Air Quality (Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles Database) (England and Wales) Regulations 2019

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Adonis

Thursday 11th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I think the principle of the regulations that the Minister has moved will be entirely uncontroversial to the House. Giving local authorities more powers to regulate air quality and the causes of poor air quality is the right thing to do. It is right that local authorities, which represent the views of their voters, should be able to act on this, providing they use sound procedural methods. I do not think any noble Lord will want to query the principle of the regulations. Poor air quality is one of the main causes of premature death in the country at large and it is right to give local authorities the power to deal with it.

I have two issues. First, the Minister’s speech was full of impenetrable jargon. It was clearly written for her by her civil servants. Will she tell us what a “regulatory triage assessment” is? I have not come across that phrase before. What is the “new burdens principle” she referred to? I was not aware of the old burdens principle, but can she tell us what the new burdens principle is?

Secondly, it would be helpful if the Minister could give us some indication of the Government’s assessment. She referred to a regulatory panel being set up in her department to deal with this, an oversight panel that will oversee the process. It would be helpful if the House had some indication of what the impact of these new clean air zones will be on taxi fleets outside London. There clearly will be opposition to it from taxi operators because they fear they will be subject to charges, particularly for older vehicles that are more polluting. It would be helpful if we had some idea of what the Government think the impact will be. I know this has been a particular issue in London. The mayor has been forthright about the need to modernise taxi fleets, and I support him in doing so. My assumption is that the taxi fleet outside London is older and might be more impacted by clean air zones, and it would be useful if we had some understanding of what the impact is likely to be.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, there will always be somebody who will be inconvenienced by changes and, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, in this case it will be fleet drivers and fleet operators. They will often have cars that a few years ago would not have been thought out of date but will suddenly become so. A study of how we are making sure that that bit of the transport network goes on would be beneficial to the House.

This information will be updated once a week, but local government is not exactly awash with spare cash at the moment. Will the Minister indicate how the Government will support this to make sure it happens? I cannot think of a bit of local government at the moment that is not saying and displaying by its actions that it is short of resources. This database is a good thing, but if the Government do not make sure it is properly financed it will not happen well or quickly. Will the Minister give us a little more information on that?

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Adonis

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and his amendment, primarily because this is the first chance we will get to dig out some detail here. Many of the questions I have about this are directed at the Government Front Bench, because the Government’s attitude is crucial. There is undoubtedly a problem with home education, with the fact that it is totally unregulated and we do not really know what is going on. That is the nub of it.

Everybody who comes to see me over this reckons that they are doing a pretty good job in producing something. We on these Benches had as a party group a meeting with some home educators. The interesting thing was that, within about 20 minutes, they were arguing among themselves as to what was the true essence of home education in quite a heated way. The only consensus we got was when I asked them whether they agreed that a child has a right to an education that equips them for adult life afterwards. That was the only degree of agreement we got.

Most of this is dictated by people talking about things such as the rights of the parent. The rights of the child are there. The essence of keeping a record of those who are being home educated is fine. I do not think that there is anybody who would disagree with that. However, I am afraid that I have quite a lot of problems with the detail on this. I am not sure how it will work. There is far too much undiscussed government regulation that will be relied on afterwards and so on.

If the Government are paying attention to this, it is largely as a result of some classic cases of neglect or cruelty where a person has been hidden away. Throughout the communities I have spoken to about this, everyone agrees that there are cases where there are seven or so children and they just cannot be bothered to deal with them, so they home educate them and nothing happens. That example has literally been said to me. I was not given any dates, times or names, but I was given that example. What do the Government intend to do to find out what is being done there?

Then, when it comes to regulation, you start to get into very muddy waters. I have had briefings from the local government authority which say, “This is great, but we do not have any power to enter a home”. I do not know whether or not that is right. Does the Minister have an answer to that technical question? All the powers for registration and assessment do not matter if you cannot get into the home. I suspect that is wrong and that other legislation could be used, but you will need a mechanism to identify and cross-reference. Is that not fun? Is it not easy to do? It would be asking a bit much of a Private Member’s Bill to get anywhere near that. Can we have some answers from the Government about what they are prepared to do on this? If we do not, we will not know what the intention is on whether there will be the back-up and authority to go through with this.

Following on from what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, we should remember that many people are home educating because they feel the system has failed them. I do not often make an intervention in an education debate without mentioning dyslexia, and I draw the Committee’s attention to my interests in that field. It may have been more common in the past, but it still happens now that people may go into the system without an early enough identification of their special educational needs. They have a bad experience and the school gets into a series of appeals about what used to be statements and are now plans. A conflict situation develops with the education establishment, and some people say “Enough is enough” and pull out.

As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, also said, the state then seems to more or less wash its hands of the pupils and many home-educating parents ask, “What is the state’s duty to ensure that we have some assistance?”. If children become school phobic because they have failed or have special educational needs—for example, if they have been overloaded with inappropriate maths and English tuition and help which dyslexics cannot absorb and makes life a living hell for them—what is the state going to do? Dyslexia is a difficulty with short-term memory and an inability to sequence, which anyone who has tried to organise my diary will know manifests itself in me on occasion. If they have to go through this, what is the role of the state to support them? It is a complicated issue. The question of resources also arises. Will we do this? If help is made compulsory, this would lead to a situation in the current world where home-educated pupils would get more assistance than they would do in the school system. It gets more and more complicated.

Can the Minister say what the Government think should happen now? What is their thinking on this? It is clear that the noble Lord, Lord Solely, has enjoined a process of kicking the Government into action, but what are they doing? That will be covered in the rest of this discussion. Is this Bill merely a footnote, a forlorn hope or a part of the process? We need to know because that will colour everything that happens in the rest of today, the future of the Bill and on this issue over the next couple of years. If we are to get this legislation through, it must be fit for purpose.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I agree mostly with what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said about home education and I commend my noble friend Lord Soley on his Bill.

I would like to direct the attention of the House and the Minister to the issue of school exclusions, which is getting more and more serious in communities up and down the country and directly relates to home education. Yesterday in Gateshead—having addressed the north-east chamber of commerce, ably led by the son of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who I am delighted to see in his place—I met social workers and school leaders to discuss the big challenges they face. The single biggest issue that they raised with me was the problem of school exclusions, pupil referral units and what they call “off-rolling”—a term which, even as a former education Minister, I had not come across before. Off-rolling is managing people off school rolls into pupil referral units or into no provision whatever and often calling it home education. This is simply to get pupils off the rolls so that they do not engage in disruption in school—disruption which, frankly, the schools for the most part should be managing—and do not count in performance and league tables which are published for schools at the end of each academic year.

This is a big issue. To give a concrete example of what is happening in Gateshead at the moment, one of the social workers at the meeting said that the pupil referral unit in Newcastle, where many of the students from Gateshead are referred, until recently had nearly 400 pupils in it, which is almost the size of a small secondary school. Of those pupils, only 80 to 90 were formally part of the pupil referral unit; all the others had been “off-rolled” or managed into it. For the most part, they did not turn up. They were lucky if they were there for an hour a week. Indeed, it was said to me that if they did all turn up there would not be provision for them.

This is a huge social crisis which is taking place in this country at the moment. It is at the root of many of our problems, including in educational underperformance and in the criminal justice system. Many of these children, particularly adolescent boys, are basically not playing any part in schools and are being managed out of them by the age of 14 or 15. They do not get any qualifications or into a culture of learning or work—and we all know what happens to them thereafter.

The relationship with home education is problematic. As a former Minister, I was constantly being told by home educators that it was an essential social right that people should be able to home educate. I believe in principle that that is the case for people who have philosophical views on how education should be conducted—noble Lords will know of people for whom that is true—but for most people home education has nothing whatever to do with philosophical preferences about the style of education but everything to do with failure at and rejection by schools, which often happens. In some communities, particularly Traveller communities, people often do not want their kids to go to local schools because their relationship with the local schools is so poor, and the cultural issues and alienation are so great, that by the time they come, particularly, to secondary level, they do not want to play any part in the local schools.

We all change our views over time. When I was a Minister, I was worried about seeking to limit the power of schools on exclusions. This is a deeply difficult issue because nothing holds back schools and pupils more than disruptive children, and getting the balance right is difficult. My view now, after engaging in this issue for many years, is that Parliament needs to adopt a much more robust approach and that temporary exclusions should be banned. There are hundreds of thousands of temporary exclusions a year. The idea that the punishment awarded for low-level disruption in schools should be chucking kids on to the street for a day or two—as if somehow that would be an incentive for them not to misbehave in future—is one of the biggest misconceptions in the way we handle discipline in schools.

However, for serious disruption, my view is that schools should not be allowed to permanently exclude pupils unless there are issues of violence at stake which simply cannot be managed inside the school. That is not to say that seriously disruptive pupils should be able to disrupt classes. Rather like the way in which we handle special needs, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, schools should have additional resources for managing challenging behaviour. It may be that in some cases the provision should be outside the classroom —although, again, this should be managed properly—but getting pupils off the rolls of schools so that no one has responsibility for them at all, which is happening at the moment, is an absolute derogation of our duty as parliamentarians to see that all young people are educated. To put the euphemistic label of home education on it is to betray a generation of young people who then, in very large measure, end up on the streets, underemployed, unemployed or in the criminal justice system.