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Cost of School Uniforms

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the cost of school uniforms.

Ms McDonagh, this is the first time I have spoken under your chairmanship, so not only is today’s debate really important, but it gives me real pleasure to serve under you. I am sure that view is going to be shared by everybody, including the Minister, for whom I have some really good news. I am hoping to enlist him in a twofold campaign. One part of it is that all of us who want to intervene should approach the Chancellor and ask him to lift VAT on school clothing—full stop. We should also ask him to give a direction to school governors in a way I think is going to emerge during the debate, and I will touch on that as well.

We are facing an open goal, because the year that the Minister came into the House of Commons, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) introduced a Bill saying how absurd it was that there was a 14-year cut-off—a point some of us may come back to. He pointed out that, for an average-sized 14-year-old, it means that VAT is applied where their collar size is over 14½ inches and where they wear jumpers with a 34-inch chest and upwards, trousers with waists of 28 inches and upwards or skirts with a 26-inch waist and upwards.

The key person supporting my hon. Friend—I will call him my hon. Friend because I agree very much with his views—was the Prime Minister. She was not then the Prime Minister; she was a Back Bencher. This was a topic dear to her heart, so I hope, when all of us together make an approach to the Prime Minister, and through her to the Chancellor, that we are going to get a massive amount of support for my hon. Friend and a constructive response.

I am hoping for a twofold response. The first part is that we scrap VAT on school clothing. If people can provide evidence that it is for a child at school, that will exempt the actual product, just as people with disability get some VAT exemptions when they can prove the status of their disability. Secondly, we want the Minister of State who drives schools policy to give a commitment that he will write to school heads and governors and ask them to do several things. First, school governors should undertake a pricing each year in local stores or wherever they request parents to shop on the cost of the school uniform. Secondly, there should be standard items from many suppliers rather than just one or, if lucky, two. Thirdly, if the school wants to distinguish itself from others, it should do it by standard colours that can be bought in many shops, not by specific blazers that are only to be bought in certain places.

I think other Members may want to come in on the actual costs of games kits, and I will quickly touch on all those issues. However, I also want to thank people from Birkenhead and beyond, because we had the most extraordinary response from there and from around the country about today—I did not know people wanted to follow a Facebook link to Birkenhead—and those people wrote in with their comments about the horrors.