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Tag: Damian Green

  • Damian Green – 2002 Speech to the Connect Think Tank

    Damian Green – 2002 Speech to the Connect Think Tank

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, to the Connect Think Tank on 1 June 2002.

    One of the symptoms of over-centralisation is the over-increasing complication and sheer number of tests that schoolchildren now go through. Let me make my attitude to this clear. Regular testing, in a simple and clear way, is essential.

    Publishing the results of the main national tests is also essential, to allow parents and others to know how schools are performing.

    But what is not essential, indeed what is actively harmful, is turning school years into a never-ending grind of exams. This is where we have now ended up, especially for 16-18 year-olds. The system after GCSEs has now reached saturation point.

    AS levels are one of those reforms that seemed like a good idea at the time. They have proved to be a failing attempt to widen the curriculum which has done more harm than good. They were meant to widen the experience of young people, but instead they have encouraged them to give up sport, music, drama, and other useful and enjoyable activities to make sure they succeed on the exam treadmill.

    Look at the figures. In 2000, 1,149 candidates complained about AS levels out of a total of 76, 427—a rate of 1.5%. In 2002 19,496 students complained out of 771, 893—a rate of 2.5%. One teacher from Suffolk who wrote to the Conservative Party Education Website summed it up perfectly: “The new AS exams are one set of exams too many.”

    Other correspondents to our website include two students: one, from Surrey, wrote

    ‘I have found that AS levels promote only anxiety concerning the burden of work and the inevitable exclusion of activities such as culture and sport. The system punishes the student who engages in either.’

    Another, from London, said: ‘I believe that pupils do sit too many exams which us preventing schools from giving children the rounded education they deserve. Summer sports such as cricket have virtually disappeared for the 15-18 year group in both state and independent schools due to the constant demands of the modular examination system.”

    There have been reports of individuals buckling under the stress. One girl fled from the exam hall in tears as she sat her fifth paper of the day. She had already faced her first four papers with only a ten-minute gap in between each. Another correspondent to our website said that at her college, in the first year of the introduction of AS levels, there were more cases of stress reported than ever before.

    In response to Parliamentary Questions from me Ministers have said that the number of external tests an average pupil will now take in a school career is over 45. Research by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has shown that a typical student of higher ability could face 95 exams through a school career.

    On the issue of AS levels I rather agree with John Dunford of the Secondary Heads Association, who said earlier this year: “If the Government is to introduce new reforms in secondary school qualifications it must address the problem of over-assessment and reduce the number of external exams.” My solution to this is to recognise that AS levels in their current form are the fifth wheel on the coach, and to get rid of them.

    After last year’s fiasco with exams, the Government promised a review. This year, they have promised another review. This is wholly inadequate. Our teenagers are being asked to do too many exams too often. Let’s act now to relieve the burden.

    There are a number of alternatives to the AS level system. We should be looking at the baccalaureate system as one option. Another is a General Studies Paper, which could encompass subjects not covered by the student’s main ‘A’ level subjects. A third is simply to encourage schools to teach non-examined subjects—exams are a measuring rod, not the purpose of education.’

  • Damian Green – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Spring Conference

    Damian Green – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Spring Conference

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, at the Conservative Party’s spring conference on 16 March 2003.

    A year ago Iain Duncan Smith told this conference that the Conservatives would take the fight to Labour on public services.

    If you need a reminder of why our drive for better schools is more important than ever, let me take you through the 12 months since we were last here.

    A year in the life of Labour’s Education Department. A year in which pressure from us, from parents, and from teachers forced Estelle Morris to resign. She went, saying she was useless. Six months later, many of her Cabinet colleagues still can’t quite understand why that’s a reason for resigning.

    As it’s Sunday, I am feeling charitable, so let’s start with the Government’s own assessment of its performance.

    Labour set themselves nine targets. They have had two hits, two near misses, and five failures. The Government describes this as ‘significant progress’. I wish my chemistry teacher had been that generous.

    But of course the real truth lies behind the missed targets.

    With the one in four children leaving primary school unable to read, write and count properly.

    With the 50,000 children playing truant everyday. Many of these children are probably already on the conveyor belt to crime.

    With teachers like the one in Surrey who not only suffered abuse and even death threats, but was then forced to take back the very pupils who had threatened him.

    With the 30,000 young people who left school this year without a single qualification, unskilled and unprepared for life in the working world.

    With the hundreds of thousands of A-level students who had their futures thrown into doubt by Government incompetence.

    And with the schools up and down this country that are cutting their budgets and laying off staff. Six years into to New Labour, and the council tax goes up, while the schools are cutting back.

    Look at that record and don’t tell me that New Labour is a One Nation Party. They are as deceitful and vindictive as Old Labour—just better dressed.

    And to cap this year of failure look at our universities. Students were told before the election there would be no top-up fees.

    There are now top-up fees. Students were told admissions will be on merit and potential. But that doesn’t apply if you go to the wrong type of school, or if your parents went to university or if they earn too much.

    Let me take this chance to assure you that a Conservative Government will scrap quotas, scrap the Access Regulator, remove secrecy in admissions policies and get rid of anything else that makes university admissions unfair. The best places should go to the best students—whatever their background—that’s the Conservative way.

    And since we are in the constituency of the Liberal Democrats Education Spokesman they deserve a word too. That word is dishonest. This is party that is against selection, unless you have a popular local grammar school. That says it has abolished tuition fees in Scotland, when you just pay them after the course, instead of during it. The only real LibDem contribution to education is creative maths. As in the LibDem canvasser who comes to the door, you ask him “What does two plus two make,” and he replies “What do you want it to make.” You know you can’t rely on the Liberal Democrats to attack Labour.

    But let me assure this conference: you will never hear me apologising for highlighting Labour’s failures time and time again.

    We have an alternative – a Conservative alternative – that will bring better schools and universities for our children.

    People often ask what is our message. I’ll tell you.

    Power to schools, power to parents.

    Because we believe that heads and teachers know how to run their schools best. And we believe that parents know which schools are best for their children.

    We already have some of the policies that will turn these principles into reality.

    We will create State Scholarships. These will give parents the right to decide which school deserves the money the state spends on their child’s education—not the politicians or the bureaucrats. And if there is no acceptable school nearby, we will encourage new schools to set up, funded by the state but run independently. That will give real choice to millions of parents for the first time—and that’s the Conservative way to drive up standards.

    And in all our schools, we will give heads and governors the power to decide how they run their schools, and where they spend the money.

    We will abolish the independent appeals panels that second-guess teachers’ decisions on disruptive pupils. And we will allow heads to use legally backed behaviour contracts, signed by the parents, to instil discipline in their schools. We won’t undermine the authority of the head and the teacher—we will back them against the disruptive child, and the disruptive parent.

    We will also cut back the National Curriculum, which has become too rigid. We will reduce the number of exams, because the purpose of school is to learn and to grow intellectually, not just to pass the next test.

    There will be much more to come. Our fresh thinking won’t stop there.

    A future Conservative Government will introduce a fairer funding formula for schools. It will make sure that, wherever they are from, children are supported on the basis of their need and not punished because of where they live.

    Of course children with problems deserve help. But a poor family in Surrey deserves help just as much as a poor family in South Shields. The current funding system for schools is arbitrary and unfair—we will get rid of it.

    In the coming months we will unveil our policy on vocational education, which for too long has been the second-class citizen in education.

    Iain Duncan Smith and I visited Holland recently where we saw children of 12 and 13 learning to rewire a room, and fit up a bathrooms all in the course of their normal lessons. They don’t see it as second best. Why should they? Let’s organise school time so that everyone can find something they are good at and want to concentrate on.

    And we will be turning our attention to the most vulnerable in our society – children with special educational needs.

    I believe the Government’s relentless policy of inclusion at all costs is harming the care and education of too many children. The closure of special schools threatens to rob us of vital centres of expertise forever. Those children, and the dedicated staff who work in those schools, deserve better.

    And we will have more to say on our university policy. It will be based on the principles that students deserve a fair admission system, universities need to be strong independent institutions, and opportunity needs to be offered to everyone. Just like our schools, our great universities will need rescuing from the damage this Government is doing, and we will be proud to come to the rescue.

    So the power we will give to schools and parents will mean a fair deal for everyone.

    The Labour way in education is to interfere, bully, discriminate, fiddle figures, tax, spend, and fail.

    The Conservative way will be to back heads, trust teachers, empower parents, take decisions locally, and above all promote choice as a route to excellence.

    We will not leave children behind in sink schools. We will not cheat deserving students out of their university places.

    We will reward hard work, good discipline, and those who aspire to the best.

    So tell them on the doorstep between now and May 1st. If you want a good school get a Conservative Council. If you want an education system we can all be proud of—get a Conservative Government.

  • Damian Green – 2003 Speech at the LGA Conference

    Damian Green – 2003 Speech at the LGA Conference

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, on 5 June 2003.

    Last summer when I addressed your conference in Swindon, I arrived to be greeted by the local paper, which had as its entire front page a strong attack on Estelle Morris for snubbing the LEA and letting down Swindon’s schools. It is interesting to see that 12 months on, with a new Secretary of State, there has been such a huge improvement in relations between the Department for Education and Local Government—or so David Miliband tells me.

    I am for obvious reasons going to talk today about the funding crisis that is hitting schools up and down the country, in areas controlled by different political parties, in urban as well as rural areas. But I want to be constructive. I want to devote most of my speech to positive proposals about the future freedoms we need to give to schools, and the future role for successful LEAs.

    I will just say a few words about the current fiasco. It is not often that a Conservative politician has the pleasure of quoting the New Statesman, so I will enjoy agreeing with Francis Beckett in last week’s magazine. He wrote “Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, has for three weeks focussed his formidable political intellect on the schools budget crisis. Unfortunately he has not focussed on solving it. He has focussed on shifting the blame.”

    Exactly right. I think the Government owes an apology to LEAs for trying to set them as the fall guys for this crisis. I have seen many of the letters your councils have written showing how much money you were passing to schools. Detailed, factual letters, which have blown out of the water the idea that there is a five hundred million pound gap where the money has simply disappeared. I think everyone here knows that the crisis has been caused by a toxic combination of a local Government settlement that treated some councils much better than others, and a raft of increased costs on our schools which all but cancelled out the extra money that was put in. Stir in a dash of fancy footwork with standards fund money and you have the current mess.

    So let’s spend today looking forward instead of back. What I think would be the worst outcome from this crisis would be a new funding system devised in a hurry, because the Secretary of State is having a fit of pique with Local Government. Whatever your views about how to fund our schools, policy making on the hoof, driven by a sense of crisis and the search for scapegoats, will always be bad policy-making.

    It is extraordinary to realise that in one part of the Whitehall jungle the Deputy Prime Minister is running a committee designed to provide an LEA-based solution for future school funding, which is told to report by the end of this month, and next door the Prime Minister’s officials are working hard on a solution which cuts out the LEAs altogether. We are told that the Education Secretary is in the second camp.

    This is a lousy way to make policy. If we are to have effective and long lasting policy, rather than eye-catching press releases and poor delivery, Policy needs to be considered and evaluated. It should not be a knee-jerk reaction to a crisis, however serious, and it should certainly not be used as an excuse to shift the blame for current problems.

    The first step towards devising a funding system which will stand a chance of being fair and durable is to set it in the context of a regime which gives a clear role to Local Education Authorities, and freedoms for schools so that they can be the driving force for improvements in standards.

    Every policy these days needs a road map. So I think there should be a road map by which schools can become genuinely autonomous institutions. I think there should be a radical cut in the power of Government to interfere in the day-to-day running of our schools. I want this because the decisions that will improve the performance of schools year after year have to be made by heads, teachers, governors and parents.

    The guiding principle, as I have said, is that schools run schools best. By far the biggest influence on the standards set by a school is the effectiveness of the Head. So I want to go much further than the rather half-hearted attempts at decentralisation that the Government has already set out. The concept of ‘earned autonomy’ is, by any standards, a nonsense. The phrase itself is an oxymoron. If you are autonomous you cannot have earned it from a higher authority. And in practice the policy of earned autonomy is being implemented a rather arbitrary and centralising way.

    So we will replace this with a concept of assumed autonomy. If a school wants to be autonomous, and they have met some transparent criteria about standards in performance, discipline and governance, it will be their choice as a school whether they accept autonomous status. If they do, they will have control over how you spend they money, which will come to the school in a direct lump sum, and therefore mean that they will have more freedoms in other key areas.

    This autonomy will give schools the choice to manage their own affairs, remain under the control of their local authority, or join a federation of other autonomous schools. They could choose to employ their own teachers, have control over their own spending, and decide from where they buy support services such as transport, payroll, or catering.

    My intention is that the vast majority of schools would qualify for these freedoms. Obviously those who are seeing poor results, unacceptable disciplinary standards, or problems with general governance will need to be helped to reach the acceptable standard. But these will be the exceptions. One of the key functions of OFSTED, which will continue to undertake inspections, will be to look at these schools to put them back to full health.

    Clearly if schools are to be given the choice to be autonomous there is a significant change in the role of the Local Education Authority. Good LEAs will have a role in providing services that schools do not want to manage for themselves. For example, transport in many rural areas, perhaps Special Education Needs, payroll services. I am sure that local authorities that have a good track record in providing support services will continue to find a ready market for their services. Indeed, those who do not have a good track record would find themselves considerably sharpened up if they wished to continue to be significant service providers.

    The other key role for LEAs will be monitoring the progress of schools, particularly those that are struggling. There is enough data—at least enough data—demanded of schools now for this to be monitored on a continuous basis without the imposition of any new form-filling. This would allow the LEA to act as an early warning system between OFSTED inspections.

    And there is a potential new role for LEAs under our scheme for State Scholarships, which will allow new schools, state-funded but not state-run, to meet the needs of parents who are dissatisfied with the current provision. We want to create a new type of school within the maintained sector, of particular benefit to those in the inner cities who so often are unable to exercise the choices about their children’s education which the middle classes take for granted. I believe that an excellent education should be within the reach of everyone regardless of their personal circumstances. Now if we are to allow new bodies, whether voluntary or private, to set up new schools there needs to be a gateway body through which they pass, to check they meet the criteria. This could be an important role for local authorities. Since we would abolish the surplus places rule to enable the creation of these new schools, this role would replace the school planning function at local authority level.

    So there is a role for good LEAs in my vision of the future. A role in providing services for schools that want them, helping to provide information for parents so that standards can be continuously monitored and improved, and acting as a gateway for new schools from new providers within the maintained sector.

    All of this will necessarily entail a simpler funding system. Before this recent crisis I hadn’t met many who thought that the current system was simple enough to understand, or fair enough to deal justly with the different needs of different areas of the country. In the aftermath of this crisis, I suspect I never will. We are close to the position in the old joke about the Schleswig- Holstein problem. Only three people understood it, and one had died, one had gone mad, and the third had forgotten the answer.

    So we are working on a national funding formula for schools, and for the education functions of local authorities. This would remove the need for central Government to set minimum levels of delegation and to ring fence budgets. Which will mean that many of the problems that have arisen this year will have less chance of rearing their heads in the future.

    It will also allow parents to compare funding levels in different areas, force Governments to defend the weighting applied to different factors, and allow good local authorities to use savings from administration for improved services. The funding formula per child in a given area would provide a base figure for the State Scholarships—money which would follow the child.

    Now do I have a detailed plan that I can hand out afterwards? No. I try to take my own advice, and decide policies slowly and carefully, in consultation with those who will have to implement them. I have already had a number of useful discussions with practitioners pointing out the various difficulties, and I know that the Education Commission under the Chairmanship of Sir Robert Balchin is also looking closely at this issue. I look forward to hearing their findings on the issue.

    What is important is not just getting this central policy right, but putting it in the right overall context. That context is the one I mentioned a few minutes ago, in which the most important decisions in the Education System are taken by heads, teachers, parents and governors, rather than politicians.

    I hope it is clear that I am not, by habit or inclination, a centralist. But I am also not an anarchist. All schools, however independent we can make them, need to demonstrate to the wider community on a continuous basis that they are doing well for their pupils. That is why I see a continuing role for OFSTED both in inspection and in providing advice so that improvement programmes can be set in place in schools with severe problems. The assessment of the progress of improvements will also be a job for OFSTED.

    What I want to see is a system of much more independent schools, fulfilling their obligations to their local communities in an open and transparent way, checked regularly by outside bodies, and buying services they need from their preferred supplier. The main drivers for improving standards in these schools would not be central Government targets; it would be the heads and teachers, answerable to parents who will have been given choice in a way that the current system denies them.

    In this system the role of Governors will be at least as important as before. Good Governors are crucial to a well-run school. We are looking at the size of current boards of Governors, to see if they are not too large in some cases, and also at the detailed responsibilities of Governors, to see if they are not too onerous. It may well be that a more strategic role is necessary, both to make the job feasible for busy people, and to allow Governors to concentrate on what they should be doing.

    There is a thread running through all the proposals I have set out this morning. It is the notion of trust. We all say we want a more responsive school system, which offers excellence in our inner cities as well as the leafy suburbs. But we will never achieve that spread of excellence by diktat from Whitehall, and we will certainly never achieve it if the Government uses the notion of reform as a chance to pass the buck.

    There is a route out of the current morass. It requires a policy that puts the school at the centre of improving standards, and gives the appropriate role to politicians at both local and national level. Only if we trust professionals and parents to know what they want and how it can be delivered will we release the latent energies and talents of everyone within our school system.

    It is not a risk-free option. Some schools will do better than others. Some schools will fail, as they do under any system. But what I become more convinced about with every new crisis in our school system is that we will never achieve excellence under a centrally-driven, top-down, Whitehall-dominated system which generates more initiatives than improvements, and which demoralises teachers, heads, and local authorities. We need a complete change of direction. At present a quarter of our children leave primary school unable to read, write and count properly. 30,000 leave secondary school without a single qualification. The culture of truancy is growing, with a 15 per cent growth in the number of truants since 1996/97. Nearly half of all fourteen year olds do not reach the required standards in English, Maths and Science. And finally, the DfES now sends out 20 pages of paperwork every day of the school year, a real sign of the Whitehall knows best culture.
    We need a complete change of direction away from centralisation and towards local control.

    The ideas I have set out are designed to achieve just that. If we bring them to fruition, we will be able to ensure that no child is left behind, and no child is held back by the failures of a distant civil servant or Minister. We must give every child a fair deal, and a real chance to fulfil his or her potential. That is what our schools can achieve, and that is what we must achieve if we are to become a successful and civilised community in this country.

  • Damian Green – 2003 Speech on Teacher Shortages

    Damian Green – 2003 Speech on Teacher Shortages

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, on 9 September 2003.

    I beg to move

    That this House notes that thousands of teaching posts have been lost in schools as a result of this year’s funding crisis; condemns the Government for failing to respond early enough to reports of these redundancies, instead seeking to lay the blame on local authorities; further condemns the Government for not using any of the Department for Education and Skills’ underspent money to alleviate this crisis; further notes that schools are having to ask parents for regular contributions to alleviate cash shortages; is concerned about the effect of these redundancies among teachers and support staff on the implementation of the Workload Agreement; and urges the Government to simplify the funding system for schools so that there will be no repeat of this year’s problems in the recruitment and retention of teachers.”

    I am sure that the House will understand, as I do, that the Secretary of State has a prior commitment at the TUC, which is why he is not with us today. I hope that he takes the opportunity to talk some of the teachers’ representatives who will no doubt be there. One reason for our calling this debate is to show that the Government are letting down not just those who rely on our public services but those who work in them. It is not only parents and children who have been hit by the Government’s school funding crisis but teachers, who are being made redundant in schools up and down the country. I am not surprised that teachers are angry—they have been betrayed by the Government’s false promises, and they will never trust them again.

    Ministers sometimes affect surprise that trust in the Government and especially the Prime Minister has disappeared. They seem puzzled that people no longer think that they are competent to run the public services. For an explanation they need look no further than the mess that they have created in our schools and their own performance in responding to this crisis since it became apparent earlier this year. This year, Ministers have provided the general public with a master-class in blunder and confusion. One moment we have protestations of innocence, while in the next breath the Government concoct a short-term and inadequate solution to the very problem that they just told the public did not exist at all.

    The history of the crisis is instructive. When questioned by the Select Committee on Education and Skills in July this year, David Normington, the permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Skills, told us when he began to feel that there were going to be problems with school funding in the year ahead. His answer to the Select Committee was that it was after the Secretary of State’s arrival

    “at the end of October and before Christmas, some time around then.”

    We now know that the Department knew before Christmas that the crisis was going to hit our schools. After Christmas, at the Secondary Heads Association conference, the Secretary of State said that there was no problem. Indeed, he had previously told the Association of Chief Education Officers that simply throwing more money at them would not solve their problems. Such a request, he said, showing less than his usual charm,

    “just floods straight over my head. I don’t listen to what you say quite frankly”.

    I am sure that the association responded in kind.

    I ought to have been apparent to the Secretary of State and other Ministers that not only was the local government settlement likely to cause difficulties but that many other matters under the direct control of the Government were going to cause problems, not least the Chancellor’s insistence on increasing employers’ national insurance contributions, which hit schools particularly hard—characteristically, 80 per cent. of a school’s budget is taken up with staff costs—and the decision to increase employers’ pension contributions, which came straight off the bottom line of school budgets. The bulk of the crisis has therefore been caused by decisions made inside government.

    I therefore agree with my hon. Friend that the Secretary of State’s apparent ignorance of the fact that the crisis was going to happen, let alone the reason why it was happening, is quite extraordinary. I can only assume that he was convinced by the announcement by the Minister for School Standards that every local education authority

    “will be getting at least 3.2 per cent. per pupil increase for next year, with further increases in the following two years. No LEA will lose out in real terms as this new system is introduced”.

    That was the Government’s formal position in the early months of this year.

    I am afraid that it is sadly characteristic of the Government that, when they are faced with a problem, their first instinct is to look not for a solution, but a scapegoat. In this case, the scapegoat was to be local education authorities. I suspect that the reason why the Government gave up on their fruitless quest for a scapegoat had nothing to do with the merits of the case, but related to the fact that many Labour-controlled authorities throughout the country were pointing out that their schools were suffering in the same way as those of Conservative-controlled authorities, which became politically unhelpful to them.

    In May, in response to many LEAs of all political colours, protests from schools and the rising number of complaints about the crisis, the Department finally announced that it would allow schools to set deficit budgets and that they would be allowed to use their capital budgets for paying teachers’ salaries. That was he first signal that the Department was beginning to accept the scale of the problem. However, I remind Ministers of what we said at the time. Allowing schools to dip into money intended for capital projects as well as their reserves risks storing up even greater problems for the future. The scale of the problems that the Government have stored up with that approach to the problem is now beginning to become clear.

    Many head teachers have said that when a school is engaged in a major capital project, it is extremely likely that it will be carried out during the summer holidays. Given the need to book builders, it is likely that arrangements will have been made for this year long before the Government gave permission for the money to be spent elsewhere. Their gesture was therefore moderately futile as well as ill timed.

    Labour Members will have a lot of explaining to do to head teachers who have been told to use their capital budgets for revenue spending.

    Let me quote Nick Christou at East Barnet school, just one of the many affected head teachers, who has had to divert £90,000 from capital projects. He said:

    “The money that I had was for repairing the roofs because they are leaking all over the place—in the maths office and textile technology room for a start. But we have to use it and run with our leaky roofs for one more year. We will just have to put buckets underneath them.”

    In Labour-controlled Ealing, schools are using between 70 and 100 per cent. of their reserves just to avoid another crisis this year. The Government’s first response merely stored up a worse crisis for years to come.

    Even once the Department and its Ministers had accepted that there was a problem, there was still an enormous gulf between the reality of life in our schools and the purported facts coming from the Government. Even in June, some in the Government were unwilling to accept the scale of the problems. On 11 June, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister

    “how many teachers are facing redundancy right now?”

    The Prime Minister replied:

    “According to the Department for Education and Skills, there are about 500 net redundancies.”

    We now know that that answer grossly underestimated the problems that schools have been facing. As my right hon. Friend said at the time

    “The reality is that the figures for redundancies are that, this year, three times as many will face the sack as last year.” —[Official Report, 11 June 2003; Vol. 406, c. 673–74.]

    Absolutely. All that I can say to my hon. Friend is that I hope that Ministers will apologise to the head, teachers, parents and governors at her school and at many others that face similar problems.

    By midsummer, even Ministers had stopped trying to bluster their way out of the crisis. Extraordinarily, one of their partial solutions was to scrap one of their own flagship policies—the school achievement award. That was truly bizarre. Only in May, the Minister for School Standards had said:

    “It is right to reward the staff whose work helps pupils to learn and today’s awards celebrate their achievements”.

    Two months later, the Secretary of State announced that too many teachers had been allowed to go to the top pay levels too quickly. In the next month, he announced that the Government would be scrapping the policy that was, according to them, intended to
    “celebrate the work of the entire school community”.

    Clearly, 2003 is not the year to be a teacher under this Labour Government. Last week, the Secretary of State finally came close to apologising to the thousands of children facing the new school year with fewer teachers. In a webcast to welcome the new academic year, he said:

    “The government make mistakes, certainly I do, my colleagues do, and the handling of the schools’ funding last year was a good example of that which I am determined to put right this year.”

    In these circumstances, with so many teachers experiencing redundancy or facing the threat of redundancy, I am amazed that the Government have the nerve to run expensive TV advertising campaigns for teacher recruitment. There is something surreal about watching a news programme that contains an item about teachers losing their jobs just before an advert urging people to become teachers. I congratulate Ministers on their latest advert, which features large numbers of headless people. As a piece of post-modern irony commenting on the Department’s performance this year, it cannot be beaten.

    If the Secretary of State had admitted culpability when these problems first arose, and had created a real solution instead of merely putting off the inevitable, perhaps we would not be in a situation in which one school in five are asking parents to make contributions to keep the school system going and in which a survey by the Secondary Heads Association and The Times Educational Supplement found that 2,700 teaching posts had not been filled and that 700 teachers have been made redundant. Only months ago, the Prime Minister was talking of losses in the order of 500 teachers.

    The articles head line was staff cuts running into thousands”, and it gives what it calls the “critical numbers”, stating that 2,729 teachers and 1,152 support staff have not been replaced because of lack of funding. The TES goes on to say that there have been 730 teacher and 301 support staff redundancies; that there are 1,881 unfilled teacher posts; and that, of teachers appointed, 4,246—16.6 per cent.—were judged unsatisfactory by heads.

    The Minister also knows that the increase in the school population means that approximately 1,000 teachers are needed to keep pupil-teacher ratios steady and that the Government have failed to do that. Perhaps he will turn to the inside pages of The Times Educational Supplement, which paint an even bleaker picture.

    The head of the Royal Grammar school in High Wycombe has pledged £15,000 of his salary to ease his school’s budget problems. The school caretaker is offering £5 a month. In East Anglia, one comprehensive school is considering charging for textbooks. One school in London—the London Oratory, which, I dare say, is familiar to senior members of the Government—is asking parents for an increase of £5 in the monthly £30 contribution that they already make. The school made it clear that the call for extra money is a direct result of the funding cuts for many schools in southern England that the Government announced early this year. The Oratory started term last week with fewer teachers.

    Ministers appear peculiarly reluctant to accept the facts that everyone else acknowledges to constitute an accurate description of life in our schools today. Their immediate reaction to the Secondary Heads Association survey was simply to rubbish it. It was followed by a survey of local education authorities in The Guardian that showed similar results. Ministers must stop pretending that the rest of the world is out of step.

    In 55 local authorities, more than 1,000 full-time teaching posts have been lost through redundancies and schools opting not to replace teachers who leave for other reasons. If that pattern were repeated in all local education authorities, approximately 2,500 teaching posts would be lost. We have a consistent set of numbers, which everyone, except the Government, recognises.

    In the Minister’s authority, 17 teaching posts have been lost. The LEA told The Guardian:

    “Schools have set budgets by using their high levels of carry-forward balances.”

    In the Secretary of State’s authority, 11 teaching posts have been lost and French and German classes are being cut in schools, which can simply no longer afford them. The Government tell us that they want to revive language teaching in schools, yet schools are having to cut such classes because of the Government’s funding policies.

    Not only teachers but support staff are suffering. According to The Times Educational Supplement, on top of the 301 support staff who have been made redundant, 1,152 support staff have not been replaced because of lack of funding. There are also problems with cuts in the capital budget that the Government have forced on schools. One can only spend one’s capital once.

    What do Ministers say to Roland Waller, the head of Morley High in Leeds, who said:

    “We have protected staffing by cutting repairs and maintenance to the bone this year. Upgrades to classroom furniture will be virtually zero and our rolling programme of redecoration and refurnishing has been curtailed.”

    Only yesterday, Anne Welsh, the new president of the Secondary Heads Association, said that this year’s cash crisis would have repercussions for many years. She said that problems were exacerbated because

    “It is increasingly difficult to persuade young teachers to take on the responsibility of middle management roles, which is very worrying given that most in leadership positions are within 10 years of retiring.”

    We are not therefore considering a one-year crisis; it will linger in schools for years.

  • Damian Green – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Damian Green – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, at the Conservative Party conference held in Blackpool on 6 October 2003.

    In 1996 Tony Blair stood on this spot and famously said that his priority was education, education, education.

    Did he mean it ? Or had the autocue stuck? Whether it was truth or spin, it lacked the fundamental ingredient of substance. And ever since, his Government has betrayed teachers, parents, pupils and students.

    In those days, New Labour asked us to trust them. Trust them with the health service. Trust them to make our streets safer. Trust them to educate and train the next generation of doctors, teachers, builders and plumbers.

    Trust them? I would rather trust John Prescott to mark GCSE English.

    Labour failures

    Let’s look at the facts. One in three children leave primary school unable to read, write and count properly. One in three!

    This year, more than 30,000 children left secondary school without a single GCSE. 30,000!

    And up and down the country teachers have been made redundant and schools are plunging into deficit because this Government gives money with one hand, takes it away with the other, and then hopes that nobody notices.

    Well let me tell Gordon Brown and Charles Clarke. Parents, governors and teachers have noticed the way you have betrayed our schools. We don’t forgive you, and nor will they.

    What have six years of New Labour brought to our schools?

    · The confidence in our exam system destroyed
    · Teenagers taking so many exams that they have to give up sport, music and drama
    · Teachers spending hours filling in forms instead of teaching
    · And above all, dozens of useless targets set by Ministers

    Charles Clarke used the targets to say that incompetent heads should be, in his words, ‘taken out’. But when he missed the key Literacy and Numeracy targets in primary schools, he just changed the date by when he needed to hit them.

    So under Labour, when teachers miss their target the teacher gets sacked. But when ministers miss their target the target gets sacked.

    It’s typical. From Education, to Transport, Defence and Health, right up to No 10 itself, this is a Government full of Ministers who refuse to take responsibility, and who never ever own up.

    Let’s look at some of their initiatives. Labour doesn’t want violent pupils excluded from school. In the real world that means that the small disruptive minority can cause havoc in our classrooms. It is time to give classroom control back to the teachers where it belongs.

    Too many children have been turned off school altogether. Whose fault is this? Not the teachers.

    Two years ago, when Iain gave me this job, I stood here and said I would not blame teachers for things going wrong. And two years on I am more convinced than ever that most teachers are hard-working conscientious professionals who want the best for their children—and this Party recognises that.

    Underneath all their talk of celebrating good teachers, the Government has simply failed to trust them. That’s why teachers, and heads, and governors, and parents no longer trust this Prime Minister and his Government.

    I talk to teachers all the time. They tell me why they joined the profession. How they believed that they could inspire the children they taught. And I have seen lessons that really inspire me.

    I sat in on a lesson about Thomas Aquinas where 14-year-olds in a London comprehensive discussed his theory of the proof of God’s existence from the argument of First Causes.

    I know everyone in this hall will be familiar with the theological niceties of all this.

    But listening to a teacher guide a discussion on Thomas Aquinas in a class roughly one third Christian, one third Muslim, and one third with no religion at all was a real lesson in how to bring the best out of all our children.

    So of course good things are happening in many of our schools. But teachers also tell me other things.

    They tell me about their fear that they may be beaten up. Every seven minutes of every school day there is an attack on a teacher.

    Their sadness that at least one member of their class is unlikely to turn up, out truanting with fifty thousand others every day.

    And their disappointment that this Government, and its constant interference, is telling them how to teach their class and how to run their schools.

    So Government meddling lies at the root of these serious problems.

    We will change all that.

    And we are the only party that will deal with the real problems of discipline and standards.

    The Liberal Democrats held an education debate at their conference. Faced with the huge challenges in our schools and universities, what was the big Lib Dem idea?

    Compulsory sex education for 7-year-olds.

    And this from a party that wants to be taken seriously.

    The Conservative Approach to Schools

    Our approach will deal with the real problems. Let me tell you how we will tackle them.

    I have a unique ambition for a politician. I am the first aspiring Education Secretary to want less power not more.

    That’s because our Conservative approach, which we will all be laying before you this week, is about taking power away from the Ministries and giving it back to the British people.

    Trust the people. It was always the approach that served us best and this Conference will see us set out new policies that come from our fundamental beliefs – that local is better than central, and that power should be dispersed, not concentrated.

    Our Party is at its best when it spreads wealth and opportunity. Twenty years ago we gave millions of people their first chance to buy their council house and gain control over their lives.

    We, the Conservative Party, will now give millions of parents their first chance to choose a school they really want for their children, and gain control over how their children learn.

    Council house sales defined the new freedoms that transformed this country in the 1980s. Today I am launching our Better Schools Passport.

    These will define new opportunities that will transform our education system.

    Quite simply, these passports will give the money that the state spends on their child’s education to the parents, and let the parents decide in which school it should be spent.

    It will be a passport to a better school for all children.

    It will offer a radical extension of school choice. It will allow all children to aspire to an excellent education.

    We will start in the inner cities, where the problems are worst.

    Today I am announcing that the Passports will be piloted in big cities including Inner London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

    And then we will introduce them to the rest of the country bringing real choice to all parents in all schools in all areas.

    Our scheme will give parents access to new schools, funded by the state but run independently, to meet the needs of those parents who can’t find the right school for their child.

    The Better Schools Passport will revolutionise our school system.

    We will allow parents and other groups to create new types of school within the maintained sector.

    What sort of new schools? All sorts.

    Some parents want small schools. Some parents want traditional schools.

    Some parents want schools like the Tabernacle School in North London which Iain and I visited earlier this year. A school started five years ago by a black-majority church to help pupils, most of whom had been excluded from their previous school. These children now find that the small classes and firm but fair discipline enable them to achieve their full potential.

    This school symbolises a vision of hope that our inner cities desperately need.

    It is a vision of hope that all parents want.

    And it is a vision of hope that only the Conservative Party, with our fundamental belief in freedom and choice, will provide.

    We believe that parents know what is best for their children. Not Tony Blair or Charles Clarke or me.

    Some parents will want a school that specialises in vocational education. And how much does this country need a vast expansion of technical schools, so that we can give a decent start in life to children with practical rather than academic abilities.

    And I will tell you one other type of school I am very confident parents will want. The sort of school where academic children from any background, rich or poor, are given a chance to stretch themselves.

    We already have 164 of these schools. They are called grammar schools and Labour and the Liberal Democrats still want to destroy them. We will support our existing grammar schools.

    And we will go further. Under this scheme we will see new grammar schools opening for the first time in a generation. They will provide a ladder out of deprivation for thousands of children, just like they used to.

    Labour politicians ask “Why do so few children from poor backgrounds go to university?” Well, I’ll tell them. It’s because they don’t go to schools that let their talents and intelligence and energy flow. Give them the right schools, with discipline and order and a love of learning, and they will have a chance of real academic achievement.

    Only a Conservative Government can give them that chance. We will give them a Fair Deal.

    Higher Education

    And we will transform the prospects of those who aspire to a university education. An aspiration that Labour’s lies and deceit on tuition fees are taking away.

    In 1997, Labour promised there would be no tuition fees. In 1998 Labour introduced tuition fees.

    In 2001, Labour promised there would be no top-up fees. If Labour win the next election then by 2006 there will be top up fees.

    Labour’s tuition fees are a tax on learning which will leave students with huge debts and universities tied up in red tape.

    Let me tell you now, the first thing a Conservative Government will do is introduce a Bill to scrap tuition fees. Under a Conservative Government entry to university will be based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay.

    So take this simple message with you out of this hall and onto every doorstep in the country – under a Conservative Government families with children at university will face thousands of pounds less debt.

    Labour also wants to discriminate against pupils from good schools—saying that they are at an unfair advantage when they apply to university. What kind of bitter, twisted world do Labour politicians live in, when they try to penalise children for getting into a good school?

    A university place should be awarded on academic merit and potential, not as a result of social engineering and political meddling.

    Under a Conservative Government tuition will be free, and a degree will always be a meaningful and useful qualification.

    Conclusion

    Education used to be regarded by the pundits as a Labour issue. Well not any more.

    We now have schools where teachers are sworn at and assaulted. We have classrooms where teachers are afraid to innovate because Big Brother has told them exactly how to do their job. And we have universities where quantity has replaced quality as the main driving force.

    Six years of New Labour, and what have they done?

    They have messed up the exam system, downgraded key subjects, second-guessed teachers, hunted for scapegoats, insulted LEAS, demoralised professionals, overloaded governors, undermined authority, damaged confidence, ignored heads, wasted money, destroyed standards, created jargon, imposed dogma, interfered, fiddled, meddled, drivelled, bleated, huffed, puffed, and,
    as Alistair Campbell would put it, totally fluffed it up.

    At the next election we will offer a real alternative on education.

    Freedom for schools
    Trust for teachers
    Choice and diversity for parents
    And a fair deal for pupils and students

    That’s the way to give all children the start they deserve. Only a Conservative Government can deliver it – so let’s get out there and make sure we have one.

  • Damian Green – 2022 Speech on Achieving Economic Growth

    Damian Green – 2022 Speech on Achieving Economic Growth

    The speech made by Damian Green, the Conservative MP for Ashford, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2022.

    It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss).

    I rise to support many of the Bills in the Queen’s Speech. In particular, I wish to support the contention that slow growth is the long-term bane of the British economy, going back many decades, so I wholeheartedly welcome the fact that the Chancellor has made raising productivity, and therefore growth, his main task. The urgency of the task is only amplified by the scary inflation that we are currently experiencing. He is absolutely right to emphasise that as the central purpose of his chancellorship. In his excellent opening speech, the Chief Secretary made the point that there are three pillars to the Chancellor’s approach. I was going to mention five; I hope the number having gone up so quickly is not another sign of rapidly rising inflation.

    On top of the pillars that the Chief Secretary mentioned, I would add and commend the idea, which was in the Queen’s Speech, of spreading economic activity and opportunity all across the country. If all the UK was as productive as London and the south-east, UK GDP would be boosted by some £180 billion—as the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) mentioned, many figures flying around today, but that is a very significant and simple one. We would all—all over the country—be significantly richer if we could make the less productive parts of the country as productive as the most productive parts. Therefore, those bits of the levelling-up Bill that are about spreading activity and opportunity are central to the success of our economic policy over the next couple of years. We may wish to return to the planning parts of that Bill in a later debate.

    Skills, as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury mentioned, are essential, so I very much welcome the Schools Bill. School education is about much more than preparing for economic life, but consistently higher standards in our schools will give us a more productive workforce, and therefore greater wealth and, in the end, more leisure time. It is one of the bases on which we need to build not just a healthy society, but a healthy economy.

    Science and technology, which my right hon. Friend did not mention, is the other element that I would add. Again, successive Governments, going back more than half a century—as far back as Harold Wilson—have emphasised the need to harness science more effectively to give us a long-term advantage in a competitive world. One thing we have learned over those many decades is that it needs to be done in a focused way. In that regard, the genetic technology Bill is particularly welcome. It covers one specific, but hugely important, area in which we ought to have an international advantage and that we should wish to exploit.

    My right hon. Friend mentioned infrastructure. In a week in which we have seen Crossrail operating, we should all celebrate the fact that we can, even if slightly belatedly, build grands projects in this country. I hope that the transport Bill, when we see the details of it, will encourage not just Government activity but innovation, which is hugely important and the fifth point that my right hon. Friend mentioned. Innovation is the most difficult thing to legislate for. It requires an attitude of mind, a culture, that grows from a tax system that encourages risk taking, an education system that provides the necessary skills, and the opportunities for people to make a difference, particularly in their own area.

    Nadia Whittome

    On that point, does the right hon. Member agree that climate education in schools—from primary through to secondary and vocational courses—is essential if we are to meet our legally binding targets of net zero by 2050?

    Damian Green

    I am sure that, like me, the hon. Lady spends a lot of time visiting schools in her constituency. I am struck not only by the standard of teaching in that area, but by the enthusiasm and engagement of young people on that issue, which is very important.

    I am afraid, however, that the Government’s legislative proposals threaten to take us in the wrong direction in another innovative sector in which Britain is world class: the creative industries. Any Government would want to support, encourage, and, above all, listen to those industries when considering the future, but in that regard I have reservations about the media Bill. The Government’s own White Paper on broadcasting, “Up Next”, which was published last month, says:

    “The UK’s creative economy is a global success story, and our public service broadcasters (PSBs) are the beating heart of that success. They produce great British content loved across the UK and the world over. The government wants it to stay that way.”

    Good, so do I, and so do millions of people who value the BBC, Channel 4, as well as ITV and Channel 5; they all do a good job. What worries me, looking at the White Paper and the announcements made, is that the Government’s warm words are not matched by sympathetic actions. Let us take Channel 4 first. The Government had a consultation. There was an overwhelming desire to keep the ownership situation as it is, and that was ignored. In ignoring the consultation, the Government have argued that Channel 4 needs borrowing powers so that, in the end, it does not have to rely for borrowing on the state. Channel 4 has come up with a suggestion for a joint venture that would enable it to stay with its current ownership regime, but still access private capital. That was ignored. Instead, the Government insist on carrying on with privatisation.

    If we care about a successful sector—the creative sector is successful and the many small businesses that make programmes for Channel 4 are particularly successful—we should listen to it when it tells us how best to strengthen it for the future. As a Conservative, I find it extraordinary that we have a Conservative Government who are saying, “The gentleman from Whitehall knows best” and that they are deciding how best to run this part of the sector, ignoring the small businesses that make it up. I thought that listening to small business was a core Conservative aim, but we seem not to be doing so.

    Let us go from the abstract to the concrete. If this legislation goes through, which I hope it does not, Channel 4 could be bought by a big US player, in which case let us look in five years’ time at how much quirky, different, and innovative UK-based content is being made for Channel 4, particularly as it happens outside London and the south-east, outside the traditional broadcasting areas. It is also possible that ITV will buy it, which will mean a reduction in competition in the TV advertising market. Again, speaking as a Conservative, I thought that competition was one thing that we believed in and wanted to encourage.

    Beyond Channel 4, the Government plan to move onto the BBC. They are rightly consulting on the future funding of this hugely important national institution, but it is slightly difficult to take a consultation seriously when, at the outset, the Secretary of State has announced her conclusion, which is that the licence fee has had its day. It is an arguable position, but it is unarguable that it makes the whole consultation look like a sham. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, of which I am a member, looked at this issue last year and, broadly speaking, concluded that for all the disadvantages that it has—we know what they are—the licence fee was the least bad option for the coming years. Let us have a proper debate on this hugely important and complex issue, and not a sham consultation where the verdict has been given before the evidence has been considered. Again, let us listen to the voices of those who have made our creative sectors such a big economic contributor to the country and something to be really proud of in modern Britain.

    In conclusion, there is very much that I welcome in the Queen’s Speech, but I hope the Government will listen on some issues, because, otherwise, there is a danger of stifling growth in one of our best economic sectors. Britain needs a thriving creative sector and the creative industries need a Government who will support and nurture them by creating a regulatory climate in which they can thrive, creating jobs and wealth, and also experiences and memories that the British people will share with each other. I am sure that this House will help the Government achieve that end.

  • Damian Green – 2002 Speech at Conservative Spring Forum

    Below is the text of the speech made by Damian Green, the then Conservative Education Spokesperson, at Conservative Spring Forum on 23 March 2002.

    Most of this session is for you to make your points and ask questions, but I just want to say a few words at the outset about the state of our education system, and our Party’s approach to making it better.

    Since we are in Harrogate, the constituency of the Liberal Democrats’ Education Spokesman, I should as a matter of courtesy refer to the LibDems policy. Well, policies really, because it depends where you are. This is the party that votes to abolish grammar schools in Parliament, but defends them locally. That says it supports church schools, as long as they have nothing to do with religion. Today I can unveil a new LibDem policy, on the numeracy hour. The LibDems will ask the pupil what two plus two makes, and then agree with the answer.

    But many of today’s problems in our schools stem from the Government. Five years ago education was the number one priority. Now, schools are rarely on his mind, even on the occasions when he visits this country. But even he can’t believe that it’s all wonderful. There are schools where classes have had 13 different teachers in 14 weeks. Truancy is up sharply since Labour came to power. Bullying is a real problem in far too many schools. Teachers are on strike for the first time in 20 years. Head Teachers are threatening industrial action for the first time since we created state education in 1870. 20 per cent of new teachers leave the profession within three years of starting—usually complaining about the unnecessary work caused by Government red tape.

    So it’s not all rosy. But nor is it all bad. One of my early tasks has been to immerse myself in the education system, which is why I spent a week in a comprehensive in south London, both learning and teaching. One heart-warming memory was of a class of 13-year-olds. They had been studying Twelfth Night, and the teacher said that there was a production on in London, and asked who wanted to see it. Every hand in the class shot up.

    It shows what can be achieved by an inspirational teacher, and it cheered me up no end to see that all those educational theorists who say that Shakespeare can mean nothing to modern inner city children from ethnic minorities are talking rubbish.

    And we too should take a lesson from that teacher. We should applaud the work done by teachers up and down this country every day. Teachers are not wreckers, Mr Blair. They are hard-working professionals who deserve respect. No Government will create a world-class school system without the enthusiastic involvement of our teachers.

    So our task over the coming months and years is to turn into practical policies our instinct to take power away from central Government and give it those who know and care most about education—parents, governors, teachers, and the local community. People often ask us the very fair question, what difference would you lot make?

    My answer is that, just as a first point, if I were Education Secretary instead of Estelle Morris far fewer directions and guidelines would pour out of the Department for Education. Teachers would spend their time teaching instead of filling in forms. Governors would be allowed to set the direction of the school. Local people, local councillors, would be trusted to know the local schools better than the Minister back in Whitehall.

    A Conservative Government would not interfere across the board. We would concentrate on the areas that need change. We would back heads who want to ensure discipline in schools. We would make our vocational education as good as the best of our academic education—because it’s just as important. And we would let schools reflect the needs of their local community, not the needs of the Government’s spin doctors.

    Estelle Morris and I both want excellence in our schools. The difference is that she wants to achieve it by ordering people about; I want to achieve it by trusting people. Her way is doomed to failure. You cannot run 25,000 schools from the Secretary of State’s office. Our way is to set standards of excellence, to back heads and teachers in maintaining discipline, and to trust local people to know what’s best for their children. That’s the practical way, the Conservative way, and with your help, I want to make it the way all our schools are run after the next Election.

  • Damian Green – 2004 Speech on British Hauliers

    Below is the text of the speech made by Damian Green to the Road Haulage Association’s Spring Conference in Portugal on 21 May 2004.

    “I was struck in my early weeks in this job that, for politicians, too often transport consists entirely of the railways, when rail provides only 6% of the journeys taken, and for most people road transport is much more important in their lives. All politicians are obsessed by polls, and it is instructive that MORI, in their regular polls about public attitudes to the parties in relation to the big permanent political issues, only ask about the parties’ policies towards public transport—no mention of roads and motoring. So I want to take a balanced and unemotional approach to transport planning.

    Having said which, of course rail and bus policies are vital. If we don’t get the railways right, for freight as well as passengers, then increasing numbers of people will take to their cars, or their trucks, in despair, adding to the congestion we all suffer from. John Prescott notoriously said “I will have failed if in five years time there are not fewer journeys by car.” Well traffic is up 7%, and motorway congestion is up 250%. So you can’t make our roads more effective without making the railways more effective as well.

    So with that as the background I want to set out three principles which will act the basis for our policies.

    First, Governments should give people genuine choice about the mode of transport they choose.

    Secondly, Long-term transport success will come from steady and predictable investment policies, sheltered from incessant political interference.

    Thirdly, The necessary investment levels will require private sector money, and this is as important for roads as it is for railways.

    Those are our guiding principles. What do they mean in policy terms? Indeed, what do they mean for your industry and its reliance on the road network. My basic pitch is that the Government should call off its war on the motorist—not least because making driving miserable for private motorists also inevitably means making it miserable for commercial motorists—including all of your drivers.

    We have already made some proposals, including an audit of the positioning of speed cameras to make it clear that every one is contributing to road safety and not just acting as a silent tax collector for the Chancellor. We believe speed limits should be revisited, with higher maximum speeds possible on motorways and lower speeds necessary on some other roads.

    All of these ideas are designed to make our roads flow more freely, so that no one is holding up your trucks unnecessarily, and that your trucks are not holding up other drivers unnecessarily.

    Our second principle, recommending steady investment, is designed to avoid the stop-start nature of big transport investment in Britain. You will all have seen the full page adverts in papers this week arguing for more and better transport investment—the RHA was one of the bodies placing them. They laid particular emphasis on the most serious pinch points: the M1, the M4 near London, the M6 north of Birmingham, the M62 and the M25. And it is very often schemes to relieve these bottlenecks that take an age to come to fruition. There will always be planning issues, and genuine environmental issues, which cause delays. But what is most frustrating is that such schemes are often delayed further after we have gone through all the planning delays, because the Government finances of the day don’t permit large-scale blocks of extra expenditure. It applies on the roads, it’s applying to the Crossrail Scheme in London at the moment.

    This is where our third principle comes in; that if we are to have a steady, well-planned flow of big transport projects, we will need to use private money more than in the past. The details of this are being worked on at the moment, and we will be coming out with announcements later this year, but I am absolutely convinced that unless we change our attitude towards the use of the private sector in building, operating and maintaining roads, we will keep suffering the same problems.

    For more than 50 years, under every type of Government and through good economic times and bad, our road system has been inadequate. There is no sign that this is changing. The last progress report on the Government’s Ten Year Plan said that although we were promised less congestion when it was launched in 2000, supply chains will have to cope with growing congestion and unreliability. So even under a government that is committed to taxing and spending, the current system shows no sign of improvement. The figures are depressing. The Ten-Year Plan promised a 5% reduction in inter urban congestion, and an 8% reduction in large urban areas. The result has been a predicted increase in journey times of 30% by 2010.

    The solution won’t be a single magic bullet. We will need to use our roads, especially in urban areas, more intelligently—using some of the methods I spoke about earlier. We will need more by-passes. We will need more dualling, and possibly more motorway routes. To fund these new roads, we will need more private finance.

    So we need a complete change in the way we deal with transport policy. It is obvious that the life-cycle of any particular big transport project is very likely to be longer than one particular Parliament, or of one particular Party’s period in power. We need to be grown up about this. In particular we need to set up funding systems so that the temptation for new Governments or new Ministers to drop existing ideas in favour of their own pet projects is minimised.

    So those are the principles. Let me turn now to the specific issue of fuel prices. No one expects the British Government to be in complete control of the oil price. But what the British Government can control is the level of fuel taxes. The Conservative Party voted against Gordon Brown’s increase of 1.9p a litre which he is due to bring in this September. At Prime Minister’s questions this week, shortly before we were all interrupted by noises off and powder on, Michael Howard asked the Prime Minister whether he would reverse this increase. There was a good deal of bluster but no answer. So we have to wait and see what the Government will do. But let me put on the record once and for all that we think this extra imposition should not happen.

    On over-regulation Europe, and specifically the Working Time Directive, I am conscious that later this morning you will be hearing from Philip Bushill-Matthews, my colleague from the European Parliament, and I don’t want to tread too hard on his territory. Apart from anything else, it is bad enough to have to cope with European Directives without having to listen to two different speeches about them in the course of one morning.

    So I will simply set out the main lines of our proposals. We want to get rid of at least a quarter of all existing EU regulations and directives and introduce sunset clauses for new ones. And by this we mean 25% of the total number of regulations and directives, not just a quarter of the pages in the current Acquis, which is the limit of the Commission’s ambition.

    Now you will have heard politicians talk about the desirability of deregulation before. And it’s just possible you may be a little cynical. It’s even possible that I would not blame you for being cynical. You need to know how we would do it. So here goes. There are five points.

    · We want a designated Commissioner with explicit responsibility for meeting deregulation targets.

    · We will use the confirmation hearings for new Commissioners this autumn to test their individual commitments to the deregulation agenda

    · We will use the European Parliament better for the deregulation agenda by initiating pre-legislative scrutiny of legislation, and the impact on competitiveness made explicit in every proposal.

    · We would introduce the right of repeal of legislation to the European Parliament, which would mean the Commission would lose its exclusive right to delete existing laws.

    · We would allow national parliaments to block proposed legislation if the thought it infringed the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.

    So these are practical measures which my colleagues in the European Parliament will pursue, and the more of them we elect on June 10th the more likely they are to be effective.

    Moving on to one of the worst accusations against British Governments, Are they guilty of gold plating European Regulations? Yes they are. Gold plating is a very difficult concept to pin down, but it often means simply making a regulation more detailed and prescriptive in English law than it was when it left Brussels. One way of measuring this is the simple number of words used to transpose a directive into the country’s own legal document. On this basis, the UK adds a staggering two and third times as many words to the average regulation as it had in the original. This is much more than France, and overwhelmingly more than Portugal and Germany, the three countries where these comparisons have been made.

    Changing this requires a change in the culture of Whitehall, which will only come about from a Government committed to deregulation as a central part of its economic thinking. The next Conservative Government will do that.

    Moving briefly onto the Working Time Directive, our desired outcome when we were considering it was the minimum amount of regulation compatible with safety and reasonable comfort. I urged the Government to lobby for extending the reference period over which average working time is calculated. I agreed that a 17-week reference period would be too short, and would damage businesses that have a seasonal focus.

    There has been much progress in the past few weeks. The six-month reference period for calculating the average week is an improvement. So is the definition of night time working. But I still think the omission of a definition of periods of availability is worrying. I hope it simply means that the Department is trying its best to find a definition that will be most helpful to those trying to run a business in difficult circumstances. I know there is a strong case for saying that driving time should be the key measure, and I would be interested to hear your views on this.

    As a final specific point I should address the vexed subject of Road User Charging for lorries. It is good to know, looking at the Austrian example, that this kind of system can be made to work technically, especially when you look over the border at Germany and their problems. And certainly the current situation when British hauliers are put at a competitive disadvantage to other European companies by our own Government because of our fuel duties is neither sensible nor sustainable.

    But the Chancellor’s latest delay in implementation means that the original idea, that UK hauliers deserved a more level playing field, has been forgotten until 2008 at the earliest. I know that many of you believe that the level playing field argument was always a convenient front for introducing technology that would lead to all-out road pricing. That may be true.

    What is beyond argument is that we should be looking for other ways of levelling the playing field between now and 2008, if it can be done in a revenue-neutral way. I have been investigating thoughts of charging lorries that come into Britain on the basis of the mileage used when they are using our roads. So far, all the schemes I have looked at would be effective, but would also be illegal under competition law. So I am still searching. I am sure that many of you will be able to help me in this quest, and I am very receptive. UK hauliers deserve a better deal than the one they currently get from the Government, and I want to work with you all to make sure they receive it.

    One last observation on the Ten Year Plan as a whole. It was, frankly, over-hyped as a solution to our transport problems. The slow progress of the Multi-Modal studies has meant that the implementation of specific road improvements has remained a weak area in the plan. Congestion charging seems to create at least as many problems as it solves. Rail planning is back in the melting pot. Tax incentives for cleaner vehicles are offered with one hand and taken away with the other.

    So the degree of certainty that many people in your industry hoped for when the Plan was unveiled has not happened. There is an alternative vision, where politicians step back from the detail of industrial planning and set the framework for companies and individuals to make their own decisions. That is the vision that I and my colleagues are developing, and I am sure that it can contribute to the long-term health of our the road haulage industry—an industry which itself is absolutely essential to the long-term health of our economy.

  • Damian Green – 2012 Speech to the National Asylum Stakeholder Forum

    damiangreen

    Below is the text of the speech made by Damian Green, the then Minister of State at the Home Office, to the National Asylum Stakeholder Forum on 5 July 2012.

    Firstly let me begin by thanking you for inviting me to speak to you once again. It is a little over a year since we last met at city hall for what was an excellent and very informative event, with stalls showcasing various projects, and at which you were introduced to the then, new permanent secretary, Helen Ghosh.

    Last year, when I met you, we were celebrating 60 years of the convention, and of the UK protecting refugees. We continue to be very proud of that tradition. The 1951 refugee convention was an attempt by the United Nations to set down terms to define who should be recognised as a refugee, and how they should be treated in the countries that received them. It was an admission by the world that we all have a responsibility to help those who cannot obtain protection in their own countries.

    The convention and the protocol are the most comprehensive codification of the rights of refugees yet attempted on the international level. They are the principal international instruments established for the protection of refugees, and the UK takes its responsibilities and obligations as a signatory to those instruments very seriously. These are responsibilities which remain just as important today as they were back in 1951.

    That is why the UK border agency are proud to continue to work in partnership with the UNHCR on the quality integration project, and the delivery of the gateway resettlement programme, which offers sanctuary to 750 vulnerable refugees from overseas every year, enabling them to start new lives in the UK.

    The year has brought a lot of changes and a lot of improvements too. The UK border agency has welcomed Rob Whiteman as its new chief executive, and Rob is implementing a programme of work, and the necessary structures, to make the Agency a more intelligence-led organisation. Over the years to come the agency will need to employ its resources effectively against the changing challenges it faces. In doing so it will also work hard to ensure the delivery of compliance with its processes and protocols, and to ensure its work is carried out consistently across the country.

    There have been a lot of developments in the world of asylum in particular as I am sure you are aware. Many of these have been achieved with the assistance of the strong relationships we have with corporate partners.

    To highlight a few:

    The UK border agency has increased the number of telephone lines for asylum seekers to make screening interview appointments. A pre-screening telephone appointment has also been introduced to provide us with an opportunity to understand any particular needs an asylum seeker may have, so that we do our utmost to meet those needs at the screening interview and thereafter.

    The UK border agency has considered its removals capability and the need to ensure that asylum is reserved for those who truly need it; not those who use it as a backstop without just cause. To this end we have created removal hubs and worked with international partners to facilitate returns, both assisted and enforced.

    The merits of a detained fast track (DFT) are an area of the asylum system upon which I know we, (corporate partners and the agency) will struggle to come to agreement. I do believe that DFT is an essential tool to help the agency process asylum claims quickly and effectively, right through to conclusion. That is why I have asked my staff to ensure that in delivering this element of the asylum system, we ensure it operates well and is managed sensitively.

    The DFT team has worked closely with detention services, and has improved processes within the detention centre, to reduce delays in the DFT process. Particularly around the arrangement of interviews for detainees, and in ensuring that relevant healthcare information is shared with appropriate partners.

    I am pleased that my officials are working with the Helen Bamber foundation and freedom from torture to identify how the agency might improve the screening process, to assist with identification of victims of torture or trafficking at the earliest opportunity – I understand you heard about this joint work this morning.

    We have rolled out the case management suite – Chronos – to all regions. This tool is helping us to deal with asylum seekers’ claims more swiftly and more efficiently, meaning those with protection needs have their claims decided promptly, and can access mainstream social services and support faster.

    The UK border agency has begun the COMPASS transition period. Each provider has been issued with a bridging permit to operate, which is the trigger for the gradual movement of service users from current to new providers’ accommodation. The complete package of accommodation and transport services will transfer to the new providers later in August, when the full permit to operate will be issued. The agency has been engaging closely with corporate partners across the regions to ensure all significant impacts and issues are addressed. The UK border agency is grateful for your engagement and involvement.

    The case audit and assurance unit has made steady progress in dealing with the legacy caseload. At the end of March 2012, 80,000 cases were in the asylum controlled archive and 21,500 cases were in the migration controlled archive.

    The evidence points to the fact that the vast majority of these individuals have already left the UK, and the UK border agency therefore needs to consider the benefit of spending public money pursuing these cases. With the re-introduction of exit checks by 2015 through the e-borders system, the agency will be in a far stronger position in future to ensure we have comprehensive records to tell us when individuals leave the UK.

    The UK border agency will continue to manage the controlled archive and by 31 December all cases will have been through data matching with our partners twice, and will have been checked against our own internal databases at least twice. Where these actions reveal new information that allows us to progress the case, it will be transferred to a casework team to conclude any outstanding barriers. At the end of March 2012, the live asylum cases stood at 21,000; this number will increase as individuals are traced.

    We have begun the development and implementation of the next generation quality framework, which you have played a significant part in. Under this framework the UK border agency is seeking to deliver a system that monitors and promotes quality, efficiency, professionalism, compliance, and consistency.

    The framework will look at the whole asylum process, end-to-end and is designed to focus on those areas where improvements should best be made, such as credibility, as well as capturing best practice and trend information to inform better decision-making, and asylum guidance and instructions in the future. Your engagement so far has been extremely helpful and we will continue to engage you as the framework develops.

    The UK border agency has worked with you on projects such as access and information; seeking to improve asylum seekers’ experience of the asylum system and to make the processes easier to understand. We know from that work that whilst there is already a lot of information provided to applicants, it needs to be much more balanced, consistent and focused. And that the agency needs to remove duplication where it exists. I hope that you will continue to work with the UK border agency on this, not only to help develop and implement an efficient suite of advice services, but also to help establish ways of listening to those who use the process day in, day out. The UK border agency needs their help to improve too.
    All of these things the UK border agency has done to improve efficiency and deliver value for money to the tax-payer, so that despite the economic climate the agency can continue to deliver high quality asylum considerations, and to ultimately provide protection to those individuals who need asylum in this country.

    You play a key role in helping the UK border agency achieve this aim, acting as a catalyst, and stimulating some of the thinking that has led to the development and implementation of these plans.

    I know you, and your trustees, judge your success by how well you manage to influence the UK border agency in this forum, and the level or the type of change that results from your engagement with officials. But it is true that in just holding up a mirror to the UK border agency’s work, and the way we run our business, you help us to see things differently and have made a difference. I know that my officials have valued your perspectives.

    The joint presentation from the Helen Bamber foundation, freedom from torture and the UK border agency that you had this morning is an excellent example, not only of sharing your perspectives, but also of joint working with the agency in a specific area to improve what the agency does and the outcomes for the people involved.

    Going forward we must be realistic. All of us will continue to face challenging times financially and with regard to resources. This will mean a need for a tighter focus in terms of the areas we turn our attention to, and ensuring that we leverage our time and energy on things that will deliver most value, and are of the most importance. Later on today you will be discussing the future programme of work for the forum and the structures that will best support it. I am confident of your continued contribution to ensuring improvements are made to the way in which the asylum system operates.

  • Damian Green – 2014 Speech to APCC

    damiangreen

    Below is the text of the speech made by Damian Green, the Home Office Minister, to the APCC on 21st January 2014.

    PCCs are vital in driving reform

    It’s been a challenging first year in office for everyone. We asked a lot of you. We asked you to empower communities and hold the police to account – at a time when the economic climate meant we had to make some very difficult decisions about police budgets; and at a time when the reputation of the police has been challenged by the unacceptable actions of a small minority of officers.

    But you rose to the occasion. Many of you are tackling these challenges head-on.

    You worked hard on behalf of the local communities that elected you. In terms of public awareness and their understanding of your role, undoubtedly you have had a bigger impact in a single year than police authorities did in the decade before that.

    Improving services through reform

    And we asked you to join us in radically transforming the police– embracing new technology, exploring new ways of collaborative working and driving new ideas to improve policing and increase efficiency. And that is what I want to talk about mostly today – collaboration.

    There have been some great success stories so far.

    To use an example from my local force, Kent is using Predictive Policing, which combines historic data with predictive algorithms, to identify areas most likely to be affected by crime to help allocate resources and target officers according to demand. So far this seems to have worked well.

    Northamptonshire and Cheshire, two forces separated by geography but united in collaboration, have created a joint shared service providing 24 hour HR advice, uniform ordering and admin functions. The two forces had already centralised these functions independently but recognised that joining together and sharing the investment cost would be more cost effective.

    West Midlands Police used ‘Priority Based Budgeting’ to re-examine services and challenge ways of working identifying savings of £48.7 million in the process.

    And as we have seen recently forces are making increasing use of Body Worn Video. We welcome the use of camera technology to protect the public and to support the police in discharging their duties. Body worn video is a powerful tool and can be used by the police to gather evidence to investigate crime. That evidence could also be used to investigate complaints and hold the police to account, but also evidence I have seen is that it affects behaviour. Officers have said to me that by saying this interview is being filmed then behaviours change. One example mentioned to me was of an individual who was upset at being stopped and his friend started filming the incident on his camera phone. The officer said good I am filming you as well. I hope to see more of this happening.

    There are national initiatives also. The National Procurement Hub will enable forces to make purchases at the best prices. Its management information will allow you to judge value for money. The Hub is not yet fully rolled out, but we are ensuring you can access the latest full year information on procurement spend which has been collected for all forces. I would urge you very strongly to use these tools to the fullest extent.

    PCC have played a vital role in driving this transformation – working with Chief Constables to ensure services are delivered more effectively and efficiently to the public.

    Progress is encouraging. HMIC’s assessment is that the vast majority of police forces are rising to the challenge of reducing budgets while protecting service to the public.

    But everybody in this room understands that 2014 is going to be difficult too.

    Central government funding for policing will need to reduce by a fifth over the spending review period. And as the Chancellor indicated earlier this month, further spending cuts will be required after the election. We published our provisional grant report before Christmas and, in line with the usual process, we are consulting on it. We will publish our final report early next month.

    Let’s be clear though. The sort of transformation we are talking about here is not about this year’s or next year’s budget settlement. It is not about trimming a little fat and hoping that another era of plenty comes along. It is about fundamentally re-thinking how policing is configured so it is efficient and effective for years to come.

    We know this can be done. Because it is being done.

    Collaboration, blue light integration and rehabilitation

    Collaboration

    I am pleased so many of you attended the ‘Innovation through Collaboration’ event at the Home Office last month, which gave you and chief constables an opportunity to learn from one another’s experiences of collaboration and to discuss bidding for the Police Innovation Fund.

    There is clearly no one-size-fits all approach with collaboration. Equally there is no reason why some forces should be planning less than 10% of their savings from collaboration. That may well be an opportunity missed.

    Collaboration is not just about saving money. It is about providing a more effective service. HMIC are reviewing the extent to which forces are meeting the Strategic Policing Requirement in relation to key national threats such as organised crime. On these and other crime threats forces need to collaborate with each other and with the wider public and private sectors.

    Emergency services integration

    By enhancing accountability you are driving greater effectiveness and efficiency. If it works for policing, it should work for other emergency services, like the fire service. In finding significant scope for reform, Sir Ken Knight’s independent report was clear that fire services could not, by themselves, achieve the required transformational change. The vast majority of fire and police boundaries are co-terminus and over half of police stations in England are within 1km of a fire station. The two services work closely together in more ways than one.

    Emergency services collaborating will deliver efficiencies. In Hampshire, fire, police and the county council are joining up corporate services and expect to save around £4 million a year. In Merseyside a joint police and fire command and control centre is being built.

    I know that many of you are exploring integration of police and fire.

    I want to see more of this. The government will set out in its response to the Knight Review shortly, but I want to be clear now that we want to work with you to build on what is already happening and to drive this forward by removing barriers and unlocking opportunities.

    And I would like collaboration to go further. Working closely with ambulance services will bring real benefits. In London, the Met and London Ambulance have created joint response units which are reducing average waiting times for the police from 36 minutes to just 5 minutes. That may not sound like a lot of time, but it has transformed their operations. In Surrey, there is a programme of collaboration between the police, fire and ambulance. Their collaboration will see the three services join forces to find ways of streamlining operations, sharing more premises and delivering joint safety campaigns. It would be good to see you driving similar joint working across the country.

    Transforming Rehabilitation

    Rehabilitation is another area where reform is urgently needed. For too long there has been a lack of real action on finding sustainable ways to reduce reoffending rates.

    It is not good enough that more than 148,000 criminals convicted or cautioned over the last year had at least 15 previous convictions or cautions.

    It is not good enough that over half a million offenders had at least one previous conviction or caution.

    And it is not good enough that the group of offenders most likely to reoffend – those sentenced to short sentences – are currently ignored by the system and receive no statutory rehabilitation.

    That’s nearly 85,000 further crimes committed by a group who walk out of prison with £46 in their pocket, and get little or no support to get their lives back on track and turn away from crime.

    That’s why we’re launched the Transforming Rehabilitation programme. This will provide more effective rehabilitation at better value to the taxpayer in a way that is sustainable. We want to draw on all the skills and services that can be offered by practitioners across the public, private and voluntary sectors.

    Opening up the market to a range of new suppliers will see innovative ways of working whilst giving the Department the financial flexibility to extend supervision and support to every former offender.

    I know that many of you have concerns about the changes, particularly the implications for the existing key local partnerships and accountability.

    To achieve their objective of reducing reoffending, providers will need to work closely with local partners – including yourselves.

    I want you to have a strong role in the reforms. I welcome the fact that many of you have actively engaged with the Programme to ensure your priorities are understood. We have listened to the concern, raised by many of you, that for the evaluation of bids to fully reflect key local priorities, it needs to include the views of those who have with the expertise and awareness at a local level.

    While there can be no formal role for PCCs or any other stakeholder in the evaluation process, the Programme has developed a proposal to establish a forum through which key local stakeholders with the expertise and awareness of local issues can provide advice to the local competition teams.

    The local competition teams will be in touch with all PCCs to discuss arrangements for this proposal and I hope this will make it easier for us to work closely with them to make the reforms as innovative and successful as possible.

    Innovation and technology – Innovation Fund

    Last year we announced an innovation fund worth up to £50m a year to incentivise collaboration, transformation and innovative delivery to improve effectiveness and efficiency of policing. The fund starts in full from 2014/15. But there was the need and readiness to press ahead now with transformation. So we introduced a £20 million precursor fund in 2013/14.

    We received, unsurprisingly, a fantastic response. There were 115 bids, for which I would like to thank you all. I was delighted to be able to announce last week that every police force in England and Wales will receive a share of that £20million. And £3.8 million of that funding will be used by six forces to collaborate on proposals to share buildings and infrastructure with the fire and rescue service, saving millions of pounds of public money in the process. A number of other themes emerging from the bidding process for the innovation fund included:

    – six forces who will receive funding to enhance public protection and support by investing in body worn camera technology;

    – a 24-force consortium who will move public-facing services such as incident reporting, Freedom of Information requests and impounded vehicle release payments online; and

    – nine forces who will be using the funding to roll out use of mobile data equipment so officers can access intelligence, take statements and update crime records without having to return to the station – obviously allows them to spend more time on the streets and in communities rather than sat behind their desks.

    We were able to approve 65 of the Innovation Fund bids in this round.

    Unfortunately we could not approve them all. In a number of cases there were positive ideas with potential to bring about transformation. But further work was needed to understand and articulate the impact of those changes. I hope you will feel encouraged to build on these bids and re-submit as part of future bidding rounds.

    We will be announcing the timetable for bidding to the 2014/15 fund in the very near future. In the meantime, we are conducting a review of the precursor fund. In particular, we are considering where the process, communications and criteria might be strengthened to ensure that the fund prioritises bids that truly reflect innovation and collaboration.

    I hope the feedback we have provided will help you prepare your bids for next year.

    Innovation through technology

    And when you are thinking about your bids, or indeed about future ways of working in general, think about the best ways to use the new technology that is available. You may have indulged in the New Year sales. According to the British Retail Consortium there was a 19% growth in internet purchases from a year earlier, the fastest increase in four years. Clearly this has a lot to do with convenience. And avoiding the bad weather! But it is more than that. This amounts to a change in mindset.

    Technology is shifting people’s behaviour and expectations of public services. Policing is responding to this. But are we responding fast enough? The re-launched police.uk website gives the public detailed local crime maps. It is a great tool. But in a world of apps that allow you to book your taxi, find out when your bus is coming and do your banking – all on your mobile, having access to data about crimes in their area on line is perhaps regular rather than remarkable. And if people can’t do relatively basic things like report crime on-line, as is the case with the majority of forces, then it is disappointing. There are exceptions like Sussex which allows the public to report crime online and Avon and Somerset which allows the public to track the progress of reported crimes online. In general, I think we would all admit that more could and should be done

    There are good foundations. All forces provide information via their website and Twitter. Nearly all forces (95%) provide information via Facebook; and two-thirds via YouTube. In many forces, the public can contact individual officers or specific neighbourhood teams.

    These are good examples. But I do not want to limit our ambitions to doing old things with new tools. We want to harness this potential to bring about transformational change. That is what digital policing is about.

    Neighbourhood policing illustrates this challenge. Neighbourhood policing improves public confidence and supports crime reduction, by tackling anti-social behaviour right through to national threats like organised crime. And neighbourhood policing is key to building and maintaining police integrity.

    HMIC has previously raised concerns that neighbourhood policing is being put at risk by changes driven by cost-cutting. But more recent findings from the College and HMIC suggests that budget cuts need not lead to a withdrawal from neighbourhood policing. So long as you and senior officers remain committed to supporting innovative approaches to delivery, neighbourhood policing can continue to go from strength to strength – and I know many of you are indeed strongly committed to this. The whole point of the new policing landscape is that the Home Office and the Policing Minister does not tell the police how they should operate. But it can play its part. We are giving PCSOs new powers to enhance their ability to support effective neighbourhood policing, and we have consulted on whether any further powers are needed. If you think there is more we can do I will be interested in hearing from you. In the meantime, HMIC will be looking again at this as part of its next Valuing the Police inspection.

    Here too we need to think about technology. For example, how does the traditional neighbourhood policing method serve a generation of young people immersed who are immersed in social networks, whose experience of crime might more likely be on-line than in their physical neighbourhood?

    More widely, is policing configured for the 86% of people in the UK who, according to the Office for National Statistics, use the internet, or the 14% who do not?

    It is not just the public and the police taking advantage of technology. Of course criminals are too. Which is why we are improving law enforcement capabilities to tackle cyber crime, including through developing cyber skills in mainstream policing.

    Embedding a culture of innovation in policing

    Innovation is vital. But it must become part of business as usual. As you know, the College is working to improve knowledge about effective crime-fighting interventions by developing networks so forces and academics can collaborate. Many of you will be having conversations with universities about potential new approaches. You should also work with the College to share good practice.

    I am also keen for the Home Office to support your emerging thinking on the form and function of a Police ICT Company to support forces to use technology in new ways.

    A new contract which the Home Office has just awarded for the provision of Evidence Based Decision Support will also help. This is founded on partnership across industry, SMEs and academia. This enables the right team of IT experts to focus on your specific problems before you make critical decisions to invest significant resources so they can support your forces transformation agenda and ensure it is set-up to succeed.

    The concept has been proven at the MoD and in Australia. I am looking forward to seeing what it can do for us.

    The team is here today and ready to answer your questions over lunch.

    A culture of reform has to encompass police leadership. I very much welcome the APCC’s timely review of ACPO. I look forward to working with you and the College to ensure we have the right police leadership structures to fit in with the new policing landscape.

    Challenges: integrity, undercover policing, the Fed review and FNOs

    I have set out how reform and innovation are tools to enable us to get on the front foot. But some elements of policing will always be about identifying and responding to challenges. I want to talk about some of them. But my point is that a policing profession that is constantly innovating will be better placed to deal with these challenges that emerge.

    Integrity

    You will, I am sure, share the Government’s determination to improve police integrity. It lies at the heart of the public’s confidence in policing. I know many of you are anxious about reductions to your budgets to resource the IPCC better. We believe the transfer for 2014/15 is proportionate and necessary to allow the IPCC to build capacity and take on additional cases this year. We are providing the IPCC with up to £800,000 from the Home Office budget in 2013/14 for transition costs and a further £10m in capital in 2014/15. The College of Policing also plays a key role in ensuring that all forces meet the highest level of standards in professional behaviour and is committed to delivering the package of measures announced by the Home Secretary to improve police integrity. One important step of this is.

    Undercover policing

    The alleged inappropriate behaviour of undercover officers in the past has caused concern. The two investigations into those allegations will report shortly, so I will cannot comment further. But we are working to ensure undercover work is done properly.

    We have recently introduced legislation increasing the oversight of undercover deployments by law enforcement officers.

    Law enforcement agencies must now notify the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners, all of whom are retired senior judges, of all undercover deployments. We have raised the internal authorisation level from Superintendent to Assistant Chief Constable. Deployments beyond 12 months must now be signed off by the independent Office of the Surveillance Commissioners before being authorised by the Chief Constable.

    Given the level of concern, the Home Secretary asked HMIC to conduct a thorough review of all undercover policing units. We will consider any recommendations carefully so we can assure the public that undercover operations, which are vital to public protection, are only used when necessary and do not go beyond the realms of decency. We must make sure the public have trust in this very sensitive but very necessary area of policing.

    I should also mention the Fed Review.

    As you will be aware, the independent review of the Police Federation, by Sir David Normington, published its report yesterday. The review raises some serious issues and we look forward to seeing the Federation’s response. It is important that all organisations have the opportunity to reform their functions and practices and we recognise the important step the Federation has taken in carrying out this review. It is essential that all parts of the policing landscape, including the Federation, have the confidence of the public to act with integrity and impartiality at all times.

    One other issue I want to touch on is Foreign national offenders

    The level of crime in England and Wales committed by foreign nationals is sizeable and increasing. In 2011/12 the Metropolitan Police arrested over 74,000 foreign national offenders. The scale of the challenge is less well understood outside London. But we are building that evidence for the rest of the country and will share it as soon as we can to help you deal with the problem more effectively.

    This is not about picking on people because they are not from the UK. Foreign national offenders are first and foremost criminals. The fact that they are not UK nationals provides us with other options for dealing with them.

    For example, from the beginning of this month it has been possible to take action to remove EEA nationals who are not exercising or who are abusing their Treaty rights.

    This potentially an important tool but it can only be effective if the police and immigration enforcement work together. We have been providing information to forces on steps the police can take. We will do more in the coming weeks.

    Conclusion

    There are a huge range of challenges. But just as importantly, we must maximise the opportunities. Overall crime is down to the lowest levels since the Crime Survey for England and Wales started in 1981; victim satisfaction is up and the proportion of officers on the frontline is increasing.

    But it’s all our job to ensure crime continues to fall. We want the public to feel protected by a truly 21st century police force. And we want officers to feel they belong to a proud profession.

    You PCCs uniquely placed to make sure this happens. That is because you are elected because you best understand the local people’s concerns. You have a responsibility to secure and maintain efficient and effective policing. And you have the opportunity to drive through innovative reforms. I know you are already doing this. I also know it is not going to be easy. You will encounter resistance. But many of you will find willing partners within policing, the Home Office and with policy colleagues.