Michael Fallon

Sevenoaks MP Michael Fallon joined fellow MPs Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge & Malling), Helen Grant (Maidstone) and Tracey Crouch (Chatham & Aylesford) at a meeting with Rail Minister Theresa Villiers on 27th July asking her to restore direct services between Maidstone and Charing Cross and the City, cut last December.  Mr Fallon said;

“Cancelling direct services to the City on the Maidstone East line has added to congestion at Sevenoaks.  More commuters are now driving from villages between Otford and Maidstone into Sevenoaks, increasing traffic congestion and overcrowding on our trains in peak hours.  Sevenoaks is not a “parkway station”, and it’s wrong that we should have to suffer over-crowded trains because SouthEastern can’t be bothered to run trains from Maidstone East to the City.”

The Minister has undertaken to look again at the cost of the service, and will report back to the MPs later in August.

Sevenoaks MP Michael Fallon has told local teachers that he is committed to securing the funding for the new Knole Academy.  Mr Fallon who was meeting a teachers’ union lobby (NAS/UWT) at Parliament today (19th July) said:
“I have been actively involved in the Knole Academy’s new build project, and it has taken up a great deal of my time since the election.   I’m determined that the new build will go ahead.  I’ve written to Ministers at the Department of Education, and last week I discussed the Knole Academy twice with Michael Gove, the Secretary of State.  He has assured me that the project will go ahead.  What’s important now is to restart the project meetings and get architects’ plans finalised.  I’m pressing Ministers to get their officials and Kent County Council officials back round the table.  We need to get this moving again.  Parents expect to see a new building on the Wildernesse site.  That was an integral part of the commitment to a new Academy.  It must go ahead.”

I have been pursuing this subject again since the election, and last Friday I met Paul Carter, the Leader of Kent County Council (KCC), Sarah Hohler, the Cabinet Member responsible for schools, and officials, to review the position.

The figures provided by KCC officials show that in 2009, 91 out of the 253 pupils who passed the 11+ in the Sevenoaks area did not get any of their four preferences on National Offer Day.  As the education authority is duty bound to make an alternative offer, these children were therefore allocated places many miles away from our area – much to their parents’ frustration. Many of these did eventually get their first, or other, preference school but only after weeks or months of waiting and fighting the appeals system.

I have repeatedly asked KCC to find ways of reducing the stress and delay involved in the appeals and waiting-list processes.   But this problem keeps recurring each year, and I do not think it is acceptable that so many of our children find it so difficult each year to get into our schools.

I am also very concerned that the situation will get worse as substantial new housing is added in Dunton Green and later at Fort Halstead.  KCC’s own figures already show an increase of around 8 per cent in pupil numbers in West Kent by 2017.  Our children also suffer from all the time involved in travel up and down to Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells, for which council taxpayers bear a significant cost.

I am clear, therefore, that the long-term answer is to provide more places.  It is impossible to do this at the existing grammar schools which are full, and it would therefore be logical to provide new places in Sevenoaks itself.  When the new-build Knole Academy opens on the Wildernesses site in 2012, the Bradbourne site becomes vacant.  KCC has agreed that this site can now be considered.

Rather than establish an entirely new grammar school (which presents several legal and political difficulties), it would be easier to provide a co-educational campus at Bradbourne for two of the existing schools.  We have agreed therefore that Kent will now formally explore with the current grammar schools which of them would be interested in expanding with a co-educational campus in Sevenoaks.  Kent will now approach the likely partner schools.

However, it is also the case that simply adding additional places in Sevenoaks will not automatically ensure that our children will then get their first choice.  Over 300 out of county applicants win places at Kent grammars each year.  Providing more places in West Kent could well increase the number of out-of-county pupils without increasing the number of our children getting their first preference.   We could see even stronger flows of pupils from East Sussex and Surrey in particular.

The first step, therefore, is to use the Schools Adjudicator to challenge the selection criteria of those schools that currently “super-select” beyond the 11 plus:  Skinners, Judd and Tonbridge Grammar for Girls.  Last year KCC successfully challenged and changed the selection arrangements of Dartford Grammar School to give priority first to girls living within one mile of the school (almost all of which falls within Kent), and then to girls living in parishes entirely within Kent.  Because the one mile radius includes a small part of another authority, it complied with the Greenwich judgement and subsequent rulings of the Schools Adjudicator.

We have agreed therefore that KCC will now formally challenge the admission arrangements of all three “super-selective” schools before this year’s deadline of 31st July.  KCC will propose alternatives which restrict initial selection to a tightly drawn radius around each school (which will include a very small part of east Sussex), and then to Kent children.

I will be supporting Kent’s submission with my own, and I hope you and other parents will write to the Adjudicator in similar terms.  I will let you have details as soon as the Adjudicator who will examine these challenges is selected.  I will invite the Adjudicator to hold a public hearing in Sevenoaks in order to understand the strength of local opinion on this issue.

There is no guarantee that these challenges will be successful or that we can attract sufficient support for additional places to be provided in Sevenoaks itself.  However, I am convinced, and Kent County Council agrees, that we have to try.  If we do nothing, there is every likelihood that the position could get worse, and that our parents who have chosen to bring up their children in a selective system will continue to lose out to those who have not.

I shall be in touch again with details of the Adjudicator appointed to rule on the West Kent case.

Abandoning the Buggins’s turn principle for chairs should be the start of turning our select committees into watchdogs with teeth

This week’s elections for select committee chairs, which Andrew Tyrie rightly celebrates, should be just the start of the process of strengthening parliament over the executive and making the job of backbenchers more worthwhile.

The Treasury select committee is often described as “highly influential”; that’s flattering and a testament to John McFall’s leadership and the political consensus we built together. But select committees have no legislative or budgetary powers: their influence depends on tough questioning of key witnesses, the authority of their reports and the all-party unanimity behind them.

That’s not unimportant. When it became obvious from the start of the banking crisis, for example, that regulators and bankers alike didn’t have a clue what they were doing, the Treasury committee became a focus for understanding what had gone wrong, and for testing the reforms that were needed. But parliament should be more than a forum, and I am proposing two key reforms that could turn our select committees into watchdogs with real teeth.

First, there’s no proper link between each committee and the departmental budget it is supposed to scrutinise. Yes, we look at forward plans and, afterwards, we review the annual report and accounts. But public spending remains split between three different sets of figures: the departmental budgets announced by the chancellor, the estimates presented to parliament, and the accounts filed after the money is spent. (There’s a long-running Treasury project, quaintly titled the Clear Line of Sight programme, that is currently trying to merge all three into a single set of figures.)

The government must, of course, set each department’s total. But three times a year, each department submits a supplementary estimate to parliament, requesting additional millions for new priorities or to correct overruns. These go through, billions at a time, usually on a quiet Thursday afternoon, without any proper scrutiny at all. On Thursday 10 December last year, for example, after only short debates, some £20bn was voted to the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, and some £17bn to Communities and Local Government.

The answer, therefore, is that no supplementary estimate should be presented to parliament before it has first been approved by the appropriate departmental select committee. At a stroke, this would change the balance of power: ministers would have to persuade their committee of the need for new expenditure, have to justify overruns, have to explain changed priorities.

Ministers would certainly have to take their committees much more seriously, building support for their programmes, keeping all members onside with their policies, and negotiating with each chair the timing and session of each supplementary estimate.

The second answer is to require all major public appointments to be confirmed by the respective departmental committee before being taken up. At present, we hold hearings but we have no sanction. Even though a candidate can be rejected, as the then children’s, schools and families committee turned down Maggie Atkinson for the post of children’s commissioner last autumn, for example, there is no sanction. Ministers can ignore such a vote, and in the event, Ed Balls, the secretary of state, simply brushed the committee aside and made the appointment anyway.

Instead, it should be clear that no major appointment – governor of the Bank of England, or the heads of major bodies like the Office of Fair Trading, the Environment Agency or Ofsted – could proceed without specific committee approval. Precisely because this would be a blocking power, committees would, I think, be careful how often they used it in practice; equally secretaries of state would be much more careful about their nominations.

Here, therefore, is a real agenda beyond this week’s elections. Thanks to Tony Wright’s modernisation committee, we’ve finally got away from the Buggins’s turn principle for committee chairs. Now let’s give the committees some real power over their departments.

Guardian 8th June 2010

Michael has welcomed confirmation that re-surfacing work on the M26 will start this summer, using low noise asphalt.  In a letter to him the Highways Agency chief executive Graham Dalton has confirmed that the works will replace the worn carriageway between Junctions 1 and 2A, and involve resurfacing each side of Noah’s Ark Bridge.

Mr Fallon said:  “This has been a long campaign.  Resurfacing the two heaviest used lanes with low-noise asphalt should reduce noise levels for Kemsing residents, especially those living closest to the motorway in Park Lane, Fairfield Close and neighbouring roads.”