Westminster Hall Sitting of 14 September 2004

Preamble
[MR. EDWARD O'HARA in the Chair]

People with Down's Syndrome (Education)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Vernon Coaker.]
9.30 am
Dr. Brian Iddon: Recently, the Down's Syndrome Association published a report entitled "Access to Education: a Report on the Barriers to Education for Children with Down's Syndrome". I want to draw it to the attention of the House and the Minister. We launched the report in Parliament on 26 May this year, and the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), kindly attended that launch. I am pleased to see in the Chamber my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children, who also has responsibility for young people. I look forward to her response to what I say.
During this year's Down's syndrome awareness week, the education support pack for special schools was launched. It was produced, with the support of the Department for Education and Skills, in the wake of the DSA's education support pack for mainstream schools, which in 2003 won the "Books for Learning and Teaching" award, given by the National Association for Special Education Needs and The Times Educational Supplement, at the NASEN annual conference.
Two babies are born with Down's syndrome every day in the United Kingdom; that is roughly one in every 1,000 births. Today, there are 60,000 people in the UK with the condition, which is caused by an extra chromosome in a baby's cells. People with the syndrome have varying degrees of learning difficulty. I know some Down's syndrome people who have quite exceptional skills, for example in drama and music. At the other end of the spectrum, there are Down's syndrome children who will never cope with mainstream education, and who need a special school.
The DSA is the main UK charity carrying out initiatives to improve the life of people with Down's syndrome. It was originally set up as a parent-led organisation in 1970 to provide advice to its members, but it now also campaigns on behalf of people with Down's syndrome. I am pleased to say that it has moved from its previous headquarters at 155, Mitcham road to Dr. Langdon Down's house, where he carried out all his research. That is now known as the Langdon Down centre, and is in Langdon park, near Teddington. I look forward to visiting that fine, listed building in the not-too-distant future.
Over the past 50 years there has been a dramatic improvement in the life expectancy of people with Down's syndrome, and today that is beyond the age of 60, which is good news. However, that has brought its own problems. The DSA is challenging health and care professionals to stop discriminating against the
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40 per cent. of people with Down's syndrome who develop Alzheimer's disease later in life. That is a debate for another day; suffice it to say that dementia presents itself much earlier in people with Down's syndrome. The DSA has a network of regional development officers, who are available to provide bespoke training on Down's syndrome and related matters such as dementia to groups of health and care professionals and others.
In 1999, the DSA produced a report entitled "He'll Never Join the Army" on access to the NHS for people with Down's syndrome. That report, too, was highlighted in the House, and I tabled early-day motions and parliamentary questions and arranged Adjournment debates and even a meeting with a Health Minister on the subject. Those with Down's syndrome were experiencing considerable discrimination in the NHS at the time. I am pleased to say that the culture in the NHS is slowly changing, and that is helped by awareness training in medical schools on people with Down's syndrome. However, the "Health Alert" campaign continues. At the moment, its focus is on the ageing of Down's syndrome people and, of course, dementia.
I seem to have become one of the unofficial spokespersons in this place for people with Down's syndrome—a role that has given me a lot of satisfaction. I have worked closely with the DSA since 1997. When I was elected to Parliament in that year, I was persuaded to campaign on behalf of people with Down's syndrome by one of my local Labour party members, Flo McBrien, who lives in Farnworth in my constituency—her daughter, Shelley, now in her 20s, was being discriminated against by the NHS—and by others, including Joanne Harris of Shrewsbury, whose parents and friends were raising money to send Jo to the USA for a heart-lung transplant operation. Right hon. and hon. Members may know that Joanne Harris was the young woman who received the first cheque when the winner of the first "Big Brother" programme came out of the house. She got a lot of publicity a few years ago at that time.
Down's syndrome is the most common form of single learning disability in this country. There are approximately 16,000 school-aged children who have the syndrome in the UK. It is important that they receive the appropriate level of support and training to ensure that they are able to have the highest possible quality of life.
A welcome move away from institutional care to semi-independent living for many Down's syndrome adults has highlighted the need for better training and education. In March, the DSA undertook a survey of 5,500 of its parent members with children aged between two and 19. It asked about their experiences of the British education system, and 1,500 of those invited to respond returned their survey forms. The survey covered both mainstream and special schools and collected evidence from all 120 postcode areas in the UK, thereby giving the fullest representation. I will deal with each of the major concerns in turn.
It is essential that Down's syndrome children's needs are assessed as early as possible. The vast majority of children with the syndrome are receiving a statement of their special educational needs from the local education authority, although one in three parents found that to be a very tedious process. Many of the statements were

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considered unacceptable at first drafting and needed amending. Seven per cent. of parents encountered difficulties in getting their preferred school named in the child's statement. One family reported that
"The named school refused to accept our child unless full-time adult support was included in the statement. We appealed to a tribunal to get this but the LEA gave in a week before the tribunal hearing."
Obviously, that led to a lot of stress for the parents.
Another parent responded:
"The statement is tailored to resources".
Yet another stated:
"The statement was in place at the start of school but most of the items detailed did not happen until a term and a half, after a lot of discussion"
with the professionals.
Parents' comments received by the DSA showed that the statementing process can be unnecessarily protracted, causing avoidable stress and creating additional problems with provision at school. Although improvements have been made in that process, more needs to be done to make it simpler and easier for parents to follow. The DSA believes that efforts should be made by all LEAs to get the statements right at the first draft.
An important part of education for children with special educational needs is the amount of contact time with adult support workers—for example, in the classroom. Sixty-one per cent. of parents who took part in the DSA survey said that their child received 21 to 35 hours of support a week, although only 43 per cent. had that specified in the statement. Although 69 per cent. rated the work of the adult support workers as either excellent or very good, many were concerned about the level of training that the support workers had undertaken. One parent commented:
"I feel that the job of learning support assistant is a specialised position and yet the person is paid the minimum wage and expected to be dedicated and trained … it is very difficult to get dedicated staff under these circumstances."
Another parent reported:
"The Headteacher does not allow us as parents to have the names or access to any of our son's support staff".
Yet another one said:
"The one to one helper is very good, but … if she is ill then he cannot attend nursery because there is no cover".
The DSA is concerned that statements do not always give a clear enough indication of a child's level of need for adult support. In the short term, the DSA recommends that specialist training and information should be offered to teachers and support staff throughout the UK. In the longer term, the DSA believes that a nationally recognised qualification, with a dedicated unit on the specific learning profile of children with Down's syndrome, would resolve many of the issues surrounding learning support assistants.
Speech and language therapy can play a vital role in the development of children with Down's syndrome, although unfortunately that form of therapy is not as widely available as some would like. The service tends to fall in the gap between health and education provision. Most parents participating in the survey reported that a
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specified amount of speech and language therapy had not been included in their child's statement. Sixty-six per cent. of parents felt that the state provision of therapy did not meet their child's needs, and 35 per cent. felt that the quality of therapy delivered was poor.
The comments of many parents reflect the fact that they have to battle to get the therapy for their children, with long waits and poor service being the main problems. One parent commented:
"I am still fighting for my daughter to receive speech and language therapy as she is desperate for it. She has received one 30-minute session in three years."
Another parent told the DSA that the speech therapist had advised that, in her opinion, it is not, and would not be, prudent to teach speech production to their child as what came out of their daughter's mouth was a reflection of what she had in her brain—namely, not a lot.
The DSA feels that the provision of speech and language therapy falls far short of the needs of children with Down's syndrome. There should be a steep improvement in the quality of service, with an obligation for LEAs to buy in provision from the private sector, if necessary. One of the problems is a shortage of therapists, which the Government need to address fairly urgently.
On Down's syndrome children's pre-school provision, most children—about 80 per cent.—appear to be receiving adult support, although a third of parents reported difficulties in obtaining it. Only 58 per cent. of parents had applied for a statement of their child's pre-school special educational needs; 25 per cent. had not applied; and 13.5 per cent. had been told that a statement was not necessary at that level of education. Only 42 per cent. of initial statements for that age group specified the amount of support and therapy required by the child. Many parents were unsure of whether statements are appropriate or even applicable for children of that age. Parents of children in that age group need to be correctly informed by the LEA or other agencies of what exactly their Down's syndrome child is entitled to.
The confusion does not seem to be limited just to parents. One submission stated:
"We were unable to have an LEA nursery place as our child had no statement. The LEA said no statement was needed, the head said otherwise"—
total confusion. Another parent reported:
"We are currently awaiting a proposed statement from the LEA for pre-school support. This whole process has taken eighteen months, despite our insistence on starting the process early in order to avoid delays".
To ensure that adequate support is available from the beginning of a Down's syndrome child's life, LEAs should make a commitment to begin the statementing process as soon as the child enters pre-school provision. Also, parents should be encouraged to request a statement during or prior to pre-school provision, and should not have to wait until their child receives such provision. Would it not be a good idea if all the agencies came together and prepared a booklet to guide the parents of a Down's syndrome child from the minute that the child is born in all matters—health, education or otherwise—that affect their child?
I turn to post-16 education and transition planning for those with Down's syndrome. It is important to remember that education for people with Down's

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syndrome—as with any other adult—should not be forced to end when they reach the age of 16. They are as entitled as any other student to continue their education, and it is important that support at the further education level is also in place. That is one of the most difficult areas across the education spectrum. Parents responding to that section of the DSA survey were carers of young people with Down's syndrome in the 15 to 19 age group. Some 17 per cent. of parents of that age group were not offered a transition planning meeting, and, of those who had had such a meeting with their LEA, only 69 per cent. were offered a meeting in the presence of the young person being talked about.
Provision of information prior to the meetings was poor; few options were presented by the LEA for consideration. Some 31.5 per cent. of parents were given no opportunity to comment on the draft plan for their young adult, and 28 per cent. of parents did not even receive a copy of the transition plan at any stage—prior, during or after the meeting. Some parents reported very welcome news of support and inclusion, but others mentioned problems: a lack of contact with the Connexions service in their area and a lack of support and understanding at further education establishments in general. One parent reported:
"Sixteen years of inclusive mainstream experience was disregarded by an archaic college system which segregates my son with others with learning difficulties, literally in the farthest corner of the building, away from mainstream typical students."
Another parent said:
"No review was conducted at sixteen when he left school. No information about college or training was provided over the last four years. There has been no contact with the Connexions service; they are useless."
I should add that the Connexions service is still bedding down; I see that in my own town of Bolton. Perhaps the service will get better; I hope so. The DSA believes that the range of alternative accreditation schemes in further education is not well used, and that that denies many students with Down's syndrome the wherewithal to measure their achievements. Further education establishments are less likely to be inclusive and integrated than any of the other educational establishments that I have mentioned: that needs attention. Employment and work-placement schemes for young people with Down's syndrome are also under-represented; that also needs attention.
Mainstream schools receive an extra £4,000 to £8,000 for most children with statements, in addition to the £2,800 received by primary schools or the £3,400 received by secondary schools to educate each pupil. Overall, 80 per cent. of parents are satisfied with their children's placement, and 68 per cent. reported that they had not faced a significant struggle to get their child into the facility of their choice. Fortunately, those figures are quite high.
Disturbingly, one in three parents felt that they had encountered prejudice or discrimination, including from other parents or carers. More than half of parents had encountered a lack of specialist knowledge and skills among teaching professionals. Some 11.6 per cent. of parents would prefer a special unit that is integrated into a mainstream school. I therefore welcome steps taken by Bolton LEA three years ago to co-locate Rumworth school as a special unit with the 11 to 16 Ladybridge secondary school. That has allowed children with
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Down's syndrome to receive the support that they require from dedicated adult helpers and to integrate with mainstream pupils wherever and whenever they can.
Bolton is developing a similar provision for all children of primary school age with special needs, including those with Down's syndrome. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Greenfold special school in Farnworth. On the day of my visit, a large number of the children were spending time in a local primary school; that was a regular occurrence. The plan is to attach special units to primary schools, for the better integration of all Bolton children with special needs and other children of the same age.
Parents across the UK who have experience of special units that are integrated into secondary schools have welcomed the results. One parent responding to the DSA survey commented:
"My daughter attends a special unit within a mainstream school. She is very happy and well adjusted and is equally happy when mixing with her friends in the unit and also in the mainstream part of the school."
I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will give careful consideration to that way of integrating children with special needs, including those with Down's syndrome, into mainstream schools, while ensuring that they do not miss out on the adult support that is so vital for their development. The Bolton LEA reminded me that resources for special educational needs have doubled during the past decade and that some 90 per cent. of funds now go directly to the schools.
In summary, children with special educational needs such as those with Down's syndrome benefit significantly from good mainstream educational placements. Their gains in speech, language and literacy put them several years ahead of those in special schools. I am proud of the progress that this Government have made in meeting the needs of all people with learning difficulties, including those with Down's syndrome, but there is much more to do. I hope that we can all work together across the political divides to do it.
I am pleased to have had this opportunity to draw the Minister's attention to the important report of the Down's Syndrome Association, and I look forward to her response. Perhaps she would be willing to meet officers of the Down's Syndrome Association and me in the near future to discuss the contents of that excellent report in far more detail than is possible this morning.
Finally, I draw the attention of right hon. and hon. Members to early-day motion 1278 on the report and its contents, which I tabled on 25 May. I am pleased that so far 119 parliamentary colleagues have signed it, and I urge all others who can do so to sign it before the end of the Session. I look forward to my right hon. Friend's response once other Members have made their contributions.
9.52 am
Bob Spink: This morning, we see this Chamber at its very best: caring, compassionate and trying to help people in society to fulfil their potential. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon), who is a friend of mine. He is right to bring this important debate to the House and to praise the

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Down's Syndrome Association for its excellent report. I do not recall exactly but would guess that mine was one of the first signatures to his early-day motion.
I shall make a short speech and discuss the need for common sense. There is no political edge to what I have to say. I thank the Government for continuing to increase resources for care for special needs pupils. Generally, the Government are moving in the right direction, but I shall make some suggestions about balance in the inclusivity that they are pushing.
I praise our special schools. I have been the chairman and a governor of a special school. Such schools are a great joy. I often find that it is much nicer to go to them than to ordinary schools, and the best schools in my constituency are the special schools, which have special, very caring staff. The schools are sustained by wonderful groups of volunteers who help in many ways, whether that be through fundraising, organising social events or just helping children by listening to them, reading and so on.
Perhaps my most important point this morning is a cry on behalf of the moderate learning difficulties schools, which seem to be squeezed between the severe learning difficulties schools, which must be provided and do a wonderful job, and inclusivity in the mainstream. The MLD schools felt that they were being squeezed out somewhat. Heaped on to that, they were starting to be used as a place for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Such children were not really suited to a special school environment but could not easily be placed anywhere else, so it became a soft option to stick them in the MLD school. In some cases, that began to change the nature of those schools. Staff time began to be spent on dealing with emotional and behavioural difficulties rather than with the slightly different difficulties of straightforward special needs children, and the change caused disruption and distress to special needs children who suddenly saw different faces in their school. We must be careful not to put too many inappropriate EBD children into moderate learning difficulties schools.
Essex has several—four, five or six—moderate learning difficulties schools. The one in my constituency is Cedar Hall. It is a wonderful school; it does a fantastic job. I want it to go from strength to strength. I want it to be there to provide choice for parents, because some parents want their children to go into the mainstream and others think that their children are better off in such a special environment—I think in particular of Down's syndrome children. Parents often know best. They deserve a choice in education; that is my policy, as the Minister knows. For there to be a choice, there must be options. We need to ensure that we keep moderate learning difficulties schools. They must be available, and we must not disrupt them by putting emotional and behavioural difficulties children into them.
There is nothing wrong with inclusion; it is a great thing. Cedar Hall does what the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East was talking about: it has outreach into a mainstream school where it has some special classes. Its children go into the mainstream school sometimes for a Friday morning, and at other times for the whole day. Those who benefit most from that are probably the mainstream children, who learn to
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understand the range of physical and mental abilities among people. Therefore, there is a payback for both sides, and I very much welcome that.
The arrangement works extremely well in Castle Point. Cedar Hall goes into King John school, and The Deanes school—a boarding school—does sporting activities in the special school. It sends its physical education master to that special school to give its football team some rigour and discipline. That is fantastic; I want there to be much more of that.
I share some of the concerns of the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East on the statementing process. It is too long, it is too expensive, it starts too late, and it is a little hidebound by too much political correctness and too little common sense. I want it to be more flexible. I want it to be used as an instrument to benefit the child rather than to protect the professionals. I do not want the defensive approach that has crept into it in the past decade to continue; I want that to be relaxed.
I turn to the issue of speech therapy. When I go back to Keighley where I was born, they say, "Bobby, here, couldn't speak until he was 10—hasn't stopped since." I did not speak at all until I was six, and I went to speech therapy until I was 10 or 12. I left not because I had learned how to speak—as hon. Members know, I am not very good at that—but because it became too embarrassing for me to sit at the desk as a big boy with all the other little boys and to be given a sweet. They say that when they mended me they wished that they had put a switch in.
Speech therapy is very important. It is much more important to send kids from school with the ability to speak and communicate than it is with the ability to read and write. If somebody cannot read and write, they will get by and have a reasonable quality of life; they might get cheated or short-changed occasionally in shops, although they probably will not. However, if someone cannot talk—if they cannot make themselves understood because they cannot enunciate correctly—people will not understand them, and that becomes very embarrassing for both sides and people will turn away and avoid them. That truly affects quality of life and ability to perform in society. It is most important to put money into speech therapy, because sufferers will not be able to move forward until they can speak properly and make themselves understood. I want more effort put into speech therapy.
Speech therapy was withdrawn from Cedar Hall school for about three or four months from January 2003. I kicked up a stink and raised questions in the House, and now speech therapy has returned and there is better provision in that school. Cedar Hall had to divert some of its own money to pay for that, and it was right to do so because speech therapy is a great priority, but it should not have had to do so. So, like the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East, I ask the Minister to consider the issue of speech therapy carefully.
I want briefly to advertise Business Opportunities for the Physically Handicapped, which is in Canvey Island. I am going there at noon on Friday to meet Joan Lithcoe, who set up the establishment in 1993–94. Her family includes a special needs child. She set up BOPH to provide opportunities in business for people with special needs. It works extremely well and pulls together our community. Everybody loves a place on Canvey;

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everybody knows that 17 or 20 children, young adults and older adults go there. We know what a great joy it is for them to do something useful and get a small wage.
However, there are funding issues. It would cost much more to take those people out of BOPH and put them in county council-run day centres—it would cost society a fortune—yet the council cannot help by providing a few pounds a week of pump-priming funding to help support the young adults and adults in that establishment. We need some common sense and balance in supporting, funding and making sure that places such as BOPH can continue to provide more work and social opportunities for people with Down's syndrome and others with special needs.
I will hang my next comments on the term "education for life" because otherwise you may call me out of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I believe that, in a way, youth clubs provide education. For someone with Down's syndrome at least they provide education in social graces, contact with other people and speech, game-playing-building confidence by giving someone a place to go rather than sitting at home in front of the box.
An arbitrary rule has been brought in that hoiks people out of youth clubs at 25 years old. Someone with special needs, such as a Down's syndrome person who has gone to a youth club all their life and for whom it is part of their life and family and who does not understand the wider picture, is told, "Sorry, you've reached 25. You can't go any more." No questions are asked about whether it is appropriate for the person to go to the club. It would not be appropriate for some people at 20 years old, but for others it might be appropriate and right at the age of 35. There is no common sense, just an arbitrary line drawn at 25. They are told, "You will lose a part of your life." We cannot do that to vulnerable people in our society. The rule is a politically correct response, but the matter requires simple common sense. I ask the Minister to consider that policy. I have raised the issue in the House before, and I will raise it again because I think that it is nonsense.
I thank hon. Members for listening to my points. I hope that they did not find them too idiosyncratic. I thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for calling me.
10.4 am
Jim Dobbin: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) on introducing a debate on such an important topic. He has an excellent record at supporting issues such as this. As I understand it, the education of children with Down's syndrome is covered by education law and is not distinguished from the education of children with special educational needs. The Minister can correct me if that is not true. That is a sound basis, because it means that all children's special educational needs are individual and that each child should be treated in a way that ensures the best provision to develop their talents.
I have a special interest in education for children with disabilities as my two youngest grandchildren—they are brothers aged eight and four—both have a rare neuromuscular disorder and exceptionally complex educational needs. I know from personal experience that the laudable aims that I have described are not put
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into practice universally. Sadly, some children still come up against discrimination not from other children but from local education authorities, which for whatever reason are not providing equality of opportunity to equal access.
Having witnessed at first hand my daughter's struggle to obtain suitable education support for my grandsons and the difficulties that she has encountered in her dealings with the local educational authority, I certainly have sympathy and a soft spot for all parents of children with special educational needs, who must provide care and support. They face the added difficulties of finding out what the law says on such issues, finding the time to attend numerous hospital appointments, clinics and meetings, and finding the courage and confidence to speak out and demand the same rights that other children receive in education.
My daughter is a qualified educational psychologist, so she understands the statementing of children, the process, the appeals procedures and tribunals. At such tribunals, she has represented others in similar circumstances to herself. Officialdom always tells us what we cannot do, and very seldom explains how to achieve something. Looking round the Chamber, I see a few nods, because we have all received negative letters as a result of the bureaucratic system.
In my family's circumstances, the request was for a chair lift to ease the mobility of my grandson at school. The decision that was taken, after going through the whole process, including tribunal and appeals, was to move him to a school several miles away on the other side of the city, which put another hour and a half to two hours on his day's travelling. The cost of that was six times the amount that it would have cost to install a chair lift. The travelling involved and the support that he needs getting to and from school was extremely costly. Anyhow, the decision was taken and my daughter's family had to move house.
Parents have to advise schools and doctors. No one knows more about children than their parents, who find themselves in a serious situation. They have to advise all professionals on best practice and often have to engage the local education authority in a battle to obtain a full and supportive education that will give their children the opportunity that all parents want for their children: the right to an environment to develop their skills and talents to the full. Too many parents have to attend tribunals in order to obtain the education that their child needs.
Discrimination exists not only in schools but in many playgroups, nurseries, after-school clubs and holiday play schemes, which are restrictive and discriminatory in their admissions. Sometimes, the only holiday schemes that take children with special needs are those catering only for children with complex and exceptional requirements. That is perhaps because they are anxious about their responsibilities and their ability to meet those exceptional needs, and they may not have the skills and resources to meet the level of support that some individuals require.
Another problem is that education authorities, in order to meet their legal requirements, sometimes designate certain schools to provide for children with specific needs. In my experience, however, that deprives children of access to schools in their locality. Even when

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schools are willing to accept the children, the local authority can override that and make provision in another area where it has designated provision. Often, that designation is based purely on cost. For example, schools that need little adjustment and therefore less expenditure are often chosen, with little regard to the locality of the children, who then have to travel a considerable distance to school. That means that such pupils have a longer school day and a longer school journey than others. That was our experience. Such designations also mean that parents are excluded from the local community, as they have little contact with local parents. I believe that all parents and children should be given the same opportunity to choose a school in their locality.
Local education authorities need to be open about what they are doing with their special educational needs budgets. Schools should be open about how their budgets are spent. More accountability to parents is important; parents should be aware of why money is spent in certain areas. Formulae for the allocation of such budgets should be explained to avoid total confusion. At present, LEA support provision seems to be in the hands of officers who do not necessarily meet the relevant parents or children. The system for providing resources often leads to delays in provision and too much bureaucracy. Many professionals, such as teachers and educational psychologists, see the child and the parents and gather information to design an accurate programme, based on the child's strengths, weaknesses and areas of need, and that is sent for a decision by officers. Unfortunately, the officers are driven in some cases by policy based on formula and cost, and the resulting statement fits the policy and not the child. All children with special educational needs deserve a fast, efficient statement, to give them the best possible education. We often receive representations from constituents asking us to speed up that process.
Another form of exclusion exists in the way that services are provided for special educational needs. Medical, social and educational needs are provided for separately, but a seamless approach would surely be more beneficial to all. Why should it be necessary to take time out of school to attend speech therapy? Why can physiotherapy not be provided in school? Why are occupational therapists not working in schools to provide advice on seating, desk arrangements, lifting children and trying out equipment? A multi-agency approach would be of immense benefit to all in the classroom. Teachers and learning support assistants would learn from others; they would feel empowered by their new knowledge and feel less threatened. Children would spend more time in school, and all pupils would be aware of the benefits of such interventions. The practical help readily available on site would mean that more time would be spent on educational tasks.
I realise that I have spent time discussing special educational needs in a general way, but I feel that the same principles underlie education for all. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East about the desperate need for parents of children with Down's syndrome and other disabilities to have as much information as possible, which should be given to them in a clearly understood format. That does not seem to
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happen at present. That information should be upgraded as the children grow and their differing needs become apparent, and should be made available to schools and other agencies. It should also be explained to all teaching and non-teaching staff and to the children's classmates, to foster empathy and understanding. It is our experience that children learn faster than adults; they always make children with Down's syndrome and other needs feel more comfortable in their environment. The information should be explained in a positive way, emphasising the talents and strengths involved as well as the difficulties.
People often talk about the advantages that inclusion will give pupils with special educational needs, but there is another side to the coin. There are huge benefits for the teachers, parents and pupils of all schools in which the policy is inclusive. Discrimination is based on fear, and daily contact will help to promote the understanding of each individual's strengths and weaknesses.
In my constituency I have the pleasure of knowing a young man with Down's syndrome, who is now in his 30s. He did not go to school with my children, but attended the same youth club, the same church—in which he served as an altar boy—and a gymnastics class in the locality. He learned to ski, and represented the United Kingdom at the Paralympics. He brought back a medal and was rightly proud of his achievement, which was recognised by the local authority. Like many other children in his situation, he received very little provision for further education, which should be extended so that access to education can be lifelong. At present, some areas of provision seem better than others. My friend has a great love of life. He is a karaoke enthusiast, and a very good salsa dancer. His mother, who has worked hard to help him develop his talents, has supported him in all his achievements.
Most parents of children with special needs would like to feel that they have given their children the best opportunity they could to achieve independence. Access to further education and job training is a vital component, but that is not always available. I was glad to hear the Minister for Disabled People stating that the Government want every disabled person to have the chance to play his or her full part in society, and I was glad to hear her commitment to providing support and opportunity for those who want to work. I hope that further education and training for jobs is encouraged, and that employers are made aware of their responsibilities in including those with special needs in their employment recruitment processes.
My friend who has Down's syndrome has made considerable achievements in his life. He deserves the support of society and a change of attitude that recognises his contribution to the local environment and that includes education and other services. He should be treated by service providers with the dignity that he deserves.
10.16 am
Dr. John Pugh: May I begin with a grovelling apology for having arrived a minute or two late for the debate? I will have to get a better watch.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) on initiating the debate, and on all his hard work in Parliament on behalf of Down's syndrome

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children. I congratulate all Members present on what they have taught me, as I do not claim to be an expert on the subject. Congratulations are also in order to the host of professionals, teachers and parents who, over decades, have significantly improved the education available to Down's syndrome children. Considerable progress has been made, and a lot of innovation and genuine skill has been shown in developing educational resources relevant to Down's syndrome children. I have seen some excellent IT resources recently that emulate what is available under mainstream provision.
Talking of innovation and skill, I should like to mention a project initiated in a special school in my constituency, Merefield school in Southport. A film was made that featured a number of Down's syndrome children. I will happily make that film available to any hon. Member present who wishes to see it. The film was premiered, and the children, who are not normally made a great deal of fuss of, arrived in limousines as the stars of the film, walked on a red carpet and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It was not only emotionally good for them but a great learning experience. What impressed me when watching the film and looking at the reaction to it was how much it reinforced the bonds of emotional solidarity and support among those children. It was heartening to see, and not something that one would automatically see in a mainstream school.
Much is now agreed about Down's syndrome education. One crucial aspect agreed on is that learning and progress is a family matter. The relationship between parents and schools is even more critical than it is in a mainstream situation. The support given by parents of Down's syndrome children to their local special school, or to special school provision in general, is exemplary. A second idea that is clearly admitted is that a successful outcome of Down's syndrome education requires an early start, and a very early start if possible, because Down's syndrome children often have hearing problems that are not readily picked up.
Down's syndrome children need intensive early training in order to cope with reading, and need particular training to cope with linguistic structures and the kind of ordinary language expression that other children take for granted. That is crucial if they are to develop an expressive use of language—something that everyone needs if they are to convey and deal with their emotions and relate to the people around them. That is well understood, and I pay tribute again to the various organisations in and beyond the Department for Education and Skills, including voluntary bodies such as the Down's Syndrome Association, that have done an awful lot of work in getting that understood.
A body of research appears to show that the inclusion of Down's syndrome children not only works but is wanted by the great majority of their parents. The improvement of Down's syndrome children in mainstream schools with regard to language, behaviour, reading skills and general academic skills has been well monitored. Equally well monitored is the fact that the existence of Down's syndrome children in a mainstream school is normally good for that school. It is good for mainstream pupils, and Down's syndrome children are often popular in the mainstream school. The hon. Member for Bolton, South-East argued that they are not always very well catered for, but they are a net benefit to most schools that manage to absorb them
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successfully. Inclusion has got to be a good thing, because the long-term outlook for Down's syndrome children is that they must establish a degree of personal independence. They must develop as individuals in their own right rather than he solely in a dependency relationship throughout their life.
However, the one area where the research is a bit greyer concerns the emotional needs of the Down's syndrome child. The Portsmouth research that looked into inclusion versus special school provision established that many of the conversations that began in mainstream education were, unusually for children, possibly initiated by an adult, and that a lot of the peer-group conversation was not personal-related but work-related. Like all children, Down's syndrome children need and wish to talk about their personal life as well as what they are doing at one specific time. I accept—and I think that my party and people in general accept—that there is a genuine case for special schools for the more severe cases. A sensible pragmatic approach must be the right one, and one would hope to see that reflected in whatever statements are made.
There is a case for choice, but choice is inevitably accompanied by the fact that as more people opt for inclusion there will be less demand for special schools. Because the provision of special schools is very expensive and such resources are not easily found, all of us have from time to time been confronted in our constituencies by the spectre, or the occurrence, of the closure of a well loved resource. That means in addition a long journey for many children who previously might have been educated in a more local establishment. That is an agonising problem that cannot easily be solved. The Government have to face up to it on a fairly regular basis, as do local authorities.
The hon. Member for Bolton, South-East mapped out not that dilemma but the problem that inclusion might not be properly, thoroughly or effectively delivered. Inclusion half delivered falls between two stools. I do not disagree with his analysis. He highlighted a number of specific problems to which I hope the Government and the Minister will respond. One is a problem related to statement delay, and another is the shortage of appropriately trained staff, which must be known to everybody present. Other hon. Members have specifically mentioned speech therapists. I cannot remember a decade of the past three when people have not been complaining about a genuine shortage of speech therapists across the educational spectrum.
A new and appreciable problem is coming up on the rails. In some sense it follows from the success of educational provision in the early years. It is the problem of continuing that education and of how the education system for Down's syndrome children connects with Connexions. The hon. Gentleman suggested that it does not connect very well at the moment.
Finally, there is the fact that facilities are not yet up to scratch in mainstream school provision. There is a definite demand in the mainstream for training for dealing with Down's syndrome children. Mainstream schools would like to know better how to do their job. They are not relaxed or indifferent about how their job is done; they recognise that when they take in a Down's syndrome

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children they are taking on a serious responsibility and they wish to be properly trained so that they can discharge it.
There is much to be done, and as ever there is a shortage of funding. There is also something of a learning curve, as always when educational progress is made. However, I want to finish on an optimistic note. It is an exciting prospect that mainstream school provision and society as a whole is coming to terms not only with the needs of Down's syndrome children but, as anyone who has anything to do with those children will recognise, with the contribution that they can make to the life of society and the school community.
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Angela Watkinson: I add my congratulations to those paid to the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) on securing this debate—it is a very important subject. His reputation as a champion for the Down's Syndrome Association and for children with Down's syndrome is well deserved.
As expected, this morning's debate has been a consensual one. Members of all parties wish the best possible educational opportunities for children with Down's syndrome. I worked in a special school for many years, and one of the first things that I learned was that it is impossible to generalise about children with special needs—they are all individuals. Children with Down's syndrome demonstrate that well, because they span the spectrum of ability.
Improvements in health care over recent years have increased the life expectancy of people with Down's syndrome. Given that many of them are born towards the end of their mother's child-bearing years, their long-term future after elderly parents predecease them is becoming an increasing problem. It follows that acquiring as much independence as possible prepares them best for adult life and that education is the key to that independence.
The first educational hurdle facing parents is obtaining that essential statement of educational needs as early as possible. There is evidence that some parents, particularly those who are less determined or articulate, experience difficulties in obtaining a statement. We have all had letters from constituents about that. It is as well to realise that people usually contact their Member of Parliament only as a last resort: when they have tried everything else—all the normal channels—and they have not succeeded. Therefore, when they come to us they are fairly desperate.
Local education authorities have to bear the cost of the statementing process, which is considerable. They often have insufficient staff to cope with the level of demand and the consequential delays often result in tribunals, which cause additional stress to the parents, and, more seriously, a delay in the pupil accessing proper education.
Most, if not all, statements will include a need for speech therapy. As we have heard this morning, good communication is an essential life skill and is particularly important to somebody with Down's syndrome. As all hon. Members present will be aware, there has been a chronic shortage of speech and
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language therapists for decades. Even when primary care trusts are able to fund additional therapists, they find it almost impossible to recruit them. The Government face a real challenge to find out why that underprovision has proved so intractable.
I was told that 180 speech and language therapy students graduated last year. The mystery is where they went. What career paths did they choose? Apparently, they did not choose special education. I know from discussions with the very dedicated team of speech and language professionals in Havering that they suffer frustration at being unable to meet the level of local demand, and I know that that is not peculiar to Havering.
Interestingly, some children attending our Sure Start programme are presenting with speech and language problems. Although identifying problems at that stage is highly beneficial to those children, speech and language therapy resources are finite and that early intervention is leaching resources from other areas of provision, such as schools.
I noticed a question that the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East put to the Minister on 13 July on the subject of availability and competencies of speech and language therapists. In her reply the Minister said:
"With the extra investment announced in the 2002 Budget, we expect the NHS to have net increases of at least 30,000 therapists and scientists, including speech and language therapists by 2008."—[Official Report, 13 July 2004; Vol. 423, c. 1117W.]
I know that is a global total. How many of that 30,000 does the Minister anticipate will be speech and language therapists, and what progress has been made since 2002 towards increasing the total available?
Access to pre-school and nursery provision is an important building block in the development of a child with Down's syndrome. Learning social and interpersonal skills and gaining self-confidence through play, music, painting and games at nursery school makes those children ready to benefit from the next stage of a more formal learning experience at school.
The next dilemma for any parent whose child has Down's syndrome is whether to opt for mainstream or special school placement. Some families find coping with disability harder than others, and supporting those families is something that special schools are particularly good at. Because they are smaller, it is possible for the staff to get to know the whole family—siblings and parents—and to understand their problems, lend a sympathetic ear and offer a word of support in a way that the demands of a busy mainstream school would make difficult.
The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 gave all pupils the right to be educated in a mainstream school if that is the choice of their parents. Sensibly, the learning and safety of others must not be jeopardised by the placement of a child with special needs in a mainstream setting, and so the success of the placements depends heavily on the provision of special learning assistants who are properly trained and available for enough hours to meet the child's needs. The special relationship between the SLA and the pupil is essential in understanding the child's difficulties, recognising triggers for difficult behaviour and establishing workable strategies to avert crises in the school day. That support can make the difference between success and failure for the pupil, but the cost is high and can cause severe pressure on school budgets.

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The Down's Syndrome Association's survey of parents this year revealed among other things that both types of school have had widespread success in educating pupils with Down's syndrome. The report on the survey contains many supporting statements from parents, many of which we have heard this morning from the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East, but the satisfaction level is not universally high. Some experiences have not been happy and it follows that LEAs need a flexible arrangement whereby mainstream pupils who do not thrive are able to transfer to a special school, and vice versa. In that way, the two types of school can be mutually supportive and offer the best possible opportunities for pupils.
The process must, of course, continue post-16 in local sixth-form and further education colleges, and offer Down's syndrome students a range of opportunities to continue to establish basic skills, and to learn new workplace skills to maximise their employment chances. The London borough of Havering is particularly good at that. Our aim should be that every LEA supports students with Down's syndrome who wish to continue to improve and develop to their full potential.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) about an establishment on Canvey Island that offers business opportunities to physically handicapped people. We need more of such establishments for those people with Down's syndrome who cannot quite cope with the standard employment environment. Having said that, a young man with Down's syndrome who works at my local Tesco has an instinctive idea of customer care. Nothing is too much trouble for him when he is asked for help. He is an asset to the organisation, and others would do well to learn from that. People with Down's syndrome, who often have a charming and helpful side to their nature, would be a great asset to a shop floor or in other workplaces.
Bob Spink: Is my hon. Friend aware of the great benefits to society at large of such business opportunities for physically handicapped people or those with special learning needs? The BOPH on Canvey Island provides printing, T-shirt printing and packing goods for other firms. It provides a very reasonable, high-quality service to the businesses and people for whom it works. It is a two-way process, and we congratulate those people on making use of such an establishment. Does my hon. Friend agree?
Angela Watkinson: I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is a very good example of how Down's syndrome people contribute to the rest of society. It is not always their needs but their contributions that are overlooked, and they have an enormous amount to offer.
The good work being done in some areas must be built on, so that all children with Down's syndrome, wherever they live, can access education without having to fight for it, beginning with that "open sesame"—the statement. That means finding a nursery place with properly trained staff and a school place where they will not be patronised, sidelined or even just tolerated, but welcomed and accepted for themselves and where they will receive learning opportunities suited to their specific needs. There must be a levelling up to the standards set in the good practice that we all know.
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If the Minister would like to visit any of the three splendid special schools in Upminster—Corbets Tey and Dycourts, which are for children with moderate learning difficulties, and Ravensbourne, which is for children with severe learning difficulties—or any of the mainstream schools where pupils with Down's syndrome are doing very well, she would be very welcome.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Edward O'Hara): Order. Before I call the Minister, may I draw attention to the message on the Annunciator? There will be one minute's silence at 11 o'clock. If the debate proceeds to 11 o'clock, I ask hon. Members not to depart before the observation of the one minute's silence.
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The Minister for Children (Margaret Hodge): Like others, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) on securing the debate and on the work that he has done on behalf of children with Down's syndrome and the Down's Syndrome Association, and recognise his huge dedication. I am sure that you will agree, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that the quality of the debate has been first class. It reflects well on Parliament when, in a serious debate on a less contentious issue, people try to consider solutions to complex problems that require a lot of innovative ideas, in order to improve the quality of life for any group of people, particularly those with Down's syndrome. I always enjoy debates in Westminster Hall, and this one has been high quality.
I pay tribute to the Down's Syndrome Association. We in the Department for Education and Skills worked with it to produce the support packs for mainstream and special schools, and all professionals who have used them have warmly welcomed them as a valuable resource. I am delighted that, with funding from our special educational needs small funding programme, we were able to contribute to the production of that pack. I am also pleased that we were able to join my hon. Friend when he launched the pack.
My hon. Friend asked whether we would be willing to meet him, and I am sure that Ministers in the Department would be. He will be interested to know that Lord Filkin is taking over day-to-day responsibility for these issues. I shall be speaking to Lord Filkin later today to remind him of my contribution in this debate and the commitment of his time that I have given.
The report that the Down's Syndrome Association put together, entitled "Access to Education", which I read last night, is a good piece of work. It is based on the experiences of 1,500 parents of children with Down's syndrome and how they have been affected throughout the school system. All too often we do not undertake such a wide survey, but good voluntary organisations and interest groups can do very important groundwork on which we can build.
The report mirrors the findings of the Audit Commission report that was published in 2002, which I am sure hon. Members have read and highlights many of the problems that need to be tackled. Statementing is a battle. It takes far too long and is a struggle for far too many parents unless, as hon. Members have said, they are articulate and persistent. We ought to support

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parents when their children move into the education system, as they try to think through what is best for their child with special education needs. The last thing that they need is a battle with professionals in the local education authority. They need support at just that point, which is why we are trying to do more work around such issues.
My hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Jim Dobbin) and the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) discussed the importance of supporting parents, and I could not agree with them more. That area of public policy is greatly underdeveloped. Interestingly enough, it is contentious; we are all too often accused of running a nannying state when we think about what support we can give to parents in all sorts of situations. However, I have absolutely no doubt, given the wide body of research that I have seen, that the state in all its forms, whether central Government, local government or the third arm—the non-statutory sector—must think more about appropriate support to parents in that most difficult task of bringing up children, particularly children with special educational needs such as those with Down's syndrome. The education process, particularly the transition periods that have been talked about a lot this morning, is very important and something with which parents need special support.
Another issue that has been highlighted is that of children who should be taught in mainstream settings sometimes being turned away. I was somewhat shocked by the assertion of my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton that LEAs designate certain mainstream schools as appropriate for catering for children with special educational needs and others as not appropriate. That was a worrying statement. With his permission, I shall come back to him to discuss where we are on policy. Clearly, it is appropriate that particular units are attached to mainstream schools for children with, for example, hearing difficulties—partially or totally deaf children—but it cannot be the intent of Ministers that an LEA should designate some schools as not appropriate for catering for children with moderate learning difficulties. We must examine that, particularly the situation in his authority.
Members also said that many staff, particularly teaching assistants, feel ill-equipped to meet the wide range of pupils' needs in today's classrooms. Training is very much at the heart of what the Government are doing. The work force reform agenda around the whole of the team who work in a school is about providing better training, better support and routes to progression for individuals who may come into a school as a teaching assistant and who could move up the hierarchy to other jobs in the school. I take the matter seriously. If we are to be successful in our work force reform, we must focus on the training that we give to all school staff—not just the teachers but others who play a key role, particularly with children with special educational needs.
Much has been said about speech and language therapists. We all have experience in our constituencies of problems with getting enough speech and language therapists. I agree entirely with the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela
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Watkinson), about early intervention through speech and language therapy. If we can support children's communication skills at an early stage, it can make all the difference not just to their educational outcome but to their independence and social and emotional development. There is a problem. I have just been talking to my health authority—the primary care trust—which recently withdrew the funding for speech and language therapy in schools. I am battling with them to bring it back.
We are investing a lot more—both in training and through the NHS and education budgets—to ensure that we grow the body of speech and language therapy support. I do not have the precise split in the 30,000 figure that the hon. Lady quoted and which I gave in response to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East about how many are speech and language therapists and how many are other professionals. I will try to get that figure and will write to the hon. Lady about it.
Coincidentally rather than deliberately, I am meeting representatives of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists later this week to talk about how we can grow that cohort of people. We think that there are more than 1,000 extra speech and language therapists in our schools than there were when we came into government, but there is still a vacancy rate and the problem of training remains.
I have seen some innovative work on speech and language therapy provision. Interestingly enough, it has occurred particularly in Sure Start programmes in which, to tackle the shortage, professional speech and language therapists are used to cascade some competences and training to untrained people so that they can provide much of the routine support that children require. If we can build that cascading process in as a much stronger presence in many more of our institutions, authorities or health authorities, we can grow that competence more quickly than we have done in the past.
A number of Members raised the issue of special schools. We all know that what we are attempting to do is to ensure that inclusion, where appropriate, must be on offer to individual children, especially those with Down's syndrome. I agree with what many hon. Members have said about the benefit that children with Down's syndrome can gain from being integrated into a mainstream environment as long as they are properly supported in that environment. Equally, we wish to provide choice to parents and children and, therefore, to maintain our special schools focus.
Bob Spink: I am not going to ask the question that the Minister thinks that I am going to ask. Does she acknowledge the great benefit that children with special needs can provide for children in mainstream schools?
Margaret Hodge: I do indeed. I have seen that in my own children's education. Their primary school had a good link with a neighbouring school that had children with severe and multiple physical and cognitive learning difficulties. My children benefited hugely from the integration of the two schools, because of their increased understanding of the diversity of the population and their sensitivity in dealing with children who did not have all the benefits that they had. I completely and utterly concur with that point.

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In fact, I was proud to take through the House much of the disability legislation when I had responsibility for those issues. I was particularly proud to get on to the statute book provisions about discrimination in education based on disability. I am sure that hon. Members of all parties now agree that those provisions should have been in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which the previous Government passed.
A number of Members have said that the one-size approach does not fit all. That is as true of Down's syndrome children as it is of everyone. We are attempting to reflect that, both in legislation and policies. We have a strong legislative background and the discrimination that has been described is unacceptable. However, getting legislation on to the statute book and then changing the practice in LEAs, health authorities and schools is a long-term process. The legislation has only recently reached the statute book and we need to do more.
Let me talk about the strands of our strategy, which the Department was proud to publish. Early intervention is one strand; everybody has talked about how important that is. The hon. Member for Southport built on some important research, and the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) also mentioned the matter. I want to say one thing: if we get the early intervention right, we may not have to go down the bureaucratic route of always going for a statement. Much energy is lost in the bureaucracy of the statementing processes. However we have tried to arrange things so that there is a partnership effort, there still tends to be an adversarial element, because local authorities are always worried about resources while individuals want the most for their children. The more that we can move away from formal statementing to agreement between professionals, the better it will be for children, and the earlier the intervention, the better still it will be. I am proud of our early support pilot programme. We are spending £4 million this year and £6 million next year. We want to learn from what works through that pilot programme and to try to evolve that as we develop our early years infrastructure.
As hon. Members probably know, we are also developing the national early intervention centre of excellence. A feasibility study is under way, and we want to work with voluntary organisations including the Down's Syndrome Association to get that right. We are encouraging the delegation of SEN resources to schools so the sort of conflict with the local education authority that my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton met could be got rid of. We believe that schools are best at determining how they should use their SEN resources.
The second strand is considering how we can remove barriers to learning. We want to develop inclusive practice so there is no conflict between special schools and mainstream education—although the trend is to try to support as many children as possible in the mainstream system. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East mentioned that Rumworth school in his constituency is attached to a secondary school, and the hon. Member for Castle Point talked about Cedar Hall and its relationship to mainstream education. That sort of arrangement is the way forward. That is how we can develop inclusive practice; it meets the needs of individual children.
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We are developing a new inclusion development programme. We are trying to bring together all the professionals across education, care, social care and the voluntary sector in order to develop much more effective approaches to children with special educational needs. We are looking first at autistic spectrum disorder syndrome. Having learned from that, we shall look at other particular special educational needs; I have no doubt that my hon. Friend will be pressing me on the subject of Down's syndrome.
We are also looking at how we can develop practical tools and practical material, which we want to publish in 2005. We are looking at proposals for how we can improve the quality of education for children with more severe behavioural and emotional difficulties; we have a group of people working on that. We are looking at how we can improve regional planning of provision, so that we make best use of our special school infrastructure, and then we are looking at how we establish minimum standards for SEN advisory and support services. We are doing some work around that issue with Ofsted in particular.
The third strand of our work is to do with expectations and achievement—a five-year plan about the personalisation of learning and the importance of considering individual needs and determining the educational offer. That concerns my new role, bringing together education and all other children's services around the needs of the child. There is the development of children's trusts, too. All that will lead to improvements.
I shall never forget that one of the first things that I did as Minister for Children was visit an eight-year-old child in her home. She was being educated, but had hugely difficult physical disabilities and needed 24-hour care. She was receiving education in a mainstream school, but had undergone 18 assessments during the previous 18 months from different professionals who were trying to support her. It was completely mad and totally wore her out. Her mother had become the manager of all the different professionals who were supporting the child. Ensuring that those professionals—or the lead professional—work around the needs of the child will make things better for everyone. As we try to raise the quality of achievement and aspirations for children with special educational needs, we are consulting on how best to measure progress—a very difficult area—and on matters such as whether we continue the P scales, to determine whether there are better value-added measures that we can introduce.
A number of hon. Members have talked about transition. That is utterly central, and we have a group of people considering the matter. Some authorities deal with it better than others, but we all have experience from our constituencies of people with learning disabilities or other needs falling through the net as they move from the education system into adulthood. I hope that the youth Green Paper, which we aim to publish in the autumn, will tackle some of the issues relating to children with additional needs and special needs as they move into adulthood, and the services that we provide for them. I was a little puzzled by the issues raised by the hon. Member for Castle Point about people being pushed out of provision at the age of 25. That shows the need for sensitivity at local level.

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The only area that I have not talked about is partnership. Underpinning everything that we have done is the desire to strengthen partnership between all the players involved, so that it all makes sense to children and places children and parents at the heart of what we do. We will know whether our strategy has been successful when we cease to rely so much on separate structures and processes for children with special educational needs, such as children with Down's syndrome; when all children with special educational needs have their needs met as soon as they become apparent and can feel valued members of the school community; when the barriers that divide mainstream and special schools have disappeared; when all schools work together in partnership and with other services in their locality to meet the needs of local children; and when there is much greater quality and consistency of provision for children with special educational needs, not just across the needs and schools, but right across the country.
Her Majesty's chief inspector of schools will evaluate our progress towards those aims, and we shall constantly reflect and reconsider as we learn from what has worked to establish whether we need to make any further changes to remove the barriers to learning that can prevent children with special educational needs, including children with Down's syndrome, from achieving their potential and contributing to society.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Before I call Mr. David Kidney, I draw attention to the announcement on the Annunciator. We shall commence the next debate, but we shall suspend for one minute's silence soon after commencement.

Parliamentary Scrutiny of European Legislation
10.59 am
Mr. David Kidney: Perhaps I should begin by explaining the two incidents during the summer recess that provoked me to request a debate on the scrutiny of European legislation. The first occurred on what was obviously a slow news day, when Digby Jones, the director-general of the CBI, got a lot of publicity for saying that Parliament was asleep on the job of scrutinising European legislation. The second was a Conservative call for the European Scrutiny Committee to sit in public when it holds its deliberations. I should like to deal with both of those issues later in my contribution, but first I shall address the much bigger issue of why this debate is important—but perhaps it would be appropriate to do so after the minute's silence.
The House observed one minute's silence in memory of those killed in Beslan in Russia.
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Mr. Kidney: I praise the Speaker's decision to observe a minute's silence, and the way in which you observed it in this Chamber, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It fills us all with great sadness and anger that so many civilians, particularly children, had their lives taken away in the Beslan siege in Russia. Our sympathies must be with the relatives of all who lost loved ones, and our solidarity must be with the Russian people in resisting terrorist activity.
To return to the scrutiny of European legislation, the big difficulty that we face in making our scrutiny in this place successful and effective can be seen in the climate surrounding all things European on the streets of our great country. Let us consider the recent European elections and the again disappointing turnout. Why are people in this country not engaging with the activities of the European Union as a whole? Is it down to disinterest, dislike, or ignorance? Those are problems that we need to explore and overcome.
A second issue is the commentary on the draft constitutional treaty, which is due to be considered not only by the House, but by the public at large in a referendum. Most public commentators treat the constitutional treaty with a degree of hostility and disregard that is most unhealthy for our future relations with the rest of the European Union. Parliament has an important role to play in making our scrutiny of the EU institutions—for which, after all, we are accountable to the UK public—effective. If debates such as this one and the scrutiny work that we do in Parliament add to people's understanding of the European Union and its institutions, so much the better.
It is worth reminding ourselves what European legislation is. Loosely, it fits into two categories—although it is worth pointing out that the draft treaty would make changes to the categories of and the names given to European legislation. At the moment the two loose categories are directives and regulations. Directives are largely frameworks, and national Parliaments are left with the role of legislating in order to transpose the effects of directives into domestic law. Regulations, on the other hand, apply directly in all member states. It follows that different approaches to scrutiny are needed for the two types of legislation.

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In respect of both, we ought to ask ourselves how we can influence the final form that will be settled on in the European Union before the legislation comes to this country. In addition, in the case of directives, if domestic legislation is required to give effect to the legislation, we should scrutinise the domestic legislation. It is on that point that we are most open to an accusation that has long been made, that we over-elaborate and overfill our domestic legislation when carrying out our responsibility to implement European directives—so-called gold-plating.
If we are to influence the European Union stages, it is important that we understand how the legislation is formed in the first place. I hope that it is understood in this place—it is certainly not among the public—that the Council of Ministers, not the Commission that sits in Brussels, is the legislature. Largely, the Commission proposes actions and the Council of Ministers legislates—although these days, under the arrangements for co-decision with the European Parliament, something like eight in 10 cases involve both the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. There is a complex procedure to conciliate any disagreements between them before the final form of the legislation is established.
When we talk about our scrutiny of what goes on in the Council of Ministers, in which our national representative is the appropriate Minister from our Parliament, it is crucial to bear in mind that the Council's proceedings are secret and that we do not know what our representative says and does during those proceedings. Those of us who support the improvement of the European Union and—by and large—the draft treaty for constitutional change, see that the draft treaty would make the proceedings of the Council of Ministers public and accessible to us, which would improve our scrutiny of what goes on there and our ability to hold Ministers in this place to account for the decisions that they make and the votes that they cast.
That is the state of legislation in the European Union; we should next consider our system of scrutiny for that legislation. We have two Houses of Parliament, which have two separate, although complementary, Committee systems for carrying out that scrutiny on our behalf. The two systems may be separate, but there are excellent relations between Committee members in both Houses.
In this House, the European Scrutiny Committee does an extraordinarily diligent job on our behalf in sifting through thousands of documents. I am not a member of that Committee, so I am an objective observer, and I honestly believe that it does a magnificent job. It sifts through documents at the earliest possible stage, sorts out those of particular significance to this country's or to Members' interests, and draws attention to the documents when necessary. An important part of its work has been to uphold the scrutiny reserve when, as they sometimes have in the past, Ministers have gone ahead and negotiated before scrutiny in this place has been completed.
The House of Commons' and the House of Lords' systems have a high reputation, including across the European Union, for the thoroughness of their scrutiny. If anything, the reputation of the House of Lords system
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is slightly ahead, and that is an additional spur to those of us who want to give attention to improving the scrutiny system in the House of Commons.
The system in this country tends to be document-based. We receive the documents at an early stage and sift through them as I have explained. However, not every national Parliament adopts the same approach. Some prefer what is called a pre-scrutiny model or, in some areas, a mandating model. Our system focuses on the early stages of legislation, when the Commission proposal is first adopted, but the pre-scrutiny model tends to focus on the conclusion of the negotiations in the Council. Perhaps the best-known examples of system are the so-called Nordic models of Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Documents are available about how the Nordic region conducts its scrutiny of European affairs, and my first impression of reading about their systems was that Members of their Parliaments are willing to give up a considerable number of their Fridays to the scrutiny of their Ministers' activities in Council negotiations.
In those countries, there is a very strong tradition of parliamentary control over Governments, and they are willing to allow a Committee to act on behalf of their Parliament in establishing what line they think their Minister should take in European negotiations. Of course, they only have one Chamber, not two, so there is no danger of a conflict of mandates. In the best Nordic systems, the word "mandate" is a bit overstated: Ministers are not sent to Brussels to negotiate with a strict set of rules about what they must come back with. They are allowed some flexibility to negotiate and make compromises. If it were otherwise, it would be difficult for them to have an influence on debate in the Council of Ministers.
Perhaps an obvious question to ask when we talk about improvements to scrutiny is whether if there are two systems—a document-based one and a pre-scrutiny one—it is possible to combine the two. I have heard that some of the new member states, such as Lithuania, are considering developing a traffic light scrutiny system so that, on receipt of the documents, they are sifted through and placed in one of three categories. A red traffic light would mean that Parliament is required to produce a mandate to the Minister about the measure. An amber light would require the Minister to consult Parliament before going to negotiate. A green light would mean that the matter is of little interest to the Parliament and that the Minister should get on with the job.
Why do I have such a keen interest in the subject at present? I am pleased to be a member of the House of Commons Modernisation Committee, which is conducting an inquiry on the future scrutiny of European legislation by the House. I am hopeful that the inquiry and the resulting report will provide a catalyst for changes that improve the scrutiny of European legislation. As part of our inquiry, I know that the Leader of the House has produced a memorandum on his proposals for improvements to the system of scrutiny. It is available for all Members to read. There have been a number of responses to that memorandum: a particularly important one is from the European Scrutiny Committee; others have come from many other parts of both Houses and from outside

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bodies, including the Corporation of London, the British Bankers Association and the Confederation of British Industry.
That is a useful way of bringing me back to why I took an interest in the subject of today's debate—the story during the summer recess that Digby Jones of the CBI was complaining to the media that Parliament is asleep on the job of scrutiny of European legislation. That accusation is insulting and false, and it should be firmly rejected, but it is fair to say that there is merit in calling on us to bring some of the scrutiny of European legislation in to the mainstream of the work that we do in Parliament, and by so doing into the public's consciousness. It is valuable for us to be stirred into action to prevent the gold-plating of domestic legislation implementing European laws.
The second incident of the summer that stirred me into action was the call of the Conservative party for the European Scrutiny Committee to meet in public when it is carrying out its consideration of European documents. It is fair to say that the European Scrutiny Committee is, as ever, in the lead. In December last year, the Committee wrote to the Leader of the House asking for an amendment to Standing Orders to permit the Committee to meet in public when it is deliberating. What the Conservatives are doing is drawing to our attention that the Leader of the House is yet to make a decision on that request.
The Leader of the House's memorandum has some important proposals in it, which require a good deal of consideration by the House of Commons. The first and most important one is a new forum building on the Standing Committees on the Convention and on the Intergovernmental Conference. The forum would provide for Members of both Houses to meet Government Ministers, and perhaps members of the European Commission and the European Parliament, to deal with questions and debates on matters of importance to the European Union and its relations with this country at a more general level. Some of the subjects that could be considered at such a forum are the White Papers that our Government produce, usually twice a year, about their position on negotiations in the Council and with European Ministers, and the Commission's annual legislative and work programme. Those are, I think, suitable subjects where there is much to be discussed and enough for individual Members' interests to be captured. Such an event would attract a lot of attention from parliamentarians, from the media and, I hope, from the public.
The question of who controls the agenda would be important if we were to set up such meetings. Should arranging a meeting and establishing an agenda be in the gift of the Government or of the House of Commons? I favour the latter. More generally, I would like to see a business management committee that controls the agenda of Parliament itself. Failing that, the European Scrutiny Committee asked that it be able at least to propose subjects for meetings of the new forum, and I support its request.
The other matter in the memorandum from the Leader of the House to which I would like to draw attention is the subsidiarity early warning mechanism. For those who complain that the draft treaty for the
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European constitution is bad news, that is one of the best pieces of good news in the document. One of the protocols to the treaty—I found it on page 111 of the Government's provisional text of the constitutional treaty for the European Union, Cmnd. 6289—sets out the arrangements whereby each national Parliament has a period of six weeks from the date of transmission of a draft European legislative Act to send to the Presidents of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission a reasoned opinion why the draft in question does not comply with the principle of subsidiarity. If one third of the national Parliaments' votes on an issue raise a similar objection about an offence against subsidiarity, the Commission must take back the proposal and consider whether to scrap it, amend it or try to force it through. Sceptics will say, "All it need do is wait and send it back out," but the protocol allows the European Court to adjudicate whether the reasoned objection was right or wrong.
That new and important process would enhance our scrutiny, but we would have only a six-week period in which to make our reasoned objection. The Leader of the House makes some comments about how we can effectively use those six weeks to come up with our reasoned objection, and the European Scrutiny Committee has also commented on how that can be done. If we get the process right, we will see an improvement in scrutiny—as long as we ratify the treaty and the new constitution comes into effect, of course.
I do not want to eat into the Minister's time, but I have my own suggestions for improving scrutiny. First, with a pre-scrutiny model, we must give more attention to making Ministers appear before MPs before they attend Council meetings in Brussels. Secondly, and importantly, we must enhance our scrutiny of the measures that we take to implement European legislation in order to prevent gold-plating. Thirdly, as a minor procedural point but an important one for winning hearts and minds, the European Scrutiny Committee should meet in public when it deliberates documents. Fourthly, we should improve relations with Members of the European Parliament and build on the work of the European Scrutiny Committee. The UK's representatives in that Parliament have a great wealth of knowledge, and they can assist us in our work and vice versa. Fifthly, we should treat European legislation not as a part of foreign policy but as domestic policy.
If we were to get the culture right, European legislation would simply be a matter of domestic legislation: the rest would fall into place. MPs would be enthusiastic and discharge their responsibility for proper and effective scrutiny well, the media would report on European laws more consistently and more accurately, and the public would have far less to fear from laws from Brussels. I hope that my suggestions are helpful to the Minister. I will now shut up so that he can respond.
11.19 am
The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Phil Woolas): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) on securing this debate and raising important issues. People who follow the way in which scrutiny is carried out and the relationship between the legislative and the executive in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe will read

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the points that he raised in this debate. In future years they will look back and see that his speech contained a lot of common sense and ask why we did we not see that before. I genuinely congratulate him on raising the issue. He spoke with knowledge, clarity and foresight.
For the record, my hon. Friend is, as he said, a member of the Modernisation Committee, which is holding an inquiry into this issue. His points will be well noted by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House and will form part of his deliberations and those of the Committee.
I shall explain the big picture of Government policy, then move on to some of the details. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House and the Government are keen to enhance the way in which Parliament engages with European matters and hope that the Modernisation Committee will find consensus. My right hon. Friends the Foreign Secretary and the Leader of the House have made statements to the House about the issue in recent months. We believe that greater scrutiny of European legislation by this House and the other place is the main way in which to engage the British public with the European Union institutions in a more productive and informed fashion. That requires us to get scrutiny right.
My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House submitted a memorandum to the Modernisation Committee in March—it is available on the website—and strongly argued the case for change. It would be wrong of me to respond in detail to some of the points that have been made, because they are for the deliberation of the Committee, but I shall try to cover some today.
The memorandum acknowledges, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford, that there is much good in what we already do: the European Scrutiny Committee's efficient sifting of the large number of European documents coming before it and alerting the House to those of significance; the corresponding detailed scrutiny carried out by the European Union Committee in the House of Lords; and the work done by the Foreign Affairs Committee and the other departmental Select Committees on European matters. We should be proud of the scrutiny reserve, whereby the Government have undertaken in all but special cases not to agree to European proposals until the House has completed its scrutiny.
However, it must be admitted that the commendable work that is done does not attract widespread interest in the House and beyond. European scrutiny is, sadly, something of a minority interest, even in Parliament, despite the importance of the legislation that is scrutinised. In addition, the work that is done fails to attract the interest of the media or engage the public. As the Government's memorandum to the Modernisation Committee states,
"There is a worrying and widening gap between our citizens and the institutions of the European Union; and this is not good for our democracy."
We must take steps to engage the public in debate on European matters. European issues should be in the mainstream of our political life—as my hon. Friend said, they are not foreign policies and foreign affairs. The often-heard phrase "When I'm in Europe", ignores the fact that we in the United Kingdom are in Europe all the time.
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We must take steps to ensure that Parliament's scrutiny work is done to better effect, and we must respond to the new challenges that arise from the new constitutional treaty. The treaty greatly strengthens the role of national Parliaments—that is one of its main purposes. The Government negotiated hard for that at the Convention and at the intergovernmental conference. The subsidiarity early warning mechanism—the yellow card—is also a substantial advance, and we are grateful to the European Scrutiny Committee and to the European Union Committee for their detailed consideration of how that mechanism can best be implemented. We hope that the Modernisation Committee will take into account the views of those Committees.
The memorandum also sets out in detail the Government's proposals for a joint European grand committee as a successor to the Standing Committees on the Convention and on the intergovernmental conference. I acknowledge that some Members, particularly those of the other House, were not immediately persuaded that a new Committee would add value to our existing structures. The Government believe that it would be of considerable benefit to have a forum in which both Houses could come together to debate European matters and to question Ministers. We also hope that ways will be found to allow European Commissioners to make statements and answer questions before the new body, and perhaps for UK MEPs to attend. I suspect that if that were the case, it would attract widespread interest from the media.
We recognise that those last proposals would require some procedural innovation. If the proposals find favour with the Modernisation Committee, it will be for the House to decide whether to pursue them. In researching the matter, my hon. Friend might have read about the precedent of the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, which adopted such procedures in 1933. Once again we learn that in this place there is nothing new.
The memorandum considers the time that is currently allocated to European matters on the Floor of the House and asks the Modernisation Committee to consider whether it continues to be appropriate. It also considers the potential for cross-cutting questions on European matters in Westminster Hall, and sets out several options for reform of the European scrutiny system, which range from abolishing the European Standing Committee system and replacing it with scrutiny by Select Committees, to more modest reform. In large part, the memorandum was intended to provoke debate, and it has succeeded in doing so. Again, let me say that I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising the matter. From the evidence that the Modernisation Committee has published to date, it seems that there may be more support for more modest reform, but we await the Committee's conclusions.
The Government's memorandum also invites the Modernisation Committee to consider whether more should be done to encourage Members to engage more fully in the European policy debate. We welcome the increasing joint working between Committees of this House and those of the European Parliament and other national Parliaments. The Modernisation Committee's inquiry naturally focuses on scrutiny of European matters in this House, but we should not forget the role

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of the House of Lords. As has been said, its European Union Committee is highly respected—perhaps more so than the House of Commons' Committee—for its expertise and detailed scrutiny work. It is essential that any changes that we make in this House complement, rather than duplicate, its work.
Meeting and deliberating in public is a matter on which the Government have yet
to take a view. It would be a significant change to our procedures. As everyone knows, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is sympathetic to the principle of greater accessibility and has sought the views of the Liaison Committee and the Procedure Committee on such matters. We hope that the Modernisation Committee will be able to come to a conclusion on them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford also discussed control of the agenda, subsidiarity early warning and how we deal with that, and pre-scrutiny and enhanced scrutiny designed to prevent gold-plating. Those suggestions and the others that he made are very strong, and I welcome his contribution to the debate. In conclusion, I thank him for initiating this discussion. The Government and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House in particular attach considerable importance to parliamentary scrutiny of European matters, and I have no doubt that my hon. Friend will make a very positive contribution to future debate.
11.30 am
Sitting suspended until Two o'clock.

Welfare Entitlement
2 pm
Dr. Vincent Cable: I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce this debate. I apologise to the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Pond), and to other hon. Members for the late change in debate title, which may account for the rather low interest in it.
I was driven by three sets of considerations. The first is constituency matters, as is often the case. I have been struck by the large and growing numbers of people caught up in the complexities and practical difficulties of the benefits and entitlements system, and that is the case on a much greater scale than ever before. I do not mean issues of benefits policy, although they do arise; I brought up a case in the main Chamber when the Minister was present a few moments ago, and he dealt with it efficiently and graciously as a policy matter. The kinds of issues that I will describe now, however, are enormous problems and hardships caused simply by administrative difficulties. We, as MPs, essentially deal with the agency concerned rather than the Minister when problems are administrative, but there is clearly a pattern behind the problems.
Secondly, aside from the worm's-eye view of the benefit recipient and the practical problems there, there is what one might call a bird's-eye-view problem of the growing evidence of difficulties of delivery, particularly associated with information technology systems. Just as Parliament broke for the recess, there was a report from the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, and it would be useful to have some feedback about the Government's response to it. That is one of a succession of points that could be made on similar themes.
The third, related point can be approached not necessarily from the side of the Department or the client but from that of employees and is about growing difficulties and stresses within the benefit system. One example, which I will refer to again, involves a lady in my constituency who is close to retirement and who has described events in her local jobcentre to do with jobseeker's allowance. A new system has been introduced, and calls have to be routed through Makerfield in the north of England. The problem is not only that none of the clients can get through to Makerfield, but that none of the staff at the centre can get through either. Large numbers of people are being left without their allowance and are becoming increasingly agitated. My constituent describes fighting breaking out in the local centre because of the considerable administrative difficulties. Such problems are widespread, as I am sure the Minister is aware.
I will start by giving a few concrete examples, which are the primary reason why I wanted this debate. There is a human element to these issues, and I want to bring to the surface some individual cases. The first relates to different aspects of the benefits and entitlements system—not to one pocket of that but all over the place. With regard to jobseeker's allowance, a lady came to me only a few weeks ago. Very many people are in the position of being temporary workers who are able to work for a while and who then lose employment and are normally considered for jobseeker's allowance. The lady in question had never had a problem in previous years,

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and she came along this time with a virtually identical set of circumstances but was refused and was given the extraordinary advice that whether she qualifies for jobseeker's allowance depends on who makes the decision. She has now tried to survive for several years on a growing loan.
Another example involves a very conscientious gentleman who had not been out of work before. He applied for jobseeker's allowance and meticulously followed the instructions given by the officials helping him. A slight error was made, entirely on the advice of the departmental officials in the centre that he attended, and he was overpaid by a large sum. He is unable to pay it back and is being pursued very aggressively on the assumption that he is acting fraudulently.
With regard to income support, there are other cases from the past few days. A very elderly lady—she is 88—has been trying to receive income support for the past year with the help of her daughter who lives overseas. She is unable to get replies to telephone calls and correspondence. Like the others, she has had to come to her Member of Parliament to resolve what is essentially an administrative problem.
Another gentleman who has been on income support for some time was cut off six months ago for reasons that were not explained or, perhaps, inexplicable. Despite my repeated intervention with the head of the agency concerned, nothing has been done and no explanation has been given. The gentleman survives on cash provided by his family.
Two cases are connected with different parts of the agency, but illustrate the kind of problem that I describe. They relate to pensions. One gentleman who qualified for his pension last December was not paid and repeatedly sought an explanation. In August, the Department acknowledged that the matter needed to be investigated, but it has still not been resolved. Letters have been going backwards and forwards to Alexis Cleveland, but, as far as I am aware, the issue is still as it was.
An even worse case involves a gentleman who qualified for his pension last December. Again, he was not paid. Eventually, through my intervention, it was acknowledged that there had been an administrative error and that he should be paid. However, that decision was made eight months after the start of the delay, and he was told that only three months' payments could be backdated.
There are hundreds of such cases; we all have them. My concern is that they are, perhaps, multiplying and that there is some systemic, underlying problem. That systemic problem comes under several headings: the information technology systems operated by the Department; the growing complexity of the system of application for benefits and their processing; and the system for dealing with errors, which is becoming a major issue. How does one deal scientifically and fairly with large numbers of errors? The fourth heading would involve consumer service: points of contact through call centres and by correspondence. How is that monitored, and how does one deal with what, patently, are failures?
First, I shall say a little about information technology deficiencies. I recognise that the Department for Work and Pensions has a massive information technology task. It does not deal with simple problems; they are
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inherently big and difficult. It has been said—this may or may not be true—that the Department's IT system is the largest in the world. I understand that 35 different systems are in operation. As the Minister knows, they have been subject to frequent scrutiny in Parliament and frequent criticism. There have been the reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee on the Child Support Agency and its three operating systems, the errors with the state earnings-related pension scheme and the general problems of benefit data being scattered between lots of different computing systems.
There have been some more recent disasters, notably involving the national insurance recording system, two or three of which have occurred in the past few months and are causing real hardship and difficulty. The first disaster relates to the Child Support Agency entitlement system. The report produced just before the summer by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions concludes:
"Despite some signs that aspects of the service are improving, the performance of CSA's IT programme and new telephone system remains unacceptable."
Many of us have seen that in practice, and it is two years since the system was supposed to be operating fully and efficiently. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) has done serious research on that issue. I believe that something of the order of 95,000 people have been missing their payments, many of whom are single parents and in considerable difficulty. Will the Minister say whether, as the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), hinted a few weeks ago, the system is now so bad that it will be scrapped? Is that the intention, or is the intention to try to make the system better? If so, what will be the time frame and the specific targets?
Unlike the Treasury, and the Paymaster General in particular, the Minister is not directly responsible for the second system that is working extremely badly: the child credit and the working families credit. I was given a good insight into how that system is operating when an official who works for the agencies wrote to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) about their experience as a recipient of child tax credit but from the standpoint of someone who had dealt originally with national assistance for the best part of 20 years. The official stated:
"I am driven to writing to you because my experience as a recipient of Child Tax Credits leads me to believe that a poorly designed scheme has produced a third rate service to the public, a demoralised work force, and is costing a large and probably unquantified sum on sorting out a high error rate."
The system was explicitly and rather brutally criticised in the recent report of the Public Accounts Committee. For example, paragraph 6 states:
"The Department and EDS"—
the computer operator—
"had not foreseen that the new tax credit systems would prove unstable and not fit for purpose."
That case is already well made and well recognised.
Another instance of IT systems failing dismally and causing enormous problems for our constituents occurred a few weeks ago. I am sure that the Minister is well aware of the difficulties with Post Office card accounts. Many pensioners who took up the offer of a

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Post Office card account found that they could not receive cash through the post office or that they received excessive amounts. The system had to be closed down. Again, I am sure that the Minister will give us a report on that incident, but it would be useful to know how he proposes to deal with the residual problems associated with it, making sure that that does not happen again. It also leaves a legacy: will the pensioners or benefit recipients who have already received their money be required to pay some back, and under what circumstances will that happen?
Mr. Steve Webb: My hon. Friend refers to specific incidents. Did he come across the problem that postmasters who wanted to use the emergency mechanism available to them when faced with a member of the public desperate for cash could not get through on the emergency helpline?
Dr. Cable: No, I had not encountered that problem, but it adds further grist to the mill. It is clear that the whole system is surrounded with enormous practical difficulties, many of them originating in the fact that the software and the system are not functioning properly.
The Department and the Minister will have to digest the Work and Pensions Committee's conclusions on how the Department's IT projects are working, but it might be useful if the Minister gave us some preliminary indication of how he judges the matter. One general conclusion in the unanimous report of that Select Committee is particularly worrying. It states:
"We heard evidence that DWP is growing into an 'intelligent customer'. However, despite the undoubted progress, a number of witnesses were not optimistic that major IT failures were a thing of the past."
There is a large number of recommendations in the report, and I do not propose to go through them all. However, it might be useful to have a preliminary indication from the Minister as to how he would deal with them.
The problems that I and others have encountered could fall under a second general heading of complexity. The complexity in the benefits and associated entitlements system is staggering. With his background, the Minister will understand the difficulties that such complexity poses. Two years ago, the National Audit Office reported on the problem. At that time, there were 23 different substantial benefits, 16 of which were connected to each other in 30 different ways. There are now 35 basic benefits, as opposed to 23, and of course the complexity has multiplied exponentially.
The complexity is not simply in the sheer number of benefits and their connection to each other but in the way that our constituents have to apply for them. As I understand it, the new pension credit application form has 12 pages and there are 16 pages of explanatory notes. Many elderly people are totally unable to handle that, so they have been offered a helpline; but under helpline procedure, a considerable amount of quite sophisticated information must be collected before any help can meaningfully be offered. For many other key benefits, applying is extremely complex. For example,
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attendance allowance has a 19-page application form. It is not surprising that the Child Poverty Action Group's current chief executive says:
"The system is very complicated and it is far from easy to make a claim".
I became heavily involved in the issue of Post Office card accounts as a result of recent changes in the Post Office and because I spoke on Post Office matters until recently. The problem with the Post Office card account operationally—as opposed to in principle—was that there were eight separate steps before a benefit recipient or pensioner could get a card. As a result of intervention from the Deputy Prime Minister, action was taken to reduce the number of steps from eight to seven, but the process is still causing enormous problems.
My hon. Friend the Member for Northavon has done some work on that, and he established through the Library that a significant number of people, particularly pensioners, were getting trapped between the invitation stage and the next step in the application. Many have simply not been able to proceed with their card applications, and large numbers of applications are missing. It would be useful to hear how Post Office card accounts are proceeding. Are there are any blockages, and how do the Government propose to deal with them? What happens to people who have got to the invitation stage but do not proceed any further? Do they come under the default mechanism, whereby people are sent a cheque through the post, rather than being required to use a bank? There are many uncertainties about that process, and it would be useful to have help on them.
Some of the letters to which I referred earlier deal with what might be called error management. Any system will generate error; that is understandable, and in a big and complicated system, there will be many and various errors, but it is important that there is a good, speedy, courteous and efficient system for dealing with them. The problems are considerable, particularly in relation to the tax credit system, under which there have been large overpayments. There is a history of people being aggressively pursued for repayment of very large sums that were acquired through no fault of their own, and people find it exceedingly difficult to pay. It would be useful to hear how the Minister, who clearly is not directly responsible for the matter, views the interaction between benefits payment and tax credits where errors have occurred.
Some constituents have told me that their benefit payments are being cut because an overpayment error has been made in the tax credit system. There is a danger that they will be faced with a double demand for repayment through the Inland Revenue. Perhaps the Minister could explain how error management is being looked after. What is the degree of co-ordination between his Department and the Inland Revenue in ensuring that there will be no escalation of the problem of excessive demands being made of people who have been overpaid?
There is a particular problem with the Child Support Agency; as the Select Committee report produced just before summer points out, the error rate is between 10 and 14 per cent. The report's most optimistic prediction is that the error rate will be halved to 5 to 8 per cent. My understanding is that the National Audit Office figure for an acceptable error rate in an efficient Department is about 1 per cent. What is the time path for getting the system to approach some level of acceptability?

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My final general point is about consumer service. There is little doubt that most employees of the Department do their best under difficult circumstances to be helpful and courteous. Many are outstanding individuals, and in many cases I give them credit for working under difficult conditions. However, there are clearly areas where customer service does not work. I shall highlight just one case, that of call centres. People make many calls and are unable to get replies or, in many cases, cannot even get through. Is there such a thing as a protocol governing what is expected of call centres and the way in which call centres relate to clients? It has been suggested to me that people who work in call centres on behalf of the Benefits Agency are specifically told not to make outgoing calls, which makes it difficult to deal with people who have left messages and made genuine inquiries.
One big change that will affect the Department for Work and Pensions in the coming months is the large cut in manpower, which we understand to be of the order of 40,000. It is perfectly possible to reduce manpower in that Department without a reduction in efficiency of service. I am not totally committed to the idea of jobs for life and of preserving jobs the way they are. None the less, it is difficult to see how the stress on the Department, including the management of the IT systems and the high error rates, can possibly be overcome in an environment where there is a large reduction in the numbers of staff.
It is said that staff cuts will not take place on the front line, but if they take place in back-office services, does that not imply a reduction in the support for IT systems and the efficiency of call centres? I have no idea how the reduction will be managed, but it would be helpful if the Government explained where the cuts will take place, in terms of occupation and geography, how they will be managed, who will be involved and the time frame in which the process of staff contraction will take place.
2.22 pm
Mr. Steve Webb: My hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) is noted for the calm and analytical way in which he carries out his work in the House, and we have all benefited from the way in which he has brought to the House's attention just a sample of the large number of constituents who encounter problems with the welfare system, broadly defined. His analysis of IT issues, the system's complexities, the response to errors, and consumer service provides a structure that we might follow through the debate to ensure that the Minister provides us with a response on each area.
The Child Support Agency as an organisation has gone from bad to worse. It had a very unhappy birth, having been set targets that were unattainable from day one. From the beginning, therefore, it pursued the easy cases, the people who were already paying, in order to get them to pay more. It was much easier to meet targets not by doing what it was supposed to do, which was to chase the people who did not pay at all, but by chasing those who were paying in order to try to get more money out of them. The CSA alienated many people, and it has not recovered from that.
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Several pieces of child support legislation have changed the way in which the CSA operates and how maintenance is calculated and collected. Yet, well over a decade after its introduction, it is as shambolic as it was in the beginning.
Many constituents, represented by Members from all parties, find their dealings with the Child Support Agency among the most maddening things that they do. My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) remarked in a debate in this Chamber that the CSA is not exactly part of the healing process. It is anything but, and it often makes matters worse.
My hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham raised the issue of administration of child support. All hon. Members who want to provide a quality service to their constituents are perfectly happy to contact the CSA on their behalf, but we would far rather be redundant in that role and see a mechanism whereby people received quality of service first time round, at least in the 99 per cent. of cases to which my hon. Friend referred, and see a similarly effective mechanism for resolving their problems in the remaining 1 per cent.
Only this lunchtime, as I checked my incoming e-mails, I received one about the CSA from a constituent I had been trying to help and who had been on to the CSA's hotline. I appreciate and pay tribute to the knowledgeable and thorough staff who respond on the MPs' hotline. I was in touch with them some months ago about the case, but because I had stopped pushing, the situation had been put on hold. My constituent said that it was six weeks since anything had happened. She was told six weeks ago that her case was urgent, but when she rang yesterday she was told that nothing had happened in those six weeks, that it was on someone's desk and that, if she was lucky, it might be dealt with next week. There is no sense that the agency has got a grip on what it is meant to be doing. It simply does not seem able to cope.
We talked about the new computer system. I bring to the Minister's attention the feedback that I get when I ring the MPs' hotline for the Child Support Agency. The first question is whether the case is a new or an old one. In other words, is it on the new, multi-million pound flash computer or on the off-the-shelf, rubbishy one from the 1970s? If I say that it is a new case, they groan. They say, "We are sorry but we can't tell you much because we don't have much information. The new system doesn't enable us to tell you what you want to know. If it were an old case, we'd have a notepad and could give you information for your constituents, but the new computer system is not as good."
I find that extraordinary, because when the Government said to the House that they wanted hundreds of millions of pounds for a flash, new computer system and that they wanted to reform the entire child support system, the reason they gave was that the system was running on a rubbishy old computer that had been borrowed from the Americans in the 1970s, which was not fit for purpose. They said that all would be better when we got the new computer. However, here we are, and I guarantee one thing: the Minister will not today give us a date or tell us when the new computer will be working properly. I do not know whether it will ever be working properly, but people want to know.

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My hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham referred to the fact that the date at which we switch to a new computer system is not just an administrative point but one that makes a substantive difference. People on the new system would be allowed by law to retain some of their maintenance—£10 a week—but under the old system, they cannot get that money. How much longer should parents and children have to suffer financially because of the incompetence of EDS, the Child Support Agency and the Government when it comes to managing IT projects? It is children in poorer families, living on income support, who are affected by that. In the perhaps insufficient number of cases in which some maintenance can be got out of the former partner, is it not outrageous that, because of the Government's incompetence at managing computer projects, the children do not get the £10? For every extra week that the Government delay and that the system does not work, the children will not get £10. That seems to me totally unacceptable, and I think that the Minister owes the House an explanation about when it will come to an end. All we get is bland assurances: "We do not want to change to the new system until we're sure that it's working". Of course we do not, but when will that be? Does not the House deserve to know that? Perhaps the Minister can break with tradition and tell us.
My hon. Friend mentioned something else: the other side of the coin. We have the customer—the member of the public—who deals with the agencies, but we also have the poor souls who work for those agencies. They often have to deal with wholly inadequate IT systems and with irate members of the public. While I would not defend aggression towards, or abusive treatment of, public servants—that is totally unacceptable—I see the flipside, which is that people who work for the agencies have to put up with a lot of angry people.
It is no coincidence that, as the House may be aware, the Department for Work and Pensions consistently fails to meet its targets for staff sickness. The Department set targets to cut staff sickness, yet sickness has gone up. Within the Department, the Child Support Agency has one of the worst records for staff sickness, because at times it is a horrible place to work, because workers have to deal with rubbishy computers and members of the public who are given a rubbish service. I wonder when the Department will become a better employer so that members of staff want to turn up to work in the morning and do not have to deal with the wholly inadequate structure that the Government have put in place.
It would be nice to think that the Child Support Agency, which has been a source of dissension for a decade or more, was the only example of that problem, but the Government have contrived to invent new ones. As my hon. Friend said, the tax credits system is perhaps the classic example. I liken the experience of members of the public who receive tax credits to that of being on a rollercoaster. One month they are quids in, the next month they are down, then they get a claw-back, and then an overpayment, and they never know where they stand from one month to the next. They do not know whether the call or the knock on the door will come that says, "Sorry, but you were never entitled to that money that we gave you and we want it back." Ministers give
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us assurances that that will be done terribly humanely and that discretion will be shown and some of it written off, but the Inland Revenue does not seem to know that.
I had a case recently where someone had had a substantial overpayment and it looked odd. He could not understand how he could be entitled to all that money—given the rhetoric of Ministers, though, he thought that maybe it was that generous, as he had certainly been told how generous it would be. He rang up the Revenue and said, "Are you sure this is right?" He was told, "Yes, that's right." He double-checked that the figure was right, and thought, "Fine. I don't understand how the thing works." The credit is, of course, fiendishly complicated. I served on the Standing Committee that considered the relevant Bill, and I do not quite understand how tax credits are worked out. Members of the public are given a figure, and if they ring and check it is correct, they have a right to assume that they can rely on that money.
The gentleman in question paid his father back money he had owed him for years, which he had been given for an emergency. He said, "I thought at long last I could clear my debts. We went on a holiday. It's been brilliant." But I think the whole House knows what is coming next. The Revenue said, "Terribly sorry. We set your income at zero, so we have given you far too much money." Now, the Treasury made that assumption in relation to something called the working tax credit, and I hope that the Minister will explain to me how someone can receive the "working" tax credit but not have any earnings. I find that rather confusing.
The Revenue is now after the money, which runs into thousands of pounds. The Revenue's letter says that it accepts that the mistake was its fault, but that my constituent should have realised he was getting the wrong amount. He did smell a rat, it did look wrong, so he rang up and checked, and the benefits people said, "No, it's fine." How much more does a member of the public have to do? How far do people have to understand these fiendishly complicated systems? This comes back to the important point mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham: errors will be made in the best of systems, but how do we respond to them? His comment is quite right: we need proper protocols for responding to errors. The gap between the rhetoric that we hear in this House about the tax credit system and the reality for our constituents is a gulf.
What can we do about this rollercoaster? When errors are made by a Department and members of the public could not realistically be expected to understand what is going on, they should be written off. It is unacceptable to claw that money back, especially when it has already been spent. The tax credits fiasco has been CSA mark 2. A big Government IT project par excellence has messed up the lives of thousands of people.
It is interesting that with the exception of the new pensioners mentioned by my hon. Friend, all the other cases he referred to related to the means-tested benefits system in one way or another. It tends to be the case that the more complicated the system and the more involved it is, the easier it is for officials and the public to get things wrong, and the more difficult it is to put things right.
If we are to deliver financial support to people on the basis of their annual circumstances, which is what the tax credit system does, we are asking for trouble. We are

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expecting a household—these are household means tests—to report every change in circumstances during the course of an entire year. I have sat down with constituents who have got depressed, stressed and angry trying to explain every change in their circumstances to the people on the helpline, which is not always appropriately named. It was literally a case of explaining, "Last week, my wife did overtime, and this week she wasn't well so she was on sick pay for half the week, and I did some extra hours, which took me over this threshold." The system must look good to the whiz kids in the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions on their microcomputers, screens and charts, but it does not fit the complicated lives of real people.
Government policy must surely be directed towards simpler systems with a minimum of bureaucracy, which do not need to be changed every time someone's life changes and do not require the state constantly to keep track of people's individual circumstances. The Government have gone in precisely the opposite direction.
On delivering the money, my hon. Friend mentioned payment through the post office and, again, the infamous IT problem. As I understand it, we are talking about the Monday before the August bank holiday, and, for historical reasons, people with order books expected a double payment. The computer—I am not sure that computers just do things; I think someone probably tells them to—dished out double payments to about 190,000 people, mainly pensioners but not exclusively so. The story I have been told—the Minister may have a better version—is that someone realised that this was happening and metaphorically pulled the plug. However, that someone was in America. He pulled the plug and then went home. So when British customers started trying to get money out of their Post Office card accounts in Britain, the system was not working, but the people in America were tucked up in their beds. That may be a myth, but I do not understand why systems have to be transatlantic. One hears about such systems being subcontracted to low-wage call centres in Asia, but I am bewildered that the banking aspects of the Post Office card account have to be run from America. That is certainly not designed to provide a better quality of service, because it adds another dimension of complexity.
The ultimate irony was that the people whom the Government bullied into giving up their pension books and going over to the Post Office card account could not get their money. However, people who had hung on to their pension books were able to hand them over and get their money, because they still worked perfectly well. Is that not a parable for our age? The Government drive people into systems that, in many cases, they do not want to be part of, but fail to deliver or to keep their promises.
The Government spin is that the system is an antifraud measure, but they cannot even do the basics right and deliver people's money. Even when the postmasters rang the emergency helpline, they could not get through. What kind of a farce is that? One wonders what the Government can run if they cannot run an emergency helpline.
Pensioners were not the only ones affected that day. I encountered a mother with her children. She had run out of cash. She goes to one of the post offices in my
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constituency on a Monday to pick up her income support, then takes the cash to the supermarket down the road to do the week's food shopping for the children. I understand that she literally had pennies left in her purse when she turned up to be told, "Come back tomorrow." That is unacceptable. The Minister is smiling but I do not think that it is funny. It is totally unacceptable that people should have to put up with that quality of service—if that is even the right phrase.
My hon. Friend also referred to the Department's plans to shed tens of thousands of staff. The principal reason given is that the IT is so wonderful that people can be moved from the back office, and some will go to the front office to provide customer service, but the rest will no longer be needed. It beggars belief that the current system can be regarded as so good and efficient that there is surplus capacity and that the priority for that surplus is to get rid of staff. If all those people are sitting around doing nothing all day, which I find it hard to believe, why do we not get them to sort out the backlog at the Child Support Agency or answer the phones for the tax credits system? Why not use them to improve quality of service rather than sacking them? We have heard many examples of poor customer service, and I am sure that we will hear more from the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman). However, the Department will have fewer people processing claims and dealing with applications, so it is hard to understand how what we see on the ground fits with the rhetoric about how the IT will sort the problems out.
Where do we go from here? Clearly, the direction of the Government's policy and strategy has been wrong. We all accept that there will always be a case for a residual means test. There will always be people whose circumstances are extreme or unusual and do not fit, so there must be a safety net or a catch-all to ensure that nobody falls through. However, that should be for the few, not the many, and I do not apologise for using that phrase again. It should be a way of catching those who fall through or for whom there is no alternative approach. What we get instead is mass means-testing of our elderly or of the working-age population, which forces vast numbers of people through immensely bureaucratic systems. Money that could be spent on helping people is being spent on bureaucracy.
The typical pension credit claim costs about £4 a week—£200 a year. Tens of thousands of people do not even receive that much from the system. I accept that there are teething problems in getting people on to the correct retirement pension. My hon. Friend gave some examples, and I have also found some, of people hitting pension age and not always getting their correct pension from day one. The NIRS2 computer, which my hon. Friend mentioned, is another legendary fiasco of the Department. Getting people on to the correct pension is sometimes tricky, but once they are on it, it is—widowhood and similar factors apart—basically straightforward for the rest of their lives. However, the vast majority of pensioners are in a system whereby they are means-tested for the rest of their lives, and changes in their circumstances mean reassessment. Huge amounts of money are devoted to the bureaucracy of administration—not always high-quality administration—and not enough is devoted to getting money to people.

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I thank my hon. Friend for raising this broad topic, because those of us who spend all our time in this subject area often get bogged down in the minutiae. Today, he has stepped back and said that there are common threads running across different Departments and Select Committees. He described a Government who simply cannot get the IT right and who generate problems for themselves by making the system more and more complex and dependent on means-testing. They are completely out of touch with what our constituents find week in, week out, which is that the quality of service that they have a right to expect is not being delivered for them.
2.41 pm
Mr. Paul Goodman: I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) on securing the debate and on putting at the heart of it what he called the human element when he raised, quite rightly, a series of constituency cases. The human element applies to the person who finds the amount of form-filling required excessive, the person who cannot get through to where they need to on the telephone, the person who is not sure what official has the right to set their benefit at whatever level and, above all—the hon. Gentleman rightly stressed this—the person who believes that there must be a more systematic way to address the increasing number of errors that appear to be creeping into the system.
I hear similar stories from my local citizens advice bureau in High Wycombe and from my constituents in High Wycombe and Marlow. Indeed, all hon. Members will have heard the same stories. That is why the hon. Gentleman should be congratulated. I also congratulate him on his timing. When he secured the debate, he may not have thought that his timing was all that good, given that it clashes with two debates that his party is having in the main Chamber. However, I think that on reflection he will agree that the timing was extremely apposite, because this is the first opportunity that we have had since the appointment of the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to debate the operation of the benefits system.
Before moving on, I would like to pay tribute, as I have not yet had the chance to do so, to the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), simply by saying that whenever I had dealings with him, which were in fact few, I was always struck by his great courtesy and decency in debate.
The reshuffle has made it clear that the complaints that the hon. Member for Twickenham aired, and the difficulties to which he referred, have crept up, so to speak, to the ears of Downing street. It now appears to believe that there is a connection between the complexity of the system that he described and the strategic direction being taken by the Department, to which the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) referred at the end of his remarks. A considerable debate is clearly going on between Downing street and the Department about where social policy will go now.
Will the problems and difficulties to which the hon. Member for Twickenham referred be satisfactorily addressed? We read over the weekend in The Sunday
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Telegraph that Downing street now wants to scrap the disability premium and, in other papers then and since, that it wants in effect to scrap the entire pension settlement that Conservative and, I think, Liberal Democrat Members believe is the creation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We read that Downing street wants to do so by variously scrapping or reducing means-testing—I shall return to that in a moment—which is the foundation stone of present pensions policy, and possibly by introducing compulsion and hiking national insurance by 1.5 pence in the pound.
There is a direct connection between the chaos and confusion that now appear to be engulfing the Department's policy and today's debate. As the hon. Member for Twickenham effectively conceded, any country with a welfare system that in theory covers 60 million people will also have one that in practice does not work perfectly. The key to having a system in which benefits and tax credits are paid in full and on time, and in which people receive payments to which they are entitled and do not experience the sort of problems that the hon. Gentleman referred to, is for the system to be as simple as possible. Instead, it is now as complex as possible.
We warned the Government when they originally introduced the tax credit system that there was a great problem at the heart of it: the Inland Revenue and the Department for Work and Pensions—formerly the Department of Social Security—exist for different purposes. The hon. Member for Northavon referred to that. He referred to the difficulty that has come about from trying to turn the Inland Revenue, which is used to examining what people do annually, into a Department, which, like the Department for Work and Pensions, is used to trying to find out what people have been doing each week. Traditionally it has not been the Inland Revenue's purpose to try to establish where one was last week, where one might have lived, what one's income was and whom one might have been with. Great problems have come about as a result of meshing those two systems together.
It is worth running through the record. In the space of four years between 1999 and 2003—we are not even talking about between 1997 and 2003—the Chancellor abolished family credit; introduced the working families tax credit; introduced the disabled person's tax credit; introduced a child care credit; introduced an employment credit; introduced the children's tax credit; introduced the baby tax credit; abolished the working families tax credit; abolished the disabled person's tax credit; abolished the children's tax credit; abolished the baby tax credit; introduced a child tax credit; abolished the employment credit; and introduced a working tax credit. I could not remember all that without notes, and I doubt whether the Minister or the hon. Member for Northavon could either. I am certain that scarcely one, if any, of my 74,000-odd constituents could.
In a system that complex, two main structural problems will arise that will affect the administration and delivery of benefits—besides the attack on independence, privacy and dignity that most pensioners, and such interest groups as Age Concern and the National Pensioners Convention, believe means-testing represents.

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The hon. Member for Northavon alluded to the first such problem, which is the scandalously low take-up rates that arise from systems that are that complex. The take-up for the minimum income guarantee was 66 per cent. before it was taken up into the pension credit. That means that the non-take-up rate was 34 per cent. In other words, one third of the most vulnerable pensioners did not receive a penny from the MIG.
According to the latest figures, take-up for the pension credit is 3.1 million pensioners out of 5.1 million. In other words, almost 2 million pensioners are not receiving the pension credit to which they are entitled. The non-take-up rate of pension credit is almost 40 per cent. and, therefore, almost two out of five of the most vulnerable pensioners are not receiving a penny from the pension credit. It is worth pointing out that that is not because the Government want low take-up but because of the massive complexity of the systems involved, the difficulties of getting through on the helpline, the form-filling, and the fact that the pensioners concerned may come to believe that they will not get enough back from the pension credit to make it worth their while dealing with the administration.
Even if the Government hit their own target for 3 million households to receive pension credit by April 2006, that still means, according to the Government's own projections, that 1.4 million of our most vulnerable pensioners will not be receiving it. Even under the Government's own plans, for which Ministers budget, it is assumed that one in five pensioners will not benefit from the pension credit, and they are almost always the very poorest pensioners in our society. That is why The Guardian reported this morning that the Government's social exclusion unit has found that the pensioners and those who claim benefit who are hardest to help—such as, I suspect, some of my ethnic minority constituents in High Wycombe—are not being helped by such systems.
Such take-up problems were shown in their most extreme form earlier this year by the debacle to which the hon. Members for Northavon and for Twickenham referred and which accompanied the launch of the child tax credit. At one point, approximately 800,000 families who had made a claim were not receiving the money to which they were entitled and some children were missing out on free school meals and milk tokens.
That story neatly illustrates the other main structural problem—the first being the expansion of means-testing—that affects the administration and delivery of welfare entitlement. The serious problems with the computer system used by the Department to deliver that entitlement have been referred to several times already this afternoon. I want to visit the crash on 24 August of the computer system that administers direct payments and which affected so many of our constituents so badly, to which the hon. Members for Northavon and for Twickenham referred. On 24 August, my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) wrote to the then Secretary of State posing a series of questions. He has not yet received a reply, and I suspect that he will not receive one from that Secretary of State. Will the Minister tell me whether the American story related by the hon. Member for Northavon was correct? How many pensioners were affected? When did the computer system stop authorising payments? At what time was normal service resumed? Was the breakdown triggered by the bank holiday the following week, as was claimed?
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Can the Minister assure pensioners that the new system will be able to handle holidays in future? Did the system crash after some pensioners received four weeks' money instead of two and, if so, how many pensioners fell into that category and what was the total value of overpaid benefits? Can he give categorical assurance that those problems will not be repeated? If he cannot do so, can he say whether the Department has any plans to introduce a back-up system and, again, if he cannot, will he suspend the plan to withdraw pension books by March next year? I note in passing that the contract to run the Inland Revenue's IT services during the next 10 years has been taken away from EDS, of whom we have heard so much, and given to Cap Gemini.
Then there is the Child Support Agency. At present, 74 per cent. of cases are still on the old system waiting to be transferred to the new system. There is no date on which those cases will be transferred, which means that, as the hon. Member for Northavon said, single parents have missed out on £45 million a year in benefits. Meanwhile, one in three customer calls are apparently abandoned because of the failings of the new system and £2 billion of uncollected child maintenance has been written off by the Department. The hon. Gentleman said that staff sickness rates are among the highest—when I last looked they were the highest—of any section in the Department.
As the Minister knows, there is now consensus that the Government's computer strategy is not working in many respects. The report of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, on which I serve, to which both hon. Members who have spoken in this debate have referred and on which the Government have, of course, a majority, said in its recent report that Whitehall was hiding "an appalling waste" of public money behind a "cloak of commercial confidentiality".
That is one consensus, but there is also consensus that the Chancellor of the Exchequer-driven mania for means-testing is also not working and that we need a simpler pensions and social security system. That is agreed by organisations ranging from the National Pensioners Convention to the Association of British Insurers.
Either the Minister is as baffled as the rest of us by the reports in the media, which clearly emanate from Downing street, that the Government's pensions policy should be reversed and the welfare system thus simplified, or he is in Downing street's confidence and knows how the apparent struggle between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor is going to be resolved, in which case it would be useful if he were to reply to the points that have been raised in this debate and to tell us what the Department's plans are to make the system simpler. He should also make it clear whether the major step of making the system simpler by retreating from means-testing in pensions and adopting a policy that is nearer to that of my party—linking the basic state pension with earnings—is on the desk of any Minister or about to go to any Minister.
2.6 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr. Chris Pond): I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) on securing the debate and on raising important issues about the

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complexity of what he describes as the benefit system and the difficulties of delivery, as well as about some of the stresses in the system. While he raised in a thoughtful way some of the issues his constituents have brought to him, I would not like him or other hon. Members to lose sight of how people's lives have changed in recent years as a result of some of the changes that we have made. That was highlighted in yesterday's "Opportunities for All" report. It showed that more than 1.9 million more people were in work than in 1997, that around 2.1 million fewer children and 1.8 million fewer pensioners were living in the absolute poverty they experienced just seven years ago, and that half as many people experienced fuel poverty.
There have been real and considerable improvements in the circumstances of the people we have been discussing—the very poorest who depend on the benefit system—and we are well on the way to meeting our targets. They are ambitious targets, which have never before been established by any Government. They are to halve and then eliminate child poverty.
I want to deal with some of the issues addressed by the hon. Member for Twickenham and raised in the contributions of the hon. Members for Northavon (Mr. Webb) and for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman). The first of them is complexity. The hon. Member for Twickenham is right to draw attention to the fact that the benefit system is complex. It seeks to meet the needs of people in very varying circumstances who often have very different needs. It is a system that has developed over the years. It not only draws on our post-war welfare settlement; that itself draws on many of the provisions of the period 1909-11. Therefore, by definition we have a system that is complex.
Wherever possible and bearing in mind the need to ensure that simplification does not compromise fairness, the Government are determined to ensure that the system is as simple as possible and that it delivers to our customers in a way that is as easily understandable to them as possible. Therefore, in areas such as council tax benefit and disability living allowance, we have made significant moves to simplify the forms. In the local housing alliance this morning, I launched a new phase in our reforms of housing benefit, which replace a very complex system of housing support with a simple standard local housing allowance for each locality that varies only according to the size of household. We are piloting it in a number of pathfinder areas.
In the Pension Service we have devised a new mechanism by which people can claim pension credit. They can do so from the comfort of their own home over the telephone—one of our staff will fill out the form for them —or through a home visit from the local service.
We have heard much about the failures of IT and telephony in the Child Support Agency system, but hon. Members are aware that we are seeking to replace a complex system of assessing maintenance liability, under which up to 100 different pieces of information were needed to make the assessment, with a much simpler, straightforward system. The new system will help parents with care and non-resident parents to understand how much should be transferred from one parent to the other.
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We have invested heavily in delivery; over the past two spending reviews, some £2.8 billion has been invested in modern IT infrastructure, Jobcentre Plus and the Pension Service to enable us to operate more efficiently while delivering a high level of service for our customers. For example, as I have said, pensioners can now easily apply for pension credit by telephone or through a visit at home by the local service, instead of being required, as in the past, to visit a drab benefit office. In most cases, once they have made that telephone call and their claim has been verified, pensioners over 65 need not be troubled further for up to five years.
I have to tell the hon. Member for Wycombe, who referred to the take-up of pension credit, that we are proud of what we have achieved in getting 3 million people in receipt of it already. I can confirm that there are no plans at all to allow one in five pensioners not to benefit from the credit in the longer term. We now have a more stringent target, which is to ensure that 3.2 million people receive pension credit, but we will not rest until all pensioners entitled to that help get it.
A recent Age Concern report showed that for most applicants—70 per cent.—the application process was considered easy, and simpler than that for the minimum income guarantee. Some 85 per cent. said that they would recommend to others applying for pension credit. I do not think that that reflects the picture painted by hon. Members of the complexity of claiming pension credit. I must tell the hon. Member for Wycombe that the credit is a targeted benefit because we needed to make sure that we got help to those who needed it most, after many years in which pensions were badly eroded under the previous Government, and in which there had been a substantial increase in pensioner poverty.
We are also improving the processing of benefits, so that more of our operations are automated and more staff can be released to focus on front-line work. Jobcentre Plus will increase the number of customer-facing staff by 15 per cent. We have also been able to reduce the number of offices we use by combining the old Benefits Agency with Employment Service networks to make new customer-focused agencies—Jobcentre Plus and the Pension Service. By centralising processing work in Jobcentre Plus and the Pension Service and making bespoke larger centres, we can achieve further economies of scale.
The reality of all of that is that we need fewer staff to continue to deliver a high level of service to customers, thanks to improved services and more efficient ways of working. The hon. Member for Northavon asks why we do not simply move those staff to the CSA or to work on tax credits to improve the quality of customer service, but I can tell him that customer service is improving. Although we are able to reduce the overall number of staff as a result of the investment that we have made, particularly in DWP, we have given a commitment, and our emphasis is on front-line staff and quality of service.
All hon. Members have referred to difficulties with the CSA as illustrations of what they wish the House to believe are failures of IT systems. As I have said previously, I am as frustrated as other hon. Members that we are not yet able to deliver that new and simpler system of assessment. Hon. Members are aware that we

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have had considerable problems with the IT and telephony in the CSA. We have worked closely with EDS, our IT suppliers, to try to overcome those problems. Over recent periods, as the Select Committee knows, we have withheld 15 to 20 per cent. of payments to EDS, to take account of the failures of delivery on IT and telephony.
Things are improving. Some 25,000 parents with care now receive the child maintenance premium. The hon. Members for Northavon and for Wycombe said that they would like to see all parents who are entitled to that premium receiving it, and I concur with that. The reality is, however, that that premium is a feature of the new system and not of the old, and until we can transfer the old cases to the new system, we cannot pay that premium across the board. I am afraid that I cannot make a commitment to a date when that transfer will be made. I repeat that we will not and cannot make the transfer of old cases to the new system until we are convinced that the IT is working effectively. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise.
The hon. Member for Northavon also referred to the tax credits system; he described it as a fiasco. At that point in his address he was becoming increasingly theatrical—he talked about it messing up the lives of thousands of people. Neither I nor most of my constituents would recognise that as reality.
The tax credit system, which represented a transfer of some 6 million people to a new and more generous form of family support, was perhaps the biggest change in family support since Beveridge. Inevitably, in the early stages of making a transfer of that size there were stresses on the system. However, the system is now working much more effectively than it was in the early stages, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that many of the problems have been overcome. The tax credit system is an essential part of our programme, which aims to halve child poverty by 2010 and to eliminate it by 2020.
I shall now address the points made by hon. Members about the Post Office card account system and direct payment. The hon. Members for Twickenham and for Northavon made the allegation that we are bullying people into giving up their order books and moving to direct payment, whether to the Post Office card account or a form of bank account. I reassure the House that no bullying is going on. We are ensuring that people understand their options and can make a real choice about the way in which they wish to receive their benefits or pensions. The aim is to overcome the financial exclusion that blights so many people's lives and to offer a more secure and flexible method by which people can receive their payments. Moreover, more than 90 per cent. of pensioners already have a bank account, and we should be wary of being patronising towards pensioners by assuming that, for some reason, they cannot operate a bank account.
Mr. Webb: The Minister used the word "patronising"—the right word for him to use. If, faced with an informed choice about those two options—direct payment into a Post Office card account or a bank account—a pensioner says, "No, I know my
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circumstances and my preferences, and I prefer the present method of payment", is it not patronising to tell them that that is the one choice they cannot have?
Mr. Pond: No, that is not patronising. It is a reality that we have decided to phase out the order books. They were introduced at the same time as ration books and would have been abolished in 1998, if the previous Government had remained in office and their plans had come to fruition. As the hon. Gentleman knows, 100 pensioners have their pension books stolen every week, and there was an understanding that it is a very expensive method of transferring funds to pensioners. The funds should go into the pension, not the method of delivery. Most pensioners already operate bank accounts; I do not think it at all patronising to assume that the rest, in time, will wish to do so. Some will be unable to operate those accounts, and that is why we have announced a system of cheque-based payments for those who really are unable and unwilling to operate any form of bank account.
The hon. Member for Twickenham suggested that we were making it difficult for people to take out Post Office card accounts. More than 3.8 million people have requested POCAs and more than 3 million have opened such accounts—that does not suggest that people are finding that overly difficult. Independent research commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions suggests that there are high levels of satisfaction among customers who have transferred to direct payment. Some 91 per cent. of customers stated that they were satisfied with the process of making the arrangements to receive their benefit by direct payment; 93 per cent. were satisfied with the process of having payments made into their accounts. We recognise that some people, including many pensioners, find the final stage of opening a Post Office card account difficult—the stage of returning their account details to the Department for Work and Pensions. We understand that people find it difficult to see any distinction between the Post Office and a Government Department. We are talking to the Post Office and to postmasters to establish whether there is a way of making that simpler.
A number of Members mentioned the events in August—I should say to the hon. Member for Wycombe that 23 August was the date. Having spoken to the chief executive and other senior Post Office managers to get a clear understanding of exactly what happened, I should like to clarify what appears to have happened on that occasion. The hon. Member for Northavon was right in saying that somebody from JP Morgan, the Post Office's subcontractor, apparently turned the system off, having found that multiple payments had been made to certain people. That person did so without the authority of the Post Office, and certainly with no authority from the Department for Work and Pensions. The Post Office card account is a Post Office, not a DWP, product. It was not a system or IT failure, but a management failure—a failure as a result of human error.
We have sought the Post Office's assurances that that will never happen again. There must be safeguards to ensure that, and to ensure that, if it does happen again, the fall-back mechanisms will not fail and people will be able to find out exactly where their payments are. It is unacceptable that pensioners should have been left—

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even for three hours and 53 minutes, as was the case on 23 August—without any means of accessing their money. I have made that point clearly to the Post Office and I know that it accepts that. I have also asked it to pass the message on to JP Morgan.
The hon. Member for Northavon raised the question of whether pensioners and others will be pursued for any overpayments that occurred as a result of that error by JP Morgan. I have made it clear to the Post Office, and asked it to make it clear to its suppliers, that we do not expect any pensioner or any other of our customers to be pursued for the repayment of an overpayment that was no fault of their own. In response to the hon. Member for Wycombe, we are in receipt of the list of questions sent in a letter by the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts). We delayed responding to the detailed points until after we had received clear responses from the Post Office about exactly what happened, but we will shortly issue a response to the specific points along the lines that I have just outlined.
The hon. Member for Twickenham raised a serious point about some of his constituents who had been pursued for overpaid benefits in a way that he considered unacceptable. As background, fraud and error overall cost the Department and the taxpayer some £2 billion a year, or £80 for every family in the country. We are making considerable progress in reducing the amount of fraud and error. The reduction of 29 per cent. for income support and jobseeker's allowance, which are the main working-age benefits, is well on the way to meeting our public service agreement target of an overall reduction of 33 per cent.
The hon. Gentleman will recognise that we have a responsibility to recover overpayments, even if they are the result of official error. If payment is made over and above the amount that has been authorised—for example, someone may be paid twice for the same period—the Department may invite repayment. In exceptional circumstances, a person's failure to respond to the invitation to repay could lead the Department to consider recovery through civil action, but we are very sensitive on such issues. If the hon. Gentleman will let me have details of the particular cases to which he referred, I will happily pursue them on his behalf and determine whether they have been dealt with properly.
Finally, I wish to address some of the points about pensions, which are of vital concern to all our constituents. In a short time, we will have an opportunity to debate the matter on the Floor of the House on a Liberal motion. The Pension Service has been operational for two years, and it is clear from customer and partner feedback that it is making a
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difference. Some 81 per cent. of respondents to customer surveys said that they were satisfied with the service that they received. The quality of the staff and information, and the professionalism of the service were commonly identified as the best things about the service. More than nine out of 10 respondents agreed that staff in the Pension Service were polite, treated customers with respect, were easy to talk to and were patient. A network of pension centres provides a primarily telephone-based service for more than 11 million pensioners. It is supported by locally based services that are delivered in partnership with other organisations, offering face to face contact with customers who need it through home visits and at outreach locations.
The new approach to the delivery of benefits and services to our customers means that we have to be smarter about our business processes. As I said, we have increased investment in our IT systems and in our processes overall, and our target for paying pension credit has been increased to at least 3.2 million pensioner households by 2008. That demonstrates our continuing focus on tackling poverty and our confidence in meeting challenging targets.
The substantial investment has meant a transformation of the DWP into an organisation that is focused around the needs of customers. Investment and reform are transforming the welfare state into an efficient system that is tightly focused on actively supporting and empowering people so that they can achieve their potential and get the help to which they are entitled. Modern IT and improved processes mean that we can now get more resources to the front line so that we can continue to deliver a high-quality service with increasing efficiency.
I understand that for our staff this is an unsettling time. That investment, those extra efficiencies and the way in which with fewer staff we are able to provide a higher quality of provision to our customers means that many people who work in the organisation will not be needed in the long term. Although any job losses are regrettable, by improving efficiency we will release resources to make further progress on child and pensioner poverty and get even closer to full employment.
I pay tribute to our staff. The achievements that I outlined at the beginning, from our report, "Opportunities for All", are a tribute to them and something that I much appreciate. I know that other hon. Members of the House will want to join me in paying that tribute.
2.20 pm
Sitting suspended until half-past Three o'clock.

Oversight of IMF and World Bank Policies
3.30 pm
Ann McKechin: This year marks an important anniversary for our multilateral organisations, as it is 60 years since the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created at the Bretton Woods conference. They were set up with the noble and worthwhile aims of providing global financial stability and growth to avoid the economic disasters that had scarred the first half of the 20th century and had, at least in part, led to world war two. Our world has, of course, changed a great deal during those 60 years and the role and influence of those bodies has altered significantly from the original ideals. Gradually, both organisations have adopted objectives based on an unswerving belief in the benefits of capital market liberalisation, which has certainly benefited the financial markets but has, in many cases, failed to secure the original aims of world stability and growth.
Today, IMF and World Bank activities directly affect the lives and livelihoods of billions of people throughout the developing world. Over the years there have been many criticisms of their policies, and of their policies' consequences, from a wide variety of sources. Despite the talk in western nations of the need for democracy and good governance, however, in many ways those institutions still appear remote and unaccountable to any form of democratic mandate.
At the end of the month, Ministers will attend the annual general meeting of the World Bank and the IMF, but despite the huge power of both those institutions, there has been no opportunity for a debate in the main Chamber of this House or in the other place on how this country's representatives propose to conduct negotiations, or on their voting patterns during the last year. That is the norm, for there has been remarkably little debate or scrutiny of the Government's record in either institution, despite the fact that we hold a permanent directorship on the boards of both and are viewed as a key world player.
Sadly, the United Kingdom is not unique in its lack of parliamentary scrutiny and I argue that that is one of the fundamental reasons why multilateral institutions have failed to address the true needs of the people whom they were ultimately designed to serve. Although they are public institutions, there is no direct accountability to the public. That is understandable, given their global nature; however, that lack could be balanced by ensuring that the operations of the organisations are open and transparent. In reality, they fail to be transparent, with a culture of secrecy ingrained in the institutional framework, and key economic and loan decisions still being taken in closed-door discussions. Some—the IMF and World Bank among them, no doubt—will argue that that provides flexibility, but it also precludes timely debate and criticism in national Parliaments and allows special interests full sway. Probably just as importantly, it creates suspicions that, even when groundless, can feed the forces that can undermine the political sustainability of such policies.
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Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank, argues in his book, "Globalization and its Discontents":
"The most fundamental change that is required to make globalization work in the way that it should is a change in governance. This entails, at the IMF and World Bank, a change in voting rights … to ensure that it is not just the voices of … finance ministries and treasuries that are heard."
At present, voting rights are determined largely on the basis of economic weight, giving the industrialised nations of the world, who are also the leading nations in the financial community, an effective veto on IMF and World Bank decisions. However, as Stiglitz argues effectively in his book, the premise that the creditor nations should hold the real power is fundamentally false, as the IMF almost always gets paid. It is not the same as a commercial bank. The money ultimately comes from the workers and other taxpayers in the developing nations.
That imbalance has led to IMF and World Bank policies being concentrated on the priorities of the financial community, rather than on those of the poor. Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Zambia as part of an exchange scheme for women parliamentarians organised through the offices of the British Council. For more than 20 years, the Zambian Government have been dependent on support from the IMF and the World Bank. Unlike many of its neighbours, Zambia has enjoyed relative stability and lack of conflict for a long period, and it has a proud record of caring for substantial numbers of refugees from war-afflicted zones in countries on its borders. Despite this record, however, Zambia has become increasingly poorer during that period. It now has the lowest life expectancy of any country in the world: a mere 33.4 years in 2001. In 1990 it was ranked 130 on the UN human development index, but it had fallen to 163 in 2001.
Over the years, the multilateral organisations have imposed a whole raft of conditions on the way in which Zambia's economy should operate, but for much of that time those conditionalities did not lead to better policies, faster growth or better outcomes for the Zambian people. Zambia liberalised many of its domestic industries before neighbouring countries in the region, but owing to the failure to consider the proper sequencing of these measures, the record post-privatisation has been very mixed. Many companies have collapsed, jobs have been lost and welfare programmes originally carried out through a state organisation have not been continued by private companies.
In the past 10 years, Zambia has sold 257 out of 280 state firms. Unlike the economies of east Asia, which opened their markets slowly to the outside world and in a sequenced way, Zambia was totally unable to compete with international competition, and privatisation has not led to employment growth. Formal manufacturing employment almost halved, falling from 75,400 in 1991 to 43,320, in 1998. In addition, the Government have been required to lower tariffs on a wide range of products to levels far lower than the limits set under World Trade Organisation agreements. The IMF and World Bank have taken an exceptionally long time to admit that historical evidence shows that to develop, exporting countries need protection for a

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period of time from the world's markets, and most if not all of today's industrialised and newly industrialised nations—including our own in the west—have used a wide variety of what would now be considered trade-distorting policy interventions to protect their economies before they liberalised.
Sadly that lesson was not learned soon enough to save Zambia's textile industry—one of the indicators of its transition from a developing country into a more industrialised state. The lowering of tariffs on textile products, and particularly the removal of all tariffs on used clothes, led to large increases in imports of cheap, second-hand clothing from industrialised nations. There were more than 140 textile firms in 1991 but their number had fallen to just 8 by 2002, and employment in textiles fell from 34,000 to only 4,000 in that period. Sadly, textiles is not the only industry in which such consequences have been felt.
The liberalisation of trade also had an adverse impact on Government revenues. During the 1990s, total income from tariffs, which formed a significant part of Zambia's revenue, fell by more than 50 per cent., and with declining gross domestic product overall, Government revenue fell by more than 30 per cent. in real terms between 1990 and 1998. At the same time, however, the IMF and World Bank were calling for fiscal stringency, so spending on important economic infrastructure was heavily cut. During my visit, I met communities who had to wait upwards of 30 years for the most basic health care and school provision—in fact health care and school provision now is similar to that provided prior to independence in 1964. In one area, the local community had built its own school with materials supplied by a US charity, but only had resources to appoint an unqualified teacher. Their literally incredible efforts to give their children a very rudimentary education were truly humbling, yet at the same time there are approximately 5,000 qualified teachers in the country whom the Government cannot afford to employ.
Despite that record, in the very week of my visit, the World Bank representative in Zambia stated, astonishingly, that Zambians should stop complaining about the multilateral institutions of the IMF and World Bank. Apparently, he was under the strange impression that his own organisation was an invincible force for good. As the Zambian authorities grapple with the challenge of reaching the completion point in the heavily indebted poor countries process, they may feel that they are not in a strong position to argue against such arrogance. Despite the recognised efforts of the Government this year to achieve a balanced budget, Zambia will reach the completion date, probably by January next year, with an unsustainable level of debt and will be far from ever reaching the millennium development goals. Any progress that has been made in the past couple of years is agonisingly small, while Zambian people continue to suffer from crushing poverty. Such complacency on the part of the IMF and the World Bank works against good governance and democratic decision making and involvement.
I appreciate that our Government, together with the IMF and World Bank, have placed much store in recent years on the poverty reduction strategy papers process,
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which is linked to the debt relief programme, as being much more participatory and constituting a genuine dialogue between north and south. However, the incorporation of civil society viewpoints in the final PRSP in HIPC countries does not extend to the macroeconomic policies that are underpinned by the poverty reduction growth facility, because that is subject to complete control by the IMF. A poverty reduction growth facility letter of agreement is required before a country can reach the decision point on the PRSP. The involvement of parliamentarians, as opposed to Ministers, in the PRSP process is at best minimal, and in many HIPC nations is almost non-existent.
There is no doubt that there are other contributory factors to Zambia's economic decline, such as corruption and lack of good governance. Nevertheless, the IMF and World Bank have had 20 years of significant influence in the country and its economy but have failed to deliver. If, like a Government's, their policies were truly subject to democratic scrutiny, changes in direction and scope would have happened far quicker.
Last week, in my role as co-chair of the all-party heavily indebted poor countries group, I hosted a meeting to launch a global petition calling for both institutions to recognise the right of national Parliaments to have the right and obligation to be fully involved in the development and scrutiny of their proposals and to hold the final power of ratification. The organisers of the petition, which is supported by the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank, hope to gain support in at least 60 Parliaments and Assemblies from both the north and south of the globe.
Even though we have been back in session for only just over a week, more than 125 parliamentarians from both Houses have already signed the petition, and the response from other Parliaments has been encouraging. The petition has struck a strong chord with elected representatives, who often feel powerless to influence decisions that have such an impact on their electorate. The aims of the petition are relatively modest but can go a long way to establish better governance both in our multilateral institutions and in individual nation states.
I appreciate that no single member of the institutions can effect widespread change. However, I hope that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury will agree that in the spirit of open government engendered by our Freedom of Information Act 2000, it is not unreasonable to ask the Government to disclose their detailed voting patterns as an executive director, together with policy positions and statements made to the board. That would be a good start and act as a catalyst to reform of the way in which the House examines Government policy on those matters.
The Treasury Committee, in its report in April 2001 on the IMF, stated that the actions of the IMF's
"executive board as a whole remain opaque. Most notably neither the votes, nor the minutes, of the executive board are published. We believe that … withholding this information limits our ability to hold the Government to account for their actions at the Fund."
Does the Minister accept that such information should be made available as a matter of course?
I know that our Government have in the past supported greater involvement by African nations on the boards of directors, and that is welcome. However,

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although the UK, France and Germany have one seat each, the entire African continent has only two. That makes it very hard for parliamentarians in poor countries to contact, let alone influence, their executive director. I hope that my hon. Friend will support moves to give developing nations more say in the IMF and the World Bank, which in turn would make it easier for their parliamentarians to hold their representatives on the board to account.
Given that 70 per cent. of the world's poorest people are women, my hon. Friend will agree that the fact that the boards of both institutions are overwhelmingly male—in 2002, the IMF board was entirely male—is totally unacceptable in this day and age. Have our Government requested a better gender balance on those boards, or do they have any proposals?
If policies are to succeed and gain support from those who will bear the consequences, it is important that the IMF and the World Bank engage genuinely with national Parliaments. The same is true for any policy that we as politicians try to present to our electorate. I hope that our Government will accept that if the PRSP process is to be a genuine step towards better governance, macro-economic changes and loan decisions must be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval, just as we would expect if the House were to enter into significant economic agreements with any multilateral institution.
I know that in order to focus policy direction on poverty reduction, the Chancellor has been at the forefront of policy changes in the IMF, but I urge my hon. Friend and his colleagues to ensure that parliamentary democracy and scrutiny are an integral part of future decision making. We all want the IMF and the World Bank to succeed in tackling poverty around the globe, and that would be a significant way of achieving that objective.
3.46 pm
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (John Healey): I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Ann McKechin) on securing the debate, on the clear and well argued way in which she pressed her arguments for reforming the international financial institutions, and on the way in which she brought into play her particular concerns about Zambia. In paying tribute to my hon. Friend, I acknowledge the work that she puts into the all-party groups in which she is an office holder. That all-party view has been a feature of debate about such issues in this House, backed by the commitment of community groups, faith groups and campaign groups beyond Westminster. In the past few years, that campaign has made an important contribution to our pressure on international institutions for the reforms that she and I want to secure. I am aware of the parliamentarians' petition that my hon. Friend launched last week. If 125 Members of both Houses of the UK Parliament have signed it, we already have more than double the worldwide target of 60 parliamentarians per petition that the exercise set.
I welcome the opportunity to discuss the issues, and it is important that we do so in the context of our overall approach to development. The leadership and influence that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has displayed since
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1997, to which my hon. Friend paid tribute, reflects the UK Government's firm commitment to support developing countries, strengthen their economies, reduce poverty and improve the provision of basic public services for their citizens. It is a moral imperative to improve people's lives in developing countries, but it is a practical imperative to support more general global growth—a point to which my hon. Friend alluded. She paid tribute to the Chancellor and our support of key measures such as the HIPC initiative, which will bring all countries to a sustainable level of debt. However, much more is needed to ensure that no country that is genuinely committed to reform is denied the opportunities to meet the millennium development goals.
Development will be a defining feature of the G7 and G8 presidencies that the UK is due to take on next year. One priority will be to progress the UK proposal for an international finance facility and to support the WTO's Doha development agenda to increase opportunities for freer and fairer trade. However, for developing countries to be able to make most use of debt relief, aid and more open trade, they must have the economic conditions necessary for growth. Without an economic system to ensure that growth benefits more than just a few in society, the millennium development goals, which will be at the heart of our vision and effort over the next decade, will be missed, even if there is greater international support. The international financial institutions have a crucial role to play in supporting Governments who have embarked on economic reform programmes, poverty reduction and tackling corruption.
To assist the reform efforts, the IMF and the World Bank provide a range of advice and support, but it is fair to say, as my hon. Friend did, that in the past too great a degree of direction has been applied to programmes that those institutions are prepared to support, so that it becomes a case more of directing than of supporting. That is why, as my hon. Friend recognised, the UK fully supported the introduction of the poverty reduction strategy papers process in 1999. That was a major step forward, providing the basis on which donor support to low-income countries can be built around the country's own development priorities. These issues are complex and will take time and effort to get right. We still have not made the progress that we want. The UK Government therefore welcome the recent reviews of the PRSP process by the IMF's independent evaluation office and the World Bank's operations evaluation department. Those reviews made a number of recommendations aimed at strengthening country ownership and improving the capacity of developing countries to reduce poverty. I say to my hon. Friend that we will continue to work to ensure that those recommendations are implemented.
It is correct to say, as my hon. Friend argues and as the parliamentarians' petition asserts, that parliamentarians must play their part in the development of poverty reduction strategies in order to underline and reinforce the ownership of development priorities in the countries involved. It is also fair to say that in many cases parliamentary involvement in that process has been weak. That is due sometimes to a lack of capacity, and sometimes to constitutional arrangements within the countries in question. However, over the last two years,

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the Department for International Development has been working in-country with some of them to support greater involvement of their parliamentarians. The World Bank is now doing the same in the design and implementation of its lending programmes. Ultimately, however, it is for developing countries to decide how engagement with parliamentarians should happen. Donors and international institutions cannot and should not impose that.
The Government recognise the concerns that nongovernmental organisations and others, including my hon. Friend, express about the effect that conditions attached to loans and aid programmes can have on the sense of local ownership of reform. My hon. Friend cited the example of Zambia, based on the fact-finding visit that she conducted over the summer. To complement the PRSP process, the IMF has already undertaken a considerable streamlining of its conditionality and is due to review its guidelines again this year. The World Bank has also embarked on a streamlining process. The UK is strongly behind that work to ensure that the international financial institution guidelines support country ownership and are implemented in practice. To develop further the UK's approach to conditionality, the Government—the Treasury, DFID and the Foreign Office working jointly—have prepared a consultation document for discussion with key donor and developing country partners and with NGOs. A first draft of that has been circulated to NGOs, and today sees the first consultation discussion with some of those interests. If my hon. Friend is interested, I will ensure that she gets a copy of the draft. It will be formally published in full a little later. The document sets out where and how the UK believes conditionality should be used by multilateral agencies and by itself as a bilateral donor.
The document argues that conditionality can support but cannot buy reform, that countries should have the space to develop policy options and debate them, that donors need to improve the harmonisation and predictability of aid. However, it also states that conditionality is important for justifying aid spending to parliamentarians and to the public in donor countries—I think that my hon. Friend will probably accept that point. After the period of consultation, the Government aim to publish a final document on their policy towards conditionality next year. We want to encourage the engagement of parliamentarians and elicit the views of NGOs and other groups that have shown an interest in the issues.
We agree with campaigners who make the case—as does my hon. Friend—for developing countries' input to be not just in their own country and into their own programmes, but at every level of the institutions. That is why the UK has supported the agenda of strengthening the voice of developing and transition countries in the IMF and in the World Bank. The Government are committed to measures to reinforce the
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voice of developing countries in the international financial institutions. We are already a major donor to the analytical trust fund to increase the capacity of the sub-Saharan African executive directors' offices at the fund and at the Bank. We also support exploring options to increase their voice in the boards of the institutions. The South African Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel, leads that work and we hope to see more detailed proposals and analysis in spring. Those issues are scheduled for discussion in the development committee and in the annual meetings of the fund and the Bank at the beginning of next month. If there were to be real progress in the development committee, there would be a real expectation on the international monetary and financial committee to deliver something in the spring.
On the question of scrutiny in this House, which my hon. Friend made a point of raising, I remind her that after the annual meetings last year, the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for International Development appeared before the International Development Committee to update its members and the House on progress. I am sure that if they were invited again, they would be delighted to accept and would welcome the opportunity to pick up these issues with hon. Members then.
On accountability and openness, we recognise that all countries must be accountable to their own citizens in their dealings with the IMF and World Bank. That is why the Treasury has for the past five years produced an annual report on our relations with the IMF, setting out our key agendas and our general positions. We can go further. We will continue to work to make clear the stance that we have taken in the IMF board and how we have voted throughout the year. The next report will make that more explicit, as my hon. Friend urged. As for our relations with the World Bank, this year the Department for International Development has committed to produce an annual statement to Parliament on the positions that it has taken on the World Bank board. In recognising the case for greater transparency, we must also recognise that there are members who fear the effect of greater transparency, especially on the opinions of investors in their own countries. However, we believe that the benefits of transparency outweigh the potential disadvantages.
My hon. Friend began by noting the changing role, priorities, and ways and practices of the two institutions during the past 60 years. That process will continue. This debate has raised some important points about the direction that it should take and I look forward to more debate in this place, especially as we refine the UK's agenda for the important presidencies of the G7 and G8 in the next year. They are an opportunity for this country to play an even greater role in influencing reform in future.
3.59 pm
Sitting suspended until Four o'clock.

Conduct of Elections
4 pm
Mr. Barry Sheerman rose—
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
4.15 pm
On resuming—
Mr. Sheerman: I am grateful to have managed to obtain a debate on the conduct of elections and the role of opinion polling and opinion pollsters. At one point, I thought I was doomed to lack success in this pursuit—that a Jonah was accompanying my efforts. The last time I put in for a debate on the subject, I secured a one-and-a-half-hour slot, but had to withdraw because it was set for the same day as the Liaison Committee was to interview the Prime Minister for two and a half hours. Today I got a half-hour debate and I only managed to get here through almost divine intervention, after coming from the debate on the Floor of the House.
This is an important matter and I want to get to the heart of it straight away. Although I trained as a social scientist and not as an expert in opinion polling, I know a few people in the opinion-polling world. It came to my notice that a range of people within the industry were becoming worried about the state of its self-regulation and what that meant for the proper conduct of opinion polling. Opinion polling is absolutely central to our electoral processes, because if polling is not reliable, objective and conducted to a high standard, it could be manipulative of how people vote and how they are influenced to vote. That polls can be seen to be trustworthy and that people can have confidence in them are at the heart of our democratic society.
For a long time, there was a code of conduct and self-regulation that worked—4.17 pm
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
4.27 pm
On resuming—
Mr. Sheerman: As I was saying, this is a strange sort of debate. During the Division, the Minister reminded me that I took a long time to find out which Department was responsible for the subject. After getting questions answered by the Department of Trade and Industry, I eventually tracked down the Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. I am glad that he is here to respond to the debate.
We had a system in which the traditional code of conduct was regulated by the polling industry itself. To be honest, the issue at the heart of the debate is, in part, the proliferation of polling organisations and the move away from what we all regard as traditional polling, which we associate with names such as Gallup and MORI. Such polling was carried out by people with clipboards who knocked on people's doors or confronted them in the shopping precinct, and they tended use face-to-face interviews. Telephone polling then became part of the process and, more recently,
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there has been internet polling, whereby a rather different way of finding out people's opinions on subjects has been introduced.
As soon as I started talking about the nature of regulation in the polling industry, some people thought that I was having a go at one sector—that I was targeting internet polling and nothing else. That is not the case, and I want to put on record that I have had a great deal of help, not only from what I call the traditional polling sector, but from those in the new sector. YouGov and others have written to me and have been very helpful. I have noticed that most of the major players want a code of conduct and a degree of self-regulation that works. All those to whom I have talked deplore the fact that regulation has become less effective and want something done about it. I hope that, outside this House, this debate will be construed as being constructive. A politician is, for a change, saying honestly, "I don't know all the answers."
As a working politician, I believe that this is an important area for us to tackle. I have long believed that it is much better for an industry to regulate itself than to be centrally regulated by the Government. If an industry can regulate itself effectively, that is preferable to setting up yet another quango that is probably not all that useful and that spends a great deal of taxpayers' money to do a job that self-regulation, at its best, does more effectively.
There has undoubtedly been a deterioration in self-regulation. I am fortunate in having been sent a prepublication copy of an article by Bob Worcester. I must declare an interest: I have known Bob for a long time and we are both governors of the London School of Economics. He has been helpful in informing my discussions and we have written an article on this subject for The House Magazine. Bob Worcester points out that the five main polling groups had a system of self-regulation through the Association of Professional Opinion Polling Organisations. However, both Harris and Gallup left the industry in the United Kingdom and ICM's withdrawal from membership effectively scuppered the association's efforts to represent the professional bodies in the field. The only other body able to self-regulate the industry was the Market Research Society, which found it difficult to cope because it had individual membership rather than corporate membership. Many of its members thought that its method of regulation was cumbersome and involved a serious amount of time and money. Some people described its processes as tedious and clumsy, particularly the way in which the MRS professional standards committee carried out its reviews. I have talked to people with a range of opinions in the industry and it seems that there is discontent with the present self-regulation even among some of the main players, as well as the many new players coming on to the block.
I have been sent a number of advertisements from polling organisations saying that they are cheap and quick, and implying that they will obtain the results wanted. My concern is that some of the polling organisations that have come into the market in recent years are related to, if they are not subsidiaries of, public relations companies. They may be a respectable part of those companies, but it concerns me and other people, both in the sector and in Parliament, that if there is a close relationship, those companies might be giving

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advice to major corporations on their public relations side and, at the same time, saying, "We happen to have a polling organisation." I am sure that there is no problem in the most respected groups, but there could be a tendency in the more disreputable areas of the sector for some firms to suggest that they have a convenient polling organisation that will ask the questions that the customer might like, and shred the answers that it does not like.
I have talked to pollsters who have said that they have always stuck to the rules and that opinion polls should be conducted according to good practice. There should be absolute clarity about how many people have been polled. Whether it be a traditional or an internet poll, there should be answers to questions such as: what is the sample group? Is it adequate in number? Is it professionally compiled? Is it weighted in the right way? One question asked of internet groups is, "If only 50 to 60 per cent. of people are on the internet, how does one compensate for the people who are not?" Some polling organisations have a sort of black box that they do not explain very well, and their practices are not very transparent. We need clarity and transparency of methodology. We need to know, in terms of social science, how scientific a poll is, how well it is conducted, whether the technology is useful and whether the right sort of technology has been used.
In all sorts of polling the questioning, sampling and methodology of interview used can be flawed. Traditionally, there have been ways of establishing good principles and good practice. In this debate, I ask for nothing new. I ask that we return to the principles that used to be enshrined in the industry, so that they can be observed and we can all be sure of the work of the pollsters. We must get the technique right, including the size of sample, the weighting and the use made of polling data. Let us make sure that the methods are right and that they cannot be manipulated.
In addition, we must find out what the clients do with the polling material obtained. It is all very well having a 50-question poll that provides a pretty accurate picture of people's thinking about health, obesity, countryside sports such as hunting with dogs, or any of the regular subjects that are polled, but what do those who have paid for that poll do with it? Is it legitimate for them to take only the five answers that they like? Is it legitimate for a newspaper that has asked for polling to bury the answers that it does not like and publish only the answers that it does? How much manipulation of public opinion is carried out by those who pay for the polling?
In the conversations that I have had with senior players from across the sector, including both new and established polling organisations, they say that they want a code of conduct covering not only the way in which polls are conducted but the way in which they are used. Some of the major players have told me how they have turned down certain clients because they will not abide by their rules. What a healthy situation it would be if polling organisations with a set of principles showed the door to people who would employ them and manipulate their work in a way that is unacceptable—
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The title of the debate is "Conduct of Elections", but so far the whole of the hon. Gentleman's speech has been about opinion polls. He will bring himself into order if he draws a specific connection between opinion polls and the conduct of elections.
Mr. Sheerman: I totally accept that, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I shall return to the electoral process in two minutes, but I applied for this debate on the conduct of elections with particular reference to opinion polls, and Mr. Speaker was aware that I would talk about opinion polling.
Referring to the recent mayoral election, the Evening Standard front-page headline of Wednesday 9 June stated, "Mayor race is neck and neck. Livingstone faces fight to the finish, new Standard poll reveals." The following front-page article said that the survey gave Ken Livingstone 51 per cent. and Steve Norris 49 per cent. However, if one then reads the article inside the paper on the detail of the poll, it becomes clear that the person who created that headline had a rich imagination. Some hon. Members—Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative—believe that the conduct of that election was influenced by the media, whether for good or ill. Perhaps the media brought more people out to vote in one way rather than another. However, most fair-minded people who had read that headline would say that it did not reflect the detail of the poll as analysed in the inner pages, and the coverage certainly would not have conformed to a code of conduct on the use of polls.
You were quite right to call me to order, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but that issue is at the heart of our electoral process. Elections should not be manipulated by people who own newspapers or television and radio stations or, indeed, by the BBC. I often appear on the BBC's "Today" programme, and just before I go on I often hear an announcement such as, "Research conducted by the programme has shown that one in five head teachers are unhappy about the level of funding that they receive." That may not be polling, but there ought to be a standard for that type of research as well, because it influences how people react and therefore how they vote. I know that, very often, the researcher sitting at the back has phoned 20 people to find out whether they can find someone who is willing to go on air.
Peter Bottomley: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one thing the Government could do is say that they will only use polling firms that set out their standards and keep to them? That would be a way of saying to the major firms, "We expect you to set out what your standards are and to meet them." Does he also agree that, whatever the code of conduct for polling organisations, they are not responsible for the headlines that result, but they can be responsible for saying to a client, such as a newspaper, that the client should include the sample size and the date when the poll was done, and should meet the other standards that are in the reputable companies' code of conduct?
Mr. Sheerman: I could not agree more. The hon. Gentleman and I are old friends and I believe that we are in complete agreement on that matter.

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There are several ways of driving up standards. I am fascinated by the article by Bob Worcester, who said that he
"had to sack two clients who expected me to breach professional integrity. Robert Maxwell wanted to decide whether commissioned polls for the Mirror would be published or buried, and Sir James Goldsmith, who not liking the result when we wrote the questions for his Referendum Party, wanted to write his own."
Those are the sort of standards that we are discussing. We all know that the perfect world is not arrived at by having a regulatory body, whether it is operated by the Government or the industry. Good standards must be built into a profession and should be reflected in a professional code of conduct—the one brings the other to life. If professional people are running an industry, the decision taken by Bob Worcester is the kind of decision that I would expect them to make. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is right to suggest a system whereby Departments ensure that the industry provides a sort of kitemark before organisations are used. I would like to see a kitemark for all polls, so that if an organisation has that kitemark, it indicates that it accepts the code of conduct of the industry. I repeat that I would prefer that code to be voluntary and run effectively by the industry. There is no such code at the moment, but I believe that it can be resuscitated, and I hope that it will be.
Let us get to the heart of how important polling is to the electoral process. We might think that the polling organisations are little back-street operations, but theirs is a billion-pound industry in the UK, and in a democratic society opinion polling is central to the electoral process. Its reliability, objectivity, transparency, methodology and trustworthiness are at the heart of any electoral process.
However, the debate is not only about the electoral process; it is about the knock-on effects of polls. When I was a student of politics at the LSE, I was taught that pollsters wanted to get the results of elections right because if they had high integrity and delivered good results—if they accurately predicted the results of elections—it was good for their commercial business, which was where they got most of their money. I came across a term that I have never heard before, and I am sure that it has not been used much in Parliament: Bob Worcester has asked for an investigation into the practices of "sugging" and "fugging", which are, respectively, selling or fund-raising under the guise of opinion polling. Those practices are sometimes employed by political parties, so again we find polling at the heart of the electoral process. If one pretends that one is conducting an opinion poll but is in fact using it for another purpose—for example, for raising money—the activity should come under the remit of a regulatory body.
I shall not prolong the proceedings, but will close with two final points. First, I have already asked the Prime Minister and the leaders of the other two major parties to discuss this matter, which is at the heart of our democracy. It is right that the parties agree on and push for good standards. Secondly, this subject would be prime material for an investigation by the appropriate Select Committee, but I do not believe there is one. However, it would be appropriate for the Electoral
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Commission to consider the matter. I know that many people in the industry would be happy to give evidence in the hope that the Electoral Commission would show the way to a form of regulation that everyone trusted. The issue is vital to our electoral system and democracy and it will not go away. There is enormous interest in the subject, and I believe that the campaign is still only in its infancy.
4.47 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (Mr. Christopher Leslie): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) on securing this debate. Its title, "Conduct of Elections", is very broad. He focused on opinion polling, and I shall speak about that, but I should also like to take this opportunity to discuss other issues in the wider firmament of electoral policy with which I have recently been involved.
My hon. Friend is right to say that polling, the veracity of the polling industry and the validity of its results have the potential to affect the conduct of elections. We know—he held up an illustrative newspaper headline—that the interpretation of polling data is often seen to have an impact on the outcome of elections. In a moment I shall touch on some of the few scant regulations that exist on this topic—for example, those on exit polls. Those regulations were introduced because it is self-evident that a feedback loop in a survey can influence the electoral process.
There is no direct statutory regulation of political opinion polling. As such, there is no definitive ministerial responsibility for it, although I take a close interest in its effect, such as it is, on electoral policy. There are many different facets to the issue, one being data protection. Many in the market research industry in general are concerned about ensuring that feedback and survey returns are kept confidential. After all, they are expressions of opinion that the individuals concerned might not want to share with the wider world, so it is important that the industry complies with the principles of data protection legislation. I am glad to see that, broadly, there have been few complaints that such legislation has been infringed.
Furthermore, professionally conducted market research and opinion polling should be carried out, by and large, in accordance with the Market Research Society's code of conduct and guidelines, which my hon. Friend mentioned. Those guidelines state:
"Researchers must not, whether knowingly or negligently, act in any way which could bring discredit on the marketing research profession or lead to a loss of public confidence in it."
That statement is very general, but in essence the society believes that the methodology and tactics that firms use should be of a high standard, in order to uphold public confidence. Neither Government nor statute law intervene in that sphere: such standards are, properly, for professional regulation. My hon. Friend is right to say that if a profession can regulate itself successfully and get itself in order, that is the best way forward.
None the less, the Market Research Society acknowledges that, in the case of political opinion polls, which apparently account for less than 5 per cent. of the UK market research industry, the present self-regulation arrangements may well be in need of

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improvement. Apparently the MRS had a meeting with the leading traditional and internet based UK polling companies in August to address urgently the fundamental self-regulation issues surrounding opinion and advocacy polling. The pollsters have undertaken to return with proposals for improvement by the end of the month. Apparently, the MRS will also make proposals for the self-regulation of market research organisations and individuals who have chosen to be its members.
I understand the points that my hon. Friend made, but I have to tell him that my Department has not received a significant volume of representations calling for Government intervention into polling arrangements, nor, I think, is that the line of action for which he was calling.
Mr. Sheerman: I am not surprised to hear that. I found it difficult to find the responsible Minister, and I am a Member of Parliament of long standing. Anybody outside who knew which Minister to complain to and which ministerial team had responsibility for the matter would be very intelligent indeed.
Mr. Leslie: The public are always extremely intelligent. Henceforth, I will keep an open mind and wait for representations to come. If anyone writes to me about the matter, I will be more than happy to read their correspondence.
I was interested to learn that my hon. Friend had tabled an early-day motion on the issue in May. He called then, as he has today, for better scrutiny of polling methodology. He provides much of that scrutiny himself and he has played a significant role in kick-starting the issue. It is incumbent on responsible parties—broadcasters, newspapers, and so on—to make sure that their purported survey findings are an accurate and true reflection of public opinion.
I have noticed some dubious surveys, which my hon. Friend mentioned, particularly those that are in fact a simple tally of telephone votes for option A or B. Regardless of whether one person has made 100 phone calls, or of where the sample of calls originates, the results of such surveys are reported as a true reflection
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of public opinion. That sort of approach is a million miles from the many reputable and well established techniques used by proper polling organisations. Such simple approaches do not count as worthy journalism. Clearly, a degree of scrutiny is required, as that would help to secure an improvement in services.
Mr. Sheerman: One of the great problems, particularly with the electoral system, is what I call the ripple effect. The most obscure, untrustworthy poll in the most minor publication or on the internet can ripple out to the main news on television or radio—on the "Today" programme, for example—and suddenly it has an authenticity that is beyond what anyone would have believed possible. That is dangerous. It is like gossip: a whisper becomes a shout, which becomes a megaphone-amplified voice. The ripple effect is, in my view, especially dangerous because of the number of unreliable polls that we get in some areas.
Mr. Leslie: I understand my hon. Friend's point and, as I said, there are some simple tally telephone in-type surveys that are a million miles from those conducted by the well established reputable firms in the self-regulated opinion polling industry.
I gather that, when my hon. Friend asked his question in Prime Minister's Question Time, our right hon. Friend said that he would talk to the chairman of the Labour party about the issue. He has done so. I gather that my hon. Friend is making overtures to some of the other political parties and that meetings have been arranged to discuss the matter in the party political arena. We will see what comes from those meetings.
Some issues relating to exit polls merit further scrutiny. In the most recent June elections, one newspaper reported a sample from returns in the European elections before the closure of that poll. That newspaper could well have put itself in breach of the legal requirements. Those are important issues. There are also wider issues about the conduct of elections, including how we broaden participation and make it easier and more convenient for people to vote. We have debated all-postal voting and so forth elsewhere. The Electoral Commission is an important organisation—
It being three minutes to Five o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the sitting lapsed, without Question put.