Wes Streeting destroys criticism of Labour personal faculties plan on Question Time

Wes Streeting has destroyed arguments against Labour’s private schools plan in a brutal takedown on BBC Question Time.

The Shadow Health Secretary took on critics of his party’s plan to axe tax perks enjoyed by independent schools. It wants to remove their exemption from paying 20% VAT and use the cash raised to improve state schools instead.

A member of the BBC Question time audience asked Mr Streeting if it was “morally right to impose a tax on parents’ aspirations for their children”. He replied simply “yes” and said there are “difficult choices to be made”.

In a takedown of criticism of the plan, Mr Streeting continued: “There’s lots of opposition from independent schools who are now pleading poverty and saying that people will be priced out, so I took the liberty of looking at this school’s fees and how they’ve changed since 2020. They’ve gone up from £8,717 per term, to £10,303 pounds per term, an increase of 18%.

“School fees in this country – independent school fees – have risen well above inflation every year since before 2010. So I say respectfully, not to the parents, I know that parents are worried about this, I accept that, but I say to the head teachers of these sorts of schools pleading poverty, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to cut your cloth accordingly, like state schools have had to for more than 14 years.

“And we make no apology for putting the education and ambitions and opportunities of kids from working class backgrounds like mine who attend [state schools] – the 93% of kids – above the schools that educate the 7% because we want to extend opportunity and aspiration and ambition, and that is not simply the preserve of the wealthy. And those are the sorts of fairer choices a Labour government would make unapologetically.”

Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson earlier this week said she did not accept that private schools would be forced to close as a result of Labour’s proposed 20% VAT charge on fees. “If you look at the work that the Institute for Fiscal Studies did … they concluded that Labour’s policy would raise £1.3-1.5billion net and we would invest that directly into our state schools – we would make sure we’ve got 6,500 more teachers,” she told Sky News.

Asked whether there was a risk the policy would cause private school s to close, she said: “Firstly, I don’t accept that we will see that kind of change – that wasn’t the conclusion that the Institute for Fiscal Studies reached – but secondly, in our state schools we’re actually facing a situation at the moment where we’ve got falling rolls, so fewer young people coming through our schools, so we’re actually going to be in the position in the years to come of state schools facing those kinds of pressures about whether they’ve got enough students within their classrooms.”

Ms Phillipson added that private schools could learn from state schools and how they’ve had to manage a really tight budget in recent years “whereas private schools have whacked up fees way beyond inflation, putting themselves out of the reach of many middle-class parents who might have, in the past, considered sending their children to private school”.