Labour’s school tax raid will only punish ‘working people’

Pupils in the dining hall of Christ's Hospital girls' school in Hertford 1953
Labour’s Budget continues to hit working people like those in independent schools - Getty

They were the great characters of my prep school, the kindly, humble and long-serving staff who we boys loved. Amid the fearsome headmaster – cane and crimson slippers at the ready at tea-time (lashings of corporal punishment on the menu) – and an eccentric litany of teachers, they were the comforters: the menders, fixers and feeders.

Maidwell Hall in the 1980s was a classic English prep school and while many things have now changed across independent schools – duvets, better food, words rather than lashings – the characters remain as fixtures in the system.

In my time it was Frank, who had a workshop near our boot room. There was Annie and May in the kitchens, and the extraordinary Mr Powell who peeled potatoes and lived with a dozen cats, apparently in a hayloft above a barn near the back gates.

The cooks, groundsmen and cleaners are the cornerstones of these institutions and they are the epitome of Sir Keir Starmer’s definition of “working people”. Without making too many assumptions, most strike me as those who are on a payroll and without a stash of savings, so they can’t write a cheque when they get into difficulty.

But they are in peril. Confirmation in this week’s budget of the VAT imposition on private schools has left the independent sector facing some very tough decisions. In May of this year on BBC Question Time the now Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, said of private schools: “You’re going to have to cut your cloth accordingly.” So enamoured of his phrase was he that he repeated it again this week.

So what cloth can they cut? Schools employ workers, regular people who have regular jobs: the boarding house staff and the school porters. Seventy per cent of the cost of running the average independent school is in its staff.

These schools teach, they do not produce widgets. Their products are the hard-to-quantify children who come out the other side: one hopes, as better educated, better young people. You can’t recover the input costs, the costs are the staff. And so those schools who are absorbing some of the costs of VAT have no option but to look at manpower savings. Which means that people are going to lose their jobs and they might well be people who will struggle to find another job: the invaluable Frank who can fix stuff, whether it’s the rudder of a boy’s balsa wood boat, or the valve on a radiator. Contractors can come in and do the essential work from now on, with no overheads and no additional employers’ national insurance to pay.

Having done little consultation work on the imposition of VAT on private schools prior to coming into power, Labour has no idea of the ramifications and now just puts its head in the sand and says, “tough”.

And because they come to this party with nothing but ideological zeal, they won’t have figured the machinations of the big schools, the ones they really have in mind for this tax, the ones that will happily pass the VAT cost on to the parents safe in the knowledge that their schools are vastly over-subscribed.

They won’t have figured out that schools like Eton, now registered for VAT, are gleefully claiming it back on capital projects – from land acquisition to building – and that, word is, Eton will shortly be £4.8 million to the good.

Still, nothing rallies people to the cause of true Conservatism than the prospect of an ill-conceived socialist policy, the upshot of which is that the rich get richer and the poor lose their jobs.