing at a proper rate.
My advice to the Government is please ease up on solicitors' bureaucracy; please ensure that towns have properly paid local firms to give local advice; please make sure that everyone in the country has reasonably easy access to the courts; and please get across to the Home Secretary and other Ministers the fact that not all lawyers are bad, and that lawyer-bashing is not the answer to everything. Much of the answer is to respect the legal profession and try to send a message that it is appreciated, and, more importantly, needed in today's society.
10.44 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (): I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West (Gareth Thomas) for securing this morning's excellent debate. We have had good contributions on access to justice and to courts.
I have a little time in which to deal with all the points that have been raised, but the issue is vital throughout the country, including rural areas. I am glad that it is the subject of this morning's debate and it is also important in urban and suburban areas. I represent an urban area, but I went to school in East Anglia and I remember small towns and villages such as Wisbech, Stamford, Eastry and Peakirk. Access to justice is vital in such areas, and I am glad that we have the opportunity to discuss it.
In legal terms, access to justice is not an abstract idea. We discuss it every month or so in this place in debates on health services, education, rural bus services and transport, but it is also important in the legal context. It can mean the difference between having a roof over one's head or being evicted, and between being properly defended in court or being wrongly sent to prison. It
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means receiving quality advice in the local citizens advice bureau. Access to justice is very important to many people living on the periphery, as my hon. Friend suggested, but it is also important to people who live in rural communities.
Only three or four years ago, access to justice was a hit-and-miss affair. It was unplanned and there was no real concept of the fair allocation of scarce resources. Since the introduction of the community legal service in 2000, however, we have begun to see the change that people need in their areas. The Legal Services Commission, which replaced the old Legal Aid Board, operates throughout England and Wales, and plans carefully to ensure that the most pressing needs for legal services are met first and that local voices are heard when assessing legal problems and issues.
It is important to state for the record that this debate relates to what the public think of as legal aid. Legal aid was a fantastic invention of the Attlee Government and an important contribution to the life of this country. It stands alongside universal education and universal health provision as a cornerstone of a civilised democracy.
I will talk about modern legal aid and the community legal service, but before I do so, it is right that I should spend a little time talking about court closures, which hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber have mentioned. Hon. Members will know that magistrates courts are managed locally by magistrates courts committees, which throughout the country comprise local people, as set out in the Justices of the Peace Act 1997. Each committee is solely responsible for the efficient and effective administration of magistrates courts in its area. Hon. Members will also know that local authorities sometimes dispute those decisions, which must be taken locally. If decisions are disputed, they may end up on the Minister's desk. Only then may a decision be taken to stop a court closure.
On 3 February, we had a very good debate, which the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) secured, on court closures in mid-Wales.Hansard recorded the debate, and I will not discuss it today. However, I want to put it on record that the Government strongly support the notion of local justice. The essential feature of local justice is that magistrates live or work in the locality, but it cannot follow that each community across the country will have its own courthouse. The Government can consider those matters if a local authority refers them to us.
Hywel Williams: Will the Minister give the Government's definition of locality?
Mr. Lammy: The hon. Gentleman knows that those issues depend on local circumstances. A unified courts service, towards which he knows we are progressing, will not only enable magistrates courts committees to deal with magistrates courts and the Court Service to deal with county courts, but allow local people to look locally to courts that are fit for purpose, can accommodate modern technology and ensure access for disabled people.
I want to clarify what the Government have done, although I do not want to be partisan. I am grateful that hon. Members have outlined the context, as 21

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magistrates courts were closed in 1996 under the previous Administration, although that number diminished considerably in the last few years. In the last few months, Ministers have allowed appeals against court closures in London—Kingston, Sutton, Harrow, Barking and Dagenham—as well as in Grays, Aberystwyth, Caernarfon and Sutton Coldfield. We look at the circumstances and we are prepared to keep our courts open.
Mr. Heath: The difficulty for many of us is that a lot of magistrates courts committees formed the view that they were required, if not because of resource limitations then for some other reason, to "rationalise" their courts. Will the Minister give a clear undertaking that under the unified courts procedures, a key element underlying policy will be maintaining that service for and in the local community? If that element is present, we will start with the right basis for policy making at local level.
Mr. Lammy: Local justice must involve flexibility, which is key. Flexibility cannot mean that the Minister in Whitehall starts to tie people's hands over what happens locally. Decisions must be made locally, but if a local authority is unhappy with a decision it may come to a Minister's desk. The recent past demonstrates that we are able to stand up for local issues.
Let me move on, importantly due to the time available, to focus most of my remaining comments on legal aid. I have made two trips to Wales recently. I visited the Riverside advice centre and the headquarters of Shelter Cymru to see for myself the excellent ongoing work to address problems in Wales. I put on record the Government's thanks to the many legal aid practitioners across the country who do publicly-funded work on behalf of the taxpayer for poor people who really need that service. I know that there is a lot of debate about legal aid lawyers and I am afraid that there are areas of practice—I will not go into them today—in which we have not seen the quality that we have come to associate with legal aid lawyers. However, by and large, they do a tremendous service across the country.
The CLS budget has come a long way in a short time. Spending on legal help in Wales has increased from £9.3 million in 2001–02 to £11.4 million in 2002–03. Over the same period, CLS partnerships have spread rapidly across England and Wales, with more than 99 per cent. of the population now covered by a partnership. CLS partnerships bring together local funders and providers of legal services to help in the planning and development of local services. They do that by producing strategic plans that consider all aspects of need and provision in the area. Those plans are fully taken into account when the LSC makes its decisions on where the funding goes.
Let us be clear about what that means. We previously had advice services and legal aid lawyers throughout the country, but the service was patchy and unco-
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ordinated—people did not know where to access it—until we introduced the CLS, which has set the standard with the quality mark provision and organised strategic plans for local areas. Of course, the needs in Wales will be different from those in my inner-London constituency. Until we introduced the CLS, uncoordinated legal services were provided ad hoc by lawyers, pro bono law students and advisers, but in 2000 this Government provided that co-ordination through the CLS. In Wales in particular, the Legal Services Commission is engaged in the CLS partnerships in all 22 local authority areas.
All that is encouraging, but, better still, it is good news for those who need good quality legal services. Quality is another major advance that the Government have brought to legal services. With the introduction of the CLS came the quality mark, in which I have believed strongly since I saw it taking shape in my constituency when I was a Back Bencher. The mark has meant that the poor and socially excluded people who need legal services can bank on their quality. Just because someone was sat behind a desk in a suit, it did not mean that they knew what they were saying, so I am glad that the Government have brought the quality mark to bear.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West spoke about gaps in provision in our local areas. The Legal Services Research Centre, which is the research arm of the LSC, recently published a report called "Causes of Action", which provides a lot of assistance in strengthening the CLS. It gives us the clearest picture yet of the legal problems that people face and of unmet need. The Government acknowledge that unmet need exists in our communities, and that we must ensure that people are getting advice at the right stage and from those who are appropriately trained.
We are running a family advice and information networks—FAINs—project with family law practitioners. It encourages lawyers to consider other local services such as social welfare, as well as the legal advice that they provide, to ensure that the vulnerable women who turn up at their practices are not directed solely down the legal path. I saw a FAINs project in Swansea, and those are the type of project that the Government want to continue with. That is why we commenced an independent review of the CLS, which is due to report in April.
The report will give us the opportunity to develop the CLS, building on its success and ensuring that we are dealing with any gaps. Comments were made on contracts, and we have also undertaken research on the development of the supply and purchasing of legal aid arrangements. We have done that because it is important for us to understand what is going on in our law firms and centres.
I have not been able to deal with all my hon. Friend's points, but I will write to him to cover them. I say to him also that where there is bureaucracy, I will seek to deal with it. I know that the LSC is ensuring that its next round of contracts is shorter, and I hope that he is pleased about that.

Access to Justice (Rural Areas)

  School Meals
  11 am
  Mr. Stephen McCabe: Health, particularly that of children, is currently a hot issue that is endlessly discussed in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television. The Government treat it seriously, and various Departments play their part: the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Health, the Department for Education and Skills, the Food Standards Agency and dozens of other non-Government organisations across the country. I recognise the serious commitment of all those involved. A recent Food Standards Agency report linked children's diets with television advertising, and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell) has asked the advertisers to consider their role. The Department of Health is currently examining the issue of food labelling, particularly where fat, salt and high sugar contents are involved. There can be no doubt about our common objectives.
  I was particularly stuck to read recently about Sue Seabrook, a secondary school catering manager in Gloucester, who made the startling confession that for the last two years, she has been guilty of force feeding pupils with vitamins by surreptitiously adding pureed vegetables to their school dinners. She probably deserves a medal. Despite all the activity, our children's health continues to deteriorate, and obesity appears to rise almost in direct relation to the number of Government warnings about health and nutrition. In far too many areas, school meals have become virtually nutrition-free. The food value on the plate is about 35p, despite an average charge of £1.60. All too often the meal of the day is reheated pizza or burger and chips. Some staff and governors have argued that they do not pursue healthy eating in schools because feel no incentive to do so.
  Let us consider what is happening. One in seven 15-year-olds and one in 12 16-year-olds are now so overweight that their health is already under threat. The long-term implications of lost school days, extra costs to the health service, and eventual loss of earning potential are catastrophic. We should be concerned not only with individual health problems, but with the growing problem of unacceptable behaviour in our schools. Studies in Spain have found that children with behavioural difficulties, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, have low levels of vitamin B—folic acid—which is normally found in green vegetables and breakfast cereals. Many experts are now beginning to link the growth in ADHD with child nutrition.
  Lord Winston wrote recently about the effect of good nutrition on behaviour, citing research from the USA and Oxford university. In one example, children were given nutritional supplements, which appeared to lead to a reduction in cognitive problems, behavioural problems and anxiety. Poor behaviour does not affect only the child who is behaving badly; it has a knock-on effect on every other child in the class. If the youngster is then excluded, that leads to further personal difficulties and adds to the overall cost of education without any discernable gain. If the youngster is then
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  excluded, that leads to further personal difficulties and adds to the overall cost of education without any discernable gain.
  I am conscious that poor nutrition is not recognised as a contributory factor to behavioural problems in our schools. I read in a recent DFES circular that the Department recognises that attendance and behaviour are fundamental and can make or break our school system. The circular went on to acknowledge that bad behaviour had a range of explanations and sources and that there was not a single quick fix but that there should be more tools in the box for staff and teachers to use.
  It seems obvious that we need to try to do more to tackle such problems. If a youngster has a poor diet and is consuming products stuffed with highly refined sugar, it cannot be a great surprise that their attention span is poor and that their behaviour is characterised by a sudden energy rush followed by lethargy, lack of concentration and inattentiveness. There are already links between poverty, obesity and child behaviour. We provide free school meals for a great many children in this country. Would it not make sense to ensure the nutritional value of those meals?
  Finland is often cited in debates such as this as a country that has sorted out school meals and exercise programmes for its youngsters. In so doing, it has tackled a great many health and behaviour problems. Someone recently suggested to me that the Finns are a biddable nation who accept expert advice and support Government measures put in place for their own good. I understand that in some Finnish villages it is common to compete to see which village can reduce overall cholesterol levels the fastest, and that schools regularly weigh pupils and advise parents if there is a problem with the youngster's weight.
  Try as I might, I cannot see that happening here. We seem to be a population who revel in ignoring expert advice and resent being told how to behave. Choice is obviously important in our society, but offering a youngster a choice between chips and doughnuts and a tuna salad strikes me as a bit tricky. I have thought for some time that we should maybe persuade the big chain outlets to give the toys away with the apple and the salad rather than with the chips and chicken nuggets. I have tried to persuade my own children that they should think about that, but they are not desperately keen at the moment.
  About 20 programmes are spread across the various Departments, all tackling issues of diet or nutrition aimed at children. In addition, we have health action zones, Sure Start, healthy living centres and others. To cite just one example, the New Opportunities Fund commitment of £42 million pounds for the national fruit scheme provides about 800,000 children with one piece of fresh fruit a day. I am told that that same money could provide about 26 million nutritious school meals.
  Funding in this area across Departments—excluding local and regional programmes—is worth about £173 million. I wonder whether the time has come to have a serious debate on our children's health and to consider what proactive measures we could take. I would recommend a national audit of all the current funding. Personally, I think that we should explore the notion of free, nutritious school meals for all primary children. A

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  poll on Channel 4's "Richard and Judy" programme yesterday showed that at least 70 per cent. of their viewers supported that idea.
  At the very least we should ensure that the 2 million primary school children whose parents pay for school dinners or who already receive them free are guaranteed one healthy nutritious meal a day. I am not calling for blue skies thinking or excessive radicalism; rather, I am calling for a rational and sensible debate. We must recognise the huge long-term cost if we do not get to grips with such problems. School meals could be a vital tool in transforming our children's health and behaviour.
  11.10 am
  The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills (): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe) on securing this debate, which, despite the absence of any other Member from any other party, is of great significance for all our constituents and our country. I welcome his call for a rational and sensible debate and I concur that it is vital that we have one. My hon. Friend referred at the beginning of his speech to the Government's clear commitment to promoting healthy eating and encouraging pupils to be physically active. An important part of fulfilling that commitment is a greater focus on physical education and sport in our schools.
  It is essential that we practise what we preach about joined-up approaches to government at all levels. My hon. Friend referred to the different Departments and institutions that have an interest in making that objective a success, such as the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Health, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Food Standards Agency and external organisations. My hon. Friend's challenge, which is reasonable, is for each Department to have a coherent approach. He cited the example of advice from the Department for Education and Skills about attendance and the impact on children's behaviour of the diet and food options available in schools. I am sure that, like me, my hon. Friend has visited schools where teachers and governors have made that case powerfully, as have the children and young people themselves, in their meetings.
  We spend a lot of money on children's health and it is vital that the money is used to the greatest effect. My hon. Friend talked about an audit of where the money is spent—I shall return to that at the end of my remarks. He described the national school fruit scheme, which is a £42 million scheme that is now funded through the New Opportunities Fund, but which will in future be funded by the Department of Health. The scheme followed the manifesto commitment, on which my hon. Friend and I were both elected in 2001, to provide a free piece of fruit each day to children between the ages of four and six. More than 1 million children now receive their fruit. The programme is under review and I understand that carrots are to be designated as a fruit, because the feedback that we have received suggests that they would be particularly popular, as well as nutritious.
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  From my visits as a Minister and as a constituency MP, I know that the scheme is popular. I remember knocking on a door in my constituency and meeting an eight-year-old girl who said that she was upset that the scheme applied to infant schools but not to her junior school. Her five-year old brother then appeared and said that he would be quite happy if the scheme did not apply to his school, because he was not keen on the fruit that he was getting. However, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Some 99 per cent. of staff at schools that have been part of the scheme welcome and support it, and 97 per cent. of those schools say that it supports teaching and learning. Almost every school involved is in favour of continuing the scheme.
  In learning lessons from that scheme, we need to consider the implications for our broader work. In my hon. Friend's closing remarks he talked about the possibility of free school meals for all primary age children. Kingston upon Hull city council was recently granted permission for precisely such a scheme. Free school meals will be introduced for primary age children in schools there. It will be interesting to consider the impact of that proposal and the take-up of the meals on the children's education, their health, and their behaviour. I shall be attending an event in Hull next week at which such proposals will be considered. Hon. Members will want to keep a close eye on how such schemes develop and to consider their implications for policy throughout the country.
  It is critical that school meals have high nutritional standards. My hon. Friend rightly focused on the dilemma of choice and whether it was possible to provide a choice, and still to bring about a healthy outcome. I accept that that can be a tricky matter, but such decisions are best taken locally. I especially welcome what Hull has done, because it decided locally to introduce the free school meals scheme. Although there is clear guidance from the Government, the situation varies from school to school; we must ensure that the basic standard is higher than it is at present in some schools.
  I am impressed by the schools that have successfully engaged with their pupils about the options that are available, with the result that they have healthier menus, contrary to what we might think about what pupils say they prefer. Recently, I visited Barking Abbey, a specialist sports college in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, which decided to change its school meal contract and to source all its meals from a local organic farm, at no extra cost. That is most encouraging, as there will be a higher take-up by the pupils, who will have healthier options.
  The Department for Education and Skills and the Food Standards Agency are undertaking a joint exercise involving about 80 secondary schools in England to consider the extent to which schools adhere to the standards. It is important to see whether schools are following the recommendations issued by the Department in "Healthy School Lunches—Guidance for Caterers on Implementing the Nutritional Standards". The study will also consider broader issues such as the dining room layout and space, lunchtime activities, vending machines—that is a big issue that has been subject to public debate—seasonal produce, and the nature of catering and contracts.

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  My hon. Friend asked us to look at the example from Finland in the context of strategies for primary schools, and several primary school heads have made the same suggestion. Selflessly, I have agreed to visit Finland and I undertake to look at school meals as well as primary school policy. I was very impressed by the quality of the food provided for primary-age children at a school that I visited in Madrid a couple of months ago. My hon. Friend cited evidence from Spain in his speech. We can learn from positive examples elsewhere in the world, as well as in this country.
  My hon. Friend said that he was proposing not blue-sky thinking or extreme radicalism but simply getting the balance right. It has been suggested that some foods and vending machines should be banned, and there has been a broad public debate about such proposals. We are cautious about the matter, as such decisions are better taken by the head teacher and governors of the schools themselves. It has been suggested that vending machines could provide water and healthier food such as fruit, and we have a role in encouraging the take-up of those options.
  I should like to say something about the broader role that education and schools can play in encouraging healthy living and healthy eating. Clearly, the curriculum itself has a part to play. While food and nutrition is not a discrete subject, there are many opportunities across the curriculum to encourage healthy living and an active lifestyle, for example through personal, social and health education in science and in food technology. We are constantly looking at ways in which we can ensure that these areas of the curriculum support the important work that is going on in that respect.
  An area for which I have direct responsibility is personal, social and health education and citizenship education in our schools. An important part of that is encouraging healthy lifestyles and ensuring that healthy eating is embedded in the ethos of our schools. Five years ago, we launched the national healthy schools standard. I am impressed with the numbers of schools that have achieved that standard and the real enthusiasm that there is for it. I should like all our schools to sign up to that and to obtain a kite mark for being a healthy school both in terms of the food that they provide at lunchtime and, more broadly, their curriculum and wider work.
  One subject on the school curriculum is the food and nutrition strand within design and technology. It is not compulsory, but I am pleased to report that it is growing in popularity, particularly among boys. Around 100,000 14 to 16-year-olds take GCSE food technology and we are investing an additional £500,000 in professional development for this important part of the school curriculum. We are also encouraging primary schools to consider this.
  Finally, we have the food in schools programme, which is a joint programme between our Department and the Department of Health. The aim is to bring
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  together the different initiatives, some of which my hon. Friend mentioned. We have been working with the British Nutrition Foundation and the Design and Technology Association to draw up guidance on establishing a whole school food policy that links together all the different aspects I have described, so that the messages that are available throughout the school are consistent.
  A number of different projects have been set up including healthier breakfast clubs. Breakfast clubs can contribute to all of the outcomes that my hon. Friend rightly emphasised in respect of lunches. Healthier breakfast clubs can have the same impact on behaviour. Tuck shops and what is available there and through vending machines is another element. The availability of water also makes a difference to the health and behaviour of children. Other projects involve the dining room environment, cookery clubs and growing clubs for the outside areas. We are seeking to provide best practice and to learn from the best practice that is available in schools and communities across the country.
  Last year my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made a speech at the Institute of Public Health in which he announced that the Department for Education and Skills and the Department of Health would work together on a healthy living action plan. That plan is of critical importance. It enables us to learn from schools that are implementing successful whole school food policies and to look at what works and what does not. It gives us the opportunity, to which my hon. Friend alluded, to engage those who may be apathetic, uncertain or even resistant to these changes and to examine what motivates teachers, heads and governors in this respect.
  The potential benefits to be gained from a healthy living action plan that brings together all the different resources in government, in schools, local communities and the wider world are well worth striving for. It will draw together the key areas of work from the different Departments to create a healthy living blueprint for improving pupils' diet and nutritional knowledge. That important work is under way, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made it clear that it is a vital part of our work in the Department for Education and Skills. This is an important debate on a subject that is close to the hearts of all our constituents and hon. Members on both sides of the House. For that reason, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green for securing the debate, which will make an important contribution to the discussion as it progresses. I hope that we can engage hon. Members on both sides of the House and the wider public, so that we get things right and establish the very best practice with regard to healthy living and healthy meals in our schools and the broader education community.
  11.25 am
  Sitting suspended until Two o'clock.

Primary School Redundancies
2 pm
Mr. Graham Brady: I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this important matter today. I was prompted to seek this debate by the particular plight of one local school, Woodheys primary school, in Sale in my constituency. The problems to which I want to draw attention affect many of my local schools and many more around the country. Laura Daniels, the head of Woodheys, wrote this to the Minister for School Standards:
"At Woodheys we decided"—
she was referring to last year—
"to set a realistic budget. Some heads 'balanced' their budgets by allocating negligible amounts to supply 'cover' or 'training' and have had to deny staff their entitlement to professional development. We did not. Also we refused to lose support staff at that late stage (it was July before we were given final information on our under or over spends from the previous year), and decided not to use Devolved Capital for buildings as we felt that although we had been given 'permission' by the government, this was not an avenue we supported. Also perhaps, naively, I believed that the government would rectify its mistake in 04–05. We were horrified to find that this has not happened. Against our principles and under pressure, as we only had until November 30th to change our decision, we have now decided to use Devolved Capital to 'clear' our deficit. Unfortunately, with no real increase in funding, we are back to 'square one' for September 2004. I have spent hours and hours agonising over an impossible task— I am supposed to give staff more support time, release and a better work/life balance (as promised by the government) and through no fault of my own or my governors, we will have to lose all support staff, many trained in-house, in September 04."
The Department for Education and Skills replied to Laura Daniels on 16 February, seeking to transfer blame to Trafford borough council. Trafford is a Labour-controlled authority, which has for two successive years been described as "weak" by the Audit Commission, so I am not altogether averse to some blame attaching to the local authority. The Department wrote:
"The Regulations governing LEAs' formulae, as I have said, still give LEAs a considerable measure of freedom to determine the detail of their formulae, so if your concern lies with the operation of Trafford's school funding formula, then you will need to follow-up matters at the local level."
This Government have taken massive powers to control the funds that local education authorities pass on to schools and the criteria by which funds are distributed between schools. Surely Ministers must therefore take some responsibility for the depressing picture of job cuts and service reduction that is beginning to emerge. However, instead of taking responsibility, they are showing complacency and giving excuses. Labour's 2001 manifesto promised explicitly that there would be more classroom assistants and claimed that primary schools' problems had already been tackled. It said:
"We plan a radical improvement in secondary schools",
then, in bold print,
"building on our success in primary schools."
All the problems in the primary school sector had apparently been tackled in the first Parliament of the Labour Government, so it was time to move on to secondary schools.
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The Chancellor, in his Budget statement last week, gave a similar impression that everything in the educational garden is rosy. He said:
"Having, in the last spending round, tackled under-investment in schools and in teaching staff, the primary focus of this spending round must be on excellence and improving standards for all."—[Official Report, 17 March 2004; Vol. 419, c. 334.]
The picture that I have gained from my local schools is not one in which under-investment in schools and teaching staff has been tackled—far from it. Schools and parents will view the Chancellor's remarks in the light of their experience of last year's funding crisis. They saw, as we all did, that overall expenditure increased, but they also saw, owing to increased taxes, and especially employers' national insurance contributions, increased pension charges, the removal of much of the standards fund money, and changes in pay scales, that schools had less money to spend at the front line.
Last year, the National Union of Teachers commissioned Professor Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson to research the effects of the crisis. Last October, they published their report, "The Reality of School Staffing", which showed that more than half of primary schools and nearly two thirds of secondary schools received less money than they had in the previous year, and that nearly a quarter of primary schools and a third of secondary schools had cut staffing levels. Smithers and Robinson found that schools throughout the country had lost 8,800 teaching posts, 5,500 of which were in primary schools, and 12,300 non-teaching staff.
Last year's crisis would have led to even bigger cuts had not Ministers belatedly urged the use of capital funds to stave off redundancies. Even then, schools were left with no reserves and no funding for necessary capital projects. Many schools were forced to set deficit budgets for the current year, and schools that face budget pressures this year that are the same as or worse than last year's have no reserves on which to call.
I shall illustrate the point with a letter that I received from St. Mary's Church of England primary school in my constituency. The head wrote:
"Last year, because of the change to the distribution of class size funding I had to lose 0.5 of a teacher. I was, because of careful budgeting the year before, able to fund 0.4 from my under spend. This year I am in a similar situation with no underspend."
Such schools face the loss of teaching staff.
The Minister will say that, in some areas, jobs will go in schools because of falling rolls. A recent survey in The Times Educational Supplement suggests that hundreds of teaching jobs will be lost this year. Primary schools are expected to bear the brunt of the losses. Professor Smithers has estimated that as many as 50,000 teaching jobs could be lost by 2010. However, we now have what Ministers have called an historic agreement on teacher work load. Even if rolls are falling, staff numbers need not decline if the Government intend to keep their promise to reduce class sizes and teacher work load and to increase the numbers of classroom assistants. Instead, we are looking at a picture of further redundancies as well as vacant posts being left unfilled.
For the teacher work load agreement to work, schools will need more staff, not fewer, but the Minister for School Standards apparently thinks that everything is fine. Asked in The Guardian on 13 January about how the plans were taking shape, he responded:

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"How do I think it's going? Swimmingly well, swimmingly well."
The reality for schools, however, is often different, as the head of a Hale primary school told me:
"Finally I'd just like to add that as a relatively new Headteacher who has always aspired to this role I feel deeply let down by the workforce reform and the budget issues I am faced with on a day to day basis."
When the Prime Minister, no less, was in Manchester on 13 March, he advanced a new explanation for Labour's failures to deliver in our public services. He said that everything was wonderful—it is just that people think it is terrible. He said:
"There is much scratching of the head in political circles over this apparent paradox: people who feel personally optimistic in Britain; but collectively pessimistic. They say their own health care in the NHS is good; but the NHS in general is bad. Their schools are good; but education is bad."
One of the most important functions of the House is to keep Ministers, and perhaps especially the Prime Minister, in touch with reality. I shall do that by giving a snapshot of the views of primary school head teachers in my constituency.
I have already described the frustration felt by Laura Daniels, the head teacher at Woodheys. I shall share with hon. Members further comments that I received from a variety of primary schools in my area. The head teacher of an Altrincham school wrote to me on 12 March. He said:
"Confronted with advice from the DfES on increasing the number of classroom assistants and their profile across the school, I feel saddened, disappointed and disillusioned, whilst receiving funding that could not possibly meet the challenges set out by the DfES and current legislation.
Yesterday the school governors cut the hours by 40 per cent. of all classroom assistants and handed a redundancy notice to another. The working hours of one teacher were halved."
At a time when Ministers say that the work load of teachers should be reduced and staff numbers should be rising, staff numbers are actually falling, which will mean that work load will either stay at its current level or, in some schools, get worse.
The head teacher of All Saints Catholic primary school in Sale wrote to me, saying:
"Where vacancies have occurred, the Governors have taken clear decisions not to employ someone too expensive! Fortunately we have made good appointments, but we have actively discriminated against the elderly."
The funding pressures force schools to take staffing decisions that they regard as less than ideal. The funding crisis last year, and continuing pressures this year, mean that schools, instead of recruiting the teachers they think will be the best people to join their staff, will skew appointments towards the recruitment of less experienced, cheaper members of staff. At the other end of the scale, there are schools that already have long-serving members of staff, perhaps because they are the best schools and have the best working environments for teachers. Such schools, which have been successful in retaining their work force over a long period, will have a disproportionate number of older, more experienced teachers, and will face ever greater problems because the proportion of their school budget taken up by staff costs will be greater. The issue affects different schools in different ways, but in all those different scenarios it
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distorts the pattern of recruitment and creates problems, even in schools that are successful in retaining staff, which Ministers say is one of their principal priorities.
Another primary school head teacher in Sale wrote to me to say that the school faced a number of difficult issues this year, and that to resolve its budget difficulties it had been decided to
"reduce teacher staffing by one full-time teacher from 31/8/04."
He said that that
"does not involve redundancy as the teacher concerned is on a temporary contract".
Such job losses may not feature on the official returns of numbers of redundancies, because it is sometimes a matter of staff not being replaced, vacancies not being filled or contracts not being renewed, rather than of existing staff being made formally redundant.
The head teacher says that the school will also reduce its
"Teaching Assistant support by the equivalent of one full-time post from 31/8/04."
and its
"Midday Supervision Staffing by at least two staff members; this will involve redundancy procedures."
He continues that the school will also
"reduce budget allocations to Curriculum Resources and Buildings Maintenance by 30 per cent. and 20 per cent. respectively from the 2003/4 levels."
The pressures that are being applied to the numbers and type of staff recruited and retained are being felt throughout the system, and they are affecting other areas such as service provision, curriculum resources, library materials and buildings maintenance, because schools are moving heaven and earth to try to ensure that they do not have to make staff redundant.
The head teacher of a local Roman Catholic school wrote:
"It is the Governors' decision not to immediately pursue a policy of redundancy, however it is clear that we cannot continue to maintain the current quality of educational provision…for another year given the current level of funding. We are clearly at breaking point with no other cuts or strategies to adopt."
Those schools have already weathered a crisis in the past 12 months, the like of which many in the education world had never seen. They have been through an incredibly difficult period, believing at every stage the Government's promises that things would be better this year, that new resources would be in place, and that there would be a guaranteed funding increase to deliver them from their difficulties. However, there is nothing to help schools that plunged into deficit budgets last year and face continuing pressures this year.
The head teacher of another Sale school wrote to me:
"Although I will not have to make redundancies this year, I may not be replacing one teaching assistant who is leaving in September and will be using all of our reserves to make ends meet."
That school is perhaps fortunate, because it still had some reserves after the difficulties of last year. A vast number of schools that had run their finances prudently and maintained some reserves to help them in difficult times were forced to spend all that money to stave off redundancies last year, and they now have nothing left to cover current and future difficulties.

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The head teacher of another local school, this time in Timperley, wrote:
"Trafford have stated that the"
school's
"budget has been well managed. Savings in the Special Purposes Fund resulted in £73,000. Governors intended that this fund be used to supplement the budget during the years of falling pupil numbers. £33,000 was used to balance the budget in 03/04. The remaining £40,000 will be used in 04/05, but will not achieve a balanced budget."
Again, we see the problems that existed last year, and that the Minister assured everyone would be resolved adequately this year, continuing into the future.
The head teacher continued
"Even without falling rolls…we would be unable to maintain current staffing levels without additional funding."
Current staffing levels cannot be maintained, let alone the increases in the support staff and classroom assistants that the Government promised and that Ministers know are essential if their promises to tackle work load difficulties and meet the work load agreement are to be fulfilled.
The head teacher continued:
"From September 2004 we will have large, vertically grouped classes in most age groups, with many accompanying issues for staff and parents."
Again, we can see the ramifications for the quality and nature of education provision: not only the loss of valued staff but further difficulties as schools create different strategies to deal with the problems that arise.
The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, David Hart, said:
"In some areas April's budgets will be like applying a sticking plaster to a gaping wound."
The Chancellor has promised a direct payment to each school in 2005–06, but that will not do anything to help this year. Even if the sticking plaster is big enough for the following year, it will have done nothing to prevent redundancies and job cuts this September.
We must ask why, faced with last year's devastating problems and continuing pressures this year, the Chancellor did not promise support this year in his Budget statement but held it out as a prospect for future additional help. Heads around the country are becoming somewhat sceptical about promises of future funding, because all too often, even when the overall expenditure is increased, the costs that heads have to bear—staff costs, additional tax costs or extra bureaucratic costs—increase by more than the additional funding.
Ministers must accept that thousands of schools across the country have dire problems. The Prime Minister must understand that the paradox puzzling parents is that they pay more tax and the Government are spending more money, but the outcome in schools is teachers facing the sack. Schools do not want to hear from the Minister that everything is perfect, because they know that it is not; they want him to understand that there is a problem. They want to hear, as do I on behalf of schools in my constituency that have written to me, practical proposals to stop the loss of good, experienced teachers and classroom assistants in September.
2.22 pm
Lembit Öpik: I was considering participating in the debate this morning, but I have a confession for this Chamber and the country: I am ill. However, I intend to fight the illness and continue as leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats for now. Sadly, the media have not shown the slightest interest in the condition of my health, but my lines are open and I am waiting for "Newsnight" to call. Nevertheless, I put on record my gratitude for my leader, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Inverness, West (Mr. Kennedy), for passing the torch of illness to a new generation of politicians, and I shall do my best to gain political mileage from it.
Redundancies caused by primary school closures are an issue in my constituency. I realise that the Minister is not directly responsible for matters in Wales and can therefore relax, but I will ask him a general strategic question on which I hope he can give his perspective. I shall describe the specific issue in my constituency that brings me to the debate. Over the past few years, Powys county council, which oversees education in Montgomeryshire, has considered various school closures, and some schools have been closed. Most recently, five schools were considered: Llangurig, Llandinam, Llanrhaeadr, Llansilin and Llangedwyn. One could think that all schools beginning with a double `1' were chosen, but I suspect that there was more strategy to it. The bottom line is that each individual committee felt it wrong to close those schools and cause redundancies in the teaching community, for various reasons.
A fractious series of debates and arguments culminated in a debate in Powys county council in which, breathtakingly, the then chief executive sought to criticise me in front of all the councillors for seeking to lobby them in support of the schools. I respectfully point out that that is my job. Nevertheless, that shows how high emotions were. I am glad to say that all those schools have had a reprieve, except for Llangedwyn, which remains under review.
That brings me to my analysis of the redundancy difficulties caused in my constituency, which are relevant to the whole situation in England, as outlined by the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) in his excellent introductory speech. The redundancies are bad from an educational perspective, especially in primary schools in rural areas, because the schools are the heart of small communities and in some senses embody the soul of the community. If we close down the school and fire the teachers, we also close down much of the community's social focus.
Those redundancies also have a knock-on effect on the economy. The decelerator effect of taking a primary school out of a rural community can often lead to a reduction in population and a disincentive for young families to move to the area. The result is economic pressure on the shops and trading outlets in those villages, which oftentimes pay the price as well. That is a new, additional observation that I seek to raise with the Minister: redundancies caused not directly by cuts in the education budget but indirectly, by population reduction and deterioration in the economic viability of a community.

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I could at this stage make known my criticisms of the Government for attacking councils that have introduced large council tax increases to mitigate what they regard as extremely difficult financial circumstances brought about by Government policy. However, I shall not do that, because that is not the core issue for this debate. The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West sought guidance from the Minister on why money has increased in real terms but genuine cuts have been made. The explanation is the ring-fencing of much of the money. It is laudable that teachers have received a better financial settlement in the majority of cases, in order to right the continuous underfunding and reduction of salaries in the teaching community under the Conservatives, but using up the increased pot of money entirely in teachers' pay settlements will not help with the infrastructure or maintain the number of teachers.
My considerations about what could be done next apply to England as well as Wales, and I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about them. We must obviously consider the educational impact of redundancies caused by downsizing or closing schools. Taking a primary school out of a community clearly has a knock-on effect. I personally believe that the most effective way to teach citizenship is in small local schools, with community support, where real relationship building can take place and inculcate values by osmosis. Both cuts in the teaching work force and school closures, which lead to redundancies, should be considered in the light of the economic knock-on effects that I have described.
There is an interesting implication of my analysis. If I am correct, it should sometimes be appropriate for money that is earmarked for economic activities to be used to support a primary school in a rural area, because the economic cost of not doing so far exceeds the saving to a local authority.
Mr. Brady: The hon. Gentleman might want to reflect on the fact that the Government accept his argument when it comes to regenerating urban areas, where they are happy for additional money to be spent, but apparently reject it for rural areas.
Lembit Öpik: The hon. Gentleman makes an insightful point. Some of us have felt for some time that, despite considerable talk of rural-proofing, there are double standards in the treatment of inner-city areas and rural areas such as Montgomeryshire. No doubt he is familiar with rural circumstances himself.
I seek confirmation that the Minister takes the economic impact of school closures seriously and that, strategically at least, he would recognise that there is an economic case to be considered in decisions to downsize teaching work forces or proceed with school closures that might lead to large-scale redundancies. For my part, I shall tight, fight and fight again to save the schools in Montgomeryshire, which I love. I hope that the Government's support for the strategic considerations that I have described will be a useful indicator for the decision makers in Welsh education policy, and also a reassurance to rural areas in England.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: May I express the hope from the Chair that the hon. Gentleman recovers from whatever is ailing him? He
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tipped me off this morning that he was suffering from a disease that is new to me, called Kennedyitis. I hope that the epidemic sweeping his party is not too debilitating for him or any of his colleagues.
Lembit Öpik: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: It is sure to be bogus, but I will accept it.
Lembit Öpik: If one of the consequences of the affliction is a conversion to Liberal Democracy, you can expect that many more people in the House will contract it.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I am sure that hon. Members have noted what the hon. Gentleman says.
2.31 pm
Mrs. Annette L. Brooke: I congratulate the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) on securing this debate. It is undoubtedly an important issue and has a big impact on our communities, demoralising teaching staff and causing them extra stress when they are already in stressful situations. In my constituency, certainly, parents are now desperately worried about the reorganisation that is being discussed. The issue is incredibly important, and the focus on primary schools is another vital aspect. The population bubble is moving into secondary schools, taking more funds and making it even harder to sustain a good teaching ratio in our primary schools.
I acknowledge at the outset the difference that the Government have made to our schools—it would be remiss not to. Up to two years ago, the teachers in my constituency were beginning to see a real difference. There was a sea change. I shall refer a little to my own constituency, although I know that this is a winding-up speech, simply because one of the two local education authorities there, Poole LEA, is the lowest-funded primary school authority, so some points are relevant.
Sadly, we have to take last year's settlement as our starting point. That is clearly where things started to go badly wrong. At long last, it has been accepted as a crisis that saw hundreds of teachers made redundant across the country and many temporary contracts for both teachers and learning support assistants not renewed. One survey showed that one in five primary schools increased their class sizes as a result, which is the contrary direction to that in which we wish to go. We saw the introduction of a new funding formula, plus the significant increase in costs falling on schools. It all happened at the same time. The increased national insurance contributions and teachers' pay and pension increases were all incredibly predictable, but it would appear that civil servants failed to research accurately the impact of such changes.
I seem to recall that at first Ministers were in denial, trying to blame LEAs for not passporting funds to schools. Undoubtedly, some misdeeds were flushed out, but at the end of the day not enough money was provided. That created extreme problems for many authorities, and especially those with low funding such as those in my constituency.

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The debate over who was at fault was blame culture at its worst. The crisis in funding was a setback in the considerable progress made by this Government, resulting in demoralisation for many teachers and head teachers while childish squabbling went on nationally. As we have heard from other parts of the country, and I am sure that it is pretty widespread, many schools minimised the impact of last year's poor settlement by using up balances or dipping into their capital reserves.
The improved settlement this year for many LEAs was not sufficient to make up that deficit. In many authorities, the problems are compounded by falling rolls. In Poole, the key group of workers facing redundancy were learning support assistants, many more of whom went than teachers last year. In that small education authority, 46 lost their jobs, partly as a result of falling rolls and partly because of the unfair education settlement for 2003–04, which favoured some parts of the country above others.
The survey to which the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West referred was commissioned by the National Union of Teachers, and the Department for Education and Skills questioned some of its findings. One of the survey's conclusions was that head teachers and senior staff in primary schools would have to do more teaching, which is substantiated by schools in my constituency.
I quote a first-school head, who has met the Minister for School Standards several times, which I welcome, as that head teacher can explain what it is like being head of a small first school in the lowest-funded primary school authority in the country. She said:
"At the end of 2003 we lost a full-time teacher and 47 hours of teacher assistant time. In order to attempt to set a balanced budget we have replaced a retiring member of the school leadership team with a newly qualified teacher. This means that our leadership team will consist of only 2 others and myself to lead the teaching and learning for the school. This will put great pressure on us as we are so thinly spread. Our supply and staff-training budgets have been slashed. My SENCO relies on me, the head teacher, to give her non-contact time to carry out her role. I also give each staff member an afternoon of planning and preparation time each term, though this is not enough, of course. All these hidden stresses mean that in real terms we are a great deal worse off now than in 2002/3 and all staff are extremely tired through trying to compensate for the deficiencies in funding."
Many other schools in Poole are predicting compulsory redundancies this year because the percentage increase in funding in an already inadequate budget has just not lifted schools up to where they were before.
I have talked to various local education authorities. A councillor in Oxfordshire said:
"While we are not facing a huge drop in primary numbers due to housing growth, we still face severe budget problems from last year's settlement. This year's settlement has kept us stable from last year's position but has not made up all of last year's gap. The key factor in that gap was and is teacher pay reforms, which have never been properly funded."
We acknowledge that the Government swiftly took action for this year, introducing the guaranteed minimum increase in funding, restoring money to the standards fund—it would have been dreadful if that had been removed—and introducing payments for the worst-affected authorities, but many authorities just missed the additional help, and Poole was one of them.
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As falling rolls begin to bite, the threat of redeployment or redundancy will increasingly become a fact of life for teachers in many parts of the country. The Department for Education and Skills predicts that schools will lose more than 600,000 pupils between 2001 and 2016, which on the present pupil-teacher ratio is equivalent to about 41,000 teachers.
The Times Educational Supplement survey showed that schools in most of England's 150 local authorities would shed staff this year. It is difficult to imagine that anything will reverse the demographic trends—it will take more than power cuts—so we need to look forward and consider how they can be managed.
Liberal Democrats favour the local management of schools and local decision taking, but as a consequence, the way in which redundant teachers are treated varies tremendously across the country. In some areas, there appear to be deals with unions, but in others teachers are on their own in finding jobs. I have great sympathy with the teachers, who may include my daughter, as she is likely to be affected by what happens in the next four years. It is a sensitive matter that should not be subject to dictation from the centre, but it is difficult for the teaching profession to handle the differentials.
It is important to note that the decline in school rolls does not hit all areas in the same way, even in the same authority. In Poole, the drop has been sharpest in the old council house estates. That is a result of the policy of selling council houses, which means that families remain in their houses long after their children have grown up, so new, younger families cannot move in.
Commendably, the Government want to see joined-up services and extended schools, which I am in favour of, at the heart of such communities, but that will be impossible if existing schools close, so local education authorities face a choice: if communities are to be sustained in the face of falling rolls, key schools must be kept open and schools redefined as providers of a wide range of services to the community. If we can focus on that, the outcome could be very positive.
Councils must be allowed to be creative, but that will be impossible if market forces dominate and popular schools are allowed to grow at the expense of all others. That relates rather well to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), who is suffering greatly, and who, I hope, is not spreading his germs in this direction. He referred to the economic impact of the closures and the fact that we need to support rural primary schools. I come across such rural issues in my mixed constituency, and I have great sympathy for his points. It is interesting that they are reflected among schools on council house estates. Indeed, the issue is exactly the same.
At the moment, everyone is talking about improving the protection of vulnerable children, and schools will undoubtedly play a vital role in ensuring that every child matters. As part of an excellent scheme in Poole, pastoral support workers are appointed to cover a pyramid of schools or a specific school. Those workers are ideally placed to link up with health and social services staff to co-ordinate services to children and parents. I am sorry to say, however, that cuts to learning support funds have put the position of those workers at risk. Of course, we now have the work force reform programme, which is much spoken about. I have not

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seen much evidence of it in my constituency, but that is because I have not visited any of the pathfinders, which are further along the line. It is also true that schools are now tackling the 24 tasks. However, learning assistants are still losing their jobs. They are the very people who should be doing jobs such as photocopying to make life better for our teachers and to allow them to concentrate on using their skills to the utmost.
I must tell the Minister about a meeting that I attended with Poole head teachers, just as the real severity of last year's settlement was hitting them. The LEA suddenly announced that it had been given a grant of £18,000 or more to devise a work reform strategy. I do not know how those head teachers stayed sitting in the room—they were so incensed about the fact that they had to make redundancies while a grant had been given to devise a strategy. Of course, they want work reform, but it is ironic that they face the prospect of working longer hours and asking others to do so. It is important that we get the balance right. We all want teachers to be given the non-contact time that they desperately need, and we need to use the opportunity provided by falling rolls. We must ensure that things do not get worse as schools get into a downward spiral because they do not have enough money. The 32 pathfinders have been given extra resources. What additional resources will be provided across all LEAs for work force reform? How will that tie in with falling rolls in some authorities?
Many trade unions have said that falling school rolls offer opportunities. For example, parents will have greater certainty about whether their preference for their child's school place can be met. There is greater scope for the removal or replacement of poor-quality or temporary accommodation, and other surplus accommodation can be used to support community initiatives in the extended schools. There is a good opportunity to reduce class sizes, which authorities cannot often do because the Government dictate the money flows to the schools and pressurise them to eliminate surplus places. The Government cannot do anything about the falling rolls, but they can allow greater flexibility locally to find good solutions that will benefit our young people, their future and our future. Redeploying more money into early-years education is possible.
Islington councillors made the interesting comment that inflexible compulsory requirements from the Department for Education and Skills have had unhelpful and distorting effects on the ground. For example, the requirement that no school should receive less money next year than last year cuts right across coherent three-year strategies. This is an example of a uniform national requirement having perverse effects because it does not take local factors into account. I do not know the full situation, but the councillors make the important point that so much has been dictated from the centre. I understand why, and I have seen schools that have benefited from such a strong-arm approach, but it is now time to let the LEAs and the schools work out the best local solution. Will there will be any slackening off?
Councillors from Milton Keynes made a point that is not key to the debate, but I have been asked to mention it and will do so as there is time: the school population of Milton Keynes is rising, but schools are still suffering. It is worth examining this converse situation, because
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the councillors say that the Government funding formula does not provide for that rising school population. Almost all their grant is swallowed by passporting to schools, but it does not cover the rising demand. It seems that everyone is unhappy, but I wanted to make that point. I was interested to read that the Department is responding to the problem of the falling primary school rolls, and that there is a proposal to establish a working group with partner organisations to explore the options and opportunities available to schools and communities. I will be interested to see how that works out.
When the Government announced the percentage terms and individual grants to secondary and primary schools, it all sounded as if there was a lot of money. There is, however, a lack of trust about whether all this money really exists and what it will mean. In my part of the world, people are never very happy when percentage increases are mentioned. Cash grants to schools would, in many ways, be more helpful. The percentage of a small base does not provide enough money. Moving to the new formula was a contributory factor, but the Government always said that it would not be revised in the first few years. What plans do the Government have for monitoring and adjusting that formula? It has been said many times before that LEAs throughout the south-west are suffering under the formula because of the bizarre situation of low wages outside the public sector, in which wages are high, and very high house prices. It is therefore very difficult for teachers to move, which we want the formula to take into account. It makes no sense that one area receives more money than another area a few miles away when there is no difference in the cost of living.
All in all, there are opportunities, but the situation worries many people in the profession and parents who are concerned about their children. I hope that the Minister will give us a positive answer. We know that he cannot control falling rolls, but there is much that he could do to mitigate the effects. I agree with the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West that we do not want to hear that everything in the country is hunky dory, as it is not.
2.50 pm
Mr. Mark Hoban: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), as a veteran of school funding debates, on opening the debate in such magnificent style. He highlighted two aspects of the matter: its historical background—he set out a macro-picture of the cause of the current school funding crisis; and the impact of that crisis on the quality of education, which he eloquently described, with particular reference to schools in his constituency and the decisions that they are taking about funding and teacher recruitment.
My hon. Friend was right to point out that 8,800 teaching posts and 12,300 non-teaching posts were lost last year. It is noticeable how many schools took the difficult decision last year to lose staff—both teaching assistants and teachers—and how much poorer those schools are for having done so. I know that many hon. Members can tell of similar examples from their constituencies of problems that are the consequences of redundancies in primary schools.

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I am grateful that there is a cordon sanitaire between us and the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), who is suffering some ailments; he outlined the concerns of many hon. Members about the impact of falling rolls, particularly in rural areas, and described the threat that they pose to valued rural schools, which offer a great deal of amenity to their local communities—they are often their lifeblood.
The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Mrs. Brooke) seemed to advocate a policy of selective power cuts on council estates to restore numbers in the schools in her constituency. I am fully aware of the problems there, for which she made a powerful case, since I visited Poole and met the excellent Conservative leader of the borough council, and the executive member for education. They have done a great deal to raise the profile of problems in Poole. As well as meeting me and my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins), they met the Minister for School Standards to raise their concerns.
I was delighted to have an opportunity to go to Poole, to meet the director of education and visit a couple of schools, so that I could understand at first hand the impact of relatively low LEA settlements on schools. In classrooms that I visited in my constituency in Hampshire, not that far along the coast, I saw the significant difference that a relatively small funding difference can generate in schools. Poole is suffering because it has relatively few areas of deprivation compared with the rest of the country, and does not receive the area cost adjustment that I believe the neighbouring authority of Bournemouth has. That clearly has a big impact on education.
I spoke to a head teacher who raised the same question as the hon. Lady about what happens when money from a Government initiative runs out and schools want to continue to support the employee who was recruited because of that initiative. The pastoral workers who have been recruited in Poole schools are clearly very highly valued by head teachers, who see them as a way of resolving several issues and improving learning. However, it is clearly difficult when central Government funding for that is withdrawn. How is the funding to support the post to be made up? That is particularly difficult in an LEA where there is little headroom as a consequence of the starting point of the financial settlement. The points about that were well made.
It is also clearly important to reduce the number and complexity of funding streams that schools must deal with. I was interested to talk to a group of heads in the primary school sector in Nottinghamshire recently. They applied for funding for a project and were told that they should have had a bid writer to help them prepare their bid. That would have meant diverting valuable resources from the classroom to appoint a consultant simply to secure additional funding for schools in the area.
It is appropriate to engage in this debate as we come to the end of March and the schools' financial year 2003–04. It is also timely to look forward to the next financial year. We are all clear as to the causes of last year's funding crisis. We are familiar with the means by which the Government have gone about trying to solve
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it for the 2004–05 financial year with the minimum per pupil guarantee of 4 per cent. and the transitional funding for some schools in some LEAs.
The letters that I have received from LEAs show that there are two important concerns about the upcoming financial year. First, there is a hangover from the 2003–04 financial year. As we have heard in the debate, many schools used their reserves to balance their books for this year and have set deficit budgets in the hope that things will get better. Those schools are now reaching a point where they wonder whether they can continue those measures in the 2004–05 financial year or whether they need to take tough decisions this year to solve their funding problem. Then there is the issue of work force reform, which has been touched on in all the speeches so far. How can we deliver the promises to classroom teachers if the funding is not there to employ support assistants to enable them to have more non-contact time?
Let me quote some of the responses that I have received from LEAs about the school funding crisis. Essex county council has delivered to its schools the 4 per cent. per pupil increase and it says that the average school should be able to meet the cost of inflationary pressures on the school budget in 2004–05. Most LEAs are in the same position. They believe that the Government's increase is sufficient to meet this year's cost pressures. Essex county council points out, however, that there are 34 schools in Essex with accumulated deficits totalling some £4 million. It believes that schools have used £18 million of their reserves to fund recurrent expenditure.
The Government, recognising this use of deficits and reserves to balance the books across all schools, primary and secondary, have given certain LEAs transitional funding. Essex has received only £9.8 million of transitional funding, which is clearly not enough to cover the reserves that have been used and the deficits that have been created in the 2003–04 financial year. Those schools that have used their reserves or have set deficit budgets will have difficult decisions to make in 2004–05.
That fact has not escaped the Essex NUT spokesman, Mr. Jerry Glazier, who said:
"These latest settlements just compound the problems. Clearly they are not nearly adequate to meet the financial demands on schools, especially with extra pressures faced by the workload agreements. The crisis is most certainly not over, not by a long way."
It is perhaps not surprising that the Secretary of State for Education and Skills has decided not to grace the NUT conference with his presence this year, arguing that he has better things to do.
The director of education in Bromley said:
"Evidence from individual schools is that the guaranteed funding level may not be sufficient to maintain school resources…at the current level. As at 31 March 2003"—

this shows the scale of the problem and its deterioration over the course of the last year—
"Bromley had 11 primary schools with a total deficit or £295,000."
It is estimated that at the end of March 2004, 16 primary schools will have a total deficit of £716,000. Based on the allocation of the transitional grant to Bromley, he considers the £1.8 million that has been allocated insufficient to cover the deficits and the use of reserves.

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In Bedfordshire, another authority expressing concern over the future, the county education officer says:
"I am aware that some schools are already expressing concern over not being able to balance their budgets without making reductions…A wider issue however, is whether the Government will be able to sustain these levels of funding in future years. A major area of concern here is the pressures associated with the full implementation of the workforce reform proposals over the next two years."
I have heard of at least one school that had to make teachers redundant in order to employ learning support assistants to meet the work force reform commitments. Our schools are facing a dreadful situation.
The Minister is responsible for education in London, so he will be interested to know that the chief education officer for Barnet, in a letter to me, said:
"the LEA has managed to ensure that the schools' budget shares will rise by 5.8 per cent. The Government's assessment of the inflation pressures on schools is 3.4 per cent., but we believe that this is an underassessment of the costs of implementing single status and workforce reform. This leaves insufficient funds to redress the budget gap from 2003–04…Most of our schools have had to make savings in 2003–04, and many will have to make further savings in 2004–05 and 2005–06, to ensure they are able to balance their budgets in future years."
The initial impact of the Government's financial settlement, which we saw in the financial year 2003–04, will continue this year and next year. As the chief education officer goes on to say:
"Most of our schools' budgets consists of salaries, so it is inevitable that much of the savings will consist of staffing."
That is yet a further indication that there are more redundancies to come in our primary schools.
I also received a letter from the chief education officer for the London borough of Camden, in which he states:
"We anticipate that the transitional Grant will enable us to reduce the level of deficits in 2004/5. Our ability to continue this…into 2005/6 will depend on our then settlement and any further transitional protection. I do not believe that the level of funding will enable schools to replace the balances used during 2003/4 and 2004/5."
The picture seems to be similar across the whole of London. The borough of Enfield, in which the Minister will take a particular interest, is making an early bid for support in the financial year 2005–06, as shown in a letter that I received. It states:
"We are concerned about funding in future years including the additional costs that will arise from the next stage of implementing workforce reforms, the turbulence that may arise if pay and performance grants are mainstreamed in 2005/06 and the funding of the outer London teacher pay award that has been mooted for September 2005. We are also anxious to ensure that Enfield receives transitional support funding in 2005/06."
That is a clear indication, from the Minister's own authority, that problems will emerge in the future.
Lest any part of the country should feel neglected, let me turn to Portsmouth, which neighbours my local authority. Members of Portsmouth city council recently went to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to ask for more funding. The complexity of the Government's funding and the impact that it has on individual authorities comes out very clearly in the reported concerns for Portsmouth. On Thursday 18 March, Portsmouth newspaper,The News, reported that
"an additional gift of £891,000 given by the government last year to meet a shortfall has been taken out of this year's budget."
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The LEA must recover £900,000 from this year's budget, but it is a small authority with challenging schools and difficult circumstances—although it is making progress.
The impact of the shortfall can be seen in several primary schools in Portsmouth.The News reports:
"St. George's Beneficial C of E Primary School in Old Portsmouth lost seven assistants and Stamshaw Junior School was forced to axe two posts."
Across the whole of Portsmouth—with an LEA of 140,000 electors—some 40 learning support assistants were lost. That is a big reduction in an area that has many difficulties. Therefore, even when LEAs make great efforts—as the Portsmouth authority has—to improve behaviour in schools and to find innovative ways to tackle truancy and bad behaviour, they find that central Government do not give money to support those initiatives.
As I hope to have illustrated using those letters from LEAs, the prospects for 2004–05 are bleak in many schools, particularly those that set deficit budgets last year or used their reserves to safeguard the education of the children in their care. Although this year's spending pressures have been met from the settlement, the transitional grant is not sufficient to offset the use of reserves and deficits last year. If the transitional funding is not enough, how else will primary schools that used their reserves and set their deficit budget balance their books this year, other than by reducing their biggest cost—staff? Is there any light at the end of this tunnel?
The Chancellor announced in the Budget last week that education spending in the next spending round will rise by 4.4 per cent. in real terms. However, he failed to mention that this represents a tightening, compared with an increase in real terms of 6 per cent. in the current spending round. We are seeing a reduction in the rate of growth of spending on education across all schools in the next spending round. To put that into context, we are seeing work force reforms—many people doubt that they are adequately funded—on the basis of current spending plans, together with a combination of greater demands on schools' work forces and the need to recruit more learning support assistants. Will those demands be met from within the lower rate of increase forecast by the Chancellor for spending on schools in real terms in last week's Budget? I cannot see how primary schools will achieve that necessary reform without an improvement in spending.
My hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West mentioned the £55,000 for an average primary school that was promised by the Chancellor last week, and we must be clear what that promise means. Is it an extra £55,000 for the average primary school, or an increase in the standard sum that primary schools already receive, to take them up to £55,000? I heard a few comments last Friday in my constituency that led me to believe that teachers think they will receive an extra £55,000. That is what they hope for, but I suspect that the reality is that the average primary school will receive an increase up to £55,000. We must clarify that today, given the importance of funding to all schools, and especially primary schools.
There is another factor on which we have not yet touched. The cause of this spending crisis was the way in which the Government decided to reallocate money

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among the LEAs, a decision announced to the House in November 2002. The full effects of the funding system of floors and ceilings have yet to work their way through to LEAs. Some authorities, such as Barking, will lose up to £1 million; Bexley will lose up to £3.3 million; Kent up to £36.6 million; Enfield up to £4.5 million. Those are all figures that have been provided to me in written parliamentary answers by the Minister here today, or by the Minister for School Standards. In total, those local authorities and other LEAs are set to lose more than £166 million as the funding formula works its way through to fruition. When will it happen? We know that schools have been given a stay of execution until the other side of the general election, or the other side of the 2005–06 spending round, as Ministers prefer to put it—being a slightly cruder politician than some Ministers, I prefer to talk about the general election. However, once those spending reductions work their way through to those LEAs that are set to lose, there may well be a further round of redundancies in our primary schools.
It is clear that the funding crisis of 2003–04 will have repercussions, not just in 2004–05 but in 2005–06. It is also clear that such problems will be compounded by the introduction of work force reforms at a time when the Chancellor feels able to reduce the rate of growth of education spending. I fear that the combination of such circumstances will put many more jobs at risk in primary schools and the redundancies that we have seen over the last 12 months will merely be the start of worse to come.
3.9 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills: We have had a good debate, and I join others in congratulating the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) on securing the debate, and on his reappearance. He is a fellow veteran of schools debates in this place over last year, and it is good to see him back—though in a different place to where he was before. A number of important points have been raised during the debate, and I shall do my utmost to respond to as many of them as I can, but give my usual undertaking that if I fail to do so in the 20 minutes left, I shall respond to hon. Members' specific points in writing.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) on his contribution and wish him better health. I congratulate his Front-Bench colleague, the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Mrs. Brooke), on apparently being the only Liberal Democrat Member to be in good health at the moment.
This is a serious and important debate, and I was pleased when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education invited me to take responsibility for work with primary schools. The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West quoted the 2001 Labour party manifesto, which said that we would seek to build on our success in primary schools. I do not regard that statement as meaning that somehow everything that needed to be done had been done. Rather, it recognised the real progress that primary schools made between 1997 and 2001, as measured most notably by the improvements in literacy and numeracy.
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There was a strong commitment to build on those improvements with regard to literacy and numeracy and the broader school curriculum. We therefore published last May the document entitled "Excellence and Enjoyment", which has been broadly welcomed in the primary sector, both for its reaffirmation of the core challenge of literacy and numeracy in primary schools and for its celebration of the broader school curriculum. I have no doubt that in addressing the need to build on that success, we must also recognise how crucial it is to invest in school buildings, equipment and staff. That is why this debate on redundancies in primary schools is of great relevance.
Let me say a word or two about the broader situation in Trafford. The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West spoke, quite rightly, about his constituency and raised legitimate areas of concern. He is corresponding with my hon. Friend the Minister for School Standards about Woodheys school, but he will acknowledge that Trafford has seen a very significant improvement in staff numbers in schools since 1997. I am told that teacher numbers in Trafford increased from 1,750 in January 1997 to just over 2,000 in 2003—a 15 per cent. increase—and there has been an even bigger increase in the number of school support staff. That is the context for the events of recent years, about which the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole spoke.
There has been a real improvement since 1997. The hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that that is reflected in the very high standards that are seen in schools in Trafford, which I am sure he would want to join me in celebrating. We estimate that between 1997–98 and 2004#x2013;05, the funding per pupil in Trafford will have increased by 31 per cent. We have also seen a significant improvement in capital investment in schools in Trafford, as we have in other parts of the country. Of course, I do not suggest, and I have not suggested in previous debates, that everything is perfect or, as the hon. Lady put it, hunky-dory. We face a number of challenges. I shall do my best to address some of them and, in particular, some of the points that were made in the debate.
The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire made a thoughtful speech in which he addressed one important aspect of the debate—teachers' pay. For years, this country has failed properly to recognise and recompense teachers. Part of the cost pressure that has resulted in some of the difficulties—I emphasise that—relates to the fact that we are starting to give teachers the levels of pay that they should be receiving. As several colleagues have said, that can result in 80, 85 or even 90 per cent. of the budgets for some schools going on staffing costs. That factor has definitely come into play in the difficulties that we have had over the past year.
The hon. Gentleman made another interesting point about ring-fencing. Part of the issue last year—this operated differently in different parts of the country—was an attempt to reduce ring-fencing by saying that the standards funds for certain areas would be removed. The effect of that was very difficult to deal with in some areas. It created some of the problems that we saw. That is partly why, in the announcements to which the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole referred, the Secretary of State reversed the planned cuts to the standards funds for the coming financial year.

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In October, the Secretary of State set out our approach. As several colleagues have said, it will provide for a guaranteed minimum increase of 4 per cent. per pupil in every school's budget where pupil numbers stay the same. The guarantee also seeks to take account of unavoidable cost pressures on the budgets of all schools, whatever happens to their rolls. As has been said, those costs are estimated at 3.4 per cent. on average.
The dilemma that we face was well summed up by the hon. Lady, who set out the views of several different authorities. She made the perfectly legitimate point—I think that it was on behalf of Milton Keynes—that in an area in which schools typically have rising rolls, a guarantee that gives a little protection to those with falling rolls might mean that other schools do not get as big an increase as they might have done and that they might, therefore, be under additional pressure. That powerfully illustrates the difficult balance that we must strike, particularly in the general context of falling primary rolls. I shall return in a moment to some of the specific points that the hon. Lady and others made about falling rolls.
The Government have sought to ensure that every local education authority has sufficient resources, headroom and flexibility to deliver the guarantee and to support schools facing individual pressures. As I said, we have reversed the cuts to the standards funds for the coming year and the following year. The standards fund, the school standards grant and Learning and Skills Council funding for school sixth forms will all increase in line with the minimum guarantee, and we were pleased when the School Teachers Review Body agreed to a multi-year award, under which increases in teachers' pay will be in line with inflation from April this year to the end of August 2006. That will give schools and local education authorities some of the predictability that they have been denied in the past.
We expect local education authorities to do all that they can to ensure that funding reaches schools. In a sense, that gives LEAs a more local, flexible role in assessing and supporting every school's needs to ensure that resources additional to the minimum guarantee reach all the schools in their area.
Fears about redundancies are, of course, very real For those who have lost their jobs—be they teachers, teaching assistants or others working in our schools—there is clearly a human dimension, which several colleagues mentioned. The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West referred to The Times Educational Supplement survey of 5 March. The paper concluded:
"ministers have largely succeeded in avoiding a repeat of last year's funding crisis…most problems will concern schools affected by demographic changes."
I do not deny that some issues follow on from last year's difficulties, but the bulk of those that we now face relate to falling rolls.
Falling rolls are a serious issue, and need to be dealt with effectively and sensitively. Primary rolls in many parts of the country are likely to fall and, indeed, to do so quite sharply in some cases. It is a challenge to us in central Government and to our colleagues in schools and local government to respond in a way that is appropriate and sensitive to the circumstances.
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All hon. Members will broadly agree with the principle that funding should follow pupil numbers and that local education authorities will, therefore, sometimes have to make hard decisions about a school or a local community of schools. We are properly considering the issue. Last year, there were almost 500,000 surplus places in primary schools in England—something like 12 per cent. of the total capacity. On the basis of current forecasts, primary rolls will fall by a further 4 per cent. by 2006–07.
The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire spoke about the impact on different communities of falling rolls, followed by downsizing or school closures. He was right to emphasise not only the educational dimension but the broader social and economic dimension. In the Government's first term, we introduced a presumption against closure of rural schools in England. That presumption has had quite a dramatic impact and is a positive example of rural-proofing, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. From memory, I think that the average number of closures of rural schools in England has fallen from around 30 a year in the mid-1990s to around four or five a year now.
Lembit Öpik: I am very encouraged by that policy in England. However, I respectfully ask the Minister whether he would be willing to have a conversation with his opposite number in the Welsh Assembly to see whether there would be any benefit in at least considering a presumption against closures in rural Wales as well.
Mr. Twigg: I am happy to undertake to do that. It will be nice to lobby the Welsh Assembly, rather than have it lobbying us. I took the time to check that the presumption in question applies only in England and I understand that it does.
I should like to take up the challenge regarding the social focus of schools, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. It is fair to say that there is a problem in rural areas, but the social focus of schools is important in some of the most disadvantaged urban areas as well. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole rightly challenged us to be creative about the problem. There is an option to avoid school closures, although I do not think that it will always work. She talked about extended schools. When considering surplus places, we can explore the possibility of some of those schools becoming extended schools. Such schools can offer an incredible opportunity to widen the services that are available to children and young people. Of equal importance, such schools can widen the services that are available to the broader local community. All of us who have seen the principle of extended schools in action agree that they can provide a great service on family learning, which involves giving educational opportunities to older members of the family and parents. I should like to take the hon. Lady's challenge forward, because extended schools are a possible solution in some cases. However, I would not want to pretend that they are always the solution. We must consider the problem in the round.
There is another possibility. The hon. Lady referred to the "Every Child Matters" Green Paper and the legislation coming from that. Local education authorities and schools have the potential to consider

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using spare capacity to develop the children's trust agenda, which aims to deliver integrated education, social and health care services to children and young people.
The hon. Lady also referred to discussions that the Department is conducting with partner organisations to consider some of the options and opportunities with respect to falling rolls. I can confirm we have established a group that brings together some of the key players, including the Department for Education and Skills, local education authorities, the head teacher associations, the majority of the teacher unions—the ones that have signed up to the work force reform agreement—the Local Government Association, governors' representatives, the Association of Chief Education Officers and the faith organisations. We have brought together all the key organisations. The first meeting was last Friday. The idea is to develop a toolkit of solutions working, for example, with the Audit Commission to help local education authorities to meet the challenge of falling rolls. I also hope that the group can come up with positive and creative solutions, very much as the hon. Lady set out. I shall be happy to keep her informed of the group's developing work, because it will be critical to getting things right.
In response to some of the other points that have been raised, we have set out a minimum guarantee, which recognises that schools with falling rolls will have fixed costs for cleaning, repairs and heating, which obviously do not decline when pupil numbers decline. That is why we guaranteed such schools a per pupil funding increase in 2004–05 of more than 4 per cent. In response to the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban), I can confirm that what the Chancellor set out in his speech last week was what an average primary school could expect to receive in the coming year. The Chancellor did not make a new announcement of an additional £55,000; rather, he set out the combined payment in respect of the school standards grant—the money that we introduced to go directly to schools—and the devolved formula capital, which we had announced previously.
Mr. Brady: The picture seems to be worse than I feared. The Minister is telling schools across the country that they are not only faced with the hangover from last year's funding crisis—some schools have deficit budgets, some have spent their reserves—and the possibility of redundancies in September, but that the £55,000 referred to by the Chancellor will not bail out their next year's budget because it is a restatement of money that we already knew existed.
Mr. Twigg: That is not fair because we cannot compare where we were this time last year with where we are now. Other announcements have been made in the interim and schools and local education authorities across the country are working though the implications of those announcements in their budgets. The hon. Gentleman and his colleague set out examples of how that is being discussed. For example, it is fair to say that transitional grant money provides support to some schools that had particular difficulties in the financial
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year that is about to finish. That money is available for the coming year and, as the hon. Gentleman reminded us, will also be available for the following year.
Mrs. Brooke: I wonder whether the Minister will guarantee that clear information will be provided for all local education authorities and schools about cash grants to schools. If schools have read the Secretary of State's statement, as most people did, their planning will be considerably upset.
Mr. Twigg: That should not be the case because every school has received notification of their allocations for the coming year; no school should be in any doubt about the implications for the coming year. I visited schools in my constituency on Friday and there was a clear understanding that the focus of new announcements in the Budget was on the outcomes for schools of the following spending review. I hope that Opposition Members will join me in welcoming the fact that the announcement for education was made earlier than for other areas, enabling schools and LEAs to plan far further in advance than has previously been the case.
Mr. Hoban: It will be of use to hon. Members if the Minister could provide us with a copy of the letter that schools received about the £55,000 and the equivalent for secondary schools. Some head teachers will look at the budget for 2004–05 and think that they can put off making a difficult decision because they will receive an extra £55,000 in 2005–06.
Mr. Twigg: I am happy to clarify in writing for the hon. Gentleman what has been sent to schools—I will have to check whether it has been sent in the form of a letter or an e-mail.
I shall draw my remarks to a close. A number of hon. Members have referred to the work force reform agreement, which is an important part of the programme of reform in education. The agreement has been reached with all bar one of the trade unions, including the head teacher associations and the representatives of support staff. I welcome the broad support that there is for remodelling. I recognise that there are concerns about ensuring that resources are available. Some areas of work force reform require additional resources, but some will result in savings. In the schools that I visited recently, I noticed that there was a view that less supply cover might be required in schools when the work force reform comes in. Schools could invest the money saved in their own support staff. We are establishing a national remodelling team working closely with local education authorities and other partners to help schools to implement the changes in support of the agreement.
I conclusion, I again congratulate the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West on securing the debate. I absolutely reaffirm our strong commitment to primary education because children must have the best possible preparation, not only for secondary education but for their later lives. I reassure the Chamber that continued investment in primary education, teachers, support staff, buildings and equipment is critical to the future of our education service.

Human Rights (Colombia)
3.30 pm
Mr. Richard Allan: As the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Colombia, I am grateful for the opportunity to hold this short debate. It is timely because in the past few days, we have had a visit by Vice-President Santos of Colombia, to whom I am grateful for the helpful and informative briefing that he gave at Chatham house yesterday morning.
I am also grateful to the AB Colombia umbrella group of non-governmental organisations and Amnesty International UK both for the briefings that they have given for today's debate and for their ongoing work in publicising incidents in Colombia and bringing visitors to meet us in Parliament. Peace Brigades International has also been important in exposing us to the work of human rights defenders in Colombia. The Colombian embassy has also supplied information, as has another interesting source—an intern in my office from the United States; although the use of word "intern" may be odd considering Guantanamo bay. Stephanie Adams, whose family are Colombian, has given me a helpful insight into life from the point of view of ordinary Columbian citizens.
Needless to say, 30 minutes is a short time to debate an issue of such importance, but I hope that at least it will allow the Minister to update the House on the Government's position, which is what we want to get on record.
Interest in the House on Colombian issues should be gauged not by attendance in this Chamber, as a hot Budget debate is raging in the main Chamber, but by the fact that 187 Members have so far signed early-day motion 333 on military assistance to Colombia and human rights abuses. That is an extraordinary number, and it is so high because any Member who has been touched by, or had experience of, Colombia takes a serious interest in the country. Many Members have clearly encouraged their colleagues to take an interest, too.
To set the context for the debate, I should like to point to several factors that bring the UK and Colombia together. We have always enjoyed good political and commercial relations. There are active links between chambers of commerce in the two countries, and I am sure that the Minister will testify to the fact that relations are extraordinarily warm, as they are between the UK and many Latin American countries. I found on my visit to Colombia that there is a tremendous, historical warmth between our two countries.
In that context, the UK was the host for the London declaration of July 2003, which established the international framework for Colombia's human rights agenda. Although the declaration brought together several countries, the fact that we were hosting it was not accidental and places us in a position where we have a particular responsibility to ensure that the declaration's aspirations are implemented.
Having visited Colombia with a Member from Northern Ireland some years ago, I believe that the Northern Ireland context is important. There are some similarities in how the Governments are trying to deal
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with armed paramilitary forces claiming to defend the state, although they are disowned by it, and secessionist groups trying to break away from it. That allows us to understand and empathise with the situation in Columbia, although the death and destruction caused by that conflict is on a greater scale.
It is also important not to take a neo-colonialist approach, which is especially significant in the light of a small dispute between the EU External Affairs Commissioner, Chris Patten, and the Colombian Vice-President. From the Vice-President's perspective, Chris Patten visited the country and tried to tell the Colombians how to run things, and was told off for treating the country like a banana republic. Although it is important to recognise that Ecuador is actually the largest exporter of bananas in La tin America, to treat the Colombians like a banana republic is inappropriate.
I shall couch my contribution in terms of our engagement with a sovereign, democratic country. The Vice-President made the serious point that Colombian democracy is deep rooted and goes back many years, and we need to respect the fact that we are dealing with a fellow sovereign democratic Government. We should not feel that we must instruct them, but rather behave as partners seeking to advise and assist in response to their request for assistance from the international community.
Whatever criticisms of the Colombian Government we may make in our debates, we should recognise that those are on a completely different level from the unreserved condemnation that we apply to acts of illegal violence, whether committed by the guerrilla or paramilitary factions. There is no equivalence in the way in which we treat the sovereign, democratic Colombian Government, and the armed groups who are acting illegally, and whom we condemn unreservedly.
It is also important not to make generalisations from the Colombian situation in relation to some kind of war on terror. The Colombian conflict started decades before any of the current rhetoric and debate on the war on terror—whatever that might mean; the situation in Colombia is unique and to generalise from it is unhelpful. Just as the Northern Ireland situation was unique and required unique British and Irish solutions, so the Colombian situation is unique and requires particular Colombian solutions.
The reaction of political visitors to Colombia is generally one of confusion, because they are confronted with different views of the same events. From a politician's point of view, it is clear that in Colombia there is a fundamental problem of governability, which has existed for many years. There are places where the Government's writ does not run. As a politician who has faith in democratic politics, I believe that the long-term solution must be for the democratic Colombian Government to have control and authority over the entire Colombian territory.
However, there is great concern about the allegations, suggestions and, in many cases, documented evidence of collusion between people who claim to act for the Government and for the Colombian state, and those who carry out the most severe human rights abuses. I have not met anyone who has visited Colombia who would say that the situation was simple—that it was

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either all the Government's fault or all everyone else's fault. Everyone returns with a confused picture of different views of the same events.
That is not surprising, for two reasons. First, the Colombian Government are trying, like every Government who deal with terrorism, to balance different rights—They are trying to balance the fundamental human right—the right to life, and therefore the right to be protected from acts of terrorism and violence—with other human rights, such as the right to a fair trial and fair treatment by the state.
Those rights can sometimes pull in different directions, and that leads to tension. It leads to something that is part of the normal discourse between all Governments—not just the Colombian Government, but Governments in general—and non-governmental organisations that are interested in human rights and criticise Governments severely when they are seen to have stepped from the path of absolute respect for human rights.
We see that process in the UK with some of the comments that the Home Secretary tends to make, not just about NGOs but about the judiciary and anyone else who dares to question his efforts to deal with terrorism. That is part of the normal political discourse: NGOs and judges criticise the Government, and the Government often respond robustly to that criticism.
However, there is an important difference in Colombia, because denunciation by the Government can lead to illegal actions by paramilitaries. That means death for people who believe that they are acting—and indeed are acting—as defenders of human rights, but who have been singled out as being friends of the terrorists. In the Colombian context, that is a most serious accusation and takes things far beyond the normal political discourse that might be enjoyed in places where such illegal actors are not so prevalent. Again, we can draw a parallel with Northern Ireland, where people were singled out as being friends of illegal actors—guerrilla groups—and were subsequently killed by other illegal groups.
In the Colombian context—again, perhaps, there is a parallel with Northern Ireland—there is particular concern about Church leaders who, in the course of looking after the interests of local people, may seek to negotiate the release of kidnap victims, and therefore may have contact with some of the illegal groups. The fact that they have contact with those illegal groups does not mean that they associate with them or approve of their agenda.
I hope that the Minister will be able to commit himself to speaking up for legitimate non-governmental organisations, Church groups and other similar groups that are trying to work in the Colombian context, and that he will ensure that we always request the Colombian Government to give them protection. The Minister will recognise the reference to a problem last year, when the Colombian President made comments about NGOs, which unfortunately fell on the plate of the then British ambassador in Colombia. The finger was pointed at the NGOs and the British Government were not as helpful as they could be, although the
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ambassador subsequently made statements to the effect that they would ensure that NGOs had the protection they needed.
I understand the scale of the threat to life in Colombia, which its Government are seeking to tackle. Colombia has a population that is about one third smaller than that in the UK, yet there are between 20,000 and 30.000 murders a year in Colombia, and only 800 a year in this country. I have every sympathy with the Colombian Government in trying to resolve such a serious death rate and I want the UK to continue to support them. In addition to the murders, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced, many are kidnapped and there are terrorist bombings; the situation will be fully resolved only if a settlement can be reached that respects human rights.
I seek the Minister's views on the following human rights issues: first, the question of military justice. The Colombian Government have recently proposed legislation to enable the military to conduct judicial processes in areas where the civilian authorities do not have a significant presence. Vice-President Santos was helpful, fair and open in describing the legislation as a limited set of powers, saying that there would be no sense of military impunity; if military officers abused the powers action would be taken against them—they would have no immunity in that respect. The powers would not be used where civilian authorities, as the preferable alternative, could be used. I hope the Minister will say that it is on the British Government's agenda to ensure that the powers are used appropriately.
Secondly, the question of impunity is significant and the Northern Ireland example is relevant. Settling a conflict requires exceptional measures, but they must be applied appropriately. People who have been convicted of terrorist murders are free again on the streets of Northern Ireland; exceptional measures were required to settle the conflict and it is helpful to see the situation in that context. However, in Northern Ireland, people were released on licence; they were not pardoned, and the terms on which they were released were important—the terms had to be acceptable. Convicted terrorists have no legitimate guise; they have gained no military authority. In the Colombian context, the concern is that paramilitaries who are demobilised could appear in a legitimate guise. Freedom from sanction is one thing, but being able to reappear in a position of power, having committed human rights abuses, is quite another.
We are interested in the resolutions proposed by the United Nations human rights commission. We hope that they will be given teeth with an action plan, but that has still not been proposed, even though the UN has made recommendations and continues to write regular reports. The end goal is to create a space in which people can act safely in a political context. Again, Vice-President Santos was helpful in pointing out that in the political context in Colombia, some left-wing politicians and trade unionists are able to succeed. I do not say that because I support left-wing politicians but because it is a sign of political health. Vice-President Santos cited the example of the mayor of Bogota, which is appropriate, because if people can engage in the normal political process they have moved on from engaging in the illegal, paramilitary process.

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In 2003, 68 trade unionists were killed, and many members of the opposition who oppose the political status quo in Colombia still cannot operate in the usual political sphere because they fear death and do not feel sufficiently protected by the state. I would be grateful for any reassurance that the Minister can provide.
Finally, military assistance between the two countries remains a concern. I know that other Members have asked questions about that and that it is limited to technical assistance. However, it is always helpful when talking about assistance between our two countries to reiterate the United Kingdom's clear and strong human rights agenda. After all, the Government introduced the Human Rights Act 1998 and, as I regularly restate, they require the recipients of their aid and assistance to respect human rights as we do. The Government must assure us that that assistance is monitored effectively, and that they are confident that it is not being abused. That was the subject of the early-day motion that attracted so much attention.
I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this important subject. I hope that the Minister will assure us that human rights in Colombia remain high on the Government's agenda, and that the UK can offer genuine assistance and friendship to the Colombian Government and to all the other agencies that work in Colombia. I hope that they can reach a peace settlement, not exactly like the Northern Ireland peace settlement, because we are not quite there yet, but one that at least mirrors its demilitarisation. That was a significant step forward, and to reach even that stage would be a tremendous achievement for the Colombian people.
3.46 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs: I am exceedingly grateful that the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) has secured the debate and enabled us to discuss these issues openly. It is not parliamentary flannel to say that I warmly welcome the measured tone and balance of his contribution. One of the frustrations of dealing with the situation in Colombia is that people with the best motives sometimes lack that balance, and that does not help any of us to make progress. I immediately confirm that we share the hon. Gentleman's view that the human rights situation in Colombia merits great attention. Human rights lie at the heart of the Government's agenda and policy on Colombia.
Colombia's problems are immense and extraordinarily long-standing. They stem from a potent mix of drug trafficking and the wealth that that brings to those involved, a continuing 40-year armed conflict that followed decades of violence, and an historical lack of state control over huge swathes of the country, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. The activities of three large illegal armed groups and scores of smaller organisations, as well as of criminal gangs, have made Colombia one of the world's most violent countries. Serious human rights abuses, which affect principally the civilian population, are the inevitable consequence of these problems.
In 2002, President Alvaro Uribe was elected with a strong mandate to tackle these problems. His first priority was to re-establish state control over the whole
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of Colombia to provide security for the whole population. From the outset, we made it clear that we support his efforts to deal with the dual and linked problems of armed conflict and the trade in drugs. It is critical, however, that those efforts are grounded in a complete and unconditional respect for human rights and international humanitarian law. Indeed, I made that clear to President Uribe when I met him in Bogota last May and in all my subsequent discussions with his colleagues. The London declaration of July 2003, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, was adopted following a meeting of 24 Governments and international organisations. The blunt message that security was necessary, but not at the expense of human rights, was repeated loud and clear in the presence of senior members of the Colombian Government, including Vice-President Santos. We have continued that dialogue since then.
The hon. Gentleman was absolutely right to say that the situation in Colombia is unique and requires unique solutions; there are no off-the-shelf solutions from elsewhere in the world. He also rightly underlined the significant problem in Colombia with respect to the fact that the writ of the Government and state authority does not spread far enough in the country, so that people are beholden to terrorist groups and paramilitaries in a way that is not in their interests. I also agree that there are no simple, easy-to-deliver solutions and that the situation in Colombia is an acute form of the dilemma that faces all of us—balancing people's security against upholding and respecting their civil liberties and human rights. That is an aspect of the current difficulty in Colombia.
The hon. Gentleman referred to non-governmental organisations, which have a critical role to play in any civilised and developing society. That is particularly true in Colombia, where fundamental liberties are under threat from illegal armed groups. Non-governmental organisations have a very important role to play in bringing problems to the attention of local authorities, the Government and the international community. We work with those organisations, and I pay tribute to the work that many of their staff undertake in difficult circumstances. I also believe that civil society more generally must be part of the solution for Colombia, rather than part of the problem, as it has sometimes been portrayed.
We put our money where our mouth is, and give financial and political support to the work of NGOs such as the Peace Brigades International, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Plan, and Save the Children. That is an important priority for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We have continued to make our view clear to the Colombian Government: respect for NGOs and their work must be a priority. We need to continue to make that point.
Although senior Colombian figures have made some unfortunate statements about NGOs—I think that the hon. Gentleman referred to those—I do not believe that the President is deliberately trying to target civil society. I am, however, aware of the danger, in the Colombian context, that certain statements may be taken by illegal armed groups as a green light to attack NGOs and their staff. That is a real concern and it is unacceptable.
I know the speech that the hon. Gentleman was referring to. I have always said to the President and other Ministers in Colombia that if there are specific

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concerns about alleged links between certain non-governmental human rights organisations and terrorist groups, they should be tackled through due legal process. A blanket condemnation putting all NGOs and human rights organisations in the same basket should not be made. I have made that point and so have other Ministers. The Colombian Government have listened and responded, and we shall continue to put those views.
The President's policies are aimed at cracking down on the illegal armed groups that are responsible for the vast majority of human rights abuses in Colombia. That approach has yielded some impressive results in some areas of fundamental rights. Clearly, much more remains to be done, but we see those improvements as the start of a long and complex process in which we want to be involved—helping the Government to extend those successes.
We are acutely aware of the plight of Colombian trade unionists and other vulnerable groups, particularly with respect to human rights, and have made it plain to the Government that they must provide adequate protection from threats and attacks for those groups that are at risk. Our assessment is that although the situation is still critical, it has improved in the past 12 months. Fewer trade unionists have been murdered and the perpetrators of several murders have been brought to justice. The hon. Gentleman alluded to that.
Our contacts with the Colombian authorities, and, indeed, UK trade unionists, on trade union issues, are complemented by regular discussions with NGOs and trade unions themselves. We have raised individual cases of concern with the authorities and have facilitated visits to the UK by Colombian trade union leaders to allow them to tell their stories first hand to wider audiences. I have met many of those trade unionists.
As the hon. Gentleman said, NGOs are concerned about the effect of the intensification of the armed conflict, and of the President's policies, on the civilian population. The humanitarian crisis is severe, with between 2 million and 3 million Colombians driven from their homes by the conflict. We are also concerned about the illegal armed groups' adoption of new tactics, such as encircling villages to prevent the population from fleeing, thus forcing them to co-operate. That must stop.
We also share the concerns of civil society and our partners in the international community and the UN system about the interlinked problems of impunity and collusion between some members of the armed forces and police, and paramilitary groups. We have expressed publicly our conviction that the Colombian Government need to take early and effective action to stop collusion and to bring quickly to justice anyone accused of human rights abuses. Again, I think that it has to be acknowledged that there has been some progress in that area. About 15 military figures and 20 policemen were recently arrested for collusion with the paramilitaries, and I very much welcome that action.
We shall certainly continue to exert pressure on the Colombian Government to deal effectively with the problems and to meet their obligations under international law. We also believe that it is important for the Government to take rapid and effective measures to
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implement the 27 recommendations of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Progress so far has been slow and we need to look at ways to improve that situation along with our partners.

We have also made it plain to the Colombian Government that we are concerned about the granting of judicial powers to the armed forces and about the future of the paramilitary peace process.
I know that the issue of UK assistance to Colombia provokes as much comment and controversy within this debate as any other issue. Principally, our assistance focuses on two areas: first, on human rights and social development, and secondly, on the fight against the trade in illegal drugs. Recent projects have dealt with creating a culture of non-violence in urban centres and helped poor agricultural producers to market their produce more effectively. Our embassy is crucially involved in those processes. When I was in Bogota in May, I was able to announce the funding for four community human rights ombudsmen in key conflict zones to provide an independent source of advice and assistance to Colombian citizens.
On the anti-narcotics front, we are actively assisting the Colombian Government in the war against drugs, as drugs are an integral part of the problem faced by Colombia. They are also our problem—80 per cent. of the cocaine that arrives in this country derives from Colombia.
The key issue of concern, to which the hon. Gentleman referred in respect of early-day motion 333, is the issue of UK military assistance. Compared to help in the anti-narcotics field, UK military assistance is small scale. It is centred on areas of direct benefit to the Colombian civilian population. We therefore fundamentally believe that it would be counter-productive to suspend it, since that would affect negatively the very civilian population whom we wish to help.
Recent assistance has been in anti-explosives training for police and military officers tasked with defusing bombs, which are often directed at civilian targets. We have also brought Colombian military officers to the UK to participate in senior staff training courses. An important element of all such courses is the role of the military in a democratic society and the need for an understanding of human rights concerns. In the same way we have also provided, along with the UN, training in human rights issues for the Colombian armed forces.
I can give a categorical assurance that no UK military assistance has been given to individuals or units known, or suspected to have been, implicated in human rights abuses or in collusion with paramilitary forces. I fundamentally believe that to be the case, and some of the things that are printed and written about the subject with no basis in fact do not help anyone in Colombia in addressing the issues and in taking the situation forward.
I will now deal with the UN recommendations and the London declaration. We have made it clear that we firmly believe that the Colombian Government must live up to the commitments made in the London declaration last year. I was pleased that President Uribe stressed the importance of that in his recent speech to the European Parliament. Our ambassador in Bogota is taking part in the follow-up process to the London

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meeting by participating in the working group set up to monitor progress on the commitments. The regular dialogue between Government and civil society representatives facilitated by the group is a vital and integral part of the process. Put bluntly, I strongly believe that Colombia has a moral obligation to carry out its task in respect of those commitments. I will be visiting Colombia soon and will raise the issues again.
There are many threats to the enjoyment of full human rights by the Colombian population. The illegal armed groups have not taken any notice of the recommendations of the United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights, which were addressed to them. They continue to torture, murder, kidnap and engage in drug trafficking and to commit the vast majority of human right abuses.
Although we recognise the progress made in some areas and applaud the Colombian Government for what they have achieved in the relatively short time that they have been in power, we will continue to urge them to take urgent and effective action to address the many remaining issues of concern, especially those of impunity and collusion between state forces and the paramilitaries. We will balance regular contact with the Colombian authorities at the highest levels, to keep up pressure on the issues, with close contacts with civil society, to ensure that our policies take into account the important issues, concerns and priorities.

BBC Monitoring
4 pm
Dr. Gavin Strang: I am grateful to have this opportunity to draw hon. Members' attention to an institution whose work is vital to our country in the light of the threats that we face today. In 1939, as the world stood on the brink of war, the BBC first established a service to monitor foreign broadcasts. A week before the outbreak of the second world war, 50 monitors moved into the Evesham headquarters. By 1942, BBC Monitoring had flourished—for obvious reasons—with 500 employees, and in 1943, the service moved into its present site in Caversham Park in Reading. With the end of the second world war and the lowering of the iron curtain, BBC Monitoring became a vital tool in observing the development and conclusion of the cold war. As I shall discuss later, in recent years, BBC Monitoring has again adapted to meet Britain's needs after the cold war and 11 September.
BBC Monitoring is a division of the BBC, part of the BBC World Service. It is funded separately, receiving about —22 million from its stakeholders and raising about —4 million in other revenue, including commercial income. BBC Monitoring's stakeholders are its four principal customers: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office and its agencies and the BBC World Service. They provide funding and influence the priority given to the areas covered. It is worth describing the sheer scale of the operation conducted by BBC Monitoring. Covering about 150 countries and 100 languages, it tracks more than 3,000 sources in the international media. Selecting and translating material, the unit publishes an average of 1,000 reports daily, giving a comprehensive and well-judged portrayal of events worldwide. In addition to around 400 staff at Caversham Park, it has five bureaux abroad: in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in Moscow, Kiev, Nairobi and Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. It does not just translate and relay what has been broadcast, but analyses material to produce a viable picture of events. Reports published by BBC Monitoring cover all areas relevant to those interested in foreign affairs, including politics, security, human rights and organised crime. Clients can choose the type of reports that they wish to receive and how they receive them, including by internet or e-mail.
New sources are always appearing and BBC Monitoring is always looking for them. New technology brings new opportunities. It has introduced digital technology to develop multimedia projects, enabling customers to receive reports combining audio, video and the written word. Customers can also receive a live feed of a television station via the internet.
To provide a truly global service, BBC Monitoring works in partnership with the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service, or FBIS, a partnership that began in 1941. Britain does not have the capability alone to provide a detailed assessment of events in every corner of the earth, but there are many parts where we are exceptionally well placed to do so, often owing to our historic connections to those areas. In those parts of the world, we can provide a package second to none, and BBC Monitoring does the world a service. Working with the FBIS means a partnership with global reach: the two

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are perfectly complementary. The FBIS provides coverage that is vital to our Government—of the Chinese media, for example—and BBC Monitoring provides information that is vital to the US Government, such as coverage of Afghanistan.
The value of BBC Monitoring's work can be divided into two broad categories. First, it provides hard information about particular events worldwide. It was the partnership between BBC Monitoring and the FBIS that drew attention to the statement by an al-Qaedan group claiming responsibility for this month's atrocity in Madrid. The statement was spotted in a London-based Arabic newspaper. There are occasions when a particular broadcast is itself a significant event. Last year, hon. Members will remember Libya's announcement in December that it had programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction that it was prepared to dismantle. Before the Prime Minister gave his speech welcoming Libya's statement, BBC Monitoring was asked to check that that statement had actually been broadcast as agreed.
BBC Monitoring is also invaluable in providing its customers with information on the political climate in the area in question, including perceptions of Britain and our allies. In recent years, it has included in its work the monitoring of hate speech—broadcasts that incite violence. Countries whose media are being monitored for hate speech include the former Yugoslavia, the Ivory Coast and Israel-Palestine. Colleagues will, I am sure, agree that it is important to have a measure of the political temperature in those areas.
BBC Monitoring staff are not just skilled in languages; they have a broad and deep understanding of the countries in question and are therefore able to provide a good picture of the attitudes prevailing. This is an important point, which may sometimes be lost. In my view, it is not possible to overstate the importance of that expertise. Yes, BBC Monitoring is about sophisticated modern equipment, skilled engineers and expert linguists, but nothing is more important than the ability to put the information received into context, and that knowledge comes from the vast experience that BBC Monitoring staff have of the particular part of the world to which they are assigned.
BBC Monitoring is a tremendous national asset that is very important in today's world. We must nourish it. I know that the Government share that view. Indeed, the Foreign Office Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Mr. Rammell), told us last April that BBC Monitoring
"is the main open source provider of information for the Government and the BBC World Service. It provides a valuable service to its stakeholders and to others throughout Government. By tracking world events and reactions to them, including, importantly, perceptions of British foreign policy, it assists the Government in their decision-making processes."—[Official Report, Westminster Hall, 29 April 2003; Vol. 404, c. 30WH.]
At this point it is probably worth reminding ourselves that BBC Monitoring provides a large amount of the material that makes the BBC World Service the best known and most respected broadcaster in the world.
In a world in which our security is threatened by international terrorism, monitoring has taken on a greater importance, and BBC Monitoring clearly has an
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important role to play. There has understandably been a considerable focus on secret intelligence over recent months, but people are perhaps less aware that a lot of the information used in counter-terrorism is in the public domain. That information is conveyed to counter-terrorism staff by BBC Monitoring. It is important to realise that among the customers of BBC Monitoring are the Defence Intelligence Staff, the assessments staff, the intelligence agencies and the National Criminal Intelligence Service.
The cold war is miles behind us, and the threat that we face today is totally different. We have some experience, sadly, of terrorism at home, and that has no doubt been useful, but the threat facing Britain today—international terrorism—is far more dispersed than any previous threat to our security. BBC Monitoring, with its reach and skills, is of tremendous value to Britain and our allies in the face of that threat.
I should like to say a few words about the importance of global coverage. The global reach of the BBC Monitoring-FBIS partnership is crucial to its customers; there is widespread agreement among those working in foreign policy that the partnership's global coverage is critical. During the cold war, to put it bluntly, we knew where our opponent was, but in the current climate we simply do not know where we must look next to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Clearly, then, we should maintain global surveillance.
In addition, international terrorism is one of a number of global themes of which we need an accurate and comprehensive picture. Just as with other global themes, such as organised crime, we need global coverage to get a clear picture of international terrorism. From my remarks, my hon. Friend the Minister will not be surprised that I take the view that it is imperative that BBC Monitoring is adequately funded. Hon. Members may be surprised to learn, however, that BBC Monitoring funding from its stakeholders has actually declined in the past decade.
The worst of the damage was done in 1996, when more than 50 jobs and £1.2 million were axed. Since 1997, stakeholder funding has increased slightly in real terms, most significantly in the financial year 2001–02, but that slight increase has not repaired the gap in funding, and stakeholder funding to BBC Monitoring is 7 per cent. less in real terms today than it was in 1993–94. In parallel with that reduction in funding, BBC Monitoring has increased its work load many times over in terms of both input and output.
The number of broadcast stations and publications that are monitored has grown rapidly. In countries that are crucial to our Government's agenda such as Afghanistan, the media are flourishing, and many new outlets require the attention of BBC Monitoring, whose output has also increased massively. Rather than a single paper product, it now produces thousands of bespoke products, delivered to people in real time and wherever they need it, to our military in Basra or to Foreign office staff in Baghdad, for example. That has meant a huge retraining of staff and restructuring of operations. At the same time, many of the efficiencies currently being encouraged in our Departments have already been carried out by BBC Monitoring.
BBC Monitoring and the FBIS form an excellent partnership in providing global coverage. No one would argue that BBC Monitoring should be funded to the

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extent that it alone could provide detailed coverage of all the media in every part of the world—that is the strength of the partnership with the FBIS. However, as I said earlier, for various reasons there are parts of the world in which we are exceptionally well placed to do the job. It has been made clear to me that if BBC Monitoring were not there to do the job—if, for example, it was allowed to decline—the FBIS could not simply pick up the pieces and take on the work itself. The importance of BBC Monitoring to Britain in the world today means that it is crucial that the Government stakeholders make available the money that it requires to develop the excellent and important service that it provides. Indeed, I would argue that the case for investing in BBC Monitoring is stronger today than it has ever been.
I welcome the Government's provision of additional resources for our intelligence and security services. However, a lot of the information that the agencies use is open source material from BBC Monitoring. Such open source information provides a context into which secret intelligence data can be placed. The Government will fail to maximise the benefits that they should get from secret intelligence if our main provider of open source information is not adequately resourced. In the current climate, given the growing importance of being informed about what is going on worldwide, we should surely be providing more, not less, support to BBC Monitoring.
BBC Monitoring is a tremendous resource. It has an august past and a vital role in our future security. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will take this opportunity to put on record the tremendous service provided by BBC Monitoring and undertake to do what he can to ensure that it receives the resources that it needs to perform its crucial role in the years to come.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I advise the House that the right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) has obtained the permission of the right hon. Member for Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh (Dr. Strang), the Minister and the Chair to participate briefly.
4.12 pm
Mr. James Arbuthnot: I obtained permission, but only late in the day, and for that I apologise.
I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh (Dr. Strang) for allowing me to contribute briefly to his debate. I agree with everything that he has said and echo in particular his point about the value that the BBC gains and gives to this country from its partnership with the FBIS in the United States. That value is phenomenal, and we are all in debt to the BBC for the service that it gives partly as a result of that partnership.
Only this morning, I checked the BBC Monitoring service to compare the coverage in Israeli Hebrew newspapers with that in Palestinian newspapers of yesterday's death of Ahmed Yassin. The comparison that I was able to make was unlike anything that I could have found anywhere else, and it was interesting to see that even the Hebrew newspapers made comments such as:
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"With his death he has bequeathed to us another death."
It is important to be able to find out that the Hebrew newspapers are saying that. The BBC Monitoring service is extremely valuable to this country, and I hope that the Minister will consider carefully what the right hon. Gentleman said.
4.14 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs: My right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh (Dr. Strang) has raised an important issue. He recently visited the BBC Monitoring service at Caversham, as I did last September. In a previous incarnation as a humble sub-editor at the BBC World Service in the 1970s, I made use of its output, so I have been well aware of it for many years.
As my right hon. Friend said, BBC Monitoring supplies news, information and comment from the world's media. It covers a wide range of topics, including politics, elections, international security, terrorism, human rights, technology, the environment and economic affairs. It is the main open source provider of information for Her Majesty's Government and the BBC World Service.
BBC Monitoring was founded in 1939 on the eve of the second world war. By 1942, it had grown from having 50 staff to about 500. In those days, it played a vital role in relaying information from France to UK Government headquarters. After the war, it turned its attention to developments in the iron curtain countries and the unfolding cold war. There is no doubt that the service has played a valuable role in the recent past. Today, as my right hon. Friend mentioned, it operates from bureaux in Moscow, Kiev, Tashkent, Baku and Nairobi, in addition, of course, to Caversham Park, near Reading. In co-operation with its American counterpart, it can provide global coverage of events.
BBC Monitoring has adapted to changing geographical priorities and huge changes in the information environment flowing from recent technological developments. It now has access to video footage and websites and distributes material electronically—facilitating a more rapid response—in greater quantities. Users who fund the service can customise the information that they receive through a password-protected intranet.
BBC Monitoring used to be funded through grant in aid from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to which the Ministry of Defence contributed 20 per cent. A review of the funding regime was carried out in 1994, with the aim of making it more customer-focused. The review recommended a move from grant in aid to a stakeholder regime to be shared among primary Government users and the BBC World Service. The new regime came into effect in 1997, with costs divided as follows. The FCO paid 40 per cent., as did the MOD. The Cabinet Office got away with 1 per cent. and the BBC World Service paid 19 per cent.
Those shares were adjusted in 2001 better to reflect use of the service and were set at the current levels. The FCO and MOD shares were reduced to 33 per cent.; the Cabinet Office share was increased to 12 per cent.; and the BBC World Service share went up to 22 per cent. Total funding is at about £22 million per annum, with

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the FCO share amounting to approximately £7 million. There is also limited commercial income from other Government users, foreign Governments, and commercial organisations. Last year, a further independent review was undertaken to explore radical options for funding. It recommended no change in the current funding mechanism, although it suggested that a benchmarking exercise be undertaken to make the costing of products and services more meaningful.
I have described how BBC Monitoring has successfully adapted its activities in the light of changing circumstances during the years since it was founded. It now faces three main challenges: changes in the information environment, changes in strategic and geographical priorities, and the prevailing climate in favour of reduced public spending.
Never before has so much information been available to people at the touch of a button. Staff at the Foreign Office in London can read this morning's American newspapers; the right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) can read this morning's Arab and Israeli press. Information comes at us from all directions—from television, radio, the print media, the internet, mobile phones and so on. If anything, the problem these days is information overload, not information shortage. That is very different from the dark days of 1939, when we struggled to keep track of what was going on just across the channel.
As we have seen, the geographical focus of our interests has shifted and strategic priorities have changed over time. The campaign against terrorism is now a top priority. BBC Monitoring plays a valuable role in providing information on developments in the middle east and elsewhere. It continues to play a key role in covering closed societies such as North Korea, and can make a particularly useful contribution to our understanding of developments in countries with little freedom of information and tight state control of the
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media. The question obviously arises: should it focus only on those priority targets, or should it continue to offer global coverage?
The financial climate sets an important backdrop for our thinking. The Chancellor, in his Budget speech, warned that the next public expenditure round would be tough for most Departments, and that certainly includes the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That comes at a time when we are facing a number of pressures. For example, the campaign against terrorism has led to increased spending on the security of our overseas staff. We also have to find substantial additional resources—both human and financial—to enable us to establish a meaningful presence in Iraq.
My right hon. Friend called for additional funding to be made available to BBC Monitoring. I cannot speak for the other users of the service, but I know that it faces the same pressures on resources as the FCO, and I find it difficult to envisage any increase in funding for it. Frankly, we will have to think hard about whether we are able to maintain existing levels of spending. The pressure on public spending will force us to make hard choices. We will have to look rigorously at our spending programmes and what they contribute to the achievement of our objectives. The annual £7 million grant to BBC Monitoring is substantial in FCO terms, which we must take into account as we weigh up the options.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the points that he has made today and I assure him that they will be borne in mind as we consider the difficult issues in the months ahead. He will appreciate that no decisions have been taken about the future of BBC Monitoring. The issue is under consideration, but I hope that he will understand that I am unable to go into further detail today since no decisions have been made.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at twenty-two minutes past Four o'clock.