Lord Fuller (Con)

My Lords, I attended a boarding school in the 1980s and was the governor of another one for 10 years in the 2010s. I spoke two years ago at the debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. It hardly seems like two years ago, but it was, and it is great to see him back in his place. I regret to say that things are even worse than the warnings that we issued at the time, with more children impacted, more schools closed and none of the revenue to pay for more state-school teachers, who are now having to work harder than ever. The damage has been not just to the charities that run these schools, to parents who are ambitious for their children, or especially to the twice as many displaced children as the Government expected, with disrupted schooling, subjects not taken to examination, peripatetic activities curtailed and friendships broken. No, the collateral damage has spread much further than we foretold. It has spread to the staff. Back in 2024, I bumped into a man wearing a Langley School polo shirt. It turned out that he was responsible for running the minibus enterprise, comprising 27 vehicles, together with drivers, himself, assistants and mechanics—a 35-person sustainable transport business, all under threat. His colleagues—cooks, cleaners, matrons and groundkeepers, not just teachers—are the working people engaged in that education, and I want to speak for them. The damage has spread to the market towns, where these schools not just support the economy; they are the local economy. In the shires, 106 mainstream schools have closed in places such as Banbury, Bedstone, Haslemere, Windlesham and Warminster—lovely places with wonderful high streets and a much wider range of pubs, cafés and shops than their populations would normally sustain. These are not just market towns; these are factory towns. The schools are factories of education and learning. They underpin those economies, not just with their directly employed staff but with a local ecosystem of contractors and tradesmen in areas with few alternative employment opportunities. They are damaged. The damage is also to the national economy, where education has been a valuable, invisible export—not that Labour understands these things. We have heard about the additional burden of business rates and £100 million in national insurance. It is hard to quantify the impact on the 93% of children who are state educated, whose classes are now more crowded or who are forced to travel further as their natural catchments have been filled up. Surrey is a case in point—a county where the parents, to echo the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, are born with sharp elbows. If you start to treat these charities as businesses then why should they behave as charities? We have heard about the impact on music and the arts. Cancelling bursaries for the child prodigy or scholarships for exceptional sportswomen from disadvantaged families helps nobody and only drives social inequality, as well as harming our national sporting life. We are all poorer for this. Why should these charities have bursaries, scholarships, and public access to facilities in the evening and during the school holidays if there is no incentive or regulatory reason to do so? This Government have failed the public interest test. I will not echo the important points made by my noble friend Lord Shinkwin about SEND, but these schools are the solution to that, not the problem. I visited the headmaster of a public school in Norfolk where 30% of the roll need SEND support or are children of families in difficult situations. That is truly in the public interest—something that this Government have swept away. They have not raised any money. Labour’s class obsession has resulted in a net cost to the Exchequer. The Government have displayed a financial ignorance of the dynamic impacts of this policy because, if schools are forced to close, we are looking at the loss of PAYE and the payment of benefits. The fundamental premise that this is a revenue raiser is a false one, because the really rich have just shrugged it off while the striving children of police officers, nurses, firefighters, soldiers and airmen—working people with aspiration and ambition for their children—have felt the full force. It has benighted so many with their own challenges who just cannot thrive in the state sector and for whom at least specialist private classes have been an option—but that has been pushed out of reach. Well done, Labour, attacking those with the quietest voices who need the greatest help. It is not hard to see why this has been worse than expected. I was a governor of a school with just 450 places. It typically made a surplus of about £250,000 a year to fund reinvestment. It did not have a lot of fat on its back. It was a charity and, as in all these cases, the fees from about half a dozen boarders made the difference between profit and loss, surviving or failing. The finances were finely balanced. The fees from just five boarders amounted to the entire profit of the charity. If just five families found they could not afford the extra five grand a year or so, all the 450 children in that school fell on the state. I warned of this leverage, which has tipped these schools over the edge and spoiled the life chances and exam success of hundreds of others while adding to the burdens of the 93% educated by the state, throwing thousands of lower-paid staff, journeymen, local suppliers and, yes, teachers on the dole. That was always going to be the case. This policy has failed in its objective. It was dishonestly framed as a money spinner but has just been a class war pursued by the honourable Member for Sunderland, who is pursuing her personal obsession with class, with children paying the price. The Prime Minister said that things were going to be different, but it turns out he is just the same—jealousy, envy and grievance perpetuating the class war, not providing the social mobility that a scholarship or a bursary can unleash. There is so much more that I could say, but these proposals, born out of populist electioneering sloganning, have resulted in more elitism and social inequality; less opportunity for those with talent from the most modest backgrounds; less charitable purpose, for which the local communities will suffer; slipping down our national and international sports rankings; less choice; fewer exports and stunted economic growth; a catastrophic effect on the economic base of our market towns and their small tradesmen; working people in isolated areas put out of work; struggling parents; additional burdens on local authorities; listed buildings left to moulder; and driving even more children to oversubscribed state schools. The real victims here are among the lowest paid and most educationally challenged, while our economy is weakened and the soft power that helps earn our place in the world is damaged, alongside our global reputation, by levelling down that export for which the world used to beat a path to our door.