Tim Barnes [Adrian Zorzut]

THE Conservative candidate for Cities of London and Westminster has warned that Labour plans to introduce 20 per cent VAT on private school education would be a “tax on aspiration”.

Tim Barnes said it was wrong to tax parents who wanted to pay for their children’s education and that the Labour Party was just trying to make a “political statement”.

He said the policy could push around 3,000 Westminster children out of independent schools into state-maintained schools.

This would further drain resources currently available to pupils and would not raise “huge amounts of money for the Treasury”.

Barnes said: “Simply put, the VAT charge on independent schools would cost us more to educate the children we already have and that we would have in the state-maintained schools that we have.

“So it’s not a scheme that’s going to be a vast improvement on what we have now or raise huge amounts of money for the Treasury.

“Indeed, Paul Johnson of the IFS [Institute for Fiscal Studies] has said that in the grand context of national budgets, this really isn’t a significant money-raising scheme whatsoever.

“It’s more about whether or not you think it’s a social good.

“Now, I don’t think it’s a social good. I think it’s a tax on aspiration.”

“It’s a tax on people who, if they’d like to, would be able to send their kids to private schools.”

“It’s not really doing anything to help the kids who are currently in the state-maintained schools. In fact, it’ll actually, probably, make their resources per pupil lower than it is today.

“It is about trying to make a political statement rather than one that’s just about what’s best for our children.

“No country in Europe has a tax like this on education, and I don’t believe that we should be the first.

“We should really be concentrating on what’s best for all of the young people that we have in our school system, and keeping as many of those as possible in private education.

“In a way, that means that additional resources – limited resources – such as we have within the state can be spent on the ones who are there.

“That must surely be the best thing.”

Private schools do not have to charge value added tax on their fees because of a legal exemption for organisations providing education.

About half of England’s private schools are also charities, so receive an 80 per cent reduction on business rates (taxes on properties used for commercial purposes).

The Labour Party manifesto pledges to end private schools’ VAT exemption and business rate relief.

It does not say it will remove their charitable status.