Neil O'Brien

We had finally got there. We had bought the land and the houses, and the thing was about to happen. Somehow, the new Government snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, which is desperately sad. We will have to agree to disagree on that. We have talked a bit about SEND funding in the round. The high needs block spending grew 70% between 2018-19 and 2024-25, so we put a lot more money into it. Hon. Members might say that is still not enough, and I would totally understand where they are coming from, but the demand is exploding upwards. I know that the Minister will be thinking equally about the causes of that and what she can do about it—not just meeting the need, but trying to understand the root causes and reduce the need for these services. There was a very large increase in that high needs block SEND spending. A couple of hon. Members mentioned that one of the ways to solve the issue is not to look at the transport but to look at the schools. This is a long-term obsession of mine. I had a Westminster Hall debate not so long ago about this very issue. Since 1980, the number of small schools with fewer than 200 pupils had roughly halved, from 11,464 to 5,406, by 2018. That is a long-term trend. Since 2000, rural schools—those in villages and hamlets—have been twice as likely to shut. When they have shut, the typical walk time to the nearest school has been about 52 minutes. That long-term trend, which has occurred under Governments of all three of the main parties, has posed all sorts of challenges for rural areas. To try to arrest that trend, we brought in the lump sum within the national funding formula, which is about 60% of the total funding. It is a hugely important part of the funding and I look forward to hon. Members championing it. We must think about how we keep village and rural schools, which are such an important part of rural communities, going. That is not just because they make life simpler and the whole transport issue simpler, but because they are at the heart of rural communities. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale talked about a 36% increase in taxis. We need to think about how we can attack the underlying causes of the need. I am sure that the Minister will be thinking about this. I will end where I started by congratulating, in an honest way, the hon. Member for Hexham on securing this debate. It is hugely important. He made a super-important point about siblings being treated differently, which seems like absolute craziness. I am sure that we all agree that we ought to tackle that, but there are opportunities to address these issues, particularly through the local government funding formula. Government Ministers will stand up in a few weeks’ time and give us the numbers for how much local government is getting, but those in local government will want to know what is happening to their costs and for which of the services they provide, such as home-to-school transport, they will get compensation on the national insurance increase, because otherwise they will not know whether they are really ahead or behind.