Boris Johnson has said he will reverse education spending cuts made since 2015 if he becomes the Conservative party’s next leader and prime minister, promising close to £5bn per year for “historically underfunded” primary and secondary schools.
The commitment on education, made in an overnight announcement, is Mr Johnson’s biggest spending pledge so far in his campaign against Jeremy Hunt.
It came as the frontrunner appeared to regain momentum in the Tory race, following a difficult start to the week marked by controversy after police were called to deal with a noisy argument at a flat he shared with his partner, Carrie Symonds.
Linking the spending pledge to his promise to avoid any further delays to Brexit, Mr Johnson said: “By making sure we leave the EU on 31st October, we can make sure that we level up all parts of the UK, invest in our schools and close the opportunity gap in our country.”
According to the Education Policy Institute, a think-tank, nearly a third of English state-maintained secondary schools reported deficits last year, up fourfold from 2014, with overall school spending falling 8 per cent per pupil in real terms this decade. Many of the worst affected schools were in the north of England.
Mr Johnson’s campaign said the cash injection — amounting to £4.6bn a year by 2022-2023 — would reverse cuts to education over the past four years.
Ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum, Mr Johnson argued that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for public services, particularly the NHS — a claim depicted by Remain supporters as a lie. He is now again promising higher spending after Brexit, in a bid to win the support of the 160,000 Conservative members who will decide the winner.
In addition to pledges to speed up the delivery of fast broadband, and to cut income tax for people earning more than £50,000, he is considering cutting stamp duty on house purchases under £500,000.
However, the size of the tax cut promises remains bigger than the value of his spending pledges. The Institute for Fiscal Studies forecast that his proposals to raise thresholds on income tax and national insurance would cost the Treasury as much as £20bn.
By contrast, previous education pledges by Mr Johnson — to raise minimum per-pupil funding for primary schools to £4,000 and £5,000 for secondary schools by 2022 — would cost only £350m since most primary and secondary schools are already at those levels.
The promise to reverse education cuts will be a much bigger undertaking.
The government froze school spending per pupil in cash terms in the two years between 2015-16 and 2017-2018, according to the IFS, translating into a “real-terms cut of around 4 per cent”.
Onward, a moderate Conservative think-tank, said it would cost £4.6bn to return spending to 2015 levels, given that pupil numbers are expected to rise by 2.3 per cent in the next three years.
The move may renew chancellor Philip Hammond’s concerns that the Tory leadership candidates are preparing to raid money set aside for the economic impact of a no-deal Brexit.
During a hustings event with Tory members in Exeter on Friday, Mr Johnson also hinted that he could take a tougher stance than Theresa May’s government over giving Huawei, the Chinese tech company, access to Britain’s future 5G telecoms networks.
According to a leak from the UK’s National Security Council in April, Britain is poised to allow Huawei’s participation in “non-core” parts of the 5G network, despite US concerns and other members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that the Chinese state could use the company for espionage purposes.
In his first comments on the issue, Mr Johnson said: “I’m dubious about anything that compromises our security . . . We should not be doing anything that would deter co-operation with our most important intelligence partners in Five Eyes.”
But he added that he did not want to discourage Chinese groups from making investments.
