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Primary School Places (London)

I shall also try to keep my remarks to five minutes or so to give the Minister time to respond. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) on securing the debate, and other hon. Friends and Members on their participation. I hope that if the Minister leaves today's debate with anything, it will be with the recognition that this is a cross-party matter. In spite of the absence of Labour Members, the problem affects many of their local authorities, so I hope that she will approach today's debate in that vein. Members have sensibly set out the main causes of the problem. First, people have migrated to London and there has been an accompanying rise in birth rates. Secondly, there have been changes to London's housing stock. People who would have moved out of the borough when their children got older are now not doing so because of the state of the property market and perhaps because of improvements in education provision. That has certainly happened in my local authority area. Thirdly, the economic downturn means that parents who would have educated their children in the private sector either cannot afford to do so now, or are worried that they may not be able to afford it in the future. Those are the main drivers. I hope that the Minister does not say that local authorities should have predicted all that. The Government did not predict what was going to happen in relation to migration or in terms of an economic downturn, so it is difficult to see how local authorities should have been able to predict 12 months ago that that sort of thing was going to happen. It is unexpected and exceptional and I think that the Minister needs to acknowledge that when she responds. There is clearly a significant problem. London Councils has set out what it considers to be the financial implications. Its figures show a shortfall of £260 million in the current spending review period associated with the additional capital funding that is required and a shortfall of £480 million over the next spending review period from 2011 to 2014. Substantial sums are needed to address the problem. Hon. Members have carefully set out the impact in their local authorities. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Burstow) said, the key is how the transfer rate changes and that rate depends on lots of factors, including parents moving in and out of the borough and so on. If there is a 90 per cent. transfer rate—in other words, 90 per cent. of the children born in the borough continue in primary schools when they reach five—some £22 million would be required and if the transfer rate is lower, perhaps nearer the transfer rate of 85 per cent. that used to apply, £10 million would be required. Whether the problem is seen at London level or at local authority level, we are talking about substantial sums. Other boroughs have drawn up figures. Lambeth, for example, has identified a £16 million shortfall in what it needs to provide places, and we have heard about Richmond. There are similar problems outside London, for example, in Kent. So the Minister needs to respond to a London issue and a wider-than-London issue. In terms of solutions, we and, I am sure, the Minister have received briefings from London Councils that set out how it thinks the matter should be dealt with in terms of additional emergency capital grants. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton made that point in his concluding remarks. I hope that we will receive a considered, positive response from the Minister, because otherwise we are into Alice in Wonderland politics, with the banks having literally hundreds of billions of pounds invested in them to bail them out of a disaster that they created themselves through their greed and incompetence, for which they are rewarded with pensions 30 times a teacher's salary, yet schools being starved of funding despite a real need for investment in our primary schools to create new school places and investment that will create jobs and provide a long-lasting legacy for our children. I am sure that the Minister does not want that to happen—I am that she is not in the business of Alice in Wonderland politics—and that she will, therefore, come forward with a concrete response and agree to meet my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton and I to talk about our local issues. I also hope that she will do so, on a wider London basis, with other hon. Members who have been affected by this problem.