near as any at the DES to being quiet. But the consequences of the Government’s fiscal and monetary policies were shortly to catch up with us. The first instalment was in May — a round of public expenditure cuts designed to cool the overheated economy. Capital spending in education, particularly the less politically sensitive area of higher education, was an obvious target. In the event, I staved off Treasury pressure and my building programmes were not cut.
But there were other problems in the DES budget. As inflationary pressures pushed up prices in the construction industry, an increasingly alarmed Treasury refused to sanction higher spending. The rest of the school building programme had to be slowed down as well. As October — the time for firm public expenditure decisionmaking — approached it was increasingly clear to me that public expenditure cuts were essential, and that it made political sense to agree early with Patrick Jenkin, the new Chief Secretary, on reductions in my education budget. In the event, there were cuts in the school building plans and in teacher training, and school meal prices were increased.
Nor was this the end of the search for savings. As the effects of the oil crisis and the miners’ strike bit in December, Tony Barber began a frantic search for further cuts.[20] Capital spending is the only area in which large immediate public expenditure cuts can be made. So ministers were required to reduce their capital programmes by a fifth and their procurement of supplies and other current expenditure on goods and services by a tenth. Accordingly, I implemented further cuts in the school and higher education building programmes, including most painfully a moratorium on replacing older primary schools; for the longer term there would also be a reduction in the rate of expansion of student numbers. The reduction in the DES budget for 1974/75 was ?182 million — out of ?1,200 million total cuts in public spending. But I did manage for the time being to salvage the nursery school programme and also building programmes for special schools.
By now, however, my mind was fast focusing on the cataclysmic events overtaking the Government. It was not long before I would have to mount my soapbox and defend the policies I had pursued in my years at Education. I found no difficulty in doing so, for on almost every front the record was one of advance. And if the measures by which ‘advance’ at this time was assessed — resources committed rather than results achieved — are accepted, it was also a record of genuine improvement. Nearly 2,000 out-of-date primary schools in England and Wales were replaced or improved. There was a substantial expansion of nursery education. I pushed through the raising of the school leaving age, which the Labour Party had had to postpone. Fewer pupils were now taught in very large classes. There were more qualified teachers and more students in higher education. But too much of my time at Education had been spent arguing about structures and resources, too little in addressing the crucial issue of the
Equally, it was clear by the time of the general election that both the figures and more fundamentally the approach of
However frustrating it was to watch the shrinkage of my cherished plans and programmes, I can now see that it was unavoidable. And it may have had the side effect of forcing us to think creatively about how to get the best value from our suddenly limited resources. In the economic sphere, the crises of 1973 to 1976 led to a deep scepticism about the value of Keynesian demand management and to a new appreciation of the classical liberal economic approach of balanced budgets, low taxes and free markets. Similarly, in education and in other areas of social policy too, the realization that remedies must be found other than increased public expenditure opened up a whole new world. Fundamental questions began to be asked about whether the education system in its present form could deliver the results expected of it. Did it not in practice largely exist for the benefit of those who ran it, rather than those who received it? Was the state — whether the DES or local education authorities — doing too much, rather than too little? What did the — often superior — results of other countries’ education systems and methods have to teach us? It was becoming necessary to rethink these policies; and we were shortly to be granted plenty of time to think.
CHAPTER VII
No End of a Lesson
GLAD CONFIDENT MORNING
Shortly before 11 o’clock on Tuesday 23 June 1970 my new ministerial car dropped me in Downing Street, where with other colleagues I ran the gauntlet of press and television outside No. 10. The hubbub in the ante- room was of enthusiasm and laughter. There was a spring in our step as we filed into the Cabinet Room where Ted Heath, with the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend beside him, awaited us. I found my place at the Cabinet table, but my mind was at least as much on the department[21] as on the large strategic issues before the Government. As I shall explain, it remained there — perhaps excessively so. But I felt an exhilaration which was prompted by more than the fact that this was my first ever Cabinet meeting: I felt, as I suspect we all did, that this was a decisive moment in the life of the country.
It was an impression which Ted himself did everything to justify. Speaking with the same intensity which had suffused his introduction to the manifesto on which we had just fought the election, he announced his intention of establishing a new style of administration and a fresh approach to the conduct of public business. The emphasis was to be upon deliberation and the avoidance of hasty or precipitate reactions. There was to be a clean break and a fresh start and new brooms galore.
The tone was just what we would all have expected from Ted. He had a great belief in the capacity of open-minded politicians to resolve fundamental problems if the processes and structures of government were right and advice of the right technical quality was available and properly used. This was the approach which would lie behind the decision that autumn to set up the Central Policy Review Staff under Victor Rothschild, to reconstruct the machinery of government on more ‘rational’ lines (including the setting up of the mammoth Department of the Environment) and the establishment of the PAR system. More generally, it inspired what turned out to be an excessive confidence in the Government’s ability to shape and control events.
Inevitably, this account contains a large measure of hindsight. I was not a member of the key Economic Policy Committee (EPC) of the Cabinet, though I would sometimes attend if teachers’ pay or spending on schools was an issue. More frequently, I attended Terence Higgins’s sub-committee on pay when the full rigours of a detailed statutory prices and incomes policy — the policy our manifesto pledged us to avoid — were applied, and made some contributions there. And, naturally, I was not a member of Ted’s inner circle where most of the big decisions originated. The role of the Cabinet itself was generally of reduced importance after the first year of the Heath Government until its very end. The full account of these years will, therefore, have to await Ted Heath’s own memoirs.
This, however, is said in explanation not exculpation. As a member of the Cabinet I must take my full share of responsibility for what was done under the Government’s authority. Reviewing the events of this period with the benefit of two decades’ hindsight (including more than one of these as Prime Minister), I can see more clearly how Ted Heath, an honest man whose strength of character made him always formidable, whether right or wrong, took the course he did. And as time went on, he
It is also important to remember that the policies Ted pursued between the spring of 1972 and February 1974 were urged on him by most influential commentators and for much of the time enjoyed a wide measure of
