VAT on private school fees? It’s enough to drive you to drink - Vladimir McTavish

Former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Jacob Rees-Mogg

This was one of the few tax cuts in an otherwise revenue-raising Budget and predictably much Tory anger has been directed at the levying of VAT on fees for private education.

The national average cost of school fees is £15,000, so VAT will raise this by around three grand a year. That’s enough to turn teetotal parents to drink.

Keen mathematicians will have calculated that in order to make up for this increase, the average household would have to be drinking 300,000 pints of beer annually, at the new saving of 1p per pint. That’s about eight thousand units of alcohol per week, well above the government’s advised safe limits.

I’ve never really understood why parents choose to pay extra for their children’s schooling. After all, if they’re really stupid, a private education isn’t going to make them any more intelligent.

I was at university with a couple of dim ex-boarding school types who struggled to understand how to operate the washing machines in a launderette, but still managed to do with so with a sense of superiority.

Fifteen grand a year may seem a bit steep if your kid is a deadbeat, but can you put a price on sending your child out into the world with a healthy sense of entitlement?

Yet education is also about gaining life skills and there is no guarantee that sending your offspring to a public school will make them a more rounded human being when they emerge from its cloistered walls.

After all, Eton produced such social misfits as Boris Johnson and William Rees-Mogg. Having said that, Liz Truss was educated at a state school so I guess no system is perfect.

If the VAT raised on school fees is genuinely going to be channeled into improving standards and facilities in the state sector, that is surely a good thing. It may also encourage more parents to send their children to the local comprehensive, thereby saving themselves loads of money.

I’m sure many people will drink to that. Especially now we have government-funded cheap beer. Cheers!