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Health and Education

I am not saying that the system is exactly comparable, and I know that many parents in France go to private schools because they want their children to have a Catholic education—that may be the same here. I am not arguing for a sudden revolution, but a gradual change. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath, the shadow Secretary of State, agrees with that. He has been very innovative. He has looked at what is happening in Sweden, and he will come up with ideas to make it easier for people to set up private schools. All I am asking is why it is considered to be so wrong and reactionary to break down the rigid divide between the state and the private sector in education. I have never understood that, and if we can find ways of being innovative and of helping people to break down that divide, we should. If I cannot take the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) with me on that, can I at least take him this far—please do not go on with this process of trying to micro-manage our schools on the curriculum? The people involved are professionals and they know what is best. Rely on parent power: if head teachers do not deliver what people want locally, people will not want to send their children to those schools. I say the same thing about health, and again, I know that I will lose people on this issue. Why do we have a rigid divide between the public and private sector in health? My family and I rely completely on the national health service. I have no private health insurance, but if a retired person, after paying tax all their life, wants private health insurance, I do not see why they should not be given tax relief on it. The last Conservative Government did that, and it is simply fair. If people are denied a particular medication because it is too expensive and they want to top up the cost from their own resources, why should they not be allowed to do so? As with education, I believe that we should not try to micro-manage the national health service. We should rely on professionals and on their good judgment. Increasingly, we should step back and set budgets—the Government are doing that through foundation hospitals—and proceed apace, relying on the professionals to run hospitals in the way they think best. However, I will not take the House with me on many of those things.