House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Low of Dalston and Lord Adonis

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 7th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I defer to my noble friend’s greater understanding of these issues. However, it is not the case that an indirectly elected House that represented the nations and regions of this country would not be a powerful House. If my noble friend wishes himself to go and spend time in a university, he needs to go and study the operation of the Bundesrat in Germany, which is a substantially powerful institution, because it represents the elected state Governments of the Federal Republic of Germany. If my noble friend’s concern is about having a stronger second Chamber, any of these options would lead to a substantially stronger second Chamber than we have at the moment, and that would of necessity take power away from the House of Commons, which would be a very good thing.

These are issues which we should be debating as a country, and which the public wish to see debated, because they want to see more substantial power brought to them. It is a particular issue in the Midlands and the north of this country, where the sense of alienation is greatest and, I might add, if you look at the statistics, those regions are least well represented even within this nominated House. Eight per cent of the Members of your Lordships’ House come from the north of England; 15% of the population comes from the north. London and the south-east are almost twice overrepresented in this House if you compare the number of Members of this House with the population of those regions.

There are fundamental problems with the operation of this House, which will not be dealt with—I say with great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—by minute, incremental reforms. They require fundamental reform. The Brexit crisis that we are now going through puts fundamental constitutional reform on the agenda. The time is right to address it now and not to engage in tinkering reforms of this kind, which will simply entrench a nominated House.

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

Instead of addressing us at some length on the rationale for his amendment, could the noble Lord possibly answer an important question about the process or the mechanism by which it would operate? As I read the amendment, it says that whenever a vacancy occurs by reason of the death—or, I suppose, the resignation—of a hereditary Peer, the whole panoply of a general election has to be mobilised to fill this one vacancy. Is that really what the noble Lord’s amendment suggests?

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, this is such a well-crafted amendment that it would make a fundamental reform of this House unavoidable, which was the original purpose of the undertakings given by my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg during the passage of the 1999 Act. He saw at the time, and we agreed, that this would be a poisoned pill in the composition of the current House of Lords that would make the creation of a democratic House unavoidable. That, alas, has not happened in the last 20 years. I greatly regret it and I accept some measure of responsibility for the fact that the Government of which I was apart did not succeed in carrying through its proposals for a fully elected House. But I am afraid that the party opposite did not succeed in it, and that the noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches, who claim to be most powerfully in favour of these reforms, also failed when they were in government. So in different ways, all the parties in this House have failed.

That failure, and the failure of wider constitutional reform of which it is a part, is a substantial part of the reason why we are going through the current Brexit crisis. We need to address it, and I would much rather do so by fundamental changes and improvements to the constitution of the United Kingdom than by wrenching this country out of the European Union.

These issues cannot be ducked, and we certainly cannot sweep them under the carpet with tiny, incremental changes of the kind which my noble friend Lord Grocott is proposing, so I beg to move.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Low of Dalston and Lord Adonis

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that entirely new schools can be set up, and indeed are set up at the moment, as academies. So, to the extent that that is true, free schools can be set up at the moment under existing academy legislation. I warmly welcome the suggestion made by my noble friend Lady Morgan that free schools should be called academies. I hope that the Minister is able to accept that suggestion, which my noble friend makes with great generosity of spirit, to make clear that we have a much more uniform nomenclature available. I am very keen to see all categories of schools that have the legal characteristics of academies called academies.

[Lord Low of Dalston]

I shall speak to Amendments 13 and 76, which are tabled in my name. When we debated the Bill at Second Reading, there was widespread concern throughout the House that academies should have obligations to meet the needs of pupils with special educational needs that are no less rigorous than those which apply to maintained schools. The Minister was very clear that he was fully committed to this, and I am grateful to him for the trouble he has taken in meeting Peers with these concerns and also in writing to provide assurance that that is what the Bill achieves. However, there are still areas that remain unclear, where the commitment could do with being spelled out more fully or where gaps in the obligations to which academies are subject need to be plugged. These amendments are directed at remedying these deficiencies.

Amendment 13 is a probing amendment with two purposes: first, to ascertain whether academies receiving academy financial assistance will be required to have funding agreements in place; and, secondly, to ascertain whether meeting the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities will be included as a standard requirement within arrangements for academy financial assistance, just as it currently is in funding agreements.

Currently, academies are principally accountable through and governed by funding agreements signed with the Secretary of State. Clause 1(2)(b) introduces a new form of funding for academies—

“arrangements for academy financial assistance”.

These are not found in the original academies legislation. Arrangements for academy financial assistance are a form of direct funding from the Secretary of State granted through powers conferred by Section 14 of the Education Act 2002. Arrangements for academy financial assistance are an alternative to funding through an academy agreement so that it appears possible that, where arrangements for academy financial assistance are put in place, an academy may not be required to have a funding agreement.

While it is possible to have reservations regarding the scope and effectiveness of funding agreements as accountability mechanisms, there has none the less been clarity in funding agreements signed after 2007 that academies should have regard to the SEN code of practice and use their best endeavours to ensure that special educational needs are met. There are concerns that this new form of academy funding—arrangements for academy financial assistance—will bypass the safeguards contained in funding agreements in relation to SEN provision. This amendment gives the Minister an opportunity to make the position clear and to reassure us that academies receiving academy financial assistance will be required to have funding agreements, and that meeting the needs of children with SEN and disabilities will be included as a standard requirement within arrangements for academy financial assistance.