Education Bill

Debate between Lord Elton and Lord Peston

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, I have been reading a lot recently about ambiguity in legislation and the problem of its interpretation. I find this section of the Bill potentially extremely ambiguous. Indeed, whoever drafted this section was perfectly well aware of that because the sentence which we are asked to omit includes the words,

“the appropriate religious body”.

If you then read on further to subsection (5), there is no doubt that, in the case of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, the appropriate religious body is well defined—it can be done. It must suddenly have dawned on whoever drafted this provision that in the case of almost all the other religious schools, there is no appropriate religious body. If we take a Jewish school, a number of multifarious bodies might claim to be the significant body for Jews—certainly, it would not be the Chief Rabbi who has only a bit of the orthodox Jewish community as there are lots of other bits. I would not be at all surprised in the case of Muslims or Islam, whichever way you look at it, that, again, there would be a great many bodies which would all claim to be the appropriate religious body.

Therefore, this bit of the legislation is just plain wrong. It needs to be taken away by the Minister and redrafted no matter what happens with the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. I am clear that whoever drafted it knew this at the time that this was written. I do not think that the Minister can get away from this at all.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords—

[Lord Peston]

Perhaps I may just finish. The other ambiguity concerns the word “consult”. What does it mean? Certainly, when I was a professor, I used to consult the students but it did not mean that I took any notice of them. In this case, does consult mean, and is it clear in terms of the interpretation, listening to them and doing something about what they are worried about? That is always a problem. We have had this issue on many other bits of legislation in my career here. The best advice that we in this Committee could give the Minister is for him to go away and come back to us with better drafted legislation.

[Lord Elton]

As the noble Lord is on the question of definitions, I assume that consultation is the same in all statute. It occurs in so many clauses in every statute that everyone knows what it means. As to his second point, Section 88F(3)(e) of the 1998 Act contains the definition of the body which he says is not defined.