On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it in order for a Member of this House to enter the constituency of another Member to accompany a Member of the European Parliament on what is called "a mobile surgery"? The hon. Member for Perth (Annabelle Ewing) is, as we speak, in my constituency to be, as she said to the Alloa Advertiser on 17 March,

"on hand . . . to deal with issues that are decided in the House of Commons."

I did not contact the hon. Lady, although she sent me an e-mail at 8 o'clock this morning to tell me that she was going to be in my constituency. As she is a candidate for the new Ochil and South Perthshire constituency, this is not news to me, but what is news to me is that she is assuming that she can participate in surgeries in my constituency. As I understand it, the election has not been called, Parliament has not been dissolved and, although I am standing down, I am still the hon. Member for Ochil, with an office and a programme of surgeries that will stretch at least into the month of April and perhaps beyond.

I have been in this House for as long as you, Mr. Speaker, and I have never encountered anything like this during those 25 years or more or in the six general elections in which I have fought. Is this a point of order that I am raising or am I merely drawing your attention to an act of gross discourtesy?

The hon. Gentleman is quite right; we came into the House on the same day. He has an excellent record of looking after his constituents. I would expect hon. Members to come to some arrangement as to how things should be conducted when they go to a constituency, but I do not expect a Member of Parliament to go into another Member's constituency and hold surgeries. That is for the elected representative. As the right hon. Member for Glasgow, Springburn, I would be more than happy if any hon. Member wished to come to Springburn and hold a surgery, but under the circumstances the hon. Gentleman is right to raise the matter. Courtesies are important in this House and we should not be holding surgeries in someone else's constituency.

BILL PRESENTED

Video Games Bill

Keith Vaz presented a Bill to amend the Video Recordings Act 1984, to extend certain provisions of that Act to video games and to make provision about the labelling of video games: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 8 April, and to be printed [Bill 90].

Youth Disorder and Engagement

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to impose a duty on local authorities to provide youth services and establish local partnerships to promote youth participation and engagement; and to make other provision in connection with the reduction of youth crime.

It is of great importance to my constituents and me that I am able to introduce the Youth Disorder and Engagement Bill. In July 2003, I organised a meeting for 150 local constituents to meet the previous Home Secretary and to discuss ways of tackling youth disorder, which is a hugely important issue to me. Local residents were in touch with me every day, as they were worried about vandalism, arson, graffiti and intimidation by groups of youths. The meeting attracted a wide range of residents both young and old from all ethnic groups.

Consensus was reached about the two approaches required. First, as Members would expect, people wanted more police on the streets. Since then, I have circulated questionnaires, held local meetings, secured an Adjournment debate, and listened to constituents on the doorstep and in my surgeries. All the consultation convinced me that the initial consensus was correct—everyone wants to be able to walk down the street without fear, and no one wants graffiti, arson and gang fights. The way to achieve that is through a combination of more police and better youth services. We have all heard requests for police, but I hear fewer requests for better youth services. We now have more police. Since 1997, there has been an increase in Tower Hamlets alone of 43 per cent. or 200 new police officers. We have safer neighbourhoods teams, and every area of my borough will have its own team of police officers by July this year. Tower Hamlets will be the first authority in the country to roll that programme out to ensure that residents feel safer.

The safer neighbourhoods programme is delivering exactly the sort of community policing that my constituents were asking for, and we have already experienced a drop in crime. In the past year, crime in Tower Hamlets fell by 5 per cent., and in one of the first neighbourhoods to have a safer neighbourhoods police team it fell by 15 per cent. That programme is clearly working, but what about youth services? Consultation with residents led directly to this Youth Disorder and Engagement Bill, which is intended to make sure that every borough takes responsibility for providing youth services. It is a scandal that such an important area of service provision is not a statutory duty, and it is now time to crack down on antisocial local authorities that do not take young people's needs seriously.

Youth services must be good quality, and must work as a partnership, which means setting strategy locally with all the stakeholders, including the police, the education authority, Connexions, the voluntary sector, parents and young people themselves. Most importantly, youth services must reach the hard-to-reach—kids who have dropped out of education, kids who have been in prison, kids who have recently settled in the UK and, of course, girls. In the past, most youth services have predominantly attracted young men, not young women. Youth services must be both creative and preventive. Kids should have the chance to develop skills and enjoy leisure activities, but intensive work must be undertaken with vulnerable children and those most at risk of offending.

Not many things in Tower Hamlets are getting worse, but I would be kidding if I said that everything was fine. Two years on from the last time I took 150 residents to meet the Home Secretary, we still have graffiti—my house was done last weekend—vandalism and gangs of youths hanging out on the streets. But let us consider some of the issues that those young people face, and some ideas about how the Bill could help local authorities develop good youth services.

Tower Hamlets has almost 20,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 19. Fifty per cent. of the community in Tower Hamlets is white, but 60 per cent. of pupils are of Bangladeshi origin and many live in poor quality, overcrowded housing. Our overcrowding rate is four times the national average. Many families are on low incomes. I imagine that in most constituencies there are areas where the majority of pupils are not entitled to free school meals—in Tower Hamlets 60 per cent. of children are entitled to free school meals.

Tower Hamlets youth services are rising to the challenge, but even Tower Hamlets council has said that although the youth service has performed well, it has not been well regarded. I shall mention aspects of the service that have worked well. One is the rapid response team, which was set up to deal with gang violence, to defuse incidents and to bring a youth work response to antisocial behaviour. The team provides street-based youth work, three mobile youth work vans and early intervention work in schools.

Let me give an example of one young person, Tony, who had already been involved in gang violence when he met the rapid response team. He was sent to a young offenders institution at 16, after being found guilty of grievous bodily harm, and his probation officer referred him to the RRT. He was given one-to-one support to help avoid a return to his problems and to get appropriate training. He is now on a modern apprenticeship course and works with the rapid response team to help other young people get out of the conflict situations they have been in.

Another example is Asad, who had dropped out of school and felt that the new start initiative was his first real chance to express himself and develop his own choices. He was supported into volunteering as a youth worker and has finally started a degree in youth and community work at Greenwich university. He said, "Lots of my friends were getting into all sorts of trouble. I thought I was heading the same way, but meeting the new start team and trusting them has given me the chance to leave that life behind."

We need to ensure kids like that are given the chance to fulfil their potential. This Bill is the first step towards giving every young person the chance to overcome setbacks, disaffection, violence and, in the case of the young people I described, deprivation. The Bill would give them the chance to walk down the street and be welcomed as a force for good, as Tony now is, not feared as part of a youth problem. The Bill is the next step towards bringing back confidence on the streets for all of us.

In July 2003, 150 people from Bethnal Green and Bow came to Westminster. Tonight another 150 people from my constituency are coming here to meet the new Home Secretary and to discuss the next steps in tackling antisocial behaviour. I am sure my right hon. Friend will listen to what we have to say. I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, who is a Tower Hamlets resident herself, is present in the Chamber. I look forward to the time when we ensure that excellent youth services are part of the solution to the problem of youth disorder. I therefore request that leave be given to introduce the Bill.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Ms Oona King, Mr. Bob Blizzard, Ms Julia Drown, Mrs. Lorna Fitzsimons, Mr. Fabian Hamilton, Kate Hoey, Alan Keen, Tony Lloyd, Mr. Andrew Love, Ann McKechin, Mr. Andrew Miller and Joan Ruddock.

Youth Disorder and Engagement Bill

Ms Oona King accordingly presented a Bill to impose a duty on local authorities to provide youth services and establish local partnerships to promote youth participation and engagement; and to make other provision in connection with the reduction of youth crime: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 8 April, and to be printed [Bill 91].

Last week, the Chancellor set out the Budget choice facing our country: to continue to build on a platform of sustained economic growth and investment in the future of our country through education, skills, early years provision and child care, or to cut £35 billion from public services. That is not a question of potted plants at the Department of Trade and Industry, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) suggested last time we debated the subject in this place—no, it is a sum equivalent to every teacher, doctor and nurse in this country.

Is the Secretary of State seriously telling the House that she wants people to believe—I dare say that she does, so rather does she believe herself—that any incoming Government would sack every nurse, teacher and doctor? Why does she not treat these debates with a degree of seriousness?

Is the shadow Secretary of State disagreeing with his own shadow Chancellor that a £35 billion cut from public services is "vast", as the shadow Chancellor said on "Breakfast with Frost" last week? Does he agree that £35 billion of cuts is vast, or not? Can he confirm that he would match the £9.4 billion spending programme that the Chancellor announced to rebuild or refurbish every primary school in Britain? Can he confirm that he would make the extra spending on Sure Start, skills or junior apprenticeships, or make the £1.5 billion investment in further education colleges?

Yes. Now can we have a real debate?

I am delighted about that, because the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) said that those are non-priority areas. Indeed, when he was shadow Secretary of State for Education he described Sure Start as the beginnings of the "nanny state".

Perhaps we could address issues that mean something to the people who may be watching this debate instead of engaging in the usual political knockabout. Will the Secretary of State tell the House exactly what is happening to adult education funding under her Government? The Sidcup campus of Bexley college has certainly been hampered for funds and does not see the fabled growth that we hear about from Labour Ministers.

It has increased; indeed, it has increased significantly, and I shall come to the House tomorrow to talk further about that. We are making unprecedented investment not only in skills, but in further education colleges to update and transform them to deliver the skills that this country needs.

Coming back to the question posed by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) about whether the Conservatives would slash everything if they were in government, they would take us back to the old days when we had fewer teachers and doctors and were knocking down schools and hospitals. That is the sort of policy that they want to pursue, and he is not being honest about that. This is not knockabout—it is serious stuff.

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale has now committed his party to doubling spending on Sure Start over the next three years and having 3,500 children's centres in this country. That is not what his right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor has set out in his medium-term fiscal strategy, which says that spending on schools and child care social services will be protected, but that there will be a freeze in the non-schools budget.

The Secretary of State has been advised robustly by my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) about the desirability of using synthetic phonics in the effective teaching of reading. If she agrees with that proposition, will she confirm to the House that we will not have to put up any more with the ramblings of Kimberley, Meek and Miller, who are three so-called experts in the teaching of reading? They are on record as saying:

"Within the psychosemiotic framework the shared reading lesson is viewed as an ideological construct where events are played out and children must therefore learn to position themselves in three interlocking contexts."

The right hon. Lady had the good fortune to have a privately financed education, but millions do not and never will. Is not that sort of nonsense responsible for the destruction of the life chances of a generation of school pupils in state schools in this country?

I am pleased to say that the hon. Gentleman, whom I admire greatly, is right on the subject of synthetic phonics. We have a synthetic phonics strategy in our schools—it is called the national literacy hour. We introduced it in 1998 and its approach is now almost entirely based on synthetic phonics. Indeed, if hon. Members look at the results of the Clackmannanshire study, to which I believe the hon. Gentleman is referring, they will find that they are remarkable compared with those of control groups in Scotland that do not use synthetic phonics. However, if its results are compared with those under the national literacy strategy taught in England, the gap is not the same. He will agree with me that it is right to teach our children phonics. I want that teaching to be ever improved in our primary school system.

It is our ambition to be the best-educated, best-trained and best-skilled country in the world. All the evidence shows that if we really want to offer children the best start in life, we must invest in the early years. That is why children and families are at the centre of our strategy. It is right that we do more to support parents and families with young children.

The children who face the greatest challenges in learning to read and write need to be helped at an early stage. By 2008, we will be investing almost £1.8 billion in Sure Start, thus doubling the funding available now. Over the next five years, early years will become a fundamental part of the welfare state which will be able to respond to the varied needs of children and families. By 2010, we will extend from 500 to 3,500 the number of Sure Start children's centres, so there will be one in every community offering information, health care, family support, child care and other services. We will extend the free early education entitlement for all three and four-year-olds to 15 hours a week, thus working towards our goal of 20 hours a week.

We must continue to invest in our schools and to reform them so that we drive standards ever higher, promote good behaviour and widen opportunity. All parents have the right to have their children educated in modern facilities and orderly classrooms with strong discipline and good standards of teaching. We now have more teachers than before, with more than 28,000 recruited since 1997. There are now 105,000 more support staff in our schools.

The standards of teaching are better than ever before. Our children are gaining the best results ever at age 11, GCSE and A-level. Those results compare with the best in the world, but we must go further. Some 78 per cent. of 11-year-olds achieve level 4 in English and 74 per cent. gain level 4 in maths, but we know that the chance of children achieving five good GCSEs is almost seven times higher if they reach those expected standards. We must support teachers in driving standards ever higher. To do that, we need to focus on the needs of every child and have first-rate places in which children can learn. Last week, the Chancellor announced the 15-year programme to rebuild or refurbish all our secondary schools to world-class standards. He said that that strategy would be extended to all our primary schools.

For those children who have not reached the expected standard in literacy and numeracy by the end of their primary school education, we will continue to place a relentless focus on the basics at secondary school, thus ensuring that every child who leaves school is equipped with functional English and maths for work and for life.

Will the Secretary of State clarify her statement about rebuilding all secondary schools? We support that policy, so it is not a trick question. The Labour party's website says that all secondary schools will be rebuilt by 2016, whereas the Department's website states that three in every local education authority will be rebuilt by 2015. Which is correct?

We have a 15-year strategy to rebuild or refurbish all our secondary schools. The first will be rebuilt in 2007 and the strategy will go on from there. We have a programme for primary schools on the same timetable. However, not all local authorities will have to wait for their place in the 15-year programme. In the interim period, we can offer the chance to all local authorities to have their most run-down schools rebuilt or refurbished. I am not aware of the details on the Labour party website, but I suggest that they relate to local authorities not having to wait in the queue for all their secondary schools to be rebuilt or refurbished.

The key to ensuring that every child who leaves school is equipped with functional English and maths for work and for life is to free the curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds to provide space for tailored support—help with the basics, and challenge and stimulation for children who would benefit from it.

Behaviour is good or outstanding in most schools. We are clear that there must be strong measures when dangerous and violent conduct occurs. However, all parents and teachers know that we face the challenge of low-level, disruptive behaviour in our classrooms. The answer is not to create new sink schools, full of excluded children, but to redraw the line on what is an acceptable standard of behaviour in the classroom, nipping bad behaviour in the bud. We must have a zero tolerance approach to bad behaviour, providing schools with the resources that they need for on-site or off-site facilities to withdraw children from the classroom when and if they need to do that.

Is my right hon. Friend interested in the recent research that shows that food and drink additives have an enormous effect on children's behaviour? In a school in America, where children have been removed, they take away all the drinks that contain additives and the children calm down and become normal. I hope that my right hon. Friend accepts that serious point.

My hon. Friend always makes serious points and he is right to raise that one. We know that healthy meals promote good standards of behaviour and that children achieve more when they are fed healthy food. That is why we have recently been talking about the new school foods trust that we are setting up and how we can make change happen in our schools so that all children have the chance to eat a healthy meal. I shall present more details of our proposal in the next few weeks.

I want every secondary school to be part of a network of schools by September 2007. We must focus our efforts on those schools that are found by Ofsted to have unsatisfactory behaviour. That is why I recently announced that local authorities would draw up urgent action plans to support the schools identified by Ofsted as being in that category, backed up by return visits from Ofsted within a year to check on progress and ensure that improvement is under way.

Through increased and sustained investment in information and communications technology, we also ensure that learning is tailored closely to each young person's needs and circumstances, including the facility to learn from home when necessary. Strong, autonomous schools, closely linked to home and each other, with a strong sense of mission and purpose, will transform opportunities for our children. If all young people are to make the most of their skills and talents, it is crucial to give them the opportunity and encouragement to stay in learning until they are at least 18. Far too many young people drop out of school at 16 or 17. Our participation rate at the age of 17 is one of the worst in the industrialised world.

The White Paper on 14 to 19-year-olds, which was published last month, outlines our proposals to build on the current system of GCSEs and A-levels to enable all our young people to combine practical, work-based learning with traditional, academic learning in the classroom. In future, children will learn the subjects that they enjoy at their own pace in places that motivate them.

I was sorry that my right hon. Friend passed over the subject of Sure Start so quickly. I visited a Sure Start centre in Norwich this weekend, and I was amazed at the design of the furniture there—I was interested to find out that it had been made by the Amish—at the state of the kitchens and at the food that was being given to people. The encouragement that was being given was very good. My right hon. Friend is talking about 14 to 19-year-olds, but we now have a generation that is being encouraged to think and act differently. Does she agree that that is a credit to all the policies that we are operating across the whole educational field?

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. What is more, all the evidence shows that if we get the early years right, and if children start school ready to learn at the age of five, it has an impact on their performance right through primary school. The Sure Start system works best when parents feel that they have control and ownership of the courses in the Sure Start programme which they can attend while their children are learning and playing. In some Sure Start programmes, we have seen really innovative learning programmes, involving dads and books, for example, and mums learning to cook—to come back to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins). The scheme presents a huge opportunity to make a lasting difference not only to children but to their parents.

We recognise that, when a child reaches the age of 14, there are sometimes financial barriers to their participating in education, particularly for those from lower-income households. That is why we are rolling out education maintenance allowances nationally. They will play a significant role in widening access to further and higher education by encouraging more young people from lower-income backgrounds to enter academic or vocational post-compulsory education. More than 290,000 young people have enrolled for education maintenance allowances under the national scheme so far.

My right hon. Friend may know that some of the early pilots for the EMAs were carried out at the Luton sixth-form college. They provided a double bonus, because the families were helped and the students turned up for their classes and learned better as a result of having the reward of the EMA.

I am delighted that my hon. Friend has mentioned the pilot schemes in his constituency. The EMA pilots were also carried out in my constituency, so I have first-hand experience of their fairly dramatic impact on raising participation and attainment, partly because of the incentive to complete courses involved in the EMA programme. We have a real opportunity to encourage participation and to tackle the financial barriers that exist.

The Secretary of State says that EMAs offer a tremendous advantage to people staying on at school. If that is the case, why does she not believe that tuition fees have a deterrent effect on people considering going to university?

The hon. Gentleman will know that we are reintroducing grants for the poorest students, abolishing up-front fees and ensuring that students will not have to pay a penny while they are learning. I hope that he took note of the study recently produced by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which said that students will be £1.5 billion better off under the Government's programme than they would be under the one proposed by the Opposition.

As a result of the Budget, we will be able to offer an extra 20,000 opportunities in pilot areas from 2006–07 for disaffected 14 to 16-year-olds, either at work, in college or with the voluntary sector. In 1997, as we emerged from the Conservative years, there were just 75,000 apprenticeships. By 2008, 300,000 young people will be in apprenticeship training. We also want to ensure that the 150,000 16 and 17-year-olds in the United Kingdom who are in employment with no training improve their skills, so we will pilot new approaches to encourage those people to take up apprenticeships or other structured training. We will also pilot learning or activity agreements for those young people not currently in education, work or training. This is clear evidence of our determination that every young person should fulfil their potential through education and training. As a result, I want our participation rate at the age of 17 to rise from 75 to 90 per cent.—one of the best in the industrialised world. Every teenager must have the opportunity of a guaranteed place in sixth form, on an apprenticeship or in training.

Tomorrow, with your permission, Mr. Speaker, I will publish the details of our second skills White Paper. Together with the proposals in the 14 to 19 White Paper, it will set out our ambition to create a skilled and competitive nation in which all adults have access to basic skills training and the opportunity to progress. It will describe the new national employer training programme, which will build on the success of employer training pilots. It will offer employers easy access to the skills solutions they need, including free training for their employees without a first full level 2 qualification. We expect the new programme to reach full capacity by 2008, when it will cover 350,000 learners and 50,000 employers.

To achieve our ambitious plans for 14 to 19-year-olds in skills, we need a step change in capital investment in our further education colleges. I want to see a network of strong and vibrant colleges delivering training to industry standards in modern buildings with leading-edge equipment—colleges that can respond quickly and flexibly to the needs of employers and young people; colleges that make a major contribution to the productivity of the country.

This Government will invest £1.5 billion over the next five years to support the long-term transformation of the sector. That is the Budget choice facing the nation: continued investment and reform for the future—in early years, child care, the renewal of primary and secondary schools to world-class standards, investment and skills, and training—or a £35 billion cut in spending, which cannot but eat into education and skills.

That is the choice facing the country. I commend this Budget to the House.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I think I heard the Secretary of State say that the Government are to publish a White Paper tomorrow. Bearing it in mind that they have designated today as the day to debate education, would it not have been more appropriate and courteous to the House to have published it today?

That is not a matter for me.

I think that Members on both sides of the House would probably agree that the Secretary of State's speech was disappointingly thin, but let us begin on what I hope is a note of consensus: all Members of the House agree that schools, teachers and pupils are working very hard, and often very successfully. They are to be praised for what they do and congratulated on what they succeed in doing, despite the difficulties and challenges that they face.

The Chancellor boasted in his Budget speech of all the extra money he has put into education. To be clear, the Conservative party does not doubt that he has put a lot of extra money in. We do not assert that it has all been wasted and we do not propose, contrary to the wholly unfounded assertions of Ministers, to do anything other than increase spending on education in general and schools in particular very strongly in coming years.

I hope that we hear no more of the juvenile nonsense that we heard today about the absurd fiction that Conservatives plan to sack every nurse, doctor and teacher in the country. Frankly, it demeans public debate when such charges are thrown around. For the record, and for the Secretary of State's benefit, we do not intend to slaughter the firstborn either.

There are, however, genuine problems with this Administration's education record. For example, the Select Committee on Education and Skills has pointed out that it is often difficult to see that the Government's education proposals have been properly thought out or that they are delivering appropriate value for money. It has warned that the Government should not continue to overclaim the effect of some of their increases in expenditure.

The Select Committee has also pointed out recently that the Government's city academies, although they are based on city technology colleges and therefore are not something with which we differ in principle, have yet—shall we put it mildly?—to prove their full successful potential.

This very morning, a programme for international student assessment, or PISA, study indicated that investment in high technology and computers, welcome though it is, is by no means guaranteed to produce higher outputs in terms of better exam results or a better grasp of literacy and numeracy. The Statistics Commission has again warned the Government that they should not overclaim the progress on literacy and numeracy. I am delighted that this week, unlike last, the Secretary of State seemed to heed that warning. The National Audit Office, no less, has pointed out that the Government have spent £885 million on anti-truancy initiatives without making any progress. Indeed, on the Government's figures, truancy is now one third worse than it was in 1997.

Furthermore, calls have been issued by employer organisations, universities and others indicating increasing concern about the extent to which exams are not as robust as they ought to be. Clearly, when an A grade can be awarded in GCSE maths for 45 per cent. of the marks, or a pass mark awarded in one GCSE exam for 18 per cent., something is fundamentally wrong. This party has a strategy to reverse those problems, starting with a root and branch clear-out at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The Secretary of State appears to have no answer at all beyond a vague promise to examine A-level standards again in 2008. That is simply not good enough.

The Chancellor, in his Budget statement, used some interesting language:

"Head teachers of a typical primary school will receive £31,000 this year, rising to £34,000 and then £36,000, a guarantee over the next three years . . . of a total of more than £100,000. Head teachers of the typical secondary school will receive £98,500 this coming year, rising to £109,000, rising then to £115,000—a guarantee over the next three years of a total of almost one third of a million pounds."—[Official Report, 16 March 2005; Vol. 432, c. 269.]

He used the word "guarantee" twice. What does the Red Book say about those figures? On page 149, in a footnote, it states:

"These figures are an approximation . . . however, the Government intends to revise this formula which will mean that increases in allocations to schools will be distributed differently . . . These figures should therefore be taken as a broad indication only."

So much for a guarantee. Head teachers up and down the land feel that they have been here before, because the last time the Chancellor gave us such a Budget was in 2002, which was followed by some of the most acute financial crises for many of our schools for 10 to 15 years or more.

We welcome the principle of additional sums being paid direct to head teachers, but we wonder why all sums are not paid direct to them, as they would be under the Conservative party's proposal to make all schools grant-maintained and to take local education authorities out of the funding process entirely.

On the subject of guarantees and promises, will my hon. Friend confirm my understanding that our party is committed to the education spending plans of the Labour party? Therefore, were a Minister to come to Worcestershire to promise the delivery of a new school—say, the Christopher Whitehead school in Worcester—that could equally be guaranteed under our party's proposals. What is more, our proposals would also guarantee a narrowing of the funding gap between Worcestershire schools and the shire counties schools, which has grown monstrously in recent years.

The answer is yes. Indeed, I, too, visited the Christopher Whitehead school a little while ago, and unlike the Minister for School Standards, I did not claim that only by voting for my party was there any prospect of that school getting additional funding. Since he was quoted in the local newspaper as saying that that school would get extra funding—which it has needed for at least the past eight years of Labour Government—only if Labour was re-elected, I am happy to confirm that it would of course get that money under a Conservative Government, along with a great deal more financial freedom.

When I was chair of a finance committee in the metropolitan borough of Sandwell in the early 1990s, we had to make something like £8 million of cuts in Sandwell's education budget. Let us compare that with the growth in the education budgets for Sandwell under the Labour Government, which the Opposition have made a welcome commitment to sustain. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the essential difference that explains why such commitments can be made is that this Government have turned round the economy with a huge increase in public resources which can be invested in our public services? That was lacking under the Conservative Government.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing out that any increases in public spending in the future, under this or any other Government, will depend on the state of the economy. I must tell him, however, that the turnaround in the economy occurred considerably before 1997, and that the longest period of economic growth since records began—to which the Chancellor seems always to refer—started considerably before 1997.

All of us—Members in all parts of the House—accept that one decision by the Government for which they do deserve a great deal of credit, in the context of the present state of the economy, is the decision to make the Bank of England independent. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will join in the joy and delight being expressed throughout the House that one party is still committed to an independent Bank of England—the Conservative party. All the others want to put it under the control of the European Central Bank.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman again.

If head teachers are to be trusted more and more with running their own budgets, even under the Chancellor's schemes, why are they not trusted to exercise the same professional freedom in deciding their own policies on admissions and exclusions?

The Secretary of State referred to the national literacy strategy. She used some very interesting terminology—terminology that I think she will find herself under considerable pressure to justify in the coming weeks and months. Of course she will not be responsible for these matters in the coming months; but she will be under pressure to justify it in the coming weeks, at least. She said—I think I quote her correctly—that she believed that the national literacy strategy was "almost entirely" composed of synthetic phonics. I must tell her that that is not the view taken by a good many distinguished experts, who point out that if synthetic phonics are to work, they must be used not alongside other approaches but first, fast and exclusively. How can any education system be seen as remotely satisfactory when—even according to the Government's figures, and even after the Government have dropped the pass mark—one child in four fails to reach the required standards in literacy and numeracy?

The Secretary of State also referred to the group of young people who are not in education, employment or training. No doubt we will debate that again tomorrow. She failed to mention that the number of such people has increased, not decreased, since 1997.

We thought that, in the light of weekend press reports, the Secretary of State might have something to say about the Government's response to Jamie Oliver's campaign for better school meals. We learned from The Observer yesterday that the Prime Minister has apparently identified that as a high priority, and has committed additional resources to it. The first thing that should be said is that no party that has been responsible for any part of education spending at national or local level in the past 20 years should be anything other than ashamed by what Jamie Oliver has discovered and publicised. It is clear that both resources and strategy have been badly wrong for many years, and they are still badly wrong today. Will the Secretary of State confirm, however, that the issue was barely mentioned in the five-year plan for education, sidelined in the three-year spending plans, ignored in the public service agreements, and not mentioned in the Budget?

It would have been helpful if the Secretary of State had been able to clarify—given that both she and the Prime Minister were quoted at great length in yesterday's and today's newspapers—whether they have identified a single penny of new money for initiatives in that regard, and where any such money would come from. When the Conservative party announces its response, very shortly, it will not take a great deal for that response to be considerably more substantive than what we have heard from the Government to date.

The Secretary of State rightly mentioned child care. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), the shadow Secretary of State for the family, will set out our detailed proposals soon, but I shall say a few words now. The Government have a mixed record—not a record of unmitigated failure, but not one of unmitigated success either. There has been a genuine and substantial increase in the number of state-funded places available in nursery education and child care places for very young children.

For that reason, I am happy to confirm again that we will preserve and improve Sure Start, and will not abolish or cut it. However, since 1997 there has been a sharp decline in the number of places provided by individuals and groups that are not funded by or subject to the direction of the state. There has been something of a failure to recognise or understand that parental needs and preferences are not uniform or identical. There has been little to no research into or focus on the quality, rather than the quantity, of child care provided. In particular, there has been little analysis of why children aged 11 and above in Scandinavian countries seem to perform appreciably better than ours, even though they do not start formal education until the age of seven or later. In short, when the Chancellor announced in his Budget statement that he simply wants more years of education, rather than a focus on quality, many will have sighed with irritation rather than pleasure.

Our priority is not to spend less on education; it is to continue to increase spending strongly, but to spend the money more wisely. We will reduce the number of administrators in the Department for Education and Skills by two thirds, transferring all the money direct to the front line in schools. We will do away with the absurdity of the Government's top-up fees scheme, which will cost the taxpayer £1.1 billion a year, in order to give universities an extra £900 million a year.

I am interested in the hon. Gentleman's suggestion that the Conservatives would devolve more spending to the front line. Gershon's report suggests that in fact, pooling resources and scaling up—particularly to local authorities or even to Government for matters such as ordering—would be a more efficient way of spending money. One could save money by greater centralisation, rather than by more devolution.

Gershon came up with a number of very interesting recommendations in his report, but if his bottom line is that—to summarise the hon. Gentleman's intervention—centralisation is a way of saving money, I should point out that that flies in the face of the experience of all Governments in at least the past 50 years. The fact is that the more decisions are taken in Whitehall, the less value for money one gets. That is why we are determined—on the basis of independent advice received from the extremely respected James committee—to proceed in entirely the opposite direction, and according to the view that value for money will proceed from devolving power and decision making, rather than from taking it upwards.

I was going through a list of some of the ways in which we will spend money differently from this Government. We will scrap the top-heavy, expensive and unpopular learning and skills councils, transferring money away from their huge administrative costs and into the proper provision of vocational education and training instead. We will abolish the failed Connexions programme and use the savings to fund the re-creation of a proper careers service.

I have heard the argument for getting rid of the Learning and Skills Council, which is in the James review's report. How would a college get its money under the Conservative proposal? Would a Conservative Government directly fund each student, or would a new quango be created to distribute funds to the colleges?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. We propose to merge the Higher Education Funding Council and the Further Education Funding Council, reducing the number of quangos by one. We do indeed intend to apply to further education the principle of money following the student, as we already propose to do in secondary education, and as is the logical consequence of the changes taking place in higher education. We furthermore intend to offer both FE and HE a much simplified funding structure that involves no top-slicing and getting rid of all the silos. The hon. Gentleman will be familiar with the frustration that many FE colleges and HE institutions feel when the various bureaucracies that interfere with their work tell them how to do their job. We propose something much simpler and much more cost-effective.

In our first term, we will invest in providing 600,000 additional school places as part of our commitment to giving 100,000 extra parents their first choice of school. We will invest in building new "turnaround schools" to sort out the problem of disruptive children in mainstream schools who cannot be educated, and who do not allow others to be educated. That is in clear contrast with the Secretary of State. She said that she is in favour of drawing lines in the sand, of zero tolerance and of cracking down hard on misbehaviour, but it transpires that that means that head teachers still would not have the final say on exclusions, and that she believes that she knows better than they do whether a child should be excluded. Moreover, we will invest in keeping special schools open, rather than allowing more and more of them to close in pursuit of a politically correct and often entirely inappropriate strategy of one-size-fits-all inclusion.

I am very much looking forward to the moment in the hon. Gentleman's speech when he discusses his proposal to take money out of the state system, through a voucher policy, and to put it into the independent sector. He disagreed with my figure of £1 billion last week; will he now confirm how much his proposal will actually cost?

What we established last week was that the Secretary of State had produced a figure that she alleged was the cost of the Conservative policy, but she could not provide a single Conservative quotation to justify it. We also established last week that the policy that she criticises us for advancing in respect of education is exactly the same policy that her Government are currently implementing in respect of health. In other words, a patient is usually paid for by the taxpayer, and a child is usually paid for by the taxpayer when access to a state hospital or school is required. People who want to access a school that is not owned or run by the state are, in the Secretary of State's view, taking money out of public services in education, but if they want to use a hospital that is not owned or run by the state, they are acting in accordance with the spirit of proper reform in health care. In our view, that is a sensible policy to pursue across the whole of the public services. How, then, does the Secretary of State distinguish what we are proposing for education from what her Government are now doing in health?

It is interesting to note that the hon. Gentleman is giving an entire speech on education without mentioning his party's policy of introducing vouchers, under which money can be taken out of the state system and put into the private sector. He asks me where I came across the £1 billion figure, and I can tell him. I got it from Lord Blackwell, head of the No. 10 policy unit between 1995 and 1997. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman knows that, and if he is going to disagree with the Conservative head of that unit, perhaps he will tell us how much money his voucher proposal will take out of the state education system.

The Secretary of State should apply one of the rules advanced by a former Labour Front Bencher in the House of Lords. It became known as Healey's first law of holes: when in one, stop digging. If the best that she can come up with is a reference to someone who has not been associated with the Conservative Government for nearly a decade—

There has not been a Conservative Government for nearly a decade.

Well, he has not been associated with the Conservative Front Bench for nearly a decade either. The Secretary of State will have to do rather better than that. If she wants to get into the business of quoting independent think-tanks, I was interested to hear that earlier in her speech she quoted the Institute for Fiscal Studies. I would have thought that that was somewhat unwise for any Minister in a Budget debate. It is perfectly in order for me to point out, Mr. Speaker, that the Institute for Fiscal Studies believes, and has said on the record, that the Chancellor will have to increase taxes very substantially after the next election, by something in the order of £11 billion. That has been said again and again, and we are happy to go into the general election on the basis of a battle of the think-tanks, if that is what the Secretary of State wants.

The choice at the next election will not be about how much money should be spent on our schools—both parties wish to spend broadly the same—but about how it is spent. Labour says more and more of it should be spent on bureaucrats, form fillers and top-heavy quangos. We say that more and more of it should be spent in schools by head teachers on their own priorities and, yes, money should follow parental preference. Labour says that quantity is all that matters—more exams, more years of education, more places at university. We say that quality, merit and proven effectiveness are what really matter in child care, exam credibility and access to university. No one is benefiting if more and more graduates leave with higher and higher debts in pursuit of fewer and fewer well-paid graduate-level jobs.

In this Budget, as ever, the Chancellor has been boastful. We say that the fundamentals of education are no more secure under this Administration than are those of pensions, taxation and competitiveness. With truancy up, violence up, a teacher assaulted every seven minutes, confidence in exams falling, literacy and numeracy standards unacceptably poor, and the quality of school meals a national disgrace, we do not want more of the same. It is time for a change, so let us have that general election right now.

I was sorely tempted to discuss the initiatives of the Design Council and its chair, George Cox, particularly examining the products of small businesses. However, I changed my mind and decided to talk about how small businesses came about in the first place. Here in the Chancellor's document is a seven-page initiative about science, innovation, technology and engineering. We do not usually hear those subjects discussed in such a full-hearted way, so I am extremely encouraged by the contributions of Labour and, in particular, the Chancellor to developing ideas in this sphere.

There has been a slow realisation of the importance of such subjects, which has led to the doubling of the science budget under the Labour Government. A long time ago, I promoted a ten-minute Bill asking for that and never believed that it would happen, but it has—I should have asked for the budget to be quadrupled. The Government have given great encouragement. I am pleased about that and congratulate them.

The importance of science and technology in developing the economy and business and in employing people and so on is seriously to be welcomed.

Like my hon. Friend, I welcome the Chancellor's increases for science and technology. I am sure he agrees that that is important for research and development in universities and industry, and for so many aspects of our economy.

I agree and I shall deal with that point in more detail to show how we can plug some of the gaps in those developments.

I want particularly to talk about the £2.5 billion that is being put into biotechnology. One aspect of biotechnology was highlighted in the Budget speech—stem cell research. Many Labour Members, including my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, will remember that we argued about that subject profusely, but we came up with legislation that has stood the test of time and has put Britain at the forefront of research in that field. Christopher Reeve was extremely confident about this country. Just before he died, he expressed support for our arguments and congratulated us on being well ahead of America. We do not often hear that in the fields of science, technology and engineering these days.

There are many benefits just around the corner. The organisation that the Chancellor is setting up, to be headed by Sir John Pattison, includes the Stem Cell Foundation. In terms of stardom, the list of its members reads more like a Chelsea football team than a Norwich football team. I exempt myself from those remarks as I confess that I, too, am a member of that body. Everybody else is a knight or a dame, including Sir Richard Branson, Sir Christopher Evans and Dame Mary Archer. It is a glittering group. I shall probably be asked to take the minutes, which I shall gladly do.

Some of the work going on in this country is within a year of reaching clinical trial. In London, in Newcastle, at Roslin in Edinburgh—Dolly the sheep emanated from work there—and in Durham, people are carrying out research on brain infarctions and using stem cells to sort out some of the problems. In the long term, there will be work on Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Diabetes is being investigated and that work is very close to clinical trial. Corneal and bone repair research is going on, as well as work on graft structures for heart valves and blood vessels. Within a year all that work will have reached phase 1 or phase 2 of clinical trials with patients. We can bet our bottom dollar that there will be some successes in that field and the UK is ahead of the game.

As well as the stem cell foundation, the Medical Research Council will be receiving more money. The Wellcome Trust will be putting more money into such research and the Department of Trade and Industry will also be involved. All that forms a nucleus that will keep this country ahead in one aspect of biotechnology, although of course other work is going on in the private sector.

Much money has gone into economic research and knowledge transfer—for example, the Richard Lambert business initiative to enable businesses and universities to work together better. The fault does not always lie with the universities; sometimes businesses do not relate to the people who are developing that bright new technology. I am not referring merely to stem cell research.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a big problem faced by many of our universities that lead bioscience technology research is that they cannot get technicians to support the scientists? There is a mismatch between what schools are doing, especially at level 3, and what the universities actually need in terms of technical support. Does the hon. Gentleman have a solution for that problem?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Yes, I will address the training of our young people in universities in the latter part of my speech, but we must consider more than just the universities: university students and graduates come from schools, so the science, engineering and technology taught in schools, as well as the technicians themselves, are extremely important. We are missing a trick or two in that respect, and I shall make some suggestions about that.

We are putting much more money into clinical research, and not just in relation to stem cells. We are putting money into engineering under the Budget. We are bringing researchers over from other countries. Indeed, Roger Pedersen—a friend of mine who is a professor in stem cell research on the Addenbrooke's site at Cambridge—has come from California and will not go back because we are ahead of the game. In the next week, there will be another sensational recruit and transfer from across the great pond into this country. So we are well up front.

The Chancellor announced that we will put money into sustainable energy and other energy developments in relation to climate change and global warming. He also announced science cities. Now there is a concept. I asked various eminent people about the term "science cities", and the only answer that I got was, "Well, that'll be another sign outside a place. Does it mean anything?" If we read the script properly—we have more to do on it—the relationship between the science and business communities will be extended and will grow because of the feeling of being a science city. They exist across the world. For example, Sir Richard Sykes of Imperial college tells me that Novosibirsk—I have been there—in Siberia is an amazing science city, where it is minus 20° centigrade outside, so the scientists and teachers do not get out very much, as hon. Members can imagine. Perhaps that is not a bad idea, so let us have a bit of global cooling as well.

Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham are all areas where we will have science cities, and they are being developed under the aegis of the regional development agencies. Not all the regional development agencies are up to speed at encouraging interaction between universities and businesses to develop a part of their region into a science city. The other night, the Home Secretary and I entertained many glamorous people in Norwich in a business tent to collect huge sums of money for the Labour party—who in their right mind would vote for anyone else these days?—and we asked them what they would do about making Norwich a science city. There was a long silence, and we said that, as soon as we get back and get on with business, Norwich would become a science city and we would knock some heads together. The concept is intended to drive people together in order to promote the whole science arena, in the areas that the Government have identified, to the level of world excellence.

Just in case someone reads this speech after today, can the hon. Gentleman name a serious scientist who either believes that the present number of Labour MPs is good for the Labour party, democracy or science, or wants to see the present Government returned to power?

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that that was in the first motion passed at the Stem Cell Foundation, and the House would miss several eminent Labour Members' contributions to science and technology and, indeed, to higher education— top-up fees and so on—if we were not returned to government. Many constituents will believe that, and many members of the Royal Society believe the same thing, too, but there may be one or two people in other places that I have missed.

Just for clarity, will the hon. Gentleman, who is well recognised in scientific circles, say whether he is suggesting that the Royal Society or the Stem Cell Foundation had a vote on whether they preferred to see the Labour Government return for another term of office?

I have not seen the minutes, but I seem to recollect that there was such a vote following a discussion of the issue at the first meeting. There was no opposition, and Lord May and Lord Winston, as one may expect, go along with me. Those people are forming in that foundation a paradigm for many other areas as well, but we shall return to that, no doubt.

There are one or two storm clouds. I do not pretend that everything is wonderful. There are many more things to do, and the Budget has opened the way for that. There are certainly questions about research and development, as the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) will remember in relation to health care. We lag behind in terms of initiatives and developments in comparison with India and China, but we should not hold up our hands and wallow in defeat; we should say that we can do as well, if not better, and that is the spirit that the Budget has delivered to many scientists in this country. For the first time, we have doubled that budget and people are smiling and beginning to work, but there is more to do in that arena.

The problem is not just competition, but trying to persuade small businesses to develop that sort of work and to increase research and development in science-intensive small businesses. A private Member's Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell) intends to present has been picked up in the Budget, which requires Departments to provide money for research. It will be mandatory for 2.5 per cent. of the research and development budget to come from Departments.

There are problems accessing venture capital. Venture capitalists are strange people—I met some in Cambridge on Friday night—and talk in billions not millions of pounds. They work in the short term and want results within one or two years, but results take longer than that in many enterprising and innovative research arenas. We must marry those two different views and, at last, we are starting to talk to venture capitalists. The aim is to encourage small businesses—not just bright people from universities but inventors and the James Watts's of this country because they have bright ideas and need support.

Another problem is VAT, as hon. Members know, for organisations involved in biomedical research and so on. I have taken two cases to the Inland Revenue to ask its officials to remove VAT because of the nature of the research. A charity in my constituency is trying to develop a cancer information centre, but has been told that because it is connected with a private finance initiative hospital it must pay the full rate of VAT. The money comes from charity and there is a lot of reaction against that decision. The Minister will recognise that problem, which arises time and again. I never want to meet another official in my life, although when one puts the arguments one sometimes wins £1 million for a university or £2 million for a charity. I hope that something will be done about the VAT problem. The process is clumsy and we must do something about it.

There is something fundamentally at odds with the problem of developing small industries. The antipathy of many young people to taking their research and discoveries to the marketplace must be seen to be believed. The culture in this country is that people dirty their hands if they go into business after doing magic work on this, that or the other, whether chemistry, physics or mathematics, and so on. The sort of people that I have talked about—Paul Grayson, Chris Evans and Richard Branson—have had such experience but they are true entrepreneurs in a sense that is sometimes hard to define. Many people think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but are not because someone else takes on the marketing and development problems, proof of concept stages and so on. Making a discovery does not suddenly result in a glorious product that the world awaits. It must be marketed and it is difficult to tell someone to leave it to another professional or expert in the area to develop the product. Partnership and teamwork are necessary and we are beginning to accept that.

I once thought I had the answer to prostate cancer. I discovered a gene and went to my bosses at the university to ask them for advice on how to start a company. The answer—I kid you not—was, "You need headed notepaper." That was depressing. To get a kick-start and an introduction to someone who has been through the process is a big step. One gets depressed, but then one gets on with winning the research assessment exercise and glorious kudos as a scientist, but one forgets the other aspects of the work. We need to do much more to encourage that side of matters.

If there is one factor that distinguishes the US from this country it is that people in the US take risks. In the US, people can fail once, twice and even three times, but they are still not failures. It is recognised that it may take four attempts to achieve something, but every time something does not quite make it, lessons can be learned. That is how Americans are encouraged to think, but that does not happen in this country. People are deflated and put down if something does not work. The knives go in and people are put off. We have to change that culture, and we should start in schools by encouraging people to experiment and think. If they do not succeed the first time, they should be patted on the back and told to try, try and try again. We have a long way to go in introducing that attitude into our teaching culture.

The Government have also talked about other aids for small businesses, including tax credits, involving the Inland Revenue, ways to give people the confidence to get on and do it, and setting up Lambert-type interactions. However, we still have a serious problem with physics and chemistry departments in universities closing. That is not a new phenomenon, but when universities lose key departments, it is demoralising for those who work in them and it creates a threatening environment for everybody else. I am pleased that the Government have started to consider how we can prevent such closures.

We know that we need bright young people, not only for policy-making but for research, development and innovation. However, the number of people taking the subjects I have mentioned has been declining for several years, and that contributes to the closure of departments. If they are closed, we will not be able to take on the extra students coming through the system who want to be chemists or physicists, or to develop new subject matter. We have intervened to try to increase the number of university places, but we have to be smarter. We have to look at the root cause of the decline in student numbers that has led to the closure of departments. We need to inspire students and young people in schools to study science. We want teachers who can be creative and enthusiastic. We need to change the curriculum, because it is dull and boring. When I visited a school in Norwich, I found that stem cell research was not taught to scientists but to those studying religion. That is fine, but scientists should be talking about the big idea in science in this country at the moment. I invite colleagues to ask whether stem cell research is being discussed in the schools they visit.

Another reason for the falling numbers of science students is the funding arrangements for research and teaching in this country. Departments often nick money out of their research budgets to pay for teaching. Strange ratios have developed for different subjects, but nobody seems to know why one subject gets more for teaching than another. I am sure that there is an explanation, but it is not convincing in terms of the overall visionary economic plan that we have to increase the number of students in some areas. Nor can anybody tell me how many physicians, mathematicians or biotechnologists we will need. There is no overall plan, but we need one.

We must also be honest and admit that not all universities can do everything. That is a brave thing to say, but every region can provide the surety that, whatever subject someone wants to study, they can find a course that they can follow within easy travelling distance of home—I shall not go into all the reasons why someone might want to stay at home or why they should not do so. We need to take hold of the regional development agencies and take something from them—not just money but some of their people, who could interact with others on a regional affairs committee or some such body to solve our infrastructure problems in order to ensure that the subjects are taught. We will never have enough money to teach every subject that we want to teach in universities. That is a hard thing to say and believe. Yes, we will get more students; we want more graduates and we want more of them to go out into the business world and into pure blue skies research. We must allow for that on a regional basis, although I do not see it happening in some RDAs.

Policies must not dictate that research is the only thing that is important. A vice-chancellor once told me, "Forget teaching. Give the students 20 minutes and then walk out and get on with your research. That is much more important." We must not have that. We must create structures in which very good teachers just teach and do not do research, and vice versa. We must work out such interaction on an original basis.

A vice-chancellor who does not live far from me once said, "If you were starting the university system in this country over again, you would not have Essex and Norwich universities down the road from each other." Both Essex and the university of East Anglia have had to close physics and other subjects because neither is big enough separately. Together, they would be dynamite. We have a long way to go to get such things going. All the restructuring in universities at the minute is demoralising without a bigger, visionary picture.

The Budget opens up all these questions. For the first time in my life we are beginning to hear serious discussion about science, technology and engineering. There is a serious belief in our Government about using knowledge to create the businesses and wealth that will not only provide jobs, excitement and enthusiasm throughout people's lifetimes, but enable us to compete in the world markets, which are becoming tremendously serious. We can do it, and this Budget is the first line in the sand.

I begin by thanking the Secretary of State for Education and Skills for her comments about our teachers and lecturers. I share the view that in most schools, colleges and universities, to which the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) referred, an excellent product is delivered to our young people, and we should celebrate that rather than always try to find reasons to denigrate.

I welcome the admission by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) that the Conservative Government made a fundamental error in introducing compulsory competitive tendering for school meals. I am sure that he was referring to that fatal mistake of saying what matters is how cheaply school meals can be provided rather than their quality. The hon. Gentleman has always been honest enough to admit the huge mistakes that the Conservatives made during their 18 years in office.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it has taken the Conservatives a long time to admit that?

One always welcomes a repentant sinner; that is much more important.

The hon. Member for Norwich, North made a powerful and thoughtful contribution, as he does to any education debate. However, I wondered when he would get to several elements of Government policy that move us in the opposite direction. The recent publishing by the Office for Fair Access of the universities that are to charge so-called differential fees reveals that the full £3,000 top-up fee will be charged for 91 per cent. of courses. I do not believe that that is a differential. That means that there is a new flat-rate fee of £3,000 in our universities. I had hoped that the hon. Gentleman would say what impact that will have and how it will detract from the ambition to attract the young people whom we want to go to university. Are we to retrench a middle-class higher education system, which he and I would decry?

I also wanted the hon. Gentleman to say something about the letter from the Secretary of State to the Open university and to Birkbeck. During our debate on higher education last year, we were promised a review of part- time students and funding, which would start with work at the Open university and Birkbeck. The review, however, concluded that they will not receive a single extra penny to support part-time students, and both institutions will regard that as a betrayal. As we move towards a higher education market in which more students study part-time—they will be earning and learning—everyone, whatever their political party, must address the issue.

While the hon. Gentleman was speaking, the Secretary of State was shaking her head. Would he allow her to intervene and explain that all the reports that the Government would not help Birkbeck and the Open university were wrong?

I am always happy to allow the Secretary of State to intervene if she wishes. That is her prerogative.

We are working with the sector, and I believe that the Higher Education Funding Council is working with the Open university to look at the widening participation premium available to part-time students. We want to see if we can promote that agenda. As a consequence, I am hopeful that the Open university finances will improve, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman takes that into account.

I am grateful to the Secretary of State, but the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) will note that rather than having found a solution, she is hopeful of finding one. To be fair to her, the OFFA letter to the Open university and Birkbeck rules out any additional resources to support part-time students next year. That is the starting point.

In response to the hon. Member for Norwich, North, after the general election, all hon. Members must revisit the issue of higher education. I do not believe that our debates on the Higher Education Act 2004 resolved anything; they merely fudged the funding issue. We did not address the purpose, function and shape of higher education and its relationship, not only with further education but with the 14 to 19 sector. If we are to meet the 21st-century challenges that the hon. Gentleman identified, we must undertake a radical review of post-14 education through to higher education and level 4 provision. I find that an exciting, not a negative, concept, and I hope that all political parties will support it.

No one knows what will happen to them after the election or what role they will have in the House. For the past eight years, however, I have attended the annual ritual of the Chancellor's Budget. I was very impressed the first year, but less impressed the second. I may have become a little more cynical and a little less gullible. [Interruption.] I am grateful for the confidence of the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education that I am not a cynical person. I am not Welsh either. However, after 50 successive quarters of growth and the proud boast that our economy is now outperforming virtually every other economy in the world, why do our students have to incur massive debt to finance their university education? Why do the elderly have to pay for care in their old age, why do we all have to pay for simple health measures such as eye checks and dental checks—if one can get a dentist—and why is it not possible to guarantee our poorest children a simple nutritional meal at lunchtime unless a celebrity chef intervenes? Why, when our country was infinitely less wealthy, were all those services free? I am often asked that question by my constituents, but it is extremely difficult to answer.

It is not until one sifts through the fine print of the Red Book that one realises that all is not as it appears. The Chancellor has created a sophisticated illusion that we are all winners, but in reality he has produced a Budget in which, to pay for the increases for pensioners, schools, child care, stamp duty relief and next year's bus passes for the elderly, he has assumed income that will be hard to guarantee and even harder to sustain.

I shall give one example. The Chancellor has assumed a £2.825 billion tax receipt over the next three years by clamping down on fraud and tax avoidance. Considering that this is the ninth Budget presented by the present Chancellor, one could be forgiven for asking why he has not already dealt with such massive tax fraud if it is so obvious.

The hon. Gentleman is making a strong case. It has been estimated that there is a tax gap of some £37 billion. The Chancellor could go much further with more tax inspectors and more rigorous tax inspection, and draw in much more revenue than he is doing with his current proposals.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but if it is so straightforward to recover all the money being lost through tax avoidance, why has it taken nine years to do so? If it had been done sooner, we might not have had to impose fees on university students. And if there is another £35 billion out there, we would not need the James review, would we? We could pour that sum into the coffers.

What happens if the Chancellor is not successful? He has not been successful yet in driving down that fraud. Presumably, that is why pensioners are getting a £800 million rebate for only one year, and why taxes will have to rise to meet any shortfall. We should not assume that any of the proposed benefits announced last Tuesday can be sustained without extra borrowing or increased taxation. Equally, we should not assume that all the benefits that the Secretary of State for Education and Skills announced today or that were announced in the Budget are as transparent as they first appear.

The Liberal Democrats support and applaud extra investment in education. On the surface, the Budget is brimming with extras. As a trustee of the e-Learning Foundation, I particularly welcome the additional £300 million contribution from the Treasury to the e-Learning Foundation. That is a significant and welcome sum. It will help lever additional funds from parents and business to tackle the huge digital divide that exists in parts of the country.

There was an impression that the introduction of IT in schools had been completed, yet in 2004 one third of our secondary and primary schools failed to meet the target for the number of computers they should have, and half of all computers in our primary schools are at least three years old. The New Opportunities Fund money that went into providing much of that equipment was seen as a one-off, but unless we can sustain that technology and get head teachers to continue to invest in it, all we will do is build in obsolescence, which will do nothing to bridge the digital divide. The stark realisation has dawned, and the Chancellor admitted in his Budget speech that we need to provide laptops for children to take home and use there.

Has the hon. Gentleman seen the Royal Economic Society report published today, the questions that it raises about the value of technology in education, and the finding that the more pupils used computers, the worse they got at the basics of arithmetic?

I confess that I have not read that report, but I have seen the announcements about it. We should not give way to that sort of neanderthal approach to information technology. The idea that using the internet and the huge resources available to youngsters in their home and in the classroom takes away from other aspects of learning is a nonsensical concept.

Many youngsters have internet access in the home, but 2 million children do not. Those who have access to the internet at home have a whole world of information at their fingertips. We should not deny those opportunities to children who are often the most needy. Research by the e-Learning Foundation shows that children of single parents are particularly at risk from digital exclusion, yet it is often they who would benefit most. Removing the digital divide is too important for any one party to address, and I hope that after the next election there can be an all-party taskforce to consider how we ensure that digital access is available to every child throughout the country.

The commitment to primary school refurbishment is welcome. An additional £9.4 billion of expenditure to rebuild or refurbish half our primary schools over 15 years is ambitious, but the programme will not start until 2009, and without careful strategic planning at local level we may see what we have seen at secondary level—the development of a two-tier primary system, with thousands of schools still out of the programme by 2020.How do the Government intend to prioritise the primary school rebuild programme? Will it be done through local education authorities or will it, as happened with the secondary programme, be directed from the Secretary of State's office? Can the Minister confirm or knock on the head the impression that the new resources for rebuild will be given only to projects where extended school provision is offered? Will voluntary-aided primary schools be included in the programme? Where they serve communities with open admissions, as is usually the case in rural areas, will they receive 100 per cent. capital support or will they have to provide the capital element? That applies particularly to the Church of England, which is the main provider of primary education in rural areas. In other words, will the voluntary-aided capital programme and the capital programme for controlled schools come together?

The development of new, exciting primary schools will make a real difference to the learning opportunities of our youngest children, but I think that the Secretary of State will agree that it would not make as much difference as allowing children to be taught in small classes by qualified teachers supported by trained teaching assistants. The Prime Minister often boasts about what the private sector has to offer in education, but the key selling point in any independent prep school prospectus is not about buildings but about children being taught in small groups. That is because any parent or teacher believes, as all the research confirms, that giving children greater individual attention when they are developing their learning skills pays massive dividends in later learning.

We would all agree that smaller class sizes are highly desirable. However, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman accepts, per capita funding for students in the independent sector is at least double what it is in the state sector, and that is after this Government have practically doubled per capita funding. Class sizes of 15 would be marvellous, but how does he propose to pay for them?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because I am coming to that point. It is important not to have fanciful economics in terms of how we will pay for election promises.

The Government have done a good job as regards early years. We support the Sure Start programme, and it is good to hear Conservative Members say that they will support its continued roll-out. We support the extra 3,500 early years centres by 2010, and that will certainly be in our manifesto. But I ask the Minister this: why compromise that huge achievement by moving children from groups of eight, or at the most 12, in nursery classes to groups of 30 or more when they reach infant classes in primary schools? I think the hon. Gentleman would agree that that does not make sense.

The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 said that there could not be more than 30 children in a class, but the response of the Department for Education and Skills to a recent parliamentary question shows that a significant numbers of classes in our infant schools have more than 30 children in them. There are good explanations for that, so I do not think that schools are bypassing the policy. I think that there are about six categories under which children who arrive in an area may join a class and thus take its size above 30.

If we are talking about investing billions of extra pounds into early years education, why compromise that if there is another way of achieving the objectives? Liberal Democrats have chosen to invest resources to reduce key stage 1 infant class sizes to 20. That would require employing 15,000 more infant teachers, so the project is large. We would pay for that by scrapping the child trust fund. We have always made it clear that it is far better to invest in children when they are five and six than to give them something that they can cash in at the age of 18, so we have made a policy choice. We could use that £1.5 billion to give our youngest children the best chance that they have ever had at the beginning of their school careers.

The aim of having infant class sizes of 15 is highly desirable, but if primary schools continue to admit similar numbers of children as at present while they are taught in classes of 30, it is logical that schools will need twice as many rooms and that the internal layout of schools will need to be completely reconfigured. How would the hon. Gentleman overcome that problem?

Liberals do not like minor details.

With due respect to the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Dr. Turner), either we will have a sensible debate in the House on an important issue, or we will not. The hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) made a sensible intervention. I actually suggested class sizes of 20, not 15, but the logic behind what she said was right. The Government are putting more than £9 billion into a primary school build programme, so we would prioritise that and ensure that additional classrooms were available to accommodate additional teachers.

I also tell the hon. Lady that the demographic trend shows that the number of children coming into our primary schools is significantly down. Something in the region of 6,000 classrooms and teachers will become available simply because of falling rolls. It is logical to the Liberal Democrats that rather than allowing those teachers simply to go out of the door through redundancy or retiring early, let us use them as part of our recruitment of 15,000 teachers and ensure that they are working with our youngest children to give them the start in life that only the wealthy could afford in the past. The Conservative party and the Government might not accept that that would be a proper use of the £1.5 billion that the Chancellor has set aside for the child trust fund, but the Liberal Democrats will go into the election saying that giving children a flying start to their education is our priority.

I was pleased that the Chancellor indicated in his Budget statement that he was adopting a Liberal Democrat policy that he heard first at a conference of the Association of Colleges—I think that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury was at the conference this year. I spoke at the conference about a policy of colleges for the future. The Liberal Democrats have always asked what is the point of renewing all the schools when what is often needed in communities is new colleges. To be fair, the Chancellor has come on to that ground and given an extra £350 million for the final two years of the spending review, which will make a total amount of £1.5 billion. That welcome new money should be seen as a down-payment. I hope that, when the Secretary of State makes her statement on skills at the Dispatch Box tomorrow, she will say more about that capital investment in our stock. If we could bring together the colleges for the future and schools for the future programmes and view them as one entity, we would do an enormous amount to build an infrastructure for our young people in the future.

The Liberal Democrats would like the £5 billion of capital resources that is earmarked for the increasingly discredited academy programme to be used to rebuild and build facilities for 14 to 19-year-olds. We will make a quantum leap in the 14 to 19-year-old programme to improve our depressing figures for truancy, school exclusion and so on. If we give young people a flying start and wonderful options at the age of 14 to 19, including the exciting things that the hon. Member for Norwich, North mentioned, we will keep kids in our schools and in learning, feed into industry and higher education, and have well-motivated and qualified young people.

When the Economic Secretary winds up, perhaps he could say a little about whether the 35 per cent. ceiling on what the Learning and Skills Council can give as a capital grant for rebuilding a college will be retained or whether colleges will get access to 100 per cent. capital funding in the same way as schools if they rebuild their kit. It is grossly unfair that one sector gets 100 per cent. funding from the state and another, which we regard as crucial, does not.

Although the Chancellor has at last acknowledged the need to invest in further education stock, today revealed another example of the scandalous injustice that affects two thirds of our 16 to 19-year-olds—the 700,000 people who study in FE colleges. Those young people, who disproportionately come from poorer, less traditional and less affluent backgrounds, are short changed by the sum of approximately £500 a year—a loss of some £500,000 to the average FE college.

The Budget was an opportunity to make some progress towards the commitment, made during the passage of the Learning and Skills Act 2000, that schools and colleges that delivered the same programme would receive the same funding. Five years on, the gap is 12 to 14 per cent., despite initial claims to the contrary by the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education in a parliamentary answer to the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Dr. Vis) on 21 February. When I challenged the Minister, he admitted in a parliamentary answer on 17 March that he had conveniently dealt with only part of the funding gap in his reply to the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green. He stated:

"I recognise that there is more to overall levels of funding than differences in funding rates and I acknowledge that there are other important differences between school and FE funding."—[Official Report, 17 March 2005; Vol. 432, c.447W.]

We welcome that acknowledgement because we have never had it previously.

We are committed to creating a level playing field between schools and colleges for revenue funding. However, it is difficult to quantify the problem when Ministers refuse to provide accurate information about the funding gap. Will the Secretary of State agree to place in the Library—it would be good if she did it now—the recently completed report of the Learning and Skills Development Agency, which the Learning and Skills Council commissioned? It quantified the funding gap and is the definitive research into that. We therefore know what we are talking about. I hope that when the Economic Secretary responds, he will give a commitment about when that research will be published so that we can all have access to it.

Further education is constantly left out when we discuss education in the House but it is crucial if we are to deliver the skills agenda that the country needs. It cannot be right that lecturers in FE colleges are paid on average 8 per cent. less than teachers in schools, and that gap must be closed. It cannot be right that the facilities in our FE colleges are often outdated and overcrowded, or that enrichment programmes are often decimated in order to make a budget's ends meet. This hardly shows a commitment to world-class vocational options.

Yet, as sharp-end delivery struggles for resources, there appears to be little brake on the spiralling cost of administration. Administrative costs for the Learning and Skills Council have now rocketed to a massive £330 million, with additional administrative costs added to almost every programme. I hate to give succour to the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale, but these spiralling costs represent a real issue that needs to be addressed. There is no one else in the Chamber at the moment who sat on the Learning and Skills Bill Committee, but we were told at the time that huge savings would be made by moving from the Further Education Funding Council and the training and enterprise councils to the new Learning and Skills Council. However, in 2000—the last year in which they operated—the FEFC spent £29 million, and the TECs £118 million, on administrative costs. Yet, four years later, the administrative costs of the Learning and Skills Council have spiralled to £330 million. That is a huge additional cost, yet we were told in 2000 that there would be a £50 million reduction as a result of the introduction of the LSC.

The 47 regional learning and skills councils have grown like Topsy. They now have huge bureaucracies to deal with relatively small amounts of money, yet any major decisions get referred to Coventry. The adult learning inspectorate now spends £28 million a year, and the new Sector Skills Development Agency—the Government's pride and joy—now has a budget of £188 million over the next three years. I want to know what all these organisations actually do to add value to the front-line services that are delivered in the workplace and in our colleges.

The Liberal Democrats believe that it is time for a radical realignment to simplify the structure and to amalgamate the Learning and Skills Council and the Sector Skills Development Agency with the regional development agencies to form single regional skills and development agencies. We need to slash red tape and bureaucracy, and use the savings to bridge the funding gaps in colleges so as to provide the resources to skill our work force. Further education and the skilling of the nation are crucial issues, and we are delighted that the Secretary of State is to come to the House tomorrow with a new statement. In the meantime, I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to a number of the issues that I have raised today.

I endorse the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) about the crucial effect of the investment that the Government have made in science and its spin-offs. The hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) made a rather cheeky intervention on my hon. Friend and asked him to name a scientist who would wish to see the return of a Labour Government. I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that I know many scientists—some of whom are extremely distinguished—and when I put to them the prospect that there might be another Conservative Government, their reaction is either to recoil in horror or to laugh with derision, because it is total nonsense and an absolute oxymoron. There is no comparison between the Conservatives' proposals and the seriousness with which this Government have addressed the issues of higher education and the feeding through of the results of higher education and research into innovation and into our economy, the growth of which will have doubled as a result of this Budget.

Conservative Members have made much of the £35 billion, or rather they have tried to make very little of it. They have tried to pretend that it is not there or that it is something that we have dreamt up to beat them about the head with. Can I assume, therefore, that Conservative Front Benchers are repudiating the statements of the shadow Chancellor? If I understand him correctly, he has said that at the end of another six years a Conservative Government would be spending £35 billion less than us. If that is not £35 billion of cuts, exercised at the rate of approximately £6 billion a year, what else is it, or does the Conservative party not understand the meaning of the English language?

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Yes, it could be amusing.

Is the hon. Gentleman the only Member of the House who did not see the photographs the day after his Chancellor and his Prime Minister had to face a simple question? The person who saw the humour was the Chancellor; the person who looked as though he had egg on his face was the Prime Minister.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is probably the last time the Prime Minister will allow an independent photographer to attend such proceedings? We will be back to the stage-managed press conferences typical of his leadership. The fact is that the Chancellor understood the difference. It is a great pity that the hon. Gentleman and the Secretary of State for Education and Skills do not.

It is nice to know that Conservative Members see the relevance of serious politics. It is quite simple: £35 billion less is £35 billion less. They cannot talk that away, and they certainly cannot laugh it away.

The Opposition have described the Budget as a vote now, pay later Budget, as if the Chancellor had introduced a few populist measures to tempt people into voting Labour. Conservative Chancellors never did that, did they? Perish the thought. I am surprised, given the nature of the criticism that the Opposition have mounted, that they have not put forward their own coherent alternative Budget. It is completely missing.

In the Red Book, we have a coherent, joined-up financial statement whereas all we have had from the Opposition is what can best be described as a few cheap tricks to try to tempt the grey vote back into the Conservative fold. I seem to remember that a previous Conservative Government broke the link between pensions and earnings. In so doing—in the high- inflation times that they presided over, with high wage inflation—they cheated pensioners out of about £22 a week per head.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Happily. I love Conservative interventions.

Does the hon. Gentleman recall that, in those times of high inflation, prices were rising faster than earnings when the link was broken?