Will VAT on private school fees lead to a partial collapse of the sector?

[mids2019]

Will VAT on school fees coupled with cost of living drive a lot of parents from the private sector or will the majority absorb the cost? Are the numbers that potentially end up in the public sector going to offset any gains to the treasury through VAT?

Labour are working at about 4-5% transfer rate to the public sector but is this an underestimate?

@Avarcas - it’s like Brexit. They have a mandate to deliver it somehow, but not exactly how. Hard or Soft, what exactly are they going to do about all the nuances? Military families, SEN, schools in deprived areas that are significant local employers but may go out of business etc etc. They cannot just dismiss those issues. Just like they could not dismiss state boarding. The bottlenecks in EHCP - they will have to at least let people go to mediation for SEN kids and get temporary VAT exemptions. It is entirely unworkable otherwise.

“They are making SEN exemptions so I am not sure what you are talking about.“

No they are only exempting SEN with an EHCP. There are plenty of kids with SEN which would qualify for an EHCP just haven’t applied for it yet and the local councils are constantly breaching the timelines. So there will be many legal challenges. And they will have to fund the councils properly to deal with this or accept mediation in the mean time. There are plenty of people going the mediation route now.
It is unworkable to rely on that piece of paper that is both time consuming and expensive to get, the EHCP. We need a clear number on how many people are self funding. All SEN schools need to get together and work out the numbers. They have to exempt all SEN schools. It is utterly crap not to.

It's nothing like Brexit. They have been given a mandate a country mile higher than the Brexit mandate - hardly 52%!

It is simply their job to navigate how they deliver the policy they have promised. It is about pragmatism to make it workable not tactics on whether to make it hard or soft. Starmer is very well placed to navigate this.

What are you on about @Avarcas?!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c886pl6ldy9o

They really have not been given a proper mandate. Only 34%! Far lower than Brexit.

You do realise that Con and Reform together are a higher percentage than Labour on its own. They may have the seats because of first past the post, but they do not have the majority of the population on their side. So they have to tread quite carefully, not make big mistakes etc or they will be out in 5 years.

I was obviously talking about seats share. Of course they have a mandate. Which part of landslide victory did you not understand?

Yes swing voters who may only grant one term of loyalty if they don't deliver on what they said they would. All the more reason for them to get their VAT policy through.

Of the population Eligable to vote, 80 percent didn’t vote for Labour. That makes this very hard for them, as they don’t have the population behind them. They were not voted in as such, Tory was voted out. By those who bothered to turn up. And they have inherited the same shit show as the Tory’s had to deal with following Covid, Ukraine and brexit.

So if you look at it that way it is important that they deliver what they said they would, no?

Is there a reason you're adding Con + Reform but not Lab + Lib Dem + Green?

Or recognising the ruthless levels of tactical voting that went on, and the impact of that on vote share?

Or that about a third of the Reform vote came from 2019 Labour not 2019 Conservative?

Labour played the necessary (and best) strategy under FPTP in what is no longer a heavily two-party dominated system. The system rewarded choices that sacrificed vote depth and share of vote for number of seats - which in our system is the mandate that matters.

@JassyRadlett - most people think of Reform as the more Far Right. So you think it includes the Far Left too? Or just the pro Brexit, anti immigrant lot?

The Tory vote was split last minute. Perfectly naturally to look at Con plus Reform therefore.

In any event, I was responding to the poster who stated Labour have more of a mandate than post Brexit @52%. Which simply not the case. Because they only got 34% of the total vote and far less in terms of total population.
As regards disabled children and military families, they really are going to have to tread carefully. Especially with a right wing press.
Don’t assume I am anti Labour, far from it. This was meant as a caution.

Honestly, trying to create the idea of equivalence of mandate using two totally different electoral systems (which drive totally different modes of campaign and strategy) is constitutionally illiterate.

Based on repeated polling of those saying they planned to vote reform, a significant number drew from 2019 Labour. A left-right political spectrum is increasingly challenging to lay across the current voter behaviour landscape - particularly post-Brexit.

The Tory vote wasn't split last minute, either. Reform was polling as high as 13% in March and crossed the Lib Dems in January. They got a boost from Farage which actually dropped back in the final vote.

I made no assumptions about your political allegiance. Just asked some questions and pointed out facts.

Argh I've left it too late to edit but that was unnecessarily rude on my part. I should have said that creating equivalence between the two wasn't logical or valid. There was no need to be rude, and I apologise.

I think this was the tipping point in a large number of hot takes on the vote share today that totally ignore both context and history. But I shouldn't have lashed out.

@JassyRadlett - you can call me as constitutionally illiterate as you like. But most major news outlets are reporting the huge irony that Farage split the Con vote and enabled the Labour Majority in Parliament. It is not something that can just be swept under the carpet.
Couple that with the fact that many people worldwide are just against whatever party was in charge during Covid, and the difficulties encountered by Covid itself, it is a perfect storm and has to inform policy decisions. Caution and observation initially are not a bad thing.

Apology accepted.

Funnily, they were quite quiet on the subject when a very similar thing happened to the Lib Dems in 2019. Perhaps Lib Dems are more easily swept under carpets.

At any rate that's not relevant to any of the points I took issue with - and while our electoral system is worthy of debate (and there are some great threads on this running), it's not really relevant to the facts that, (1) playing by the the rules of the electoral system we have and that was confirmed by a 2011 referendum, Starmer has won an absolutely stonking mandate and (2) not even close to all Reform voters were straight Tory-Reform switches.

Local private day school fees are around £28k per year. I certainly couldn’t afford that on my pretty decent salary, let alone afford to send two or more children, and yet there is fierce competition for places.

Here the local day schools are no where near this amount.

The Local GDST school is less than £12k for primary and less than £16k for secondary and sixth form. Extra incidental costs aren't huge either.

Spare a thought for the poor old SDP/Liberal Alliance in 1983. A quarter of the vote share, and only 0.4% behind Labour, but just 13 seats.

Well what is clear to me @JassyRadlett - is that more serious politicians need to get onto the likes of TikTok and recruit accordingly. If we are going to ensure our democracy is safe. Younger people need to be involved, including their means of communication.
If TikTok is banned for certain types we do need to understand the implications. Farage isn’t stupid. He literally exploited that loophole.

Again, no disagreement that politicians need to talk to people in their own language where they are, not expect people to come to them.

To get back to the thread, yes VAT on private school fees is a penalty and a deterrent and would absolutely lead to a collapse of the smaller players in the private education sector.

And, what is more, disabled children and military families and staff in rural schools will be the ones paying the price.

Whilst the most elite schools will position themselves such that no Government can get to them by building endowments and becoming more and more elite and increasingly also selling their brand abroad to other jurisdictions that value “British public school education”. It is sort of unrivalled but can be copied.

All entirely reasonably foreseeable and not an “equality” win for us. Far from it.

You can't compare a single issue referendum with a general election. Totally different things. But if you do, you need to look at the mandate you get from it and that measure is the number of Labour seats, not % of vote.

Also there are substantial children who do have SEN, but can be supported to be in education without an EHCP - but a small private school, rather than large mainstream. ie the smaller class sizes, changes/reductions to curriculum, less large mixing in playgrounds etc. So to only use EHCP as having SEN would not be reflective of the whole population.

So perhaps there needs to be far more flexibility for state curriculum ie not just P8 subjects.

@avarcas - both Blair and Johnson got 43% of the total vote in their prime. Starmer only 34%. It is significant.

The majority of children with SEN in this country do not have access to private education.