I fear that this will be the last main debate on the Bill, which shows the double standards with which we are dealing this evening. The Government told us that the Bill was being curtailed because of a filibuster, but we have been running to deal with the debate so far and we shall not be able to deal adequately with this discussion in the short time that is left before the guillotine falls.

New clause 9 deals with what has become known as the West Sussex question, part of which deals with the amount of money available to schools to ensure that they can carry out adequate inspections. Those people who are seeking to make this ludicrous Bill work are seriously worried about whether there will be sufficient finance to ensure even the four-yearly inspections, let alone dealing with the West Sussex question, the issue of more regular inspections or a school needing further inspections within that four-year period. [Interruption.] What will the public think of the behaviour of some Conservative Members when we are talking about the money that will be made available for a privatised inspection service? That money will not be sufficient to guarantee four-yearly inspections and certainly not sufficient to guarantee additional inspections should they be needed.

We have heard from the National Association of Head Teachers that it feels that it is vital that the proposals of funding for schools to pay for the obligations introduced in the Bill should be discussed at length by the House. The association will be interested to learn that the guillotine motion means that we have less than 35 minutes to debate the issue. The NAHT says that it wants a guarantee in the Bill that there will be funding for schools to enable them to pay both for inspections and for the follow-up processes prescribed by the Bill. The new clause would ensure that sufficient finance was available.

The Government have given us some idea of what they think the finances will be and of what they have made available for the Bill. They estimated that the cost would be £70 million a year. For schools inspected on a four-yearly cycle, the cost is estimated to be £6,000 for a primary school and £30,000 for a large secondary school. About 5,000 primary schools and 1,000 secondary schools will be inspected each year if all the schools are inspected on a four-yearly cycle.

There was a leak in The Independent of the report undertaken by HMI on the review of the inspectorate. I regret that that report has not been published, and it is not adequate for the Government continually to say that it is an internal review. They have published no independent information in support of the Bill, although it is only by being provided with such information that we can have a clue about how the Government have arrived at the costings that I outlined.

9.30 pm

The leaked report in The Independent on 14 November estimated the cost at £75 million a year and said that it would take probably the equivalent of 30 full-time person days to inspect each primary school and 73½days to inspect each secondary school. It suggested that the going rate, as it were, would be about £250 a day. Some independent consultants who had seen themselves applying to set up teams of inspectors currently ask much more than £250 a day for their services, so many of them have been put off seeing privatised inspections as a new avenue of activity.

The cost of inspecting a primary school, based on those calculations, would be about £7,500 and not the £6,000 I estimated earlier. The estimated cost for a secondary school would be £18,000. That produces a total cost of £55.5 million for the annual inspection of schools, leaving a gap of £20 million. So we are left guessing to what the missing £20 million would be devoted.

A person who was thinking of setting up inspection teams wrote an amusing article in Education on 22 November last and went through what the costings would actually mean. He came to the conclusion that no inspection team would make a profit. We are talking of private companies which will have to pay for training and work over and above the work of inspection. The Minister said in Standing Committee that a team member could not expect to be on an inspection team all the time. Hence, the additional expenses for travel, office costs and so on will, I suggest, involve inspection teams in considerable overhead expenses.

We must remember that the cost of inspection will not comprise simply the cost of the team being in the school. To have a good inspection, time will have to be spent planning and the inspectors engaging in lengthy discussions about their collective experience in the school. Money will be spent on publishing the report and on marketing.

The firms in question will have to market their wares and publicise their areas of expertise and specialisms. As we know from the cost of Government spending in such areas, it is a rising and high cost. If it is expensive for the Government to advertise their wares, it will not be a cheap option for inspection teams to undertake a similar exercise. As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) has pointed out, they will also be looking for a profit, for all sorts of other reasons.

The figures that we have been given simply do not add up. They do not suggest that schools will have enough money to carry out full inspections properly every four years. The Secretary of State says that the people of West Sussex should not worry, because the four-yearly inspections will be much more thorough and detailed than the current annual inspections: we have heard a good deal about that today. But the inspections will not be so thorough unless the Secretary of State ensures that enough money is available to pay for them.

If the information that we have received so far about the costs allocated by the Government is correct, there can be no guarantee that even the four-yearly inspections will be carried out properly. Certainly there is no guarantee that each school will be able to afford the range of people that will need to cover the whole curriculum, especially in the small primary schools.

In Committee, we spoke of the need for, say, someone with a knowledge of special needs to be involved in every inspection. We were told that it would naturally be deemed important for the whole range of the curriculum to be covered by the inspection team. Yet many small primary schools will be able to afford only the equivalent of a two-member inspection team, which will have to include someone who knows nothing about the subject. How, in those circumstances, will that school be able to afford a proper inspection team? It would probably be able to afford it for no longer than half a day.

The whole thing is ridiculous. The new clause would enable Her Majesty's chief inspector to say that not enough money was available, and that a report must be brought to Parliament assuring us that it was available. Ultimately, as we debate this squalid Bill, we must try to ensure that there is enough money to secure the efficient and proper conduct of inspections. At present, it is all up to the Secretary of State.

I wanted to deal with many more points that were made in Committee, but I realise that other hon. Members wish to speak. Let me simply say that I hope that the Minister will be serious about ensuring that there are enough funds not only for the four-yearly inspections, but to allow schools to arrange proper inspections in the interim if problems arise. Anything less will inevitably mean a fall in standards; and, inevitably, it will mean that hon. Members cannot be assured that proper and efficient inspection of schools will take place.

The one thing on which the hon. Member for Durham, North-West (Ms. Armstrong) and most Conservative Members can agree is that we want the Bill to result in improved standards of inspection of our schools. The fact that the hon. Lady does not feel that the Bill will achieve that shows her complete lack of understanding of how it will work in practice. I can understand why she tabled the new clause, but the Bill defines statutorily, for the first time, the duties of the chief inspector. Clause 2(3)(c) says that his duties include:

"keeping under review the system of inspecting schools under section 9…and, in particular, the standard of such inspections and of the reports made by registered inspectors".

Clause 4(a) also says that he has a duty to make an annual report on that to the Secretary of State, who will lay it before Parliament.

The more important way in which the Bill will make inspections rigorous, to a high quality and to a standard that can be afforded by schools is through a concept that Labour Members do not appear to understand—the concept of competition. That is the essence of the Bill. Governors have a responsibility to their school. They are given a certain allocation of money. As chairman of the finance committee of a large secondary school in Birmingham, I would make sure that the amount of money that I had to spend on inspections was adequate, and that will happen in schools everywhere. Governors will not be looking at the financial side; they will be making sure that every inspection is comprehensive and rigorous. That is a responsibility for which they will have to answer to the parents of the children in their schools.

If that were not the case, high-spending authorities would have both higher standards of education—there is no evidence to support that proposition—and the best levels of inspection. My experience of Birmingham, which is not one of the lower spenders, is that its inspection system was not thought to be of a sufficient standard when I was on the education committee eight years ago. The reason for that was not how much money was spent but how it was organised and directed and on what the vast majority of time was spent.

If inspectors have to spend their time dealing with genderism, multi-culturalism and anti-racism, the authority will not have a comprehensive system of inspection of schools. Such a system is not a properly organised one. On the other hand, my present authority—Hereford and Worcester—which is one of the lower spenders, has a good system which is organised properly.

The responsibility for inspections will be at school level, and on a competitive basis, the incentive for high standards of inspection at a reasonable cost, within the figures given by the hon. Member for Durham, North-West, may well be possible and easily achieved under the Bill.

If those standards of inspection are so magnificent, why are the Government refusing to apply them to the private sector in which many people are being duped?

The Bill deals with the public sector and the taxpayer's responsibility to the public, through the local education authority and governing bodies, to ensure high standards. Secondly, when someone sends his child to a private school, he makes a choice, exercised through his cash, or his own free will, and is entitled to take his child away if he feels that standards are not high enough. In the many cases where people do not have that choice, the Bill, which, for the first time, gives parents the information that they need to make choices, gives the Government the opportunity to ensure that schools are acting to an adequate standard.

If the Opposition understood the benefits of a competitive environment and the fact that local management of schools has already led to significantly increased resources for schools because local governing bodies know how to use them better than does a relatively remote local education authority, they would better understand the rationale behind the Bill and how it will provide better systems of education and inspection and, therefore, higher standards.

It saddens me to hear that an honourable person such as the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mr. Coombs) believes in such nonsense—because that is what it is. It is unworkable.

I shall deal with the question of resources, which has hardly been mentioned. Clause 16 has the heading "Information about schools" and its title is "Power of Secretary of State to require information". On the question of information about schools, the Secretary of State can ask for all kinds of things, many of them reasonable, but the resources that schools need to carry out the plans are not mentioned at all.

Although tiny, the Bill will be to education what the poll tax was to taxation. It could linger but—God forbid—not for as long. It is as unworkable as the poll tax. We all remember that the right hon. Lady who used to lead the Conservative party boasted that the poll tax was the flagship. That flagship sunk, but not without trace. It will continue for another year at further expense, and we wonder what will happen.

It is no wonder that the Government do not mention resources, because resources are being handed out at such a petty level that every aspect of our lives is in confusion. Chaos prevails everywhere. In the education service the morale of our teaching force is at its lowest ebb. Many of us who are familiar with it can see that clearly, and everyone accepts that something must be done.

When we saw all the amendments that had been tabled in Committee we knew in advance what would happen. There were literally hundreds of amendments and the study of them was in itself a life study. One always knows when the Government are in grave difficulties with their plans. First, they rush them through at a pace which is wholly unacceptable, even to them. Because they rush them through—as they did with the Education Reform Act 1988—they amend them to such an extent that Bills emerge at twice their original length. The Government are so uncertain about the Bill that they constantly tabled amendments. Even tonight, no fewer than 34 amendments have been tabled by Conservative Members, never mind our amendments. Only their amendments would have been accepted if they had been debated. None of our amendments have been accepted.

The Minister of State looks surprised. He and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) would reach an agreement—we had to agree—saying, "If you leave this and don't vote on it, we shall attend to it on Report." Of course, we get nothing on Report, no matter what concessions we made. If the Minister does not agree, let him denounce what I have said and tell us how many amendments were accepted and how many he would have accepted tonight. In the meantime, resources, which are regularly overlooked, are not mentioned. At this stage, the debate on resources is one of the most important.

Schools are short of money now. They are low in morale, and short of books and equipment. Everywhere the fabric of the buildings is in a state which demands billions of pounds to put things right, yet we are enacting doctrinaire dogma, which says, "If it moves, privatise it; if it doesn't move, still privatise it. Privatise everything." The Government are caught up in their own dogma, so it was inevitable that the marketplace would prevail in education, and we would have all this unworkable nonsense.

In new clause 16, an important new clause which the Government will not accept, we try to put things right. It tries to remedy the deficiencies in the Bill concerning the money that schools urgently need for the inspections that are supposed to be carried out. Many of us hope that we shall never see those inspections, because the Opposition will become the Government, and we shall get rid of this nasty, squalid little Bill straight away.

New clause 16 says:

" . It shall be the general duty of the Chief Inspectors for England and Wales to identify the resource needs of the education system and advise their respective Secretaries of State accordingly and each Chief Inspector shall direct Her Majesty's Inspectors to ensure

(a) that inspection reports on individual schools contain information on the resources made available to each school, and

(b) that such information is provided to parents under the terms of section 16 of this Act together with relevant information on the efficient management of financial resources by each such school."

The Government will never accept the new clause, because the money they give schools is totally insufficient to run the schools as they are now. Schools are all short of money. Anybody who goes into schools sees that they need paint, equipment and everything else conducive to good education. Yet they cannot get that now. They have to beg for it and pray for it, and it is never forthcoming.

Yet at the same time, vast amounts of money are being given to the rich. The people in charge of the denationalised industries, such as British Telecom, are handing out hundreds of thousands of pounds to themselves, in the middle of a great recession, and there is no competition, although the Government talk about it. The situation is the same in the water industry, and now it will be the same in education. Money is to be made out of education.

In Committee the question whether inspection should include reference to the resourcing of education was left open. The Minister of State said:

"We are talking about whether inspectors should be able to report on how resources affect the quality and standards of education"—

as though resources did not affect the quality and standard of education. In order to rebuff us and justify doing nothing about the issue, he continued:

"the quality and standards of education that are delivered either nationally or in schools. We believe that there is nothing in the Bill's drafting to prevent them from doing that."

We replied, "All right then, put it in the Bill. Why can we not have it in the record that resources should play a role, that the inspectorate should tell the chief inspector nationally what money schools have available and, if they were to carry out inspections, how much more they would need?" We did not get that into the Bill. The Minister said that of course the Government would do that. Nonsense. Of course they will not.

The Minister continued:

"Indeed, I shall go further and say that we would anticipate that both nationally and locally they would do that if they felt that it was a germane factor."—[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 3 December 1991; c. 122.]

He was wondering whether resources in schools and the need for money and equipment were a germane factor. Who does he think he is talking to? I cannot imagine a situation in which resourcing was not a germane factor. However, I can imagine what a vastly reduced HMI might do. The inspectorate will be reduced to a pitiful number, and the inspectors will not be independent. They will be tied to the Minister, and the Minister knows that.

I envisage the possibility that a vastly reduced HMI or new privatised inspection team will not always provide such information unless it is required of them. The chief inspectors should have particular regard to policies on resourcing and appraisal and should maintain the widely accepted need for the inspection service to retain the integrity of independence. That deeply worries us, because all the signs are of a semi-dictatorial approach to the inspectorate, curbing the inspectors and bringing in people who are totally unqualified.

For instance, the Bill says that at least one member of a team should have no knowledge of education, in the sense of having had contact with it as a governor or in a similar role. There is no evidence to say that only one member of a team should have no educational knowledge, and the Bill gives the impression that there will be more than one such team member. Such a person could, for example, be a butcher. My hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, South (Mr. O'Hara) pointed out, in a jocular bit of repartee, that the schools will canvass the teams, and cheaper teams will be offered. Those teams will be compliant to the schools and will give a good report in order to get the job next time. The marketplace will then have entered the classroom. If that is the achievement in education that the Conservative party seeks, it is welcome to it.

The Bill is an attack on our schools, not on the schools to which Conservative Members' children go. Even the so-called great Education Reform Act 1988 applies not to their schools but only to ours. Neither does the national curriculum apply to their schools. We shall make the national curriculum apply to their schools and shall have their schools properly inspected by our inspectors.

The Government conceded to the inclusion in the publication of schools' information of a reference to managing finances efficiently. The Minister of State said in Committee:

"There is a case for at least giving the Secretary of State the power to require schools to publish what I should call financial efficiency data at some stage in the future. We have no immediate plans to do so, but it makes eminent sense to have that power on the statute book."—[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 14 January 1992; c. 434.]

We have asked the Minister to put that in this squalid little Bill. But the Bill must go to the House of Lords, and I shall be staggered if it passes through there without much discussion. In Committee, the Minister of State said that he would "expect and want" inspectors to report on how the available resources affect both quality and standards in schools, locally and nationally. He added that Her Majesty's chief inspector's annual report already deals with resources. He argued against specific wording in the Bill, saying that many other issues to be considered by inspectors would have to be added to the Bill. There are 34 more in the Bill and the Minister says that the Government would have to add more.

The Government were in such a mess with the Education Reform Bill that it emerged approximately twice as big as it started, as a result of long amendments not from the Opposition but from the Government. They are in the same mess in this run-up to the general election which they are about to lose.

The new clause deals with the Minister's concerns by ensuring that the information is included in every inspection report. We want the resources—or lack of resources—to be shown in every report so that people and parents know how little money the Government are providing. They do not want that information in the Bill because they know that they are under-resourcing education. Under the Bill, they will continue to under-resource education, so they do not want to touch on the question of resources.

The new clause will ensure that the information is included, thereby providing a ready source of information for HMI to use, without having to investigate many issues at once. We have no faith in the belief that that inspectorate will be in a position to do a proper job. It is liable to be ill-qualified. It is liable to be, as state education is for our children, on the cheap all the time.

In conclusion, because it is nearly time for the guillotine to fall—although I am more than willing to keep going, as I have a lot to say yet—the new clause goes further in establishing the rights of parents to know the level of resourcing for each school. With their new-found desire to give parents full knowledge of everything, it should be perfectly obvious to the Tories that, if there is one thing above all that parents would like to know, it is whether their school is under-resourced. If their children's school is half falling down, for instance, the inspector will make it clear. An independent inspectorate will tell the truth, as it has done all these years.