PM'S SCHOOLS PLAN IS LURCH TO CENTRAL CONTROLS AND CUT IN ACCOUNTABILITY (Eastleigh Liberal Democrats)

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PM'S SCHOOLS PLAN IS LURCH TO CENTRAL CONTROLS AND CUT IN ACCOUNTABILITY

July 7, 2004 11:49 AM

Chris Huhne MEP with Cllrs Anne Winstanley & Angie Roling at Stoke Park School in Bishopstoke

Chris Huhne has condemned Blair's plan for school funding

Hampshire MEP and Eastleigh prospective parliamentary candidate Chris Huhne today condemned the Prime Minister's plan for direct funding of schools from Whitehall as an effective end to local accountability and control over education.

'This is a move in entirely the wrong direction' said Mr Huhne. 'The man from the ministry in Whitehall cannot have any idea of how 26,000 schools up and down the country are performing. The only people who can do that are parents locally, yet they are now to be deprived of any way of making their voice heard. Funding will be handed down from London, and he who pays the piper will call the tune. There will be no way of holding local politicians to account for education spending. This is a lunge at the heart of the independence of local government'.

Mr Huhne said that the latest proposals were likely to come in the Government's five year plan for education to be announced tomorrow, and mean that education will follow health in becoming entirely centrally controlled from London. Health was removed from any local control in 1974.

'The inexorable process of centralisation of public services goes on even though all the evidence shows that central control fails dismally. You simply cannot run a complex system of services for more than 60 million people from offices in Whitehall. We need exactly the opposite: a reinvigorated local government with more responsibility that local people can hold to account for successes and failures' he said.

Mr Huhne said that the Government's rhetoric about taking local decisions now seemed wholly empty. He pointed out that there was no consultation with local government on these proposals, and that it followed other plans for centralisation such as the amalgamation of fire and rescue control centres from county level to the South East as a whole.

Mr Huhne was the chairman of the recent Liberal Democrat commission on public services, which highlighted the importance of local democracy in delivering world class public services. 'Unless the people who know about local public services have some means of holding those who deliver them to account, quality is bound to deteriorate. Centralisation simply does not work. A key task for Liberal Democrats is to hand back power from Westminster to elected local people after years of Labour and Tory centralisation'.