Richard Tice

No, we are short of time. As a former governor of an independent school, I know that that approach would have been welcomed by the independent sector. Instead, the choice that the Government have made will do the opposite of what they intend. It is not going to raise anything like the funding they think it will: almost 100,000 children will leave the independent sector, many of whom have special educational needs, so it will earn almost nothing. I spoke earlier about the unintended consequences of this policy. A parent in my constituency has written to me. She has two children with special educational needs at private school, and she cannot afford the VAT, so they are going to go into the state system. The nearest place is an hour away, so now the local authority is going to pick up the cost of the taxi service of over £20,000 per child. Those are the unintended real-world consequences of this choice by this Government. Most shamefully of all, because there is such a lack of capacity in so many areas and so many local authorities, that choice is going to result in bigger class sizes. That means more pressure on hard-pressed teachers in the state system, at a time when we are trying to ease that pressure. This choice is going to damage the education of many hundreds of thousands of children—exactly the opposite of what is intended. I say to the Minister and his Government that they could choose differently. They could pause this policy, work with the independent sector and gain much more universal support. Instead, we have legal challenges going ahead. As I finish, I ask the Minister to answer this simple question: if those legal challenges end up in the European Court of Human Rights and it rules that the policy is unlawful, will his Government comply with that ruling?