Month: July 2010

Let me annoy some bloggers by raising this issue again. Some said I was not good at this subject. Others implied I had little right to comment. I am a child of the Anglican tradition. I have every right to comment on the Church’s future, as it remains the established Church whose deeds have to be reported to Parliament and in some cases approved by Parliament.

There are two concerns mentioned against the Synod’s decision to move towards women bishops. Some traditionalists are unhappy with women bishops, as they think it wrong. I am afraid they either have to live with the majority decision, or join a Church which has no women bishops. They did, after all, live reluctantly with the majority decison to have women priests. Some worry that others will join the Catholic Church, and see this as a needless weakening of the Anglican communion. It is true the Pope wishes to recruit from amongst those who do not like this development. It is not necessarily true that the Church would have more members if it deneid women access to the priesthood as a career.

The truth is the Anglican Church could lose people from the other wing if it did not make this change. The evangelical Churches are often dynamic and also looking to recruit. That is why it is best for the Church to make its own decision based on the merits of the case, and then to go out and be proud of what it has decided.

It might also conclude that just as the Pope has offered a home for Anglicans who do not like a feature of the Church of England, maybe the Anglican Church could think of some features of the recent practise of the Catholic Church that might lead Catholics to join the C of E. The traffic need not be all one way, especially if the Anglican Church has now made up its mind and can defend its decisions.

Yesterday during debates on the Finance Bill in the Commons Labour wheeled out their old friends tax evasion and avoidance. They do not like either avoidance or evasion, but they were always with them during their years in charge. They are almost allies, because they allow Labour to work off their prejudices against enterprise and success. They give them an alibi for the deficit. If only, they intone, the Treasury would clamp down effectively on tax evasion and avoidance we would be spared the “cuts”. Let me make it clear before Labour try another of their lies about me that I too condemn tax evasion and wish the tax law to be properly enforced against crooks. Sensible tax planning is a different matter, as Labour only reluctantly accepts.

On Labour MP figures there could be as much as £120 billion of missing tax. The last Labour government was more modest, quantifying it at £40 billion but failing to collect it. After 13 more Labour years of anti avoidance Labour MPs have concluded there is still a bigger than ever golden hoard waiting to be collected by the white knights of the Revenue.

They did not have much of a response when I asked them why they had been unable tocollect this elusive treasure during their 13 years in office. They were even more dismayed when I pointed out that quite a lot of the avoidance was the result of policies the Labour government put in or supported to encourage various types of approved behaviour.

National Savings, for example, sells tax free savings products. Labour always approved of this and sold a large amount of such products to savers who did not want to have to pay tax on the interest on their savings deposits or bonds. This is tax avoidance with a purpose – the purpose of paying more easily for excess government spending.

Then there is the case of the investment allowances against Corporation Tax. Labour was busily defending those from planned reductions. They think it’s a good idea to encourage more investment by offering people a tax break from profits tax for doing so. It’s another type of approved avoidance, which was nonetheless included in the figures they were using for the tax avoidance they needed to clamp down on!

For more of the argument please see the text of my remarks under speeches on this site, to be posted later today.

This morning the outgoing Head of Ofsted was explaining her approach to bad teachers. She claims today that every school is likely to have a bad teacher, and that some good can come of that. She says she is not recommending they have one.

The BBC gave her a very gentle interview, inviting her to move towards her media critics. She did go on to say that there were too many bad teachers in schools. She told us that this resulted from Head teachers and Governors thinking it was too difficult to remove bad teachers. They feared legal recriminations if they did.

Exactly. So where has Ofsted been over the last decade? Why weren’t they pressing for changes to the law to allow the speedy removal of bad teachers? Children only get one chance of a good education. Why didn’t they go into the schools and help Headteachers by revealing bad teaching in their reports, strengthening the hand of any Head who wanted to make changes?

The single most important issues raised with me in recent years by Heads and senior teachers (“members of the management team” as they are now called) has been this issue of how to deal with teacher quality. I have urged mentoring and teaching the teachers in each school. I have backed Teaching First to get new entrants into the profession who have energy and good qualifications. I have opposed changes to the law that make it more difficult to ask someone to leave who is not doing a good job.

In the private sector companies dismiss the salesman who is not selling or the quality manager who cannot deliver enough first quality product in each batch. Sacking anyone is a sign of failure. It means someone chose the wrong person, or managed them badly. However, it is a necessary evil if you cannot find some other way of putting right the institutional mistake.

I was told recently about one Head who tried to dismiss a poor teacher. It took him six months to go through all the procuedures. He had many a sleepless night worrying, as there was always a fear of a backlash against him for trying to do it. The atmosphere did not welcome taking action to improve.

Today I hope Mr Gove at Education questions will tackle the issue of good and inspiraitonal teaching. More of that can make up for older school buildings, and is an even more important issue than the capital programme. If he has good proposals to tackle the bad teacher problem, and good proposals to remove or improve all the quangos that bestride Labour’s educational bureaucracy, we might start to make some progress towards better education.

Sorting out the budgets should be the easy bit. The sooner he tells which school improvements we are paying for out of taxes the better. The sooner he frees some more money from cutting more of Labour’s unsuccessful bureaucracy, the better.

We learn today that the £30 m a year Partnerships for schools quango was responsible for providing Mr Gove with a list of the projects that were going ahead and the projects which could be cancelled under Building Schools for the Future. This body is led by Mr Byles, on a salary of £216,000 a year.

If this body is unable to provide a simple accurate list of the new school buildings it presides over, what is the point of it? Can we please save the £30 million a year? The old system of schools working out their capital needs and then submitting proposals for government money to their paymasters was a cheaper and better one. What need have we of all the consultants, memo writers and quango kings that have muscled in on the act?

I thought Andrew Lansley’s decision to stop the £75 million a year advertising campaign lecturing us on what to eat and not to eat would be one of the least contentious cuts. On Friday night the Any Questions audience, egged on by Margaret Hodge and John Harris from the Guardian, contained many who felt this was crucial to our survival as a nation. In their world people will eat the wrong things, get fat and ruin their lives, unless a caring government spends some money on telling them they should not do so.

I explained that the government was inviting the food and retail industries to spend some of their large advertising budgets on consumer advice on healthy diets and lifestyles, as some already do. This was a blue rag to the socialist bulls. The laughed and scorned the food and retail companies, and argued that you could not trust such institutions to undertake this crucial public interest role. They seem to imply they don’t mind if their consumers become fat and suffer the consequences of poor diet and cannot be trusted.

I pointed out that food manufacturers and retailers in the UK produce a stunning choice of foodstuffs in a wide range of outlets. I could have added that in many places now there is 24 hour access to good quality food in the stores. Choice, keen pricing and high quality have resulted from the competition we enjoy.

A part of the audience was underwhelmed, claiming to dislike the very shops they rely on for their daily bread and milk. It is their money and their choices which sustains the successful larger chains. Those chains keep close to the opinions of their customers, and are happy to include health promotions, and community good works in their approach.

Cancelling the government advertising would make a modest contribution to sorting out the deficit withough losing something of value. Margaret Hodge was unable to answer two simple questions. Why did obesity rise under Labour if these ads were so useful? How many people do what a government ad tells them to do, unless it is reminding them of a legal duty with penalties for non compliance?

Last night I was not surprised by the arguments used by Margaret Hodge and her Guardian helper. Labour have gone straight into the public sector Union trenches. They plan to fight every cut, and make any discussion of improved public sector economy or efficiency into the actions of unacceptable axemen from the “Condems”, as they unkindly call the Coalition.

It was as if the last thirteen years had not happened. There is no sense that they left things in a parlous financial state, not even a memory that their last act in office was to pass legislation requiring that the next government halve the deficit, mainly by revising down Labour’s own plans for substantial increases in public spending. On capital spending there is complete amnesia. The Coalition government has decided to spend exactly the same amounts on new schools, hospitals and transport systems as the outgoing government. Because this was the one area which Labour did cut, they are now up in arms about the cuts they planned but failed to specify in detail.

What did interest me was the audience reaction. There was a strong body of support for any proposition that required the expenditure of more public money. It showed that Labour will find an audience for its advocacy of higher public spending, even at a time of national financial crisis over the levels of state borrowing and debt.

The Coaliton government needs a strategy for handling this situation. I think the government must present in a calm and measured way the truth about the figures. All too many people think that public current spending is going to be slashed. They express surprise when I point out the government plans to increase this spending from £600 billion in the last Labour year to £690 billion in 2014-15, with modest increases each year. If the public sector works together and accepts these figures, it should be possible to provide a good level of public service in all the important areas. There is no need to cut schools or hospitals or policing by 25%. There will be even more money for these core services, if there are 100% cuts in needless, wasteful and less desirable spending of the kinds we have often talked about on this site.

The government also needs to come up with some answers on its school building programme quickly. Many of us are happy to see an expensive and cumbersome way of building new schools swept aside, as Michael Gove has done with the Schools for the future programme. What we need to see is what projects we will then get for our money and how he will allow or approve the building of better value schools. I appreciate work needs to be done to sort this out, but Labour will occupy any vacuum, play on any uncertainty in the meantime.

The endless rows over “cuts” at a time when public spending continues to rise in cash terms highlights yet again the totally different approach to public service by the private and public sectors.

In 2008-9 many private sector companies faced declines in their revenue of 25% or more. This was all far more horrific than the cash figures for the public sector this year and next. I do not recall these companies appearing in the media telling us they would have to take lumps out of their service to customers, identifying in public ways they could make their service or product worse, or proposing strikes to complain about the loss of public revenue support.

Instead they got on with the difficult but essential task of bringing costs down to meet the reduced revenue. Managers and workers worked together to reduce stocks, cut costs without damaging customer service, accepted pay freezes or even cuts in remuneration for the bad times, lost pension benefits and bonuses, negotiated cheaper purchases from suppliers. They often also at the same time worked on how they could improve their service or product for customers.

I am pleased to see the government seeking to cut out the inessential, and press the message of value for money within the public sector. Councils, the remaining quangos, MPs and others need to learn the same approach.

I find it difficult to believe that the Anglican Church has made such heavy weather of women Bishops. They made the crucial decision to have women vicars years ago. How can they deny their female employees the chance of promotion? Today’s Synod should just get on with it, and allow any woman who is capable of doing the job to be able to compete for it.

What text from the Bible do they use to deny them? Do the so called conservatives deny the important role of Mary Magdalen in the Bible story? Do they acknowledge that women were important in the early Church, just as they are often more numerous in the congregations of the contemporary Church?

Gradually the Coalition government is restoring our lost liberties. They moved quickly to get rid of compulsory ID cards. Yesterday Mrs May announced the end to using counter terrorism powers to stop and search anyone without grounds to believe they could be a terrorist.

One of the worst features of the last government was the build up of the surveillance state, turning the cameras and state power against the innocent majority whilst claiming this was the way to catch the tiny minority who might be up to no good.

I raised the issue with the Prime Minister of the over use of guns, guards and gates in public buildings. These methods are unlikely to be effective against a determined opponent, as we have seen at the Commons. They just coarsen public life in an unpleasant way, and need to be changed.