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Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 25 June 2025

Debate

Independent Schools: Tax Changes

Contribution

My Lords, documents released during legal action against the Government over the imposition of VAT midway through the academic year revealed that Ministers were warned by officials that theirs would be the most disruptive option for the implementation of this vindictive policy. Why did they callously ignore that advice? Ministers were also consistently warned by the sector that their assessment that there would be hardly any impact on independent schools was ludicrously optimistic. Now, the DfE’s own statistics show a drop of 11,000 in independent school numbers, four times that predicted by the Government, with boarding schools hit twice as hard. Is the Minister not ashamed of the Government’s appalling failure to listen to advice? Will she say sorry to the schools that have inevitably closed, to the people who have lost their jobs and, above all, to those students whose lives have been so cruelly disrupted?

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