One of Labour's headline policies in the run-up to the general election is its promise to end tax breaks for private schools in the UK
Yvette Cooper has defended Labour’s plans for ending tax breaks on private schools.
Speaking to Camilla Tominey on GB News, the Shadow Home Secretary said the policy was about fairness.
Ms Cooper told GBNews: “We think this is about fairness. Other organisations and institutions have to pay VAT.
"We do think it's fair for private schools to pay VAT and for that money to be used to recruit 6,500 teachers for our schools, our state schools right across the country. This will help to make sure we can get mental health professionals into our schools because there is a mental health crisis going on with our children.
“So I think this is a fair and sensible thing to do. I know that there have been many institutions that have been raising their fees for their own reasons over the last few years. That's for them to decide and to explain.
“We think this policy is just about having a fair approach across different organisations and making use of that money to give the best possible chances for children in schools right across the country.
Pressed on whether temporary classrooms would need to be created as a result of Labour’s policy, Ms Cooper said: “There is quite a lot of lobbying going on at the moment involving some of the private schools that don't want to have to pay the VAT and it's for the private schools for them to decide what impact that has in terms of our fees.
"But we just do think this is about having sensible arrangements in place that are fair across different organisations, and making sure that we can fund the big increase in teachers that we need the mental health professionals in our schools that we need and make sure that we can get the best possible future for all of our children. We've set out our policy, it is for private schools themselves to decide.
"They will need to pay the VAT just like everybody else does. It's for them to decide what they want then they do about their fees.”
On legal migration she said: “Legal migration has trebled in the last five years under the Conservatives. One of the biggest drivers of that has been work migration because the UK is failing around the skill shortages and the need for workforce planning that has really been abandoned under the Conservatives.
“So what we'll do is introduce new rules and EU law effectively to make sure that when there is overseas recruitment there are also proper training plans and proper workforce plans in order to make sure you can reduce that work migration that we've seen shoot up. We're not setting a specific target on it.
"The reason for that is partly because the Conservatives have just effectively ripped up all the targets that they've set over many years. They've discredited the whole process.
"But also, more importantly, because there are short-term factors that can affect the numbers including in the pandemic. Instead, we need to have a long-term approach that is about bringing that migration down and tackling the failings in the system.
“The government has said that it wants to reduce net migration and they set out some Visa measures which we have supported. However, we are going further than the Conservatives on this because we think that this is not tackling the heart of the issue.
"We want to make sure we've got proper training, workforce plans, apprenticeships and support for engineers so that we don't have this doubling of engineering visas AND so that we don't have this continuous problem of the immigration system picking up the pieces for the failure in the economy.
"We can't have this kind of uncontrolled free market approach to migration, which is what the Conservatives have had in place for the last few years.
“We want to go further than the Conservative’s plans because they are not targeting the skills shortages and the training requirements. They're doing nothing in the end to tackle the problem.
"There’s no plan to get people who are currently not in employment or training back into the workforce to fill posts, and no plan to actually make sure you've got skills or fair pay agreements in place.
“So Labour will actually have a proper workforce plan to do all of those sorts of things. That's how we deal with it. That's how we make sure that those visa covers actually properly come down.”
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