My Lords, I very strongly support the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, but I will return to that issue in the next group. I was not going to participate in this debate, but I have been forced to because of the references made to rural and metropolitan areas. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench as gently as I possibly can that comparisons between allocations to different regions are always difficult and complicated.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, said that we metropolitan elites do not have much knowledge of what happens in the countryside. Equally, people from the rest of the country have surprisingly little knowledge of what happens in metropolitan areas. The levels of deprivation in London—a vast area in terms of population—are enormous. In terms of picking out individual figures, I have the brief from London Councils, which provides
figures demonstrating to its satisfaction that London has been hard done by over the last few years, with bigger reductions in the allocation to schools than the rest of the country. I do not believe bandying figures in that way is that helpful. What we want is sufficient funding across the country as a whole, and I think that setting one part of the country against another should be done with great discretion.