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Adjournment (Summer Recess)

I shall be brief. First, I want to mention endowment shortfalls, which a number of my constituents have raised with me. The House and the Government are not taking the issue seriously. Statistics tell us that many endowment policies will come to fruition in the next five to 10 years, and a large number of our constituents will find themselves in serious financial difficulty. The Treasury Committee should look into the matter and might encourage the industry to consider how to deal with the shortfalls. The Committee could also consider whether unclaimed assets might be used, as they should be for people whose pensions have collapsed. My second point is that parents should choose whether their child attends a special or a mainstream school. It is outrageous that parents are forced either to keep their child in a mainstream school when they think the child would do better in a specialist school, and vice versa. Parents know their children better than anyone else—certainly better than any local education authority official. We must reach a position where parents decide on their child’s school. My third point is the need for an index of social and domestic cohesion. That sounds like a bit of a mouthful, but the House will have an opportunity to do something about it when the Bill on the Office for National Statistics is introduced in the autumn. It is a curious fact that the social exclusion unit lists eight indicators of social deprivation, one of which is family breakdown. All the other seven indicators are reflected in the indices of deprivation published in the ONS neighbourhood statistics, but family breakdown is not. There is no reason for that omission and we could rectify it in the House in the autumn. I urge my Front-Bench colleagues and the Government to consider the matter when the Bill comes before the House. Lastly, I want to raise my concern that the Prison Service has closed the inner change programme in Dartmoor prison. We know that such programmes reduced recidivism rates from 55 to 8 per cent. in several American states. The inner change programme could have been treated like the alpha course, which runs in many prisons, but the Prison Service chose not to do so, which is a tragedy. I am unhappy about what I have learned about that case and shall raise it on other occasions, because it needs to be examined.