I am pleased to have the opportunity to open today's Adjournment debate on improving behaviour in our schools—my first opportunity to open an education debate from the Dispatch Box.

I shall say a few words about education more generally. Education is at the heart of what brought me into politics and the House. As I am sure is the case for Members on both sides of the House, my parents, but especially my mother, greatly influenced my outlook. From a working-class background in the east end of London, my mother passed the 11-plus and went to Dame Alice Owen's school but was expected to leave at 15, which very much affected her outlook and the way she brought up my sister and me. We were very much encouraged to regard education as a way forward in our lives.

Education provides a ladder of opportunity. It unlocks talent and empowers people, so it is a vital weapon in the fight against disadvantage, deprivation and poverty. It also enables us to promote a society in which rights and responsibilities are valued. Behaviour in our schools is at the core of many of the key challenges facing us in debates on education policy, including the debate on how we can improve standards in all our schools; the inclusion debate, on promoting inclusive education and equality of opportunity; the debate about truancy, violence and street crime; the debate about how to give a platform to young people—empowering them, listening to them and acting on what they say; and, of course, the crucial debate about how to recruit and retain the best possible teachers in all our schools.

Behaviour in schools is an important issue with far-reaching consequences, which is why we take it very seriously indeed. It is a priority not just in the Department for Education and Skills but across Government. Poor behaviour has a ripple effect throughout society. From the occasional truant to the hardened street criminal, from heckling in class to serious incidents of bullying, poor behaviour leaves its mark on those whom it touches. For example, low-level disruption in class can demoralise teachers and pupils alike. Behaviour such as talking over the teacher and deliberately distracting others can have a long-term cumulative effect. The atmosphere in class changes, gradually grinding down pupil and staff morale, often resulting in lower standards overall and difficulties in teacher recruitment and retention. That is just one way in which poor behaviour can manifest itself.

The statistics on behaviour in our schools speak volumes. Forty-five per cent. of teachers leaving the profession cited poor behaviour as the main reason.

I am following the Minister's arguments with considerable interest. I taught for a year before going up to university—it was an interesting experience. One thing I learned was that communication is sometimes more important than education when one is trying to involve the class. However, a sanction is also needed. Does the Minister appreciate that many teachers feel that because they have virtually no sanction any more to punish, in the broadest possible sense, they can do very little to achieve good behaviour in a class where there is a will against such behaviour?

The hon. Gentleman said that teaching was an interesting experience. I am sure that it was interesting for him, as well as pupils and fellow staff members.

The hon. Gentleman is correct—we need to get the right balance between carrot and stick. Young people need positive incentives to be in school and behave well, but schools must also have the capability to deal with bad behaviour. I shall come to that in a moment. As I said, almost half the teachers who leave the teaching profession cite poor behaviour as the main reason for doing so. Getting to the root of behaviour problems before they result in a child falling behind in lessons is therefore imperative. Once a child has fallen behind, it is hard for them to catch up again. It is all too easy for them to continue playing up in class or playing truant, perhaps even ending up being excluded.

Once children have been excluded, it is much harder to reintegrate them into the mainstream and help them with their problems. It is at that point that many of our young people fall into a spiral of decline. We know that exclusion can swiftly lead a young person down a slippery slope, with 72 per cent. of excluded children committing an offence while out of education.

At the same time, the numbers of children with behavioural problems are increasing: 6 per cent. of children have clinically identifiable behavioural problems and 4 per cent. have emotional problems. Up to one in four of the children who do not reach their attainment targets has behavioural problems, which of course can mask underlying learning difficulties. As 80 per cent. of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties are in mainstream classes, their learning and the learning of those around them will be affected.

Poor attendance at school and truancy are obviously indicators of wider behavioural challenges. Addressing them as part of the overall strategy to improve behaviour is vital—the children concerned are vulnerable and at risk of becoming victims of crime, or drifting into crime themselves as perpetrators.

We are well aware of the impact of alcohol and drug misuse and abuse on the behaviour of young people. The children of our country are the future of our country, and their life chances cannot be jeopardised. There are clear and unarguable links between drug and alcohol use and offending by young people—we know that from the street crime initiative that the Government launched a few months ago. More needs to be done in this regard, in particular in addressing alcohol abuse by young people. In the autumn I will issue new guidance to schools on alcohol education. I will also seek the views of young people as to how we can most effectively take forward our strategy on alcohol and, in particular, alcohol education in schools.

I know that there will be concern about the announcement this week reclassifying cannabis from a class B to a class C drug. Some teachers may be concerned that young people will view that as a licence to bring cannabis into schools. Let there be no mistake: we will not tolerate drugs in schools, and we will do all that we can to support teachers and other staff in making drug-free schools a reality.

Does the Minister accept that while it is the task of Parliament and Ministers to pass legislation, the message sent from this place is equally important? Does he therefore also accept that the message sent this week to children about drugs is wrong?

No, I do not accept that. There are good arguments for the reclassification, as set out by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary this week. As it happens, yesterday afternoon I visited the Highlands school in my constituency and spoke to a group of 12 and 13-year-olds. The reclassification of cannabis was a live issue with them, as it was the leading news story yesterday. We are dealing with sophisticated young people. We can certainly send out a powerful message, but they can differentiate. They understand what we mean when we say that we want to focus police time, effort and energy on hard drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, but they also understand that we are not in any way saying that cannabis is acceptable in our schools.

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way again; he has been generous. Does he accept what many police officers tell me—that most heroin users start off with cannabis?

We are in danger of straying into a different debate, but I know that that proposition is contested.

Most alcoholics start off with half a shandy.

My hon. Friend makes a point about alcoholism. It was one I discussed in the school that I visited yesterday. Alcohol has a considerable effect on peoples' lives: many die on our roads and in our hospitals as a result of it. I do not want to go too far down that route, but it is clear that there are differences of opinion on both sides of the House and within the police force. The leadership of the Metropolitan police and the Association of Chief Police Officers have endorsed the announcement that was made this week.

Whatever happens on that issue, all of us in the House can agree that improving drugs education is vital, and conducting our drugs education in a style and in language that will resonate with young people is crucial if it is to be effective—indeed, if it is to be more effective than in the past.

Another key issue that we need to tackle head-on is bullying in our schools. That is a crucial element of any successful policy to improve general behaviour in schools. I know that most schools treat the matter extremely seriously, and that there are many positive examples of schools which ensure that their pupils know that bullying is wrong and they cannot get away with it. In September we will re-issue our anti-bullying guidance pack. We wild do all we can to ensure that we are working with and assisting schools so that pupils are not left to suffer in silence.

All bullying is wrong, whatever form it takes. We know that there are aggravating circumstances in certain instances of bullying. A great deal of work has been done, for example, to tackle racist bullying, which involves children being picked on because of the colour of their skin, their religion or their ethnic origin, and the bullying of disabled children or children who are a little bit different.

I am encouraged to ask the Minister whether he is aware of bullying that goes on in Scotland against English pupils there whose parents have moved to Scotland to work? Does he agree that that is also a deplorable form of bullying?

Of course. Racist bullying, whatever form it takes, is wrong and must be tackled.

Let me focus briefly today on homophobic bullying. A survey in 1996–97 showed that only about 6 per cent. of schools referred specifically to homophobic bullying in their written anti-bullying policies. Such policies are now a legal requirement, and I fervently hope that more of those policies in schools will acknowledge homophobic bullying and set out how it should be tackled. That is very important not only in dealing with a serious problem but in helping those who suffer homophobic bullying to overcome any reluctance to report it. For too long, this form of bullying has not been given the priority that it deserves. I want it to be addressed in a sensible and sensitive way in our schools.

The trauma caused by homophobic bullying—whether the pupil is gay or straight, or whether the pupil knows what their sexuality will be—can have a huge impact on learning and emotional development. Many callers to Childline report feeling suicidal because of the homophobic bullying that they are facing. However, there are many examples of good practice to draw on.

I am delighted that the Minister is including homophobic bullying in his speech opening the debate. Will he also address the problem of homophobic bullying of teachers? That is a very real issue. Is he aware that section 69 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 contains an open agenda for the homophobic bullying of teachers in single-faith schools where, because homosexuality is not an accepted part of a particular faith, it could be a reason for a teacher to be sacked or not to be employed at that school? Will the Minister give an undertaking to look into the matter and to issue guidance?

I am happy to give an undertaking to examine the matter. I am aware of it. The message that must go out from the House and from Government is that such bullying and behaviour are unacceptable anywhere in our society and in any school.

I am pleased to say that there are some positive examples of good work that is being undertaken to tackle bullying and discrimination against pupils and also against teachers. I put on record a tribute to the teaching unions, which have been in the vanguard of work on the issue, even when it was much less easy for people to speak about it, and to the Stonewall group.

I should like to cite an innovative project—the Bolton homophobic bullying forum, which uses various methods, such as staff awareness training, follow-up work in personal, social and health education lessons, and theatre work to target homophobic bullying in its pilot schools. I am pleased to pay tribute to that excellent work in Bolton and in some other schools. I want to work with schools generally to make such initiatives the norm, rather than the exception.

Naturally, we all want to do all that can be done to persuade schools and others that all forms of bullying need to be tackled decisively, and not swept under the carpet. I hope that as many schools as possible will obtain a copy of our new anti-bullying pack when it is launched in the autumn. All of that highlights the need to deal with behavioural problems before they adversely affect other pupils.

We have invested significant amounts of money to improve behaviour and to deal with those issues. More than £600 million has been made available through the standards fund to tackle bad behaviour and truancy. Last year, £163 million was allocated to tackle truancy and exclusions.

More than 1,000 learning support units are helping to prevent disruption to mainstream classes by providing separate short-term teaching and support for disruptive pupils at risk of exclusion. Such units can have a profound effect by helping challenging pupils to improve their behaviour. We recently published good practice guidance based on the experiences of the best learning support units so that they can extend their influence, as in-school centres of excellence in behaviour management, to helping teachers in the classroom with advice on behaviour improvement strategies that really work.

Under the excellence in cities programme, 3,500 learning mentors are developing one-to-one relationships with children who need extra support, as a result of which pupils can be kept in school and working while their behaviour problems are tackled.

I pay tribute to the work done by the Connexions service, working closely with pupils over the age of 13. Connexions is now up and running in half of England, and will go national next year. More than 2,000 personal advisers are already in post, with a large proportion based in schools, helping pupils to raise their aspirations and motivation, and working with them to tackle issues and barriers that could lead to poor behaviour, truancy, exclusion, and on to crime. Excellent work is being done in many schools and I am delighted that it is being extended.

More than 330 pupil referral units have been set up for children who need additional support and whose problems cannot easily be tackled in school. They deal with children who have been excluded or who are simply not managing in mainstream classes, and they are successfully improving behaviour, attendance and attitudes to learning because of the broad, tailored curriculum and support that they are able to offer to pupils. The 2002 report from the chief inspector of schools pays particular tribute to the improved and improving performance of those units. Clearly more needs to be done to achieve excellence throughout, but progress is being made.

Simply targeting the pupils who are posing the problems is not the most effective way of raising standards of behaviour. We must lay the foundations of promoting good behaviour in the classroom. That does not just mean good classroom management, although that is important; it means giving interesting lessons that capture and hold pupils' attention, and teaching styles that engage in order to encourage pupils to stay in school in the first place. We are working through the key stage 3 strategy to ensure that the pace and quality of lessons improve, so that children are keen to learn.

More widely, we are encouraging schools to develop far greater engagement of their pupils, so that schools become places where children want to be. Some schools offer activities such as arts, sports and voluntary learning activities for pupils before and after school and in the holidays. Evidence shows that those activities help pupils to gain new skills and increase their confidence, and that their behaviour and attitude to learning improve.

I am grateful to the Minister for generously giving way to me a third time. I totally agree with what he says about morning and evening clubs, but does he appreciate that many teachers nowadays feel unable to do such extra-curricular activities because they are bombarded by the Department with more and more paperwork and obligations which take up time outside teaching? Would not a little less bombardment from his office and a few more of the sort of clubs to which he has just referred be a better option?

We are well aware of the concerns about work load and bureaucracy, and the Department has made the reduction of that a priority. Many of those activities do not directly involve teachers; sometimes they do, sometimes they do not. We are not in the business of imposing new burdens on teachers; we are in the business of making the best use of our schools and giving those opportunities to young people.

Through personal, social and health education and citizenship classes, children can learn to appreciate the effect of their actions on their own lives and the lives of others. They can learn to understand the difference between right and wrong and the fact that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand, and to consider their behaviour both in and beyond the classroom towards those in authority and each other.

We are also keen, on a cross-government basis, to promote opportunities for young people to speak up for themselves. We are keen to encourage school councils in every school—they have a real ability to have an influence within the schools—and a role for young people within some of the governing bodies of our schools, giving young people a chance to have their voice heard.

Those are just some of the existing general initiatives, but we are not resting on our laurels. In the Chancellor's Budget statement this year, £66 million was given to the Department for a programme for behaviour improvement.

We chose to invest that money in the local education authorities that have the highest levels of truancy and street crime. More than 80 per cent. of recorded street crime is committed in 34 local authority areas, and each of those has a grant of almost £2 million for the coming year for that programme. The idea is to enable LEAs to build on existing best practice around promoting positive behaviour, and allow us to test what really works as a basis for more general action.

Local education authorities can pick the measures that complement their existing provision from a range that includes learning support units, additional support staff and e-registration. All children at risk of truancy or exclusion will have a named key worker with whom to work. We have also set those LEAs the challenge of providing full-time supervised education from day one of temporary or permanent exclusion in schools involved in the programme—hundreds of schools throughout those 34 LEAs. Plans include in-school and out-of-school provision and, in some cases, working with external providers.

All the LEAs involved will be working with the police on that project, building on existing police involvement in schools that has previously been primarily a teaching role or in citizenship education. A police presence in schools will help to reduce victimisation, criminality and antisocial behaviour within the school and its community. I know that there are sensitivities about police being placed in schools and I pay tribute to the positive developments taking place in many schools, which involve them working with the police and local education authorities to ensure that we tackle criminality in and around our schools.

We know that the earlier a behavioural problem manifests itself, the more serious it will become and the more expensive it will be to remedy. The diverse causes of behavioural problems can result in a range of piecemeal, short-term interventions that do not present long-lasting solutions. That is why we are encouraging LEAs to develop behaviour and education support teams with part of their behaviour improvement programme funding.

Each team will contain four to five professionals, who between them have a complementary mix of education, social and health skills to meet the many needs of children, young people and their parents. The aim of the BESTs is to offer intensive support, using key workers, to young people aged five to 13 who show signs of emotional or behavioural problems, and to their parents, providing an over-arching service.

We have not just plucked the idea out of thin air. It builds on existing schemes, the evaluation of which has shown the many benefits of agencies working together with young people to deliver results. The evaluation that I have seen showed that teachers gained greater confidence in their ability to manage challenging behaviour and felt that they had acquired more strategies for working with difficult pupils.

We are also working on removing one of the root causes of truancy and poor behaviour: the boredom and alienation that is felt by many young people in respect of the traditional curriculum. The Green Paper "14–19: Extending Opportunities, Raising Standards" proposes offering to all young people a wide range of academic and vocational options, to help ensure that schools and the wider education service offer something relevant to all I young people and not only those who are academically able, thus giving everyone the opportunity for success. A very positive feature of our recent consultation on 14 to 19-year-olds was the high level of participation by young people. That was a deliberate aspect of the consultation and is a very welcome contribution to the ongoing debate about where we should go with that age group.

However, good behaviour in individual classrooms is not enough. To ensure consistency, schools need to adopt a whole-school approach. Strategies that set the tone on behaviour issues, such as anti-bullying and discipline policies, pupil and community involvement and behaviour audits, are very important in providing a consistent approach. That is why we are working hard to ensure that schools have the confidence that they need to develop those whole-school approaches to promoting good behaviour and to develop and maintain positive learning environments for all children and have access to additional support for children who are experiencing problems.

We are currently designing comprehensive training materials for classroom teachers and developing the role of the lead behaviour professionals. Their role will be to take the lead on all aspects of behaviour in the school by training and supporting their peers and colleagues in the classroom and around the school, and in turn receiving ongoing mentoring support themselves. We are also responding to the strong requests from school staff for support in improving their skills in behaviour management. For example, we are providing such support in the programmes for continuing professional development for senior staff, some of the new leadership programmes and qualifications, the new "Leading from the Middle" programme for middle managers and the programmes for teaching assistants and trainee teachers, all of which now involve training in behaviour management techniques.

Of course, that is not all that is involved if we are to improve behaviour. Children are in school for a significant amount of their time, but school is only part of their life as they grow up. Schools cannot be expected to take the entire responsibility for improving behaviour and raising standards. This is an issue that the wider community needs to tackle. In particular, we need to tackle it with the help of parents, whose participation is vital to our success in this behaviour project.

Greater parental involvement is surely one of the benefits that is to be gained from extended schools. We are encouraging more schools to consider extending the services that are offered on the school site to benefit not only pupils but their families and the wider community. New services could include health and social care, child care, community learning opportunities, information and communications technology and sports facilities.

Through the provision of easy-to-access services, schools can forge better links with parents and encourage them to become actively involved in their child's education. The provision of other services on the school site can help pupils and families to deal with any problems that can contribute to poor behaviour. Schools that maintain and develop strong links with parents and the wider community can share responsibility for children's behaviour and their emotional and social well-being.

We are also emphasising parents' responsibilities towards their children by, for example, challenging the attitudes of those who condone their children's absence from school and extending the use of parenting orders to emphasise the importance of those responsibilities. The truancy sweeps that were conducted in May, focusing on the 34 local education authorities to which I referred, sent out a very strong message both locally and nationally that trivial excuses for missing school are unacceptable. Last week, we launched a new toolkit for schools on dealing with abusive or violent adults—often parents—to ensure that schools are aware of the legal avenues that are open to them in such cases, as well as to reinforce the fact that such action is intolerable. Of course, the vast majority of parents are not abusive or violent, but the clear message to those who are is one of zero tolerance.

We want to create a culture in schools that supports the emotional well-being of children and staff. I believe that the measures to which I have briefly referred will help us to accomplish that aim. They will help to ensure that improvements in achievement and behaviour are ongoing and nationwide, and that children who are at risk of developing behavioural problems will be helped within a supportive framework. Our main objective is to safeguard the interests of all children and to ensure that they have the chance to achieve their full potential by making sure that their educational options are not limited by their own poor behaviour or that of others.

As I am sure hon. Members in all parts of the House will know, in many communities it is the behaviour of pupils when arriving at and leaving school that determines the local perception of what that school is like. In turn, that local perception, which is shaped by the behaviour of pupils at school, can determine the views of local parents in making choices about which school they would prefer for their own children. For many schools—especially some of those in challenging circumstances—behaviour policy is therefore absolutely central to school improvement.

In the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to visit a number of schools to speak to pupils, staff, governors and parents. It is absolutely clear that behaviour is a key concern in all those groups, whether it means that pupils are living in fear of being bullied, members of staff are considering quitting the profession because of the pressure or parents feeling that they have no ability to choose to send their children to the local school because of the behaviour that they see at the local bus stop. I want to work with schools, young people and local education authorities to promote good behaviour. I hope that today's debate can play a positive part in this very important area of work to promote the best behaviour in all our schools.

I am pleased to respond to the Minister this morning. He said that this was the first time he had been able to open a debate from the Dispatch Box. Like him, it usually falls to me to wind up debates, so I sometimes feel that I am always the bridesmaid and never the bride. The benefit of this being a Friday debate is that we both get to open this important discussion.

The Minister also spoke a little about his background and some of the reasons why he cared so much about education. Without taking too long a trip down memory lane or into family history, I reflected that while his parents were living in working-class areas of the east end of London, mine were living in Salford in similar circumstances. Obviously, something went horribly wrong, either in his case or mine, and one of us took a wrong turning in life. Perhaps we can decide when that happened and help to put it right in this debate.

The Minister spoke of education as a ladder of opportunity. In particular, he referred to a balance of rights and responsibilities in education—a point that I strongly endorse—and went on to refer to the now well-known research showing that 45 per cent. of teachers leaving the profession cite pupil behaviour as their principal reason for making that career move. That is an especially strong indicator of the scale of the problem that we face in our schools.

Improving pupil behaviour in our schools is not a simple problem. It is not easy to tackle because many factors lie behind it, ranging from the pressure of examinations to bullying, mental health issues, drugs and the Government's exclusion policy. The spectrum of pupil misbehaviour ranges from persistent low-level disruption to vicious assaults on other pupils or teachers.

Schools face a massive challenge, which affects academic results and teacher recruitment and retention. I recently met a teacher from a preparatory school in London. I asked him whether he had always taught in the independent sector or whether his background was in the maintained sector. The reply was the latter, and when I asked him why he had moved from the maintained to the independent sector, he immediately cited pupil behaviour. He said that he could not bear it any longer and that it was so bad that he would prefer to sweep the streets than continue in his previous school. That is appalling, and none of us can rest easy as long as it pertains.

The scale of the problem is shown in the research that Warwick university undertook on behalf of the National Union of Teachers. A third of the teachers who responded to the study said that they had witnessed offensive weapons in their schools; 83.2 per cent. reported threatened pupil-pupil violence, and nearly half experienced that weekly. More than half the respondents experienced threats from third parties, usually parents, and less often, former pupils, through written comments.

Nearly two thirds of respondents reported offensive language at least weekly. Damage to property was a routine occurrence in the working lives of almost half the respondents. Nearly half—46.8 per cent.—encountered persistent disruption and defiance weekly. More than four fifths of teachers regularly experienced disruption to their teaching. More than half the respondents encountered pupil-pupil bullying regularly. A tenth of teachers regularly experienced violent threats. Those are shocking statistics; I know that the Minister agrees.

One of the most worrying aspects is the evidence that suggests that the problems are getting worse, not better. An annual survey that Keele university conducted in November of the views of thousands of pupils in England and Wales recorded more than 40 per cent. saying that their lessons were being disrupted. That is a third more than when surveys began 10 years ago.

I shall read some comments by pupils in response to the research. A female pupil said:

"In some classes you can't concentrate because people are messing around. Sometimes the teacher doesn't even get round to setting the work because he/she is dealing with a child that is misbehaving."

Another female pupil said:

"Our lessons are disrupted every lesson—we rarely get more than 10 minutes' worth of work done in an hour."

A male pupil said:

"The school would be a much better place if expulsions were increased and they were to adopt a zero tolerance level to all badly behaved pupils. The school would be a better place if they could make a pupils' council to allow recommendations from the pupils."

It is striking that not only the teachers who face abuse, violence or threatening behaviour in schools are worried and want action to be taken—pupils are also urging action.

We read more and more reports of horror stories that strike fear into the heart of any parent. This week, the Evening Standard reported a story, which appeared in several national newspapers, under the headline: "School told to let sex assault boy back in". The article stated:

"A 14-year-old boy expelled for indecently assaulting two girls at school has been allowed back by governors…The headmaster permanently excluded him from the Nottingham comprehensive. but the boy—who cannot be named for legal reasons—appealed to the governors, who said he should be allowed to return…The head told"

a newspaper,

"'I believe the governors acted in good faith, but they were wrong to let him back in. I believe that what he did merited nothing less than permanent exclusion.'

The chairman of the governors said: 'Education is a right for everyone.'"

I shall consider the comment of the chairman of governors shortly.

Another dreadful story made the national newspapers in March. I shall quote BBC Online's version:

"A pregnant teacher suffered a miscarriage after she was assaulted by rowdy pupils she was trying to discipline, an employment tribunal heard."

The incident took place in Islington Green school in London. The article continued:

"Mrs. Blackburn told the tribunal there was a culture of violence at the school and teachers were routinely attacked by pupils, yet were instructed to intervene if pupils or staff were at risk of injury."

She did that. The article stated:

"One pupil had already threatened to go round to her house and beat up her baby, the tribunal heard.

'I reported the incident to the head teacher. The student was given a suspension, I cannot tell for how long' said Mrs. Blackburn.

'She was subsequently readmitted to my class, over my objections.'"

We should reflect on those two stories. Education is a right for everyone, but should it override that of other pupils to personal safety? Should it force a teacher to face young thugs in her class who have threatened to assault her or her baby? No hon. Member would tolerate that environment for his child; we should not tolerate it for other people's children. We need a clear, unequivocal message that violent or abusive behaviour will not be tolerated.

As the chairman of governors at the excellent King David high school in Manchester said to me recently when I visited the school, pupils should be grateful that they are allowed to be part of a school. That does not happen if they are told that they have a right to be at the school, regardless of their behaviour. He said that they must feel proud of their school and that they owe something to the school community as well as having a right to take something from it. That reflects the Minister's point about the balance between rights and responsibilities, which is too often tipped in the wrong direction.

Exclusion is not the only solution or the end of the story. The Government continue to expand the pupil referral unit, and we welcome that. The Government are right to do it. However, a clear and robust strategy for improving pupil behaviour should be underpinned by the knowledge that appeals panels and Ministers will back up teachers and well-behaved pupils. The disruptive few must not be allowed to ruin educational opportunity for the hard-working many.

I want to consider the problem of drugs in our schools. The message is hopelessly confused, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson) said in an earlier intervention. After the Home Secretary's statement this week, schools are in a state of uncertainty and confusion. Problems were already experienced in schools, and we considered that when the Education Bill was in Committee in January. I pressed the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), to give clear guidance to schools about drug abuse. I asked him to issue guidance to make it clear that pupils who had been excluded for drug abuse should not be readmitted. He said:

"It is unacceptable to take any illegal substance to school, but it is right that head teachers are allowed the discretion to make judgments about the powers at their disposal, whether that is no action, fixed-period exclusion or a permanent exclusion."—[Official Report, Standing Committee G, 10 January 2002; c. 370.]

I accept that head teachers should have the discretion to make decisions. However, when they make such decisions and reach a conclusion about the appropriate disciplinary policy, they are too often undermined on appeal. Ministers should get to grips with that.

Between January, when I had exchanges in Committee with the Under-Secretary, and May, the Government appeared to have moved—at least, they were going to toughen up their rhetoric. Statements were made to the press, and a new tough line on discipline and drugs in schools was widely reported. However, on closer inspection, the Government's new tough policy was limited to those who deal in drugs. The sort of guidance for which I pressed would be given to appeals panels only when a pupil was excluded for dealing, not other instances of drug abuse. The head should set a disciplinary policy for the school; Ministers talked tough, went to the press and said that they endorsed that, and supported heads and parents who wanted a clear and tough policy. However, the small print made it clear that little movement had occurred. That confusion can only increase following the Home Secretary's statement this week.

As evidence of that, it is only necessary to cite the concerns raised by some of the head teachers' leaders. To quote from The Times of 11 July:

"Head teachers struggling to prevent cannabis use said yesterday that David Blunkett's decision would make it harder to convince children of the dangers of the drug.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said the move sent a mixed message to children. 'For many years now, cannabis has been understood to be a dangerous drug. The Government is now re-categorising it, with limited explanation, and without the support of its drugs czar"'.

That concern was also picked up by David Hart, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers—

Extraordinary!

He does not usually comment.

The Chairman of the Select Committee thinks it extraordinary that the general secretary of the NAHT should wish to comment on such an important matter, but I think it is entirely right. The comments that Mr. Hart made in the statement issued by the association raised those concerns and sought to send the sort of clear message that I would like the Government to send.

The NAHT has stated that decriminalisation of cannabis should not be allowed to undermine school drugs policies. Schools need robust guidance from the Department for Education and Skills that drug abuse will not be tolerated. When heads exclude a pupil for offences connected with drugs, that decision should not be overturned on appeal.

The same confusion underlies the Government's whole policy on exclusions. The rhetoric is tough but the practice is weak. Three years ago, the Government deliberately set about undermining discipline in schools.

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive my interrupting him as he prepares to move on to another point, but I would like to ask him a question before he leaves the drug issue. He has made it clear that Conservative Front Bench policy is to exclude all youngsters who bring drugs into school or who deal in drugs. Is that it? What would happen to those youngsters at that point? They do not get excluded from society; they have to go somewhere. I know that the hon. Gentleman is sincere in what he says, but will he give us some insight into Conservative policy on excluded youngsters?

I am flattered by the hon. Gentleman's compliments about my sincerity, but I fear that he was not paying sufficient attention to my remarks. As I made clear earlier, it is not our view that all pupils who are involved with drugs, in whatever way, must be permanently excluded. It is right that the head teacher should make such decisions. Our concern is that, all too often, the decisions taken by the head are subsequently undermined on appeal. Heads across the country are worried about that, in relation not only to drugs, but a wide range of other disciplinary problems. We believe that that needs to be tackled. There must be clear guidance from Ministers—the kind of guidance that they have been prepared to give in relation to part of the problem—namely, those who deal in drugs, but not to other aspects of it. I think that the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) was present in Committee when we considered some of these problems during our deliberations on the Education Bill earlier in the year.

One of the difficulties for heads now is that, in a climate in which the Government have prompted a fairly major debate on what is appropriate behaviour in the context of drugs, they are left in the position of having to make individual judgments not only on the particular circumstances of a case and what is appropriate for a particular pupil, but on what is expected of them by society in our country today in terms of whether it is a serious disciplinary offence for a child to take drugs.

Ministers have repeatedly refused to help head teachers with that issue. They issue tough-sounding press releases to the Daily Mail, saying that they are going to crack down on drug abuse, but the small print makes it clear that the guidance applies only to drug dealing. Once again, heads are left to draw their own conclusions. That is not fair on the heads or on the schools, and it will certainly lead to wild inconsistency across the country in the way in which similar cases are dealt with.

The same confusion that we find in the Government's approach to drugs in schools underlies the whole policy of the Government on exclusion. The rhetoric is tough, but the practice is weak. Three years ago, they set about deliberately undermining discipline in schools. Their circular 10/99 required schools to undertake a variety of prior alternative strategies. What prior alternative strategy to exclusion could be appropriate in a case such as that of Linda Townsend, whose case was reported in the education section of The Guardian this week? She is a teacher who was covering a lesson for a colleague when she was assaulted. A boy attacked her because she asked him to leave the room. She was kicked and punched to the floor. She said:

"The first punch concussed me and after that I was like a rag doll."

She says that she suffered bruising over her whole upper body and lost cartilage in both knees. She was off school for a month. She said:

"I couldn't sleep. I was having flashbacks. I was an emotional wreck."

Again, we have to think back to the 45 per cent. of teachers leaving the profession who cite pupil behaviour as their principal reason for doing so. That becomes all too readily understandable when we hear of cases such as this.

The tone that the hon. Gentleman has struck in his current comments is rather at variance with the much more supportive and, perhaps, henotic statements that he was making earlier. On the prior warning indications, does he not realise that he is doing a grave disservice to teachers and educational professionals by implying that they do not do that anyway? Even in the extreme cases that he cites, the school community will address those issues at the earliest identification in every case. Bad cases make bad law, and the case to which he referred could easily be one that suddenly appeared; but, in the majority of cases, it is early identification that the educational professionals want, and on which the Government want to support them.

I am interested to hear the hon. Gentleman's point. I fear that the truth of the matter is that it was the Department for Education and Skills' circular that did a grave disservice to those professionals in the world of education, for precisely the reason that he cites—namely, that heads already undertake a variety of alternative strategies when it is appropriate and possible to do so. I never encounter heads in my constituency or in the many other schools that I visit around the country who are gung-ho about excluding pupils. That is not what they want to do, so they will certainly seek appropriate other strategies when such strategies exist.

I shall return to the case that I was describing a moment ago. The hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound) says that hard cases make bad law; they sometimes also illustrate a wider point, however, and I think that that is the case here. It is clear that the incident in question was not an isolated one. The report in The Guardian goes on:

"The boy had already threatened a teacher that day and been involved in other violent incidents at the school, including another assault on a teacher."

I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that this kind of problem is directly attributable to the Department's guidance, which has undermined schools' ability to enforce proper and appropriate discipline. When a child has assaulted a teacher once, it is quite remarkable to suggest that anything other than exclusion is appropriate; the fact that we expect a teacher to go back into a classroom with the same pupil who has assaulted him or her on a previous occasion—or occasions—is a remarkable comment on what we expect teachers to face in carrying out their duties.

It is not just a matter of how teachers will react to that appalling situation when they meet those children again. Does not the fact that those children will be back again, with the same teacher, wrongly signal to other children in the class that they can do the same?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In fixing a target to reduce the number of exclusions, the Government were motivated not by educational good practice but by the policy of the social exclusion unit—it was a social, not an educational, policy. There may be some merit in its aim, but the result in our schools was, in some cases, horrific.

The hon. Member for Ealing, North is an amateur comedian from time to time, but, if he will allow me, I will make the slightly more complimentary remark that behind it all he is a level-headed sort of chap—[Laughter.] My remarks are provoking considerable dissent on the Government Benches. I think that the hon. Gentleman will accept that the scenario that I have described is not an isolated one, even in that school, let alone in many other schools around the country and that it is not acceptable. The fact that the Department for Education and Skills issued guidance that prevented head teachers from excluding pupils who had committed any disciplinary offence, without having prior alternative strategies in place, was clearly wrong, especially in the light of those hard cases of the most appalling abuse and violence. The policy could have been introduced only by people who are out of touch with what really goes on in schools and classrooms around the country.

Eventually even the Government accepted that the policy was wrong and was doing more harm than good and, thankfully, they have moved to water down and change the policy. It is now possible, for a limited number of different offences, to exclude on a first offence and without undertaking those prior strategies. Despite that, time and again I hear head teachers say that the difficulty is that they arrive at what they believe to be the right and necessary solution to deal with a problem in their school, and take what they believe to be the appropriate disciplinary action to exclude—it is not a decision that they take lightly—only to find that their decision is undermined on appeal.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way again?

How can I resist?

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman will get no comedy from me today—this is not a humorous subject. The worst case of a primary school pupil assaulting a teacher was found, on examination, to have behind it the fact that the seven-year-old child involved had been systematically brutalised by his mother and her boyfriend. In fact, the child was simply repeating the behaviour that he had seen that morning. The school was anxious not to exclude the child, even though he had committed a horrendous assault on the teacher. For every terrible case and example that the hon. Gentleman can bring to the Dispatch Box, Members can bring others. Let us try to discuss the generality of the issue, not individual cases.

Order. That was a little long for an intervention.

None the less, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. His example supports my point—a head teacher took the appropriate action, identified a problem that ran deeper than the superficial difficulties, and tried to respond in a way that would benefit the child concerned. That is welcome and appropriate, and is the kind of good practice that goes on in schools throughout the country every day. It cannot be appropriate to undermine that through appeals panels and Government guidance. The Government must be clearer and more robust in what they say appeals panels ought to do.

Listening to the hon. Member for Ealing, North, I am tempted to refer to just one other hard case to give a measure of what some heads and teachers around the country are dealing with. I shall not name the school in question, but it is the worst case that I have ever encountered. It has had 13 heads over six years. There have been two shootings and a fatal stabbing outside the school gates in the recent past.

Eton.

I do not think that the hon. Gentleman is correct, but I shall not reveal the school's identity. The list of problems goes on, and they are genuine and huge. The Government owe it to parents, teachers and the country to take those problems seriously and to tackle them. Their school discipline policy has been, to date, a massive fraud on the parents of Britain. They have talked tough at every turn, but they always act weakly.

Your heart is not in it.

The hon. Gentleman says that my heart is not in it.

This is supposed to be a speech, not an exchange between you two.

Order.

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Chairman of the Education and Skills Committee, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), is trying to encourage a dialogue between himself and me.

It is a colloquium.

The hon. Gentleman says that this is a colloquium, but the crucial point, however much Labour Members try to divert us from it and however much they are not prepared to take it seriously, is that heads and teachers in schools up and down the country are struggling to maintain discipline. The impact on the schools' academic results and on their ability to attract and retain good teaching staff is being severely affected. We must have a clear and robust strategy from the Government, not just a strategy for the press and for broadcasting. It must get through to schools and be able to tackle this pressing problem.

I had some severe doubts and felt some trepidation about the debate when I realised that it would be on a Friday because, first, I have to be here on a Friday, which is not my favourite time to be here, and secondly, because it would encourage the type of speech that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), a gentleman of whom we are all rather fond. He is certainly not unpopular in the House. The bulk of his speech was about some horrific cases, but we would like to have much fuller details, such as what the head teacher did and whether there was immediate exclusion after the violence or an appeals panel. He seemed to link a previous case with a case that was reported only last week.

I welcome the Minister to his job—it was nice to hear him make his first speech at the Dispatch Box—but he is not going to get an easy ride. During the debate, even he fell into the trap a little. Having listened to this debate, which has lasted for more than an hour, one would think that our schools are falling apart because of bad behaviour. That is not the case. This country has successful schools, where pupils learn and get good teaching, and where there is little incidence of poor behaviour. I would love it if Opposition Members would sometimes quote what Ofsted, rather than the Daily Mail, thinks about behaviour. In fact, behaviour is unsatisfactory in only one school in 12, according to Ofsted.

Is it not the point that it takes only one or two children to disrupt a class? The fact that, overall, only one in 12 schools has a behavioral problem does not provide an answer for parents whose children's classes are being disrupted by those one or two children.

I am trying to correct the untrue impression that there is poor behaviour in every school.

rose—

I shall not give way for a while; let me get into my speech.

According to Ofsted, only one school in 12 has a problem with poor behaviour. Even small incidents of bad behaviour—and large ones in the 8 per cent. of schools in which that is a problem—can be incredibly disruptive. All my children have attended state schools and have had problems with their studies because they were sitting close to students who were not keen on the lessons. My children have come home and said, "We had an interesting history lesson, but some people in our class would not let the teacher teach." That is to be deplored. We need a bill of rights or a charter for parents, teachers and pupils, with the centre of a bill of rights for pupils being the right to learn and to get on with their studies.

The hon. Gentleman thinks that I went too far in my remarks. Is there not a danger that he is sounding complacent? He refers to a tiny minority of cases and schools. How can that possibly explain the 45 per cent. of teachers leaving the profession, citing pupil behaviour as their main reason for doing so? It is a much more widespread problem than he is prepared to accept.

If the hon. Gentleman listens to my speech, he will realise that I have great concerns about bad behaviour. I am interested in the ways in which we can interpret and analyse that on the basis of good research, before we bring in policies to try to remedy the situation. There is no doubt that a child's learning will be disrupted when there is bad behaviour in the class.

I have asked consistently—colleagues may ask why I am asking it again—what is most important in education and schooling. It is the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom. Anything that disrupts that must be deplored.

When I go around schools—I am not ambulance-chasing here—I hear head after head saying that something happened to the moral standards of this country under Thatcher. There was a moral vacuum; it was a time of "anything goes" materialism and the quick buck. During the Thatcher period moral values seemed to disappear. Something happened in that 18-year period of Conservative rule to undermine all behaviour in all schools, and that is to be deplored. The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West ought to visit his schools and speak to some of the older heads who have been around for while about the moral decay of the Thatcher years. I hear about that very often.

There are real problems, and the links to crime are worrying. Statistics from Ofsted and the Home Office show the relationship between poor behaviour and exclusion, and the dreadful cycle of decline into petty crime, more serious crime and prison. What is shameful is our track record of failure in the education of people who are in prison. I am keen that the Select Committee should look at prison education soon, as that subject has only come into our remit since Ofsted was given a role in that matter.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is absolutely right that the figure of 70,000 people in prison for non-violent offences is far too high. We must track back with prisoners to see what their educational experience was. We must learn from that—what happened to their education and how and why did that occur?

Family background is very important and we can be too politically correct in this House. I visit schools in my constituency and around the country. What kind of behaviour can we expect from the children of the large number of drug addicts in this country? What kind of behaviour can we expect from the children of those affected by that much more common drug, alcohol? There is disruptive and violent behaviour by parents. What is it like to go to school after a night lying in bed hearing your parents fighting and screaming? What sort of misery does that bring to a child? What chance does a child who has been physically and sexually abused have of an education? We know the statistics. What kind of behaviour can we expect from families with a range of dreadful problems?

There was a disruptive child in a school in my constituency. He never went to bed; he fell asleep in an armchair. He stayed up at night, watching pornographic videos with his parents. What sort of behaviour does that teach a child in terms of his fellow pupils and their parents? There are horror stories, but we must remember the background of many children in our country.

The Minister rightly said that bullying in schools was a dangerous form of bad behaviour. One third of all girls and one quarter of all boys are afraid to go to school at some point because of bullying. That figure comes from the Department for Education and Skills website. Whether it is physical, verbal or indirect bullying—psychological bullying, especially among girls, is very often more damaging than physical bullying—it has a long-lasting effect on people and can result in a loss of confidence and truancy and can adversely affect school achievement, creating a life of misery.

Anti-bullying packs have been sent to all schools and the DFES has produced an excellent website on the theme of "Don't suffer in silence." I do not think that the Minister mentioned that good innovation this morning. Nevertheless, however good these measures are, bullying still occurs far too regularly.

Where I have seen good and well-managed schools, I have seen very little evidence of bullying. The lesson is that good, well-managed schools with consistent policies can, over time, sort out bullying and poor behaviour. We need to tackle the root causes of bullying and other forms of bad behaviour in schools, and we must also support the teaching profession when bullying occurs. How do we begin to improve behaviour? How do we turn bad behaviour into good?

Good behaviour is linked to better attendance rates and better opportunity so that those from deprived backgrounds are not restricted in what they can attain. It is linked also to the wonderful work that the Select Committee has seen on the sure start initiative. The Government are very reluctant to say what the future of sure start is. When the Select Committee considered early years education, we looked at sure start. In terms of breaking the cycle of social deprivation in education, sure start has been extremely successful. It engaged parents, including the pre-birth period involving the pregnant woman and her partner.

We have seen classes promoting the early stimulation of children. We know the importance of playing with, stimulating and massaging the baby. It is important to tell the stories that one assumes every parent in the country knows. I am blessed to have my first grandchild. I got great pleasure only yesterday, seeing her at nine months old, and trying to remember—my wife is much better at it—all the nursery rhymes that form part of our heritage and oral tradition.

"Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out."

I have not tried that; it is a good one. I do not know whether I will try that when I am jogging her up and down on my knee, but I thank my hon. Friend for that suggestion.

We must talk about tackling the language barriers, about which the Minister was reticent. If a child cannot speak the language, bad behaviour can be a problem as students can become very frustrated. We have been too politically correct for too long about the absolute importance of insisting that new arrivals to this country learn English, which will open up their full potential in their education and in their working lives. For too long, we have been too deferential, saying that it is up to the individual to learn the language. I do not think that the rights and responsibilities of our country should be enjoyed until people can speak the language of this land. In Denmark and Sweden there is an insistence on children and their parents learning English. In Denmark, if immigrant parents do not learn English they do not receive the full benefits.

English?

They do not have all the benefits taken away, but they do not get all of them if they cannot show that they are trying to learn the language of the country. I feel strongly that learning English is important, and it is linked to behaviour.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I shall not give way, because this is a debate on behaviour. The hon. Gentleman was badly behaved last week, and I am excluding him from intervening on my speeches until I have an apology from him.

Families take their children away from school at particular times in their education, sometimes to disrupt it. Young girls of 13 are taken to Pakistan for long periods, and their language and education are disrupted. That is not good for their education. We need a consistent policy. I ask the Minister to consider language and how difficult it is for schools.

Those of us who are interested in education visit many schools, and we know that there are high pupil turnovers, especially in inner-city schools—not in the leafy suburbs or at Eton, Harrow and Winchester. Those high turnovers are to be found in areas where, according to the statistics published this morning, there are high levels of street crime. In many schools, teachers tell me that they do not know who they will be teaching when they walk into school in the morning. A batch of new pupils has come in and another batch has gone out. What sort of education can be provided in those circumstances, and what behaviour can we expect when students are struggling to understand the lessons because they have poor English? We have underestimated the importance of knowing the language and understanding and communicating better. We need a holistic approach: not short-term, one-off measures, but a policy over years that is much better than the present one.

I do not want to speak for much longer, but I cannot deal with better classroom management in isolation. Good classroom management is as important as good school management. There is a dramatic difference between a classroom in which the teacher understands good classroom management and has been taught the relevant skills, and a classroom in which the teacher does not have those skills. We have an excellent, wonderful teaching profession. It is important to give teachers good classroom management skills. For too long, we have taken it for granted that it is enough for someone to be a good maths teacher, a good physics teacher or a good language teacher. Only late in the day did we understand that classroom management skills were vital to an understanding of how to regulate and manage behaviour.

There should be dialogue with parents. I was not condemning parents in my earlier remarks: I was just saying that some parents have great problems, which they inflict on their children. Children often have problems at home, but is there anything the school can do to help? Is the link between the school and the parents good enough? Is there enough counselling and support networks for parents? Some of the measures that the Minister told us about are interesting, but some teachers feel that they cannot cope with so many initiatives.

I want to emphasise the quality of teaching. Ofsted has just published an interesting report. It showed that the weaker teachers are given the 11 to 14 year group. It is good to see my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) in the Chamber. The Government are particularly interested in 11 to 14-year-old students, as is the Select Committee on Education and Skills. We are considering that age range because that is when bright kids come out of the primary school system and their interest in education and their attainment reach a plateau or decline. That transitional age is a real problem, because it is when behavioural problems commonly tend to set in.

We must consider closely Ofsted's report last week, which suggested that some of the weaker teachers or supply teachers are shifted into 11 to 14 education. Poor behaviour starts somewhere, and if Ofsted and other experts have identified that 11 to 14 is the crucial age, we must ensure that those children are stimulated and that their interest in education is maintained.

Good management and good teaching are the key to our multifaceted approach, but so is consistency. I make a plea to the Minister and to the Government to ensure that policies are consistent and are carried through. I do not mind initiatives, but I want them to build one on the other and to be consistent over time. Governments owe it to schools to be consistent in their management and policies. Ofsted has shown that successful schools are consistent in their plans and policies, and do not chop and change in short-term programmes. Children must have stability, and need to be supported by effective, long-term policies.

Two areas need particular attention: the 11 to 14 age group and ethnic minority pupils, especially black boys. At a recent seminar with the Select Committee that was held in the House of Commons, Professor David Gillborn said that the behaviour of black children can be misinterpreted and read as aggression, resulting in their being placed in low sets, well below their real ability. Assessing ethnic minority children on the right basis, rather than on the basis of prejudice, is very important. Ofsted says that in black culture what really works is emphasising respect for every pupil.

These may not be all the answers, but I am conscious that a statement will be made at 11 o'clock. I shall end by making an appeal. Good management, policies over time and consistency are what the education system deserves from Ministers, the Government, teachers and heads. There are some good, well-intentioned people in the education sector. I hope that they will take those long-term views and values to heart.

I was desperately hoping that the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) would carry on for another two minutes.

I tried to intervene on him to help him in that mission. I congratulate the Minister on his opening speech. The Prime Minister was exceedingly wise when he chose him to take up this portfolio. His approach to the debate in covering a wide range of issues is a credit to him, and set a good tone for the whole debate. I thank him for that.

But.

The hon. Gentleman should not presume that there was to be a "but". I was about to say that I am delighted that the Government take the problem of homophobic bullying seriously. In 1990, I drew attention to the research paper by Ian Rivers "Social Exclusion, Absenteeism and Sexual Minority Youth Study", which showed that 72 per cent. of young lesbian and gay men and women had experienced extreme bullying at school. That issue is very serious, but has often been clouded by debates about whether advice should be given.

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I should like to make a statement about Gibraltar.

As the House will know, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe and I had planned to be in Madrid this morning for a meeting, under the Brussels process with Spanish Foreign Minister, Josep Pique. However, because of the Cabinet changes in Spain this week, the new Foreign Minister, Ana de Palacio, has asked us to postpone the meeting until after the summer, and we have agreed.

Some time ago, I undertook to report to the House before the summer recess on the progress of our talks. Had today's meeting taken place, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe would have made a statement early next week in my absence on a long-arranged visit to the far east. In view of the postponement of today's talks, however, I thought it right to take the first opportunity to report to the House myself.

There has been a dispute between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar for the last 300 years. As the House will be aware, in 1984 the then Conservative Government decided that the only way in which to make progress to resolve the dispute was to talk to Spain about both the practical issues of concern to Gibraltar and the sovereignty issue which mattered to Spain. The so-called Brussels process was thus born.

This Government decided last year to relaunch those negotiations. We did so because we had reached the same conclusion as our predecessors—that the status quo was damaging to Gibraltar, and also damaging to Britain. It is damaging to Gibraltar because Gibraltar will not thrive while the dispute festers and its people have to put up with everyday disruption: queues at the border, insufficient telephones lines, inadequate air services and much else. Moreover, Gibraltar has an uncertain future in isolation from the European Union's single market and the global marketplace, and as tax havens are phased out.

The dispute is also damaging to Britain's interests because we are trying to build a strategic alliance with Spain to help deliver the European Union that we both seek, and because Spain has repeatedly blocked European measures we want—measures, for example, to make air travel safer, flights cheaper and delays shorter.

Above all, the dispute affects the 30,000 Gibraltarians; but it also affects 60 million Britons. It needs to be solved for good. I know that there are those who think we should simply tackle the practical irritants faced by Gibraltarians, but that has been tried for decades and it has failed. The only way of securing a stable and prosperous future for Gibraltar is through a comprehensive and permanent settlement of the dispute, and that means an agreement with Spain on all issues including—as flagged up by the Brussels communiqué itself in 1984—sovereignty.

By taking the latter approach, we have made significant progress towards a solution. It may be helpful if I remind the House of the phases of the process on which we are embarked. In the first phase, the current one, our objective has been to agree the framework—the principles—of a new permanent settlement for Gibraltar. That is what we have been working on for the past year or so. If and when we were able to reach agreement with Spain on such a framework, we would publish it in a joint declaration—a statement of intent by the two Governments. Thereafter, in the second phase, there would be further detailed negotiations—in which the Government of Gibraltar would again be invited to participate fully—to produce a comprehensive package, including a new draft treaty, based on the principles set out in the joint declaration. The United Kingdom would ratify such a treaty only after securing the consent of the Gibraltarians in a referendum.

After 12 months of negotiation, we and Spain are in broad agreement on many of the principles that should underpin a lasting settlement. They include the principles that Britain and Spain should share sovereignty over Gibraltar—[HON. MEMBERS: "Sell-out!"]—including the disputed territory of the isthmus; that Gibraltar should have more internal self-government—[HON. MEMBERS: "Sell-out!"]—that Gibraltar should retain its British traditions, customs and way of life; that Gibraltarians should retain the right to British nationality, and should gain the right to Spanish nationality as well—[HON. MEMBERS: "Surrender!"]—that Gibraltar should retain its institutions—its Government, House of Assembly, courts and police service; and that Gibraltar could, if it chose, participate fully in the European Union single market and other EU arrangements. [Interruption.]

Order.

Her Majesty's Government believe that a settlement along those lines would offer Gibraltar and its people a great prize. It would mean greater freedom for the people of Gibraltar to make decisions affecting their lives, and to live, work and travel without constraints anywhere in the region and beyond. It would mean greater prosperity and more jobs—from new opportunities to trade freely in the European Union, from the investment that would come if the dispute were settled, and with the prospect of millions of pounds of EU funding to help. It would mean a better quality of life, with improved telephone and transport services, a cleaner and healthier environment, a better infrastructure and faster communications. And it would mean a long-term, settled future: it would mean preserving Gibraltar's links with Britain, while developing a new and successful relationship with Spain.

I profoundly believe that such a future is in the interests of the people of Gibraltar; but, as I have stressed many times, it is not in the end a decision for me or even for the House. The decision rests with the people of Gibraltar. If we and Spain can, after taking stock, reach agreement on the kind of framework that I have outlined, and if thereafter all parties can build on those principles to produce a comprehensive settlement, the whole package will be put to the people of Gibraltar in a referendum and they will decide.

We had hoped to reach agreement with Spain by the summer, but I have also made clear many times that no deal is better than a bad deal. There have been distinct "red lines" throughout this process.

We and Spain have not yet resolved all differences. In respect of the duration of co-sovereignty, we must have a permanent settlement. Co-sovereignty cannot be just a stepping stone to full Spanish sovereignty, however long delayed. I know and understand that Spain has a long-standing historical aspiration to regain full sovereignty one day, but any agreement between us and Spain must be permanent. Gibraltar must have certainty. As for the British military facilities, we have made it clear that our current arrangements should continue.

Unless we and Spain can resolve the outstanding issues, there will plainly be no agreement. Our aim, however, remains to overcome them if we can. We must remember that Spain too has interests. It too has politics; it too has history. The departing Spanish Foreign Minister, Josep Pique, has conducted the negotiations throughout with honesty, dignity and integrity, and I pay tribute to him. I am confident that his successor, Ana de Palacio, will wish to continue in the same spirit.

I hope that the people of Gibraltar will be able to reflect over the summer on the progress that we and Spain have made to date. I am glad to say that there is already some new thinking in Gibraltar. I have been struck by the readiness of some people there to think constructively about the future. Gibraltar's Chief Minister, Mr. Peter Caruana, has himself long been committed to dialogue with Spain, and I have always wanted him in the talks alongside me, and free to represent Gibraltar. That offer from the United Kingdom and Spain still stands, under the long-standing "two flags, three voices" formula. I believe that this and the phased process that I have described provide both the safety and the dignity that Mr. Caruana seeks for his participation, so that Gibraltar's voice can be heard in the negotiations as well as outside.

After 12 months of negotiations, we are now closer than ever before to overcoming 300 years of fraught history and securing a satisfactory outcome to a process established 19 years ago by the Conservative Government of whom the right hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram), the shadow Foreign Secretary, was a member. The chance of a better future for Gibraltar—more stable, more secure and more prosperous—is too important to let slip. We shall continue to seek an agreement, but it must be one that is acceptable to the people of Gibraltar in a referendum. That is the basis on which I commend our policy to the House.

The statement is a disgrace and a sell-out. We understand the reasons for the postponement of the talks in Madrid today. Indeed, we formally welcome the new Foreign Minister, Ana de Palacio, and hope that she will be more sensitive to the concerns of the people of Gibraltar than her predecessor was.

I thank the Foreign Secretary for giving me 20 minutes' sight of what is a detailed statement with deep implications. For the moment, I can do no more than respond in general terms. We will wish to study it in great detail before we respond more fully. It would have been better to hold it over until next week and to give us more notice of it, even if the Minister for Europe had to make the statement. It would have been better to make the statement before a fuller House than the rather small House that is always here on a Friday. I do not like ascribing conspiratorial motives to the Foreign Secretary but I suspect that it is not an accident that he chose to make the statement on a Friday.

The key to the Foreign Secretary's statement is his admission that the British and Spanish Governments are in broad agreement to "share sovereignty over Gibraltar". That is what we have feared has long been being cooked up in the dishonourable talks that have taken place over these past months behind closed doors. Today's statement is yet another shabby step in what has been from the start a shabby and dishonourable process.

Despite clear evidence to the contrary, the Foreign Secretary clearly gave the Spanish Government the impression at the outset that he could deliver a sell-out on sovereignty. Right from the start, the Minister for Europe sought to bully and to intimidate the Government and people of Gibraltar. He mocked the size of their population. He accused them of being stuck in the past. He threatened that they would be left behind if they did not cave in to the Government's determination to betray them. That hectoring tone continued in the statement today.

When will the Foreign Secretary and his colleagues realise that this issue is not about our relations with Spain? It is about the democratic rights of the people of Gibraltar, who have no representation in this House and rightly look to the British Government to represent their best interests. Does he not understand that democracy is about consent freely and democratically given and not about consent sought under duress, threat and deliberate financial pressure?

Does the Foreign Secretary not understand that his broad agreement to share sovereignty is a betrayal of the people of Gibraltar? Does he really not understand after his visit to the Rock the true feeling of the people of Gibraltar whose interests he is supposed to represent? Does he not understand that sovereignty shared is sovereignty surrendered, that the people of Gibraltar will not vote to surrender their British sovereignty, and that they will be right not to do so?

Why cannot the Foreign Secretary accept that the process that he has outlined today is doomed? Why will he not learn the lessons from Northern Ireland and guarantee that in future such talks will be genuinely three-sided, with the Government of Gibraltar properly represented and able to make their own case?

Why will the Foreign Secretary not accept that agreements on the sovereignty of Gibraltar, broad or otherwise, should never be concluded with Spain without the consent of the people of Gibraltar, freely and democratically given, before rather than after such agreement has been reached? Will he explain why he is attempting to divide the sovereignty over the military interests in Gibraltar from the sovereignty of Gibraltar as a whole? Will he assure us that in future the full agenda of talks, and the limits within which they are taking place, will be fully and openly disclosed?

I call on the Foreign Secretary to suspend the current round of talks, and to set about reconstituting them on the basis of an agenda that excludes sovereignty, upon which agreement cannot be reached, and deals instead with those issues relating to the normalisation of relations between Spain and Gibraltar, upon which agreement might be reached.

Does the Foreign Secretary not accept that these talks have been a humiliating episode for his Government? He has achieved the impossible. He has upset the Spaniards, he has infuriated the people of Gibraltar, he has shamed himself and his Government, and at the same time he has nothing to show for it. Will he now stop playing with Gibraltar's sovereignty, call off the talks and start repaying the loyalty of the people of Gibraltar to Britain by demonstrating a little loyalty to them in return?

The right hon. Gentleman begins by making what I can only describe as an absurd complaint—that I as Secretary of State have taken the first opportunity to come to the House to make a statement. I was available to make a statement today because I was not in Madrid. I am sure that, had I not used this opportunity and had my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe made a statement quite late in the afternoon next week in what will be a very busy week in the House, the right hon. Gentleman would have made the opposite complaint—that I was not here to make a statement because I was in the far east.

I listened very carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman said. I remind him that he was a member of the Government who began the process of which I am giving a staging-post statement.

We never did anything like this.

The hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position that the Conservatives never did anything like this. [HON. MEMBERS: "The Falklands?"] If we look at the history in relation to Gibraltar, the difference between us and the Conservative party is that in 1969 it was a Labour Government who gave the solemn undertaking that there would be no changes in sovereignty without a referendum. As we now know from the Public Records Office, just two years later, when the ink was barely dry on that undertaking, it was a Conservative Government, led by the then Foreign Secretary Lord Home, who were determined to hand over the whole sovereignty of the Rock under a 999-year lease without any referendum whatever.

It does not lie well in the mouth of the right hon. Gentleman or Conservative Members to complain about the fact that sovereignty has been discussed in these talks, because sovereignty was at the heart of the Brussels agreement. It is there in the text and the right hon. Gentleman knows it. Then he comes out with the most extraordinary proposition that sovereignty shared is sovereignty surrendered. I do not accept that for a second. We have shared some of our sovereignty with a large number of organisations, including multinational organisations such as NATO, where our ability to exercise control over our future is strengthened by sharing sovereignty. That is one of the paradoxes of sovereignty that the Conservative party has never been able to understand.

The truth is—this is recognised implicitly by virtually everyone to whom I have talked in Gibraltar—that shared sovereignty would lead to more control for Gibraltarians over their own lives. Behind the bluster that we heard from the right hon. Gentleman, there is inherent confusion and contradiction. On the one hand, he asks us to abandon a process and negotiations begun by his own Government when he was a member of that Government; on the other, he says that there should be genuine three-sided talks, as in Northern Ireland. The only difference between what happened in Northern Ireland and what is happening here is that in the end in Northern Ireland, one of the three sides decided to take part in talks; it took a great deal of encouragement before it did so.

There is on the table an open invitation to Mr. Peter Caruana and the Government of Gibraltar to take part in these talks. I discussed that with Mr. Caruana this time last year. He laid down certain conditions, which I got the Spanish Government to accept. He could safely be involved in exactly the way that the right hon. Gentleman and the Government of Gibraltar seek. I am sorry that Mr. Caruana has not so far done so, but there is this difference between Mr. Caruana and some Conservative Members: at least Mr. Caruana recognises, as he has said publicly, that there is a dispute with Spain and that there needs to be dialogue. Nothing that I have heard from the right hon. Gentleman has ever posed any alternative but talks with Spain to try to resolve the dispute. The dispute is a fact. Spain is a fact. The current difficulties which Gibraltarians suffer as a result of the dispute are also facts, and we are seeking to find a way through them that ensures dignity for Gibraltarians and that they have the final say.

The last piece of absurd confusion in the right hon. Gentleman's bluster was his suggestion that we should put to the people of Gibraltar the consequences of the negotiations before the negotiations had been completed. That is exactly what he said. It is the most absurd proposition from the right hon. Gentleman in a whole series of utterly ridiculous propositions. He should read yesterday's editorial in the Gibraltar Chronicle. In place of the nonsense that we heard from him, it says that it is time for Gibraltar to adopt a fresh approach and a positive agenda. It ends with the following words, which I am sure could be directed at the right hon. Gentleman:

"Let us not resign ourselves to a draining inertia or hallucinogenic escapades."

That well sums up the response that we have heard from the right hon. Gentleman.

I do not know whether the Foreign Secretary heard the cry, "Falklands" during his response to the shadow Foreign Secretary. He may remember that there were extensive discussions about the sovereignty of the Falklands before the Argentinians made the mistake of the military invasion of the Falkland Islands under the then Conservative Government. May I offer my general support for the process in which the Foreign Secretary has been engaged?

In the course of his statement he repeated once again the proposition with which one would hope the whole House would agree, that no deal would be better than a bad deal. May I ask him about what he described as red-line issues? Does he agree that there can be no deal if Spain is unwilling to abandon its claim for full sovereignty, if the United Kingdom cannot enjoy precisely the same military facilities and for as long as we wish and if it is not a matter of agreement between Spain and the United Kingdom that the issue should be finally resolved by a referendum of the people of Gibraltar? Taken singly or cumulatively, are not these issues upon which there can be no compromise?

Finally, does the Foreign Secretary have a mind to the fact that the negotiations cannot acquire some timeless nature? There has to be some time limit. I do not suggest today that he should offer a final point at which they have to be concluded, but I urge him to understand that the continuing nature of the negotiations must inevitably bring uncertainty and the sooner that uncertainty is resolved, the better.

I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his remarks and for his constructive approach. I noted the discomfort of the Opposition when he dared to mention the Falklands. I was in the House at the time of that utter debacle. I also remind the House of the approach taken by the Conservative party in 1971, which was to dispatch Gibraltar to the Spanish under a 999-year lease without any referendum whatsoever.

Thirty years ago.

They say that it was 30 years ago, but it is the same Conservative party. We know that when it comes to selling out British interests the Tories have not changed. We know about their Pol Pot syndrome, where they keep bringing forward year zero to try to encourage the country to go in for collective amnesia, but it does not work—[Interruption.]

Order. Hon. Members should listen to what the Secretary of State is saying.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman asked me about red-line issues relating to full sovereignty, military facilities and the referendum. The answer to his question is that any one of those amounts to a red-line issue; it does not require all of them together. As I said in my statement, we have to have a solution based on shared sovereignty and we have made that clear throughout the talks. I have said publicly, as has my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe, that conceding total sovereignty to Spain was never on the agenda and that the United Kingdom Government would never agree it. That would be inconsistent with the Brussels process while shared sovereignty is fully consistent and implicit in the Brussels process.

On the military facilities, I have no need to repeat what I said a moment ago about the referendum. We have made it clear to the Spanish Government that the referendum is a fact. Their approach has yet to be put precisely in terms that we have agreed, but they have always acknowledged that fact, as they need to.

On the issue of time, I cannot give a precise time scale and the right hon. and learned Gentleman is not asking me to do so. There needs to be some time limit. It is likely that we would have been further forward had there been a meeting of the Brussels process today. There was not, but I look forward to arranging one in the early autumn so that we can have a further meeting in Madrid as was planned for today. Then, of course, there will be a full report to the House.

May I commend to the shadow Foreign Secretary and to those engaged in the foolish chorus of "no surrender" and "sell-out"—

Quisling.

And "quisling" indeed.

Order. The remark of the hon. Member for Lichfield (Mr. Fabricant) is completely out of order.

If it is technically out of order, of course I withdraw it, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Order. It is not a technicality. That statement is out of order.

I withdraw it.

Thank you.

I recommend to the others that raised that foolish chorus that they have a certain humility. May I suggest that the right hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) reads the Franks report on the Falklands, the leaseback position put then by the Conservative Government and their proposals in respect of sovereignty of Gibraltar? Historians will decide whether this new initiative by the Government under the Brussels process was indeed misguided and doomed from the start or a brave attempt to deal with real issues and concentrate minds on the way to an eventual permanent solution. What is clear, as the Foreign Affairs Committee saw during our very recent visit to Gibraltar, is that there is a substantial degree of mistrust by the people of Gibraltar in respect of this current initiative and indeed that has been fuelled in part by provocative statements by individual Ministers. So may I recommend to my right hon. Friend that he uses this period of reflection constructively to seek to lower the temperature and find confidence-building measures to build bridges with the people of Gibraltar?

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his remarks. Of course I am aware of the views of most people in Gibraltar about this. I too visited Gibraltar and received an interesting reception. Yes, we should use this period which has come up by chance because of the Cabinet changes in Spain and I look forward to helping to build the confidence of the Gibraltarians in this process. I have two comments for my right hon. Friend. First, no one who acknowledges that there is a dispute with Spain which causes all sorts of practical problems for the people of Gibraltar has yet come up with proposals as to how these can be resolved other than through a dialogue.

Secondly, I wanted Chief Minister Caruana and the Government of Gibraltar to be represented in these talks from the start. I believe that the conditions that I negotiated with Spain—the so-called two flags, three voices arrangement—fully met the conditions that Mr. Caruana initially imposed. Had he been involved in the talks, their consequences would necessarily have been different because they would have involved three parties rather than two. We had agreed that we would hold these talks—that was an agreement between the two Governments as long ago as 1984. I have sought to ensure that Mr. Caruana has been informed about the progress of the talks, but it would be better all round if he were willing to say, "Yes. I have always been up for dialogue with Spain. There is a dispute and this represents an opportunity for me to represent the interests of the people of Gibraltar." Again I can give Mr. Caruana a complete undertaking that he would be as free to represent the interests of the people of Gibraltar in the talks as he always has been outside them.

Is the Foreign Secretary aware that during the Foreign Affairs Committee's visit to Gibraltar the week before last when we met every political party, the trade unions, every conceivable community group, people at random on the streets and patiently sitting stationary in their cars during the Spanish obstruction on the border, neither I—nor, I believe, any other member of the Committee—was able to find a single person on the Rock who was prepared to say that they would vote in favour of the Government's joint sovereignty proposal.

Given that it is blindingly clear that the people of Gibraltar will in no conceivable circumstance vote in favour of the Government's deeply misguided policy of joint sovereignty, surely the only sensible course is to abandon that policy, and to abandon it now.

I am not aware directly of the right hon. Gentleman's experience in Gibraltar, but it will come as no great surprise to Members of the House, particularly those who have visited Gibraltar. He asks whether I am aware that not a single person would be prepared to vote in favour of the shared sovereignty proposal. There is no shared sovereignty proposal to be put to the people of Gibraltar yet. Let me make it clear that what we seek to do is to resolve all the disputes with Spain. They include the question of sovereignty.

I have been open about that from the start, as indeed were the Government of whom the shadow Foreign Secretary was a member back in 1984. The question of sovereignty has always been on the agenda. It is impossible to conceive of why it was on the agenda unless one of the likely conclusions was that there would be shared sovereignty. The Conservative party was signed up to that principle, we have accepted it in principle. However, any agreement—any joint declaration, but any subsequent detailed agreement, including the treaty—would seek to resolve everything together.

My belief is that if we could get there, we would have a package of proposals that would make a real difference to the people of Gibraltar, and if we had a process of discussion in which the Government of Gibraltar would have to be involved, that would change perceptions. That is my belief, but in any event it was going to be some time down the track.

Is my right hon. Friend aware that I never thought the day would come that he would make a statement, practically every word of which I disagreed with? Is he further aware that many Labour Members will not go along with what he is doing and that just as this House, of which I was a Member at the time, would not accept the sell-out of the Falklands by the Tory Government, so we shall not accept the sell-out of Gibraltar by a Labour Government?

May I point out to my right hon. Friend that Mr. Pique, who has just been sacked, said that whatever agreement Britain made with Spain on joint sovereignty, Spain would never give up its claim to total sovereignty? The Spanish Government treat the people of Gibraltar so oppressively now, when they have British sovereignty, that one wonders how they will treat them if they get their hands on them, even under joint sovereignty. Is my right hon. Friend aware that the restrictions on the people of Gibraltar could be removed now as a sign of good will by the Spanish Government and that although they want to cozen this Government, they have no genuine goodwill towards the people of Gibraltar?

My right hon. Friend says that the people of Gibraltar would enjoy Spanish as well as British sovereignty. Is he not proud that the people of Gibraltar are so proud to be British that they do not want to touch Spanish sovereignty, that they want to be British, just as they were British during the war when a fascist Spanish Government fought against this country? It is about time the Government abandoned these talks.

I regret that my right hon. Friend disagrees about this, because we are genuine friends and normally agree on matters. Of course I am aware of some of the sentiment in the House, but I also believe that, in our party and in the Liberal Democrat party, there is widespread support for this process. My right hon. Friend says that the restrictions should be removed tomorrow. I understand that; I do not wish to see the restrictions there for a second longer than they should be—and they should not be there. In saying that, however, he admits that there are matters of deep concern to the Gibraltarians about how they are treated by the Spanish Government. If that is accepted, I am afraid that the next conclusion is inevitable: we must have a dialogue with Spain to resolve those difficulties. That is what we are engaged in.

There was a time when it was thought that the way to resolve those difficulties was simply by taking each individual problem in turn. That does not work, and has not worked. That was why the previous Government, in 1984, decided—it will be recalled if the Commons record is seen—with approbation from the then Labour Opposition to engage in the process of negotiation with Spain. We are continuing with it.

Finally, my right hon. Friend talked about shared Spanish sovereignty for individuals. I think that he meant shared Spanish citizenship.

Yes, citizenship.

What I would say on that is this: early in these negotiations we established that it was absolutely fundamental that Gibraltarians would retain their right to British citizenship in any event. That has been accepted. In addition, they would be offered, if they so chose, Spanish citizenship as well.

Does the Foreign Secretary accept that, whatever its validity in the past, the Brussels process is no longer appropriate? The talks should cease now. Is not the change in Foreign Minister in Spain the best opportunity to stop them?

Does the Foreign Secretary also accept that, whatever his personal intentions and motives, he gives the impression that he is more interested in the rights—claimed or otherwise—of the kingdom of Spain than he is of those of the British citizens who live and work in Gibraltar? Does he accept that he would be better employed now in actively protecting and pressing the rights and interests of the United Kingdom, including the people of Gibraltar, and dealing with Spain on matters upon which our two countries can agree? Surely it is right that the agreement that he intends to reach with Spain should not be brought into being until after he has consulted and reached a firm view about the views of the people of Gibraltar. To do it the other way around, as he currently intends, is to leave the people of Gibraltar in a state of uncertainty, which is not fair on them.

Let me deal directly with the point raised by the hon. and learned Gentleman, because it is a serious one. I am glad to note that he at least accepts the validity of the Brussels process up to now, even if there is a difference across the Chamber as to whether it should be continued. His last point is fundamental. I can reassure him that we have always made it clear that no agreement would be put in place without the positive consent of the people of Gibraltar. However, there is an issue about how one gets there.

we are engaged in a dialogue. He says that there is a dispute: we are trying to have a dialogue to resolve the dispute. We cannot know the conclusions of the negotiations until the negotiations are concluded. I wanted Mr. Caruana in the room. I hope very much that the Conservative party will join the Liberal Democrats and me in telling him that it is safe for him to be involved in the negotiations. To this day, I simply have no comprehension of why he decided not to join in the negotiations, because he would have been, and still would be, a free man in those negotiations to agree or disagree as he wanted.

The purpose of the negotiations is to come forward with a proposition. Because Mr. Caruana was unwilling to take part in the negotiations, we had to have them bilaterally between the two Governments. That was why we decided on the approach of a joint declaration, which would be a framework that would then be the subject of tri-lateral negotiations, outside the Brussels process, with the Government of Gibraltar. Only at the end of that could we pin down an agreement in treaty language, which would then be put to the people of Gibraltar.

I understand the point that the hon. and learned Gentleman makes about the current degree of uncertainty, but it is critical that before we ask the people of Gibraltar to vote, they know exactly what they are voting for. That is why we have this careful process.

I have great respect for the views and vision of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, but at times we all make bad decisions and mistakes. Surely the time has now come to recognise that what we have done with the Brussels process has been a mistake and has not been best handled.

We can come up with all the arguments in the world. I am sure that my right hon. Friend would agree that it would be better if Gibraltar were to be represented, but it is not, and we can come up with all the reasons why it is not. The bottom line, however, is that had Gibraltar had the power of veto, it might then have attended the talks. It did not attend because it did not have a veto. The time has come to end the talks, sit back and think about where we go from here. We say that the people of Gibraltar will have the right to free access to Spain, but not all of them have access to Spain now. Many people in Gibraltar are not allowed to cross the border into Spain.

Those are some of the reasons why we should not continue down this road. The bottom line is that if we want to come up with a useful agreement for Gibraltar, it should be about open access, allowing it into the single skies agreement and reintroducing the ferry across to Algeciras. All the wrongs that have been done should be put right before we continue.

The other bottom line is that we should never capitulate to a bully, because the moment we do that we will never secure the rights of the people of Gibraltar and ensure that they have freedom. Please lift the sword of Damocles from over the heads of the people of Gibraltar as quickly as possible.

My hon. Friend is a good friend of mine, but I must say that he just made the case, very eloquently, for the negotiations.

No, he did not.

He did. He drew attention to a long list of problems suffered by the people of Gibraltar, including access to Spain and to the single skies. The only way of resolving those problems is by dialogue with Spain, which is what we are seeking to achieve.

Surely the Foreign Secretary must understand by now why many of us in the House and the people of Gibraltar have no confidence in his part in the negotiations. The Government do not have a glowing record on enforcement. They failed to enforce the Sangatte protocol, to restore freight trains between England and France and to enforce the legitimate export of beef to France. Many of us have expressed real concern about infringements of law by Spain that directly affect the free movement of people between Gibraltar and Spain. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to pursue the talks, I suppose that is up to him, but he is doing so in the certain knowledge that the people of Gibraltar will ultimately reject them in any case. In the meantime, what is he doing to enforce the law as it stands or as he, practically alone, would like it to stand?

If the hon. Gentleman wants to have a contest about which Government have been more effective inside the European Union, it is one that my party would win hands down every time. He talks about Sangatte. As my right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee said, a little humility might be appropriate from the Conservatives, because the mother and father of the problems at Sangatte, about which I know a great deal, is the fact that they signed up to the Dublin agreement and tore up an effective operational bilateral agreement for the return of asylum seekers.

It is worth bearing in mind the remarks of a distinguished former chairman of the Conservative party, who recently said:

"The concessions Labour are considering are the same ones John Major's conservative government was willing to make. In politics it is important that parties do not lose their sense of history. Some of this criticism expresses an out of date and completely obsolete vision of Spain."

I am not very impressed with the yah-boo nature of this interchange. From either Front Bench we have heard that the other is to blame, but those of us who are consigned to the wilderness have an historic role: to press a Government, of whatever colour, to resist appeasement and stiffen their sinews against the bully.

Mr. MacGregor of the southern European department of the Foreign Office took the Polish ambassador to the Court of St. James down to Gibraltar to discuss the 60th anniversary next year of the death of General Sikorski—a great Polish hero who was killed off Gibraltar. What was the Foreign Secretary's reaction when he heard that Spain had said to the Polish Government during the Spanish presidency that it was not a good idea, if Poland was interested in acceding to the European Union, to aggravate Spanish feeling by participating in those important commemorations for the Poles and the Gibraltarians, as well as the United Kingdom people?

Spain has been consistently bullying, and it is time we stood up to it. Many of the things that the Foreign Secretary referred to in his statement are not things that can be given to the people of Gibraltar—they are matters of right. It is time that he and others stood up with vigour to prosecute and promote the best interests of Gibraltarians, Britons and others in the European Union who want free mobility in and out of Gibraltar, and free commerce. What he has embarked on will not succeed. It is more likely that the hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley) will seek election to the papacy than that a Spanish Foreign Minister will agree in perpetuity to joint sovereignty.

I do not know anything at all about the General Sikorski anniversary. I have a Polish community in my constituency, however, and it is entirely appropriate that they should be able to mark it, so I will look into the matter and write to my hon. Friend.

My hon. Friend talked about promoting the best interests of the people of Gibraltar and encouraging commerce. I agree with that, but he and other hon. Members have not told us how we are to do that but for a dialogue, to which Mr. Caruana has himself signed up. [Interruption.] Now the shadow Foreign Secretary says that he is in favour of dialogue. In that case, what on earth is he complaining about?

I fear that the Foreign Secretary has got so excited at the Dispatch Box this morning that he may be in need of some homoeopathic medicine for his blood pressure.

The Foreign Secretary said that an argument for shared sovereignty is that there are insufficient telephone lines. That is absolutely amazing. He should have a word with my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant). We have satellite communication now. How can he possibly say that we need shared sovereignty to deal with insufficient telephone lines and get faster communications? He then implied that 60 million Britons will be as affected as 30,000 Gibraltarians. That is patent nonsense. He has not referred to the absolute hypocrisy of the Spanish position on Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish colonies on the north African coast that the Spanish Government have not the slightest intention of giving up. If they want sovereignty negotiations over Gibraltar, they should be talking about giving up those colonies, which they grabbed many years ago.

I shall deal with the last point first. There is a dispute between Spain and Morocco over Ceuta and Melilla, but the treaty basis for those enclaves is different from that for Gibraltar. Had it been the fact that article 10 of the treaty of Utrecht had provided for Britain to have sovereignty for ever, without the provisos that the article contains, the position would have been different. The treaty of Utrecht applies only to the Rock, and there is a much livelier dispute about sovereignty over the isthmus, which is another issue that has to be resolved in the negotiations.

It is the people of Gibraltar who have said that they want more telephone lines from the Spanish to resolve some problems that they have had in running their businesses. I happen to agree with them, and to believe that dialogue is the way of achieving that.

Does the Foreign Secretary understand and accept that self-determination and freedom are not negotiable, as they are a matter of principle? Does he therefore accept that it is insulting and offensive to the free people of Gibraltar that he seeks to come to a deal on sovereignty over their heads and without their consent?

It cannot conceivably be over their heads. Opposition Members are tilting at windmills. The Brussels process, supported and activated by the last Conservative Government, laid down that sovereignty was a key part of the discussion, but nothing can be decided over the heads of the Gibraltarians because of the undertaking that a Labour Government, not a Tory Government, gave in 1969.

Does the Foreign Secretary accept that it is entirely typical of the way in which the negotiations have been conducted that the statement has been sneaked out on a Friday morning, when most hon. Members are back in their constituencies on constituency business? Does he accept that it is a sell-out of the people of Gibraltar? That is how it will be perceived, however the Government attempt to spin it. Does the Foreign Secretary also accept that it will cause anxiety in the Falkland Islands—the difference is that the Argentine Government do not have votes to trade in the European Union, as the Spanish Government do?

May I put three specific points to the Foreign Secretary? First, as he has intimated today, broad agreement has already been reached with the Spanish Government, so when does he anticipate that a copy of the agreement or joint declaration will eventually be made available, including to hon. Members? Secondly, the Foreign Secretary has visited Gibraltar and knows full well that there is no prospect whatever that the people of Gibraltar will vote for an agreement that will result in shared sovereignty with Spain. Everyone has known that all along. That being the case, will the Foreign Secretary tell the House what is really behind the agreement? What have we been promised in return by the Spanish Government for going along with it? What votes have we been promised in the EU and what—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is going on far too long.

The idea that I sneaked out the statement at 11 o'clock on a Friday is absurd. The moment I knew that the Spanish Foreign Minister had been moved from his post, I decided to make a statement and communicated that fact to Front-Bench spokesmen and many hon. Members on both sides of the House, so they were well aware of my intentions.

The hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) asked when a copy of the joint declaration would be made available, and I am glad to hear that he thinks that is a good idea. We shall do so when there is one, but there is not one, as I have been trying to explain. There may not he one, but I think that there probably will be.

As for the Falklands, the hon. Gentleman was not in the House in 1982, but I was. The history of the Falklands is one that we shall certainly not follow. There was an effort at backstairs deals with no negotiation or involvement whatsoever with the people of the Falklands; there was a readiness by the Government of whom the shadow Foreign Secretary was a member to hand over the Falklands, without any veto whatever being given to the people of the Falklands. Contrast that with our position on Gibraltar, on which we have said from the start that of course we respect the commitment that we gave—not them—to ensure that any final decisions are put to the people of Gibraltar in a referendum.

Am I right to say that both Ceuta and Melilla, the two sovereign Spanish enclaves off the Moroccan coast, are represented in the Spanish Parliament and, indeed, the EU? The Foreign Secretary has spoken a great deal about the democratic wishes of the Gibraltarians. Surely the time has now come to make sure that they have proper representation both in Westminster, probably with two MPs, and in the EU.

On the European Union, the hon. Gentleman will be aware of our commitment to implement the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights and ensure representation by attachment to a United Kingdom constituency in the European Parliament. The other issue that he raised is interesting. Essentially, he is proposing that Gibraltar should become directly a part of the United Kingdom. In that case, the Government of Gibraltar would obviously have to become a local authority and accept completely the current laws of the UK as they apply. People in Gibraltar have never put that to me; if it is a proposition, we shall obviously look at it.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of making the statement on a Friday, does the Secretary of State not think that he has learned something today? With the exception of one Labour Member, not one Member in the Chamber could give him any comfort whatsoever. Do I have to remind him that a former shadow Foreign Secretary said that he could not agree with a single word of the Foreign Secretary? Does he not think that the whole process of negotiation in Gibraltar, as elsewhere with other European Union countries, has been characterised by his Department's surrender and weakness? This is not a policy of flying two flags. It is a policy of flying one flag, as ever, as the Minister for Europe knows full well—the white flag.

The hon. Gentleman asked about comfort. I have to tell him that his interventions always provide me with comfort.

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have had an interesting statement from the Foreign Secretary, but have you received notice that the Home Secretary will make a statement today, given that we have just heard that the Government's crime policy has resulted in a 28 per cent. rise in crime and the lowest detection rates ever? That is a huge indictment of Government policy to be tough on crime and tough on causes of crime. The Foreign Secretary has come to the House, but where is the Home Secretary?

Order. I have not had any notice of that. The hon. Gentleman can make his comments at a more appropriate time.

As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted, I am grateful to the Minister for the way in which he opened the debate and for raising the issue of homophobic bullying. Contributions from Members on both sides of the House, including the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), have focused on the value of education and what education is about. I do not know whether Members had a chance last night to see the interview between Michael Parkinson and Nelson Mandela in South Africa in connection with the sports aid programme. The interview was particularly interesting because it showed that Nelson Mandela and the South African people had a thirst for education that could not be satisfied. Our youngsters have access to what is arguably one of the world's highest quality education systems, despite its flaws, yet here we are, discussing how we can get them in and engage them, while in other parts of the world, particularly in southern Africa, tens of thousands of youngsters have no education at all and face an incredibly uncertain future.

It is interesting that we are filling our schools with foreign teachers because of the lack of our own. I note the enormous numbers that are coming over from South Africa. Given the hon. Gentleman's comments, that must be a problem for the South Africans.

I am grateful for that intervention. I have raised the same issue in the House on a number of occasions. It is deplorable that, because of appalling management of the teacher supply, we have to denude the countries of sub-Saharan Africa of teachers—countries where they are most needed—to make up our shortfall. I hope that the Government will return to the issue, but I shall not pursue it today.

As hon. Members know, I spent not just one year before I went to university, but 34 years in classrooms. Apart from four years when I was deputy head in a boys' grammar school, which, I am delighted to say, was becoming a comprehensive, all my time in education was spent at the sharp end, dealing with youngsters from challenging homes and circumstances. I say to the House in all humility that in all that time, the children did not change. They were exactly the same when I left teaching in 1997 as they were when I started in 1963. What changed was society around them. We should always try to get that in perspective.

There have always been disruptive and violent pupils in our schools; the idea that they have suddenly appeared over the past two or three years is nonsense. I met violent and disruptive pupils, and I met violent and disruptive parents. Although I was attacked only once by a violent parent, who hit me over the head with an umbrella, having ambushed me at the bottom of the stairs, I know that a number of my colleagues encountered real difficulties from time to time.

I should also say that I remember my very first day at school and a disruptive child aged five. The little boy was going off to Rosehill primary school. His mother had bought him a new coat, but it was raining when he went to school, so his old coat was put on top of his new coat. The teacher met him at the school gates, sent his mother away, took him inside and said, "Will you take your coat off?", to which the little boy said, "No. My mother says I have to keep it on to protect my new coat." The teacher grabbed hold of the child and shook him rather violently to get his coat off, at which point he stood on her foot rather violently and ran out of school.

Later that day, my father caused me to go back and make humble apologies, but the point of telling the tale is to illustrate that many children are temporarily involved in disruptive behaviour—a one-off incident, or a small incident. We must recognise that from time to time children growing up in all sorts of environments stray from the strait and narrow.

The hon. Gentleman gives an interesting example and makes a powerful point, but does he accept that there is a difference between such an incident at a primary school, and one involving some hulking great brute of 17 years of age in a secondary school?

Of course. I merely wanted to show that we should not get incidents of disruptive behaviour out of perspective, and we should not believe that the problem is new; it is on-going. Sadly, what is new is that many youngsters today have an anarchistic view of authority: authority is there to be opposed. Many of their parents come with exactly the same view, whether towards school, the benefits office, the housing office or wherever.

I want to emphasise, and I hope that the Minister will accept, that we do not have a universal breakdown of discipline in our schools. The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West, who spoke for the Conservatives, gave some horrific examples, but they are exceptional. The vast majority of our schools do not have that awful problem.

We cannot look at school discipline without looking at the whole issue of discipline in society. As many hon. Members know, my daughter was attacked recently on the streets of Kennington, just for the sake of a mobile phone. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and suffered a fairly brutal attack. That is becoming quite common. In one month in Lambeth and Brixton there were 17,000 such incidents. It is a major problem.

Let us consider the examples that our young people are given in, for example, popular television series such as "Men Behaving Badly" or even the one with those wonderful ladies, Joanna Lumley and co—

"Absolutely Fabulous".

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman.

There is a relish and glorification in the appalling behaviour depicted in those programmes, but in schools such behaviour is out of order. We now have a laddish culture on our streets. There was an appalling report of City brokers—highly educated young men and, I presume, young women—who trawl the sex bars of London and regard that as normal behaviour. They are as heavily involved in the drug culture as are the youth on our streets. Let us not simply think that the only people involved in the drug problem are youngsters in poor communities. That is nonsense and we must understand that.

It also horrifies me that the behaviour of footballers such as the two from Leeds United has been glorified. The club, which I support and have supported for many years, should have set an example by condemning such behaviour.

There is no doubt that discipline in schools is becoming worse and more polarised, as is evident from the number of exclusions, up 11 per cent. between 1999–2000 and 2000–01. I think that the Minister will accept that it was a gross mistake for the previous Secretary of State to have issued a target to reduce exclusions—that was a nonsense of a policy. Schools supported that, but discipline and heads' authority in schools was undermined.

The House should know that the greatest rise in permanent exclusions occurred under the previous Conservative Government. Between 1993 and 1998, permanent exclusions rose from 3,000 to 13,000, an increase of more than 400 per cent. Let us not give the impression, as Conservative Front Benchers sometimes do, that those exclusions are the result of the failure of this Government and of schools. They have been rising for many years, and that is something with which all of us, irrespective of our political persuasions, must deal.

The Keele university study has been referred to and I shall not repeat the statistics, but it was interesting because each year between 5,000 and 10,000 young people are interviewed about their attitudes. Poor behaviour in schools is creating a culture where it is de rigueur not to work and engage in the curriculum and in what the school wishes to achieve on behalf of young people. It is an increasingly worrying trend. The peer pressure is not to work and to fool around and to be one of the crowd. We must get to grips with that.

The NUT-Warwick university study produced some appalling statistics, to which it is right to draw attention, on the effect of poor behaviour on teachers and on what they have to put up with. If we want to support our teachers and schools, the Government must address such key issues head on. They must recognise the reality of working in a classroom and accept that every new initiative that is thrust down from on high, in relation to which teachers must perform like performing monkeys, undermines what they should be doing: tackling the relationships in a school. That is what they often cannot do.

I am pleased that Mike Tomlinson, the former chief inspector of schools, referred in two of his last reports to the deterioration of pupil behaviour. The problem might affect only one in 12 schools, but that is an enormous number. The consequence is that teachers want out, which is a problem for us all, but in many ways the real problem is that many of our youngsters cannot engage with the education process, as they cannot learn in a disruptive environment—a matter on which I am sure the whole House can unite.

I want now to turn to the analysis of the youngsters who are causing disruption in our schools—especially those who are being permanently excluded—and whether we can learn any lessons from it. On breaking down the statistics, we see that 83 per cent. of youngsters who were permanently excluded last year were boys, so it is significantly a boys' problem. Some 61 per cent. of those boys were aged 13, 14 or 15. There is an immediate challenge for the Government to consider what is happening to boys with challenging behaviour. The Government need to ask what is being taught and what they are doing in relation to the curriculum to say to those boys that it is far better to mess about, be permanently excluded and get out of the system than to engage with schools.

More worrying is the fact that children with special educational needs are seven times more likely than any other child to be excluded from school. Those with emotional and behavioural needs are especially affected. I applaud both the previous and the current Governments for the work that they have done in respect of special educational needs—a comment that I frequently make in the House, as that work is a credit to those on both sides of the Chamber—but we have not got it right. We now have an inclusion policy that I support with all my heart, but we are finding that the children whom we are including, who have emotional and behavioural difficulties, are the very ones who are being turfed out because schools cannot handle them and do not have the strategies to enable them to do so. One cannot teach these youngsters in groups of 30 or 35; it is just not possible for a teacher to engage with them in such circumstances. That is a lesson that the Government must try to learn.

Before the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) became so excited that he had to leave the Chamber, he mentioned the ethnic minority issue, but I was hoping that he would go a little further. It is all right to say that there are problems in engaging with young people from ethnic minorities who speak another language, but it is utterly wrong to say that children from such backgrounds do not want to learn English. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that that is the case. I accept that such evidence exists in respect of parents, although it applies to a very small number of them, but the children have a thirst to learn English. The fact that most of those youngsters are bilingual—indeed, some are trilingual—is a huge compliment to them.

The ethnic minority group that poses a real problem is Afro-Caribbeans. The expulsion rate of Afro-Caribbean youngsters is 38 in every 10,000 children, making them the largest ethnic group of youngsters who are being permanently excluded. The hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) recently made a number of very challenging statements to the Government in asking how we should deal with black students, but I do not believe that they engaged with her comments. It is not that the Afro-Caribbean community does not want its kids not to be educated or involved in society, but that the schooling system that we are offering and the culture in many of our schools is totally alien to its youngsters. We have got to address some of those problems.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on raising that point. There is a genuine problem with some of the ethnic groups in our society. Some perform far better than white caucasians, but the problems must be tackled. So many Members of Parliament and others, even the Government, do not deal with them because of the tyranny of political correctness.

I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman made that intervention because I was trying to make an important point about analysing the problem, not suggesting simple solutions. We have all failed to tackle the problem in the past. That includes previous Conservative Governments. It is now time to act.

I want to consider in more detail the youngsters who are being turfed out of our schools and permanently excluded. Evidence from the Youth Justice cohort study in 2002 was published in March this year. It showed that permanently excluded students were less likely than school pupils to live in a two-parent household—47 per cent., compared with 79 per cent. Permanently excluded students are far more likely to live in a single-parent household; 40 per cent. are in that category. Thirteen per cent. of such students live in a household with no parent or step-parent; many are in care. It is a major problem that many of our most disadvantaged youngsters, who are in care, are more likely to be excluded.

We must acknowledge that excluded children are often concentrated in specific sorts of schools in particular sorts of communities. We often discuss grammar schools, but I point out to the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West that such children do not come from grammar schools; 84 per cent. come from community schools, where the number of pupils who receive free school meals is three times higher than the average. They come from schools where twice as many pupils as the average are on the SEN register and have statements, and from schools that have three times the average level of unauthorised absences. Such schools have three times the average number of permanently excluded pupils.

Although we must consider specific categories of schools, we should tackle one issue perhaps above all others. I say that while acknowledging that the Minister has a genuine feel for young people and the circumstances that we are discussing. I have met many disruptive youngsters, but I have not met any who did not hate themselves more than the people against whom their behaviour was directed. They have an appalling self-image. That applies increasingly to many ethnic minority communities. The hon. Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) referred to that at the weekend. There is a major problem of self-image and the way in which society perceives those students. Unless we can make young people feel good about themselves, they will not engage with education, society or end their offending or disruptive behaviour. Who is to blame?

I want to explore that issue further. From the hon. Gentleman's extensive teaching experience, does he agree that pupils, especially boys, who, he says, constitute the majority of excluded pupils, need to know the boundaries to be happy and confident? They need to know the limits and they require good discipline. In a school where discipline works, children can learn in a happy, confident environment.

I could not agree more. Knowing the boundaries within which we have to work is crucial, whether in the home, the youth club, the local football team or at school—but may I add a rider to that? When I began teaching, it was easy to go into a classroom and set out the boundaries. By and large, youngsters met those criteria, and their parents did so as well. Today, that is not the case. Now, we have to negotiate with young people in terms of agreeing the boundaries, and, more importantly, we have to bring their parents along to agree to them, too. According to the clock, I have been going for nearly two hours now, but before I finish, I want to say that that is a real issue, and I might come back to it a little later.

Who is to blame? If I am honest, I have to say that I do not blame anybody. I do not blame any party in government, although some of this Government's present policies are not helping to deal with this problem, despite being well-intentioned. The Secretary of State has now said that she wants to get rid of the one-size-fits-all comprehensive school, but I think that that is the wrong tack. Instead, we should get rid of the one-size-fits-all curriculum, and the one-size-fits-all testing regime and examination system—the way in which we make our schools conform to a centralist agenda.

That conformity has been occurring, with respect, since the great reform Bill of 1988. It is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that is hampering schools' ability to deal with problems. With respect to most hon. Members present today, most of us have been reasonably successful when we have had a test put in front of us. We might not have done so early on and instead achieved our success later, but we have none the less been reasonably successful. A public policy research paper in 2001 identified one of the biggest rises in illness among young people as being in the incidence of mental health problems. Much of that is associated with the pressure of testing.

I want to make it clear that neither I nor my party is opposed to testing, but the Government must seriously address the fact that the whole education system is geared to testing. That is now its purpose: not to educate but to test. On average, youngsters will take as many as 68 formal exams between starting school as five-year-olds and leaving at 18. Most of those exams are not diagnostic tests to determine how to improve performance; they are simply hurdles. If youngsters do not get over those hurdles, the message that goes out to them is that they have failed.

We now have level 4 for English, maths and science at the end of key stage 2 as a target. For a significant number of the youngsters whom we are talking about, who exhibit poor discipline and poor behaviour in school, one of the problems is that they cannot cope with what is going on; yet they know that, a year later, they will be faced with the next barrier, and that if they do not get over that, the reward will be to have more of the same. In secondary schools, year 7 children who fail to get their level 4 standard assessment tests in English are now getting a booster programme that involves their doing what they were doing the year before in primary school.

I say to the Minister that that is genuinely well-intentioned, but it is not addressing the needs of the children. I want him to intervene on me at this point, and to tell me what a subordinate clause is. I move on. I suspect that, if I looked round the House now and asked all hon. Members to give me a definition of a subordinate clause, and to tell me when they would use it and when it was useful, they would struggle.

It is not a main clause.

The hon. Gentleman, quick as a flash, says that it is not a main clause, but it would be worth hon. Members' going into a school next week and asking the teachers how they teach subordinate clauses to children who fail, who have not got level 2 English.

My point is that we constantly teach for tests rather than teaching children what they need to know and the skills they need to be able to function.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

In a moment; I am getting excited about the subject.

If hon. Members are telling me that authors such as Roald Dahl, who wrote wonderful children's books, and the people who wrote the Harry Potter books and the book on which "Kes" was based sat down and said, "How do I get a subordinate clause into this?", that is nonsense. We must teach youngsters a love of language. Of course they need skills and fluidity, but our strict testing regime is driving those out.

I totally agree, although I am sure that the hon. Gentleman agrees with me that it is important for people to understand grammar. I have heard even my great colleague who sits on the Front Bench, my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West, use the words "between you and I". We all know that the preposition takes the accusative, but the question—

Order. The hon. Gentleman should relate his remarks to the debate, which is on behaviour improvement in schools.

rose—

I take your hint and I shall move on, Madam Deputy Speaker.

There is poor discipline in schools because children are not coping with the diet that has been offered to them. That is a valid point, which I hope is raised in the winding-up speeches. Yesterday, the Science and Technology Committee published a report on science teaching in schools, which all Members should read. One comment is that course work is tedious and dull; I have heard that endlessly from youngsters. Other comments are that it does not engage youngsters in topical debate and that teachers slog through completely pointless practical lessons. Our Select Committee is saying that about secondary school science teaching—a key subject area—so there is work to be done there.

What can we do? I take my hat off to the Minister and his colleagues for putting in resources, recognising problems and trying to tackle them, but they are not tackling the key issues. We must free schools up so that we do not have this endless conveyor belt of exams and testing. We must free schools up so that they can innovate on the curriculum; the Education Bill is attempting to achieve that.

The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West and I—we are still at one on the issue, I think—genuinely believe that the schools that most need to innovate will not he given the powers to achieve that, as they would not pass the other tests. Furthermore, the schools that most want autonomy will not get it, because they, too, would not pass the tests. I hope that the Minister makes it clear that the very schools that we are talking about—those that need to engage with some of the most disruptive children—must be given the greatest freedom to innovate, act autonomously and devise new methodology.

Above all, we must give our schools time. For many of the youngsters to whom I referred earlier, who often come from dysfunctional families and dysfunctional communities, school is the place where there is some stability, and they need that more than anything else. School is the place where someone engages with them and has time for them. Of course, that is important.

I worked in Chapeltown in Leeds in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a hugely dysfunctional community and there were 26 nationalities on the roll. There was a violent atmosphere in Chapeltown then, including tremendous hostility towards the police. I worked with an inspirational head, who said to us, "Your job is to be out in the homes as well as in school so that you can engage with parents and not simply expect them to come to you." We operated with vertical tutor groups and people also came to the schools. We must do that today.

The management of exclusions must be dealt with. I worry about the Conservative policy of simply saying, "Out of sight, out of mind." The Conservatives think that if they get the children out, the problem will be solved. I accept that that is not totally fair, but it appears to be the case. It may be good for a headline to say, "Let us support schools by getting the kids out." However, I say to the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West that a child excluded from a school is not excluded from the community. The child remains and has to be dealt with in the community. It is crucial that we adopt strategies to deal with that.

I commend to the Minister the strategy that came from Toronto and is now operating in Slough of a no-exclusion policy. There is an exclusion-free zone, the principle of which is that we do not wait for a situation to arise whereby a child is permanently excluded, as that reinforces offending behaviour and negative imagery. Instead, we manage transfer before that occurs. One must put into place, with local authorities, rapid responses, so that a head knows that there is somewhere for a child to go if the situation is about to explode. The head knows that there will be support in terms of case conferences within five working days, and not five weeks, which is often the case with many local authorities.

Exclusion is an issue not only for schools, but for the whole of society. I implore the Government not to seek simple solutions to complex problems. They must look for comprehensive solutions to take communities, parents and, most of all, young people with them.

It is always disconcerting to follow the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), as I nearly always agree with most of what he has to say. He anticipated many of my points, although I differ from him—in emphasis, certainly—on exclusions.

My wife is the head of an urban comprehensive in Skelmersdale and the convenor of an excellence cluster in the town. As I am liable to say good things about the excellence cluster, the school and my wife, I ought to declare a sort of interest.

It is self-preservation.

That is right.

I began my working life as a teacher in Kirkby in Merseyside, in what was then the largest secondary school in Europe. Every moment of that experience—although it was nowhere near as long as that of the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, if a lot longer than that of the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant)—is etched on my memory. However, that was more than 30 years ago. I must take care not to analyse the present situation with behaviour in schools as though it were the 1960s or 1970s. The debate on behaviour in schools has been bedevilled in recent years by the comparison between "then"—whenever that was—and now. Society has changed enormously in those years, and the norms of people's lives and behaviour have changed.

Family structures have changed dramatically, and not enough research has been done on that. I was dealing with a family last week—a perfectly decent family with six children. Two of the children were the father's, but not the female partner's; two were the mother's but not the male partner's; and two belonged to both partners. Such a "step-sibling" situation is very common and has tensions of its own, with difficulties that are transferred into schools and elsewhere. That situation is multiplied again and again in my constituency, and everybody else's.

Schools have a peculiar place in society. On the one hand, they are isolated—almost all schools these days are surrounded by huge security fences and have CCTV. Some hon. Members may have read a novel by Graham Greene called "It's a Battlefield", in which he describes a school, a factory and a prison in the town in such a way that the reader cannot tell the difference between them.

Although schools are isolated from society, they are also integrated, as the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough described. Parents are invited into schools, and schools invite themselves into homes. Schools are connected to their local towns and villages through a network of partnerships and other agencies.

Many of the problems of bad behaviour and violence occur when students, especially secondary school students, are going to and from school, such as on bus journeys. Bullies wait outside school gates for their victims. At those points of movement, the responsibilities and obligations of teachers and head teachers are less clear and more complex, and sometimes more dangerous. They may sometimes be in peril, as in the case of the unfortunate head teacher who was stabbed to death a few years ago when he tried to stop a bullying incident outside his school.

It is important for schools to invite parents into the school, but on occasions they are inviting trouble. I may be stretching the parameters of the debate, which is about the behaviour of pupils and students, but I believe that it should also be about parental behaviour. These days, parents are more legalistic. They are encouraged to take legal action—looking for compo—when the slightest thing goes wrong in their lives.

More parents now automatically take the side of their son or daughter in a dispute with the school, even though they know that the child is wrong. More parents are prepared to be psychologically, verbally and sometimes physically aggressive towards reception staff. To defend reception staff as much as anything else, schools have complex systems of bells and alarms which people—even the local MP or policeman—have to ring to get into the building. More parents use violent language and violent threats against teachers and heads—and even against students, the children of their neighbours. Parents are more prepared to participate in their children's quarrels with other children, instead of letting them sort things out for themselves. They are sometimes violent towards their partner's children or their stepchildren. More males are prepared to be violent and aggressive towards female teachers.

I list those incidents, because they are known to the children in the school and highlight the vulnerability of teachers. Youngsters who are inclined to be unto-operative see that their teachers are vulnerable to such threats. Such incidents also reveal the lack of consequences for the perpetrator against whom no action is taken. They set an example for everyone in the school. That is frightening, but I do not know what the answer is. I am describing a problem that I see every day, but I do not know what the Government can do to sort it out, although I welcome their recent strong words.

My strongest assertion is that none of us should tolerate verbal, psychological or physical abuse directed towards school staff or children by parents. Our assumption—the school's assumption; the local authority's assumption—should be that such behaviour cannot be tolerated, and that those responsible will be prosecuted. It is no good shrugging it off and hoping that it will not happen again, because these people do not go away for good; they come back.

Ministers have made strong statements about parents' violence towards those in schools, but I think much sterner action is needed. Schools are entitled to a much closer relationship with the police. Indeed, it occurs to me that perhaps secondary schools, at least, should have a police officer on their governing bodies, not just for their own benefit, but to give the police a better idea of what schools must put up with. Some students who have been excluded keep returning to the school gates and trying to get into the school to harass staff or other students. They should expect arrest and prosecution. I would not have said that 10 or 15 years ago; the iron is entering my soul increasingly in this context.

What I have described does not, of course, happen daily in every school. It would be crazy to suggest that. Very few adults behave in such a way—but it takes only one such incident to destroy a school's confidence and knock it off course, and to destroy its reputation in the local community. That reputation is a precious thing nowadays, as school intakes rise and fall according to rumour. Episodes are reported in newspapers, and in the towns I represent rumours seem to get around in 10 minutes—and to be embellished in the process.

I can think of no other job that requires a woman or a man to stand in front of large groups of young people for hour after hour. That is certainly not our experience today: we are standing in front of rows of empty Benches. When I think of doing that day after day, year after year, for 40 years, my heart sinks. I did it for a few years, and was happy to get out after that. Those young people often do not want to be there. There are young people in secondary schools whose hormones are popping. The teacher must stand there and, through sheer force of character—but mostly through sheer bluff—stay sane, keep the young people happy and keep them learning. It is, in fact, an impossible task.

I am more and more convinced that teaching depends entirely on bluff. Somehow, the teacher must keep the bluff going, because once a kid realises he can call the teacher's bluff, the teacher is dead and gone: all the others will realise that the bluff does not work any more. That applies to some of the children others have described today. However skilled the teacher is by nature and through training, he and his students know that it only takes one nutter. If one person is prepared to call the bluff, everything begins to collapse.

Each school must have its own boundaries—the invisible boundaries that separate mischief, cheek, rumbustious behaviour and the one-off incidents described by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough from disruptive and destructive behaviour. They will vary from school to school. I said that I would not use examples from my own dim and distant teaching past, but I think that one is very relevant.

When I started teaching—I taught English—it struck me as odd that children of 13, 14 and 15 were expected to sit down all day, except when they were engaging in games or other enjoyable pursuits. If they were learning English or history, they were expected to sit. It seemed unnatural that pupils should be expected to sit down for 40 minutes, or an hour and 20 minutes for a double period, to write or to do an exercise, so I did not mind if the kids stood up and walked around, even if they talked to their fellow pupils, so long as it was constructive and they were working. They could stand up and work on the window sills or whatever. Other teachers in the school did not allow that. They wanted pupils to sit down so that they knew where they were. They had to sit at the same desks so that the teacher could remember their names.

Every school, perhaps every teacher, has different boundaries, but given schools' clear contracts with students about what those boundaries are—they have clear contracts now—schools should be prepared to exercise the clear right to remove students whose behaviour is preventing their peers from being educated and who are destroying the bluff, as I have called it.

Over the past 10 years—I am critical of my own Government as well as Conservative Governments for this—the messages that Governments have put out on exclusion have fluctuated. Schools and communities do not know where they are. The message should be clear and consistent. It should support the school's right to exclude on the ground of unacceptable behaviour. It should be the school's decision—it cannot be decided by central Government—what unacceptable behaviour is.

Once a pupil has been excluded, the problems increase. There are difficulties with admissions of excluded pupils to other schools. In some local authorities, the county schools are obliged to take on pupils excluded by other schools, but some schools do not do so. I will not mention any names because it would be invidious. I have been trying to do something about it. Some schools in Lancashire will not under any circumstances accept any student who has been excluded from another school, but exclude their own pupils from time to time and expect the rest of the school community to pick up the tab.

Home tuition does not work; it has never worked. It has always been a mess, insufficient and slipshod. Schools have their own policies to deal with the problem, usually before it gets to exclusion, but we need more PRUs. They work if they are run properly. I know that the Minister is looking at exclusion from day one, and getting the young person back into a proper curriculum and a proper environment. It has to be like that, but PRUs have to be everywhere. All communities must have access to them. That is not the case at the moment.

So far, I have spoken about how we deal with social failure, but schools do have positive and assertive discipline programmes. They have systems to try to instil class self-discipline. We need to think in such positive terms as well as analysing the negative things that are going on. We must be tough on unacceptable behaviour and tough on the causes of unacceptable behaviour.

I agree with the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough. We find ourselves wandering into a culture where it is desirable, acceptable and cool not to work. That is not just the case in schools. When I taught in higher education, I knew that students were working like the devil at night, and they would pretend to their friends that they had not done any work at all because it was cool not to work. However, it is more the case among children.

We indulge our children from the earliest days. We indulge them with consumer goods and by giving in to their demands. It is so hard to expect children to change their habits once they go into the classroom if they have got their own way at home; they cannot. I suggest that we fail our children in that respect. We expect schools to patch up the sorry mess that we, as parents and communities, have created. When my children were growing up I was guilty of this, too. We shove our kids in front of the television so that we can get a bit of peace and quiet and so that we do not have to bother talking to them. When they get bored with the television they go upstairs and look at the computer screen. They spend half their time looking at screens and when they go to school they look at more screens as they are shown endless videos and have to work on computers. The amount of decent human interaction between adults and children has been shrinking for a long time at school just as it has at home.

We give children mobile phones because we cannot think of anything else to give them for Christmas. They take them to school where they are obliged to switch them off. However, I have had more than one incident reported to me by teachers of a teacher telling a child off for misbehaviour and the child phoning his mum. Ten minutes later the mum arrives at school and starts berating the staff.

I do not have time to go into detail as I want to conclude my remarks, but there are huge problems with special educational needs. I note what the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough said in congratulating the work of successive Governments on special educational needs, but it is far short of what is needed. Vast numbers of new cases of dyslexia and dyspraxia seem to be emerging from the darkness and we are slow to tackle a wide range of disabilities. For years, kids do not find out that they have a disability which has not been detected or assessed. When it is assessed, the processes for dealing with it are very slow. Such children often need one-to-one tuition which is very expensive and local education authorities are reluctant to spend piles of money which they do not have. However, these problems produce extra unacceptable behaviour for which the kids cannot be blamed. Nevertheless, it has to be addressed.

Special educational needs require more resources. I hate to say that as it is not the answer to everything. Local education authorities need to take a more intelligent approach.

Is it not the case that parents often become frustrated because they cannot get resources or statementing for their children? Parents are a community and talk to each other and those who are upset with the system help to draw down the perceptions of other parents of the education system and the schools because they are not getting the essential resources that their children need.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We have all had constituents come to us in torment because they cannot access the right facilities for their child. They see their child's education disappearing down the drain for months and years until something is done. That time can never be made up. When I meet constituents in that situation, I feel that if I were in their place I would be prepared to tear the local authority to pieces to get the right resources for my child.

We need joined-up action between local education authorities and the police service to tackle severe misbehaviour. We need much more research into the self-discipline of the classroom. In the past, if a disrupter became more than a little nuisance the class would sort it out somehow because most of the class wanted to work. We need to address the reasons why that discipline breaks down. We need much more support for teachers who are ashamed, frightened and, in the case of men perhaps, a little emasculated when they find themselves being challenged by young children. They are ashamed to report it, so they hide it and try to cover it up, and it has to be discovered from outside.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) said earlier, we also need sure start. That brilliant programme operates in the most deprived ward in my constituency, Skelmersdale, where it is doing some tremendous work. One can feel the difference. A home start programme also operates throughout the constituency, with volunteers looking after people with small babies in deprived or neglected areas.

Many of those solutions need to be strung together. Misbehaviour in schools is a serious problem and it is no good hiding from it. No matter how much we work on understanding the problem, finding out where it comes from and the many reasons for it, we must concentrate resources and energy in all sorts of areas, which I and others in the debate have identified, so that the lives of perfectly ordinary, decent kids and their education are not disrupted by half a dozen baddies who can destroy an entire school.

I am pleased to take part in this interesting debate on what is clearly a complex issue. It is as important to consider the reasons for behavioural problems in schools as what we should do about them.

I do not accept that the problem can simply be blamed on modern-day society. That is much too superficial a way to approach the subject. Nor do I have much sympathy with those who blame pupils' bad behaviour only on poverty and disadvantage. Essentially, children have not changed over the years, yet at the turn of the last century schools did not have the same behavioural problems as we see today. Although bad behaviour in schools is clearly worse in inner cities than it is in rural areas, it would be wrong automatically to assume that there is no poverty or deprivation in rural areas.

I served as an inner-city councillor in a previous political existence and I now serve as a rural Member of Parliament, and I have a few observations to make. First, as the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) and my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) said, we should not shy away from discussing the difficulties posed by multi-ethnic classrooms. Simply to avoid the issue for fear of sounding racist plays into the hands of those who would feed on people's ignorance. It is important that we consider those issues so that communities do not become isolated and we do not return to the ethnic strife that we unfortunately saw in some cities earlier in the year.

If, as was the case in my London borough, 60 to 70 per cent. of secondary school pupils have English as a second language, it is almost inevitable that some children will communicate less effectively than others. They may then become disinterested in their class studies and a higher proportion might behave badly as a result. In that connection, I feel strongly that we must continue to address the high levels of illiteracy in this country.

My second observation is that family life in cities is often more diverse and fractured than it is in rural areas. My constituency is in the eastern region, which has relatively few exclusions. Generally, family units tend to be more cohesive there than in the big cities. Perhaps the fact that children find it harder to travel in rural areas than in big cities means that they tend to be more home-centric. Marriage rates are higher and the number of single-parent families is lower than elsewhere in the country. That must have an impact on a child's stability and therefore on the incidence of behavioural problems. Support for the family and for family values need to be prioritised when we are considering children's behaviour.

Unfortunately, however, there seems to be a growing number of parents who, for whatever reason, believe that the schools, society as a whole—indeed, anyone but themselves—should have the primary responsibility for socialising their children and asserting discipline over them. Of course, we are where we are. It would be nice to believe that all parents would hear the elaborate contributions in today's debate and behave accordingly, but that is unlikely.

It is the duty of Parliament to tackle the issue and remind parents of their obligations to others. To my mind, it is a question of helping parents as well as punishing them; of providing schools with the ability to discipline children; and of re-examining the judicial system, so that extreme behavioural problems can be dealt with more effectively and swiftly. We have a long way to go.

This is certainly not a problem just for parents. The school system is part of the problem. Three quarters of exclusions happen in our secondary schools, where there are significant teacher shortages and up to 40 per cent. of teachers leave within three years of joining the profession. Increasingly, foreign teachers are being recruited to fill the gaps. It is an unsatisfactory situation.

At the same time, children, being children, will often be difficult. Anyone who has had children will know exactly what I mean. They will push things to the limit, just to see how far they can take them. They need to be disciplined, to learn what is and what is not acceptable—what the boundaries are. When we have fewer and less well-qualified teachers struggling with growing class sizes in secondary schools while filling in more and more Government forms, they are likely to have less time to devote to the one or two children in a class who are creating a problem and who probably need a little more attention.

Lack of home and school discipline is leading to worse behaviour. In my experience, most parents value discipline and a strong school ethos just as highly as academic standards. If behaviour is not controlled, a vicious circle can come into play whereby pupils lose interest in their studies and teachers can lose interest in their careers.

As the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) noted, significant recent research shows that pupil behaviour is now one of the main reasons that teachers give for leaving the profession. In the year to March 2000—I believe that these are the last available figures—more than 26,000 teachers left. As one leaving male maths and physics teacher in the eastern region put it:

"It's having to fight this uphill battle against—if I am allowed to call them that—'naughty kids'. They get involved in so much low level misbehaviour. And rudeness and the language…Quite often the parents don't support you. You are battling against it, because parents don't believe their child can be naughty. It's like that in every class and it's got more common. I think a lot of staff feel that the kids are untouchable."

The proportion of schools where behaviour is unsatisfactory is now one in 12. I do not agree with what the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) said. I feel that he underplayed the seriousness of one in 12 schools having that problem, although as any parent knows, in some ways it is irrelevant how many or how few schools have a problem: if one's children have to share a lesson with one or two disruptive kids, that lesson can be utterly destroyed. The fact that one in 12 schools have a problem is not relevant to parents who have children in that class.

Expulsion of the troublemakers has been made increasingly difficult in recent years by the Government, who have been proudly stating that they have reduced exclusions to low levels. To my mind, and to that of many people in this country, the policy has been a disaster, so I am relieved that the Government are now going to change it. It has not been mentioned in our debate, but the Government issued a consultation paper on exclusion policy—the deadline for replies was 19 April. The Government have not yet commented on the consultation's findings, so it would be helpful if the Minister could do so.

However, there is still a catch, because exclusion will have financial implications for the school concerned. In fact, it can cost the school between £3,000 and £6,000 in lost budget per excluded pupil, which seems most unfair. If the Government are moving towards accepting further exclusions, they must address the issue of funding. Why should the school have to suffer? If anyone is going to suffer, it should be the pupil and his family, rather than the school. If it is now acceptable for a mother to be sent to prison for her children's truancy, why should parents not pay the price for disruption to the education of 30 other children? That would instil a more direct lesson about parents taking responsibility for their children. It would also be more relevant than the Prime Minister's gimmicky suggestion of withholding child benefit.

I would not argue that the Government have been ignoring problematic behaviour in schools. The Minister made an eloquent speech and explained a number of Government policies. At the same time, however, we must realise that, to date, Government solutions have made the problem worse. There is more disruption and youth crime, and more teachers are leaving schools. I heard what the Minister said, but I hope that everyone agrees that we still have an awful long way to go. In fairness, however, I commend the Government policy of getting schools to build links with local police forces to tackle bad behaviour and truancy in schools. Schools in Huntingdonshire have been following that policy for some years, and have been extremely successful in building bridges with the community and making young people understand their relationship with the police. The Government's handling of bad behaviour in schools has been deficient, and it is vital that we all work together to get that right for the future of our communities.

I shall end with a couple of suggestions, and would be grateful for the Minister's views. First, we should recognise that many children are not suited to, or interested in, academic study. We have become much too academic-centred, particularly in the national curriculum, as other hon. Members have mentioned. We need to look at vocational options, which are much more likely to win the attention of children with behavioural problems and reduce those problems.

Secondly, we should realise that some parents are incapable, for whatever reason, of giving adequate guidance to their children. They need, or could benefit from, the help of a mentor. In the same way, children will often get great benefit from having a role model, especially if they are not surrounded by role models. I believe, therefore, that there is room for child mentoring.

As chairman of a social services committee on a council, I became aware of a pervasive view that teachers, social workers and probation officers are the only people qualified to deal with the problems of parents or children, but I have seen at first hand in New York the superb success of a scheme whereby unambitious and poorly educated children benefit from the advice and the relationship involved in a long-term mentoring scheme.

The nearest equivalent that I have seen in the United Kingdom is the Prince's Trust, where the addition of a role model or the input of friendly business or tactical advice from an experienced mentor can make the world of difference to a young person's chances of succeeding and moving forward in the community. I should very much like to see such a scheme put in place for children, especially in our inner cities.

I concur with the comments of many other hon. Members in the Chamber today about the extraordinary degree of skill, ability and dedication that we cherish and respect in the teaching profession in this country. If there is one lesson that we have learned, which is appropriate in a debate on education, it is that many parents seem to wish to abdicate responsibility for their children's upbringing and put that responsibility on the shoulders of teachers, support staff and the entire school community. I have been massively impressed, both today and in my day-to-day experience, by the extraordinary skills of our teachers. None of us should miss any opportunity to make that point.

At 8.30 this morning, I was speaking to Peter La Farge, the head teacher of Greenwood school in my constituency, about a fairly serious matter—the replacement of hutted accommodation. He broke off from the conversation to identify two pupils in the playground who he was convinced were about to start a fight. It is that quality of anticipation and sheer skill in teachers to which we must pay credit.

As many other hon. Members have done, I pay credit to the assured, skilled and deeply caring and committed introduction to the debate by my hon. Friend the Minister. I do not share his happy childhood memories of education. I was the original schoolboy with

"shining morning face, creeping like snail

"Unwillingly to school",

though had I faced the prospect of the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) as a supply teacher, I might have revised my opinion.

However, I left school at the age of 15 and a half, by mutual agreement with the head teacher, and was fortunate, as one could do in those days, to go straight into the Royal Navy, where I learned to kill people with expediency, which stood me in no little good stead when I came to apply for a job later. I was told that as that was my only qualification, I should try the national health service. In fact, I spent 10 years working as a hospital porter.

The point—which relates to the comment by the hon. Member for Lichfield about sanctions—is that, like many schoolboys and, sadly, even some schoolgirls of my generation, I was beaten continuously and thrashed remorselessly on a daily basis. I will not state, as many people do, that it did me no harm. It did me a great deal of harm. I had absolutely no interest whatever in education. I was out the door at the earliest opportunity, without a GCSE, O-level, A-level or any qualification to my name. Fortunately, I found sanctuary in the structured and disciplined violence of boxing and London Labour politics, and was able to make something of a career for myself. I do not think that looking back to some black-and-white past of cane-wielding teachers, even should they now repose in Lichfield, is the way that we should aim to approach the debate today.

I felt sorry for the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) with his cri de coeur that he was ever the bridesmaid and never the blushing bride, and the House has sympathy with him for that. However, he did refer to drugs, which in many ways illustrate one of the horrors of the reality of education and, in particular, parental involvement.

Some of the worst cases of drug involvement in schools that I have been aware of have been where boys have sold cannabis which they obtained from their father, who grows it, smokes it and allows it in the home and in no way condemns it, and even gives his son that drug to sell. That is an actual case.

Two years ago I was at a school asking year 6 pupils what they most wanted in life and one child said that what she most wanted was for her mother's boyfriend to stop injecting himself in the kitchen because he sprayed blood all over the tiles.

I could give many other horrific examples, but I shall give only one more. At a show-and-tell in an adjoining borough to mine, a primary school child brought in the most valued object in the house, which was a small glass cocaine container that her mother obviously cherished and valued. That is the reality.

We saw from last year's Ofsted report that 80 per cent. of children found truanting were accompanied by an adult. Adults have real responsibilities in this regard and we cannot, as a House, as individuals, as parents, simply stand back and expect teachers to take up that slack and carry that load. Parents must become more involved. How right my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) was to pay credit to sure start, the lesson of which is precisely that everyone must be involved in a child's education. If it takes a village to educate a child, it takes a family to nurture and support that child. Everyone must be involved.

The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) rightly drew attention to the decline in the number of exclusions, which he said peaked at 13.000. About 12,700 pupils were excluded in 1996–97 and there has been a 28 per cent. reduction in that figure. That points towards the core of this debate, which is the need to achieve a balance between the needs of the excluded and allowing teachers to teach, pupils to learn, schools to operate as schools and classrooms to be the places where children can grow and learn and expand their horizons and become better people.

As has rightly been said, one may be excluded from school but one is not excluded from society. Simply taking the children from the school may solve the problem in that place, at that hour, on that day, but it displaces the problem to society at large. We must address that in the round. If the curse of modern politics is the constant reference to things being joined up, let us live with that, because we must see things in the totality, in their global perspective, and work with that.

Many hon. Members wish to speak, so I shall briefly refer to experience in the London borough of Ealing where we faced precisely that problem. When I was elected, all the high schools bar one were grant-maintained and the pupils that they excluded all ended up in the one non-grant-maintained high school, which, inevitably, despite the best efforts of the teachers, support staff and governors, became perceived as a sink school. It is now being relaunched as a city academy. It simply is not enough to move the problem on.

In Ealing, we have worked with the Government on sure start throughout. I pay credit to assistant director Howard Shephardson and our inspirational director of education, Dr. Caroline Whalley, and particularly to Councillor Leo Thompson, the council cabinet member with responsibility for this area. We had a high level of permanent exclusions, but we now have a joint LEA-school panel, known as a placement panel, which meets regularly for referral purposes, to discuss policy issues involving partnerships.

I give credit to the excellence in cities partnership forum, which allows us to develop a behaviour and social inclusion strategy for secondary-aged pupils in Ealing. That allows us to share out pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties so that no one school is over-burdened. That is completely different from the beggar-my-neighbour, devil-take-the-hindmost policy that sadly existed among some proponents of grant-maintained schools. Support systems for any child who is being reintegrated are agreed through the panel members working together.

The primary sector in Ealing has undergone an extensive review, resulting in a decision to close the primary EBD or educational and behavioural difficulties school and develop more flexible and inclusive provision. We have replaced the school with a centre that has a multi-agency approach providing educational programmes and therapeutic support. The primary behaviour team works from the centre to support schools in behaviour management and reintegration of pupils who have had a placement at the centre. In other words, it addresses the needs of the pupil while recognising the importance of the school being allowed to teach and the pupils being allowed to learn.

The number of permanent exclusions has been massively reduced. The preventive role of the PRUs, or pupil referral units, has been mentioned. In Ealing, we have developed over the past few years an "at risk" model for early identification—an issue that was picked up earlier. We have done so because we owe it to our children and young people, who are the citizens of tomorrow—the child is the father or mother of the adult—to give them that early identification. I would recommend the "at risk" model to anyone.

In Ealing, we are currently working with a range of agencies on developing the multi-agency provision and support plan that sets out the contribution that each of the support agencies will make. The process is defined and delineated from stage one, and provides for 25 hours of education for permanently excluded pupils. That is slightly below the Government's target, which is, I think, 27 hours, but I assure the Minister that we are getting there. The provision is intended to extend to at risk and vulnerable pupils.

I should like to refer also to the children and young people's strategic partnership, which is overseeing the children's fund development. That is beginning to contribute significantly. An early intervention co-ordinator and panel, mentoring and summer schemes are all designed to target intervention to prevent children from becoming involved in youth crime. Through the excellence in cities programme and PRG—pupil retention grant—funding, Ealing high schools have become self-sufficient in meeting the needs of students with a range of difficulties. We now have specialist counsellors, learning mentors, therapists and business mentor schemes—precisely the theories that we have talked and heard about today. We are now seeing those concepts being delivered in practice in my borough, in the place where my children go to school. The improvements are now working, and the local education authority team aims through regular consultation with schools to complement those schemes and assist them where they require additional help and where an objective outside agency input is required.

Intervention and support for children with mental health and therapeutic needs have also been referred to. They are a major focus area for primary and secondary behaviour support and provision development. In Ealing, we currently have a partnership project between the child and adolescent mental health service—the CAMHS—and the study centre of the PRU to develop a bridge for parents and pupils in accessing mental health services. A therapeutic inclusion project is planned to link the PRU with an Ealing high school that currently has good practice in support and intervention for its pupils. We also co-ordinate training and support across the borough.

In addition to the core support services provided by the LEA, there is a range of other ongoing and developing initiatives to support primary and secondary pupils in improving the management of pupil behaviour to support vulnerable groups. Those initiatives include the looked-after children education/social services team, a multidisciplinary team that we are continuing this year and which again brings together all the experts in the field, the "at risk" preventive programme and the PRU curriculum, which has developed substantially in the past two years and which incorporates the explorer programme, about which we may hear more.

The Ealing parent partnership mentoring programme for pupils in years 3, 4, 5 and 6 provides the assistance and support for which hon. Members have called. Such a mentoring service exists in Ealing, thanks to a Government initiative, my hon. Friend the Minister's pathfinding work and the local education authority's active response. Ealing parent partnership and the primary and secondary behaviour teams are currently working with feeder primary and secondary schools. Thirty year 6 children, who were identified as vulnerable, are taking part in a transition skills programme. They will be supported until they reach year 7.

We have a new joint social services and education post through the standards fund. We are grateful for that. A social worker who supports the work of the primary and secondary behaviour teams will therefore be placed in the social services teams and provide a direct link between education and social services.

Connexions was mentioned earlier. It is the finest example of mentoring for secondary school pupils. It provides a role model and support as well as the parameters and boundaries that young people need. We are delighted to be one of the first education authorities to work with Connexions.

We obviously support a continuation and extension of the excellence in cities initiatives, for example, the excellence challenge for post-16 students and further funding for standards fund initiatives.

The hon. Gentleman cites a catalogue of great achievements that, he claims, the Government have facilitated for his constituents. Does he agree that many initiatives depend on the money that has been made available? Should not the same funding be made available for other local authorities, especially in the south-west, that receive a much lower standard spending assessment?

I am not convinced that an election address by me to the voters of Ealing, North calling for additional funding for the south-west of England would garner me many votes. I was trying to make the point that we are considering not money, but one of the biggest societal factors that affect us today. We are examining the way in which tomorrow's leaders, workers and society are shaped and formed today. That does not depend simply on giving more money; that is meaningless. Money without commitment or an overarching policy has no value.

I do not apologise for listing the wonderful achievements in the London borough of Ealing in partnership with central Government. I am proud of that list because my kids go to schools in my constituency and benefit from it. I promise the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) that any left-over money that we do not need will head in his direction post haste.

We are witnessing a pivotal moment, not only in my borough and my city, but in our country. Education is being perceived as part of the growth of society and the future of our country. It is not enough to concentrate on those who do well and do not cause problems and are not "creeping unwillingly to school." We must consider the whole picture and realise that education will not be a good system for anyone unless it is good for everyone.

I do not underestimate the extent of the problems that disruptive behaviour causes in schools. The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West gave examples of horror stories, and I could match them. That applies to all hon. Members. We know how much teachers put up with. However, that is only part of the story. We are trying to value those who have been considered valueless in the past. The people who cause the problems are the hardest to work with. They will not go away and we must either work with them now or face the consequences of our neglect later, when they cause even more serious problems. I am therefore delighted to participate in the debate.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough has popped out, probably to issue a press release. I sympathised greatly with his point about the ever-expanding horizon of hurdles over which secondary school pupils must leap. That issue was particularly brought home to me last week when my daughter told me that she had just got her third level 7. I was delighted until she told me that I had to pay her £25 for each of them, as I had rashly promised. So, it is not just the pupils who suffer in these cases; parents feel the pain, too.

I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for his earlier comments, and I look forward to his winding-up speech, as do we all. I would like to say, with him, that this is an issue that cannot be ignored. It must receive the attention and the resources that it deserves. I shall close as I started, by saying: let us pause for a moment and give thanks to those who teach our children and shape our future citizens.

And that, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is a lovely thought. I would like to join the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound) in expressing it, because teachers work very hard, not only in their jobs but for the maintenance of the education of their children. It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Gentleman. Although he said he agreed with the mutual arrangement between him and his headmaster that he should leave school when he was 15 and a half, the eloquence of his speech demonstrated that there is not only a university of life but a school of life. Clearly the Royal Navy taught him not only how to kill ruthlessly—and perhaps to do so metaphorically in the Chamber—but how to be articulate. It obviously gave him a vocabulary that is most appropriate in the Chamber—not the sort that I would have thought one would learn in the Royal Navy.

While we are in the mood to offer congratulations across the Chamber, I would also like to congratulate the Minister on his debut speech in his new post. His comments were thoughtful and interesting, and he mentioned a particular subject to which I shall return later. He spoke about his mother, and his background. My own mother was born in Aberavon and had to leave school when she was 14. As I am speaking from the Conservative Benches, I had better say that I went to an ordinary state school, just in case anyone thinks that I went to Eton or one of those other schools mentioned earlier which have a problem with cannabis. I certainly do not think that Eton is exclusive in that respect.

I also mention—not really to boast, but to give some justification for my taking part in this debate—that I taught for a year before going up to university, and also undertook some tutoring of masters degree students learning statistics when I was doing my doctoral studies. I think it was the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall) who said that he had been a teacher for 34 years. Oh, no—that was the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis). I think the hon. Member for West Lancashire had been a teacher for 20 or 25 years—more than a decade, anyway, and certainly more than a year. Anyway, I certainly do not claim to he an expert in this subject. Nevertheless, like everybody else, I went to school, so I know the experiences that I went through there. I would, therefore, like to speak of my own experiences both as a teacher—in my own small way—and in school itself.

The Minister talked about the carrot and stick approach—although that is not the main issue of his that I wanted to discuss—to behaviour and discipline in schools. I want to return to the issue of sanctions, because it is a real problem. This is not a party political matter; the same problem has faced Conservative Governments in the past. We can talk about a carrot and stick approach, but the fact is that there is no stick at the moment. Although I am not advocating bringing back corporal punishment, I am not totally sure that that is such an outrageous idea—I shall say why in a moment—and it is certainly one that we need to think about.

I rather fear that we have reached the stage in schools at which we have not only parents who are barrack-room lawyers, but pupils who are, too. Some of those pupils really do get away, if not with murder, with disrupting the whole class, to the detriment not only of the teachers but of the other pupils in the class That is wrong and unfair.

I do not know whether I am going to regret saying this, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I will tell you that when I first became a teacher—when I had finished my A-levels and wanted a year's gap before going up to university—I taught first and second-years in a high school. My head of department gave me two pieces of advice for maintaining behaviour and discipline in my class. The first was that to capture the interest of the class and maintain discipline, one must provide 20 per cent. education and 80 per cent. entertainment. Members should remember that when they speak in the Chamber. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ealing, North, who is traversing the Chamber as I speak, because he is able to combine entertainment with educating the House. That is important, because if one gives boring speeches or boring addresses in class, one will not retain the listener's interest.

The second piece of advice is a little more controversial, and it brings us back to the carrot and stick. My head of department at the state school at which I taught gave me a strap and told me that I was to use it if I had any problems. I very rarely had to use discipline, and I hope that my pupils enjoyed the year when I taught them. I certainly did. However, I used the strap two or three times, but I never, ever forced it on the pupil. I used to tell pupils at that boys' school, "Look, either do 100 lines or take the strap. It's up to you." Invariably, the pupil would rather have the strap—thwack, it was over and done with.

A little sanction is called for, but let me set the record straight: I am not advocating the return of corporal punishment. I am saying that it is interesting that when pupils were given the choice between 100 lines or the strap, they chose the strap, which took half a second to administer, stung for perhaps 10 seconds more and perhaps involved an element of humiliation. They would rather have that than go home and do 100 lines.

I say to the Minister that there must be some form of sanction, because teachers in some schools are finding it difficult to maintain discipline. We must be aware that pupils and their parents are barrack-room lawyers and that sometimes discipline breaks down, for all the reasons that have been outlined. We must address those problems.

I was not getting at the Minister or the Government when I mentioned the tyranny of political correctness earlier. However, just as we should not allow political correctness to get in the way of addressing the problems of racial groups in society, likewise we should not allow it to get in the way of discussions on bringing back some sanctions for teachers. Teachers in Lichfield and in Burntwood in my constituency tell me that they have no way of controlling their classes when things start to break down seriously.

I am pleased that the Minister mentioned bullying, because it is a serious problem. Because this is the first time that it has ever been addressed in the House, I am especially pleased that the Minister raised the issue of homophobic bullying. Can you imagine, Mr. Deputy Speaker, being a young man or, indeed, a young woman growing up without understanding things about themselves and being bullied for being different? They may then try not to be different and deceive themselves.

I congratulate the Minister and the Government on undertaking research and providing guidelines on that important issue. Perhaps he will send me a copy of the guidelines when they are printed. I suspect that most teachers are not aware that homophobic bullying is even an issue, although I may be wrong and that may be unfair. However, the fact that the Government have highlighted it today will make teachers and head teachers aware that it can be a problem in our schools.

The Minister also spoke about the problems of exclusion, and it is useful that we have all agreed that, once a pupil is excluded, he enters society, from which he cannot be excluded. How will that be dealt with?

The Minister talked about the 6 per cent. of those who have been excluded who have been identified as having clinical problems, and the 4 per cent. with serious emotional problems. That demonstrates that we cannot look at behaviour in isolation. We must be able to diagnose the causes, just as a GP does. Hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough and my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) said that we cannot look at problems of indiscipline in isolation. Often there are real causes and we must be tough on them, as well as on the crime itself.

Money is also a factor. The hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) is not alone in belonging to an area where people feel that funding has been unfair. The Government said in 1997 that they would look at this problem, and they have kept their promise. However, we have a real problem in Staffordshire because the four recommendations that have been made all make Staffordshire worse off than before, and that needs to be addressed.

I want to make a few recommendations to the Minister and I would appreciate him giving them some thought. Acoustics in a classroom are important. When I taught in a laboratory, which had a wooden floor and wooden benches, discipline went a bit. The reason was that people at the back could not hear me properly, and the louder I spoke, the more it echoed. Some schools are investing in carpets and other acoustical devices to ensure that there is not too much echo and that not too much noise comes in from outside the classroom. Has any research been done on whether there is a correlation between indiscipline and classroom acoustics? When children cannot hear what the teacher has to say, it can lead to indiscipline.

Another issue is the continuity of teachers. The hon. Member for Ealing, North said that I was a supply teacher. I was not; I was at the school for a year. I like to think that I gave a little continuity to the class. Whether they enjoyed that is another matter. No doubt some of my former pupils will write to me if they hear about this debate; I dread to think what they might have to say. However, continuity is important. The general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, John Dunford, said:

"The huge expansion in the market for supply teachers in the last three years has sent the market out of control. The Department for Education and Skills should put in place a Licensing system for supply agencies, with a Code of Practice and clear sanctions if the agencies fall below accepted standards."

That is important, but even more important would be not to need supply teachers.

If only.

I know how the Minister feels. It is important to have continuity within a school.

The subject of grammar was raised earlier. A previous occupant of the Chair cut me off in mid-stream, Mr. Deputy Speaker, so I did not say what I wanted to say. I can well understand why certain pupils would not want to learn how to parse a sentence or understand the structures of the English language. I found grammar immensely boring when I was taught it at school. I only became interested in it when I learned German. I make a little cri de coeur—which is French—a Schrei des Herzes: if only there were enough German teachers, it would be a good idea for German, instead of French, to be the first foreign language taught in schools, because it helps people to understand English grammar better.

What about Latin?

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but that is impractical in this modern day and age. [Interruption.] If he disagrees with me, I can accept that.

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but we need silence at the back of the classroom.

Thank you for your protection headmaster—I mean, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

This has been a good, thoughtful debate. I do not think that anyone has made party political points, which is good. Everyone has spoken about what would benefit pupils and teachers. I look forward to hearing the Minister's reply.

It is always interesting to follow the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant). I am sure that all of us would agree that he managed to achieve his 80 per cent. entertainment quotient. We are all still pondering the image of a sea of hands of those in his class who wanted voluntarily to receive the strap. No doubt the lines that he was going to give them would have been even more devastating for them.

I pay tribute to the Minister for his opening remarks. His speech was wide ranging, and gave us plenty to work on. I also pay tribute to him for being the Member of Parliament for the Enfield, Southgate constituency, where I went to school. The school has since closed, but I promise not to blame him for that if he does not blame me.

The hon. Member for Lichfield referred to the need for resources to deal with problems in some parts of the country from which complaints have been received. I do not want to shatter his illusion that no party political points have been made in the debate, so I shall not ask how he expects more resources to go into education, given that the Conservative party said only a few days ago that it refuses to match the spending plans that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce on Monday. We expect him to give significant extra resources to education.

In one sense, it is right that the debate is not about resources. We know that more resources will go into education, and we desperately need that investment, but without the changes that are necessary to deal with disruptive behaviour, we will not get the high standards of education that our young people deserve. We know that the stakes are high. Disruptive pupils can seriously damage the education of other children by disrupting the programme of teaching, undermining staff morale, absorbing a disproportionate amount of staff energy and resources, and undermining other students' enthusiasm to learn.

If disruptive students are out of school, because of exclusion or truancy, the community pays a heavy price. We have seen that in today's figures on street crime. We must find a way of dealing with disruptive behaviour without excluding children from school, and thus from the hope of an education that will give them a future.

A factor that has not featured in the debate is the effect of children's employment. I raised that issue in a private Member's Bill in 1998. I was concerned about the evidence from a number of sources, which showed that about 40 per cent. of school-age children have some form of employment. Some of it is regulated, but three quarters is illegal because of its nature or the hours that the children work. The evidence was that unregulated and illegal child employment had a significant impact on children's education, partly because of the time they spent out of school and partly because when they were in school they were often tired and could be disruptive as a result. I urge the Minister to establish, along with his colleagues in the Department of Health—which for reasons I cannot understand is responsible for that area of policy—whether regulations can be introduced to update the law established by the Children and Young Persons Act 1933.

I have talked to teachers in my constituency, as, no doubt, have other Members. They have made it clear to me that disruptive behaviour is increasing. Yesterday It received a letter from one of the most respected head teachers in Kent and, probably, the country. Mr. Simon Harrison is the head of Ifield special school in Gravesham, a beacon school described by the Office for Standards in Education as

"outstanding with some excellent features",

and the recipient of an award from Sport England. He has been a head teacher in Kent for 16 years, and has worked in special education and with pupils exhibiting difficult and challenging behaviour for 29. He is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and successful head teachers.

Mr. Harrison wrote:

"Children in general have become much more difficult to deal with in the last few years and are less responsive to the range of creative strategies we employ to correct their behaviour. It is more difficult to engage parents in the partnership required to help students exercise greater self-control. The reasons are complex and really related to us living in a more selfish society where 'I' is a much more important word than 'you', and treating other people as you would like to be treated yourself has become a rather quaint notion within a culture of get what you can."

Mr. Harrison also pointed out that many children voluntarily give service to their communities—they do so very willingly, in fact—and that the problem must be kept in perspective. It is a growing problem and a serious problem for many schools, but we should not use it to demonise all children and young people.

One problem mentioned by Mr. Harrison, and by Members today, is that teachers may have too few sanctions at their disposal. I am not sure whether Mr. Harrison or I would be in favour of some of the proposals advanced by the hon. Member for Lichfield, but exclusion is often seen as the only possible sanction. Most schools see it as the ultimate deterrent, but one that fails.

In fact, it is often not a deterrent. Some children actively seek it, which causes a real problem.

Just for the record, I did not advocate any form of capital punishment—

Capital?

I mean corporal punishment. I merely suggested that the issue should at least be looked at.

I take the point, and I know that the hon. Gentleman did not advocate either capital or corporal punishment in schools. I also accept that many children would be happy to be on the streets rather than at school, because they themselves have given up. I think that the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knareshorough (Mr. Willis) observed that disruptive children often have a bad self-image and low self-esteem, and are keen to get out of school for that reason. We must, however, establish a range of constructive measures, short of exclusion, to deal with this serious problem.

I welcome the initiatives announced by my hon. Friend the Minister and the Secretary of State—including the £66 million package announced in April, which is intended to deal with truancy and other bad behaviour and will include the introduction of new or expanded learning support units, as well as pupil referral units.

Westcourt primary school in Gravesend has tried hard to deal with the problem of disruptive and difficult children, and has managed to do so quite successfully. It has made considerable progress in recent years, lifting itself out of "special measures" status, but it faces the continuing challenge of disruptive pupils. It decided that it was worth investing its own resources to set up an internal learning support unit. It cost the school £45,000 a year, but the impact was significant, not only for the 10 or 11 children who were in the unit—about 8 per cent. of the children in the school—but for the rest of the children, who were able to learn in a much more conducive atmosphere.

The unit was set up by the head teacher, Mrs. Jean Everest, in April 2000 but, sadly, it had to close in April 2002 because the school could not continue to find the resources internally. As soon as the unit closed, three of its 10 children were excluded, three went into part-time education because no full-time alternative was available and the others were transferred. Therefore, the cost of closing the unit was probably far higher than the £45,000 that it cost to keep it open.

I lobbied Kent county council's education authority to see whether it would help with the cost of the unit. It wrote to me and said that

"the LEA is currently engaged in a review of provision for pupils with behavioural difficulties in the County. As part of that process, some consideration is being given to the possibility of establishing a primary Learning Support Unit which could support a number of schools in the locality, including Westcourt. Discussion was taking place about whether this unit could be on the Westcourt site."

If those discussions develop, that will be significant and important. Most of the units are focused on the secondary sector, but most of the problems of disruptive behaviour begin in the eight to 11 age group. We need to find a way of dealing with the problems where they begin, rather than trying to address them after they have been established in the secondary sector. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to see whether we cannot do more for primary schools in dealing with such matters.

In Kent, as in much of the south-east, there are real difficulties with teacher recruitment. We must ensure that the boroughs that border the London ring can still compete with salaries in London boroughs and that—it is perhaps of equal importance—we can deal with the problem of disruptive pupils, which discourages people from staying in education.

I share with the House another initiative that has been developed by Ifield school—the SMILE centre; I prefer that title to its full title, which is supporting multiprofessional inclusive education. It does some important work. Ifield school set up the unit, which is a resource available to all schools in the borough of Gravesham and beyond. It is a multidisciplinary, multi-agency approach to help to deal with children with special needs and with difficult and disruptive behaviour.

One concept that I would like the Minister to take away from the debate is that of the smiley boxes—literally, boxes containing resource materials that can be used by parents and teachers on a range of issues, whether it be asylum seekers, conditions such as autism and difficulties with literacy, numeracy and thinking skills. The initiative acts as a way of improving the ability of all schools to deal with those issues.

We are in the middle of autism awareness year. We need to think carefully about the role of special needs in this issue. Often, children with special needs can be perceived to be difficult and disruptive, partly because of the way in which they operate in a school, but partly because of the reaction of other children to them.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on mentioning autism. Will he also bring to the attention of the House a subsection of autism, Asperger's syndrome, which is far more difficult to diagnose, is not autism as one would normally understand it, results in behavioural problems that can result in the very issues that we are discussing today and needs the attention of teachers and others so that they are able to diagnose and deal with it?

Like other types of autism, Asperger's syndrome can produce social and communications problems for children that can be perceived as difficulties. We need to make sure that teachers and schools can properly identify when that is the problem, as such cases cannot be addressed by disciplinary measures, and certainly not by exclusion, although we know from evidence that that often happens.

Finally, let me underline a point that was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound). We cannot expect teachers to carry the burden of dealing with these problems on their own. We appreciate the work that teachers do and the skills that they use, but very often those skills are undermined because parents are not fully engaged in the process. We need to take tough measures against abusive and aggressive parents. We need to use measures such as parenting orders, and in extreme cases where parents are colluding in truancy to take the toughest possible measures. However, we also need constructively to engage parents. We must create an atmosphere that allows parents and young people to feel that they can engage with the schools and their staff. If we treat young people as though they were casual observers, we will not tackle the problem of disruptive behaviour.

In common with many schools around the country, Painters Ash primary school in Northfleet in my constituency has a school council. Not only does it help to establish the boundaries of acceptable behaviour but the children themselves devise the sanctions to be imposed. They have not yet come up with anything equivalent to that mentioned by the hon. Member for Lichfield; the sanctions are low level but very effective as they are devised by the peer group.

Moving to a slightly higher age group, I pay tribute to Gravesham Youth Forum, which is helping to deal with problems involving youth disorder, crime and disruptive behaviour in schools. It has signed an agreement with the local police, the local education authorities and the local borough council to work to meet the challenges and the opportunities that lie ahead. I was very pleased that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister showed how important he considered that initiative to be by inviting Gravesham Youth Forum to No. 10 Downing street a few days ago to mark the signing of that agreement.

If we can find constructive ways forward involving young people, parents and schools, we can crack the problem. We must not get it out of perspective and assume that all young people and children will be disruptive and difficult, but we must give those who are not disruptive the chance of getting the highest standard of education by dealing with the few who are.

I am pleased to take part in this debate, albeit very briefly. The subject, certainly in its wider terms, is very important. As the Minister said in his impressive maiden speech from the Dispatch Box in an education debate, the value of education cannot be overestimated or overstated. I should like to explore what that means.

I have the distinction, which is not unique among Conservative Members, of having attended a secondary modern school when I was 11, although I did go on to grammar school for the sixth form. That secondary modern provided me with a good basic education and a lot more. I will never forget what the headmaster used to say every day in assembly. School assembly is still a legal requirement although some schools do not fulfil their legal duties in that respect. He used to remind us that the school was a family, and that sentiment will remain with me to my dying day as it was important. Not only did we learn about history, English and French, but about behaviour, morals and ethics—words that we do not use enough these days. I like to think that that fostered good behaviour within the school because pupils went to learn not only about history and geography, but about how to behave. I do not claim that no one who went to that school went wrong—human nature is such that some did—but it was an important aspect of running the school. However, that was a long time ago.

I was looking through some old papers a few years ago and found a report from my wife's school. My wife enjoys slight superiority to me, and we noticed that in her class she was one of 47 pupils. We now have a rule that classes of a certain age cannot have more than 30 pupils, but it was acceptable then. It was probably easier for the teacher to control the class of 46 or 47 pupils than it is to control a class of 30 now, so something has changed.

One change is that, in those days, pupils were far better behaved, which enabled teachers to control the class with no great difficulty. Those teachers did not have the same burden of paperwork as present-day teachers, and the pupils formed part of a more cohesive family unit. I am pleased to see the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall) back in his place because he made a very useful contribution to the debate. He spoke about special needs, with which I shall deal in a moment, but also about the make-up of families. Although he was not critical of the modern family, he pointed out that new challenges were presented by the fact that families are not what they used to be. The wider family no longer exists in the same way.

When I visit schools—I have regular meetings with head teachers and meet about a dozen every three months—an issue that comes across strongly is that teachers now feel like social workers. The Minister and the whole House will be aware of that. Teachers feel that they are not getting the support to which they are entitled from many families. Teachers are not social workers and should not be expected to fulfil the role of parents. We should not be afraid of saying that.

Teachers are also concerned about their inability to expel—or "exclude", or whatever the modern word is—pupils from school and there is some confusion as to whether they can or should expel and what happens to the expelled pupil thereafter. I am mature enough to realise that the story does not end with expelling a pupil; indeed, that is only the beginning. What does that pupil go on to do? The heads to whom I speak claim, with great justification, that they must have the ability to remove a pupil from school not only to punish the pupil, although that should be part of it, but to protect the education of the other 29 pupils in the class. Another problem is that pupils are aware of their rights. How often do we hear the word "rights" without its being linked to responsibilities? Pupils are aware of their rights and they play on that. Teachers have a heck of a job trying to control classes.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) said that, according to the reports that he has seen, only one school in 12 has problems. That, however, is an awful lot of schools. It is a frightening figure, so let us not try to play it down. I come from an area that used to have very high unemployment, which I regret, with one in 10 or 11 out of work. Labour Members used to say that that was a shameful figure. The figure of one in 12 schools is also shameful. I do not entirely blame the present Government, but let us not pretend that there is not a serious problem; there certainly is.

I accept that parents must play their role, but I draw the House's attention to one or two other role models who have not quite played the game as they should have done. I have deliberately used the phrase "played the game" because I refer to footballers, pop stars and even Members of Parliament. Few people are impressed by the yah-boo politics that we sometimes have in the House and they wonder why they send us here. I am all for the dramatic speeches that we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) and the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound), and the House would be a much poorer place without such speeches. There was a good deal of common sense and sound politics in what they said. The House will understand when I say that perhaps we, too, should take seriously our duty as role models.

I do not want to be party political, but I have to be somewhat critical of the Government as I deeply regret what they have done concerning cannabis this week. The House is not only about passing laws but about the signals that we send, and reducing the classification has sent a most unfortunate signal to young people. Cannabis is not the same as alcohol or tobacco. The taking of drugs leads to disrupted and mined lives, and to criminal activity to finance the habit. That has a terribly destructive effect on schools.

On the subject of crime, I return to the value of education. This really is a piecemeal speech, and I am trying to get through it as quickly as I can. I understand that 90-odd per cent. of people in prison have some form of mental illness, be it severe or mild, and I think that between 50 and 60 per cent. have virtually no education and are either illiterate or semi-literate. We should be ashamed of that in this day and age, when we spend billions of pounds on education. Too many people come out of school without being able to read and write. That is not an excuse for committing crime, but it is a fact that many of those people do it. We must accept that that is a failure in our society.

I have raised this point with the Minister several times, and I will continue to do so until I get a satisfactory response. I admired the Secretary of State when she gave her verdict on the comprehensive system. I was a victim of the 11-plus—I failed it—but I also stood out against the introduction of the comprehensive system, because I thought it was wrong. She did not condemn all comprehensive schools, and neither will I. My daughter went to a very good comprehensive school—Bournside, in Cheltenham—having left a very poor public school. The Secretary of State made a good point when she said that the system is not delivering what was intended.

If the Government are being brave and enlightened enough to take that line and accept that comprehensive schooling may not be the answer to all society's ills, what is the logic of their programme of the inclusion of children with special educational needs in mainstream schools? Many such children are included entirely appropriately, but a great many others need special schools for their own sake. It may be convenient to call it inclusion, but if they come out of the school without the proper education that they need, they are excluded from society for the rest of their lives.

I urge Ministers to talk to teachers, heads, parents, governors and, indeed, the children about whether their special schools should be closed. The Government have said that their inclusion policy is not a green light to close special schools. I am sure that everyone is sick of hearing me say it, but the fact is that in Gloucestershire, which is not controlled by the Conservative party, there is a deliberate programme of closure of the special schools. It is a wrong policy. Pupils have come to me in tears because they feel that they are losing not only their school but their best chance of an appropriate education.

The word "appropriate" is the key. I had an appropriate education. It was not a university education—before the sixth form, it was not even a grammar school education—but it was the appropriate education for me. I urge the Minister to look into what is happening in Gloucestershire and tell the Liberal Democrat and Labour groups which control the county council that it is not the Government's intention that special schools should be closed. I urge the Minister, for goodness sake, to go to Gloucestershire and tell the council that it should not be closing those schools.

With the leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should like to make a brief response.

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson), particularly given his compelling point about the continuation of special schools and their ability to provide education appropriate to children with special needs. We have had a good debate, even though it was interrupted by a statement on a completely different subject. However, because of that, we had almost two debates and have had some useful exchanges. Members who read the record of proceedings this morning will see that there is quite a lot of agreement between Members on both sides of the House about the scale of the problem, its importance and, surprisingly, more agreement than expected about the steps needed to tackle it. There is no doubt that those steps must cover the services for pupils with difficulties who need support before serious problems arise, and improvements in the services for children who have been excluded.

There was also substantial agreement about the need to trust teachers and heads to introduce policies in our schools that will create a learning environment with proper discipline in which behaviour can be improved. I know that the House will want to hear the Minister's response, so I ask Members to forgive me for not referring to their remarks in detail. I should like to apologise to the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall) for missing his contribution, although I have been given notes, and I believe that he said some important and appropriate things.

The fundamental lesson to be drawn from our debate is that teachers and heads must be supported in their mission to raise behaviour standards in our schools. There must be clear, robust guidance for schools and appeal panels, and there must be genuine trust in the professionals, who have the interests of our children at heart. I hope that the Minister will send a clear message—this point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury—that drug abuse and violence in schools will not be tolerated. I repeat my invitation to the Minister to issue tough guidance on that, and make it clear that heads will be supported in implementing the policy of maintaining and improving behaviour and discipline in schools.

With the leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker. We have had an excellent and wide-ranging debate, albeit interrupted. I shall do my best to do justice to the various points made by hon. Members.

First, may I clarify an important question asked by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis)? It slipped my mind earlier, but a subordinate clause is a clause that functions as a noun, adjective or adverb in a complex sentence and is dependent on the main clause.

We knew that.

I am sure that hon. Members on both sides of the House did.

I thank Members for their kind remarks about my first speech at the Dispatch Box as an Education Minister. Members on both sides of the House raised specific issues relating to their constituencies, which I shall follow up after the debate. However, I want to pursue a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Pond) about the excellent work of a head in his constituency, Simon Harrison. I can certainly give him the encouragement that he is seeking, and assure him that the Department will do what it can to support the good work of Mr. Harrison and his staff.

Everyone agrees that behaviour in schools is a serious issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) is right to quote the latest report from the chief inspector of schools, which states that behaviour in secondary schools in 2000–01 was very similar to that in the previous year. We must be careful not to give the impression that all is doom and gloom. There is not a universal breakdown in behaviour in schools. However, I agree with hon. Members in all parts of the House that it is unacceptable that one in 12 schools has a problem with pupil behaviour. That is why we provided the opportunity for a debate on this important matter in Government time.

Many hon. Members stressed that the issue of behaviour in schools cannot be isolated from wider factors in society—a decline in discipline and in respect, and a certain change in the ethical and moral values of our society. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield that some of the materialism and excessive individualism fostered in the 1980s contributed to the change. All of us should join together to rebuild a sense of respect, cohesion and discipline, not only in our schools, but in our wider society.

Many hon. Members referred to the advice that the Government issue to schools in cases where pupils have been excluded. The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) who, I know, had to return to his constituency, asked about the outcome of the consultation on exclusions that was concluded on 19 April. I can inform the House that the responses to that are being fed into the on-going work on circular 10/99, which is being revised as result, and which is also to be revised to incorporate changes in the Education Bill, which comes back before the House on Monday. Those changes are due to be implemented in January 2003, so fresh guidance will be issued later this year for implementation next year.

We are committed to continuing with the independent appeals panels set up by the previous Conservative Government. It is only right that a parent of the child has the right of appeal against a decision permanently to exclude their son or daughter, but we want to send out the clear message to schools and head teachers that we support heads in their management of their schools. We do not want the inappropriate reinstatement of pupils. That is why, in the Education Bill, we are making the changes to the panels.

We want to ensure that independent appeals panels will have at least one member who has direct classroom experience—for example, a teacher or retired teacher. We will ask that in reaching their decisions, panels will balance the interests of the excluded pupil and those of the wider school community, including the other pupils. The panels will not be able to reinstate a pupil solely on the basis of a technicality in the way that they were excluded.

On discipline committees, the trigger for an automatic meeting of a discipline committee will be relaxed from more than five school days in a term to more than 15 school days in a term. We believe that that will help to reduce the burden on heads and governors.

A number of specific cases were raised by the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), who spoke from the Conservative Front Bench. I shall refer briefly to one which I agree is extremely serious—the case that was reported in the press this week of the 14-year-old boy who was reinstated after a sexual assault.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills asked this week for the facts of the case to be brought in for her attention. They showed that the boy is not currently at the school and will not be returning to the school, and that the girls left the school in June, following the completion of their GCSE courses. In the light of that, and the governing body's apology, my right hon. Friend has decided that no further action will be taken, but we have asked that she be kept informed should the situation change. It is worth pointing out that in that case, it was the discipline committee of the governing body that made the decision, rather than the independent appeals panel.

A number of hon. Members expressed concern about the availability of sanctions to schools. Our guidance will take that into account when we issue it later this year.

It is worth making the point that all schools exist within the same framework and some have a much better record in dealing with these matters than others, so the ethos, practice and leadership within the classroom and the wider school community are important factors when considering the policy and what works in particular schools.

I am also pleased to reaffirm what I said in my opening remarks in response to the challenge from the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West regarding drugs and alcohol. The important signal that is sent by the House and by the Government is that schools must be drug-free zones. We shall continue to debate the rights and wrongs of the Home Secretary's announcement earlier this week. I think that he was right, but we can have that debate elsewhere. However, all will agree that that message must be sent out strongly. In my opening remarks I sought to say that we should also seriously address the issue of alcohol.

The Government tightened their guidelines for appeals panels earlier in the year in respect of pupils found dealing in drugs. Is the Minister now saying that it is the Government's view that it would be wrong for appeals panels to overturn the view of a head who has excluded a pupil for a drugs-related offence other than dealing?

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the change that we made concerned dealing. We are having a wider review of the guidance, and I am not issuing new guidance from the Dispatch Box today. Clearly, dealing is serious and we want to send a strong message from the Department, and I hope from Parliament, that such behaviour is completely and utterly unacceptable and will not be allowed.

Several hon. Members today have referred to the importance of listening to young people and providing opportunities for school students and other young people to have their say, whether it be through schools councils or through youth assemblies and councils. That will be important in taking forward the policy initiatives that we have been debating.

I referred in my opening remarks to bullying and, in particular, homophobic bullying, and I welcome the cross-party support from the Liberal Democrat and Conservative Benches for my remarks on that.

Several hon. Members referred to the nature of the curriculum. The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough referred to 13 to 15-year-old boys. The curriculum reforms contained in our Green Paper "14–19: Extending Opportunities, Raising Standards" and the 'wider debate on that are vital and we shall return to that soon.

A number of the initiatives to which I referred will begin in those local authority areas that have the most serious problems with street crime and truancy. We are starting there, but we want the good practice established by the setting up of behaviour and education support teams and encouraging more pupil referral units and learning support units to spread elsewhere. I very much take the points that have been made by several hon. Members that if that good practice is to be taken up as part of a universal service, that will sometimes require support in terms of resources.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound) made an important point from the experience of Ealing about the danger that excluded students from a number of schools can all end up going to one or two particular schools. That problem is not specific to London, although perhaps it is more pronounced in London than elsewhere, but part of the work that I am doing on London schools will attempt to address that. It is not an easy matter to address, but it will provide a further set of challenges for a school that might already have challenging circumstances if it finds itself as the school that effectively has to pick up all the young people excluded from other schools in the area.

Many hon. Members have referred to parental involvement and support, and that is clearly important. Several of my hon. Friends emphasised the importance of other programmes, notably the sure start programme, but also mentoring, not just for pupils but for their parents and other adult role models.

This has been a very good debate about an important matter. I hope that the cross-party spirit in which it has been conducted can be reflected afterwards, so that all of us can work both in our constituencies and nationally for the sort of step change in pupil behaviour that we want, to enhance standards in our schools and to make schools a better place for teachers to work in and for students to study in. I thank everyone for taking part.

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to raise this issue in the House. I also thank the Minister for responding on behalf of the Government. He will be aware that yesterday, I sent him a summary of my speech in order to ensure that party politics takes a back seat in our discussions of this important issue and to give him some time to consider his response.

In my constituency of Billericay and district, we are very concerned about the various threats to our green belt and green fields. One of the growing dangers is the illegal development of greenfield land, especially by the travelling community, which buys land and then, very quickly, often in only a few days, develops it without planning permission. The council has tried to combat the problem, but without success. I believe that local authorities are hampered by the law, and during the next 10 minutes or so, I should like to put forward proposals for the Government to consider as to how the law could be updated.

However, I should like first briefly to describe the problem. I shall start by making one thing very clear: my constituents are simply seeking fairness for all under the law, but it is only fair that all those who live in a community should abide by the same set of laws. No one is seeking to discriminate against a minority. Partly because of our historic links with the pilgrim fathers and the Mayflower, as a community we recognise more than most that the mark of a civilised society is the extent to which minority interests are respected.

For example, in Basildon district alone, there are more than 100 authorised sites for the travelling and gypsy communities, while some districts have none at all. Indeed, many of us believe that it was wrong that in 1994, the statutory duty on local authorities to provide authorised sites was removed. As a society, we should provide an adequate number of sites with proper amenities, for which the travellers should pay costs; otherwise, taxpayers would be encouraging people to pursue a nomadic way of life and the settled community would be discriminated against.

In short, we have long accepted this way of life. Residents have no problem with the law-abiding traveller and gypsy communities. However, for some reason that I cannot explain, there is an increasing number of cases in which travellers who are new to the area are buying land, speedily developing it without planning permission and subsequently not living in harmony with their neighbours. That is causing much concern and anger not only in the settled community, but among the more established gypsy communities.

A recent example at Sadlers farm roundabout in Bowers Gifford involved travellers buying the land and then, on a Friday, digging a 6 ft bank around the perimeter of the field before laying hardcore over the centre and bringing in caravans over the weekend. By the time the council reacted some three weeks later with enforcement and stop notices, it was far too late. Needless to say, the enforcement notice is now being held in abeyance because an appeal has been lodged by the travellers, while the court hearing regarding the stop notice has been adjourned over a technicality.

Consequently, we have now entered a lengthy planning and appeals process, which could take years. Meanwhile, the illegal development continues. Similar situations have occurred in Hovefields in Wickford and Oak road in Crays Hill. Typically, what happens is that the lives of neighbouring residents are made a misery. Many residents, have complained of the local area and ditches being swamped with refuse, rubbish and excrement, which has caused flooding; of intimidation to the point of people being fearful to leave their home, with crime generally on the increase; and of nearby narrow lanes being plagued by under-age youngsters driving recklessly, or by noisy lorries, often during the early hours of the morning.

As the Minister can well imagine, I have received many letters about the issue, as feelings are running high. If the House will forgive me, I shall quote from just a few of them, although the names have been withheld because of fear of intimidation.

A lady in Wickford said:

"Here in Wickford a well organised group of travellers has bought various areas of greenbelt, moved in with JCBs and totally decimated the entire areas covering them with tonnes of building, rubble".

Another lady in Wickford added that

"the situation is already causing problems with flooding to the local area, congestion on what is an unmade road. There are no drainage facilities which raises environmental concerns."

A resident of Crays Hill wrote that,

"as we walked through the Spinney in Oak Avenue, we came across two very unpleasant heaps on the path along with paper, flies etc. There was also about 50 empty beer cans and evidence of drug taking."

Another resident of Bowers Gifford wrote:

"I would like to use the Human Rights Act to ensure my right to a secure and settled family life but fear that if I did, as soon as this action became public knowledge I might not have a home, family or even a life."

Many residents point to the local Labour-run council as the culprit, but I believe that the law needs updating. I have solicited views from the Government, Basildon district council, the police, various research and environmental bodies, the House of Commons Library, residents, gypsies and councillors—and at this point, I would like to pay particular thanks to Councillor David Dadds, Mark Pinner, Councillor Malcolm Buckley and Julie Stainton.

I do not believe that the council could have stopped the illegal development of Sadlers Farm roundabout in the early days as, by law, it had to take account of the personal circumstances of the travellers and ensure accurate drafting of notices for fear of the financial implications of adverse court rulings. A further factor that delays councils is the Human Rights Act 1998.

The Minister knows that I raised the issue with his Department by letter on the 24 April. In his response, after describing the enforcement powers available to councils, the Minister said that

"the enforcement powers will only deter unauthorised development if local planning authorities implement these powers in a determined and decisive fashion."

In other words, it is up to the council. I have written again, asking the Minister to reconsider his position.

We may be making progress. The Government recently issued a press release, dated 5 July, entitled "A New Approach to Tackling Unauthorised Traveller Camps", which appears to accept that councils cannot deal with the issue alone. The initiative will apparently produce new guidance on managing unauthorised camping, and provide police with increased powers to move on unauthorised traveller encampments. [Interruption.]

However, it appears that the increased powers will apply only in cases of trespass. Will the Minister confirm whether that is the case? If so, the new guidelines will not help my constituency. [Interruption.]

Order. There appears to be a problem with the sound system, which means that we have no recording for official purposes. I shall therefore suspend the sitting for five minutes.

I understand that guidelines will be issued in the autumn, and, with this time scale in mind, I would like to suggest three changes to the law. The first involves retrospective planning applications; the second, stop notices; and the third, injunctions. All are aimed at stopping illegal development early, as soon as it first occurs or is about to occur.

With regard to the first proposal, retrospective planning applications should be restricted where it could be shown that significant harm is about to be, or has been, caused to the greenfield site in question. The council would have discretion whether to act following guidance from the Secretary of State as to what constitutes "significant harm".

Under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, planning permission is required for the carrying out of any development. However, as we know, a retrospective planning application can be made where development has already been carried out without permission. When a retrospective planning application has been received, any pending or proposed enforcement action is suspended until the application has proceeded through the planning system and/or the courts. In other words, serious and costly delays can occur during the appeals process, and in some cases it can take up to six years, or even longer, before the processes are exhausted. Meanwhile, the unauthorised development remains. In refusing retrospective planning applications, a strong message would be sent out that speedy unauthorised development of greenfield land would not be worthwhile and would not be tolerated. Enforcement action could be immediately carried out in the knowledge that retrospective planning could not be allowed as a ground for appeal.

There is little doubt that the current enforcement system is unduly complex and cumbersome, but the measure would prevent those who seek to deliberately evade or abuse the planning system from doing so. The term "significant harm", as opposed to just "harm", would be appropriate, to ensure that any such amendment complies with the Human Rights Act 1998 and that minor contraventions of planning law were not necessarily penalised by the council.

The second proposal would involve no costs or penalties being awarded against councils who issue a stop notice in relation to any development where planning permission has not been granted. Currently, in part due to the Human Rights Act, inspectors' enforcement decisions regarding unauthorised traveller sites are increasingly being decided against local authorities, with hefty costs or damages being awarded.

That danger considerably discourages councils from using stop notices, or at least delays the issuing of those notices while councils prepare lengthy paperwork, during which time much damage can be done to the greenfield in question. If that danger were removed by preventing costs from being awarded against councils, it would provide a big incentive towards allowing councils speedily to enforce their planning powers where necessary by issuing a stop notice. Again, councils would have final discretion in that.

The third proposal involves injunctions. A letter from my local council says:

"Injunctions, to have any effect, must be served on the named perpetrators and this is fraught with difficulties when dealing with unco-operative travellers of no fixed address. This, therefore, has the effect of making injunctive action ineffective in most cases."

Councils should be made better aware by Government that they can issue injunctions against a person whose identity is unknown—in simple terms, an injunction can be served on the land. Councils would therefore be better aware that they can issue injunctions quickly and stop any unauthorised development in its tracks immediately, subject to the appeals process.

An additional problem is that, often, court sentences for contravening an injunction and for non-payment of fines are too lenient. Penalties available to the courts are limited and they do not act as a deterrent. That also needs to be put right by the Government.

In conclusion, Mr. Deputy Speaker, this is a real problem in my constituency, and it is causing much distress and anger. Whereas section 61 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 can deal with trespass, the existing law is essentially ineffective against determined and unco-operative people who buy land and then speedily and illegally develop it.

That problem is getting worse, and it could escalate significantly. Local residents cannot sell their properties or land because of the location of many of those illegal sites, and greenfield land is being sold at knockdown prices to that new wave of travelling communities.

Clarification is required as to whether the Government's latest initiative deals only with trespass. I am also aware that the planning Green Paper has announced that enforcement powers and procedures are being scrutinised. We shall hear more in the autumn.

In the lead-up to the announcements, I urge the Government to consider those three proposals, which aim to put an end to the generally perceived view that there is a two-tier planning system operating in this country. There may be technical issues to address, but these should not get in the way of what I believe are common-sense policies, which, if sufficient political will exists, would tackle the problems.

These proposals would give councils the power to act quickly against the illegal development of land owned by the perpetrators, whether traveller or not, and would therefore create fairness for all. I await the Government's response with interest.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) on securing this debate. It is an important matter and I sympathise with much of what he said in terms of the effect of illegal and semi-legal camps on his constituency. It is an issue that most of us have had to deal with on a constituency basis.

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's comment about this being essentially a minority pursuit among the travelling community in the context of more than 100 authorised sites within the Billericay, Basildon and surrounding district. I am grateful that this week's debate—I seem to have one a week, nowadays—is outside party politics and talk of conspiracy about changes. The hon. Gentleman's constituents and the issue deserve better than that.

There are essentially two issues here. The first is the breach of planning control that occurs through the use of land for development which does not have the benefit of planning permission. The second is the fact that the unlawful use is taking place on greenfield land that may also have metropolitan greenbelt status.

The hon. Gentleman said that councils were hampered by the law, and I will return to much of what he said in relation to the unauthorised encampments guidance that has just been issued for consultation. I am grateful for his comments and their context, because they underpin much of what the Department is trying to do. We start from a premise of fairness for all, rights for all and—clearly within that—responsibilities for all. Neither the settled community nor the travelling community has been afforded a status above the law. That is the balance that we are trying to get into the system. All should abide by the law. As the hon. Gentleman said, respect for minority interests is a measure of our civilisation.

Day-to-day policy on development control is the responsibility of local planning authorities. If there has been a breach of planning control in the district, Basildon council has the option of taking enforcement action to bring the unlawful use to an end and to require the offenders to apply formally for planning permission. The planning system provides for appeals to be made against enforcement notices, as well as against refusals of planning permissions. Appeals are considered on their merits and determined in accordance with the development plan for the area, unless material considerations dictate otherwise.

The merits of using greenfield land for development are a matter for the determination of the local planning authority in the first instance, and for the inspector or my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister when considering appeals. The Government are committed to maximising the re-use of previously developed land and empty properties and the conversion of non-residential buildings for new housing, in order both to promote regeneration and to minimise the amount of greenfield land being taken for development. We have more than met those targets in the past.

That means giving priority to re-using such land within urban areas, bringing empty homes back into use and converting existing buildings. That is preferable to the development of greenfield sites. In a planning context, that is the background against which we consider illegal developments and the illegal use of greenfield land. However, not all development can take place within urban areas and, where it has to be located elsewhere, we are looking to the local planning authorities to utilise the most sustainable option. Policies and guidance on greenfield and open land are the next step on from use of brownfield and urban centres.

The Government recognise that gypsies have a right to pursue their own lifestyle. We are committed to ensuring that the planning system treats members of that community as fairly as everyone else. Gypsies make up a tiny proportion of the population of this country, but their land use requirements must be met. That is what much of the new guidance will be about.

Planning policies relating to the provision of suitable locations for gypsy sites, whether provided by the local authority or privately, are set out in the then Department of the Environment circular 1/94 "Gypsy Sites and Planning". That advice is now eight years old but remains the legal framework in which planning and other matters are dealt with. The circular places gypsies on the same footing as others in relation to the planning system, while recognising their special accommodation needs, and the desire of many gypsies to buy their own sites to develop and manage. Gypsy sites constitute development, and therefore require planning permission.

The circular emphasises the importance of local authorities and gypsies working together to identify suitable sites, and encourages gypsies to consult local authorities before buying land on which they intend to camp and for which planning permission would be required. Effective liaison is essential if disputes are to be avoided. The lack of availability of alternative sites can be a consideration when appeals against enforcement notices are determined.

It is the responsibility of local planning authorities to judge how they frame their policies, and these of course are open to public scrutiny and comments at inquiry. Development plans must take account of local circumstances. For example, gypsy sites are not among the uses of land that are usually appropriate for greenbelt land, areas of special scientific interest and places of open land where development is severely restricted.

The onus is on the applicant to prove very special circumstances that overcome the harm by reason of inappropriateness. In gypsy cases, special circumstances often include health and educational needs, and those may be human rights considerations. I have participated in two or three debates on this subject, but I am still unclear about the allusions to human rights law. One case revolved around a technicality, with the judge going beyond his brief. We shall explore that further and get back to the hon. Gentleman. We also need to add to what the guidance says about unauthorised sites. We are dealing with three or four different strands of policy, of which the guidance will be one and planning is another.

A difficulty that we have nationally is that there has been little quantitative and sustainable research on the demand for the provision of sites. We are not minded—although this may change as a result of the research—to return to the pre-1994 position in which every local authority had to provide a site of some description.

We have organised a body of research, which we hope will report during the summer, to try to get not just a feel of how many sites there are, their nature and their general upkeep, but a wider picture of demand and the need for temporary or transitory provision. Building on that research, we have said in the guidance that local authorities and the police should devise strategies to deal with travellers in their areas. That will be through a mix of existing sites and provision for emergency or temporary sites, which can often overcome difficulties in some areas.

As a quid pro quo, if local councils devise such strategies, we will provide a stream of funding for those temporary or transitory sites. We have diverted some of the funds from our three-year gypsy site refurbishment grant for that purpose. As a further quid pro quo, the enforcement powers and the ability to move unauthorised encampments in those areas will be far stronger. It is about getting the balance back into the equation: recognising the need for sites and the responsibility to provide them while giving the police greater powers to move people on.

Do the enhanced powers apply to cases in which travellers own the land that they have illegally developed?

I will get back to the hon. Gentleman if I am wrong, but I understand that in the context of the guidance "unauthorised" means unauthorised in the context of the planning framework. Whether the person owns the land or not, if there is inappropriate land use or development that has not been authorised through planning permission, the ownership of the land is irrelevant.

In the first instance, it is for the local planning authority to determine planning applications against the new backdrop of the guidance. There are of course other elements of the legislative nexus, such as the Children Act 1989—if children are involved—and social services. All that is taken into account in the guidance that we have issued, and the balance, hopefully, has been restruck.

The fact that gypsies own their land does not mean that planning permission need not be applied for. It should be obtained before development takes place and before the land is occupied. I think—but I will write to the hon. Gentleman in more detail—that there cannot be a qualified position on the principle of retrospective planning. As the hon. Gentleman said, retrospective planning applications should be restricted where it can be shown that significant harm could be done to the land in question, but retrospective planning applications and subsequent provisions are dealt with in exactly the same planning framework. If an existing application came in for a greenfield development that would mean inappropriate use of that greenfield open site, it should not be allowed as a future application. Those are the rules that prevailed for previous applications. We cannot lock qualifications on to retrospective planning; either we have retrospective planning applications in principle or we do not.

The other important principle is established use, meaning that approval for an application for land that has been used for that purpose for 50 years is fairly automatic because it is determined under the older rather than the new framework. Anything from now on should be dealt with, albeit retrospectively, in the context of whatever the framework is at the time. I cannot envisage many cases in which action that would either cause significant harm or be counter to what the General Development Procedure Order and planning policy guidance currently say about greenfield and green-belt developments would be permitted simply because it was retrospective.

Will the Minister clarify his last statement? Increasingly, people buy land and then quickly develop it, knowing that they will subsequently put in a retrospective planning application. That has the effect of instigating the appeals process, and everything else—including enforcement action—is held in abeyance. If we restricted retrospective planning applications, such people—whoever they may he—would know that they could not act in that way. It would constitute a major deterrent.

With respect, that could be described as tackling things the wrong way round. The hon. Gentleman probably wanted me to clarify the relationship between the planning process—whether retrospective or otherwise—enforcement notices, and what starts and what stops, what is suspended and what is not suspended. We are trying to speed up the enforcement process and to make it more flexible: that is part of our response to consultations on the planning Green Paper. I will get back in touch with the hon. Gentleman on that. However, I do not think that shackling or restricting powers at that end—I mean retrospective planning applications—is necessarily the right way in which to deal with the relationship between planning application and enforcement or stop notices and difficulties.

We want to streamline the system. I am not sure why, but stop notices are used less and less and injunctions more and more. I do not know whether that is because they are a clumsy weapon, or simply because they are no longer appropriate. Happily, I am not a lawyer. I do not know the ins and outs of it, but I should not think it appropriate to lose the notion, for public authorities or others, of costs to prevent malicious or capricious use of the law.

There may be some other way to do it. I will certainly investigate the notion of serving the injunction on the land rather than the title owner; I had not heard of it before and I had the great pleasure, perverse or otherwise, to be on a planning committee for 11 years. I will have a look at that and get back to the hon. Gentleman.

We need to get to a position where everyone who lives in Crays Hill, Wickford and Billericay lives in peace without fear of molestation or antisocial behaviour, whether from the traveller community or the settled community.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at five minutes past Three o'clock.