This morning in the Liaison Committee I questioned the Prime Minister about spending cuts. I was not surprised by his evasive answers, but it was somewhat depressing to hear the usual combination of stonewalling and red herrings.
I note that a report by the Centre for Cities think tank says that some of our cities are so dependent on public sector jobs that they will soon face “significant cutbacks”. From 2011 to 2014, they say, around a quarter of a million jobs, and maybe more, could be lost. It is not cheering to learn that two thirds of the 1.2 million new jobs created in our cities under this administration are paid for by the tax payer.
What this means, as the report makes clear, is that many cities are economically dependent on vast injections of government spending.
Below is an edited paraphrase of my encounter with the Prime Minister, of which a full transcript is not yet available.
EL: Should there be an open debate about where cuts should fall?
GB: Our first priority is to get growth and employment into the economy and therefore there is a need to spend now.
EL: I know that one shouldn’t believe everything that one reads in the papers, but what about the Sunday Times article which claims that senior civil servants are drawing up plans for cuts of up to 20% in public spending?
GB: I agree that one shouldn’t believe all one reads. The article is ridiculous. We’re only 15 months into a 3 year spending review and we’re not sure of the future so we can’t choose which departments to cut at this stage.
EL: Peter Mandelson has recently made comments that cuts will be necessary within the public sector. Given that he is in effect your right-hand man do you agree with him?
GB: I would emphasise to you our plans for asset sales and efficiency savings. It would be wrong to say in July 2009 what cuts may be needed in the future and where they need to be.
EL: How much are we spending this year in Afghanistan?
GB: £3 billion, on top of the defence budget.
EL: But, for example, in 2002 we spent £19 million buying up poppy crop in Afghanistan. Is there a cost benefit analysis of the progress made in Afghanistan? And regarding the renewal of Trident, will there be any cost-saving reduction in that programme?
GB: We have identified £9 billion in efficiency savings across all government departments within back room services in order to get money to front line public services. [Also reiterated that there are to be asset sales but didn’t specify which assets.]
EL: Not everything can be paid for by efficiency savings.
GB: The families of our soldiers in Afghanistan won’t welcome news about cuts when their boys are out fighting.
EL: With respect Prime Minister that isn’t relevant to the question.
GB: We have made announcements on tax increases and also on reductions to capital spending.
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Thank you with persisting with this question. The Labour party appear to imagine that they can continue to massage the news to such an extent as to hide the necessity for swingeing cuts in public spending, but the reality of the situation must hit home soon with efforts such as yours.
However, for the time being, they appear to be saying almost anything in order to hide the facts. By way of but one example:
Baroness Morgan recently said as recorded on the "They Work for You site", that the DCSF did not expect the recommendations in the highly faulty piece of "research" ie: the Review of Home Education "to place any significant additional burdens on LAs as most already monitor home education", a claim which is clearly ridiculous, as the report's recommendations propose a registration scheme and a close monitoring process for thousands of HEors which currently does not exist.
Sadly, the absurdity of Labour's policy proposals doesn't simply extend to their costings. For example: the HE Review's recommendations suggests a tick box mentality which represents a failure to understand the real problems or to offer any real solutions.
Registration is not an efficient way to solve safeguarding problems since, if it is not (as is likely) resisted en masse, only law-abiding HEors will register. The ensuing expensive monitoring procedures will generate nothing of any value and at the same time will result in the removal of civil liberties of thousands of innocent families, and will cost LAs an enormous amount of extra money, which (if it really does exist) could have been more usefully used dealing with the genuinely needy families who already come to their attention and who already struggle to get help.
If there are families who are at risk of harming their children, (and actually FOI results gathered here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rbrk5-GEdrUdcmfi670Mihg&gid=2
reveal that abuse rates in the HE community are actually unusually low when compared to national rates,)
we very much doubt that the rare abusive family will bother to register with their LA, choosing rather to go further underground, or to become peripatetic.
At the moment, home education represents a HUGE saving for the state. Many HE'd children are home educated because the state system failed them so badly. These children would have required enormously expensive special needs support had they remained in schools. The outcome for the large majority of these children is infinitely better in HE.
Where there are problems, such as with the issue of schools off-rolling struggling children so that these children do not damage the school's statistics, these problems must be dealt with at source, either by giving schools leeway to help these children without penalty to the school record, or by offering good out of school provision with such value-for-money organisations such as NotSchool which has proved it's worth for children who are disaffected with the schooling system but whose parents could not manage an effective home education.
This would be a far more insightful way forward, and would have the added advantage of not overturning a key principle of the unwritten constitution which is that parents should be responsible for determining the nature and content of their child's education. The recommendations in the review would overturn this principle since with their implementation, the state would becomes the ultimate arbiter of the nature of education.
The DCSF should therefore be giving its attention to another significant expense (which is presumably that the Conservative party would rather not have this laid at their door), which is that if the state appropriates parental responsibility for education, it would then become liable when a child fails to receive a suitable one and Labour, in it's cost assessments of the review recommendations, should therefore be budgetting for a huge rise in litigation against the state.
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