Childcare

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question; the issue is very important and, as the noble Baroness knows, extremely complicated. We announced in July a number of measures that are under review to try to improve the supply of childcare and bring down the costs. My honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families is considering all of these actively at the moment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm that the idea of upping the ratio of children to childcare staff has been removed from the table—and that going up to five three to four year-olds per member of staff, as has been suggested and is happening in Scotland, will not happen here? Lowering the quality of care will not help anyone.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I would say to the noble Lord, first, that nothing is yet off the table. As I just said, my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families is considering all options. I am not aware of any research or evidence showing that quality is deteriorating; indeed, our childcare ratios are among the lowest in Europe.

Oak National Academy

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we must thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for drawing the issue to our attention. I do not think that half of us would have known that this was going on had it not been for a couple of the interventions he has made. It is probably a case for the use of Parliament.

This is a very odd one. Initially, I looked at the debate and said, “Yeah, online teaching—great. Wonderful. Online tools and technology—let’s use them”. I remind the Committee of my interests in those fields. However, I suddenly thought, “If the private sector is doing this, why are we intervening?” Is it because we are saving a lot of money? It does not really seem that the case for that has been made so let us hear it. Let us hear whether we are creating money to give extra resources to classrooms because that would be a case for it. If we are damaging one of our commercial sectors—there seems to be a well-argued fear, shall we say, that this could be happening—let us hear what the Government are going to do to mitigate that.

For instance, are we going to go to the publishing sector and say, “You have the contracts to make sure that the Oak academy is up to date”? If you want to make sure that something works, you have to keep monitoring it. Have we established that relationship? Is it going to happen? Are we going to make sure that we have some incentive for people to carry on writing new material that is relevant and keeps up to date with developments? Look at the textbooks from 10 years ago and take a field such as archaeology. We all know now that the hippies were turning up at the wrong time for their big party and that it should have been in mid-winter. This is because scientists and archaeologists have gone out there and had a look. So all those primary school projects got it wrong. How do we get in and make sure that things are happening? Maintenance is a big issue here. If that supplier and incentive have been removed, you may well damage the quality of education in the medium term.

Also, when it comes to supporting classrooms, a basic model may be acceptable but how on earth, with the variability of a classroom’s components, can a standard model ever be anything other than the briefest of guides? I have made it a mission of my own to mention special educational needs on every occasion until the Government tell us when that review will be published. January was the target; there is not much of that left. If you have a higher percentage than average in one class, you will need a different plan and, if it is different types of special educational need or there is one dominant pupil, you will need a different plan. If you have different levels of ability and interest in that class, you will need a different plan. You need variation; there is only so much benefit to be taken from that. I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to let us know exactly what the Government think they will get out of this.

When you have the free market being defended by the Labour and the Conservative Benches, and greater government control being spread around the House, something is wrong—or very right. Let us get an idea. The Government have to give us some answers on value for money and how they will refresh this. Will they give us some answers on both those points? I hope I can go away slightly more comfortable about the answer and the situation when we come back. Let us see.

Initial Teacher Training Providers

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government take bursaries very seriously and we review bursaries each year. Amounts granted in 2021-22 took account of the extraordinary circumstances of Covid, but we are increasing bursaries in 2022-23 and in 2023-24 similar to the levels offered pre-pandemic.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, if we have a problem with training people for initial teacher training then the review of special educational needs will put extra pressure on them, because they will have to be able to deal with problems that historically they are regarded as being underprepared for. What will be the result of the review?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I cannot prejudge, but it is only a few weeks away that we will be able to discuss the results of the review. Clearly the Government initiated the review because they take seriously issues for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Young People: Skills (Youth Unemployment Committee Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I first decided to look at the report and speak on it, I was struck by the fact that many of us who had been looking at this field and at education had been agreeing with it for quite a long time. We had been agreeing with its general thrust that further education and technical skills have been seen as a second-class option by an education system that is dominated—I forget which noble Lord said this; it might have been the noble Lord, Lord Knight—by an objective to get everybody to Oxford—Cambridge will do. It is a process of acquiring exams, getting them rubber stamped and going through. This is the culture of our education system because it is led by graduates and that is where they want to go. We all know that what is normal is what we did.

We must shift culturally from that, but that it is very difficult to do. The Government inherited a situation where they are trying to do this, but they have discovered not only is that what we do not need for our economy because only a limited number of graduates are needed, especially at higher levels, but that certain people cannot join in with that process culturally or because of special educational needs. The Minister will have been expecting me to say that. When she answers, will she tell us when we will finally get the Government’s response? Last time, she said that it would be December—that is next week. Will it be next week? Will it be before Christmas? That will colour quite a lot of what we are saying because large sections of those who are failing and cannot get into certain universities are in the special educational needs categories or they are factors in their personal cocktail of circumstances which often hold them back from succeeding. If they cannot pass those GCSEs by which we are so keen on defining the success of a school, how are we going to make sure that they carry on? The incentive in the past two years to offload has been absolutely there, and that is why we have such a high number of children who are not in school. If it is not the only reason, it is a factor.

Something else I gathered from this report and by talking to other people is that a key skill is probably not passing that English exam but using a computer efficiently. I remind the Committee of my declared interests in dyslexia and technology. Schools also allow you, bizarrely, to nullify some of those disadvantages—say, if you have dyslexia—of not acquiring those skills that most people have of being able to read and write quite easily. It is actually so commonly available now that there is a shift towards teaching people to use a standard package of technology, rather than putting additional technology on, but you have to use it and you have to get the classroom to use it. It would be a way of allowing more people to acquire a new key set of skills.

Everybody seems to agree on the committee—it is in the committee’s findings—on the fact that that is your new key set of skills. But if you are not going to encourage people to do this by saying that this is what you should be doing now, encouraging them to go and learn other skills, and then insisting that you have to get that 1960s grammar school-type approach to education—that you have to have X number of ticks to get through—you are going to continue to make it difficult to get these groups in, denying the initial stage of entrance to these processes. I have a long history when it comes to apprenticeships. If you are going to allow them in, even if you allow them to take the course, they cannot finish it. I know that there have been changes, some of which I helped to initiate, a long time ago, but I have heard that it is more observed in the breach than in the practice. But that is a battle for another day.

If the Government are not going to accept that radical change needs to take place in our exam system, we will continue to get the same results. We will continue to get an Education Department that is constantly talking about people retaking courses—people who are not achieving and who have not achieved at school—in something that most people do fairly easily. If we are going to carry on doing this, we are not allowing them to go on to further training, and we are effectively writing them off—that is, if they have not already taken themselves away. These factors are accentuated by their background: if they come from a family where everybody has failed exams, they will say, “I’m not going to be different from my folks”, and they will continue to do it.

How do we break this pattern? The only way in which we will start to dent this outside the curriculum is to make sure that there is better careers advice, which gets to the homes of these pupils. If you manage to sell it to the parents, the child may listen. How we do that interaction with the parents will always be difficult, but that is the key structure. It is about making sure that any child says something to the parents and the parents say, “Yes, we’ll buy in”. At the moment, careers advice is that you should work terribly hard, get on with the process and get your degree—but we have excluded hundreds of thousands of people before you have started, because it is not something that they are attuned to. If we make that path more open, which means far more emphasis on further education than we have now, we stand a chance of affecting it.

We need a huge cultural shift, as well as a technical one. Unless we start to embrace that with an aggressive attitude, we will never get there—because the status quo is the status quo because of the fact that people do not like to change.

Education Technology: Oak National Academy

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am delighted to be able to reassure the noble Baroness that Oak will never be mandated; it is an optional resource for teachers.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my registered interests. Will the Government assure us that if we are using this to support teachers, it will be an example of the style of help that can be used in areas such as better education around special educational needs? If so, when will we get an idea of how this will fit in—possibly through the reaction to the review, for which we are all waiting?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The procurement of materials for key stages 1 to 4 is largely discrete from the review. Oak will be providing resources only for key stages 1 to 4, and only digital resources. That procurement has just gone out, and we will wait to see what is delivered as a result.

Schools: Resources

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I will respond to the noble Lord in two ways. He is well aware that as a nation we face incredibly difficult decisions over our public expenditure and the fiscal challenges we face, but as a department we are always on the side of children and teachers. We do everything, and use evidence in every way we can, to make our case.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that schools are an important part of every community? They also contain a large part of things such as playing fields, theatres et cetera. What are the Government doing to make sure that these are available to the community outside the school day? Can we have an assurance that they will not be cut in the name of making sure that budgets are balanced?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree with the noble Lord that schools are an incredibly important part of their local communities. The Government’s position is that it will be up to individual schools to decide how to use their assets, but clearly those assets can bring in additional revenue for schools, so I would be most surprised if they cut them at the present time.

Plurilingual and Intercultural Education

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My understanding is that the decision to withdraw from the council’s European Centre for Modern Languages was taken over a decade ago and we have no plans to rejoin at this time. We currently fund teacher continuing professional development via the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy. To encourage recruitment for the academic year 2023-24, we have increased the language bursary to £25,000 and we are also offering a prestigious scholarship worth £27,000 for French, German and Spanish trainees.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, will the Minister give us some idea of the Government’s assessment of the cost of not having sufficient people understanding other modern languages—or are the Government happy to have our heads eternally bowed to Google Translate?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware of whether those costings have been done, but if they have, I am more than happy to share them with the House.

Times Education Commission Report

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we must thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for bringing this report to our attention. I did not read in it anything that I had not heard before, or at least heard discussed, but if you are interested in education and happen to have been in the upper Chamber of the British Parliament, you probably would have heard most of these things, so that is not a big surprise. The interesting thing is that they are brought together here as a whole. It is good to see this in the round, even for someone such as me, who tends, when he looks at education, to cast half an eye over the special educational needs provision—and if the Minister could tell us where that review has got to, I would be jolly grateful, but there might be a bit of a list there.

Before I go on, I should declare my interests. I am a dyslexic who is president of the British Dyslexia Association, and I am a user of assistive technology and chairman of a company that provides assistive technology. I looked at this from the position of special educational needs and thought, “How do I pull it all together around this one area, and how does that affect the other bits of the subject?” This is something where, in this Govian model of passing English and maths, as a dyslexic you think, “Oh, there’s a little conflict there from the start, isn’t there?” People do not actually get that we are thinking, “Well, this is what we’ve got to do, but we’re the group who will do it worse than others—but we can do it, because since some dyslexics do pass.” We then discover that systematic synthetic phonics is a system which does not help dyslexics. Even if a few get through, some do not. Bad short-term memory means that we do not learn well things such as equations in mathematics. One or two people say that dyslexics do not have short-term memories, but only one or two. Therefore, you have a series of conflicts built in there.

This means that you have a group who experience failure early in our system. It is not the only reason people struggle in special educational needs. If you go through the neurodiverse groups, both dyspraxia and dyscalculia are much bigger than we originally thought a few years ago, and there is attention deficit disorder and various levels of functioning in the autism spectrum. And guess what, lucky teacher? They overlap.

When the report says that classroom teachers should be better trained to deal with this, they should, but you need more than a few classroom teachers being taught how to do this. You need a systemic approach with awareness of how to spot and how to back up, and that things will occur and become present at different times. Early years is a very important sector, where we tend to look for autism, especially at the lower-functioning end. It does not pick up those at the higher-functioning end, who will just be a little awkward and cranky, with a few social problems.

The same is true of all of this: you need continuing awareness at different times to pick this up. This means you need to invest, back up and make sure that people are ready. You will then have to deal with people who are failing. As was said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the system may not be that friendly to anyone going through it, but these people are going to be that much more disadvantaged.

I will carry on to some other points. If you invest in things that some of these people might be able to do better, such as sport, music, drama and things that give people a chance to succeed, this group will stand a better chance of succeeding here than they would somewhere else. Regular failure reinforces itself. Failure makes sure that people cannot do things, because they know they are going fail. Think of the damage there: this is not just about failing to get on a course because you have not passed an exam; it is about not being able to integrate with anything.

Going back once again to the Govian model and that initial exam, I have spent a long time on the Back Benches of this Chamber saying that identified dyslexics should be allowed to take apprenticeships, if they can use assistive technology for English, without having to pass an English exam. That was an incredible experience. I forget who it was who said that the system had been run by officials in the department, who could not quite get that somebody could fail or that it was difficult. Ministers did; Ministers agreed with me, then disappeared and came back saying, “This is awfully difficult.” Eventually, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, took on the department and let us win that battle, at least in principle. He deserves eternal credit for that, but life is too short to do it over and again—certainly mine is. I hope that, when the Government look at this and in their replies, they look at ways that mean that people are supported and backed up throughout the systems. They will need backing and even more training-based systems.

What else in this report allows this to happen more easily? The answer is simple: technology. Most ways in which you can support people with educational problems are contained within computers. A few years ago, you had to stick on add-ons to the computer; now, voice recognition and readback is a standard package in just about any computer you can get. Those were the two big things that changed my life about 20 years ago. I hasten to add that they work a lot better now than then, but you still need to be in an environment in which their use is accepted. A classroom has to accept that somebody will produce their work differently. They may need to sit at the back of their class, so that another voice is not on the microphone. If my noble friend Lord Razzall were here, I would tell you in considerable detail what happened when he was sitting behind me and started talking to me when I was making a message in this way; I will leave out the expletives.

We have to learn how to use this and how to structure it, but we have that capacity to make lives a lot easier. Could the noble Baroness, in her reply, give us some idea of the thinking about the use of technology in normal, mainstream classrooms, if we are going to start coding, et cetera? This can help; it is a tool that will touch everyone’s lives.

Nobody has ever challenged me seriously about one idea: no one cares whether the document they are reading was word-processed by somebody talking or somebody tapping a keyboard. If they have, I have not met them. Think about it: it is a written document in front of you. You do not care. You might think that the punctuation or grammar is a little more like spoken than written English, but you can teach that. You can change it. It is that readily available.

Are we going to make sure that these groups outside can actually access the rest of the system, and these basic components, by using the technology? We have to have environments in which people can succeed, and we will make it that much easier if we take this step forward. Teachers have to be trained to spot and encourage people to use this correctly. But it is all there.

The waste in human population that this avoids is massive. The amount of extra time taken by the tiger parent to fight to get their child through will be reduced, such that everybody has an easier life. For the person who does not have the tiger parent who expects them to pass exams, maybe we can get teachers saying, “By the way, you can do it: this is the way.” It would be a major change.

This is not the whole story, but it would make the rest of the story easier for not only those teaching but a large part of the population. If we can integrate this, it means that people can be better employed later on. Knowledge of a subject and the use of technology opens up the world to a whole section of society which was restricted. I hope that we can do this, but what will get in the way—and has got in the way in the past—is an over-adherence to a very seriously academic curriculum, where other levels of success and types of creativity are frowned upon.

I do not know whether the Minister will wholly embrace everything that I have said. When she replies, some idea of what we are doing about the special education needs review would be very helpful—I am sure that not everything I am saying here is alien to the Government, and I hope not, because half of it has been taken from policy documents that they have produced over the years—so we can actually get some idea of where we are going. Because if you can allow people to access and thrive—and it will not just be these groups but people who are just slightly worse at spelling, or take it on later on or do not get the environment at home—you will actually allow people in.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who said at the start of this debate that we have a system now which is designed such that the ideal person is somebody who passes their Oxbridge exam first time and sits down at the age of about 17. There are only a few people who are ever going to do that. So let us make sure we can expand to the rest of them, so that they have reasonable chance of succeeding, and having a meaningful and happy life afterwards. You can always struggle around, and have the brilliant and the lucky get through, but those are not odds that I like.

GCSE and A-level Results: Attainment Gap

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I looked at this debate, I looked at the statistics and said, “Yes, there’s a problem”. I then looked at it again and said, “It ain’t the only place there’s a problem”. Then you look at it again and discover there are pockets of deprivation—let us face it, how many of us have read reports or sat through discussions in this place about deprivation in, for instance, rural towns and seaside towns? Wherever you have areas with lower economic expectation and financial support, you get worse educational results.

When you decide to invest in education as a parent or a child, you are putting huge effort in for something in the future. If there is nothing in the future that you feel that you can realistically attain, you are not going to do it. Also, with the best will in the world, you do not have the opportunity to support that person. The pandemic has proved this clearly. If you happened to be at home with your own computer in your own quiet room or space, you did fairly well; if you had one mobile phone between a family of four—we have all heard the horror stories—you did not do very well. Then you go back to an environment where you are behind and not achieving very well. So why would anybody sensible, who does not have any examples around them, invest time, effort and sacrifice to achieve? That child will not and, if their parents have had a bad experience, they probably will not push them either. We are in a cycle here and the Government have to intervene to change it, either through the school or by getting hold of parents—this is not easy; it takes time and is not just the responsibility of the Department for Education—to make sure that they value what they are going through and the sacrifice.

I remind the House of my interests in special educational needs and technical support. My pet subject is a classic example of this. If you have, say, a moderate dyslexic—that is the area I know most about—who is going through and is failing but is from a middle-class family, they find out why. The exam-passing classes make sure that they find out how you succeed, because they know you can. They know that it is not a big deal. They make sure that you can get through and get the support. They have the few hundred pounds, maybe few thousand pounds, to take on the system and push through.

If you come from an environment where nobody has passed any exams or maybe has passed just one, “What are you worrying about? You don’t need that for the jobs you’re going to do; you’ll do a job like me”. You can break that cultural link by making sure that teachers and the careers service start earlier and by making sure that people appreciate what is available to them by simply passing a few exams—you clearly do not have to be a genius to do that, because lots of people do it. All of us who have been to university know that, wherever it was, it was not manned by thousands of geniuses—there were some who had passed their exams who had trouble breathing without help, in my opinion.

If we go through this, it is the idea of reaching further in and making sure that people invest in it. That will make your job infinitely easier. We need support to get children through; many things have been talked about here that we could do, so I will not waste time by repeating them. Unless you get the intervention right to enable people to feel that the investment is not only beneficial but possible for the person doing it, they will not take it on. Your environment is a magnifying glass to your own personal cocktail of opportunity.

Unless we can make sure people understand that there is a possibility and a benefit from taking on these difficult choices, we will not do it. The levelling-up agenda should be something that addresses this. When the Minister replies—and I am, once again, reassured that she is still here; at least we have somebody who understands what is going on at the moment—will she give us some idea of how it ties in with the education agenda and how the departments are working together to achieve this? If there is a silver bullet, I very much doubt it is in the gun that the Department for Education by itself has at the moment.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[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”.