Isabel Hardman
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‘As the honourable lady will know, if she had taken the time to read our guidance, that actually those food parcels didn’t meet the expectations or the guidance that we had set out. They are not acceptable, and we have made that clear and where we are very keen to ensure that schools have the choice and the freedom to choose what is best for children within their school, that is why we have given schools… the opportunity to either do food parcels, give them the opportunity to do vouchers as locally procured or the national voucher scheme and over 15,000 of those vouchers have already been dispatched today.’
The images of the pathetic parcels given to some families unsettled many in the Conservative party as they feared that even though the government was not directly responsible, it would be blamed anyway. But it was striking that Tory MPs were by and large keen to support their colleagues in government. Pauline Latham asked a very helpful question about how many calls the department had received complaining of inadequate food parcels, which allowed Minister for Children Vicky Ford to announce that ‘by the end of last week, we had received a total of seven calls in relation to unacceptable parcels’.
Food parcels are only the latest row. Williamson and colleagues are still struggling to answer questions about IT provision for disadvantaged children. The Education Secretary went on the offensive against Wes Streeting when the shadow schools minister complained that the ‘incompetence of his own department’ meant children still didn’t have the laptops and dongles they needed. Williamson accused the Labour frontbencher of ‘playing politics with children’s lives’, and argued that he was ‘focusing on… delivering for those children’.
As an aside, there is something miserable about a politician using ‘politics’ as the basis for a complaint: politics is the business of getting things done that the electorate has voted for. The alternative is leaving decisions to unelected technocrats who have no accountability, something Williamson has found quite convenient when it comes to who else he can blame for the exams fiasco of last summer, for instance.
Labour is continuing to home in on why nurseries remain open. Ford insisted that the ‘evidence at the moment’ was that transmission and the risk to individual children was small in these settings, while the benefits of early years care were too important. She also said the department was in ‘continual contact’ with Public Health England about the risks for early years. But beyond that, she didn’t really answer Stella Creasy’s question about what meetings ministers have had about the evidence of transmission in special schools and nurseries. Her insistence that nurseries should remain open for the time being is unlikely to give the sector much confidence either way: after all, ministers in this department have insisted all sorts of things over the past year, before U-turning at the very last moment.
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