Suffolk parents anxious over Labour VAT on school fees plans
I was delighted to be asked to contribute a monthly column to the EADT – and with fortuitous timing my first such piece coincides with the return of Parliament, for what promises to be a busy autumn. With a Conservative leadership election underway this week and a Labour budget to come in October - following a summer of speculation around potential tax rises - political life is unlikely to be quiet for the foreseeable future.
On the former, I have managed to maintain my position of remaining uncommitted to any individual leadership candidate until the hustings. I was the PPS – or Parliamentary aide – to both Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak, so breaking at the outset of their respective contests in order to support them was close to inevitable; I was also an early backer of Theresa May. However, in this case, the election result was so traumatic for our party that I want to take my time to see how each candidate performs under question from colleagues, before committing.
What am I looking for? I want someone who is able to level with our party and our country about the extent of the challenges that we face. Britain is and will remain a great nation, but to properly get our mojo back, we need a government that is open about the policy trade-offs needed to succeed.
For example, we can promise to reduce migration until we are blue in the face, but I’ve always argued that the number of legal arrivals will not fall significantly until we reform the welfare state. Simply, we have to ensure that the jobs migrants perform can be filled by our ‘local’ workforce, not least as this would arguably lead to higher wages over the long-term.
What we can be sure of is that we will not secure that elusive mojo – the notion of a UK where ‘everything works again’ and our economy is sustainably growing at a decent lick, year on year – if the current government’s growth ‘mission’ entails taxing and regulating entrepreneurialism out of existence. I will await the full detail of what Labour actually bring forward in terms of new taxes and business red tape, not least as all governments have a tendency to soften up the public for bad news by suggesting that Armageddon awaits… but as the ideas suggested so far would be very unlikely to inspire investment and business confidence.
But there is no speculation about Labour’s plans for taxes on education. Their moves to impose 20% VAT on private school fees are transparent and, unlike the situation with the Winter Fuel Allowance cuts, nobody can say that they didn’t warn us. The Government are going to make private schools much more expensive, and that is without dispute in any quarter.
What concerns me is that this tax change will have a very detrimental real-world impact. Indeed, I’ve already spoken to constituents at my surgery who are incredibly anxious about what to do. Affected families that I’ve engaged with are all similar in one particular regard: they are not wealthy. Rather, they have worked hard and saved hard to afford a fee-paying school because they think that’s what’s best for their children, even if it means scrimping along and avoiding luxuries such as foreign holidays.
In each case, they are profoundly concerned about whether there will be a good school place available for them, if their current private school passes on all or much of the VAT rise, and they conclude it’s unaffordable to continue. What I’m describing is the undoing of peoples’ life plans – I cannot think of anything worse to mark the hallmark of a new Government, but that’s the reality that is now dawning.
Certainly, it is hard to see how this policy will do anything other than increase pressure on state school places, and so I feel it makes one of my top constituency priorities even more salient – to ensure Labour continues with the multi-million pound rebuild of Ormiston Sudbury Academy. I was so pleased to help secure this investment under the last Government because I want the largest town in my constituency to have two secondary schools with the most modern facilities, given the previous rebuild of Thomas Gainsborough in Cornard.
I very much regret Labour’s abolition of the well understood one word OFSTED school descriptions – but I still hope that both schools in Sudbury could one day be ‘outstanding’ in all senses. Certainly, striving to improve our education offer in totality will remain one of my top priorities in the constituency and Westminster.
In the meantime, it may be all change in terms of a new Government and imminent new Conservative leader, but the privilege of representing South Suffolk remains as great as ever.
James Cartlidge is Conservative MP for South Suffolk.
Published in the East Anglian Daily Times.