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Education and Inspections Bill

It turned out that balloting was used as an excuse to try to wreck the principles underlying the reform, as I shall briefly explain. I will not repeat the principles on which the majority consensus in the House agrees. We are looking for a better form of localism in so far as structure is relevant to improving the quality of service, although I agree with all those who have expressed reservations about whether structural reform in itself can guarantee success. There are more important factors, but such reform is an important contributor nevertheless. We are moving back towards a situation in which we are striving to give people who deliver services at the local level more autonomy, discretion and control over what they can provide. We are trying to determine whether we can introduce a greater diversity of providers and have some competition among them, because we think that the process will thus become more consumer-oriented and, in the case of education, that parents will get used to the feeling that they are able to exercise more choice and real influence over the schools that they choose when they get into the education system. Kenneth Baker—now my noble Friend Lord Baker—embarked us on such a process in 1988. However, that was part of a whole package of reform. We had grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges. In the health service we had NHS trusts and GP fundholding practices. We also had housing action trusts. All those things followed the same underlying principles of localising and moving towards more local discretion and a greater diversity of supply. We did not have ballots for most of those proposals—when we started out, we were not advocating local ballots for any of them. We had ballots on housing action trusts and grant-maintained schools, but my recollection is that that was not the intention of the Government in whom I served when we first put the proposals forward. I recall that we were defeated in both cases by the House of Lords, which insisted that when setting up housing action trusts, which took the management of housing out of local authority control—they achieved great improvements in many cases—or allowing schools to take up grant-maintained status, the matter should be subject to a ballot. I am sure that the arguments that then appealed to their lordships were very similar to the reasonable-sounding arguments that have been put forward by the hon. Members for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) and for Selby (Mr. Grogan). The arguments are, ““We’re all democrats. Why can’t we have an intelligent local discussion? If the reforms are so attractive, surely you’ll find that the proposals will be carried forward by the people who will benefit from them. What are you frightened of?”” Their lordships were attracted by that democratic appeal—such appeals usually attract them on any argument except that concerning their own status and composition—and we were rather unsure about whether we had an adequate majority to overturn them, so away we went with ballots built in to the proposals. I have been involved in many such proposals at various stages. It was always my intention that NHS trusts should eventually become the norm in the health service, as they have. It was always my intention that grant-maintained schools should be the norm. However, we never imposed them and no one is suggesting that they should be imposed now. The whole point of introducing changes to the structure was that local people—governors and head teachers, in the case of schools—should put forward the proposals and volunteer for the change. The likelihood of success is increased enormously if that happens. The people who opted for NHS trust status, the GPs who wanted fundholding practices, and the governors and head teachers who opted for grant-maintained status were thereby committing themselves to making a success of the changes that they were introducing. They chose to do that not at the behest of the Conservative party or Whitehall, but because they believed that they could demonstrate to their communities that they could produce a better service if they did. That is the basis on which we proceeded. NHS trusts spread like mad, and they were the norm when the Labour party came to power, which is why the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) could not abolish NHS trust status when he was Secretary of State. If we had been in power for longer, GP fundholding would have become the norm. It would not have been reversed, so the Government would not have been obliged to return to it, as they are currently doing. There were hundreds of grant-maintained schools, but they did not become the norm. All those ballots were bitter political and ideological battles. There were about 10 such schools when I assumed responsibility for education. By the time I had finished there were more than 100, and I could probably list all their names. We fought a battle from trench to trench across the country as those ballots took place. We should not be under any illusion. I heard the charm in the voices of left-wing members of the Labour party who asked what was wrong with a ballot—but head teachers and governing bodies required great courage to subject themselves to the ordeal, and it left some of them badly knocked about. Local authorities, including Conservative ones, defended their institutional interests by devoting large amounts of money and a great deal of officer time and effort to campaign against the proposals. They were supported by the teaching trade unions, which contributed a great deal of money. Local Labour organisations were wheeled into action to distribute leaflets, and everything became a political battle, in which we could not even agree on the facts. In my county—but not in my constituency—the local authority mounted an elaborate and successful case. Contrary to the general argument that grant-maintained schools were unfairly financed, it persuaded parents that such schools would lose money, so there would be less money per pupil. There was a predictable effect on parents, who were not initially hostile, and had been attracted to the proposal when it was first made by the head teacher and governors, whom they knew. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) said, the public are instinctively conservative; that is one reason why we make such slow progress on these subjects. The secret of referendums and local ballots is that people always vote against change. Parents are naturally cautious about change, but they are prepared to listen to head teachers and governors explaining that they will do better under the proposals. However, they may discover that they have wished on their community a ferocious political battle, and there may be welter of warnings and even threats. Staff who make a commitment to support grant-maintained status worry about what will happen if they lose the ballot and find themselves back in the employ of the local authority, which expended a great deal of effort resisting change. In some cases that battle was bitter and extreme, and we lost most of the ballots—[Interruption.] I am delighted to be told that we won most of them; we obviously began to improve as time went on, and subsequent Ministers assumed those responsibilities. Personally, however, I lost quite a lot. Whether those battles were won or lost, the process politicised and poisoned the atmosphere in schools, and it took a long time to recover. If anyone tries to seduce us with arguments about gentle local democracy giving more legitimacy to change, they are defying our experience in the early 1990s.