A Conservative government could revive plans for a "regional pay" system which would mean to pay teachers and nurses in parts of the West Midlands received lower salaries, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has warned.
He said he had blocked plans announced by George Osborne in 2011, and later abandoned, to vary public sector pay according to local job market conditions across the country.
The idea, bitterly opposed by unions, would have meant staff in areas such as the Black Country and Birmingham suburbs received lower salaries than those in city centres or the south of England for doing the same job.
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In an interview with The Birmingham Post, Mr Clegg claimed Conservatives could bring the plan back - if they formed a Government on their own after the May 7 General Election.
The Liberal Democrat leader also said:
- Students backed the Coalition's changes to student fees
- Opinion polling is a "fake science" and predictions of a Lib Dem wipeout are wrong
- Liberal Democrats would pledge to abolish illiteracy
Mr Clegg said he had blocked Conservative plans for regional or local pay, adding: “They pushed it very hard and I had to push very hard back to stop it.
“The Conservatives have always been very keen in my experience at pushing this idea that nurses and teachers and doctors should be paid less in some parts of the country.”
He added: “They were adamant for ages."
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Conservatives were likely to revive the idea if they win a majority allowing them to govern without the Liberal Democrats as Coalition partners, he said.
"I suspect they will if they were on their own in government.”
The Chancellor announced plans in 2011 to introduce a scheme modelled on a system operating at the time in the courts system, which meant a worker in the Black Country or the edge of Birmingham could be paid less than those in central Birmingham, while wages were higher again in London.
, and Liberal Democrats say their opposition to the idea forced the Chancellor to back down.
Students back our fee changes
The Deputy Prime Minister insisted students actually liked the new fee system introduced by the Coalition, which saw maximum fees tripled from £3,000 a year to £9,000 a year.
He was widely criticised for breaking a promise made during the 2010 election campaign to vote against any increase in fees.
But Liberal Democrats point out that while richer graduates pay more under the new system, graduates on low average incomes actually pay less than they used to.
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Mr Clegg said: “To state the obvious, we are not going to do as well among students as we did last time.
“But my experience, as someone who has a fair number of students in my own constituency, is that if you actually speak to students about the system that has been introduced, they are the first to tell you that it is much much fairer than all the critics predicted it would be.
“Far from discouraging people from going to university, we now have more young people on fill time courses at university than ever before.”
Opinion polls are a "fake science"
Mr Clegg dismissed people who interpret opinion polls as a “cottage industry of pundits” involved in a “fake science”, as he dismissed predictions the Lib Dems could lose the bulk of their 56 seats in the May 7 General Election.
“I think we have got into this ludicrous game at the moment, where every single Tom, Dick or Harry can pop up and come up with some entirely specious prediction on some entirely random poll and say that’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen.
“The notion that these predictions of Lib Dem wipeout - it’s just patent nonsense.
“And unlike this great cottage industry of pundits I spend a lot of time in these seats and what matters is how people locally vote for their own local MPs.
“And none of that is picked up by this fake science where they take a snapshot view across the whole country.”
We'll end illiteracy
Mr Clegg said Liberal Democrats would include a commitment in their manifesto to wipe out “illiteracy” in British schools.
Nearly one in four children left West Midland primary schools without learning to read well enough to prepare them for secondary school last year, Liberal Democrats say.
Mr Clegg’s target is to ensure every child achieves what the Department for Education calls a “good” score in reading tests taken at the end of primary school. This is also known officially as achieving level 4B or higher.
In the whole West Midlands region this target was met by 76 per cent of children in 2014, just over three quarters. The success rate was slightly higher in Solihull, where it was met by 81 per cent of children, and lower in Birmingham, where the success rate was 73 per cent.
Mr Clegg said: “One of the commitments that will be included in the Liberal Democrat manifesto is to eliminate child illiteracy by the middle of the next decade by 2025.”
Liberal Democrats would increase the pupil premium, an addition grant of £1,300 per pupil paid to schools teaching children from less wealthy families.
Coalitions are the future
Coalition government would become the norm, Mr Clegg predicted.
“I always anticipated that being one of the architects of the country’s first proper coalition at a time of economic emergency, when you are having to make lots of controversial decisions is not going to be popular - but I think it is very much a harbinger of what’s going to happen in the future.
“It’s fairly obvious to me that coalitions will repeat themselves in the future. The two old parties . . . are trying to turn the clock back and pretend that everybody either votes for the red team or the blue team. They don’t.”