It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I will try to squeeze my remarks into the remaining time.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) on securing the debate and on his excellent and compelling opening speech. He is a strong advocate for his constituency on a range of issues, and this is another example of that advocacy. I also congratulate
my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) and the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) on their contributions, in which they cited their own constituency issues.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) was unwise to talk about school places planning, given that the previous Labour Government eliminated 200,000 primary school places when it was absolutely clear that the birth rate was increasing. One of the first things that the coalition Government had to do was to double the spending on creating new school places at a time of enormous constraint on the public finances. Over that period, we have spent several billion pounds on providing more school places to make up for the backlog that we inherited in 2010.