Education Bill

Debate between Lord Griffiths of Burry Port and Lord Hill of Oareford

Monday 11th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords—

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

Perhaps I may respond to that point because we want to get on. We are proposing the perpetuation of the current situation. The people who are currently responsible, the local authorities and other bodies, would continue as now to be responsible. The legislative regulatory framework in terms of employment law, equality law and everything else remains in place. It is not the case that the proposed abolition of the SSSNB would change what we currently have going on. The change would have been if the SSSNB had gone ahead.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

With the change in role and the scope of responsibility being exercised by the local authority being radically revised, it will not be the same local authority that we will have to deal with and to which we will have to look. Where I live, we now have other bodies providing what has been provided in the past. Consequently, it is not just a return to the status quo. If this Bill goes through, the status quo is no more. In fact, it is not a status quo at all.

Building Schools for the Future

Debate between Lord Griffiths of Burry Port and Lord Hill of Oareford

Monday 14th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am afraid I have to agree with my noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater that that was indeed the case. I fear that it is part of a broader picture. I understand why the party opposite will, perfectly properly, question spending decisions and cuts that this Government are having to make but hope that they can see the reason we are having to make those decisions and cuts. I do not enjoy finding myself in the situation of going around the country having to turn down all kinds of applications for school capital. It is because we inherited a situation in which we had no capital.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, first, I should express a possible conflict of interest as the vice-chairman of an educational foundation that underwrites two schools, or at least collaborates with the Government in that, in the East End of London. The Minister may remember that almost before he had drawn his first breath as a Minister, before the Recess last summer, I asked questions about the status of one of those schools in the borough of Tower Hamlets that had made a great deal of effort to get itself into the right position to have its Better Schools for the Future programme agreed. At that time, despite my asking him on two separate occasions, the Minister was not able to answer my questions because, as he honestly said—he is a man who always says what he honestly feels—he did not know the answer.

That was last summer. I expressed on that occasion anxiety that the foundation of which I am vice-chair had already incurred £5 million-worth of expenditure to acquire a piece of land and was incurring significant legal costs as it sought to process the application. Everything was on hold; everything went into abeyance; nobody knew what was happening through the autumn. We worked through the Christmas holidays with lawyers—our legal fees have now accumulated to nearly £500,000—and, just last week, I signed off an agreement with the London Borough of Tower Hamlets for it to hold £7.4 million on behalf of our trust against the day when, or if, the Government allow the £13 million that we still hope to get from the Building Schools for the Future programme because we were one of the schools that was in the end spared last summer.

Is the Minister able at this stage to enlighten me as to whether we can go ahead, because we still do not know? Will he agree that the word used of the BSF by the Government to describe it, inefficient, happens to be exactly the word that the trust of which I am vice-chair thinks applies to the Government to describe the way in which they have handled this matter?