Police and Crime Commissioner Elections (Amendment) Order 2022

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Brinton

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I will make a couple of comments and ask a question about the SI on assistance with voting for persons with disabilities. I declare an interest as someone with a disability.

First, I very much welcome the approach. I have turned up at a polling station in a church only to discover that the place for my part of the ward had been moved to the nave, up two steps. I was offered the chance to fill in my ballot paper on the edge of a pew in the middle of the area—much improvement needed. I have to say that the local authority concerned was very apologetic and has since moved a large number of its polling stations.

The whole balance between the new SI and the Electoral Commission’s statutory guidance for returning officers is what is going to make this work. The burden on returning officers seems to have changed from being highly specific—and, in some cases, as with the tactile voting devices, inappropriate and no longer necessary—to being entirely reliant on the training of returning officers and their key staff and the staff present at polling stations on the day. I have talked to people with a range of disabilities, including a family member with visual impairment that has got considerably worse over the years. The draft statutory guidance suggests that all staff should be able to guide people with a wide range of different disabilities, which would require quite considerable training.

I notice that this will be reviewed within five years. It might be helpful to have a review before then because I suspect we are going to find quite a lot of patchy performance, not just between local authorities but between individual polling stations, because we are asking for a large amount of expertise from people who have not had to have the responsibility for that in the past.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I will start with the police and crime commissioner SI. This is a sensible change to the legislation as it brings the legal requirements for so-called notional expenditure in line with the Elections Act 2022. Consistency of regulations across all public elections is important, hence our support for this change. However, notional expenditure is a perennial concern for election agents as it is not one over which they have direct responsibility but they are legally responsible for it.

The Electoral Commission guidance will be important in clarifying the rules on expenditure. Can the Minister explain how an election agent or a candidate can be responsible for notional expenditure by a third party which exceeds election spending limits when reported? I look forward to her reply.

I turn to assistance with voting for persons with disabilities. The Electoral Commission has been consulting with people with disabilities about their experience of trying to vote on the day. We have heard from my noble friend Lady Brinton about her experience. The changes proposed in the SI will go some way to making voting accessible for those with disabilities. That must be wholly positive.

The Explanatory Memorandum says:

“There is … no significant … impact on the public sector.”


Can the Minister explain what is meant by “assistive equipment”, which election officers will have to provide in every polling station? What will the cost of that equipment be? There are 188 polling stations in Kirklees, for example, so additional costs can soon mount up. Will the Government be compensating councils under the additional burdens agreement? Perhaps the Minister can tell us.

Can the Minister explain why adults who accompany people with disabilities are not expected to show their ID as an additional security check, rather than completing one of the forms drafted in the papers with this SI? As the Minister will know, the demand for voter ID at polling stations will lead many more to opt for postal voting. What improvements will be put in place to enable people with disabilities or with little English to use a postal vote according to the requirements of the Ballot Act 1872? I look forward to the Minister’s replies.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Brinton

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has already expressed the worries from home educators and why she is opposing the clause standing part. My queries are more probing as to whether these clauses and the schedule should stand part.

On Clause 49 on school attendance orders, many Peers have already raised a surfeit of problems during the debate. Unlike the current system on the government website that I described, there is no sense of a ladder of penalties, of support between each stage before progressing on, or how local authorities will work as constructively as they can with parents and pupils before the process for school attendance orders kicks in. I know that the Minister said before the break that the guidance will talk about support. The problem is that, if that guidance is not in the Bill or referred to in the Bill, it might easily be missed and ignored.

On Clause 50 and failure to comply with the school attendance order, I want to come back to something the Minister said at the end of the debate on the first group. I am sorry, and I appreciate that the Minister is probably getting frustrated by this, but I have frustrations myself. She said in response to my question that prison terms were increasing from three months to 51 weeks because magistrates’ powers were now being increased from three months to 51 weeks. In fact, the current maximum is six months. It is going up to 51 weeks, but it is not currently three months. I was slightly bemused by that.

Usually, a maximum prison sentence is defined by the level of the offence, not the sentencing power of the court that is going to hear it. That is exactly why I quoted examples of crimes that would receive sentences of up to six months—threatening someone with a weapon or a second offence of possession of a gun. The example that I gave of a 12-month sentence—I appreciate that 51 weeks is not quite 12 months—was of very serious harassment and stalking, over an extended period, which involved a large team of police investigating over many months, not to mention the distress it caused to the 30 people who were the targets.

I am hearing from the Minister’s response that the drafters decided that, because magistrates will have the opportunity to sentence a convicted criminal to up to 51 weeks, that should be in the Bill. There are three worries and three groups of people involved in this. First and most importantly, what is the impact on children of a parent, especially if it is a single parent, going to prison? For three months, a temporary foster placement or possibly a short-term placement with kinship carers might be possible, but social services view a 51-week sentence very differently, even if the parent comes out after half the sentence has been served.

The second is the impact on prisons. We already know that our prisons are overcrowded. I have no idea of the numbers the Minister thinks are likely to be involved, but it might be useful to have an indication. The third is the impact on the parent who is themselves imprisoned. I ask the Minister if the Ministry of Justice has said that it is content with lines 18 to 20 in Clause 50 and this new, much-increased maximum sentence of 51 weeks.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, sort of said “all home educators” and I briefly want to say that that is not the case. Some home educators feel threatened by a number of people in their organisation, particularly a number of ex-home educators who are running and providing services. I am happy to show the noble Baroness the evidence for that privately.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Brinton

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a former chair of governors of Mayfield Primary School in Cambridge, which at that time had the hearing impaired unit for southern Cambridgeshire.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, introduced his Amendment 97 on arrangements for funding for specialist SEND services for children and young people with sensory impairment. I completely support it. I have heard very recently of a profoundly deaf child, the only one in his mainstream primary school, who has access to a deaf teacher for just one afternoon a week. That is not inclusive education.

The Secretary of State must give local authorities the right level of funds, in this case through the high-needs block, so that they can deliver the support that SEND children need. This is the key to the current SEND issue: the money does not get to the local authority so the local authority cannot follow the child and the child’s needs; this probably explains many of the problems that we are discussing in this group.

Amendment 99 adds to Clause 48 that the details of any SEN or disability that a child has need to be listed; I support that too. I also support the amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, who set out so eloquently the further protections needed for pupils with SEND. Amendment 163 at last demands a strategy to close the education attainment gap for young people with SEND.

Last Friday I attended a webinar run by the Disabled Children’s Partnership, at which parents recounted many of the problems they are facing in getting the right level of support; or worse—as in the case of one parent of a child with multiple physical disabilities but who was intellectually on a par with his peer age group. The only school available to manage the former issue could not teach him at his chronological age; every other child in that school also had learning difficulties.

Even worse, Oskar Nash and Sammy Alban-Stanley, two disabled teenagers with complex medical needs, both died after their school and LA failed in their duty to follow their care plans. Their families had pleaded for support in helping them to cope with the boys’ disabilities. Sammy’s mother told us at the webinar how exhausting it had been to constantly have to fight for the support he needed. CAMHS had recommended a care education and treatment review, but it was not actioned before his death. Oskar Nash was moved from a special school to a mainstream school without further review of his EHCP. Despite urgent referrals to CAMHS, which passed him on to an external counselling service without any clinical assessment, at the time of his death his local authority, Surrey County Council, had not done an assessment of his needs. Coroners in both these cases are extremely concerned about the boys’ deaths and have written recently to Mr Zahawi, Mr Javid and the local education and healthcare bodies involved.

I have worked with families with disabled children for years. These cases are the tip of the iceberg. The system is broken. Children are dying and children are being let down. While many of the amendments relating to Part 4 of the Bill relate to the concerns of parents who have chosen to home-educate their children, I want to focus in this group on a number of different groups of pupils who do not wish to be out of school but who face difficulties, either with their needs not being met or who have medical conditions that mean they are out of school. They broadly fall into the category of school being an unsafe place for them either without medical advice being followed or, for some, without reasonable adjustments that would have made school safe for them.

Almost universally, all these affected children are getting no alternative provision at all. They include pupils so severely bullied that they are waiting for mental health appointments but cannot face school until they get help. There are also pupils who are young carers known to their local authorities, who are doing a full-time job caring for a parent or other family member and are emotionally and physically exhausted. There are pupils with complex medical needs, with clinical requirements that are not being followed by the school. There are pupils who are either immunosuppressed or immunocompromised, whose doctors say that special arrangements should be made for them in school; otherwise, they are at risk of catching illnesses—such as, but not only, Covid—which might kill them.

Dr Lee-Anne Kohli’s son Kieran is clinically extremely vulnerable. His paediatric cardiologists requested remote learning for both of her children. This was agreed until Department for Education policy changed. From September 2020, the school enforced new government policy that every child must attend school. When the school threatened fines and prosecution for persistent absences and recommended to the parents that the child be off-rolled, the parents eventually did this. Children such as Kieran should have access to remote exams but most exam centres do not permit remote exams. The parents say that, if a school attendance order were enforced against them, the children would have no option but to relocate overseas to live with their father as UK schools are not safe for their child; the hospital doctor says so too.

“Child EA” is due to start primary school this autumn. Both she and her mother have primary immunodeficiencies and her father is also clinically vulnerable. The family are acutely aware of the issues faced by high-risk families. Both parents have been supported by their employers to work from home. All their child needs to be able to go to school is a HEPA filter to be installed at the school, but the school will not do that. Currently, these parents are considering delaying their decision until their child reaches compulsory school age. They face having to educate her at home alongside her attending a private forest school to allow her to socialise outdoors if there is no HEPA filter in the primary school.

There is one thing that many parents from this group share: they are already being fined for their child being out of school because currently schools have the right to ignore professional medical advice or the advice of other experts such as social workers. This is because the statutory guidance for schools on pupils with medical conditions has been diluted away from its original intentions. It cannot be right for parents to be fined if their child’s safety or needs are not being met in school and where an expert says that, until their safety is assured or their needs are met, the school should make alternative provision for them. Parents are being fined now despite their children being ill. Clauses 48 and 49 will make this much worse, especially if Ministers, local authorities and head teachers are able to decide what is and is not medical, contradicting the advice of professional doctors.

There is a way to remedy all this. Section 100 of the Children and Families Act says:

“The appropriate authority for a school to which this section applies must make arrangements for supporting pupils at the school with medical conditions … In meeting the duty in subsection (1) the appropriate authority must have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State.”


The statutory guidance published in 2014 after the Secretary of State worked with schools, parents, medical charities and Peers, including myself, stated clearly:

“The aim is to ensure that all children with medical conditions, in terms of both physical and mental health, are properly supported in school so that they can play a full and active role in school life, remain healthy and achieve their academic potential.”


It further said:

“Governing bodies should ensure that the school’s policy is explicit about what practice is not acceptable”,


including ignoring “medical evidence or opinion” and penalising

“children for their attendance record if their absences are related to their medical condition.”

That guidance also states how schools, local authorities, doctors, parents and the children themselves should together create a healthcare plan for these children that sets out how best the child’s medical needs can be met. As I have said at earlier stages of this Bill, unfortunately this statutory guidance was changed in 2017, with no consultation with medical charities or parents, to remove the statutory elements about schools having to work with, and not ignore, medical advice.

Page five of the new guidance talks about schools having to follow the duty under the Equality Act for disabled children, but not all children with medical conditions are classified as disabled. Worse, some of the excellent parts of the previous version are now reduced in strength to being merely “further advice”, including working with medical practitioners who know the child.

At the webinar on Friday, I heard about a six year-old child with type 1 insulin-dependent and complex diabetes, ASD, sensory processing disorder, Pica, communication difficulties, severe anxieties and more who has not yet attended school. Nursery consisted of one and a half hours per day and was very inconsistent. Nursery staff were said to be trained in diabetes, but mum was called on a daily basis to check her son’s dropping levels. The family recently attended a SEND tribunal. The tribunal judge found that a SEN school with no medically trained staff or qualified nurse on site can meet need against parental choice of a non-maintained special school. The problem is that the tribunal decision was made of the grounds of the best use of resources, even though the parents argued, “How on earth can you put a price on his life?” The actual effect of that decision is that it is dangerous for the child to be left in school without experienced staff who understand the child’s diabetes properly. I have laid my amendment to make sure that we go back to a previous version, where medical advice is followed for these children.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am speaking in place of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who was at a meeting at the DfE. As he arrived late, he did not want to be accused of not being part of the debate. He was talking about dyslexia at that meeting. I would rather hear from him than me, but I will just say a few words.

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his very important amendment. I want to understand a bit more about the usage of language in respect of that. He gave some examples, but he did not give any real steer on the language we should use. Maybe that is something we could have between now and Report. I am conscious that special educational needs will loom large over the next few months in any case.

I was at a meeting at lunchtime hearing from families of children in alternative provision. These are children and young people who have been permanently excluded from school. The fact that linked them all was that they all had special educational needs. Had those needs been identified at a very early stage and provision made, maybe the problem of exclusion from school would not be as great as it currently is.