David Smith

I am absolutely delighted to speak in this debate alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris), and I am delighted that he secured it. The lack of accessible transport options to Northumberland secondary schools, in particular, may not attract national attention, but it affects children, young people and parents in my constituency much more directly than almost anything else we discuss in Parliament. In North Northumberland, it is now common in villages such as Pegswood for an 11-year-old to spend up to two hours a day on four different buses making the round trip to school and back. When we factor that in for SEND students, as my hon. Friend said, parents face a collective nightmare. One constituent recently wrote to me—I have changed the name of their daughter—to say: “We are currently having issues with school transport for our daughter who is autistic. Northumberland County Council have rejected our appeal for alternative provision. Sarah is no longer attending school, due to a number of issues, the first being transport. We are now homeschooling Sarah.” That issue is repeated over and over again in my mailbox. There are two reasons why it matters so much. The first, which I have just highlighted, is the most obvious: the cost and strain on parents is totally antithetical to the ideal of the state school. Families are spending hundreds of pounds a year making sure that their child gets to school, worrying the whole time about their safety, as we heard. Our state school system should not rely on significant private expenditure to meet basic educational needs. In fact, it was designed to do the very opposite. Secondly, school transport is a pinch point in terms of a wider range of northern rural inequalities in education and transport, and deservedly reinforces the idea that places such as Northumberland have been left behind and ignored over the years by the powers that be. There have been repeated failures across the county in the way that our schools, roads and rail are run, and school transport exposes them all, pointing to a much wider range of issues. How did we get here? North Northumberland has too few schools, and in some areas that is leading to huge pressures. The nearest secondary school to Pegswood, the village I mentioned, is in Ashington—Ashington Academy—which is a 20-minute bus journey away. However, Ashington is oversubscribed, so students are often sent to Cramlington instead. If parents cannot drop them off, there is a range of ways to get there, of which the quickest takes 41 minutes and involves a train. The season ticket for that train costs £1,120 a year, so most take the cheaper option—a bus journey. Actually, it is two bus journeys, which take up to an hour and a quarter and will cost at least £960 a year, according to the very confusing and unhelpful Arriva website. This very afternoon, teenagers from Pegswood who finished school in Cramlington at 3 o’clock will only just be getting home, having taken four buses on a £1,000 ticket. Commutes like that are happening in towns all over North Northumberland, from towns and villages such as Belford, Wooler, Rothbury and Amble. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham about the state of some rural roads and about how that often makes journeys more challenging. Nowhere is this issue more visible than with SEND schooling. Like my hon. Friend the Member, I welcome the Government’s commitment to spend £1 billion pounds more on SEND next year. North Northumberland has three SEND schools and they do a remarkable job supporting the flourishing of young people with more complex needs. However, the nearest school might not necessarily be the best option, which can require pupils to spend over an hour in a taxi or bus to get there—we heard about the hour-and-a-half journey in each direction that some have to make in my hon. Friend’s constituency. Parents are increasingly resigned to the notion that having a child with more complex needs will require spending large amounts of money and time travelling to school. The Education Act 1944—I am sure hon. Members did not expect me to bring that up in this debate—established modern secondary schools and came into being because, “when poorer children were offered free places” —at grammar schools, as they then were— “parents often had to turn them down owing to the extra costs involved.” Free state schools were instead set up to cater to all needs and incomes, but my constituents seem to have ended up trapped in a new system that promises equal and free schooling, but includes submerged and unexpected costs that put family finances under strain. On the wider issues, the school transport issue has not emerged in isolation but is evidence of a wider series of pressures on public services across the county. First, the education system is struggling in various guises in some parts of Northumberland. The town of Berwick, in my constituency, is extremely reliant on its one state secondary school to nurture the necessary skills and qualifications for the town’s economy, so when the school struggles, the town struggles. A 2017 report said: “Berwick is one of Northumberland’s most deprived towns. It has a vulnerable economy characterised by poor quality job opportunities, part time working, low wages and very limited education facilities.” North Northumberland’s further education is in a poor way too, and 16 to 18-year-olds who want to take up a vocational course have to travel miles out of the constituency and at great expense. Another constituent recently got in touch about this very issue, saying: “I have been made aware of a colleague’s 16 year-old daughter who undertook an apprenticeship across the border in Scotland in July. She lives in Berwick and was catching a bus to and from work. However, after just a few weeks, Border Buses removed the morning bus. Emma”— whose name I have changed— “is now relying on taxis to get her to her apprenticeship in the morning. This is costing her family, who are not in a position to afford this, £150 a week. Emma is a vulnerable young woman who has endured a difficult time at school and yet is thriving in her apprenticeship, but this is now at risk.” North Northumberland’s GCSE and apprenticeship levels keep pace with the rest of the country, but A-Levels and higher education qualifications are behind the England and Wales average, and that will be in part because of the inaccessibility of further and higher education. However, those pressures are also evidence of a public transport system that is not up to the job. North Northumberland residents are right to be sceptical about local bus services, considering that Arriva, the largest provider, is owned by an American equity investment fund based in Miami, which is hardly ideal for a public service. In fact, from 2017 to 2022, the distance travelled by bus services in Northumberland fell by over a third—one of the highest reductions for any authority in the north-east. It is for that reason that, like my hon. Friend, I am delighted that the Mayor of the North East, Kim McGuinness, has started the process of bringing buses back under public control so that we know that they go where they are needed and not just on the routes that make the most money. Having spoken to the Mayor of the North East about that, I know that one reason she is keen to do that is the positive impact it would have on rural services. Meanwhile, local train services are increasingly sidelined in favour of London to Edinburgh links on the east coast main line that squeeze stopping services from the timetable. Cost-benefit calculations designed to extract value do not favour rural areas, which need targeted public investment and intentional support. Poor transport is a contributing factor to low rural productivity. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham said, all of this is the natural end point of 14 years of a real-terms education spending freeze, with reduced school capital spending; of 14 years of neglect of public transport that let franchising diminish the value of rail travel and bus companies be driven by international investors; and of 14 years of letting economic liberalism expose rural communities to economies of scale that make post offices, banks and other essential services non-viable. It is not by accident that hundreds of schoolchildren cannot go to schools in their own communities—it is the consequence of the policies of the last Government. However, the work of change has begun locally and nationally. I am working with Berwick stakeholders to rethink our vision of what an outstanding education system could look like, with a campus model and associated further education facilities having the potential to transform education in the town and even the town itself. I am fully supportive of the campaign by the South East Northumberland Rail User Group to introduce a regular stopping service up the east coast main line that serves local residents and opens up the region to inward investment. I welcome the £1 billion committed by the Government to local transport, with another £650 million towards transport and buses in towns, villages and rural areas. The difference between a Labour and a Conservative Government is that when we see communities facing economic disadvantage and inequality, we have no issue putting our money where our mouth is and making sure that where someone starts in life or where they live does not determine the opportunities they can pursue.