As any politicians knows, there is only one way of avoiding that nightmare moment in Nick Ferrari’s studio when he keeps asking questions you can’t answer about the costs of your policy commitments: don’t put them in in the first place. Every politician would like to do this, but only the Conservatives were arrogant enough actually to try it. Labour and the Lib Dems published their own versions of the budget book with detailed costings for all their manifesto pledges. The Tory plan was to brief out a little detail and settle back to enjoy watching Labour squirm on the hook of the spendthrift reputation that the Tories themselves had crafted for it in the run-up to the 2010 election.
The Conservative manifesto is empty of costings; austerity is not mentioned, as far as I can see, at all. Theresa May’s determination to reinvent her party for the Brexit era does not mean there won’t be austerity – there will, and it will be worse than ever – it’s just that as a concept it is part of the identity of the old regime. It has no place in the armoury of the stout new party of the worker. May – and her chancellor Philip Hammond – with understandable caution about the economic consequences of Brexit, are determined to go on squeezing public spending. That may be one reason for the catastrophic lurch into an un-worked-out policy for paying for social care, which may yet be seen to have scuppered the Tory landslide.
It is not, however, the only exercise involving smoke and mirrors in the 88 pages of Forward Together. Another policy headache that also has the May fingerprints on it is the decision, much needed but politically lethal, to try to standardise funding per pupil across all schools in England. This is a reform that the ancien regime, always with a finger to the wind of public opinion, spotted as an electoral nightmare and ducked. Not good government, but very smart politics. Now many constituencies, and not just Labour-held ones, have dozens of schools with budgets that are already pared to the bone which are facing further losses because of the new national funding formula.
Cash to buy them off had to be found somewhere and, one can imagine it seeming to the glassy-eyed policy unit trying to write a manifesto at a few days’ notice, help was at hand: in the coalition years, the Lib Dems had won an agreement on introducing free school dinners for every infant in English primary schools. The policy, which was introduced in 2014, now costs around £650m a year.
How appealing this tidy sum must have looked to the anguished researchers trying to devise a cost-neutral education policy that somehow made room for the party leader’s baseless enthusiasm for grammar schools. And it was not just a handsome wodge of cash, but also an end to another of the policies foisted on Conservatives by the Lib Dems.
Yet more enticingly, the evidence on its success in boosting outcomes was still in the balance. While no one questioned the wider health benefits of giving children a good, nutritious meal once a day – something many people see as a natural obligation of the state to children while they are in its care – research did not yet show that it was a better way of spending money to lift educational standards than others such as literacy or numeracy hours.
But there was another school food project that did have a proven track record. Magic Breakfast is a brilliant charity that aims to provide a pre-school meal for children from disadvantaged families for just 22p a time. Last autumn, it published the results of a year-long survey that showed a two-month boost in attainment for seven-year-olds over the school year.
Only guessing here, but that must have looked very appealing to a Tory back office toiling over the manifesto. Breakfasts, on the Magic Breakfast model, could be done at a national cost of a trifling £60m. There would be nearly £600m to buy off complaints about the national funding formula and even set up a few grammar schools.
Unfortunately, like other headline excitements, it didn’t work out quite like that.
First, campaigners such as Jamie Oliver who care about what children eat and regard it as essential to the nation’s health were furious about the decision to abandon school dinners – a policy that seemed uniquely wasteful when so many schools had only just finished spending millions of pounds reinstating their kitchens.
And now, Education Datalab has done the sums and found they don’t even begin to add up. Magic Breakfast is a charity that has some big corporate sponsors, its costs were based on a low take up and volunteer help. That is not a business model readily available to government (although I fear it is only a matter of time before it’s the only business model available). Education Datalab suggests providing all primary-age children with a nutritious breakfast, and paying for the staff time that would also be needed, could well cost all the £650m saved from ending free school dinners.
The Tory manifesto was not so much a serious prospectus for government – after all, the only question was how big the majority would be on 9 June – as a giant exercise in hubris. And every grammar-school educated Tory knows what comes after hubris. Nemesis.
