Politics

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE OF RT HON TONY BLAIR MP

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE LIAISON COMMITTEE FROM THE PRIME MINISTER - RT HON TONY BLAIR MP - July 6 2004

Evidence heard in Public Questions 144 - 288
NOTE:
1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House.
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Oral Evidence Taken before the Liaison Committee on Tuesday 6 July 2004

Members present
Mr Alan Williams, in the Chair
Mr Peter Ainsworth
Donald Anderson
Mr A J Beith
Andrew Bennett
Derek Conway
Jean Corston
Mr John Denham
Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody
Dr Ian Gibson
Mr David Hinchliffe
Mr Robert Key
Sir Archy Kirkwood
Mr Edward Leigh
Mr David Lepper
Mr Martin O’Neill
Mr Peter Pike
Dame Marion Roe
Mr Barry Sheerman
Mr David Tredinnick
Mr Dennis Turner
Sir Nicholas Winterton
Tony Wright
Sir George Young
________________

Witness: Rt Hon Tony Blair, a Member of the House, Prime Minister, examined

Q144 Chairman: Welcome again, Prime Minister. I am glad you have made yourself comfortable as usual. It is rather stuffy in here, I am afraid, today. As is normal, we notified you a few days ago of the three themes, but, as I think everybody knows and understands, you are not told any of the questions that are going to be asked today. The last three meetings were inevitably dominated by international affairs, and so you do not get bored, we thought this time we would start with some domestic issues and move on to international affairs. The first two themes today will be social cohesion and domestic policy delivery, introduced by Andrew Bennett, because we have again sub‑divided into teams, then we will follow with energy policy, led by Ian Gibson, and then we go to Iraq and the Middle East, led by Alan Beith. Before we do that, one quick question on update. You will remember at the start of the last meeting I raised with you the chasm that existed in the quality and quantity of information and, indeed, access to witnesses that had been provided to Hutton as compared with that which my colleagues are accustomed to, and you agreed to look at the nearly quarter of a century old rules. That was five months ago. Can you tell me where we are on that review?

Mr Blair: Peter Haine will be in a position to come to you with suggestions and proposals in September. I cannot be sure, obviously, what the precise nature of those proposals will be at the moment. I think, going back and having a look at it again, Alan, the areas where, if I can say this to you, I am most sympathetic to change are areas where you have got departmental issues that cut across not just one department but several departments, and there is something somewhat limiting therefore about saying it is only the actual departmental ministers that deal with the departmental select committee. It may be more difficult on the issues to do with advisers, but we are continuing to discuss it and we will be in a position to come back to you in September with some precise proposals that I hope, even if you do not agree with all of them, you will find that there is some movement in that direction.

Q145 Chairman: I am rather surprised and pleased at the response, because only three weeks ago the Leader of House, sitting where you are now, informed us that the minister who was chairing the study group was not yet involved and it had no formal terms of reference. So whilst there seems to have been very little progress for four and a half months, I am delighted at the momentum that has suddenly built up quite spectacularly in the two weeks before your arrival here. Can we ask you to come back next week?

Mr Blair: Yes, I take the implication, but it has actually been… You raised this with me this time last year, and then did we not have an exchange of correspondence in February, or was it in February you raised it with me? In February you raised it with me and then we had an exchange of correspondence. I think September, frankly, is long enough to come back to you with some proposals, so we will do that.

Chairman: We look forward to receiving those. We are now going to the formal hearing and to Andrew Bennett.

Q146 Andrew Bennett: Prime Minister, I think you take the issue of social cohesion and you know only too well the problems that there are in Northern Ireland because of the lack of social cohesion across the communities. I think it was at the Lisbon Summit that you put forward social cohesion as a very important issue for the whole of Europe, and I think in the last 12 months you and a lot of other ministers have been stressing how important social cohesion is for economic and social well‑being. Is that still the Government’s policy?

Mr Blair: Yes, absolutely.

Q147 Andrew Bennett: We have a fair number of examples of where that is your broad policy, but in practice a whole series of policies do not make that work?

Mr Blair: We can obviously have a discussion about that, but I think that the thing that is most important for us, obviously, is… Social cohesion is made up of a number of different things: one is obviously to invest in some of the more poor and disadvantaged communities, which we have been doing; other parts of it are to do with building good community relations and making sure that people from ethnic or religious backgrounds can work together.

Q148 Mr Pike: You obviously know Burnley had disturbances as one of the three places in 2001 and Lord Clarke’s Report identified, as did the Commission for Racial Equality’s Report which took place the following year, that services for young people were particularly needed and identified deprivation and disillusionment amongst young people as a particular problem; and the CRE proposed that we should have a more publicly funded youth service. Do you not think this is absolutely crucial if we are to tackle these problems of disillusionment and lack of cohesion and problems that occur?

Mr Blair: I agree certainly that investment in new services is important. I also think, however, the New Deal programmes for the unemployed are important as well, since I think that if you have got large numbers of disaffected young people who are unemployed that is a contributing factor to a lack of social cohesion, and I think the education system has a part to play in that as well.

Q149 Mr Pike: We are coming on to education later, but we do have a lot of young people who hang round on streets and start gangs between each other and different problems as a result of there being a lack of places for young people to go without a bar?

Mr Blair: I think this is an issue. It is why we invest in new services and why we are looking, for example, at the concept of an extended school so that the school can be a focal point for the community as well as simply a place where people learn. I think, on the other hand, we have also got to be very clear that, whereas there are a whole range of reasons for the break down in social cohesion that may occur from time to time, we cannot justify any acts of intimidation or violence from young people or anyone else in respect of those things. So I think it is important that we work on the causes of it, and I think those causes are reasonably clear to you and to me, Peter, but I think it is important that we also make it clear that we do not tolerate and cannot, in any shape or form, excuse behaviour that spills over into violence.

Q150 Mr Pike: The boundaries and rigid lines drawn on maps, do these not sometimes cause frictions? I had a case come to me yesterday where somebody lives three doors over a boundary for a Sure Start, and obviously people who are mischievous and want to cause division do use these lines. Can we get away from such rigid lines and divisions where they do cause social cohesion?

Mr Blair: I think this is a very good point. The problem obviously is that if you have a programme like Sure Start and you have not got the resources to make it universal, then you have got to limit its application in some way. Very often what happens with Sure Start, for example, but also with other programmes, is that you will limit it by reference to a particular local authority boundary. I have the same situation in my own constituency with Sure Start schemes. I think that one possible way of looking at this is that we have started a dialogue with some of the people in local government to see how we could give them greater flexibility to decide locally how it is that they would like to use or implement a scheme such as this. It may be difficult to do that, but I think it is worth investigating because they will often be in a position to know better how they can implement such a programme in a way that does not lead people to say ‑ and I think this is the point you are making ‑ “So and so next door is getting a whole lot of help but we are not getting it”, and then they link that into maybe ethnic background and then it becomes a cause of racial tension. This is something that we are looking at with local government. There will be a situation, though, in the end, where unless you have got the money to finance a programme universally, you will be limiting it in some way.

Q151 Mr Pike: Certainly we need more flexibility. May I move on to my third point, which is empty houses? You will probably know that the Halifax published their report in March to coincide with Empty Homes weeks, and it shows a massive number of empty houses in Liverpool and Manchester but it showed Burnley as having the highest percentage, 7.7 per cent. Obviously the housing and Pathfinder projects are absolutely crucial in tackling this, and again there are cohesion problems arising from this. Do you think there is sufficient funding in the early years and are we going to be guaranteed that this funding, which is particularly a problem in many of our northern cities, there is the continuity? Does it not need a commitment of the Government perhaps for ten, fifteen years if these problems are to be solved of deprivation, and three out of the five areas with the most housing are also the most deprived areas in the country?

Mr Blair: Yes, that is true. The Pathfinder budget, and I can check this for you, but I think it is around £300 million. It is a substantial sum of money. We are piloting this at the moment in various projects, and I think we have got to do that because of the substantial sums of money involved and see how well it works because the issue is, obviously, if you have got a whole string of empty houses in a particular area, why is that happening? Is this something where you are best to demolish those houses, accept that there is a reduction in the housing demand in that particular area, or are there other particular reasons to do with the local community which could be altered by other policies? I think it is important we learn the lessons of this, and housing is a very important part of it, but it is an expensive programme, the Pathfinder programme, and I think we need to be sure that it is going to provide value for money; and that is the reason why we are running it in your area and in others. Can I make this other point to you? I think that there is a lot that can be done too by getting the communities to try and work together in a more cooperative way at a local level too. I know you have done this in your own constituency, but sometimes there is an unnecessary tension that enters into local relations, and obviously this is what has happened in certain parts of the north‑west, particularly but not limited to the north‑west, and those are areas where particularly political parties like the BNP can come in and exploit those tension. I think that one part of this ‑ you can put in various sums of money, you can invest in new services or the Pathfinder projects, but you have also got to work out how we get local communities from different ethnic backgrounds to work together, to have proper exchanges between their young people and indeed their faith communities at well.

Q152 Mr Pike: You have to tackle other issues as well as housing?

Mr Blair: There are a whole series of things that we have to tackle; that is right.

Q153 Mr Denham: I wonder if I can follow that point through. It is good news that there have not been serious disturbances for three years now, but since the northern riots we have had September 11th, we have had international military action, we have had a sharp rise in public concern about asylum, we have undoubtedly had the alienation of some Muslim young people. Would you say that the underlying social tensions that led to the riots are better or worse than they were three years ago?

Mr Blair: I think it is difficult to judge unless area by area. I think in some respects they are better, and, as you say, we have not had those disturbances, but I think that the issue to do with terrorism, and we heard all the controversy over the stop and search and so on, has put a new dimension of this into the equation which, I think, is difficult. I know from my conversations with leaders of the Muslim community that they feel very strongly that if someone who calls himself a Protestant goes onto the street in Northern Ireland and murders a Catholic that that does not reflect on the whole of the Protestant religion, whereas they feel that if you get Muslim extremists or terrorists then somehow this can be taken as stigmatising the entire community; and I think we need to be sensitive to that and we need to give publicity to the fact that the vast majority of Muslim leaders are immensely responsible people who exercise a very positive effect within the local communities and for community harmony. I looked at the report that you did a year ago now in respect of these issues, John, and I think we have made some progress actually. There is certainly… For example, in relation to local government and their services assessments, we do put issues to do with social cohesion and community relations into that now, but it does depend enormously on the willingness and good efforts of the people on the ground in each individual community. So my assessment would be that I think it probably in some ways is better that it was, but, on the other hand, I think there is this new dimension that we need to watch.

Q154 Mr Denham: Can I ask whether you feel that the Government has pursued this important issue with sufficient focus over the last three years? You mentioned stop and search and policing. In the first national policing plan, community cohesion, which I think is the same as social cohesion, was given a very high priority for the police services nationally. In the most recent national policing plan it has very clearly been down‑graded as a priority and no doubt other things like the fight against terrorism at one end or anti‑social behaviour at the other have risen up the agenda. Are you certain, Prime Minister, that social cohesion has been given a consistently high priority by central government to ensure that most progress is made at local level?

Mr Blair: I would like to think that we have done everything that we reasonably can. I think, in relation to policing, it is not so much that it has been down‑graded but, obviously, as you say, there are other issues that have achieved a particular salience recently. I would say that the police, for example, in London are more attuned to community cohesion issues than I would certainly say from 10 years ago and even possibly from five years ago. I think they are more aware of the need, for example, to go out and recruit people from the different parts of the ethnic community. I think, some of the issues to do with behaviour inside the police force and the way areas are policed have been adapted, and I think that one of the things that is interesting is that in relation to some of these powers that the police have been given the powers are a lot more extensive than they have been for many, many years. On the other hand, we have not actually had a very strong push back from the communities, whereas I remember all the controversy there was in the 1980s over the stop and search powers, when it became a real focal point of racial tension, and I think that for a lot of these local communities they want pretty tough policing. They do want their community cohesion, but they want some tough policing as well, and, provided they think the tougher policing is fair on the basis to whom it is applied ‑ in other words, it is applied whatever the colour of your skin or religion ‑ then they are up for some pretty hard stuff in dealing with drug-dealers and dealing with people who cause dissent and difficulty within their communities.

Q155 Mr Denham: To end on this point, Prime Minister, will you look at next year’s national policing plan just to make sure that social cohesion is given an appropriate priority?

Mr Blair: I am very happy to do that, and what I will do is I will write to you, if I might, in respect of whether there is any deliberate down‑playing of it in respect of this year. I suspect not, but I will check it out for you.

Q156 Andrew Bennett: Do you think social cohesion is something that all government departments think about all the time? The ODPM and the Audit Commission have been very firmly pushing choice‑based lettings in housing. That can very easily lead to housing segregation.

Mr Blair: I do not want departments to focus on it all the time. The question is do they focus on it to the exclusion of everything else? No, I think they will have various other issues that they need to look at. I think this is difficult, because I am sure, as indicated, we will go on and talk about education a moment, but in relation to faith schools, for example, you could perfectly easily make the case: is it in the interests of social cohesion that you have faith schools at all? I happen to think, in the end, this is a choice you cannot take away from people and I would, therefore, say, if there is a social cohesion issue that comes out or a community cohesion issue, you have to try and manage that. So, do departments think about it all the time? I know that they have it there as a significant priority for them, but it can be, in certain instances, that other policies can at one level appear to conflict with it.

Q157 Andrew Bennett: Yes. You have got this policy of wanting to impose choice in education and in health, but there is a danger that that just undermines social cohesion. If you are a parent making a choice about a school, it is very difficult if you are trying to predict what the school is going to deliver for the next six or seven years, but it is much easier to look at the colour of the pupils there and make a decision that your child might be more comfortable with children from the same background. There is a lot of danger that we have got schools suffering from White Flight now. Is there not a conflict between your desire for choice and for social cohesion?

Mr Blair: I do not believe so: because I think that in the end the most important thing is to try and lift the standards of the schools whatever the ethnic background of the children in them. The question is in the end, the hard question is: do you say that you have some restrictions on faith schools, for example? I would say, no, to that because I do not think it is justifiable that, say, there should be Catholic and Protestant faith‑based schools but not Jewish or Muslim ones.

Q158 Andrew Bennett: But you know the problem we have got in Northern Ireland as a result of segregated education?

Mr Blair: Yes, but I think what I would say is: is the problem in Northern Ireland the segregated education or is the problem the nature of the division that has grown up between the two communities? We have a situation in London where, within a few miles of here, you will have a range of Church of England and Catholic schools. I do not think there is any great tension between the two. So I am not sure that the issue is the segregation by way of education, I think the issue is more deep‑seated in respect of the way that the communities interact with each other in Northern Ireland, for example, where it was then linked with a whole set of political issues.

Q159 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Prime Minister, for social cohesion to succeed do you believe that people should be happy and secure in their own homes?

Mr Blair: Yes, I would certainly agree with that, Nicholas.

Q160 Sir Nicholas Winterton: If that is the case, Prime Minister, how is it that many people on the Upton and Moss Estates in Macclesfield ‑ a delightful town ‑ are having their lives made hell by the yob culture, anti‑social behaviour, low‑level crime involving theft from cars, stealing of cars themselves, burglary, by the activities by a limited number of people, often driven by drugs? Would you believe that that is possible in many parts of this country?

Mr Blair: Yes, I certainly accept that these are real issues in communities up the down the country, which is one reason why I think it is so important that we take forward and implement the measures of anti‑social behaviour which give the police more powers than they have ever had before, and, in particular, we single out and deal with the issue of drugs and the relationship between drugs and crime.

Q161 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Would you also accept that many of these people whose lives are being made hell can no longer rely upon the police because the police say they have inadequate manpower to respond to incidents on an estate such as the two that I have mentioned, and they are forever telling me, making representation on behalf of those that I represent, that they have inadequate resources to devote to going to the various incidents that are reported. What is the Government going to do about that and, further, my final point, what are the courts going to do about dealing with these young people who are apprehended, who are making people’s lives hell, because so often they appear to pat them on the back and say, “You have done wrong. Please do not do it again”, but many of these people are recidivists and go back and do it again because the punishment is inadequate?

Mr Blair: First of all, I totally sympathise with the problem that you are raising. As I say, it is a problem in communities up and down the country. That is why a few years ago we began the process of introducing legislation specifically designed to deal with anti‑social behaviour and did so on that basis; but I think the point about anti‑social behaviour is that a lot of the crime is low‑level crime in the sense that if someone is convicted in a court then the likelihood of them going to jail for a large period of time is pretty limited. The trouble is the combination of these types of low‑level disorder make life hell for people: it is gangs of youths hanging around street corners abusing pensioners on the way to the shops; it is people putting bricks through the window; it is people writing graffiti on the walls, or burnt‑out cars. The whole reason we began this anti‑social behaviour push was because we could see, I could see, and so could every other Member of Parliament, that this issue as much as the big crimes that attract the headlines in the newspaper was what was worrying people. Therefore we have introduced a whole range of new powers, and I think one thing that is really important is that in the local area people sit down, analyse what powers the police now have for fixed penalty fines on low‑level disorder and behaviour, ability to fine parents of kids who are misbehaving in this way, the ability to shut down houses that are being used for drug-dealing, the ability to confiscate the assets of drug-dealers, the drug-dealers who drive around in the big cars and with money in their pocket. There are powers for the police to deal with this now, and a lot of these have come in recently. The police have got the power now to apply for a very quick shutting of a pub or a club where there is constant disorder, and I think what is happening in different parts of the country is that the police are working out: “How do we use these new powers to the most effect?”, but that is one aspect.

Q162 Sir Nicholas Winterton: What about the resources, Prime Minister?

Mr Blair: I was just coming on to that. The second thing is that the police themselves… It is a fact that we have record numbers of police, but the fact is for the public you can give them whatever statistics you like; if they do not see the copper out there on the street they say, “So what”. I think we have got to approach this in a slightly different way, and that is why I favour the expansion, as well as of the police, of community support officers and street wardens. I think you need a support team alongside the police in these areas. What has been very popular in certain parts of the country where it has been tried is that you will have a police sergeant, say, a police officer, and you will have two or three community support officers or street wardens and between them they will patrol the area. That does not necessarily mean that you catch all the criminals, but it is a big deterrent effect, it gives the public a lot of reassurance and, armed with the new powers, which mean, for example, they can do on the spot fines, that is very, very important. The problem for a police officer, and I discovered this when I was talking to police officers and saying to them, “If there is graffiti on the wall and you know who has done it, why do you not take them to court and get them fined?” They would say to me, “Look, I have got to take them down to the police station. I have got to go through hours of charging. I have then got to take them to court. I have got to make sure they turn up at court. I have then got to get the witnesses there. I have got to take the case to the Magistrate. It takes nine months and by the time I get to the end of that, for hours and hours of work, the person gets a fine.” That is the reason why we introduced the on the spot fines. There are thousands of those being used; there are the anti‑social behaviour orders being used as well. All I am saying is I think there are areas where the local authorities and the police have got together and really worked out how they can use these new powers, and I am very willing - and this is where we need feedback from the MPs, because actually this should be something that any person, or any member of the public can agree with - I am very willing to go back and legislate again on this anti‑social behaviour if there are problems in the way the law is being used because it is a big, big issue for people.

Q163 Dame Marion Rose: Prime Minister, is it not the case that the Barker proposals will only serve to draw people out of the inner cities into ever increasingly sprawling suburbs and that this will be at the expense of the regeneration of our cities, the redevelopment of derelict brown sites and the protection of the Green Belt?

Mr Blair: I do not believe that is the case, Marion, because the Barker proposals, the proposal by Kate Barker in housing, recognise the fact, and it is a fact, that there is an excess of demand over supply for housing in the south of the country. This is just a fact, and the curious thing about the debate we have in housing is that when I am talking to Peter I am having debate about empty houses and when I am talking to you or a Member of Parliament from down in the south their problem is completely different. The truth is that for many families in the south of England it is difficult for them get on the housing ladder; many parents find it very hard to see how their children can get on the housing ladder. We have to expand the supply. What we have tried to do, and the idea behind not just what Kate Barker has said but the proposals John Prescott has put forward, is to identify certain specific areas. There is no question of us concreting over the south or diminishing the acres of Green Belt at all; and we have got a target of 60 per cent or more for brown field sites that we are meeting, but we are going to need to expand the number of houses in the south‑east. If we do not do that, then we just do not have the supply of houses that we need.

Q164 Dame Marion Rose: But, Prime Minister, how can you square the targets for house‑building in the south‑east that is contained in the Sustainable Communities Plan, which, of course, will serve to further draw economic activity away from the rest of the country, with the Deputy Prime Minister’s policy document to revitalise other areas of England through the Northern Way?

Mr Blair: Because I think you have two separate issues here. I represent a constituency in the north‑east of England. That constituency has need of business opportunities, investment and so on. The north‑east is doing significantly better than it was a few years ago, but we have got certain policies that help develop that region and deal with that region’s problem. The problems in the south are different. I do not think we are going to be… By expanding the number of houses in these particular areas, very limited particular areas, particularly in relation to the Thames Gateway where you have got vast tracts of derelict land that we are trying to revitalise, I do not think you are going to take jobs out of the inner city, but what you will do is provide economic regeneration for areas that are, as I say, at the present time, even in the south, derelict, and you will also provide additional housing supply for people that desperately need it, and they do desperately need it. I think with the issue of housing … Of course, every time you say you are going to expand housing you get an outcry from people saying, “You are going to concrete over the country or the Green Belt”. All we are trying to do is to make sure that there is a sufficient supply of reasonably priced housing that people can get their feet on the home ownership ladder and bring up their family with some prospect of owning an asset.

Q165 Dame Marion Rose: One final point, if I may, Prime Minister. Is it not the case that the planning for the provision of the necessary infrastructure for this massive number of new houses in the south‑east is actually woefully lacking? I am talking about new hospitals, new roads, new schools. Is there not a risk that these vast housing estates will have nothing to actually bind the inhabitants together into a sustainable community?

Mr Blair: I can assure you, because I Chair the committee on the Thames Gateway, that that is not case, that the Health and Education Departments will be a vital part of this, so is the transport infrastructure; indeed you cannot develop these estates… I think to call them vast estates is a slight exaggeration, but it is impossible to develop without putting the basic facilities and infrastructure in there; and that is why the very purpose of having the Cabinet committee that I Chair is so that we make sure that we have actually got the health, the education, the transport infrastructure, the policing infrastructure that is necessary; and the reason why we have set up, as it were, a body that brings together all the various aspects of government in respect of the Thames Gateway is precisely for the reason that you give, Marion, that we know there is no way that we can make this work unless we put in the infrastructure as well, otherwise you just have communities that will put pressure on existing services.

Chairman: A final question before we go on to the education aspect. David Lepper.

Q166 Mr Lepper: I am concerned about housing in the south‑east and the south as well from a slightly different perspective to the one that Marion has pursued, Prime Minister. I am not so concerned about drawing large numbers of people into the south‑east as about providing affordable housing for people, like my constituents, who already live there. My area of the south coast in Brighton and Hove is an area of high housing prices, whether we are talking about buying or whether we are talking about renting, low provision of social housing, high provision, comparatively, of privately rented housing. What we do see are families, as you have just suggested, not sure how their youngsters are going to be able to find their way into the housing market to stay in the area in which they were born. What we also see, I think, because of that is problems of recruitment and retention for our public services, particularly health and education. I wonder whether some of the regional planning that we have talked about so far really is the best way of looking at this issue. I am concerned at a very local level with providing in precise travel to work areas the housing that is needed; and all the planning that has been proposed for the south‑east in housing is not going to help my constituents, I do not think.

Mr Blair: Let my try and deal with one particular aspect, David, of what you are putting to me. Obviously there are always limits to the development and the particular development. The four areas that we have looked at, in particular, do not include yours, but on the other hand, the key workers housing programme is a programme that we have started in London, it is true, but we want to take into other parts of the country where we are providing help for about 10,000 key workers now, and that will be significantly increased over the next few years, and helping precisely those people who we need to recruit in the areas where the cost of housing is very high and yet the salary for a teacher or a nurse or a police officer is not going to be sufficiently higher on any basis for them to be able to live there. So we are trying to do that as well. I think there are certain issues that are the coming issues. I think one is to do with pensions, which is a topic perhaps for another day, but the other is to do with housing. I think both of those will have a much higher prominence in the political debate in the next few years than, as I believe, certain of the issues like the Health Service get into a different place.

Q167 Mr Lepper: I think one of the issues that the Barker Report raises is about the balance between building for buying and building for renting and particularly social renting. Do you feel that we have got that balance right at the moment? Which way do you think that balance ought to swing in the future? Can you give us some suggestions about how we head in the right direction?

Mr Blair: The two things that I would say to you is whether the balance is right or not is pretty much a matter of random judgment, to be honest. I believe we have got the balance about right, but I accept that people can make a different judgment. We are trying to make sure that we increase social housing. We are investing a lot in that as well as housing that people will buy. I think the other issue in relation to this is that we also need to look very specifically in certain areas where it can be very difficult sometimes to get the right planning permissions, where there is not enough ingenuity and innovation in how we deal with developers in areas where sometimes they could get easier development if they were prepared to make some commitment to social housing. I think these development issues are again coming up on the agenda. Some of them are very, very difficult to deal with. I think we are getting the balance right, but I do think that the implementation of the Barker Report is a very important part of making sure that for housing in the south‑east the situation is somewhat eased.

Q168 Mr Sheerman: Prime Minister, a lot of governments that have been in power for seven years tackling something as complex as the reform of public services tend to run out of steam. Has your administration run out of steam?

Mr Blair: No. There is a short answer for you. No, I do not think so. I think the recent health service plans indicate very clearly that we have not.

Q169 Mr Sheerman: If you take something like the reform of 14 to 19 education, there is a feeling around that the Government is losing its enthusiasm for really shaking up for the 14 to 19 agenda and that they are getting concerned that the Tomlinson Report - because it is going to introduce some very radical proposals for how we educate our young people that the Government is getting nervous and backtracking. What do you say to that sort of thing?

Mr Blair: No, I think that would be completely wrong, Barry, actually. On the contrary, I think we are prepared to be very radical in relation to 14 to 19 year olds in particular to make sure… I think this is one of the issues for us to address, that the vocational stream is given the importance that the academic stream has always had. I held a reception in Downing Street last night for people who provide education post sixteen, and what was interesting there was the very clear view of people from the independent learning sector, from further education colleges and from schools that increasingly young people are looking for very high quality vocational skills training and that a lot of the problems you get in schools are when you have got children aged 14 who may well want to go down the vocational route who are forced into the academic straight‑jacket and feel that they are not getting any benefit from that schooling at all. We are awaiting the final report from Mike Tomlinson a little bit later in the year, but I think you will find our response measures up to the scale of the problem. I would point out as well that from 70,000 a few years ago we have now got 250,000 modern apprenticeships, and we will be expanding that still further.

Q170 Mr Sheerman: But right at the heart of everything you say these days and have said for a very long time about the reform of public services, you have put choice and personalised service right up front. I sometimes get the feeling that you do not explain well enough the way that you see that as a dynamic. Can you explain to us why you see that as a dynamic for change and reform?

Mr Blair: I think that there are two aspects to this. There is choice for parents and pupils between schools, but there is also choice within whatever institution you are in to pursue, for example, the vocational rather than the academic route, and I think you need to get both of those things right. I do not think… Choice, in my view, applies in a different way in education and health, but choice is meaningless unless the capacity is there, unless you are providing, for example, the good schools. If you have one good school in an area and everybody wants to get into it and the other schools are mediocre or doing badly, there is not a great deal of choice because some people will not be able to get into the school that they want to get into. So you have got to combine choice with expanding capacity and raising standards. It is why I do not believe that you can have a free‑for‑all on schools. I think you need freedom for schools but not a free‑for‑all: because if you end up saying to schools, “Right, you get on with your own business. Do whatever you want”, and those schools are not performing adequately, you are going to end up with a situation where the parents that are the most assertive get their kids into the best school and the other parents end up with their children getting a poor education, and that is not fair.

Q171 Mr Sheerman: The choice is quite complex for a lot of people. There is an argument that choice favours those people who are well informed, can make those judgments, sophisticated judgments that they are, and, indeed, who have money. Is not choice loading the dice towards the sort of professional middle classes?

Mr Blair: Let me say, first of all, my view very strongly is that choice should not be dependent on money. I do not believe that we should be giving subsidies to private schools or private healthcare. That is a debate we can have in another forum maybe with other people here, but that is not the choice in my view. However, I do believe it is very important, and I do not think this is simply a middle class preoccupation at all, it is very important when parents come to decide their secondary school, in particular, for their child that there are a range of good schools for them to choose from. I think that is not something limited to people of a certain income. I think that many working class parents feel exactly the same: they want their children to do better. People are often very well aware of what are the good schools and what are not the good schools.

Q172 Mr Sheerman: We only get good schools and we only get good hospitals if people value the public service; and you will remember, as I do, John Smith’s commitment to turning what he thought was a selfish society, worshipping getting rich quick and all that, into serving the community, bringing back serving the community, doing public service jobs as being high value. Do you think your administration has done enough to lead on making public service a respected profession whether it be in health or in education?

Mr Blair: I do not think it is just a task for government, but I do think the Government has done a lot on this. If you look, for example, at education, if you look at the rises in teachers’ pay over the past seven years, they have been significantly more than they were before, the expansion of the numbers of teachers, the expansion of teacher training places. If you are the head teacher of an inner city school in London today it is not impossible that you are on an almost or actually at a six-figure salary. I still think there is a lot more that we need to do. In my view the people who are the entrepreneurs in our public services are every bit as much deserving of public esteem as the entrepreneurs in the private sector. All I would say to you is if you look at the programmes that we have introduced, whether it is specialist schools or excellence in cities, they have made significant differences to school results, and I think it is hard for any of us to go into our local constituencies and visit local schools and not see the investment that has gone in there. Seven years ago we were pretty average on technology in the classroom. We must be one of the best in the world now for the amount of computer technology, and so on, in the classroom.

Q173 Chairman: What about the child who wants to do woodwork or home economics rather than textiles or even an academic side of the subject?

Mr Blair: That is where I think the point that Barry is making about Tomlinson and how you provide a really good vocational stream is very important; but I think one of the other things that helps in that is to get more involvement from local business and the business community in schools as well. The specialist schools often have a connection with their local business. Some of the children now in the specialist schools that have a specialism in enterprise, for example, will go and spend some time with local employers before the age of sixteen. I think that is all very helpful and I think, as I say, one of our main tasks in the new next few years is to put the same emphasis on raising vocational standards as we have on the academic side. One of the weaknesses of the British system over a long period of time is that the vocational side has not been given the same prominence.

Q174 Tony Wright: Prime Minister, choice seems to be the Government’s big idea at the moment, indeed it seems to be the opposition’s big idea as well, and yet we had the Chairman of the Audit Commission last week saying that he thought it was a useful idea. What I want to ask you is: is it a big idea, is it a little idea, or is it a sort of middle sized idea?

Mr Blair: The big idea is to raise the standards of service and to do it on the basis of equality rather than on the basis of ability to pay, and choice has a role to play in that. I know people can be very sniffy about choice, but if you are waiting for a long time for an operation and you have for the first time the ability to go anywhere you need where there is spare capacity within the Health Service that is able to treat you, I think choice is very important; and I also think it is very important not, as I say, that we simply introduce choice and theory. The choice is often there now in education. You need to raise the standard of good schools, however, and raise the number of good schools in order that people can exercise their choice better.

Q175 Tony Wright: What you describe there is in a sense people’s second choice. People’s first choice is to have a decent service down the road. What everyone is saying to me is that we are putting all this money into public services, record levels of investment in public services; we are now seeing some of the fruits of that coming through, more rapidly in some areas than others, education, health. Why can we simply not stick with that so that people have got some guarantee about getting a good quality service down the road? Why now go off and chase choice?

Mr Blair: We are not suddenly going off and chasing it. If you take the National Health Service, one of the reasons why you have got every single waiting list indicator and waiting time indicator in a better place is the development of the diagnostic and treatment centres in various different parts of the country, particularly where there is high waiting, where people can go to if they are not able to get into their local hospital. Of course, what everyone wants is the good school and the good hospital on their doorstep. The question is, given that we live in an imperfect world and they do not always have it, are they then just stuck with a failing or poor service on their doorstep or can they exercise the choice to go elsewhere? The important thing about choice is, let me make this clear, choice is only really a means to an end and the means to the end is making sure that if someone does not get a decent service they can choose to go elsewhere and if you do not give them that choice then, actually, that is highly inequitable. The one thing you can be sure of with the more assertive, wealthier, middle class people is that they will make damn sure, one way or another, that they get to the place they need to get to.

Q176 Tony Wright: Do you not think that people are just a little bit jaundiced about choice? A few years ago we had a rather good directory enquiries service. You just phoned up this number, 192, and they would tell you the number that you wanted and everything was straightforward, and then choice decreed that we had to have loads of different numbers that none of us could remember. We now have a report that has just been published which says less people now use the service than did before and the price is just the same. Do you not think that people just want quality and if that means a bit of planning, let us have a bit of planning?

Mr Blair: There is planning and where it is necessary you have to plan. I do not agree that choice is not still important for people, Tony. If you look at your local school and you think the results are really not good enough, I do not think it is fair to say to that parent, “I’m sorry, you’ve just got to wait until the school miraculously becomes better or until someone intervenes and makes it better.” Insofar as possible you have got to be able to say to the parent ‑ and this is where you need to open up the school system, have greater diversity of supply, of different types of schools and so on ‑ as far as possible, if that school is not to the standard that you require there is another school that you can go to, and I think the same is true with NHS care. What interests me about both the education and the National Health Service debate is that people say to me now, “What are you on about more change for? You’re always on about more change. We’ve just been through one lot of change and now suddenly you’re coming up with another lot of change.” I remember when we first introduced specialist schools people told me it was going to end up with elitism. I remember when we first introduced all the changes in the National Health Service people told us it would undermine the nature of the Health Service. The improvements we have seen in health and education have largely been as a result of the policies on which the next ramp of policy actually builds.

Q177 Tony Wright: What I am simply putting to you is that people want to be able to see in practical terms what some of this means. Let us take a town with just a couple of secondary schools, one is at the posh end of town and is over‑subscribed and the other one at the poor end of town people do not want to go to. You tell me which model of choice is going to enable those people in the poor end of town to go to the school in the posh end of town?

Mr Blair: The model of choice is, and this is why I say choice without building the standards and capacity is a chimera —

Q178 Tony Wright: So what are we saying?

Mr Blair: What we are saying is, and this is where I would disagree with the policy of other political parties, is that I think it is extremely important that you do not say, “Well, that school is failing. Tough! There’s nothing you can do about it.” You have got to intervene and ensure that that school gets better, if necessary by changing the management at the school, the head teacher at the school. That is why the numbers of failing schools, for example, is down by more than a half since we came to office.

Q179 Tony Wright: That is collective choice. That is us choosing to put in place a policy that will produce that result, that is not individuals choosing.

Mr Blair: Exactly. I am not saying that choice alone is the answer. I am saying, however, that choice has a part to play along with building capacity. The reason why we are building up choice within the National Health Service rather than simply giving it to people immediately now is that if you do not build the capacity in the Health Service then what you will do is you will just move the bulge of demand round the system. If you actually expand capacity then it makes perfect sense to give people choice.

Q180 Tony Wright: I do not know what building capacity means. Does it mean that we are going to make the popular school twice as big?

Mr Blair: I do think there is a case for saying that good schools that are popular can expand, but I think that you also have to intervene in the case of failure and make that school that is not providing a good service improve it.

Q181 Tony Wright: Why do we not do what the Americans do with their charter schools, which we were interested in at one time here, which basically allows anybody to apply to any school and they have a lottery to decide who gets in? That is a radical choice model that people could understand, but that is not one that we are embracing, is it?

Mr Blair: We are not embracing that one, no. What we are embracing, however, is the City Academy model which means that you take a school that has failed, you are turning it round with outside sponsorship, with some government investment, the school is run with its own distinctive ethos and purpose and these schools that are now starting are immensely successful. I simply say to anybody who wants to see how you actually can turn around failing schools that they should go and visit some of the new academies that are starting up round the country. If you take the treatment of heart disease and heart patients within the National Health Service for example, when we introduced the choice for people that after a certain period of waiting you could choose to go wherever you wanted it was fantastically successful and popular. It has helped build up capacity within the system and as a result of it people are getting treated far faster. What I would say about this choice issue in a sense is to demystify it. It is not the be-all-and-end-all of the entire debate, but what it is is an important lever in circumstances where otherwise your user of public services has no choice but to use a bad service. The reason why I think it is so important for our side of politics to take this up is that my passionate belief is that public services should remain for all parts of the community. Public services should not be the services for those that cannot afford to go private. Once that happens ‑ and this is the danger, for example, with parts of the education system in London, let us be blunt about it ‑ then you lose the support for universal public services. We are not going to have a free-for-all but we are going to have greater freedom, greater independence and we are going to do that against a background of wanting to say to parents, if the school that is on your doorstep is not sufficiently good, we are not going to leave you with the choice of either going privately or sticking with the school that is not up to standard.

Q182 Chairman: Prime Minister, I listen but I do not understand. I have got my public accounts hat on at the moment. Following on from what Tony has said, schools have finite capacity, they can be expanded to a limited extent. The idea of choice is fine, but the idea of the sort of absolute choice you have adduced is just unattainable unless you have an enormous massive surplus capacity and therefore wasted resources within the system. It is fine in theory but it will not work in practice.

Mr Blair: I just do not agree with that argument. I do not see what is difficult to understand about it.

Q183 Chairman: I will tell you what is difficult to understand. I have a school in my constituency exactly as Tony described, where the people from Donald’s patch would try to get into that school, and I can understand why. One has had a situation where a grandfather living within the catchment area adopted the granddaughter from Donald’s side so that the child would go to the school on my side. The school on my side already has all these portable classrooms, there is nowhere else to put people. How do you give choice in a situation like that?

Mr Blair: Surely that makes my point for me, that what you have got to do is you have got to ask why are the other schools in the area not of a standard —

Q184 Chairman: You have not answered the question. Where are the children going?

Mr Blair: The very reason why you are having to deal with this problem is that at the moment the good school is over‑subscribed and as a result of that there are people who are not getting the choice of school that they want. The answer to that surely, Alan, is not to take away their right to choose but to expand the capacity within the school system of good schools, which is the reason for the changes and reforms we are making, and then give them the greater choice.

Q185 Tony Wright: My local authority and others are still pursuing a pretty robust surplus places policy. Are you now announcing the end of the policy of removing surplus places from the system?

Mr Blair: No, I am not saying that. I am simply saying that you cannot say that good schools are unable to expand simply because you have got surplus places elsewhere when the surplus places elsewhere may be in a school that is not up to standard. We have a very simple choice on this if you like. We either say that in no circumstances is that good school going to be able to expand, even though it could expand and wants to, because there are surplus places at a school that someone does not want to send their children to. I am sorry, in the end that is not acceptable. We have to make sure that we are not simply allowing the good school to expand but we are also taking measures to deal with the school that is not up to scratch. That is why I do not agree with the free‑for‑all. I think it is important to give parents a range of different choices. When people say that this is something that simply middle class parents want, I do not agree with that. I think it is something that all parents who have got aspirations for their children want. Unless you could expand the capacity this is a meaningless debate, I totally agree with you, but if you do expand the capacity it is a very meaningful debate for parents.

Q186 Chairman: Let us take it in school terms. If you expand a good school by 30 places at entrance, you have to expand it by 30 places all the way through the school system to accommodate those extra children as they go through. That is a massive increase. It is not attainable particularly on existing sites. In the meantime, even if you have got what you want, what you are doing is only creating a return to the secondary modern by having a two-tier school system within the same time.

Mr Blair: You are not doing anything of the sort. The very hypothesis you posit is that you have got your two tiers, ie you have got one school they all want to get into and you have got another they do not want to go to. We really will have to debunk this idea that we do not have different tiers of provision within our public services at the moment. There is not a single one of us round this table who is a parent that does not look at different schools to see whether they are good or not. Therefore the tiers that you have are tiers in relation to quality. In the example that you give, if your successful school in your community thinks it is unattainable and it does not want to expand, it does not have to, but that is not the issue. The issue is whether you say to them they are not allowed to expand even though they could, which I think is an unacceptable restriction to put on them, but that is not all I am suggesting. At the same time, if the school in your constituency ‑ and I do not know the ins and outs of it so I do not want to criticise it ‑ is not providing high enough standards, we have got to ask why and then take remedial action. I am not suggesting this thing called choice hangs out there on its own as a sort of abstract because in the schools system at the moment in theory there is choice. The problem is there are not enough schools to choose from and therefore you have got to have both, both the capacity and the choice. I say to you in all honesty, I passionately disagree with this notion that at the moment this is a system where there is a marvellous degree of equity and everyone just goes to their next-door school because they think that is really what they should do. It is not what happens. As you know perfectly well, people move homes, they do whatever they can do in order to get their kids into the best school and I think that is natural. People want the best for their kids and they are going to carry on doing that and our job is to provide more good schools. We have put far more money into the most disadvantaged areas for schooling. The Excellence in Cities programme is raising the standard of schools in some of the poorest parts of the country.

Q187 Mr Sheerman: Would you support an academy for Swansea?

Mr Blair: I think if you can get one, get one. All I can tell you is that you will find some of the most disadvantaged kids in schools that are new schools and they are providing high quality education and I think all of these schools are schools that had fewer than 20 per cent of the kids getting five good GCSEs.

Q188 Mr Hinchliffe: I think I would be the first to acknowledge that there have been some very significant improvements in the NHS in terms of quality of care in particular and indeed increases in capacity. I was struck very strongly recently when the NHS White Paper was launched at the exchange that took place in the Commons between the two front benches which was almost exclusively around this narrow area of choice as the key issue in health. If you are still Prime Minister by 2020 and there is quite a good chance you will be, half our children will be clinically obese on current trends. We are currently spending between £6.5 and £7.5 billion economically on obesity and, frankly, choice is an irrelevance to the real health issues. It is very nice to talk about this consumerist approach to choosing hospitals but it really does not address some of the pretty serious problems that we have. Do you not feel that the Government has a role to play in shifting the focus of the debate on health towards a preventive agenda rather than on to a hospital and curative agenda?

Mr Blair: I totally agree with the last point, I think we do have a responsibility. I think you are right in a sense to say that this concept of choice has become a surrogate for a debate about the consumers’ role in public services. My view of this again is very, very simple, which is that for my father’s generation post-War people got the basic services that they never had before and that was a tremendous innovation and step forward and a whole lot of social progress through the 1944 Education Act and the creation of the National Health Service and so on arose from that. What we do in the private sector part of our lives is we have gone beyond mass production, we have a range of different choices and we operate far more as consumers. I think that in respect of public services people demand and expect to have, particularly with the large sums of money going in, a more personalised service, a service more responsive to them. That is why when we first said you should be able to see a health professional within 24 hours and your GP within 48 I know it caused problems for some GPs, but I used to say to my people, is that the most we can offer? You should be able to get access into the health care system pretty quickly and that is the reason for walk‑in centres and NHS Direct and so on. I agree with you that sometimes the thing appears to revolve around choice. I think it is more fundamental than that. It is about how you personalise public services for today’s world. I think the choice argument is important in that. All I say is that the empirical evidence we have within the Health Service is that when people are given the choice they enjoy exercising it.

Q189 Mr Hinchliffe: We have a Public Health White Paper coming out in the Autumn. Will that be a radical White Paper in terms of putting public health at the centre of the Government’s agenda cross‑departmentally? One of the worries that I have on a range of policies is that we can evaluate them financially, we can find the cost implications of them, but we rarely ever seem to address the environmental consequences and the health consequences. A good example is the Congestion Charge policy in London. We know the costs of implementing it, we know the cost benefits arising from it, but we have not evaluated the positive health consequences, the fact that people need to walk more and cross the street safely.

Mr Blair: The point you make about public health and prevention is absolutely right. I hope the White Paper is radical in this area. It is difficult though because you will run into this concept that you can see over the issue to do with smoking bans and the issue to do with obesity and whether we discourage certain types of advertising of particular foods to children and all the rest of it. I find it quite difficult to talk about the issue of what is the Government’s role in relation to obesity? In the end I cannot tell someone how to live their life.

Q190 Mr Hinchliffe: The Government’s role is to evaluate in any area of policy the possible health consequences.

Mr Blair: Yes, that is true. I think what you can do is educate people as to the lifetime changes they can make in order to give themselves a better and more effective life. I think you reach quite early on in these debates a crux which is the issue to do with - if I can call it in crude political terms - the nanny state notion, to what extent is the Government able to say this is what you must do? I think what the Government can do in relation to healthy living is that it can explain to people what the facts are. It can do a lot more in schools, for example, to make sure that people know what the consequences are of the lifestyle that they lead and it may be in certain areas ‑ and the smoking issue is one of them ‑ that you can take action now that maybe a few years ago people would have said, “What on earth do they think they’re doing getting into that?” So this debate does move. I agree that the prevention aspect is fantastically important, there is no doubt about that at all. If you look at health care costs going forward, the biggest single item of cost will be people who have got chronic diseases that they need to manage of one sort or another and sometimes these

Connate Entries

• May 13, 2007 -- Blair’s Legacy: Official Secrets or Open Government?
• May 10, 2007 -- Transcript of Tony Blair MP’s speech, May 10 2007
• May 4, 2004 -- Prime Minister Tony Blairs Speech To The House
• April 28, 2004 -- Robin Cooks Resignation Speech In Full
• September 13, 2004 -- UK Government to deny NHS healthcare to asylum seekers

© 2004 An Unevenly Distributed Future.