House of Lords
Economic Downturn
Lord Haskel
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of forecasts of an economic downturn later this year, and what steps they are taking in response.
Baroness Penn (Con)
Her Majesty’s Government do not prepare forecasts for the UK economy. In March, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility forecast growth of 0.3% and 0.2% for the third and fourth quarters. Recognising that the economic outlook has become more challenging since the OBR produced its forecast, in May the Government pledged a further £15 billion of support to help maintain consumer spending and head off the risk of an economic downturn.
Lord Haskel (Lab)
The Minister has not mentioned rising inflation, rising hardship and inequality, low growth and productivity, strikes, a fuel crisis and, especially today, climate change. All tell us that the outlook is dire. What are we going to do about it? Judging by the Tory leadership hustings, we are going to cut taxes and cut public spending, either now or later. No wonder the Conservative-dominated House of Commons Treasury Committee accused Ministers of a
“lack of long-term thinking in economic strategy”.
Those whom we rely on to invest and grow the economy do not make decisions based on headline tax rates and soundbites. Even though we only have a caretaker Government, will the Minister urge her colleagues to start thinking through a proper strategy to deal with this economic crisis, or simply adopt Labour’s strategy?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, there was quite a lot in that question. I am not sure that the noble Lord listened to my initial Answer, where I referenced the support that the Government are providing to help people with the cost of living. That was extended by £15 billion in May, but of course previous support was announced, which takes that to £37 billion. He mentioned a long-term plan for economic growth, which is exactly what the Government have. At spending review 2020-21, we made a landmark investment in capital projects and we are increasing public investment in R&D to £20 billion a year by 2024-25. Those are just two of the measures that we are taking to support our economy.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, since our economy is facing a major backlog in almost every government department, is this not the time for our great public servants to be reminded that they are there to serve the public and in particular our business community—for instance, on passports, trade and business? Can we please ask them at this time to remove the backlogs that they are performing on at the moment?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I think that our public servants have at the forefront of their minds when they do their jobs the service that they give to the public. My noble friend refers to backlogs. I am not sure quite which ones he is referring to. My noble friend is beside me and she would say that there are no backlogs in passport processing, and that applies to a number of other government services too. There are in the NHS—we absolutely acknowledge that—but the Government have a plan to deal with that.
Lord Walney (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister remain committed to the assertion by the former Levelling Up Secretary, Michael Gove MP, that levelling up may be more difficult in a time of economic hardship but that it is even more important to tackle regional equality and that investment must continue to be made to be able to do that?
Baroness Penn (Con)
This Government are absolutely committed to levelling up. The former Levelling Up Secretary did an excellent job, but that commitment does not change with his departure.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
The Recruitment & Employment Confederation found that the UK could lose up to £39 billion a year from 2024 if we do not resolve labour and skills shortages. What is the Government’s future workforce strategy? If the Minister tells me that there is one, could she indicate where to find it, because nobody, including industry, can seem to locate the bones or the substance of such a strategy?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, there are several prongs to that, one of which we discussed during the passage of the skills Bill, which the Parliament has just enacted, including increases in investment in skills and working with employers to ensure that the qualifications meet their needs. As part of that work, the Department for Education is also working with employers to look forward to what future skills the country will need.
Lord Woodley (Lab)
My Lords, we all agree that soaring inflation is a great threat to the economy and is, without a shadow of doubt, fuelling the cost of living crisis, but new research from my union, Unite, shows that it is being driven by corporate profiteering and some greed, with profit margins of the FTSE 350 firms now 73% higher than pre-pandemic. What is stopping the Government bringing in a windfall tax on all companies found to be profiteering or price gouging, not just the oil and gas companies, as currently proposed?
Baroness Penn (Con)
The Bank of England’s independent Monetary Policy Committee said in its recent report that the vast majority of the increase in inflation over the past year reflects the impact of sharp increases in global energy and tradeable goods prices. On increases in energy prices, we have introduced the energy profits levy, and more than the amount that will be raised through that levy is being returned to households through our cost of living support.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
Does my noble friend agree that the great success in this country of the unicorns—greater than that in Germany, France and Israel combined—could be enhanced with the relaxation of the EU state aid rules, particularly on EIS and SEIS companies?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My noble friend is right that the UK remains a great place to start a business and we will always want to make sure that our tax regime is incentivising businesses to start here. I am sure that he would agree that measures such as the super-deduction are a great initiative to help support that.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, can the Minister tell the House what she has discerned, having watched the interviews with the candidates to be Prime Minister, about their long-term thinking? None of them has talked about climate change. Is it not time, particularly on a day like this, that we started thinking about the need to travel less, to use less water in due course and to eat less? There is a whole range of areas where we need to do less, not more. When will we start that kind of debate and thinking?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I was doing some other things this weekend, such as celebrating my daughter’s first birthday, and I will not comment on the leadership race. The noble Lord raised the need to have greater hybrid working, for example, and to look for other opportunities for efficiency in our economy and I absolutely agree with him on that.
Lord Londesborough (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that real economic growth will prove almost impossible in the long term while our workforce remains more than 1 million short? Given the current leadership debate, how long will we have to wait until the Government take action to address this growing labour crisis?
Baroness Penn (Con)
I reassure noble Lords that they will not have to wait at all. We are investing in skills across the range of our workforce to ensure that those who are out of work, or in work where they could be making better use of their skills, can find those opportunities. We need to encourage people back into the workforce—for example, older workers who moved out of the workforce during the pandemic—and we need to use migration in a targeted way to ensure that we get the right skills that this country needs.
Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)
My Lords, media reports suggest that Ministers are to launch a multibillion pound business loan scheme in an attempt to counter a looming recession. Can the Minister confirm whether an announcement will be made to Parliament before the Summer Recess? Can she also confirm what measures, if any, are being put in place to avoid the level of fraud seen under the Covid support schemes?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I am not aware of any such plans, but I reassure the noble Lord on his question about fraud. In the Spring Statement, the former Chancellor announced a range of resources for the Government’s counterfraud function to ensure that measures to counter fraud are designed into programmes from the very start. I know that the context for the question is the bounce-back loan scheme and I remind noble Lords about the need for speed in getting support to businesses at the time of the pandemic.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, one way to help with the cost of living is to bring down prices by removing tariffs. We still have tariffs that fall heavily on clothing, footwear and foodstuffs. Those hit people with the lowest incomes hardest, because they have to spend a higher percentage of their income on those basic commodities. Could we not scrap some of those tariffs or, if we absolutely must indulge the idea that that would mean some kind of disarmament in advance of trade talks, could we not suspend them for 24 months during the cost of living crisis, with an option to renew at the end?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I am not aware of any plans to take up my noble friend’s suggestion, but I will take it back to the Treasury. He will know that the Government are focused on increasing opportunities for trade deals and free trade to bring down those barriers and bring down costs to consumers in the long term.
European Convention on Human Rights
(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Roberts of Llandudno
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights.
Baroness Humphreys (LD)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend, and with his permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Bellamy) (Con)
Her Majesty’s Government are committed to remaining a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights and protecting all the rights set out in the convention.
Baroness Humphreys (LD)
My Lords, when the European Court of Human Rights halted the deportation of migrants to Rwanda, the Prime Minister and some of his government colleagues began considering withdrawing the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights. The convention is a major contributor to peace and democracy, and we cannot afford not to be part of it. However, if the Government will insist on pushing ahead with this reckless decision—and we have not had a denial from some of the candidates in the leadership race—is the Minister confident that such a move will not negatively impact the rights of vulnerable groups in the United Kingdom?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
Her Majesty’s Government, with respect, are not pushing ahead with any reckless decision. The policy of the Government is to remain within the convention on human rights; speculation to the contrary is quite unfounded.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, the noble and learned Lord has been asked this Question many times and has said that it is the Government’s policy to remain inside the ECHR. However, scepticism and questions persist because a senior government Minister, the Attorney-General, has a number of times over the last week said that she wants to withdraw from the ECHR. What conversations has the Minister had with the Attorney-General in the last few days to resolve this?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
I have had no conversations with the Attorney-General, and what the Attorney-General says or may have said in her capacity as a leadership contender is neither here nor there—as an unsuccessful leadership contender, I hasten to add. We need to get this straight. Unless we can define the boundaries of the debate we are about to have, we will be in a very unsatisfactory place. We are talking about the mechanisms of the convention—we are not talking about whether we should be in the convention or not. I remind the House that the UK has the best record of all member states within the convention; we are a party to, I think, seven United Nations conventions on human rights; we are very active in the Council of Europe in a number of respects; we fully support the ICC in its reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and there is no question of this fine tradition being mitigated, let alone abandoned.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
The Minister is quite right that we need to be clear but unfortunately, only two of the five remaining candidates for the Tory leadership have been clear that they would not leave the convention. Liz Truss, who is still in the Government, has said that she would be prepared to leave the ECHR. Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch have failed to clarify their positions. Can the Minister be confident about the position of the Government from September, when he even has present Cabinet Ministers who do not agree with him?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
The Government have set out their position in the manifesto upon which they were elected. There is no change to that manifesto.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, I, for one, am very grateful to the Minister for the clarity of his Answer. However, I am concerned that the more popular of the two candidates in the Conservative race for the premiership who have committed to staying in the ECHR has been subject to an absolutely disgraceful campaign of smearing in the right-wing press. Can the Minister give some fatherly advice to these candidates that when they launch Islamophobic and misogynistic attacks on each other, and when they attack human rights, it is bad for his party and for the country?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
I am not in a position to give fatherly advice to anybody. The Government do not support misogynistic or Islamophobic attacks on anyone. I have set out as clearly as I can the Government’s policy, and I shall doggedly pursue that policy unless and until instructed to the contrary.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, it must be obvious that our suspicion stems from having had a lot of legislation come through this House that has shown no concern for human rights or political freedoms, which is what the ECHR is all about. How can we be sure about the next Prime Minister—a Tory party Prime Minister from the collection of leadership candidates that we are all horrified about?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
The aim of the proposed legislation is to restore public confidence in the UK judiciary, to improve democratic accountability, to strengthen the right to free speech, to preserve the right to jury trial and to better protect journalists’ sources. I defy anyone in this House to vote against those objectives.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, can the Minister confirm that the trade and co-operation agreement which this country has with the European Union is contingent, from the European Union’s point of view, on our remaining in the convention on human rights? Can he give us the names of countries which have withdrawn from that convention?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
The noble Lord is correct that there are references to the European Convention on Human Rights in the trade and co-operation agreement. We are not withdrawing from the convention—I do not know how many times I must say it before people understand the Government’s position. Since we are not withdrawing, the question of who has withdrawn or been expelled does not arise.
Lord Lexden (Con)
Does my noble friend agree that the European convention should be regarded as particularly precious by Conservatives, given the part that Winston Churchill and Lord Kilmuir played in devising it?
Lord Watts (Lab)
What do the Government mean by “mechanisms”? It seems to add something to the Minister’s answer that he is not categorically ruling out changes. What are those mechanisms?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
The provisions in the Bill are designed, in the words of Clause 1(2), to clarify and rebalance. The relevant mechanisms are to make clear the respective roles of the UK judiciary and the Strasbourg court, of the judiciary and Parliament, and of rights on the one hand and responsibilities on the other. Those are the mechanisms which I hope we will debate in detail in due course.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, I recognise and acknowledge that the Minister has indicated that there will be no withdrawal from the ECHR. However, can he give an assurance to your Lordships’ House today that he, along with other Ministers, will work to ensure that we remain within the ECHR, because any withdrawal from it would be a flagrant undermining of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, which is hardwired into the ECHR?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
I will happily give the noble Baroness that assurance, and I assure your Lordships that I will work with any or all of you to ensure that this Bill meets such concerns as you may have, in so far as it is within my power to do so.
Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)
My Lords, the Minister is reassuringly adamant in his commitment to the convention. Can he assure the House about how he defends the export of asylum seekers to Rwanda in the face of the convention?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
We are entirely satisfied that the Government’s policy on asylum seekers is in compliance with the convention. In this context, I do not think that I can add to that answer.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
My Lords, it is right to look at the draft put forward by the Lord Chancellor, which makes it absolutely plain that the intention of the Government in that document is that we stay in the European Convention on Human Rights. The preciousness of that is absolutely clear, and I feel certain that a Conservative Government—and, I believe, a Labour Government—are unlikely to move away from it.
Lord Bellamy (Con)
I respectfully agree, and I am particularly delighted to pay my personal respects to my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern following one of his last interventions in this House.
Her Majesty The Queen: “The Faithful”
(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Farmer
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what consideration they have given to advising Her Majesty The Queen to add “The Faithful” to her title; and what legislation, if any, would be required before such a title was adopted.
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his thoughtful suggestion and for his kind words in the Motion on the humble Address about Her Majesty the Queen’s long and successful—and, I submit, happy and glorious—reign. There are no plans for the Government to advise Her Majesty to change her title, which was set out by proclamation made under the provisions of the Royal Titles Act 1953.
Lord Farmer (Con)
I thank my noble friend the Minister for that Answer, which I was expecting. Does he agree that the unprecedented occasion of a Platinum Jubilee demands marking for future generations and centuries the uniqueness of this reign? Adding “the Faithful” to the Queen’s title, as in “Alfred the Great”, would make her stand out in the sweep of history. This permanent and indisputable marker would acknowledge her constancy and outworked sense of duty. It has a double meaning, as it is directed both to God and to her fellow man. Can my noble friend the Minister suggest a constructive way forward?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I agree with every sentiment that my noble friend has expressed about Her Majesty. The position is that the titles are proclaimed by the Accession Council and embraced in the Royal Titles Act. The Platinum Jubilee demonstrated the affection this country has for Her Majesty; it may be left to history to accord titles to past monarchs, but the Government have no plans to make a change.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)
My Lords, as the Minister mentions history in this context, would he not agree that such additions to the titles of our sovereigns, and indeed sovereigns in other states, have tended to be post hoc rather than during the lifetime of the person in question?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, that is true, and I think I alluded to that. I believe that the unfortunate title of King Ethelred the Unready, who died in 1016, was brought in only in the 1180s. The fact remains that the characteristic that my noble friend alluded to of the Queen’s sense of duty and commitment to her people, which was set out while she was still Princess Elizabeth, shines forth, as it has done on every day in her reign, and I am sure will shine on long after her passing.
The Lord Bishop of Carlisle
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. I declare my interest as Clerk of the Closet, an office of service to the Crown dating back to the 15th century. At her coronation, the Queen first gave her allegiance to God before anyone came forward to give their allegiance to her. Does the Minister agree that the generous, hospitable and open interpretation by Her Majesty of that duty to people of all faiths and none, over so many years, is not only a foundation stone of our constitution but a reason to feel all the more thankful for the lifelong service Her Majesty has given?
Lord True (Con)
Of course I agree with the right reverend Prelate. It is obviously not the custom of this place to comment on Her Majesty’s opinion or that of any other member of the Royal Family. I think the objective facts we have observed from that time prove that everything the right reverend Prelate has said is true.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister not agree that, in terms of recognition, building a national flagship is not actually what we should be doing? As far as I am aware, there has been no bid from the Royal Family, despite the fact that they loved the old royal yacht—and its removal was a disgrace. Focusing on building this national flagship in advance of some things that are crucial for our defence is not a clever thing to do.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I think that was mildly away from the subject of the Question, but I always note when a former Sea Lord is against the building of a ship.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that as people in the years to come look back on this extraordinary and glorious reign, they are likely to subscribe to it all manner of suitable loving and respectful epithets, and it might perhaps be wrong to single out any one term?
Lord True (Con)
I agree. Is it possible to agree with what both my noble friends said? I believe it is. The Queen’s reign provokes so many positive reflections, and I hope they will last. Her illustrious great-grandfather, King Edward VII, was known as “the Peacemaker” for his efforts to prevent war in Europe. Sadly, four years after his death, the Great War broke out.
Mr Mike Veale
(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Lexden
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what recent inquiries they have made about a date for the start of the misconduct hearing relating to Mr Mike Veale announced by the Police and Crime Commissioner for Cleveland in August 2021.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, arrangements for the misconduct hearing of former chief constable Mike Veale are a matter for the Cleveland police and crime commissioner and it would be inappropriate to comment further while those proceedings remain ongoing.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, I remind the House that I have used every means open to me—Motions of regret, Oral Questions, debates—to try to help bring the notorious Mike Veale to book ever since, as chief constable of Wiltshire, he conducted an appallingly biased investigation of the allegations of sex abuse against Sir Edward Heath. I also remind the House that in Cleveland, where he is chief constable, he is due to face a gross misconduct hearing, to which my noble friend referred. It was announced a year ago but has not even started. Meanwhile, Veale lives the life of Riley on £100,000 a year as adviser to the so-called Conservative PCC for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland, who must have taken leave of his senses. This scandal really must end. How on earth can the Home Office stand by helplessly while a disgraced ex-policeman rakes in public money? May I ask that arrangements be made for a small cross-party group from this House to see the Home Secretary as soon as possible?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, I am more than happy to request that of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. I hope that my noble friend would agree that, through all his years of effort, a remedy is on its way to being sought through the misconduct hearing. In terms of the individual’s work in Leicester, that is, of course, a matter for the Leicester PCC. It might be that my noble friend, as well as my request for him to see the Home Secretary, might himself request that of the Leicester PCC.
Lord Bach (Lab)
My Lords, how much longer must this farce go on? I am grateful to the Minister for her reply to my noble friend Lord Lexden, as I shall I call him, on this matter. I very much welcome the chance to talk to the Home Secretary about it. But you have a twice disgraced ex-chief constable awaiting a gross misconduct hearing that, by law, should have been heard months ago still advising for good money a police and crime commissioner in holding Leicestershire police to account. You could not make it up. A request for a meeting is actually the bare minimum. The Home Secretary is never short of advising on right and wrong; why are she and the Home Office so silent on this scandal?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, it is a matter for the legally qualified chair to convene a misconduct hearing. It is usually within 100 days but can be longer if the interests of justice will be served. Therefore, the LQC—the legally qualified chair—has obviously made a judgment on that. In terms of the issue of Leicester, that is a matter for the Leicester PCC.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, to be fair, some of us have had meetings with the Home Secretary, who is obviously concerned about this. One obviously understands that the Government cannot intervene in the internal conduct and affairs of the police, but surely there is something a bit odd here. As my noble friend Lord Lexden said, here is someone who is under investigation for gross misconduct. Surely, at a time such as this, they would be asked to stand aside until the matter is cleared up for them, rather than being promoted and given enhanced status inside the police service. Is there not a way of getting a message to the police authorities that this is appalling behaviour, which led to nonsensical accusations which proved to be based on lies, and demands a sensible handling of a kind which, at present, does not seem to be obvious?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I do not disagree with my noble friend that sensible handling is required. That is why I made the suggestion. The Government will not intervene in a matter with PCCs. I suggested to my noble friend and perhaps also suggest to my noble friend Lord Howell that there might be a delegation from noble Lords to go and see him.
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, it is unacceptable that something as serious as this has been going on for more than a year without any resolution at all, not even a day in court. I understand that the Minister cannot comment on an individual case, but can she undertake to review how the process of misconduct hearings takes place nationally? It just cannot be in the interests of justice for this situation to continue. It is not fair, either to the accused or to the accuser.
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I do not disagree with the noble Baroness, but I reiterate that the legally qualified chair can, in the interests of justice, take longer than 100 days to convene the misconduct hearing. I do not want anything I say at this Dispatch Box in any way to undermine a misconduct hearing, which is why I am so cautious about the matter.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, I was going to ask the same question as the noble Lord, Lord Howell. Why should Mr Veale not stand aside? I thought the Minister said in her response that she agreed with the proposition put by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. Does she think Mr Veale should stand aside while this investigation is under way?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I think noble Lords will all support the upholding of the rule of law, that justice is served and that anyone is innocent until proven guilty. The misconduct hearing will see that course of justice resolved.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, many thousands of very good police men and women are doing a great job 24 hours of every day, every week, including many on this site, but is it not a comment on the current state of the police force at senior management that the BCU commander for central and east London can issue an email at lunchtime today to say that he has been appointed to help lead the Met’s response to a recent finding by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which has placed the Met into a form of advanced monitoring? I thought the Home Secretary described it as “special measures”.
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I think it is one and the same thing, in the sense that the Met Police will have to show obvious signs of improvement before the engage process, as the Home Secretary described it, is removed.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister will know that police and crime commissioners were established as elected postholders to increase accountability of the police forces to the local community. In the light of experience, does she think that has worked out well? If not, is it not time to put them to bed?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, I think there are some excellent examples of PCCs up and down the country, including the noble Lord, Lord Bach—Parliament’s only PCC and a very good one indeed. Should the PCC not perform well at his or her job, they can be removed at the ballot box.
Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)
Will my noble friend the Minister accept that it is now generally acknowledged that a series of interrelated police operations—Yewtree, Conifer and Midland—were heavy-handed, disproportionate and founded on inappropriate assumptions of guilt? It is evident that there were manifest failings of procedure, governance and natural justice. Perhaps a complaint in this House was that the police were marking their own homework. When will anyone be held to account?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
In answer to my noble friend’s first question, I hope I have outlined the process by which remedy can be sought and secured for anybody accused of improper behaviour or misconduct in office. The whole system has changed, in the sense that now a police officer cannot just run, by retiring or resigning from their post, without facing the consequences of their actions.
Lord Lexden (Con)
Should not the legally appointed chair in Cleveland be asked to explain why a year has gone by without her starting these extremely important misconduct proceedings? Can the Home Office at least get an answer from her?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
The legally qualified chair is independent of government. Again, my noble friend might wish to put that to the legally qualified chair. It would be wrong for the Government to intervene in such a process.
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]
Monday 18th July 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
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United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 (Exclusions from Market Access Principles: Single-Use Plastics) Regulations 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 9 June be approved. Considered in Grand Committee on 12 July. Relevant document: 5th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, I beg to move the Motion standing in his name on the Order Paper.
Electricity and Gas (Energy Company Obligation) Order 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
That the draft Order and Regulations laid before the House on 22 June be approved. Considered in Grand Committee on 12 July. Relevant document: 7th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Callanan, I beg to move the Motions standing in his name on the Order Paper en bloc.
Business and Planning Act 2020 (Pavement Licences) (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2022
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 16 June be approved. Considered in Grand Committee on 14 July. Relevant document: 6th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
Cat and Dog Fur (Control of Movement etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2022
Viscount Younger of Leckie
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 20 June be approved. Considered in Grand Committee on 14 July.
Schools Bill [HL]
Monday 18th July 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 35-II Manuscript amendments for Report (Supplementary to the Second Marshalled List) - (18 Jul 2022)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will begin with a brief note on scheduling. I know that there were concerns about progressing with Third Reading before the Summer Recess. The Government have listened to the concerns expressed, including on the first day on Report, and have agreed through the usual channels that a quick Third Reading is no longer desirable. As announced in the new version of Forthcoming Business, Third Reading has moved to Wednesday 14 September. The short delay does not affect the wider passage of the Bill. I hope this provides reassurance to your Lordships.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, Report may be the last occasion on which this House will be able to consider the Bill because, as the Minister said, the suggestion is that it should get a Third Reading on 14 September. I do not know any example of a Government who do not yet exist determining whether a Bill should get a Third Reading. On 14 September there will be a new Government, who may have different views on the Bill. There will be different Ministers. I hope very much that the Minister will remain in her post because, quite frankly, she is the only Minister in the department who understands anything about education. She is surrounded by five Boris cronies who know absolutely nothing about education. They are there for a pay rise for five weeks and compensation for loss of office—a loss of office which will be richly deserved. I hope that she will survive, because she understands this Bill better than most.
The point I would like to make is that if we agree that the Bill should be voted upon on 14 September, there will be a different set of usual channels that may decide this, thank God—I should not have said that. There will be a different team. I am not insulting any of them individually; I would never do that. You do not insult the usual channels because you have to live with them, although you may never forgive them. To continue my point, I think the vote should be later than that.
I have had a most helpful letter from the Minister today setting out her intentions for the time that she is in office, saying that she will preside over a committee set up to begin the long process of determining what should be the relationship between the Government and MATs—multi-academy trusts. This is a very important measure because it is the creation of an administrative body that stands between the Department for Education and the rest of the schools. In the past, when we have set up administrative bodies of this importance, it has usually taken weeks, months, decades or, in some cases, centuries to determine the right relationship. In effect, many of these bodies will be local authorities and therefore the issues involved are of immense importance. What power do they have over the schools? Do the individual school boards count for anything? On what occasions can they cut or increase the money to the schools? On what occasions can specialist schools protect their specialisms? In the Bill as it stands, a grammar school or a religious school is protected in a multi-academy trust, but, as the amendment from the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, showed the other day, there are many other schools with specialisms in maths, science and dance, all of which are not really protected at the moment when they go into academy trusts.
The Minister set out in her letter that she hopes to have, or her successor might hope to have, findings by the end of September, then a consultation period and determinations by Christmas. In that case, if the Bill came to the Lords on 14 September, there is no way that amendments would appear in the Commons until early spring next year. The Bill will therefore not come back to us until summer next year, and it will involve issues that we know nothing about; we do not really know what the recommendations will be.
This is a unique situation in the constitutional history of the House of Lords. We have never been asked to pass a Bill to the Commons where half of the Bill is not known. In all fairness, the Minister does not know it either, because she has to consult on it with the committee. This has never happened before and I think it is highly disrespectful to ask this House to pass a Bill on the undertakings. As far as I understand, in this sort of situation, in spring or summer next year we will get a Bill with maybe 10 or 20 new clauses and we will be given a day. How lucky we are that we will get a day to discuss them all. I do not think that we should put up with this.
The House of Lords started this Bill, not the Commons, and the importance of starting a Bill in the Lords is that we can make radical changes to it without knowing whether or not the House of Commons has been whipped to support it. That is what we have done in this Bill. I hope that we might set an example for other Bills that start in the House of Lords to be much firmer in making amendments and changes. That is our power as a second Chamber. We do not have many powers, but we have that power.
I very much hope that we will not agree to a Third Reading on 14 September. The constitutional arrangements should be that it should remain pending for the new Government. They may well want to accept all the recommendations that my noble friend is working on, but she will not even know what they are because they are not going to agree the recommendations until the end of September, and she will either be in or out of office on 7 or 8 September. This great uncertainty leads me to believe that it would be imprudent for us to consider a Third Reading on 14 September.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I echo and support the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I do not understand why the Government are in such a hurry to have a Third Reading on the Bill when they have already agreed to take out the first 18 clauses. Those clauses will be subject to a review being conducted by the Minister. She will need to keep to a very ambitious timetable, because essentially this is about the situation of how all schools, under the White Paper produced earlier in the year, are to become academies by 2030. The matter that the Minister’s review is looking at is: what should the accountability system be for thousands and thousands of schools?
Even if the Minister reaches a conclusion by the end of September, a full consultation has to be held. At that point the Government have to make decisions. They then have to give instructions to parliamentary counsel to redraft Part 1 of the Bill. That is surely going to take many months indeed. I think the noble Lord is ambitious in thinking that this will be back with us in the spring. It could take very much longer. On that basis, why on earth are the Government going for a Third Reading? There is absolutely no need for it until they see what they are going to do to make the changes.
A second point I would like to make comes back to the points that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, made at Second Reading and in other debates, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to it. The Government have sought to ride roughshod over this House in the nature of the drafting of the Schools Bill. We must set down a marker that this is unacceptable. I believe that we should not give this Bill a Third Reading until we have much greater assurances that when these new clauses come back—if they come back—we will go through a full process of Committee, Report and Third Reading before we can say that we have dealt with them satisfactorily.
Lord Judge (CB)
My Lords, we understood that Third Reading was going to happen this week. I drafted a Notice of Motion for the House to decide whether Third Reading should be heard at all. I showed the Notice of Motion to the Chief Whip, he saw it and it was perfectly plain that, if the House agrees, we should not take Third Reading at all until we know exactly what is in the Bill. I happen to agree with the noble Lords, Lord Baker and Lord Hunt: whether or not we leave the Third Reading in Forthcoming Business, the House will also have to consider a Notice of Motion that we should not consider Third Reading at all.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
My Lords, sitting where I am, I have repeatedly felt genuinely sorry for the Minister, who has done so much to try to improve the Bill or respond to concerns that have been expressed. But she must have realised by now that the Bill is beyond repair. If it does re-emerge, it will do so in such a different form from the one that started out that it will be tantamount to being a new Bill. In our attempts to improve it, I am reminded of the no doubt apocryphal British Rail announcement that the Wednesday afternoon train to Crewe would now run on Thursday mornings and would not stop at Crewe. That is the situation that this Bill is in. I think that the Minister can honestly and with real integrity report back to her political colleagues in the Commons that we really need to stop trying to amend a Bill that has gone way beyond that stage and that the last rites need to be performed and a new Bill brought before the House.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, the Minister has done what in rugby they say happens to good players: they catch the bad ball. You catch the attention of the entire team and you get flattened, but the good players get up. I hope the Minister will be able to get up and report back that—and I have made this point to her many times—unless we have a realistic amount of time and structure within which to discuss the changes, we are not doing our job. It is as simple as that.
I would be slightly more flexible about having a whole new Committee stage, but only one day has been suggested. I asked the Minister at the time whether that meant one day of business that might be extended to three or four—we might have a better reading if we had that—but a process that would be effectively guillotined, or at least very condensed, fills me with nothing but dread. We have to make sure that we have enough time to discuss the changes, and if that meant another process coming through, I would be quite flexible and would encourage my noble friends to do the same. But one day of Committee, with 12, 20 or who knows how many more new clauses and a structure that we have not heard of yet—come on, that is not on.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, the only thing that stops me wholeheartedly agreeing with everything that previous speakers have said is the thought that we would have to go through this again.
Viscount Stansgate (Lab)
My Lords, that is one of the reasons why I support what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. This is not just about a particular Bill; it is about the way we do business. As I am just about to finish my first parliamentary year in this House, and, as other noble Lords have said, a situation of this kind has not arisen before, I would not like to think that this would set a precedent in any way for the way in which the House considers its business in future. When it comes to what I might call negotiating leverage, one day is a derisory offer to the House; with no disrespect to the Minister, that is not good enough. There is great merit in not agreeing to allow a date for Third Reading to be set at this stage.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, it is quite clear that the Bill has been badly received across the whole House. Whole chunks of it have been taken out and it is in a very poor state, and it is clear that it should not have come here at all because it had not been put together properly. I am sure the Minister has heard that; it is not the first time that these views have been expressed. We will have a new Government in September, and then it will be up to the Prime Minister. This Bill may disappear completely—we do not know.
I have been part of the usual channels now for 13 months, and I hope still to be here in September—in one or other part of the usual channels. I will spend my summer working with colleagues in other parts of the House to ensure that the points raised by colleagues are fully understood by the Government, so that we can work together, bring things back and have a system that everyone is happy with. The Minister has heard how dissatisfied the House is. I am sorry, but I think that is important.
One thing I have learned as Opposition Chief Whip is that the forthcoming business can change from day to day, never mind what is going to happen in September. Particularly in March and April, the forthcoming business was changing literally every day. The fact that it is listed for September does not necessarily mean that it will happen then. We do not know. We will have those discussions then.
As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, has mentioned, we have the other protection of his Motion. I am sure that if Third Reading is tabled and he is unhappy with it, his Motion will be tabled for the House to consider. There are many barriers in place to make sure that the House can make its views known if it is unhappy. I am sure the Minister has heard how unhappy the House is.
Baroness Barran (Con)
The Minister has heard loud and clear. I suppose I would say a couple of things—but very briefly, because it is important that we get on and hear your Lordships’ thoughts on the rest of the Bill.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord, Grocott that the Bill is not beyond repair. There are significant parts of it—relating to the children not in school register and illegal schools—that are definitely not beyond repair. I also point the noble Lord to the large section of the Bill where there have been no amendments at all.
My request to your Lordships is that when we come to look at the new clauses, noble Lords leave these debates behind and look at them objectively, fairly and with all the experience and critical judgment that they can bring to them. I hope very much that, when that happens, the Bill can see a speedy passage.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes) (Con)
My Lords, before calling the first group, I should say that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I remind the House that remote speakers speak first after the mover of the lead amendment in a group and may therefore speak to other amendments in the group ahead of Members who tabled them.
Clause 49: Registration
“(5A) Condition C is not met if the parents of the child have made alternative arrangements to satisfy the duty in section 7 (duty of parents to secure education of children of compulsory school age).”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to exempt home education from mandatory registration, where the standard of learning is such that parents are compliant with their duties.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 64B I shall also speak to other amendments in my name. I declare an interest, as I have before, that I am from a home-educating family, which I am proud of. I wish there were more noble Lords in this Chamber who had the privilege of being part of home education.
As was discussed earlier, the Bill really should not exist in its current form. It has been thoroughly gutted already, and there were good reasons for that. The reasons for gutting the earlier parts of the Bill are no different from the reasons for doing the same to the end of the Bill, which I am afraid is just as much of a mess.
We live in an age of change. There is more remote working and people want to take more control over their health, and they want to do the same for education. I fear that this Government, and Governments generally, are on the run. More and more parents are choosing to take control of their children’s education, which is their right in this country. We as parents have a duty to educate our children. When we want to, we hand over responsibility to the Government, academies, trusts and so on to fulfil that duty, but in this country it is parents who are legally obliged to provide education for their children, and that is only right. We are not some other countries where the opposite is the case.
In this time of change, where perhaps people are taking back control—though maybe not always in the ways that we might have imagined—that forms a threat, in health and to local authorities. I am afraid I have documentary evidence, which I shall share with the House today, about how that perceived threat has led to real injustices under the current regime, even before this Bill becomes law.
Without protections and, frankly, without a wholescale redesign of this law, on which I may push a vote several times today, we may end up with a circumstance in which the injustices that many families are already experiencing today will be heightened and worsened, and we will see many willingly go to prison to stand on this principle. Having spoken to the Minister and colleagues in the department, I do not think the Government truly understand why anyone would go to prison on principle in order not to have their children on the register. They do not understand why. Is that because they do not have any children who they home educate? I would love to see survey results on how many Ministers, people in the department and people in local authorities home educate their children. If they did then they would take a very different view of what they are trying to do today.
I start by apologising to my colleagues on the Benches who have had to come here in such heat—although, thank God, we are well air-conditioned in this Chamber—to potentially vote on my amendments and those of other Peers. I am truly sorry that my amendment was put in early on the Marshalled List so that they have had to take that kind of heat. However, I ask the House to imagine that they had to face that heat every day for four or five years with no end in sight.
As I start to present my amendments, I shall read the House a few excerpts from a testimony that has been shared with me which has broken my heart. It is under the current regime—the current legal means by which local authorities can monitor and vet home education. I will not share the name of the lady concerned but I want the House to hear her story because there are many similar ones that I and other Peers have been sent. Again, this is happening under the current regime and existing laws.
This lady, a teacher of 20 years’ standing, decided to home educate after a parents evening where her six year-old daughter’s teacher announced that she “would not set the world on fire”. This is a teacher saying that a child will not do anything good in their life, basically. She decided, quite rationally, as is her right, to home educate and the child thrives. In fact, in Kent, where the family started to do this, the local authority visited them, with consent, saw the learning that was going on and valued it so much that it highlighted all the information and resources that were available to support this family. Soon after, the local authority said that it would be a waste of its time and resources to continue to visit this family. Clearly, education was a priority. They were always available and they did not need to have the level of monitoring that they initially had. They were happy for several years.
London, where my children are home educated, is an amazing environment for home education with all kinds of groups. However, this family then moved to Bromley. I am sorry that I have to mention this local authority by name, but it is one of many, according to the letters that I and other Peers have received, that have behaved atrociously under the current regime, which we are about to tighten, by the way. We already have many injustices and many families facing difficulties—I will describe the kind of things that happened to them—but we are about to give the authorities a great deal more power and not even to track down and deal with the bad actors that my other amendments try to start to deal with.
I will fast forward, because of time. This local authority visited the family, asked for lots of information and samples of work, which were kept on record over a long period. The authority’s job was to identify children missing from education. This eventually became unnecessary intrusion. After four years, the family still had no answers; they were still under investigation. Their immediate request for information held about them—remember GDPR, which we will discuss later—was not heard. The family decided not to provide any more information, because the situation was getting ridiculous after four years of constant hounding. It got to the point where the children were scared of the postman coming.
The family requested information. They wrote to Ofsted and they wrote to the department. This is all relevant to my amendments, so forgive me for taking a little more time. Bromley was given a great report for the way it treated this family. Eventually, the family was given a school attendance order, after requesting information being held about them under GDPR rules, with the Information Commissioner’s Office saying that Bromley had to comply. None of the ICO’s requests was followed through. The information that was held about the family was not provided and a school attendance order was slapped on them. The home education was of a very high standard—there was no reason to do that.
We have found out since then that this is a common occurrence. School attendance orders are used to silence families who kick up a fuss, because you cannot complain to the Local Government Ombudsman. I would love to hear from the Minister whether she disagrees and whether she has audited this kind of behaviour, but I hear that it is very common. Most families do not know that it has happened to them; they cannot appeal and they are silenced because they now have a school attendance order. We are about to make this process stronger in the Bill, forcing people to send their children to school where, ultimately, if they do not comply or provide information, prison is what awaits. The Secretary of State has not replied. We have heard before that there is provision for appeal, but both routes are closed for these families. Again, I have other amendments to create better ways to hear their voices.
The point of my first amendment today is that we need to provide protection. One of the ways that we can provide protection is simply to exempt home educating parents who are delivering a high standard of education, in line with current law, from this register. It is, in my mind, ludicrous that those who are doing a good job are put on a register in an open-ended way. At any time, their home education can be interrupted. Those who complain can be forced to send their children to school, so they do not complain or appeal. There is no recourse and no time limit and there is no easy way to overturn this.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
I gently remind the noble Lord of the Companion, which says that speakers
“are expected to keep within 15 minutes”.
That is not a formal limit but an advisory one. It says that
“on occasion, a speech of outstanding importance, or a ministerial speech winding up an exceptionally long debate, may exceed”
the limit, but the noble Lord has now been going on for 17 minutes.
Lord Wei (Con)
Thank you, I will wrap up.
I have two final amendments in this group. Amendment 86A in my name relates to a refusal to provide info not being sufficient reason to impose a school attendance order on a family. In this instance, the fact that the teacher or home educator did not provide information was seen as evidence that they were not educating their children properly. If you do not provide education and choose on principle not to provide that information, that should not mean that you are not educating your children well or that a school attendance order is put on them. This amendment is to prevent such occurrences happening again.
Finally, I support Amendment 118C on a code of conduct, but others will speak to that. I will give way and let them do that now.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes) (Con)
I assume that the noble Lord would like to move his amendment?
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes) (Con)
My Lords, as I previously advised, I now invite the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to speak.
Oh, I have been advised that the noble Baroness does not wish to speak.
Lord Soley (Lab)
I was going to get a glass of water, but that is going to be difficult. I thought for a moment that maybe the noble Lord, Lord Wei, was not going to move the amendment. I would have advised him not to. I am sure that he is well intended—I do not doubt that—but he has missed many of the debates on this over the years. I ask him to understand that, when I put the Bill forward on home education, that was five years ago. I never heard from the noble Lord then or had any involvement with him. He did not seem to be interested in it, but I consulted very widely. I consulted by all sorts of measures: I had meetings in the House; I had Zoom meetings up and down the country; I had emails and all those things. I was dealing very much with a small group of people who objected to the register. Most of them came on board; a small minority have not, but the majority support the Bill and the register. They do so because they know it is beneficial.
I think one of the things the noble Lord, Lord Wei, has missed quite seriously is that the provision is designed to be supportive. It is not a punishment, but he does not seem to understand that. In other words, for the first time a home-educating parent will be able to say to the local authority, “I want help to do this bit of home education, which I cannot deliver myself.” It might be in advanced science, music or art; it might be any of those things, and the local authority has to do it. It is supportive, not punitive, and the noble Lord’s whole speech was on the idea that it is punitive.
I say to him, as I have said in previous debates, some home educators are very good at it, but that does not mean that they do not need help at times. Just because you are able to teach certain things does not make you a good teacher without that support and backup which might be, as I say, in advanced sciences or whatever. The noble Lord’s amendment would deny them that and actually make it worse for them.
My line on this—I give credit to the Government, who have adopted most of my Bill here—has been about doing it well, and they have. I had some doubts about the appeal system. I wrote to the Minister about this and she gave me certain assurances in her reply about how that system will work. I made other suggestions too, but I think the Minister is saying that the appeal mechanism is there for both the parents and the authority. We should remember that this is a two-way street. The noble Lord, Lord Wei, says that he has had complaints from people about the way that a local authority has behaved. I say to him: listen to those people, mainly children who are now grown up and had complaints about the way that home education was done to them or, importantly, where it was done partly as a cover for something else. You do not have to think just about abuse here: it is about a child working in a shop and then being told “Well, you’re learning mathematics”; it is about trafficking, too.
Listening to the noble Lord, I think he has no concept of this. His speech was all about the terrible state and the wonderful home-educating parent. Most parents who home-educate in the way that he described do it well. They really have nothing to fear from this because what they will get is support from the local authority, if they ask for it. At the same time, they will have to demonstrate that the child is being properly educated. Is that really wrong?
Lord Wei (Con)
Just to clarify a few of my remarks, I want to credit the noble Lord, Lord Soley, the Minister and the Government for doing research. That is important and I hope that the research and consultations that will take place, moving forwards, will bring out more of the data and evidence that we sorely need. I feel that the most recent consultation, which was very short, did not get enough of the opinions of home educators. Many of those who oppose the register are painted as a minority, but that is not necessarily the case. A lot of people—
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Will the noble Lord give way? My understanding is that it is not normal to have a backwards and forwards between Back-Benchers. I am getting nods from the Front Bench, which is a very rare occurrence from either Front Bench. I am going to speak to my amendment—oh, sorry.
Lord Soley (Lab)
I had not finished. It is very unusual to intervene on an intervention. I was speaking and I was giving way to the noble Lord, Lord Wei.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, it is probably worth clarifying that on Report a Member should speak only once unless it is the Minister. I think we will finish the remarks we have heard; then if the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, wants to make her contribution separately, I am sure we would love to hear it.
Lord Soley (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Wei, asked me to give way, which I did, but I am quite happy to continue as I have nearly finished.
I emphasise again that there has been far more consultation than the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is aware of. I did not spend the last five years arguing for this Bill just for the fun of it. I did not ignore people. I have had people say to me what they have said to him: “I’ll go to prison rather than this”. Mind you, in a very long career in politics of 40-odd years I have heard an awful lot of people say they would go to prison for one thing or another, but very few do. The poll tax was a near exception, but by and large they do not.
I was saying to those people—to be fair, I won over a lot of them—“Think of this as supportive”. The noble Lord is falling into the trap of a tiny minority who say that this is a wicked state that is going to do terrible things. He has taken that as a fact; it is not. It is not even in the Bill that way. This is supportive. It is not a punishment. He is not doing himself or the House any favours in implying that it is anything other than supportive. I ask the House to reject the amendment.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I am going to be very quick. I would like to speak to my Amendment 86B and later amendments which are essentially saying the same thing: that this Bill is dreadful and ought to be taken away and thought over completely.
Amendment 86B is to delete Clause 49 entirely because it is such a far-reaching clause that it will create a bureaucratic nightmare for thousands of families. At the same time, it will fail to achieve the Government’s stated policy aims. I am also completely puzzled about how overstretched local authorities will be able to implement these new powers and duties. Having been a local councillor, I know how hard they work and how overstretched they are already—even before the recent government cuts.
Overall, I am convinced that Clause 49 will turn out as a total legislative failure and will leave a trail of destruction that will probably be ignored because home-schooling families are a minority in this country. I wish the Government would see sense on this and support the deletion of this clause, as they have with significant other parts of the Bill which they acknowledge were also unworkable. Within that, I would like to include my deletion of other parts of the Bill in Amendments 93A, 95A and 95B.
Finally, on my Amendment 118C, the government amendments are a step in the right direction, but a long way from the necessary protection that families need from these new powers. A code of practice would address the data protection concerns that many parents have. I urge the Minister to think about that.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I have several amendments in this group. If I were to say one thing to my noble friend the Minister, it is that I really hope the department will use the time it has while dealing with Part 1 to advance its thinking on the guidance and other aspects of the Bill so that, by the time it gets considered by the Commons, its thinking is rather more detailed and matured than what we have had the chance to look at. That would be a real help.
My noble friend Lord Wei raised some issues of true Conservative principle, which I hope home educators will find the opportunity to discuss with the candidates during August. Home education is a matter of freedom. Although the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and my noble friend both say that the Bill is supportive of home education, in many details it is not.
As my noble friend Lord Wei said, many letters are reaching us describing situations in which local authorities have been, frankly, abusive to home educators without any obvious good reason. I have pursued some of these matters with local authorities. I will not name the one I have talked to, but it is clear that they allow the difficulty that they have with some families to spill over into the way that they deal with those who are, on the face of it, doing a pretty good job—for instance, harassing a child who had a stroke aged six and saying that the child, rather than being cared for specially within their family, must be cast into school, not accepting independent reports about this child and saying that they must have more, different evidence. That is not in any way conducting their relationships in a supportive way. There have been cases where they have made really unpleasant remarks about home educators privately, and then, by mistake, copied others into emails. This shows that among a good number of local authorities there is a very unsatisfactory attitude to home education.
I am very keen that the Bill contain safeguards which put home educators, particularly good ones, in a position where they can reasonably hope to argue their case. We will come to some more details of that later. My noble friend Lord Wei espouses some true Conservative values of freedom and family which the Bill does not recognise sufficiently. One could also argue for efficiency, in that the best local authorities seem to do a very good job and, with the same money, go beyond what is achieved elsewhere by building up a pattern of trust which enables them not to spend time harassing people who are doing a good job.
The Bill as it is at the moment is not efficient, nor does it pay sufficient attention to all those occasions when the state is failing children. We have an amendment later, which I applaud, which says that children who have been excluded should not be placed in unregistered institutions. Oh, my golly—that is the state doing that. Why are we fussed about what good private educators are doing when there are things like that being done by the state?
There is a flavour in some of the remarks I have read from local authorities of a difficulty with difference which we should surely not allow. Local authorities have to deal with a lot of very different people, including Gypsies and others who choose to live a lifestyle which is not at all in accordance with the normal. Fear or dislike of difference should not be something one finds in a local authority. I entirely understand where the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is coming from, but my wish in the Bill is to find ways of improving it in its detail rather than attacking the principle of the register.
Amendment 65 looks at the
“means by which the child is being educated”.
That is widely seen—I think correctly—as permitting the Government to inquire deeply into the exact way in which a child is being educated. That is one of the ways the worst local authorities have adopted to oppress home educators. They ask for more and more detail. They ask for things that home educators are not doing, like having a timetable. There is a whole structure of education which is necessary in school but does not apply to home education. Home education can be centred on the child and be very different. The question is: is it effective and sufficient? Is it doing what it should do to bring out the qualities of the child? The structure of what is being provided should not be open to question and attack if the outcome is sufficient.
Amendments 65 and 66A suggest alternative ways of dealing with that, and in Amendment 66 we will come to another, when the right reverend Prelate speaks to it. With Amendment 66A, we are looking at a limit to who is providing the education. The Government want to know what outside people are providing the education that a child is receiving. That seems to me to be a reasonable bit of information to ask for, and is well short of the worrying implications of the wording as it is.
In Amendment 85, I come back to a subject I raised in Committee. One of the justifications for the register is so that we know what is happening to children. I find that quite persuasive, but if we are going to do that, we ought to know what is happening to all children in this country; we should not leave bits unexamined. At the moment, your standard independent school does not return data to the Department for Education on the children in its charge. I do not think it takes legislation to change that; it just takes the Government to decide that they want that, and to ask for it—they have the power. But if the justification for a register on home educators is that the Government ought to know what is happening to children, that same thought ought to apply to independent education too.
The Lord Bishop of Carlisle
My Lords, I speak on behalf of my right reverend friend the Bishop of St. Albans, who has two amendments in his name, Amendments 66 and 94. His name is also listed on Amendments 65 and 66A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.
Amendments 65, 66 and 66A continue to take issue with the proposals for details of the means by which a child is being educated to be included on the register. Amendment 66 would replace this with a determination of suitability, and provide for visits by the local authority for determining that suitability to be recorded. However, further to communication with the Department for Education and the Minister, we understand that their interpretation of the word “means” does not relate to the educational content or methods of home educating but simply to the providers of the education, since separate rules for registration will pertain to out-of-school education. We have been informed that this framework will be set out in the future statutory guidance. This is a much more positive interpretation than had previously been supposed, but if this is the interpretation I am not sure why it could not have been contained within the primary legislation rather than prescribed at a later date. Amendment 66A, from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would naturally resolve that problem.
We are most grateful for the Minister’s communications with the Bishops’ Bench to clarify this matter. However, the terminology remains unhelpfully ambiguous. I hope that the Minister can alleviate the concerns of home-schoolers and state on the record that this simply means inquiring into who is providing the education and not the substance of the education or the methods of teaching.
I turn now to Amendment 94, which would insert a new clause after Clause 50 and seeks to provide protection for the institution of home schooling against any undue or unfair interference. The proposed new clause would ensure that any contact between the local authorities and home-schoolers respects protected characteristics, as well as Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights, as in the Human Rights Act, in making sure that
“the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”
The point is that the way in which this Bill is framed could be seen to cast a cloud of suspicion on all home educators. The noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Wei, have already raised that point. Some parents are also worried that this register is the thin end of an invasive wedge that could lead to undue state prescription with regard to home schooling.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I am very supportive of Amendment 64A. Amendments 65, 66, 66A and 94 are also ways of reassuring and protecting home-schoolers in the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Soley, made the point that, over his many years in politics, many have threatened to go to prison for their beliefs and rarely do. We all recognise that point. But it is also true that, over the many years that I have been involved in politics, I have been reassured that many a law is supportive and not a punishment or threat, and I have learned not to take much notice of that either. The notion that if you are a good actor you have nothing to fear is actually quite chilling, because then you have to ask who decides who the good actors are—who will define what a good parent is, in this instance. It is a little unfair that people who feel so strongly that they say they would go to prison are dismissed, because it speaks to the fact that this Bill has created uncertainty. The Minister has gone out of her way to be reassuring—I do not dismiss that; that is something to be taken seriously—but all that these amendments are trying to do is to codify that reassurance in a variety of ways, rather than just having it on word of mouth.
It is not helpful to say whether it is a minority of home-schoolers who are worried about the register or a majority. In a way, who cares whether it is a majority or a minority? It is the principle, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has made that very clear. I emphasise that there is a principle of freedom here that we should not just throw out or dismiss as some sort of inconvenience to more pragmatic concerns.
The problem with the register is that it is not just a register; it ends up looking as though it requires far more on details of means, as the right reverend Prelate just explained—more than you need in a register. It does not just tick a box. That is why many home educators are very anxious about it. I am not a home educator and have never been home educated; to be frank, I am not interested in home educators per se, but I am interested more broadly in a situation where the state collects so much data and information—a database of children—and interferes in our freedom in a democratic society to home educate, if that is what we want. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle explained, the cloud of suspicion being created that this is a potential assault on deeply held religious and philosophical freedoms is something we should all take seriously as democrats who support a free society.
The suspicion that some home educators have of the state and the way that education is conducted is what we should be discussing in relation to this Schools Bill—if it were not such a basket case of a Bill that we cannot get anywhere on what we ought to be discussing, which is irritating. We have a problem when many parents believe that the state cannot be trusted to educate their children. All sorts of controversial issues come up. I do not think it is a criticism of home educators that they do not trust the state or think that it does not provide the kind of education that their SEND child or bullied child needs, or that they do not want someone to be exposed to the kind of materials in sex and relationship education that we will probably discuss later, which have been all over the news. These are reasonable philosophical ideas to hold; they, and religious freedom, are things that we should be protecting in this House.
We should remember the Telford report, which I just finished reading over the weekend. We have to be careful when the state starts saying that the people acting suspiciously are the parents. I also read the Oldham report, in which state actors—councils, schools, the police and all sorts of people—ignored in plain sight the sexual grooming and abuse of thousands of young people. I am not prepared just to say that I trust the state. It is perfectly reasonable when people do not, but we at least have to reassure them about their freedoms to withdraw from state schooling. After all, it is not the law that you have to school your child, simply that you have to educate them. I trust those parents to educate them as much as I trust the state. Where there are bad actors, you act, but you do not treat everyone all the time as potential bad actors.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I said at Second Reading, putting the register aside for a moment, that we as a society have a responsibility to ensure that all our children are safe, secure and educated. If that is not happening, we need to ask why and what we can simply do to make sure that every child is safe and educated.
Over the last seven or eight years, I have put down a whole series of Written Questions asking how many children are missing from our school rolls, such that we do not even know where they are. The answer is that we do not know. The best we can do currently—this goes back to 2018-19—is information from the National Crime Agency, which, by the way, identifies as missing anyone whose whereabouts cannot be established and who may be the subject of a crime or at risk of harm to themselves; examples include child trafficking, getting involved in drug pushing, et cetera. It concluded that there are 216,707 children missing whose whereabouts we do not know. That is a very low figure. I think it is considerably higher than that.
For me, that is what this debate is about: protecting children and making sure that they are safe, secure and educated. That is why I welcome these measures on home education and congratulate the Government on having the courage to pick up this political hot potato and try to do something about it—it is not perfect; I take it for granted that there are some concerns—and about unregistered schools.
Of course, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle was right about parents’ rights and values, but society has to make sure that, when children are in schools which are not subject to any checks or inspections, they are not being taught the most appalling practices, which Ofsted highlights in its reports. There have been a couple of cases where it has taken those schools to court and managed to close them down—the right reverend Prelate would be horrified if he knew. One such school, which was not unregistered, was a Christian school as well; I am happy to talk to him privately about it.
Let us understand where we are coming from in this debate. We all have anecdotal evidence of home tuition and teaching. I listened with great interest to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and his worries about what might happen. I accept that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is absolutely right that there have been some appalling practices by local authorities; there have also been some fantastic practices by them, which should be the model for how we behave. That is why I will suggest in the next group that local authorities appoint home school co-ordinators.
I have been struck by the number of emails I have had—I think it was 82 at the last count—from home educators. They have concerns, of course, or they would not be emailing me, but I come away thinking, “Wow, what a tremendous job you’re doing.” I have met some of them. I met one last week, who told me about how she had ignited an interest in the Tudors in her daughter. I thought again, “What a tremendous job you’re doing.” However, those actually doing the work of home tuition are perhaps seeing problems that will not be there.
We need a simple register which collects some simple information. I did not know and was quite surprised to learn that independent schools do not provide any data—that is a new one on me. They should be doing so. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, rightly said, we should know where all our children are—whether they are in school, home educated, in an unregistered school or in the independent sector. Let that be the rallying call from these amendments.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, I am in a bit of a dilemma. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, if I may so refer to her, has spoken to all the clauses she would like to have taken out of the Bill. When I was last in the House, during my 26 years, the issue of whether a clause remained in the Bill came up only in debates of clause stand part. At that stage only did the argument come forward, if someone wanted to make it, that a clause no longer stand part of the Bill.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, on the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, we disagree in principle on this. Of course we respect the ability of parents to educate their own children, but nothing in this Bill prevents parents from educating their children at home. The sad truth is that home education is being used, sometimes, as a front for neglect, or even abuse. This is happening, and many of us here have seen too many examples of this, but there are multiple examples of great practice too—of course there are—and examples, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, quite rightly said, of local authorities playing a supportive role. Clearly, there are situations where this relationship has not been successful, and I would be interested in what the Minister has to say about what she is planning to do to make sure that that is prevented wherever possible.
But registration does not mean that children will be forced to attend school. The reference of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, to the sex offender register was unfortunate and inflammatory, and the noble Lord’s Amendment 72A, on the obligation to provide information, raises great concern for me, where it says that
“A local authority may only require parents to provide the information under this section if the local authority suspects that the parents are educating the child in such a way that it may lead to the child conducting violence or sexual or physical abuse against others.”
There is nothing about the protection of that child. I could never vote for that, and if the noble Lord chooses to divide the House on his amendments, we will be voting to make sure that they are not included in the Bill.
My noble friend Lord Soley has told us previously that he has been waiting for these measures to be brought into law for some time. He has done sensitive and sterling work for very many years on this issue, and I pay tribute to him for the kind way that he handled responding to the noble Lord opposite, and for the work that he has done over some time.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made important points about the capacity of local authorities, but I note that many local authorities, when asked, have welcomed the approach being taken. Obviously, the proof is going to be in the implementation, and we do not dismiss the concerns about how this Bill will work in practice. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, the balance here between the freedom of home educators, which we recognise, and the safeguarding of children, has not been where it needs to be previously.
We welcome the Government’s amendments in this clause. We agree very much regarding our obligations to support and protect children, and with the reassuring words of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on this issue. We should be celebrating home education; too often, it has been viewed—and I think home educators themselves have picked up on this—with some suspicion, or even ridicule, not just by local authorities but in society generally. There is no need for that, and having this clearer framework may actually support the recognition of home education as a valid way of educating children.
It would, though, having said all that, be very helpful to alleviate some of the fears of home educators if the Minister could explain to the House what she intends to do ahead of, and after, implementation, to take home educators with her, so that the threat and fear can be reduced, and home educators can be properly reassured.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to the first group of amendments which relate to the proposals for children not in school registers. If I may, I would like to start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for their very constructive remarks in setting the context in which these measures are being introduced. I would also like to echo the noble Baroness opposite’s remarks regarding the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and his, as she said, very sensitive and kind work on this. Obviously, sensitivity and kindness are really important, because we are talking about parents who care desperately that their children get the right education, and all of us as parents can recognise how important that is.
Amendments 64B and 72A, from my noble friend Lord Wei, seek to narrow the eligibility criteria for the registers. Local authorities would still need to make inquiries and hold certain information to ascertain a child’s eligibility to be on the register, and indeed to check whether a child is at risk of harm. This is not materially different to local authorities recording this information in a register, except that the effect of these amendments would hinder local authorities from discharging their existing duties. The House has already heard reflections from the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Chapman, about the pressures that local authorities are under.
It is vital that the registers contain information on all children not in school. The registers are there not just for safeguarding reasons but also to aid local authorities to undertake existing responsibilities to ensure education being provided is suitable, to help them identify children who are truly missing education, which will become easier once we know where all children not in school are, and, critically, to help them to discharge their new duty to provide support to home-educating families. As other noble Lords have said, this in no way diminishes the rights of any parent to decide to educate their child at home.
My noble friend talked about the lack of opportunities for appeal and complaints. There are a number of routes for complaints available for parents in relation to school attendance orders. First, they can ask the local authority to revoke the order, and the local authority must act reasonably in deciding whether or not to agree to this. If the local authority refuses, the parents can appeal to the Secretary of State to give direction; the Secretary of State will consider each case individually and will make a balanced judgment on the information available, and has the power to direct the local authority to revoke a school attendance order. The Education Act 1996 also gives the Secretary of State powers to intervene when a local authority exercises its functions unreasonably or fails to comply with duties under that Act. We are also looking at how we can strengthen independent oversight of local authorities and considering alternative routes of complaint for home-educating parents.
I will also write to my noble friend, and to the House, to clarify once again the fact that the failure to provide information to a local authority is not criminal. Rather it starts the whole process for a school attendance order, but in the interests of time I will set that out in a letter.
I also thank my noble friend Lord Lucas and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, and, on his behalf, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle, for their Amendments 65 to 66A. The measures in the Bill do not give local authorities any new powers to monitor, assess or dictate the content of education. The right reverend Prelate talked about a “cloud of suspicion”, and I think it would be unfortunate if he was right about that. We have striven to be clear about the scope of the powers and when any new powers are required. We are of the view that local authorities’ existing powers are already sufficient to assess the suitability of the education being provided. Therefore, I would like to be clear that the phrase in the Bill
“the means by which the child is being educated”
does not include the content of the education itself. I am happy to put that on the record. It is limited to matters such as whether the child is taught entirely at home or also attends education settings, which settings they are, and how much of their time the child spends there.
It is important to keep this existing drafting to ensure that local authority registers not only include information on where a child is being educated other than at school, such as entirely at home or at out-of-school education providers, but what proportion of their education they are receiving at those settings. Capturing this information will help local authorities identify those children who may be receiving most, if not all, of their education in unsuitable settings, such as illegal schools. Regulations will set out the details of the child’s education provision to be included in registers, as well as whether or not a child is assessed to be receiving a suitable education. I have tabled Amendment 86 to enable these, and other regulations concerning the collection and sharing of data, to be subject to increased parliamentary scrutiny.
Turning to Amendment 67, I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that it is already the Government’s intention, through regulations, to require local authorities to record the reasons why a child is eligible for registration, and Amendments 68, 69 and 73 in my name make provision for this. We believe that this information will be invaluable for understanding why parents may be home educating, including identifying systemic issues such as insufficient SEN support or off-rolling—all concerns that your Lordships have raised, rightly, during the passage of the Bill.
It was always our intention that the power in new Section 436C(1)(d) should be used to prescribe the inclusion of information, such as this, aimed at promoting the education, welfare and safety of children, but we recognise the concerns raised about its breadth. We have therefore proposed its removal and replacement with a targeted list of matters, which would allow for the inclusion of information such as reasons for eligibility, the child’s protected characteristics, or whether they are a looked-after child, on a child protection plan or a child in need.
Amendments 85A, 94 and 118C concern the important issue of safeguarding data. It is our intention that data protection be a key area of focus during implementation, but to provide more reassurance we have sought to introduce additional protections for families. Amendment 70, in my name, will place in the Bill our existing commitment that no data that could identify a child or parent be published or made publicly available.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in discussing these amendments and thank the Minister, who I pay tribute to, as many others have done, for her long-suffering forbearance with all our discussions on various aspects of the Bill.
I accept that the Government are taking, and are planning to take, account of some of the concerns that have been raised today. My main issue, and the reason I have shifted from my earlier position on the Bill, is that my concerns have been raised by existing bad practice that we are seeing in the interaction between local authorities, the department and home-educating families. If that were not the case, and there were many more local authorities—which I applaud as well—doing a great job, I would not be standing before your Lordships today. However, sadly, if the current situation is that sufficient protection is not in place for home-educating families, what confidence do we have, until we actually see the detail later on, that these abuses by local authorities will not happen later?
My Amendment 72A, which would provide a warrant, is designed to allow us to pursue bad actors. We also have through the Children Act ways to pursue people who neglect their children, so we can protect the children. However, the problem is that we do not always use properly those rules and laws—or the data that we can collect, in a co-ordinated way, together, to pursue those bad actors. I genuinely still believe that this register will cause bad actors to go under the radar.
Therefore, I would like to test the opinion of the House. I am not saying that we should not have a register but it should be there for parents who do not believe that they are providing the level of education that the law requires them to provide. Those who are uncertain can seek advice and support from the local authority, but those who just want to get on with the job should be given the right not to be interfered with in doing so.
Lord Soley (Lab)
The noble Lord would give a right not to go on the register to those who he would say are educating their children okay. How on earth are you going to define that without giving the state even more powers? It is contradictory.
Lord Wei (Con)
The law already places a requirement on parents to educate their children to the standards that the law requires; therefore, I would just refer to the law. It is not for me or for us here to specify in detail in the Bill what that looks like, and the moment we do so, we will have overstepped the mark.
I am more satisfied by the Minister’s response on Amendment 85A, that greater care is being taken on the use of the information in this register, and I look forward to hearing about that.
Finally, on Amendment 86A, again, existing practice evidences to me that local authorities are not necessarily respecting parents’ rights not to be interpreted as not providing a good education by not providing information. That misunderstanding is dangerous, and I have not heard anything yet that satisfies me that the plans that will be put forward will solve that problem. If you refuse to provide information, you should not have a school attendance order put on to you. That may create problems, but it should be a principle. We have that in law: when you are arrested, you have the right to remain silent. Why, then, if you do not provide information in this instance, are you forced to send your child to school on the pretext that you are not providing a good education? There are many ways in which local authorities can get information. Forcing parents to do so by saying, “If you don’t do so, your child will be forced to go to school” is the wrong way to go about this. Therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Baroness Penn
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment removes the broad power to prescribe information that must be contained in the register of children not in school. It is replaced with a more targeted power: see the new subsection (1A) inserted by the amendment in Baroness Barran’s name at clause 49, page 42, line 30.
“(1A) A register under section 436B must also contain such information about, or in connection with, the following matters in respect of a child registered in it as may be prescribed, to the extent that the local authority have the information or can reasonably obtain it—(a) the child’s protected characteristics (within the meaning of the Equality Act 2010);(b) whether the child has any special educational needs, including whether the local authority maintain an EHC plan for the child;(c) any actions that have been taken by a local authority following, or in connection with, enquiries made by a local authority under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 (local authority’s duty to investigate);(d) whether the child is a child in need for the purposes of Part 3 of the Children Act 1989 (see section 17(10) of that Act) and, if so, any actions that a local authority have taken in relation to the child under that Part and any services that a local authority have provided to the child in the exercise of functions conferred on them by section 17 of that Act;(e) whether the child is looked after by a local authority (within the meaning of section 22 of the Children Act 1989);(f) the reasons why the child meets Condition C in section 436B, including any information provided by a parent of the child as to those reasons or, in a case where a parent has not provided that information, the fact that they have not done so;(g) whether, under arrangements made under section 436A, the child has been identified as a child who is of compulsory school age but who is not a registered pupil at a school and is not receiving suitable education otherwise than at a school;(h) the school or type of school (if any) that the child attends or has attended in the past;(i) whether support is being provided in relation to the child under section 436G and, if so, the nature of the support being provided;(j) any actions that have been taken by a local authority in relation to the child under sections 436I to 436P (school attendance orders);(k) any other information about the child’s characteristics, circumstances, needs or interactions with a local authority or educational institutions that the Secretary of State thinks should be included in the register for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education, safety or welfare of children.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment replaces the broad power currently in section 436C(1)(d) to make regulations detailing information to be included in the register of children not in school with a more targeted power which sets out the matters which regulations may cover.
“(4) No information from a register under section 436B may be published, or made accessible to the public, in a form—(a) which includes the name or address of a child who is eligible to be registered under that section or of a parent of such a child, or(b) from which the identity of such a child or parent can be deduced, whether from the information itself or from that information taken together with any other published information.” Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would prohibit publication of any information from a register under section 436B which identifies a child who is eligible for registration or a parent of such a child, or allows such a child or parent to be identified.
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment reduces the obligation on parents to provide information to the local authority when their child becomes eligible to be registered on the children not in school register: it would mean that they would only need to provide information that they have about their child and themselves and the other parent, and not the information prescribed by regulations.
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment reduces the obligation on parents to provide information, on request from a local authority, in cases where the child is on the children not in school register: it would mean that they would only need to provide the information mentioned in section 436C(1)(a) to (c), and not any information prescribed in regulations under the new subsection (1A) (inserted by the amendment in Baroness Barran’s name at clause 49, page 42, line 30).
Baroness Penn
“(aa) must provide the other local authority with any information relating to the child that is prescribed under section 436C(1A) that they have,”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the amendment in Baroness Barran’s name at clause 49, page 42, line 30.
Lord Lucas
“(A1) Local authorities must—(a) recognise that the first responsibility for educating a child lies with its parents,(b) be supportive of those who elect to educate their children at home,(c) recognise that home education is of itself not a safeguarding issue, and(d) acknowledge that in many instance the decision to home educate reflects failures by other institutions of the state.”
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 74 I will speak also to Amendments 75 and 78. It is important in the context of the relationship between local authorities and home educators that there is a very clear statement of that relationship. I have set out a couple of versions of that in Amendments 74 and 75. I would be content if this was to find its way to the top of the guidance, which is a document that both local authorities and home educators will need to be able to refer to and get clear guidance from. Amendment 74 contains a statement of the fundamentals of the relationship which seem important to me.
On Amendment 78, I will defer to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, when she speaks to Amendment 77. I am thoroughly in support of what she is proposing. That home-educated children should be enabled to take exams has been a long-running problem and ought to be one of the things that we and local authorities are doing to support them.
I am also very much in favour of the amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Storey, and look forward to hearing from them. If we happen to have the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on the line, which I hope we do, I think her direction of asking local authorities to take account of expert advice is important. I know of several occasions when local authorities have said, “It doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter. We’re interested only in what we hear directly from the parent. Expert advice is not something we listen to.” I do not think that is the right attitude; the attitude described by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is right. I beg to move.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 77 is in my name, and I am delighted to have the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is a very modest amendment so I hope the Minister can agree it without too much difficulty—one always lives in hope in this place.
Home educators save the country thousands of pounds because they are not using state-funded education systems, but they often have difficulty finding a test centre for their children when they want to take public examinations, and when they do find one they have to pay exam fees, which can amount to hundreds of pounds, for the privilege of doing so. Of course, many home educators are not wealthy and struggle to find the money for the fees, but surely home-educated children are as entitled as other children to have public recognition of their learning in the form of examinations. This amendment would guarantee that home-educated pupils had a place at which to sit their national exams and financial assistance to ensure that no child is denied recognition of achievement because their parents cannot afford the fees.
As I say, it is a very modest amendment and I hope the Minister will look on it favourably.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Hunt, who is in the Moses Room grappling with procurement, I will speak to his Amendment 79, to which I also put my name. It would require a local authority to have regard to the case of a SEND child and to listen to the wishes of the child and the parent around provision decisions; the information and support necessary to enable participation in those decisions should be present.
It is an important amendment, given that in so many of the cases that we have heard about where parents are anxious about the Bill’s measures in respect of home education, they are parents of children with some form of special educational need or disability. They have felt that their child’s needs are not being properly addressed in the maintained sector and have therefore chosen to home educate their children. It is important that there is some safeguard for that group in particular, so that the parents’ and child’s wishes are properly considered in the context of what we are trying to do in the Bill.
I also support Amendment 74, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, which I supported in Committee, makes an important case for support for sitting national examinations and the cost of doing so. By consequence, I support Amendment 78.
Finally, having listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Wei, on the previous grouping, and given the problem that the Local Government Ombudsman does not apply in the cases of parents of home-educated children, I think it is important that there is some kind of independent complaints service or ombudsman service. I shall be interested in the Minister’s response on how that independent voice to handle complaints about local authorities, with the diverse range of services that they might provide to support home-educating parents, might be provided.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it might be appropriate if I speak first to Amendment 76, which stands in my name and that of my noble friend. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just mentioned—and I thank him for his support—and as I think we have heard from around the Chamber, if you are dealing with a very rare condition, a teacher or the school cannot be expected to know everything about it.
What we expect teachers to deal with now has expanded. Special educational needs have been spoken about already, and we have a better understanding of them: it is not some fad or anything that is made up about various conditions. I refer the House to my declared interest in dyslexia; that is just one. All these conditions will be present in the classroom, and we now expect schools to deal with them. Expecting them to deal with every medical condition that might affect the way children should be taught is beyond the pale. Commonly occurring ones? Yes. The rest of them? No. There should be a duty on the school and the education authority to communicate and to take it on board when something else arises. That is quite straightforward.
Indeed, many of the amendments in this group are about establishing that supportive relationship between such bodies and home educators. I hope that we hear some supportive words from the Government on that, and on Amendment 84, in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey, which makes provision for some sort of co-ordination of support for those who are home educating, and a relationship. I am hopeful that the Minister will have something positive to say in this area. We need to support those who are, let us face it, at the most basic level, saving the public purse some money. If they are doing it properly, let us help them.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 118 and in support of Amendment 74. As I said before, I have real concerns. I accept the intentions of the Government as stated by my noble friend, and I hope that this summer will provide an opportunity to come up with independent appeals processes which are not operated just by local authorities or the Government. The current regime, where something like that is already in place, is clearly insufficient. Families are being left in the lurch—often, as I said, for a very long time.
I shall not speak for long. I have already spoken about my amendment in the previous debate, so others can refer to Hansard on that, but the principle is that we would have a voluntary, independent person who would serve as an adviser to local authorities where they want to investigate what is going on in home education, but also provide a mediation resource for families so that they do not have to resort to expensive and lengthy processes such as judicial reviews. I was speaking to some judges over lunch last week who said that there is a massive waiting list in the courts. Why should we add to that through the Bill? Instead, we should provide an independent means by which issues can be resolved, such as the one I described here in London and elsewhere.
That is why I tabled Amendment 118, but I support the idea captured in Amendment 74 that there should be recognition that home education itself is not a crime or anything negative; in fact, it is positive for society. I think the noble Lord, Lord Soley, would agree on that point, so let us make sure that those hard-working, hard-pressed officials who are trying to work with home educators truly understand that in law.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, in the debate on the last group, I completely forgot to say thank you to the Minister, who is not in her place at the moment, for meeting me not once but twice. She also met two home educators, and I like to think that that influenced the amendments. I have never had as many emails and contacts as I have had on home education, so it would be very good if the Bill’s changes could be expanded to include the concerns of those people.
Baroness Penn (Con)
Did the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, want to speak to his amendments in this group?
Lord Hacking (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness very much. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was giving me a signal from the other side of the Chamber, and I was wondering what it was, but now I know, and I am very grateful for knowing.
I must start with an apology to the whole House for the massive number of manuscript amendments tabled by me to remove, one by one, all the clauses in Parts 3 and 4. This was a mistake by me. When I went to the Legislation Office this morning, I said, “Can I table a simple amendment that runs on the lines ‘leave out Parts 3 and 4’?” I was told it could not be done that way, but only by individually asking for each clause to be left out of the Bill. I should have realised that I needed only to give one example of my proposal, and then your Lordships would not have received this massive number of manuscript amendments. For that, I again apologise.
I should also say that I have not, save for one occasion, which I will come to in a moment, spoken so far on the Bill. I sat through parts of Second Reading and many of the sittings in Committee, but I did not intervene. The one exception was in Committee, when the Clock of our House was stuck at 10 minutes to 3 pm. I thought a literary comment could be brought into the Bill’s proceedings and I reminded the Committee of Rupert Brooke’s poem, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, which ends with a reference to whether the village church clock in Grantchester was still standing “at ten to three” and was there “honey still for tea”. That was my little contribution as a matter of literature on a Bill which, after all, is to do with education.
I have thought very carefully, particularly last weekend, and concluded that, in the interests of the whole House, Parts 3 and 4 should be removed, not as a wrecking amendment but as a constructive one, so that the provisions in Parts 3 and 4 can properly be looked through and thought about. I am supported in that view by my noble friend Lord Grocott, who said at the beginning of the debate that the Bill is beyond repair. The Opposition Chief Whip, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said that the Bill is in a very bad state. That supports my general proposition, that the entirety of Parts 3 and 4 should be removed.
In making this proposal to the House, I am not denying that the many improvements that noble Lords have added should be considered. As part of a reconsideration of this Bill, those improvements might well find themselves in it. I recognised at the weekend that a new broom needs to be taken to the whole of Parts 3 and 4.
Coming back to this House after an absence of 22 years, one is struck by the increasing disease in all our Bills of what I would call particularisation. If I have invented that word, I apologise, particularly to the editors of Hansard. I refer to the ever-increasing perceived need to place everything in the Bill, to the point where our Bills are becoming more detailed and more complicated—and pretty incomprehensible. We seem to think that our job is done when the Bill passes and have insufficient thought for the users of our Bills. Look, for example, in the previous Session, at the police Act, the health Act, or the Nationality and Borders Act, and think of those who must enforce them—police officers for the police Act, health workers for the health Act, and customs officers for the Nationality and Borders Act, to say nothing of the tasks that are thrown up to judges and lawyers who interpret the terms of our Bills.
This Bill, in its present form, has no fewer than 40 pages of obligations on home schooling and local authorities. This is a vast section of the Bill, and it is those 40 pages that I ask your Lordships to reconsider. It is as though someone in the Department for Education has been thinking of everything under the sun—and, I must add, the moon—which can be put into this Bill, the result being these 40 pages. This must come to an end.
I now come to a problem that was entirely new to me. I met the five home-schooling mothers, several of whom are listening to this debate. As the Minister may remember, I introduced three of them to the Ministers when we were in Committee, the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran and Lady Penn, who kindly had a word with them about their concerns, although it was only brief. I am not denying that a lot of noble Lords have expressed a concern and I am not at all deriding all the work that has been put into the Bill by noble Lords.
When you come back to this House after a long time, you also have a freshness when looking at the issues. In this case, I looked at the Education Act 1944, a very important social Act brought in under Rab Butler, later to become Lord Butler of Saffron Walden. I also looked at the more recent Education Act 1996. I have several cited cases, one in 1980, when Lord Donaldson presided, and one in 1985, when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, presided, for which they each provided further help and guidance over the application of the then provisions. As recently as 2019, the Department for Education issued statutory guidance. I am not going to read the terms of those two Acts or the statutory guidance. Suffice it to say that for both Acts, the recent statutory guidance gave clear support for home schooling, and little interference.
What then has gone wrong? It appears—I emphasise that word—that education officers in a few powerful local authorities have set their face against home schooling, believing that pupils should be at the school with which they were provided. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, spoke of abusive behaviour by certain local authorities. I emphasise “appears” because the Minister, when I spoke to her, was strongly of the view that this was not the right interpretation. However, we have heard a different view from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Therefore, why have these provisions gone into the Bill? This is quite different from the stance taken in 1944 and 1996. It appears that the views of those education officers in a limited number of boroughs—I will not name the boroughs here but will in a meeting with the Minister—have wrongly persuaded the Government to bring in the Bill in the way that we find it.
I have already told the Minister that I will not divide the House and that remains my position. The Minister has kindly agreed to see me and some of the concerned home-schooling mothers and their advisers.
Finally, I ask the Minister not to forget the World War I poets. I could name them, as I did just now in a conversation with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, but I just leave that as a final thought among the Ministers. I hope that she will not neglect those poets, and the literature that they produced, when she sums up.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I will start with Amendments 74 and 75, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas. The law is clear that parents have a right to educate their children at home, and local authorities should already be working collaboratively with parents to ensure the best outcome for the child. We are keen to ensure that home-educating parents, and local authorities, are fully supported in ensuring that the education received at home is suitable. Therefore, as my noble friend Lady Barran said, as part of the implementation of the Bill we will be reviewing our existing guidance and publishing new statutory guidance for local authorities on their “children not in school” responsibilities, which will include advice on how they should discharge their new support duty.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. If she has any kind of assessment of the cost of requiring local authorities to cover that cost for parents, it would be really useful to share that with noble Lords taking part in the debate.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I am not sure whether that assessment has been made. If it has, I will be happy to share it. As we have said several times, there are at least two more stages to go on the guidance. One is a collaborative process to produce the draft guidance, and then a consultation process. There are plenty of opportunities as we go along to look at it—for example, whether exam costs would be included in the statutory guidance. I will find out whether we have that assessment and, if we do, I will share it.
I turn to Amendment 118 from my noble friend Lord Wei. As we have already discussed, several routes for complaint already exist for home-educating parents. But, as my noble friend said in response to the previous group, we have heard concerns raised by noble Lords about whether the different current routes of complaint are sufficient. We are also continuing to consider what more we can do to support home-educating parents and strengthen independent oversight of local authorities, such as exploring alternative routes of complaint.
Finally, I turn to Amendments 97ZZA to 100F from the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, which would remove Clauses 53 to 66 from the Bill. The overarching purpose of Clauses 53 to 56 is to improve the consistency of attendance support pupils and families receive to help pupils attend their school regularly. These clauses are an important part of the Government’s overall approach to providing more consistent support for pupils and families in order to help children attend school before legal intervention is considered. Clauses 57 to 66 concern the regulation of independent educational institutions and help us to ensure that all children receive a safe and suitably broad education. Extending the registration requirement and improving investigatory powers will ensure that full-time settings serving children of compulsory school age are regulated. Other measures improve the regulatory regime for independent schools, including by creating a power to suspend the registration of a school because pupils are at risk of harm.
I heard the noble Lord’s request for a meeting and my noble friend is very happy to do that because, as I think she has been at been at pains to stress throughout the passage of the Bill, we want to make sure that we engage with a broad range of voices from the home-education community to be clear about what we are aiming to do with the Bill. It is not at all about reducing or interfering with the right to home education, but just ensuring that we have the proper processes in place to make sure that the best interests of all children are protected while doing so.
Lord Storey (LD)
Before the Minister finishes, will she respond to Amendment 77 from my noble friend Lady Garden, about examination costs? Maybe she will have that in mind that when she meets these home educators, as it might be an issue to talk to them about.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I believe I responded about examination costs. In fact, I had an intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on it. One of the things I said to him was that in the statutory guidance we are seeking to create, we will look at the support duty. We are looking to work collaboratively with local authorities and home educators to hear all those different views in order to help us co-create that guidance. Then we will also consult on it. We are keen to ensure that we hear those views as part of that process.
I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas will feel able to withdraw his amendment and other noble Lords will not press theirs.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
Before the Minister sits down, will she receive from me great gratitude for her willingness and that of her fellow Minister to see home schoolers, several of whom are in the House this evening, and those advising them? They have helped a lot and I hope they will help the Ministers a lot too.
Baroness Penn (Con)
That is very much appreciated. I also pass on to my noble friend the Minister the thanks of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for engaging with home educators. I emphasise that we see that as a very important part of the process for the Bill.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am glad to hear that the Government continue to give thought to the question of an independent appeal. The current system, where the first appeal goes to the local authority, is obviously right; you want to resolve as much as you can without going outside. But, beyond that, the idea that the Secretary of State provides a satisfactory route of appeal really does not stand up. First, there are far too many relationships between the Department for Education and local authorities to allow independence. Secondly, I believe I am right—although the Minister may contradict me if she wishes—that, in the entire history of this right of appeal, the Secretary of State has not granted any, but he has come down in favour of the local authority on every single occasion. That may or may not be true—as I say, I hope the Box will be able to confirm it when we return to this issue in two groups’ time—but that there should be an independent appeal is important.
My noble friend Lord Wei’s proposal for an ombudsman is one that should be considered, although there are others. One way or another, there should be a point where someone truly independent casts their eye over what the home educator is doing and how the local authority has handled it and says either, “Yes, come on: get into line,” or “No, I can see here that the local authority has pushed things too far and ought to take a step or two back.” That would make a big contribution to keeping the relationship straight between home educators and local authorities.
I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Storey—I apologise if it was not—who said earlier that this bit of the Bill meant that local authorities had to give support. I can see nothing that makes it compulsory. I hope we will get the Government to give this a budget so there is an indication that support ought to be given, but at the moment I do not believe there is anything compulsory about it.
My noble friend Lady Penn said local authorities could consult a doctor when they consider it appropriate. I think the right balance is that the home educators ought to be able to able to evince that evidence when they consider it appropriate too, and the local authority ought then to pay attention to it. From cases that I have seen, I rather doubt that that is the arrangement at the moment. However, as my noble friend asked, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment, together with the amendment in Clause 49, page 46, line 7, is aimed at ensuring that guidance given to local authorities in relation to school attendance under sections 436B and 436G of the Education Act 1996 must be subject to the affirmative regulation making process.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I also have Amendments 81 and 83 in this group. I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lucas, is supporting Amendment 80 and my noble friend Lord Knight is supporting Amendments 80, 81 and 83. I have just been in the Procurement Bill debate in Grand Committee, so if I repeat points that have already been made then I apologise to noble Lords. These amendments are concerned with Part 3, the provisions in relation to school attendance and the duty to register children not in school. The Minister will know of the concerns; in fact she has just reflected in her wind-up speech on some of those that have been expressed by noble Lords.
My particular interest is the special needs of children being educated at home with special educational needs and mental health issues. It is fair to say that many parents already find that the current attendance policy and enforcement system can have a negative impact on mental health and well-being. They are concerned about the ramifications of the Bill: the register, the live attendance tracker, the tighter lacing of attendance enforcement and the fast track to fines and prosecutions.
It is clear that Ministers have listened to the debate, and I am very grateful for the amendments that have been tabled, which are aimed at providing assurance to families over the information to be prescribed, its intended use and what can be published, and to give Parliament increased scrutiny of the use of delegated powers concerning those matters. My three amendments encourage the Government to go a little further in terms of reassurance.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group, asking that local authorities give reasons when they choose to deviate from guidance. I hope this will be dealt with in guidance rather than in the Bill, but it is important that both local authorities and home educators come to regard the guidance as something to which they can resort for support. Therefore, when local authorities need to go outside the guidance, as they may, that should be clearly explained.
I very much support the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has proposed, in particular Amendment 81. It is important that there is a strong set of guidance around attendance. This is a change of structure for local authorities. They are taking on much more of a responsibility that was formerly shared with schools. We will need them to reach deeper into the reasons for non-attendance and to deploy other strengths that local authorities have to deal with those reasons, going well beyond the usual educational provision. To have a set of guidance that enables them to do that well and to have ways of sharing good experience will be really helpful. In the next group we come to the punitive side of this. We really ought to be strong in making sure that as few families as possible get tipped into that, and guidance seems to be a clear part of that.
I have one question on government Amendment 99, which applies to regulations passed
“before the end of the session of Parliament in which the Schools Act 2022 is passed.”
I wonder whether it should refer just to the first passing of the guidance. Given the extended timescale on this Bill and the consultations we hope to have, it may run beyond that. The Government are really saying that they do not want this to last for ever. It should cover the first issuing of regulations, whenever that may happen to occur, and we should not have to rush things just because we have this in the Bill. If it is passed next year, will it still be the Schools Act 2022 or will it be the Schools Act 2023?
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I support the thrust of these amendments. They follow on from my noble friend Lady Brinton’s amendment on the fact that specialist guidance and help will be needed. The education sector is going into an area where it does not expect to have the expertise readily at hand. It may have to go and find it, and the parents are often the people who have done the finding. I hope that, when the Minister comes to answer, the Government will give us a little insight into how they expect to handle this process. We are talking about often very seldom-occurring incidents, which means that we cannot expect there to be group memory. These are incidents occurring not only infrequently but over long periods of time; certain combinations of events come through. Stress tends to trigger mental health incidents. If a child happens to have been failing at school, they and their parents will have more stress. It does not take a genius to take it to the next step. I hope the Minister will give us an idea of the Government’s thinking and how they are proposing to address these very real concerns.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 119, and am generally supportive of a lot of the other amendments relating to mental health. Amendment 119 is conceived as a means to cut through what I believe will be quite a lot of court cases and judicial reviews. As we have discussed on this grouping, there will be instances in which local authorities make a judgment about home education, whether in the case of mental health or involving families with a particular faith or philosophy around education. My concern is that, even if the Government in their own impact report feel that they have satisfied all human rights obligations—bear in mind that concerns are raised in that report that Articles 8 and 9 will be intruded or infringed upon to some degree—how can we be so sure that the local official in the local authority has the expertise to make a judgment? In some cases, given the context or circumstances, they may go beyond what is right in terms of human rights. This may lead in turn to many judicial reviews. I believe that in the home education community there are already attempts to start raising the funds for such action. That will be costly for all concerned. It may delay for many years the implementation of what the Government are trying to do here, so I ask the Minister to look at this whole area.
A lot hinges on the composition of this consultation committee, review committee or implementation committee. In the interests of transparency, I would love to know the criteria for inviting those to join such a group and to have reassurance as to whether they will be preselected to be favourable towards the Government’s current views or will be genuinely independent members with genuine expertise in some of the really sensitive matters that will be dealt with as the Government seek to implement this.
I can tell from the House’s view that, from my point of view, this part of this campaign must come to an end. I will not seek to divide the House any further today, but I know that there will be many discussions in my party over the summer, whoever the two candidates for the Conservative Party leadership are. With all due respect, I believe this is not a Conservative Bill. Our party is about many things but really it is about letting people get on with their lives, and many aspects of the Bill currently do not make me feel that it is following that principle. I think many home educators will write to their MPs and come along to various hustings around the country to make that view known to those candidates. We should probably ask them what they think of this Bill so that we can get an early view as to what will happen to it in the autumn.
I would be pleased to know more from my noble friend the Minister how the guidance provided will be consulted on, including with those of us who have spoken in this debate. Clearly, a lot hinges and rides on that.
I will stop there, but I think my noble friend the Minister and the Government have heard strongly the views of many in this Chamber, including those such as me who do not believe the Bill is a great idea. It is now up to them to see if they can get it through the Commons and into statute and, in so doing, make sure they look after the welfare—as I believe they claim to do—of home educators up and down this country.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I will not speak to the Tory leadership election.
We support the approach suggested in many of the amendments in this group. To pluck one out of the air at random, Amendment 81 tabled by my noble friends Lord Hunt and Lord Knight, suggesting a code of practice—which is really just another way of sharing best practice—is a positive suggestion. We recognise completely that poor attendance can be a symptom of a much deeper problem and that schools often take a holistic approach already. The amendment suggests that families and organisations with experience of overcoming barriers to attendance be included in the Government’s thinking. It is a very good idea and seems to be the right approach. Even if we do not divide the House on this today, it is a good suggestion for the Government to consider this code of practice further.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, for hotfooting it over here from the Grand Committee. I also thank him and my noble friend Lord Lucas for their Amendments 80, 82 and 83, which I will speak to together.
I mentioned earlier that the Government are already seeking the power for the Secretary of State to give local authorities in England statutory guidance that they must have regard to. Local authorities will not be able to diverge from it unless there is a coherent reason to do so.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has been in this House even longer than I have, and it is amazing what we have learned today about what happens to the date on a Bill—though 2023 maybe optimistic, who knows?
The noble Baroness has reflected on the importance of the guidance to be given to local authorities to approach this new role in a sensitive way. I support the general principles here. Whatever our views, that brings us together, because it will be essential that local authorities do the job properly, and they need support to do so. The statutory guidance and consultation she referred to are very welcome indeed.
Then noble Baroness felt that my suggestion that the guidance should be brought in through a regulation would be rigid. However, in our debates, today and previously, we have recognised the importance of this guidance. It is in some ways as important as what is set out in statute. I would have thought at least on the first occasion, when the guidance is brought in, it should have the benefit of parliamentary scrutiny. I think it is something we ought to come back to on Report. If she accepted my code of practice, that would be a way of getting the flexibility that I understand she needs, alongside statutory provisions. It has been a very useful and constructive debate,
Baroness Penn (Con)
Just briefly, I should make it clear to the noble Lord that we are at Report stage and I do not think we will be returning with amendments from the Government at Third Reading.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
The noble Baroness almost tempts me to push this to a vote, but I would not be allowed to. I have come straight from Committee to Report—I apologise. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Barran
“(3) In section 569(2A) (regulations subject to affirmative procedure), for “regulations under section 550ZA(3)(f) or 550ZC(7) may” substitute “—(a) the first regulations under 436C(1)(c), (1A) or (3),(b) the first regulations under section 436F(1),(c) regulations under section 436F(2),(d) regulations under section 550ZA(3)(f), or(e) regulations under section 550ZC(7),may”.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would make the first regulations made under section 436C(1)(c), (1A) (as inserted by the amendment in Baroness Barran’s name at clause 49, page 42, line 30) and (3), the first regulations made under section 436F(1) and any regulations under section 436F(2) subject to the affirmative rather than the negative procedure.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is to reserve penalties under this Clause for substantial misbehaviour.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, in moving this amendment I will also speak to my other amendments in this group. This group is looking at the stage of the process at which penalties start to come in. I feel that the wording of the Bill is at the moment far too hair-trigger. The words that Amendment 87 seeks to replace mean that a local authority must tip a home-educating parent, or a parent, into the school attendance order process if they have failed to provide any scintilla of information. That could be anything; it could just be that they have spelt something wrong or have not got the date right, or whatever, and does not seem appropriate.
I am not sure that the Government will find my wording appropriate either, but we ought to look to soften this to make it clear that for these hard-pressed parents, an ordinary error of forgetfulness or a failure which does not find its roots in opposition or deliberate obfuscation should not be punished immediately. It should be something the local authority should seek to engage with.
I came across one example where the local authority had been corresponding with a good home-educating parent and had decided that it really wanted to see examples of the child’s work. It is one of those arguable questions you come across as to whether the experts’ report that had been provided should have been sufficient. It did not then e-mail the parent to say, “If you continue in this, we will tip you into school attendance orders”. It wrote by snail mail, to an address which was wrong, and made no other reference to it until six months later when the school attendance order appeared. There needs to be a much more active relationship and there should not be things in the Bill which make a lazy relationship between the local authority and parents acceptable. The local authority ought to be working with the parent to get things right.
Amendment 88 seeks to restore the current timescale of 15 days, rather than the 10 days in the Bill. This is the crucial step; it is the point when things get serious. Parents ought to be given a reasonable length of time and 15 days is what is accepted. The Government have argued us out of all sorts of other extensions of timescales, but this one is crucial.
Amendments 90 and 92 come back to the subject of a tribunal, which we have covered. It is really important that the Government do something. I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on Amendment 95 in wanting to reduce the maximum prison sentence to three months.
In Amendment 97, I am urging the Government to provide proper funding to local authorities as they take on these additional duties on school attendance. Particularly post Covid, this is clearly a complicated problem with its roots in all sorts of aspects of society. Local authorities ought to be properly supported to get it right and become really effective at helping children to get into school.
I also look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, speaking to Amendment 100. He has put his finger on a really serious thing there.
My Amendment 110 suggests that Ofsted should be able to inspect local authorities on their performance with elective home education and absence. I do not want all these things we have suggested to come into force—it would just be ridiculous to have everything—but we need some structure for oversight of local authorities, so that they feel motivated to improve. Ofsted might be one of the options, so I hope that the Government will keep that under consideration.
I look forward to what other people will have to say on this group and beg to move my Amendment 87.
The Deputy Speaker (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is participating remotely and I invite her to speak now.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. He talked about hair-trigger actions for the school attendance order process. He is right that we need clarity and common sense, an active relationship with parents and a way of holding local authorities to account where things have gone wrong.
Amendments 89, 95 and 96 in this group are in my name. Amendments 89 and 96 echo my amendment in the first group, which my noble friend Lord Storey spoke to. Many Peers have reported specific cases where, despite the Minister saying that this is meant to be about schools and local authorities working together with parents, that is just not happening in practice. Parents are definitely made to feel that they are always in the wrong, so I thank my noble friends Lord Storey and Lord Addington, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and others, for their comments in that group that despite some schools and LAs having very good practice, unfortunately there are some which do not.
Noble Lords know that I have focused on pupils with medical conditions because some of the most concerning incidents relate to schools and local authorities making decisions that fly in the face of the pupil’s doctor. It should not be possible for education people to countermand expert advice. There are other categories, too: a looked-after child, a young carer or even a young offender may all have—in the eyes of the expert, such as their social worker or youth offending officer—a good reason why they should not be in school. Schools should not be able to countermand that.
Other noble Lords have given examples of some of that poor practice, and I cite one example I have heard about: of a paediatric oncology specialist telling a school with cases of an infectious disease—that could be Covid but could also be measles—that a pupil with cancer on strong chemotherapy should not be in school as they were severely immunosuppressed and that if this pupil caught the infectious disease, there was a high risk that it would be fatal. At present, the guidance says that there must be a partnership between parents, schools and health professionals in determining the best route forward. Unfortunately, the school can still choose to ignore that advice.
I thank the Minister for saying on the first day of Report that a headteacher disregarding specific advice would be acting unreasonably and would therefore be in breach of their duty. The problem is that no one knows that—certainly not headteachers or health professionals, and especially not parents or the pupils themselves. I am afraid that the same is true for some local authorities too, which is why these amendments are laid, to ensure that a poor process that starts in a school does not just continue on a conveyor belt. I repeat the point I made at earlier stages of the Bill: the current arrangements do not work. If we especially want to protect children with medical conditions and ensure that they have the same experience as other children, frankly, the arrangements need to be more explicit.
Amendment 95 is a probing amendment about parents who have repeatedly failed to comply with school attendance orders and not paid fines, and who can now—under the Bill—be sentenced to a prison term of up to 51 weeks. The previous maximum level was three months; that is a very large difference and, if used, is likely to lead to the local authority having to provide foster carers or, even more drastically, putting the children in care if a parent or both parents were imprisoned for 51 weeks. Surely, that is the exact opposite of what should be happening. The whole point of this part of the Bill is to encourage children into the stability of education and learning, in which their parents should have a role, and if things have gone wrong then this is a step too far.
I am grateful to the Minister for the meeting last week at which, in light of the debate we had in Committee, we discussed this. She also said in a letter that there was no intention ever to use 51 weeks and that it was a technical provision, solely because that would be the maximum sentence a magistrates’ court can give. This seems extremely strange to me, and slightly worrying. It is wonderful that the current Government say that they would never use it, but what of a future Government? I look forward to hearing the Minister confirm at the Dispatch Box exactly what she said in her letter, so that, should the 51-week term be used, the ministerial intentions when the Bill went through your Lordships’ House could be prayed in aid.
Above all, we need clarity. We need to ensure that this part of the Bill does not act solely as a form of prosecution. Surely, all the good intentions regarding parents who wish to educate their children at home should be understood. Schools and local authorities should really understand when there are genuine reasons why a child may not be in school.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am going to speak to Amendment 97ZA, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. Unfortunately, because of today’s conditions, she is not able to travel to your Lordships’ House.
If the noble Baroness were here, I think she would first say that a lot of progress has been made in how we support those with learning disabilities and autistic people in the last parliamentary Session. The Health and Care Act saw the introduction of mandatory training for all health and social care staff to ensure they are better able to work with people who can otherwise struggle to find a voice within the complex system designed to support them. She would also refer to the Down Syndrome Act, which acknowledges the gaps between the intent of existing legislation such as the Equality Act and the Care Act and its implementation in practice. That is a rationale which underpins the amendment I have signed.
We know that many autistic people and those with learning disabilities can have complex needs across the breadth of the public sector and experience so many barriers to accessing support. What happens in childhood can determine their lifelong trajectory, whether this be in a positive or negative way. For example, for some children and young people this may be the beginning of a downward spiral of school exclusions and admissions to mental health facilities. That is how the journey to long-term segregation in an ATU begins—journeys that the Department of Health and Social Care’s oversight panel chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, is currently trying to reverse.
Clause 54, “School attendance policies”, gives little regard to the way that neurodiversity and chronic health conditions can affect a young person’s development and how their educational needs may differ from their peers. This is important because people with learning disabilities and autistic people have higher rates of physical health and mental health comorbidities. This is particularly so for autistic children in mainstream schools.
I am very grateful that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, wrote to Peers following Second Reading to try to address the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Hudnall, that the attendance clauses in the Bill would penalise pupils with SEND and those with autism. In the letter she said:
“We are clear that schools should authorise absence due to both physical and mental illness. Schools should only request parents to provide medical evidence to support absence where they have genuine and reasonable doubt about the authenticity of the illness. We are also clear that schools pressuring a parent to remove their child from the school is a form of off-rolling, which is never acceptable.”
That was very welcome indeed, but as she knows, the words of Ministers do not always turn out to be adopted in practice everywhere throughout the school system.
The importance of this is in the statistics. In 2022, her department stated that persistent absence—defined as missing over 10% of available sessions—involved 12.1% of students; hence the legitimate concern about this, which I understand. However, the rate is nearly three times higher among autistic pupils, at over 30%. Exclusions of autistic children have more than doubled from 2,282 in 2010 to over 5,000 in 2020. There is a big question here: why is it so much higher?
In 2020, Totsika et al published what I think is the only peer-reviewed study into school non-attendance for autistic students in the UK. They found that non-attendance occurred in 43% of their sample of just under 500 students and that autistic children miss 22% of school. Some 32% of absences were attributable to illness and medical appointments, and:
“Truancy was almost non-existent.”
This study found that going to a mainstream school, as opposed to a specialist school, increased the chances of missing school by nearly 100%.
Autistic people experience higher rates of physical and mental health difficulties compared to their neurotypical peers. Anxiety is a predictor of school non-attendance for all children, but we also know that anxiety is more common in autistic children, with approximately 40% having a clinical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder and another 40% experiencing subclinical anxiety symptoms.
The DfE has guidelines around managing non-attendance and support for students with SEND or medical conditions. This includes a duty to ensure suitable education, including alternative provisions or reasonable adjustments and that the local council should
“make sure your child is not without access to education for more than 15 school days”.
However, we know from experience with the Autism Act 2009 and the Down Syndrome Act that, just because it is written in guidance, it does not mean it happens in practice.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, shared with me the example of one parent who wrote:
“My local authority has not accepted medical evidence that my daughter can’t attend school due to severe anxiety... Now we won’t get tuition help and all her further absences will be unauthorised!”
This is despite supporting evidence by a chartered psychologist. She goes on to say:
“Imagine forcing someone with a physical illness to come to school when a doctor says they can’t?”
Another parent has written to us saying that
“Fining parents for school absence due to school-based anxiety is … counterproductive”.
The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, is based not on a few cases but many. It seeks to confirm the Government’s commitment to ensuring that SEND students are not disproportionately penalised by the Bill. There is a duty to implement existing guidance in day-to-day practice. I hope the Government will be sympathetic to the intent of the noble Baroness’s amendment.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I would like to speak briefly to Amendment 91, in my name in this group, which aims to clarify the provisions on school attendance orders to ensure that they should only be issued when, in the opinion of the local authority, this course of action is in the best interest of the child in addition to being expedient.
The Minister may remember that we debated this in Committee. The Bill says clearly that school attendance orders can be issued where “it is expedient” to do so. I had an amendment which said that it should be in the best interests of the child, not that it could be “expedient” to issue a school attendance order. In reply, the Minister said that the word “expedient” was in the 1996 Act anyway and that the test would be the same.
For avoidance of doubt on this matter and to have a clear record, it seems that the best way to proceed is to take my amendment, in which I have not deleted the word “expedient” but have added that it is
“in the best interest of the child”
to have a school attendance order. The benefit would be much greater clarity, and I hope the Minister can agree to my suggestion.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 100, in my name and the name of my noble friend Lord Shipley. I hoped that we could have spent the same amount of time talking about the most disadvantaged children in our society as we have on home education. These are young people, mainly with special educational needs, from the most deprived communities and from ethnic minorities, who are permanently excluded from school. What we do with some of these children reminds me of Victorian education, to be honest.
Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 97A, 118J and 118K.
We have to remind ourselves that the issue of unregistered school settings and the claim that some people are home schooling in order to send children to such settings is a problem that we have long had. Many people here will remember that Section 96 of the Education and Skills Act 2008 was established specifically to make sure that such settings were deemed unlawful. Unfortunately, we found that the law was so difficult to enforce that we have had a massive increase in the number of unregistered school settings, creating much more of the problem that we have had to deal with. Indeed, there have been only three prosecutions, and the first one took 10 years to take place. The number of schools that have been reported to Ofsted exceeds, I believe, a thousand. Hundreds have been identified by Ofsted but have been very difficult to deal with. Enforcement has been so poor that many schools deregistered to unregistered schools to avoid any form of regulation because they felt that they could operate in that way.
The position has been very clear. Departmental advice for collaborative working between the Department for Education, Ofsted and local authorities in March 2018 stated:
“Over recent times, we have seen a rise in the number of institutions operating outside the regulatory regime as unregistered independent schools; this involves a criminal offence and conduct that may be putting children at risk of harm, denying them a suitable education, and limiting their life chances. Tackling unregistered independent schools is a priority—and one that involves joint working and collaboration.”
Unfortunately, even in those times it was very clear that the provisions available to Ofsted, local authorities and the Government were very weak. That is why these measures in the Bill have been so warmly welcomed.
However, there are issues on which I am still trying to probe the Government and encourage them to think of creative ways in which to draft measures. It would be a tragedy that, 15 years after we thought we had solved a problem that had existed for decades beforehand, we were in the same position, in that the provisions were insufficiently flexible and strong to make sure that the law is properly enforced and that that which is meant to be outlawed is so done; and that if it were seen to be unable to be enforced effectively, we would have to wait another 15 years in order to do that.
Amendment 97A tries to deal with those who are enablers of the use of unregistered educational settings and who do not take a formal role in the structure of that educational setting. Such people may provide a facility or other forms of support, be that a location or funding that goes towards individuals who are providing these skills, but they structure it in a way that does not make them culpable in any way as an educational institution. I believe that the Government are missing a trick if they do not deal with those people who help these things continue.
Amendment 118J seeks to give Ofsted a more general, anti-avoidance power. This would allow it to join the dots in situations where its intelligence and information, in matters raised by a parent or parents in this situation, make it clear that it can take a broader view of how these institutions may well be operating or trying to operate once their structure has been changed to try to find loopholes in the law.
Lastly, Amendment 118K would establish a process to review the Act and its operation and to encourage reporting to the House, particularly on this measure—I suspect there may well be a clumsy error in the drafting, for which I apologise in advance. The intent is to try to focus on this area so that the expertise and views of local authorities and others involved in education, especially Ofsted, can be collated by the department so that we can review whether or not these measures are being successfully enforced and we are achieving the outcomes that we so desperately want for the safeguarding of children.
Obviously, I will not push these amendments to a vote. They are there to try to encourage the Government to think again as the Bill goes through its passage in another place on how additional measures could be introduced to make sure that we make this the final time we have to legislate on these issues.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
The amendments in this group have attendance at their core, and nothing is more important. In addition to being directly related to physical health, the attendance of learners in school is affected by well-being and mental health, and by attitudes towards learning and schooling. My noble friend Lord Hunt and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, made some important points regarding children with medical conditions. The interrelationship between attendance and general well-being is considered so strong that attendance has often been taken as a measure for well-being in previous data collection. We know that attendance has a strong impact on learner outcomes, standards and progression. I can tell you from first-hand experience that examination outcomes strongly correlate to attendance rates.
Amendments 118J and 118K, proposed by my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn, seek to deal with the current gaps in legislation, addressing important issues surrounding attendance and its promotion by educational institutions, and would require a review of any avoidance of the legislation as it develops, which we support.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, the fourth group of amendments relates to school attendance orders and independent educational institutions. I thank my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for Amendments 87 and 89. However, we are concerned that these could work directly against the child’s best interests by increasing the time that a child could spend in potentially unsuitable education. We do not regard the issuing of a preliminary notice as an extreme penalty that warrants such justifications for issuance. We believe that a local authority should be able and required to take steps to determine the suitability of education being provided where there has been insufficient or inaccurate information given.
The local authority is already legally required to consider all relevant factors in determining whether it is expedient for a child to attend school, including whether it is in the child’s best interests. I hope that reassures the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who tabled Amendment 91. To reiterate, “expedient” in this context means that it must be
“advantageous; fit, proper, or suitable to the circumstances of the case”
for the child to attend school. Of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, said, it will almost always be in the child’s best interests to attend school if they are not receiving suitable education, but there may be cases in which it could be argued that another solution would be better for the child—for example, if the child is physically or mentally too unwell to attend school.
On Amendment 96, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, we have been clear through our recently published school attendance guidance that local authorities are expected to work closely with other services and partners, such as health services. Paragraph 79 of the guidance—I am worried that the noble Baroness is at home saying to her screen, “But who gets to paragraph 79?”, but I know that she will get to it—says that local authorities are expected to
“Build strong relationships with a range of services and partners that can help with specific barriers to attendance and how to access them.”
It then lists services that local authorities are expected to work with, which include health, children’s social care and youth justice services, to which the noble Baroness referred. I know she is concerned about what happens in cases where the guidance is not followed, and I am happy to write to her to set out our response to those situations in more detail.
As already mentioned, government Amendments 71 and 72 would prevent the school attendance order process being triggered where parents simply do not know the information required.
With regard to Amendment 88, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas, I must reiterate the importance of local authorities remedying the situation for any child who is not receiving a suitable education, in the shortest time possible. The introduction and reduction of timeframes in the school attendance order process will help achieve this. However, I remind the House that, as my noble friend mentioned in earlier debates, even with the timeframes set out in the Bill, a child could still potentially be without suitable education for a period of at least 51 days, without extending this any further.
Lord Storey (LD)
That is the statutory guidance, but what is the Minister’s department doing in relation to those many local authorities which take no notice?
Baroness Barran (Con)
That was in relation to illegal settings, and we hope that is straightforward. Alternative provision education is delivered in other settings—as the noble Lord has rightly drawn attention to—which do not receive state funding, are not required to register as an independent school, and do not meet, currently, the requirements for registration. The noble Lord is aware, I think, that in the special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision Green Paper, we made a commitment to strengthening protections for children and young people in unregistered alternative provision settings, so that every placement is safe, offers good-quality education and has clear oversight. If I understand correctly, that is exactly what the noble Lord also aspires to.
I am pleased to report that on 11 July the department issued a call for evidence on the use of unregistered alternative provision settings. Again, I place on record my thanks to the noble Lord for his insistence and persistence on this very important issue, which is important, as he pointed out, for children whose parents may not have the confidence to challenge the system. The information collected will help us find the right solution that addresses these concerns effectively and proportionately.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, for his Amendments 97A, 118J and 118K, and for the very constructive way that we have been able to work together. I hope we can continue to work together to address the points that he has raised. We have worked with Ofsted to develop the package of measures to investigate illegal schools, to ensure that we can take effective action against unlawful behaviour. Since Ofsted started investigating unregistered schools in 2016, we have gained a much better understanding of how to tackle this sector. There have been six successful prosecutions. The number of cases investigated reflects an increase in efforts to investigate. The actual number of unregistered schools, as the noble Lord knows, is unknown, sadly, but the measures in this Bill have been developed—working together with Ofsted—to address the key issues in the sector, which the noble Lord has rightly drawn attention to.
We believe that Amendment 97A is not necessary as we can already prosecute companies and charities which are operating schools unlawfully. We already inform the Charity Commission when charities are prosecuted. Education and childcare behaviour orders will allow courts to prevent individuals from continuing to operate from buildings that have been used for illegal schools. When we were developing the measures, we also looked at whether it would be appropriate to create measures which would allow action against landlords, in the way that the noble Lord’s amendment has set out. This is a very complex area, and we concluded that education and childcare behaviour orders, which could prevent those convicted of an offence from continuing to operate from a given site, were the more appropriate mechanism.
Amendment 118J replicates powers that Ofsted already has. Genuine part-time settings are not under a statutory obligation to register, so would not be caught by the proposed amendment. There is ongoing engagement between the department, Ofsted and other stakeholders on the effectiveness of measures to tackle unregistered schools. The effectiveness of the legislation will be kept under review. The need for accountability suggested by Amendment 118K is, we believe, best secured through the annual report that Ofsted presents to Parliament.
Finally, I turn to Amendment 110, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. We believe that this amendment is unnecessary as existing provisions—specifically in Section 136 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 and in Clause 65 of the Bill—already ensure that new local authority education functions under the Bill will be within scope of Ofsted’s inspection powers. I therefore ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw Amendment 87 and hope that other noble Lords will not move theirs.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that extensive explanation and her many good answers. I am delighted, too, that she is being so supportive of the campaign of the noble Lord, Lord Storey.
With regard to her last answer in relation to Amendment 110, I look forward to sharing with her the correspondence I have had with the chief inspector, who takes a different view, but this can be remedied later in the passage of the Bill if the chief inspector is right. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Barran
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the removal of clause 1.
Baroness Barran
Member's explanatory statement
This is a technical drafting amendment to match the terminology used in clause 60 with that used elsewhere in the Bill and in the Education and Skills Act 2008.
(a) provision made by an Act passed before, or later in the same session of Parliament as, the Schools Act 2022,(b) provision made by Part 3 of the Schools Act 2022 (school attendance), and (c) provision made by subordinate legislation (within the meaning of the Interpretation Act 1978) before the end of the session of Parliament in which the Schools Act 2022 is passed.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment corrects a drafting error: subsection (2) should have referred to “the Schools Act” rather than “this Act”. The amendment would also allow the application to independent educational institutions of provisions made by or under Part 3 of the Bill itself, as those are closely linked to other provisions that may be applied under the power.
“British values(1) In any statement relating to British values for education purposes at primary and secondary level in England and Wales, the Secretary of State, OFSTED and any other public authority must include—(a) democracy,(b) the rule of law,(c) freedom,(d) equal respect for every person, and(e) respect for the environment.(2) Any statement under subsection (1) must refer to British values as “values of British citizenship”.(3) The values listed under subsection (1)(a) to (e) must be taught as part of citizenship, at the first to fourth key stages. (4) In subsection (1)(a) “democracy” includes—(a) an independent judiciary,(b) in a Parliamentary system, a Government that is accountable to Parliament,(c) regular elections, and(d) decentralised decision-making, accountable at an appropriate level to the electorate.(5) In subsection (1)(c) “freedom” includes—(a) freedom of thought, conscience and religion,(b) freedom of expression, and(c) freedom of assembly and association.(6) In subsection (1)(e) “respect for the environment” means taking into account the systemic effect of human actions on the health and sustainability of the environment both within the United Kingdom and over the planet as a whole, for present and future generations.”
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
I beg to move Amendment 101 on British standards, which stands in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Norton of Louth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher.
The Ofsted chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, has said:
“When it comes to British values, we often see an oddly piecemeal approach, which too seldom builds the teaching into a strong context … we see a lot of wall displays and motivational assemblies, but not much coherent thinking about how a real depth of understanding can be built through the academic curriculum”.
British values have to be taught in schools, but there is a fundamental problem at the moment about them being taught.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
I support the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and declare my interest as the honorary president of the Association for Citizenship Teaching—and I put on record that I will adhere to normal sartorial values on Wednesday.
I will speak very briefly, because there is still a long way to go this evening, in support of the amendment. It follows on from the Ties that Bind recommendations of the Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, back in 2018; the Justice and Home Affairs Committee’s investigation into the “life in the UK test”, published just a few weeks ago; and the ongoing desire to align the Department for Education—sadly now without the guidance of Robin Walker, who was deeply committed to citizenship and who was actually shifting the templates a little—and Ofsted, which is not aligned at all with what the DfE says or what we thought Ofsted had understood four years ago. It is a very strange juxtaposition.
I just want to put on record that we need to understand and be clear about the difference between personal development and citizenship education, which incorporates an understanding of the broad values of being a citizen in the United Kingdom, as well as the practical measures that make it possible for our democracy to function properly.
At this moment in time, given the clear need for respect from one politician to another, whether it is on ITV or Channel 4, we need to reinforce with our young people one simple message. We may, as your forbears, have got into a terrible mess and our democracy may well be extremely fragile—as I was saying last week, quoting the noble Lord, Lord Hennessey—but the future is in your hands, as the next generation, and beyond. Unless we guide and provide a framework and a landscape by which those young people understand what is happening in our democratic process, we will have let them down, because they will think that what they see on their televisions and what they read in their newspapers at the moment constitute the values that we espouse. They do not.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I offer very strong support for Amendment 101, so eloquently moved by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and spoken to by my noble friend Lord Blunkett. It offers a coherent system we can unite around. Other countries have their written constitutions; we do not. The Americans also have the Gettysburg Address—easy to teach, easy to understand. In this amendment, we have a coherent system of basic principles of democracy, human rights and equality and the modern imperative of care for the environment. This whole subject, taught as a unity, is particularly important for non-faith schools also, which have a less coherent framework than the faith schools. We are a diverse society. We have several faiths and beliefs and we need a framework that we can cohere around, such as the values of British citizenship in this amendment. The Minister would be doing the children of this country a great service if she were to accept it.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I will briefly add to the chorus of approval for this amendment moved by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. He talked about the problems attached to British values and how they have appeared to exclude some people. What he is trying to achieve is truly inclusive.
I add my voice in particular on sustainability. All of us in this and the other House have been circulated Sir Patrick Vallance’s briefing to MPs on the challenge of climate change. Looking at that, and at the scale and urgency of the challenge from those presenting, it was clear to me that what is missing is public behaviour change. I am absolutely convinced that the key to unlocking that lies in our schools and with our young people, as the demographic which is most enthusiastic about this and can reach into everyone’s home and start to shift our behaviours.
The education company Pearson recently published its School Report, which showed that 50% of school leaders want to teach this—a glass-half-full/glass-half-empty figure. We have had a strategy from the Government which said they wanted schools to do this. Only half of school leaders are planning to do so. We need to do more, including this.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 105, the purpose of which is to ensure that parents can discover what their children are being taught in school. They must have access, we say, to the materials deployed in class.
It arises because some commercial providers of materials in the sensitive field of RSE and health have tried to stop parents getting access to materials which they have provided for use in class. Requests to see material have been met with the assertion that it is protected and exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act by reason of commercial confidentiality. In other cases, copyright has been raised. In some instances, schools have simply refused point blank. That is what the amendment is aimed at.
The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, who put his name to this amendment, regrets that he cannot speak because he is elsewhere on a prior engagement. On our side, we are grateful for the two meetings we have had with my noble friend the Minister and officials. They have been constructive; we have made progress and received an encouraging letter on Friday.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I speak in support of the amendment just spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, to which my name has been added. I thank the Minister for the meetings we have had; I think we have made real progress. She completely understands the issue and is doing what she can within the constraints she has to try to move this forward, and progress has been made, but there are still things to do. That is why it is worth this debate and worth hearing further words from her from the Dispatch Box.
I was first drawn to this issue because I thought it was merely an issue of copyright. The example that had been brought to my attention was materials not shown to a parent because of copyright; the education curriculum was being delivered by a third party which had copyrighted the materials. I thought it was as simple as that. The Minister has now made sure that, legally, you can do that, and all heads will be told—and a lot of work will have to be done to make sure that all heads realise that and act on it. But the more I look at the issue, the more difficult it appears.
Where we have curriculum content over which there is very little disagreement, the issue almost never arises because parents do not particularly want to see curriculum content all the time. It is in these tricky areas, particularly in PSHE, where there is no national curriculum content, that the real problems arise. There is no doubt that some of the issues which have since been brought to my attention and I have had the opportunity to look at have arisen from real differences of opinion and breakdown of relationships between the head teacher and the parent.
That is the problem at the core of this. If it gets to the point where there is an argument between the parent and the head teacher, and the head teacher is saying that the parents cannot look at the materials, that relationship stands little chance of being mended. That is the real risk. It happens only where content is contested, which makes the problem even worse. That is why it is important to sort this out.
I hope the Minister will agree that the contention has to be taken out of some of the curriculum content. The issue that I was interested in, as was the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, is the teaching of sex, which I believe is biologically based. Some of the materials that I saw that were being withheld from parents were hugely contentious, and many parents—quite reasonably, to my mind—would not have wanted them to be taught to their children. It is a complicated issue, and there are three main issues. First, parents should have the right to see the materials; secondly, copyright is irrelevant as a barrier to them doing so; and, thirdly, we are looking to the Government to offer some very clear guidance on subject content as far as these contentious issues are concerned.
I completely understand that we do not want to get to a position where parents demand to have the right to see every note that a teacher is going to use in a lesson. When I was a teacher, I would have been horrified if I had had to show my lesson notes to the parents. That is not where we want to be. We are talking about a broad understanding of the curriculum content so that parents and teachers can be the joint educators of children, especially in these important areas. I reassure the Minister that I completely understand the need to draw professional boundaries, but at the moment parents are being pushed into challenging those professional boundaries because they cannot have access to the materials at the first ask. I am grateful to the Minister for what she has said so far in the letters to us, and I hope she can go further.
I support the amendment by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. The argument has been forcefully made today, and I think it is unanswerable. We are all in favour of the values of British citizenship being taught. We know it is not being done well, and I genuinely think that the way forward that he points to would offer a better chance of getting everyone on the same side for a common goal.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I have also put my name to Amendment 105. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, on their work on this issue, which has been very important, and the Minister on listening and moving forward.
I start off with a bit of a caveat, because a lot of good things have been said: as an ex-teacher, I too am only too aware of the dread of pushy parents intervening in the minutiae of school, turning up and demanding to see this, that or the other. More seriously, we know what happened when a group of activist parents gathered outside Batley Grammar School and demanded to dictate what the curriculum was. That is not what this is about at all.
The context for the Government, which is very important, is that at the moment, because parents cannot see this material, it has been left in an informal morass of people hearing stories and getting particularly worried. Parents have had to resort to freedom of information requests to see third-party materials, and that really is not helpful. There is a rather excellent exposé by Milli Hill entitled “Worrying truth of what children are REALLY learning in Sex Education”. We are leaving it up to journalists to do these exposés. That just worries parents, so we have to grab this back.
Most parents think that, when their children are being taught about pronouns, that is helping with their English grammar, but then, when they read in the newspaper that it has something to do with policing language and gender ideology, they understandably worry. They worry when they hear about the affirmation of radical medical interventions, such as the amputation of sexual organs. These things are really scary. I urge the Government to grab hold of these horror stories and deal with them. I would like to see them acting on this very important issue.
There are matters that go beyond the scope of Amendment 105. The issue of parental access and teaching materials talks to a problem of parents feeling that the curriculum on contentious issues is being politicised. There is an excellent new report from Don’t Divide Us called Who’s in Charge? A Report on Councils’ Anti-racist Policies for Schools, which I will pass on to the Minister and I hope she will even meet the authors. The reason why I refer to it is that I do not want people to think this is just about the gender ideology issue. It is a sort of broader feeling that many parents have that there are third-party providers creating a political atmosphere in school, and that even schools themselves are doing the same. That raises problems of parents’ trust in what is being taught to their children.
I therefore query Amendment 101, on British values, despite the brilliant speeches we have heard in support of it. I was initially attracted to this amendment. After all, it mentions
“freedom of thought, conscience and religion … freedom of expression, and … freedom of assembly and association.”
These are my passions; I go on about them all the time. I thought, “Great—can we get them into schools?”. But when I talk about freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, these days I am often written off as some sort of alt-right lunatic who—
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
There we go. I am written off as someone who wants free speech only in order to come out with hate speech. I say this because even something such as free speech is contentious. I do not think that trying to use an amendment such as this, including the word “citizenship” to get around the fact that there are contentious arguments about values, will resolve the problem. I wonder whether I can be consoled by those who tabled this amendment that it is not about avoiding a political argument via using the law. It could end up politicising the curriculum.
For example, I disagree with the proposed new paragraph on “respect for the environment”. We have to take into account that Section 406 of the Education Act and schools’ legal obligation to remain impartial can be compromised by things that people in this House are passionate about politically but that maybe should not be in schools.
That finally gets me to my concerns about Amendments 118B and 118H, which call for
“a review into teaching about diversity in school curriculums”.
I am concerned about their emphasis on British history including
“Black British history … colonialism, and … Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade”—
not because I do not think those things should be taught, but we have to ask whether this is being promoted for historical or political reasons. The recent controversy over the OCR syllabus on English literature being changed, when we had the works of Keats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen and Larkin removed, was justified not on literary merits but on the basis of an emphasis on ethnicity, diversity and identity. That kind of politicising of the curriculum does not do any service for the pupils we are teaching and is making parents rather suspicious about what is going on in schools.
Lord Woolley of Woodford (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 118A in my name. Before I make any substantive remarks, I say on the record that, on perhaps the hottest day ever recorded in this country, this Chamber is cooler than the Central line; I was on it this morning. I never thought I could put the House of Lords and being cool in the same sentence. I want to thank a few people who have helped me put these remarks together: L’Myah Sherae, Alfiaz Vaiya and Simon Dixon in Stella Creasy’s office.
Only through a freedom of information request by the Guardian newspaper do we know that UK schools recorded more than 60,000 racist incidents in the last five years. Many people, including black community and education leaders, accuse the Government of failing to meet basic safeguarding measures by hiding the true scale of the problem. For example, the data from the Guardian excluded 80% of England’s multi-academy trusts. The scale of racial incidents in schools is therefore probably much worse, causing one academic working in this area, Professor David Gillborn from the University of Birmingham, to conclude that we have a racism epidemic in our schools.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord in what I thought was a very moving and profound contribution. My Amendment 118M takes us back to the role of regional schools commissioners, which we touched on in Committee. Commissioners have enormous power but they are civil servants and act on behalf of the Secretary of State, who remains accountable for their decisions. Each regional schools commissioner is supported by an advisory board, and they have a wide range of responsibilities including intervening in academies that Ofsted has judged inadequate, intervening in academies where government is inadequate, and deciding on applications from local authority maintained schools to convert to academy status.
In the schools White Paper earlier in the year, the Government stated that they would be changing the name of the regional schools commissioners to regional directors. A new regions group has been established within the noble Baroness’s department, which is bringing together functions currently distributed across the department and the Education and Skills Funding Agency. In Committee my noble friend Lord Knight raised a question about regional directors, as part of his thinking on what an all-academy schools system might look like in practice, particularly relating to the accountability of multi-academy trusts. He referred to the fact that many think academies insufficiently accountable. He felt that the advisory boards that regional schools commissioners have might be one way of strengthening accountability, particularly if they had a majority of local authority people on those advisory boards. The Minister was not very encouraging, I have to say, at that point.
I want to come back to this, because it seems to me that the review the Minister is now undertaking must take account of the relationship between academies, multi-academy trusts and regional directors. The direction of travel is that, by 2030, all schools will be academies. In essence, the Secretary of State is taking direct responsibility for each school in the English school system. In reality, the regional directors will take on that responsibility on behalf of the Secretary of State. Those regional directors are nominally civil servants, although they are not really civil servants in the way we think of them because they are external appointments. The sort of people who are appointed are not career civil servants; they are people who have come mainly from outside the system, as far as I understand it, so to call them civil servants is misleading in many ways, because it suggests they are functionaries directly accountable to the Secretary of State. The reality is that they take on huge powers. My argument is that they need to be more accountable to the system. I think the Minister should spell out in more detail the role of these regional directors. Recent research on Twitter—this is where we get information about them—shows that five of them have announced themselves on Twitter setting out their responsibilities. Each of them says that they are now responsible for children’s social care. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm if that is so or not. Does it mean, for instance, that these regional directors will be taking a lead on the regional adoption agencies? If there is an inadequate judgment under the Ofsted inspection of local authority children’s services framework, what is their role there? Do they have intervention powers?
What are the transitional arrangements between the regional schools commissioners and the regional directors? Will the regional directors be responsible for maintained schools that are not going through the academisation process as yet? I agree with my noble friend Lord Knight: there should be much greater transparency about what regional directors do, with the role of the advisory boards beefed up. There is actually a strong case for them becoming statutory agencies in the end, given that so much power is going to be given to them.
My substantive question to the Minister is: given the review she is now undertaking, will she assure me that the relationship of the regional directors and their accountability will be part of that review? She may argue that this has all been settled in the White Paper following Sir David Bell’s review but, given the scale of the change in many schools, which are going to be forced to become academies, I do not think that is the answer. We need to see much more accountability about how the system is going to operate. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond on that.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, before speaking to the amendments, I want to quickly say how much I agree with Amendment 101 on British values from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and Amendment 105 from the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. I do not see it as an issue of culture wars or whatever—parents should see the material that their children are being taught. I am quite surprised that we cannot do that. When we had parents’ evenings, the textbooks and the material that we were using were freely available for parents to look at. It was quite an important aspect of those meetings, as well as children’s work being on display. I hope the Minister can answer this issue about copyright because that seems to be a red herring.
On Amendment 118H, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, is absolutely right: there should be a review of diversity in the curriculum. When you ask about black studies or black history in school, you get a list and you might find a black author or an Asian poet on it, but there is no guarantee that that is actually taught in schools; invariably, it is not. I want that audit on diversity to be carried out so that we know exactly how our curriculum should be developed.
I will come to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, at the end, if I may.
I have a slight reservation with the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. We do not have a national curriculum: it is not taught in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, so it is not national. It is not taught in academies or free schools. It is taught only in maintained schools, so it is not a national curriculum.
I like the fact that academies and free schools have the freedom to devise their curriculum and I wish that freedom were given to maintained schools as well so that schools can devise their curriculum to suit their particular circumstances or issues. I gave an example to the Minister only today: Liverpool was the centre of the slave trade and I know that in academies in Liverpool they will do a unit on the slave trade, but it is not part of the maintained school curriculum. Maintained schools should be free to develop their curriculum.
The noble Baroness’s amendment lists the things that should definitely be part of this mandatory curriculum. They are probably the right ones. Financial management should be taught. Certainly, some personal, social and health education issues should be taught. I have a Private Member’s Bill on water safety, because I believe passionately that that should be taught in schools. Yes, there are things that should be taught, but let us not be prescriptive now. What we need is a review of our curriculum. It has not been reviewed for 10 years and we need to do that—for all the reasons we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. So this is an important amendment but it is perhaps too prescriptive.
Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak very briefly on Amendment 118B.
For generations, there have been interventions that have looked at education, but what needs to change is to make schooling applicable to everyone. What is always missing is where the black child fits in. We have only to look at the scandal around the Windrush generation and the lessons that have not been learned, and the injustices that occurred back in 1948 and still do in the present day.
Back in the 1960s, Bernard Coard wrote a book called How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System. The British school system has failed children in schools following the immigration of their parents into this country, and the racism they suffered in education in some cases continues to this day.
In my opinion, the majority of children in pupil referral units are from the black community. Children are sent there for many reasons, and racism is high on the agenda. Once children are placed there, you could say that is the end of their education, life chances and prospects. We can see this in the Prison Service and with employment opportunities.
The Schools Bill needs to look at education for all. Education is supposed to equip you for the future, and for you to understand who you are and that your background matters.
Racism was laid bare during the pandemic. We saw that the first casualties to have died of Covid-19 were from the black and Asian community. This was highlighted as part of my review.
Unless the Government look seriously at the impact of racism in our schools on education and wider society, we will back discussing the same agenda in years to come.
To touch on black history, it does not address the curriculum in education. I believe that decolonisation is the way forward. The Stephen Lawrence foundation will be working on this moving forward.
Wales is looking at education and the changes that are needed to the system. This is a start. What are the Government looking to do in the other devolved nations? Following on from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, I wish that we would take the racism that happens in schools a lot more seriously.
Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)
My Lords, I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that regional schools directors are civil servants. I am sure my noble friend the Minister will confirm that there are no proposed changes to that. During my tenure they were all directly answerable to me on behalf of our Secretary of State. I tried very hard to ensure that we had a mixture of skills in that group.
When I was the academies Minister, the national schools commissioner had been a teacher, then a headteacher, then the chief executive of an academy trust, so he had a very good understanding of the whole culture. We had another very good regional schools commissioner who had been the head of local authority social services and so on, but we also had permanent civil servants. My mission was to bring them all together. They all reported to me, and we met as a group regularly so that there could be a transfer of ideas between them. I do not think there are any plans for that to change.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I am speaking to the two amendments we have in this group: Amendments 118G and 118H. I thank my noble friend Lady Lawrence for making some extremely salient points which I will refer to subsequently.
To the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I would like to explain that Amendment 118G will require every academy to follow the national curriculum. We have the list of things we would like to talk about because of the inherent contradictions we have found in this Bill. We have been trying to work around them and are attempting to fill the gaps as best we can. As the Government were clearly intent on a sweeping approach, we felt it was imperative that those issues be included in the national curriculum.
Amendment 118H would compel the Secretary of State to
“work with the devolved administrations”,
as noted by my noble friend Lady Lawrence, to launch and publish a review into teaching about diversity in the curriculum and
“to ensure that teaching of British history includes but is not limited to … Black British history … colonialism, and … Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.”
The English education system could learn a great deal from Wales in this matter. Our new curriculum will be launched this September. The new mandatory elements of the curriculum, in particular the teaching of the experiences and contributions of people from minority backgrounds, will broaden the education of every child in Wales so it better reflects the experiences of the whole population of Wales. Educating young people about the experiences and contributions of minority ethnic peoples in Wales, past and present, will promote lasting change aimed at tackling broader inequalities within society. I urge the Minister to support this aspect of our range of amendment suggestions.
In conclusion, we also support Amendment 101 proposed by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and other noble Lords. The values of British citizenship should include important elements, not least democracy and the rule of law—an important lesson learned by some Members of the other place in recent weeks.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, for explaining her amendment to us. I am liberal rather than post-modern; I believe in the objective being one united society where we are all equal, rather than in the fractured values which her amendment proposes. It is really important that what we teach in schools covers all our experiences and all the threads that make up the UK. The English ought to learn a great deal more about the Welsh and Scots, for a start.
One of the fundamental problems, illustrated in the dispute with OCR over its poetry curriculum, is that we have allowed our examination system to become far too narrow. Yes, a thread of the undisputed greats in literature ought to run through things, as well as the thread of our history that used to consist of learning the names and dates of kings but is actually rather more interesting. Within them are the stories of us all—and that really ought to be us all.
To manage that within a school curriculum, you need a lot more freedom than we allow people at the moment, not less. We should not have a national curriculum that says, “These are the five things that you must teach”, but one with the ability to stretch broadly, bring things in and illustrate them and, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, enrich people’s local experience with things that mean something to them. I support the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, in his endeavours.
My noble friend Lord Sandhurst will know that I am very much with him on his amendments, and I am delighted to find myself with the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, in what he is asking for. The noble Lord says that he is surprised to discover that the Lords is cool. For those of us who come from the west, we walk in every day past a notice that says, “Peers entrance”. Indeed they do. The problems he outlines remind me a lot of what goes on with sexual abuse in schools. The answer is to face it, look at it and really be interested in, not afraid of, what is going on. We should be confident that we do not want it to be that way. We should not expect quick solutions so that we can forget about it, but know that this will take us a good long while to sort out and that it has some deep roots. I would really like to see the Government take some steps in the sort of direction the noble Lord proposes.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for Amendment 101. As he knows, we support the principles at the heart of this amendment and agree that teaching staff and leadership in schools need to understand the important role that fundamental British values play in our society and beyond.
I think he is making two points: one about curriculum content and one about the quality of the delivery of that curriculum. The Government believe our current arrangements provide a sound basis for this. As your Lordships know, schools have a duty, as part of providing a broad and balanced curriculum, to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development. Those principles are embedded in the Independent School Standards, teacher standards and Ofsted inspections.
As to the comments on the environment, our ambitious sustainability and climate change strategy publicly addresses the importance of teaching about the environment. This includes teaching topics related to climate change, covered within the citizenship, science and geography national curriculum.
We have prioritised helping schools to remain focused on recovery from the pandemic. This is why we undertook in the schools White Paper not to make any curriculum changes during this Parliament. The noble and right reverend Lord referred to the comments of the Chief Inspector of Schools about what she and her colleagues had seen in schools on the teaching of these subjects. We expect schools to take those comments very seriously and respond to them.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
I thank all those who spoke in support of my amendment, and I listened with great interest to those who spoke so powerfully on a whole range of amendments. I thank the Minister for what she said, and for the offer to meet her to talk about guidance, but the problems are more deep-seated than just changing the guidance. One point that I want to correct is that I do not believe that my amendment involves a change of the curriculum; after all, fundamental British values have to be taught at the moment. This is not changing the curriculum; it is just exactly listing the values, to gain greater support from teachers and pupils.
I do not intend to divide the House tonight, although I know that there is very strong support all around it from all parties and I have not lost confidence in this amendment. A new Government are coming in in September, we have the Third Reading in September, the Bill still has to go to the Commons after us, and I believe that the reasons in favour of this small but significant change are so compelling that it eventually will be picked up by one Government sooner or later. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
21:10 - Division on Lord Collins of Highbury’s amendment to the Motion - Ayes: 80 / Noes: 96 - Lord Collins of Highbury’s amendment to the Motion disagreed.
Lord Callanan
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 27 June be approved.
Relevant documents: 7th and 9th Reports from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (special attention drawn to the instrument).
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)
My Lords, I will also speak to the Liability of Trade Unions in Proceedings in Tort (Increase of Limits on Damages) Order 2022, which was laid before the House on 24 June 2022. The purpose of the regulations is to lift the current ban on employers bringing in agency staff to help them cope with industrial action. The other instrument makes long-overdue changes to the maximum levels of damages the courts can award against trade unions that take unlawful industrial action.
I will start by explaining why the Government are making these changes. Our trade union laws are designed to support an effective and collaborative approach to resolving industrial disputes. They rightly seek to balance the interests of trade unions and their members with the interests of employers and the wider public. While the Government continue to support the right to strike, this should always be a last resort. The rights of some workers to strike must also be balanced against the rights of the wider public to get on with their daily lives. Strikes can, and do, cause significant disruption. This is particularly the case when they take place in important public services such as transport or education.
It cannot be right that trade unions can, as we saw in the case of the recent rail strikes, seek to hold the country to ransom if their demands are not met. Some trade unions appear to us to be looking to create maximum disruption in a bid to stay relevant, rather than constructively seeking agreement with employers and avoiding conflict. In light of this, the Government have reviewed the current industrial relations framework and have come to the conclusion that change is needed.
The first change we are making is to remove the outdated blanket ban on employment businesses supplying agency workers to clients where they would be used to cover official industrial action. Of course, employers can at the moment already hire short-term staff directly to cover industrial action, but this change will give them the ability to work with specialist employment businesses to identify and bring in staff. This change does not in any way restrict the ability of workers to go on strike. However, it will give employers another tool they can use when trying to maintain the level of service they offer to the public.
This is a permissive change. It will not force employment businesses to supply agency staff to employers to cover strikes, agency workers will still be able to decline any assignments they are offered, and the right to strike is unaffected. This change is simply about giving both employers and employees more freedom and flexibility to decide what works best for them—a freedom that the current outdated regulations deny them.
I have seen some, frankly, rather overblown reports that this will somehow put workers or the wider public at risk. This is absolutely not the case. Employers will still have to comply with broader health and safety rules, and employment businesses will still need to be satisfied that the workers they supply are suitably qualified and trained.
Alongside this change, we are increasing the levels of damages that a court can award in the case of unlawful strike action. It has long been the case that employers can bring a claim for damages against a trade union that has organised unlawful strike action. The upper limits to the damages that can be awarded are set out in the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 and are based on the size of the union that organised the unlawful action, but this damages regime has not been reviewed since 1982, so these limits are significantly out of date. As a result, the deterrent effect that Parliament intended has now been significantly reduced.
The Secretary of State is using powers granted to him in Section 22 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 to increase the existing caps in line with inflation. In practical terms, this means that the maximum award of damages that could be made against the smallest unions will increase from £10,000 to £40,000, and for the largest unions it will increase from £250,000 to £1 million. This is a proportionate change because we are simply increasing these amounts to the levels that they would have been at had they been regularly updated since 1982. We are increasing the limits in line with the retail prices index, which is of course a well-understood measure of inflation.
By increasing the limits on damages in line with inflation, we are sending a clear message to trade unions that they must comply with the law when taking industrial action. Strikes should be called only as a last resort and as the result of a clear, positive and democratic decision of union members. The key point is that unions that continue to comply with trade union law will be completely unaffected by this change.
I am grateful to the members of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for the time and care that they have taken in reviewing these regulations. I note their comments about the impact assessment for the changes to Regulation 7. This has now been published in line with our commitments to Parliament. As the committee noted, because this is a permissive change there is some legitimate uncertainty about the extent to which employment businesses will want to take advantage of their newly found freedoms. However, as the impact assessment shows, this change needs to lead to only a small reduction in the number of working days lost for it to make an extremely positive difference to the economy and society.
I have also noted the committee’s concerns in relation to Wales, specifically our commitment to repeal the Trade Union (Wales) Act 2017. In response, I simply say that there is nothing new about this commitment. The Government’s position on this issue has been consistent since the relevant Act was passed in 2017. Although we will of course engage further with the Welsh Government on this issue, it is very clear that labour markets and industrial relations are reserved matters.
The changes we are making will ensure that our trade union and agency laws remain fit for purpose. We are giving businesses the freedom to manage their workforce and we are empowering workers by giving them more choices about the kinds of assignments they can accept. We will continue to protect an individual’s right to strike, where proper procedures are followed, while ensuring that trade unions are deterred from taking unlawful industrial action. I therefore beg to move that both instruments are considered by this House.
Amendment to the Motion
Lord Collins of Highbury
At the end insert “but that this House regrets that the Regulations have been introduced without required or sufficient consultation, are opposed by employer and employee organisations, will do little to address the trained workforce shortfalls, could put workers’ safety at risk, will harm industrial relations, and may breach international law; further regrets that the associated Liability of Trade Unions in Proceedings in Tort (Increase of Limits on Damages) Order 2022 is unnecessary, as there are few if any occasions on which damages have been claimed, and an increase on the cap by 400 per cent is a threat that may inhibit the legitimate exercise of the right to strike; and concludes that the two instruments are simply a political exercise to deflect from the failure of Her Majesty’s Government to engage meaningfully with the organisations affected to resolve the disputes”.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this debate, but what I heard was a lot of gesture politics and nothing about how we improve industrial relations in this country. In moving this amendment, I will focus on the failure to consult, the lack of an impact assessment when the statutory instrument was laid, and whether the instrument will meet the Government’s policy objectives.
The Employment Agencies Act 1973 requires consultation before changes are made. Rather than consult on the new regulations, the Government are relying on a consultation conducted in 2015, when Ministers previously considered similar changes. I do not see how it can be justified for a seven-year old consultation to apply to legislation being laid in 2022. Things have changed considerably in those seven years, both industrially and politically. Even the department itself acknowledged that
“circumstances have altered in some ways”.
However, it did not think that these were
“particularly relevant to the changes”
proposed. Tell that to the employees of P&O Ferries, where agency workers were used to undermine a collective agreement and replace unionised jobs. P&O’s actions were met with condemnation from all political parties—including the Minister’s—unions and employer organisations alike.
Turning to the 2015 consultation, let us not forget that 70% of the respondents were of the view that the changes would impact negatively on employees, yet the Government still believe that they have got the balance right between the interests of individuals—by protecting their right to engage in industrial action—and the interests of the general public.
Despite what the noble Lord says, I think it has the completely opposite effect. They are not defending individuals’ rights. Rather than focus on supporting negotiations to resolve disputes, we have a Government determined to undermine workers and damage good industrial relations. The use of agency workers during a strike would increase tensions between workers and their employers. This is bound to make disputes more difficult to resolve amicably.
Let us not forget: strikes are a last resort, as the noble Lord says, and most negotiations resolve in an agreement. Even where a strike takes place, the resolution requires agreement and this Government are doing nothing to support negotiations and reach settlements and agreements. It will make it far harder for working people to organise collectively to defend their jobs, their livelihoods and the quality of their working lives. This would be a shameful outcome for a Government which only a few years ago promised to protect and enhance workers’ rights.
The Explanatory Memorandum to the draft regulations stated:
“The Impact Assessment will be published in good time before any parliamentary debates”.
That did not happen. The explanation for the delay, given to the SLSC by the department, was that an impact assessment had been produced but needed “final quality assurance checks”. As the SLSC reminded us, every time an instrument is laid without the supporting impact assessment, it undermines the ability of Parliament to scrutinise legislation effectively.
Last week, the Government belatedly published an impact assessment. This featured, as the noble Lord said, vastly reduced costs and benefits from 2015, suggesting that any net benefit for businesses is expected to be below £5 million per year. The impact assessment published in 2015 was declared not fit for purpose by the Regulatory Policy Committee because it did not provide sufficient evidence of the likely impact of the proposals.
Of course, the SLSC rightly drew attention to the Secretary of State’s statement that it is not possible to robustly estimate the impact of the policy due to the lack of evidence. That is where we are: no evidence. This is purely a political gimmick without any consultation with those most affected, including employment agencies and workers. How can we believe the assumptions in this latest assessment?
The lack of robust evidence and the expected limited net benefit must raise questions as to the practical effectiveness and the benefit of the proposed repeal of Regulation 7. I repeat that this change is opposed by employment agency businesses, trade unions and employee organisations alike.
In his letter to noble Lords, the Minister stated that:
“We believe the changes we are making will help mitigate the impact of future strikes, such as those seen on our railways this week, by allowing—
—and these are his words—
“trained, temporary workers to carry out crucial roles to keep trains moving.”
What is clear is that there is not a large pool of sufficiently trained and qualified agency workers able to replace most roles on the railway and in most other sectors. They are simply not there, so what is the purpose of this change?
Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, says:
“The government’s proposal will not work. Agency staff have a choice of roles and are highly unlikely to choose to cross picket lines.”
In addition to the damage to constructive employment relations, agency workers could also face a terrible choice between crossing a picket line or turning down an assignment and risk not being offered future employment.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, there is not a lot of competition on these Benches to speak, so I hope I shall be forgiven. We normally begin by making a declaration of interest. Mine is quite simple: I left school at 16 and I joined a trade union straight away. I have been in a TUC trade union ever since, and I am currently the president of BALPA, the pilots’ union. I have been the president of the British Dietetic Association. From being a branch official at the age of 16, I have in some way or other been an active trade unionist for longer than I have been an active politician.
I say that because I just cannot see the purpose of the regulations. They deal with an Act passed by a Conservative Government, the Employment Agencies Act 1973. They do not appear to have had the requisite consultation. I would not be surprised if, at judicial review, they did not manage to stand up. There could be a judicial review that the Government had not fulfilled what the regulations were meant to do. I have had briefings from UNISON, the TUC and the British Medical Association. When you get those three in one pot, you really have trouble, I will tell you—with the BMA, particularly.
My first question for the Minister is this. What has changed since 2015, other than that we have a different Prime Minister and that Prime Minister’s trade union envoy no longer seems to have much resonance around the Conservative Party? In 2015, this was dropped; it was not proceeded with. We have the impact assessment and the report of the scrutiny committee. I should like to read just a little into the record. The fact that the impact assessment of the department was
“unable to ‘robustly estimate the size’ of the policy’s impact because of a lack of evidence raises questions as to the effectiveness of the change proposed by the draft Regulations … The lack of robust evidence and the expected limited net benefit raise questions as to the practical effectiveness and benefit of the proposed”
repeal of Regulation 7. That is fairly clear; there is not much room for disagreement there.
I also ask a question about the Liability of Trade Unions in Proceedings in Tort (Increase of Limits in Damages) Order. When was the last case? It is fine to update it, but when I asked someone, they could not find anything in the past 10 years in the way of a case. My experience of attending TU governing bodies is that they spend a hell of a long time looking at complying with the law. If you were to be privileged to sit in on a BALPA meeting, you would find that before even the mildest industrial action is undertaken there is absolutely rigorous scrutiny of whether it fully complies with the law—there is no attempt to get round it. What are HMG trying to achieve, other than to annoy people? I do not think this legislation is draconian; I think it is pretty useless.
Where will you find signalmen to be recruited by, I do not know, Reed, to send them down to Cambridge station to work the signals? I do not think they are there. You will find plenty of doctors. Indeed, one of Addenbrooke’s biggest problems is that the doctors prefer to work through an agency because they get more money. Will you have the doctors all working for the agency? Of course not. The fact is that there is no great skill pool on the railways. If you go to my local station in Cambridge, you will see that there are signs in all the shop windows for baristas and people to work in the shops. There is no unemployment there to be mopped up by such people, even if they wanted to do it.
The average working person gets no pleasure out of crossing picket lines; it is not a natural thing to do. So I ask the Minister: does he really need this? What does he achieve? One-third of trade unionists vote for the Conservative Party. Why go around sticking unnecessary pins into them? We do not have a crisis. We do not have a major problem. We have a minor problem, and even that minor problem needs addressing in negotiation between the railway unions and the people who run the railways. There is a lot that could be improved there, but it is not going to be improved—sorry, Minister—by little bits of legislation such as this. This, I am afraid, is nearer to a dead letter than a live proposition.
Lord Woodley (Lab)
My Lords, the critique by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, was absolutely stunning. Last month, the Minister told this House that it was “outdated” to talk about workers and bosses because apparently:
“We are all working together for the good of the country.”—[Official Report, 29/6/22; col. 645.]
I say to the Minister: go and tell that to the 3.6 million kids in poverty. Go tell it to them.
The Minister even claimed that the trade unions were a “minority profession”, which “do not represent anybody”. So I ask him again whether this is now the Government’s official position: that 6 million trade unionists do not count. Is this the justification for hobbling trade unions which are fighting for better pay to offset rampant inflation? We are still waiting for the mythical employment Bill—much talked about, but never seen. I remember the Government’s crocodile tears at P&O’s use of agency staff to undermine trade union rights and drive down pay and conditions, yet here they are now, proposing to enshrine such despicable practices into law. I asked the Minister who has been consulted over these changes, and he replied that there had been no consultation—as the noble Lord, Lord Collins, said—since 2015.
My noble friend is right. The economy has changed significantly over the past seven years: Brexit, Covid and now the cost of living crisis. It is “wholly inappropriate” to rely on a seven year-old consultation, especially given
“the wider economic and political context”.
Those are not my words but those of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, the REC, which represents agency firms—the employers—and of the TUC, representing trade unions. The REC even warned that these proposals leave employment agencies and their workers in an unfair moral position because of the pressure to break strikes. Let us stop pretending that this Government are on the side of working people, especially when they are slipping through major changes so underhandedly, with only a couple of hours of parliamentary debate.
Surely such a significant shift in workplace power deserves “proper parliamentary scrutiny”? Again, that is not just my opinion, but that of the REC and the TUC, which have both written to our Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, as the Minister mentioned, warning against these inflammatory changes being rushed through both Houses. The committee also expressed its concerns with the way the Government have introduced these statutory instruments, especially with their impact assessment—again, as the noble Lord, Lord Collins, said—which was delivered late and recognised as being of very poor quality, with a “lack of robust evidence”. Surely the Minister can see that these proposals deserve primary legislation, not sneaky SIs.
I ask the Minister: why this all-out war on trade unions, which risks breaching not just international conventions but even domestic law? Will he accept responsibility for poisoning industrial relations across this country as a result? I draw noble Lords’ attention to a contribution from the debate in the other place. The Conservative MP—yes, that is right, the Conservative MP—Alec Shelbrooke said:
“This agency worker measure was not in our manifesto, and it seems to have been done very quickly in reaction to what is going on in the public sector.”
After stating the obvious, that the private sector has
“quite a few unscrupulous employers”—
there is one for the record books—he hit the nail on the head:
“If people lose their ability to have an effect when they withdraw their labour, I am afraid they will effectively lose the ability to withdraw their labour.”—[Official Report, Commons, 11/7/22; col. 93.]
Lord Monks (Lab)
My Lords, this SI is the latest in a long line of steps, taken by successive Conservative Governments, to wrap trade unions in ever-more complex and restrictive dollops of red tape. It is almost a rite of passage for each Conservative Administration to slap fresh restrictions on unions. This SI is the latest in a long line. As my noble friend Lord Woodley has said, the Government were supposed to be introducing an employment Bill with new rights for workers—a positive step forward—but where is it? We keep asking, and again I pose that question to the Minister.
The Government were going to tackle the abusive practices of P&O Ferries in sacking staff and replacing them with agency workers, but where has that gone? Instead, they are now encouraging, through this SI, employers in a dispute to replace workers with agency staff. That looks to me like a U-turn, and one that is unacceptable to many of us.
A wiser Government would learn from their own successful experience with the furlough scheme, where they worked closely with unions and the TUC to devise a scheme that did much to see our country through the pandemic in reasonable shape. That degree of wisdom is sadly missing in this exercise we are talking about tonight.
A wiser Government would recognise that the current inflation is not due to wages but to Covid, the war in Ukraine and Brexit-related matters. In fact, our country’s experience is of stagnant wages and soaring profits, with real wages having been pretty flat since 2000, with the exception of executive pay, in the largest companies in particular, which grew during the pandemic alone by 29%. Is it any wonder that there could be an increase in labour unrest in the forthcoming period? Workers have got plenty to be restless about.
A wiser Government would seek to address this situation, not by playing to their own political gallery with this kind of gesture, but instead by seeking to work with unions, employers and all those concerned that might have some way of helping this country through a very difficult economic period ahead. Will the Minister, even at this stage, reflect on the request from many of us here tonight to put this SI in the recycling bin and tackle the real problems?
Lord Hendy (Lab)
My Lords, I support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Collins. Wages are rising at 4% per annum and prices are increasing at 11% per annum. It is a sad thing that the Government’s response is to take yet further measures to stop workers exercising the only leverage they have to maintain or even improve their standard of living. The Minister frankly admitted this evening that the purpose of the statutory instrument in relation to damages was to deter unions from striking, and that would be achieved by increasing the cap on damages by 400%. The point that I wish to raise with the Minister is that this further regulation of trade union freedom may well put the United Kingdom in breach of its international legal obligations, and it is to that that I will restrict my remarks.
My noble friend Lord Collins mentioned Article 3 of Convention 87 of the ILO, which is the most fundamental of all the ILO conventions, the international standards of labour. Article 3 guarantees that unions and employers’ associations can organise their activities
“free from any interference which would restrict this right or impede the lawful exercise thereof.”
Among the activities that unions must be free to organise is, of course, industrial action. Consequently, the relevant supervisory committee of the ILO—the quasi-judicial Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations—has said:
“Provisions allowing employers to dismiss strikers or replace them temporarily or for an indeterminate period are a serious impediment to the exercise of the right to strike.”
My noble friend Lord Collins mentioned a decision of the Committee on Freedom of Association to similar effect. The authoritative interpretation of conventions by these committees is recognised not only by the European Court of Human Rights and other courts, such as the Supreme Court of Canada, but by our domestic courts. Those committees have held for some time that, among other non-conformities, British law currently does not comply with the requirements of Convention 87, Article 3 because workers taking industrial action are inadequately protected.
I hope that the Minister is not going to say that he disagrees with the rulings of those two ILO committees. They are the supervisory bodies of Convention 87, and it would sound like the first-year law student who writes an essay saying that he disagrees with a judgment of the Supreme Court. I am sure the Minister will not be saying anything like that.
I wish to make an additional point before I sit down. Breach of an ILO convention is bad enough, particularly one ratified by and binding on the United Kingdom, of which the United Kingdom was the very first signatory back in 1948. Secondly, the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement of 2021 involved the Government undertaking post Brexit to comply with various international treaties by which they were already bound. The effect is that non-compliance with these treaties is not only a breach of them but is unlawful on the additional ground that it is a breach of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Paragraph 2 of Article 399 states:
“each Party commits to respecting, promoting and effectively implementing the internationally recognised core labour standards, as defined in the fundamental ILO Conventions”.
Paragraph 5 states:
“Each Party commits to implementing all the ILO Conventions that the United Kingdom and the Member States have respectively ratified and the different provisions of the European Social Charter that, as members of the Council of Europe, the Member States and the United Kingdom have respectively accepted.”
The UK has the obligation not only to respect and promote Convention 87, but also to effectively implement it. Those obligations surely prevent the UK adding an additional obstacle to the effective exercise of the right to strike by allowing agency strike breakers.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, we on these Benches are very concerned about the impact of strikes such as those planned to close down the rail network, preventing hard-working people, including emergency workers already suffering under the cost-of-living crisis, getting to work, but we do not believe these regulations are the answer.
This first statutory instrument appears to be a sham. It is another pretence at doing something instead of what the Government should actually be doing, which is enabling, empowering and facilitating employers to negotiate effectively with their employees and the trade unions that represent them to prevent the need for strikes in the first place. If the Government were taking effective action to mitigate the devastating further increases in the cost of gas and electricity this winter and the associated increases in the costs of essentials such as food and clothing, there would be less of a demand for large wage increases in the first place.
The report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee not only casts doubt on the practical effectiveness of the change brought about by this SI, but also points out the weakness of the Government’s own impact assessment, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has said.
Using agency staff to backfill those on strike is likely to prolong disputes—that is, even if employers can get agency workers. As the Trades Union Congress and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation have said, with 1.3 million vacancies in the UK, the number of agency staff available is declining rapidly, the opportunities for them to be employed are increasing and they will choose employment that does not involve having to cross picket lines.
According to UNISON, research shows that, with the best will in the world, agency staff less familiar with the workplace and working practices are more likely to make mistakes, have or cause accidents and cause harm to themselves and others, mainly because of a lack of training, lack of access to protective equipment and lack of supervision. If the Government think there are sufficient agency train drivers, signallers and trained station staff, who, for example, have to assist disabled passengers on and off trains, they are deluding themselves.
Even the British Medical Association is opposed to these regulations. The Government are required to consult before making changes, and yet, as other noble Lords have said, the last consultation was seven years ago, when, as a result, similar proposals were abandoned. Surely, a seven-year-old consultation is not sufficient, as the BMA suggests, and as the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, has said.
Even in that consultation seven years ago, the majority of businesses supplying agency staff said that the changes would have a negative effect. Some 49% of the respondents said it would have a negative impact on agency workers. On the impact on employers, 40% said it would have a negative impact. Only 24% said it would have a positive impact, as it would worsen the relationship between employers and employees if they backfilled with agency workers.
Despite all of that—despite the majority on all sides saying that this is a bad idea—the Explanatory Memorandum states:
“The Government has carefully considered all these points and remains of the view that removing regulation 7 is the right course of action.”
If that is not the definition of pig-headedness, I do not know what is.
As the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, has set out in detail, doubt has also been cast on whether the change is compatible with international law, for which this Government have scant regard—be it genuine asylum seekers seeking sanctuary in the UK, or their proposed unilateral action on the Northern Ireland protocol. This Government are rapidly moving the UK towards being seen by others as a rogue state.
This statutory instrument is a poor and ineffective substitute for what the Government should be doing: being more effective in tackling the cost-of-living crisis and getting employees and employers around the table to prevent strike action in the first place.
With regard to the increase in the limit for damages for illegal strikes, rarely if ever is industrial action brought by trade unions if it is illegal. Other than intimidating trade unionists, we question the timing of such changes.
We support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate—which, I have to say, was a bit shorter than I expected. I will start with the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Collins. I thank him for raising his concerns.
I repeat the point I made at the outset. This is very much a question of getting the right balance between, on the one hand, the right of individuals to strike, and on the other hand the rights of individuals to go about their daily lives, whether it be children taking an exam, people going to their hospital appointments or other workers wishing to go to work to do their jobs. These reforms will ensure that our laws strike the correct balance. In doing so, we are protecting the public from unwarranted disruption while, as I said, maintaining workers’ ability to go on strike, which, I repeat, will remain unaffected by these changes.
The noble Lords, Lord Collins, Lord Woodley and Lord Paddick, all referred to the consultation not having been carried out on the agency regulations since 2015. In response to those concerns, I would say that the consultation that we carried out in 2015 was extremely thorough. Given that, I struggle to see what a further consultation will bring up. Are there any new issues or objections that we are not already aware of? I think the response to that is no. As we said in response to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, some things have changed but the fundamental issues remain the same. I think that in their hearts, Opposition Peers know that that is the case. This is about finding that right balance between the rights of individuals to strike and the right of the public to go about their lawful daily business.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, also referred to the impact assessment. As I said in my opening remarks, it has been published, as we committed to do in the Explanatory Memorandum. As the impact assessment makes clear, this is a permissive change: employers will hire agency workers only if it makes sense for them to do so. There is no compulsion on them; it is permissive and their choice. Our assessment also shows that this change needs to lead only to a small reduction in the number of working days lost for it to have a positive effect on the economy.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, went on to question why it was necessary to raise the damages cap for unlawful strike action when damages are so rarely claimed—in which case, Opposition Peers’ concerns are ill founded. We are simply restoring the deterrent effect that Parliament intended when the original amounts were set.
The noble Lord also suggested that the increase in the cap would inhibit the ability of unions to take legitimate strike action. He himself made the point that there have been no recent cases on this matter. I also respectfully disagree with the point he makes. As I said, this change applies only to action which a court determines to be unlawful. If, as he suggests, trade unions go to the maximum possible trouble to make sure that their action is lawful, they will have nothing to be concerned about. I am sure that no noble Lord would suggest that unlawful strike action is acceptable in this day and age.
Let me address some of the other points made in the debate. My noble friend Lord Balfe asked whether agency workers would be willing to cross picket lines given current labour shortages. Again, this is a permissive change; nobody is going to be forced to take an assignment that they do not want to take. The point is that the current regulatory framework actually prevents them having that choice, and that cannot be right. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, raised concerns about the damage that this will do to the reputation of the recruitment sector, and the concerns of the employment businesses and others that have registered about this change. Nobody is being forced; nobody is being compelled; no employment businesses will have to supply workers to businesses facing industrial action. Again, it will be their choice to take part or not, as the case may be; no one is going to force them. We just do not see the point in having the blanket ban that we currently have.
The noble Lord, Lord Monks, drew some I think incorrect parallels with the P&O Ferries case earlier this year. This case is completely different. In the P&O Ferries case, the company has admitted deliberately choosing to ignore statutory consultation requirements when firing staff with no notice. All we are doing in the case of these changes is giving employers more flexibility to help them minimise the disruption that industrial action causes. Where proper procedures are followed, staff on strike should not lose their jobs; they will continue to have exactly the same legal protections that they already have.
The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, questioned whether these changes comply with our international legal obligations, including our commitments under trade and co-operation agreement. We have carefully considered all of these issues and we are confident that the changes are compliant with all of our international obligations—as, indeed, I told the noble Lord, Lord Collins, during Question Time last week. The ability of businesses to use agency staff does not affect individuals’ right to strike, and the protections those striking workers have in law remain unaffected. The Government are adjusting the balance between the right of workers to strike, and the rights of the wider public to go about their lawful business, and this falls well within our margin of appreciation when implementing international conventions.
The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, raised concerns about health and safety. Again, these concerns are not well founded, simply because this change does not change the broader health and safety rules that businesses still have to comply with. Similarly, the obligation on employment businesses to supply suitably qualified workers also remains in place. The aim of our trade union laws is to support an effective and collaborative approach to resolving industrial disputes, one that balances the interests of trade unions and their members with the interests of employers and the wider public. The changes we are making will, in my view, support that balance, and I therefore commend these draft regulations to the House.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, simply asserting something does not make it true, and that is exactly what the Minister has done tonight. In fact, the reason why this debate was perhaps shorter than he expected is that not a single person supported his line of argument; that is the issue here. He talks about strikes as if there is somehow a desire on the part of workers to go on strike; there is no such desire. It is when they face intransigence; when they face Governments who are determined that negotiations cannot take place—that is what we have heard. I have not heard a single word tonight supporting the Minister’s assertion that this Government are in favour of a collaborative approach. When we were collaborative, as my noble friend said, during the pandemic, the TUC worked hand in hand with this Government to make sure that the economy did not suffer long-term distress—and what is the payback? As the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, says, it is simply to have a pop, to have a go, but with no evidence provided that it will achieve anything that the Minister suggests. It will entrench opinions and it will delay settlements.
The employers, the temporary agency firms—and there are many of them—provide a very necessary service. They provide flexibility in very difficult, tight labour markets, as we have heard, and this action will undermine and discredit them and make it more difficult for them to do their job. It has been a very interesting debate. I hope we will be able to read in Hansard what this Government really are about, because they assert something and do something else. I beg leave to move the amendment and divide the House.
Schools Bill [HL]
Monday 18th July 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 35-II Manuscript amendments for Report (Supplementary to the Second Marshalled List) - (18 Jul 2022)
Lord Moynihan
“Provision of defibrillators in schools and AcademiesThe Secretary of State must ensure that all schools and Academies are provided with sufficient numbers of defibrillators so that the defibrillators are easily accessible from each classroom and sports facility.”
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 104 concerns the provision of defibrillators in schools and academies. My purpose in proposing this amendment requires me to declare my interest as chair of the board of governors of the Haberdashers’ Monmouth Schools, where we educate over 1,100 children, and place the highest priority on safeguarding their interests in every activity in which they participate. In this we are led by an outstanding governor, Jo Booth.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, who cannot be with us this evening, sadly; to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thomson, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for putting their names to this amendment, for offering my apologies in Committee when I was hosting a key meeting at the Monmouth Schools that Monday evening, and for their subsequent support; and to my noble friend the Minister, who has been active and diligent in listening to our case and, I hope, will respond positively this evening.
The Monmouth case was particularly important to me. The schools form a close-knit society, and from governor to ground staff there is pride in our schools and a strong sense of community. So it was that one of our popular and talented students joined his friends in the cricket nets at the idyllic sports grounds in the Wye Valley, shortly before last term’s half-term, for an evening’s practice session. There he was taken ill and, realising the seriousness of his condition, the master in charge gave him CPR twice. After the second time, he regained consciousness, and by the time the ambulance took him to hospital, his mum and dad were with him. I pay tribute to the staff who cared for him throughout. Had it not been for their professional care and devotion to the well-being of the students, it is more than likely that he would not have been with his parents at the end. Later that evening, he passed away, leaving family, teaching staff and all who knew him reflecting with a heavy heart on the tragedy, which continues to be felt by us all.
Sudden arrhythmic death syndrome kills 12 young people under 35 every week. Callum Stonier, a remarkable cricket coach and committed teacher on duty that evening, had decided that if our young, outstanding student had not come round from CPR, we would have used one of the five defibrillators in the school—the nearest, rightly, being close to the cricket nets in the pavilion. A defibrillator at the sports centre nearby had previously saved a life at one of our school sporting events.
Many noble Lords on all sides of this Chamber have made the case for ensuring that defibrillators are not a voluntary addition to a school’s first aid equipment and required just in new or refurbished schools, as is currently the policy, but a mandatory part of the first aid equipment in all our schools. In fact, if there is a strong enough argument that they should be a legal requirement for refurbished or new schools, there is an equally strong legal argument for the compulsory purchase of defibrillators in every school, as there should be. We should not and cannot differentiate between two groups of children; all their lives are equally important, and I am glad that the Government recognise that.
The announcement yesterday by the Government that they intend to do exactly what we have been campaigning for is exceptionally welcome. No doubt we will hear more detail in a moment. It is not just we in this House who have been campaigning. The Oliver King Foundation has for much longer been exceptionally active in this context. It has done outstanding and important work in lobbying to ensure that all schools have a defibrillator. It appears that the Government are now building on their current open-ended policy of engaging with civil society to ensure that there are defibrillators in all our 32,163 schools in the UK. A statutory duty will save lives, and the important relationships with civil society are the vehicle to ensure that this is done.
I hope my noble friend the Minister will confirm what we heard yesterday on the radio. I heard it at 6 am when I was driving to St Andrews for the final day of the golf, and I was absolutely delighted to hear the news that the Government intended to follow the spirit of the amendment before the House. No doubt it was because the Government were more than aware that there would be an overwhelming cross-party vote in favour of the legislation this evening, and I am delighted if that was the case. They acted first and deserve the credit for doing so, because their being in favour of the objectives behind such a long-running campaign is critical.
We owe my noble friend the Minister a great debt of gratitude and our warmest thanks for her personal commitment to this subject, without which I really do not believe this would have happened. Maybe I am being too optimistic; we will need to hear from other noble Lords this evening, and whether the announcement on the radio and from the Government yesterday is accurate, and potentially receive more details from my noble friend the Minister. If it was accurate, we should celebrate this evening. As far as I was concerned, it was great news from the Government and made an outstanding day’s golf all the more memorable, because it was even more important than the opportunity I had yesterday. It will allow us, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, my noble friend in sport, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and many others in this Chamber, to take this forward from schools and to really look at the importance of making sure that defibrillators are available in community sports fields and sports grounds and throughout the sporting world.
If this is true, I very much hope that it will be a first, important step in that direction. On that rather happier note than in many of the other debates in this House today, I beg to move.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as the president of the Local Government Association, and I have a number of other interests in this area. I know that my noble friend Lord Aberdare is disappointed that he is not able to be in his place tonight; he is actively involved in the Procurement Bill. As I have previously talked about, 40% of sports facilities in England are behind school gates, so this is not only about protecting children, it is about all those people who use sports facilities.
I am disappointed that I was not going to St Andrews when I heard the news yesterday; I was merely out with a friend and we saw it on the television. I was absolutely delighted to read the social media post by the Department for Education, which said:
“We’re making sure every school in the country has a defibrillator. These life-saving devices increase the chance of survival from a cardiac arrest, and will help keep children, staff and local communities as safe as possible.”
I was even more delighted when I saw that it had been reposted by the Minister. I thank her for recognising the Oliver King Foundation, because its work in this space has been absolutely tireless.
The only question I have tonight is about the process and timescale for this announcement, because it is so incredibly important that we do this. I am sure that my noble friends will be coming back for more because, as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, said, we need to be looking at community centres and at widening this, but this is a really important step forward.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it is now my job to hang on to the coattails of the people who did the real work on this and say thank you to the Minister. I do not know whether the fact that this amendment to the Bill is not to be accepted says something about confidence in the future of the Bill or the timescale involved. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us roughly the timescale on which this part of the coverage will be brought in.
Schools are an important factor; they predominantly deal with most of the sporting activity of the very young. However, while the correct terminology totally escapes me—the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, had it earlier—other heart problems will occur in middle-aged men running around trying to lose a few pounds; a group which I am probably waving goodbye to even now. We are setting down that other people will have heart conditions, which is helpful.
Getting this into other sports facilities is a fairly cheap, easy way of avoiding early death. If the Government could give us some idea of the plan for the future, after this provision—I am basically asking about the timescale, implementation and future development—that would be very helpful.
I say thank you to the Minister for this one, and to the Government, but hope it is just part of ensuring that we have universal coverage for those places where sport is usually played. It is a good start but is not the end of this story.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 109 in my name. I look forward to hearing my noble friend’s response to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. I am grateful to the Public Bill Office for its assistance in redrafting this amendment and for a meeting with the Minister and her officials. This is very much a last-resort power.
The amendment is not about compelling schools to open when there is a dispute about their safety, which is a welcome clarification since Committee. I will not rehearse the details of the scenario I outlined in Committee but I do not believe that noble Lords have had a clear answer from my noble friend the Minister as to how, in the scenario of a serious failure in the school estate, where the Department for Education says that a school building is safe but the responsible body says it has an expert report to say that it is not, that stalemate is resolved. In those circumstances, the building would be closed as the responsible body makes the decision.
In addition to this scenario, it could be that although the expert report tells the responsible body that a school building is safe, it is extremely risk averse and refuses to open it. My noble friend the Minister said in Committee:
“However, we expect schools, trusts and local authorities to make decisions proportionate to the level of risk, and to minimise disruption”.—[Official Report, 27/6/22; col. 503.]
I think this is the nub of the issue. Some responsible bodies might not, in the Department for Education’s view, be acting proportionately because they have come to a different decision about the level of risk of opening that building. Some responsible bodies are very small charitable trusts or may even, unfortunately, be a local authority in great difficulty, and those responsible might rightly fear becoming personally liable under health and safety law for anything that then occurs in the building.
Such fear may be irrational, in the judicial review definition of that word. I have mused that without such a power to direct a responsible body to open, the Government are leaving themselves with only that remedy: they themselves would have to judicially review a responsible body and say that its decision was irrational or unreasonable in order to force that school to reopen. Would it really be irrational, in the ordinary view of that term, if there had been serious injuries caused by building materials in another part of the estate, for a responsible body to err on the side of caution—perhaps due to an ambiguous phrase in its own expert’s report—causing it to make such a decision?
The amendment has highlighted that the Department for Education understandably assumes that responsible bodies will behave in this scenario as they have done in the past, with the current level of risk that we know about on the school estate. In the scenario, the department’s excellent capital team comes alongside to give its additional expertise and a negotiated solution is reached—sometimes, sadly, including the temporary closure of buildings. However, if a serious incident has taken place, could it not be that some of the approximately 2,500 responsible bodies might justifiably now behave differently? What looks irrational now might not have then.
I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for agreeing to reach out to the, for me, newly-discovered disaster relief experts whose profession has gained a higher profile since the pandemic, and since Professor Lucy Easthope’s recent book When the Dust Settles was published. There may be other experts who can aid the department in assessing more accurately how responsible bodies might behave in this scenario.
One has only to look at the Grenfell tragedy to know that building managers and a whole host of other professionals are behaving very differently now. I am sure the department will be watching carefully the Health and Safety Executive inspections that are beginning, looking at schools’ ability to manage the asbestos within the school estate. If those inspections lead to any of the scenarios that I have outlined, the Secretary of State is powerless to act.
Further, my noble friend the Minister stated in Committee:
“The department taking on direct responsibility for school buildings, or compelling schools to open when they have safety concerns”—
the latter point has been dealt with—
“could actually reduce safety overall as it could undermine the incentive to maintain buildings effectively and obscure the currently clear responsibilities for the safety of pupils and staff in our schools.”—[Official Report, 27/6/22; col. 504.]
Again, that is quite an assumption by the Department for Education about responsible bodies’ behaviour. I am not sure on what evidence it is based, especially since what is in the amendment is a last-resort power. I hope the experts that the DfE meets are able to help my noble friend assess whether this assumption of how responsible bodies would behave is correct, as I am afraid it strikes me as rather unfair on responsible bodies to make such an assumption.
I understand that the Minister will be taking steps to ensure that responsible bodies are rigorous in undertaking checks and more detailed surveys as necessary where they have buildings in which the specific material reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, which we spoke about in Committee, could potentially be present. I am keen to hear more on that.
As I stated in Committee, in a Bill that attempts to take so many powers, I have managed to achieve that the Secretary of State has decided that they do not need this one. I sincerely hope, as I am sure other noble Lords do, that the scenario I have outlined never arises. I will not be asking for the opinion of your Lordships’ House today; this is a case of wait and see. I am sure noble Lords are with me in saying that we hope it is not a case of saying, “We told you so”.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Our Amendment 118F would require the Government to publish a report detailing the condition of school buildings by category of fault, whether it is boilers and pipe work, electrical services, lighting or IT. We would like to know their assessment of risk to children and staff, the geographical breakdown and the cost. We have not been able to glean all the information that we have been looking for from the Condition of School Buildings Survey from May 2021, and we think the problem is getting worse following years of neglect. We know that the total condition need is estimated to be £11.4 billion.
We have been alarmed, as have many others, at being made aware of leaked emails at the department describing school buildings as posing a “risk to life”. Schools have been fined for failing to tackle issues from disturbed asbestos to heavy lockers not attached to walls falling on to children. We have not been able to find a record of the number of school days lost due to building failure, whether that is snow days or, as we are seeing today, closures due to excessive heat.
Bad school buildings risk lost education and physical harm to children. Will the condition data collection 2 programme enable local MPs, for example, or councillors and parents to know the condition of school buildings in their area, the estimated costs and the assessment of risk? Will the number of days of education lost due to problems with buildings be published?
This is an important amendment to try to get some additional information. We may not divide the House tonight, but it will be returned to as the Bill progresses. It really should not take an amendment to do this; perhaps one of the noble Lords opposite could ask the candidates for Prime Minister where they stand on this issue, because I predict it will become of greater and greater political interest in the coming months.
I also place on record our thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and others, especially the Oliver King Foundation, for their incredible work on defibrillators over many years. Let us hope the Minister can confirm what we think we know. This is such an important step and we all hope it will save lives.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
I thank my noble friend Lady Berridge for her Amendment 109 and for raising the important issue of building safety. I valued the opportunity to speak to her about her concerns last week. We absolutely agree with her about the importance of minimising disruption to education from closed buildings.
Our priority is the safety of pupils and staff. The most effective way of ensuring this is for those with day-to-day control of sites to be responsible. Only they have direct knowledge of the buildings, changes in their condition and how they are being used. As I set out in detail in Committee, the department provides significant capital funding, rebuilding programmes and guidance and support to help the sector deliver its responsibilities. I will say more shortly about how we provide more targeted programmes for specific risks across an estate of approximately 22,000 schools, with buildings of different ages and construction types.
We have carefully considered the scenario my noble friend set out. Our view remains that there are sufficient mechanisms in place to support the sector to keep buildings safe and open. Even if the department took on this role, a power as suggested in the amendment would not in practice speed up the decision-making process for buildings that closed on a precautionary basis. Decisions about whether it is appropriate to close school buildings on safety grounds should, as my noble friend stressed when we met, be based on advice from qualified surveyors. That would remain the case whether the department or a body responsible for school buildings was taking the decisions. We think it is very unlikely that schools would ignore professional advice that they have commissioned which says their buildings are safe; we think they would not want to disrupt education unnecessarily. Where surveys demonstrated issues, appropriate support would of course be available.
A power for the department to make directions about the safety of buildings could undermine incentives to maintain buildings effectively and to carry out appropriate checks, which could reduce safety for pupils and staff. Such a power could also risk some responsible bodies abdicating the decision on whether to keep schools open or reopen them, insisting that the department issue such directions. This could lead to an increased and avoidable loss in education, which I know all noble Lords are keen to prevent.
My noble friend has highlighted the issue of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or RAAC, in some buildings. We published guidance on identifying and managing RAAC last year and continue to work across government to understand the issues relating to it better. We recently contacted responsible bodies to ask about their knowledge of RAAC, its presence in their buildings and how they are managing it. I reassure the House that we will follow up rigorously to ensure as complete a response as possible to help inform next steps.
Lord Shipley
“Local authorities: strategic education functions(1) The Secretary of State must, by regulations, provide that a local authority in England must perform the functions listed in subsection (2) on behalf of all state-funded schools in its authority area.(2) The functions are—(a) to ensure that every child of compulsory school age living in the local authority area has a school place;(b) to coordinate the provision of education to children who are at risk of exclusion from school;(c) to coordinate the provision of support to children with special educational needs or disabilities;(d) to act as the admissions authority for all state-funded schools in the local authority area, including by managing in-year admissions;(e) to manage the appeals process against individual admissions decisions;(f) to prevent pupils from being removed from the pupil roll of a school unlawfully;(g) to monitor the performance of schools; and(h) to monitor how schools engage with their local community.(3) The Secretary of State must, by regulations, provide that a local authority in England is given such powers as are reasonably necessary to perform the functions listed in subsection (2).(4) The powers conferred by regulations under subsection (3) must include, but not be limited to—(a) the power to request that the Secretary of State directs an Academy school to increase or reduce the number of pupils it admits; and(b) the power to require the proprietor of an Academy school to appear before a committee of the local authority to answer questions about the performance of the school or about how the school engages with the local community.(5) The Secretary of State must, by regulations, impose a duty on schools not maintained by the local authority to cooperate with the local authority in the performance of the functions listed in subsection (2).(6) The duty under subsection (5) must include, but not be limited to—(a) a requirement to inform the local authority of any plans that the school has to increase the number of pupils it admits; and(b) a requirement to provide pupil attendance data to the local authority when requested. (7) In this section—“local authority in England” has the same meaning as in section 579 of the Education Act 1996 (general interpretation);“state funded school” means a school in England funded wholly or mainly from public funds, including, but not limited to—(a) an Academy school, an alternative provision Academy or a 16 to 19 Academy established under the Academies Act 2010;(b) community, foundation and voluntary schools (within the meaning of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998).”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment gives local authorities new strategic functions in relation to all schools in their area.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I spoke to this in Committee and on the first day on Report. I just want to say that I welcome the Minister’s commitment on the first day on Report to developing a collaborative standard between trusts, local authorities and third sector organisations. It is an approach to be welcomed.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will be taking part in the next group remotely, and I invite her to move her amendment.
Amendment 108
Baroness Brinton
“Duty to report child sexual abuse(1) Where a provider of activities in a school-age educational setting has reasonable grounds for knowing or suspecting the commission of sexual abuse of children who are in their care, they have a duty to report their knowledge or suspicion as soon as practicable to—(a) the local authority designated officer (LADO),(b) children’s services, or(c) such other single point of contact with the local authority as designated by that authority for the purpose of reporting the knowledge or suspicion of sexual abuse of children.(2) The duty in subsection (1) applies whether the abuse has taken place in the setting of the regulated activity or elsewhere.(3) The duty under subsection (1) applies to—(a) the operators of a setting in which the activity takes place;(b) staff employed in any such setting in a managerial or general welfare role;(c) all other employed, contracted or voluntary staff and assistants only for the period of time during which they have had direct personal contact with such a child.(4) For the purposes of subsection (1) children are in the care of providers of regulated activities—(a) in the case of the operators of any setting in which the regulated activity takes place and of staff employed by the operators at any such setting in a managerial or general welfare role, for the period of time during which the operators are bound contractually or otherwise to accommodate or care for such children whenever the regulated activity is provided, and (b) in the case of all other employed or contracted staff or voluntary staff and assistants, for the period of time only in which they are personally attending such children in the capacity for which they were employed or their services were contracted for.(5) A person who fails to fulfil the duty in subsection (1) is guilty of an offence.(6) It is a defence to show that the LADO, children’s services or other single point of contact was informed by any other party of the commission or suspected commission of sexual abuse.(7) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale.(8) A person who makes a report under subsection (1) in good faith, or who does any other act as required by this section, cannot by so doing be held liable in any civil or criminal or administrative proceeding, and cannot be held to have breached any code of professional etiquette or ethics, or to have departed from any acceptable form of professional conduct.(9) A person who causes or threatens to cause any detriment to a person to whom subsection (1) applies, or to another person, either wholly or partly related to the person’s actual or intended provision of a report under this Act, is guilty of an offence.(10) In subsection (9) “detriment” includes any personal, social, economic, professional, or other detriment to the person.(11) A person guilty of an offence under subsection (9) is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale.(12) In this section—“children” means persons who have not attained the age of 18 years;“providers of activities” has the same meaning as in section 6 of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, in so far as the activity takes place in a school-age educational setting.”
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
Amendment 108 in my name is on mandatory reporting of child sex abuse. I thank the Minister for her comments at the Dispatch Box in Committee, when she said that the Government have no evidence that mandatory reporting is effective. In my contribution, I referred specifically to academic research in countries where mandatory reporting has been introduced and is working well. It is evidenced, but the Government clearly do not want to look at it.
Teachers in Australia, who were unhappy with the principle prior to its introduction, now feel it has given them more confidence in reporting suspicions and that they would not be ignored by the school or, worse, punished for reporting difficult evidence. Professor Ben Mathews from Queensland University of Technology, a world expert in mandatory reporting and how it works in practice, gave evidence in 2019 to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse. I hope that, once Ministers have read this evidence and the comments of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse victims’ group when they responded to a survey on mandatory reporting, the Government would reconsider.
I am very well aware that the IICSA will be publishing its final report in the autumn. I understand that the Government will want to wait until then and will respond in due course, but I remain concerned that there is not a will yet to understand how mandatory reporting is transforming the reporting on child sex abuse by educational professions. I beg to move.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 118D would mean teachers in all schools would be
“required to have, or be enrolled on a course such that they are working towards, qualified teacher status”
before September 2024. I have spoken extensively previously about teachers without QTS having less pedagogical training and less subject knowledge than their qualified colleagues, although I do note the Minister’s previous replies to this on several occasions. However, I firmly believe the Government need to match the ambition of Labour’s national excellence programme. This amendment will begin to address these current failings.
Amendment 118E would mean that, within a year of Royal Assent, the Secretary of State, whoever he or she will be, would have to ensure that
“every … school is working towards establishing a breakfast club, able to provide a free breakfast to every pupil who requests one”.
Yet again this evening, the UK Government could learn from what the Labour Government are doing in Wales: providing free breakfasts in primary schools has been an integral part of the wider work the Welsh Government have done to improve food and nutrition in schools maintained by local authorities since September 2004.
Finally, Amendment 118I would mean that, within six months of Royal Assent, the Secretary of State would have to
“consult on and launch a school children’s pandemic recovery plan”.
The consultation would include:
“free breakfast clubs … extra-curricular activities for every child … provision of … in-school mental health counselling staff … small group tutoring … ongoing learning and development for teachers, and … an education recovery premium”.
This may include uplifting the current premium rate by 10%, increasing the early years pupil premium to match the premium rates for primary school pupils, and expanding the secondary age pupil premium to include pupils aged 16 to 18 and children with child protection plans. There is so much to do but this amendment clearly sets out the difference between what a Labour Government would do for the children and young people of England compared with what little they are now receiving and will continue to receive under this Conservative Government.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, I was for a short time a governor—the noble Baroness is looking at me as if I am doing something wrong—of our local primary school. I remember at a governors’ meeting that one of the teacher-appointed members of the governing body was the English teacher. The only trouble was that he could hardly speak any grammatical English. I wondered often—and spoke to the headmistress about it—how good he was at teaching English.
Two other amendments are being considered in this group, both in the names of my two noble friends on the Front Bench. I support both of those. It is not easy to set up breakfast clubs and the like at primary schools. You have to stretch teachers to provide those services but when they can be provided, they are of enormous assistance and enable parents to go and get on with their lives—nothing could be easier. It also ensures that children start with a good breakfast.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 118L in my name and I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. Although we were too late to get him on the list, this is also supported by the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead. He was the first chair of Feeding Britain, a job he passed on to me.
This is a very simple amendment which would mean that families of pupils who are eligible to receive free school meals are automatically registered rather than having to opt in. By the Government’s best estimate, 11% of children who are eligible are not registered. This could mean that up to 200,000 children in England are missing out on both a nutritious meal and the pupil premium.
We have investigated this a great deal at Feeding Britain. We know that it works. When the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead, was in the other place he attracted cross-party support from 125 Members, but that Session drew to a close before his Bill could receive a Second Reading. As well as the support, my amendment has the advantage of being proven to work. When automatic registration has been piloted, as it was under the old housing benefit regime in the Wirral, more than 600 additional children were automatically signed up.
The Children’s Commissioner, the Local Government Association and Henry Dimbleby, in the national food strategy, have all supported this, and this amendment really goes with the grain of government policy in other areas, such as the warm home discount and cost of living payments. Even my own pension arrives automatically, whether I want it or not. It seems quite extraordinary that a child has to opt in to get a meal, especially now in the cost of living crisis. This is a very simple and straightforward amendment and I urge the Government to accept it.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I am aware of the hour and will be extremely brief. I just want to speak in favour of Amendment 118L, so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. I want to make two points in addition to what she said, while associating myself with what she said and noting that the noble Lord, Lord Field, has also shown his support for this.
First, the children who are the most vulnerable, from families which for whatever reason—language difficulties, other disadvantages—may find it difficult to navigate the system, are those who need those free school meals the most. If we do not have an automatic opt-out system, the people who miss out will include the most vulnerable.
The other point is that, a couple of weeks ago, a survey by LACA, the school caterers’ trade body, demonstrated that despite the number of pupils eligible for free school meals rising very significantly, more than half of the caterers surveyed were seeing the number of free school meals that they were providing going down. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said, we know that so many families are struggling with the cost of living crisis. This very modest amendment would at least ensure that those who are eligible for free school meals are getting them. I would like to see free school meals expanded much further and perhaps renamed to take away some of the stigma. This would simply ensure that people who are entitled to something get it. They are not only entitled to it; people desperately need these healthy school meals.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I begin by responding to Amendment 108, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, regarding mandatory reporting. As we set out in the March 2018 government response to the reporting and acting on child abuse consultation, and as the noble Baroness quoted me as saying—though perhaps I should have been clearer—there was no clear evidence from those who responded to the consultation to show that introducing a mandatory reporting duty would help keep children safe, and therefore the case was not made for its introduction. We are keeping this under review, and we await the final report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which is expected in the autumn.
Schools and colleges are already under legal duties to exercise their functions to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. This includes having regard to the Keeping Children Safe in Education 2022 statutory guidance, which makes it clear that if staff have any concerns about a child’s welfare, they should act on them immediately, and that any concerns should be referred to local authority children’s social care. Many other settings, such as extracurricular activities or clubs, are already required to register with Ofsted and must ensure that they have the processes and policies in place to safeguard the children they look after. That includes reporting any incident or allegation of serious harm or abuse to Ofsted, or any significant event that might affect someone’s suitability to look after or be in regular contact with children.
In all such cases Ofsted will pass the information to the relevant police or local authority and take appropriate action to ensure the safety of children cared for at the registered provider. Where settings are not registered with Ofsted, our guidance is clear that these settings should have clear escalation routes to manage concerns and allegations against staff and volunteers that might pose a risk of harm to children.
I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, for Amendments 118D, 118I and 118E regarding qualified teacher status, education recovery and breakfast clubs. Amendment 118D would restrict the flexibility that school leaders in academies currently have to recruit unqualified teachers and goes further than the restrictions currently imposed on maintained schools via the Education Act 2002. The current scheme allows maintained schools to employ teachers without qualified teacher status in several circumstances beyond those where a teacher is working towards qualified teacher status. This amendment would also remove those limited freedoms for maintained schools.
On Amendment 118I, we know that the impacts of the pandemic have been significant for all children, especially those who are disadvantaged, which is why we are targeting our support at those most in need. The latest evidence suggests that recovery is under way following the Government’s almost £5 billion investment for a comprehensive recovery package. Since spring 2021, primary pupils had recovered around two-thirds of progress lost in reading and around half of progress lost in maths. By May 2022, 1.5 million courses had already been started by children across England through the National Tutoring Programme. I can confirm that the latest data is due to be published imminently, and we expect to see a further significant increase.
Through the catch-up and recovery premium, we have provided £950 million of direct funding to schools, to help them deliver evidence-based approaches for those pupils most in need. The Government are providing an additional £1 billion to extend the recovery premium over the next two academic years. Additionally, this year, through the national funding formula, we are allocating £6.7 billion towards additional needs, including deprivation. The Government are also increasing pupil premium funding to £2.6 billion this year, and allocating £200 million a year to support disadvantaged pupils as part of the holiday activities and food programme over the next three years. Altogether, we are allocating £9.7 billion this year for pupils with additional needs, including deprivation.
On Amendment 118E, the Government recognise that a healthy breakfast can play an important role in ensuring that children from all backgrounds have a healthy start to their day, so that they enhance their learning potential. We are committed to supporting school breakfasts, and our approach has always been to support pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds who are most in need of that provision. We are investing up to £24 million in the national school breakfast programme for 2021-23, and will support up to 2,500 schools in disadvantaged areas, which will be targeted by the programme. Alongside our national programme, schools can also consider using their pupil premium funding to support their financial contribution to breakfast club provision, as endorsed by the Education Endowment Foundation’s pupil premium guide. Overall, the Government are investing significantly to support children from low-income families, and it is right that we are targeting investment towards those who are most in need.
Finally, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott and Lady Bennett, for Amendment 118L regarding free school meals. We want to make sure that as many eligible pupils as possible are claiming their free school meals, and to make it as simple as possible for schools and local authorities to determine eligibility. We provide an eligibility checking system to make the checking process as quick and straightforward as possible, and we continue to use and refine a model registration form to help schools encourage parents to sign up for free school meals.
We are also continuing to explore the options and delivery feasibility of introducing auto-enrolment functionality. However, there are complex data, systems and legal implications of such a change, which require careful consideration. Therefore, we think it is premature to change this through primary legislation at the moment, but I would be happy to meet both noble Baronesses to discuss how we can move this forward. For the reasons outlined, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, Amendment 118D in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Wilcox and Lady Chapman, talks about the importance of ensuring that all trainee teachers are working towards qualified teacher status. Amendment 118E outlines the important way that breakfast club arrangements work well in Wales, and Amendment 118I focuses on a recovery plan of pupil premiums. We are so delighted that Labour is as keen as the Lib Dems on the pupil premium, which we brought in during the coalition, and which we have pushed the Conservatives to expand since those days. I hope the Government will now consider it.
Amendment 188L from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on free school meals is simple—ensuring an auto opt-in and a voluntary opt-out, so that no child will slip through the net—and probably virtually without cost.
I am grateful to the Minister for her response to my Amendment 108. I am relieved that she clarified things by saying that there was no evidence of mandatory reporting working from a survey, which is rather different from the strong body of academic research from around the world that now shows that mandatory reporting makes a big difference. I hope the Government will look at that research—IICSA certainly has. I am very much looking forward to seeing the IICSA report in the autumn. I hope that it will make clear recommendations on mandatory reporting. I will not press this to a vote this evening so, with that, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 108.