Richard Tice

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Caroline. What irony that the Government have sent a Minister to listen to these debates who went to a private school. I wonder whether his parents would have been able to afford the extra 20%. However, as the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth) said, this is about the education not just of those at independent schools, but of the hundreds of thousands in the state system. Their education will also be damaged because of the capacity crisis. Class sizes will grow. There is an SEN crisis everywhere. Local authorities are in panic; headteachers are in panic; parents are in panic and, most shamefully of all, children are panicking. Will they be removed from their school in the middle of a school year, be taken from their friends and have their education damaged? It is extraordinary. I give one example: I have had a letter from a constituent who has two children with SEN provision. She cannot afford the extra 20% so she has to put her children into the state system. There is no capacity within an hour’s drive, so she has a quote from the local taxi firm. The cost to the local authority will be over £20,000 in taxi fares per child. That is not only damaging to the education of children; it is an economics of utter tomfoolery and madness.