Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Lord Blencathra

Friday 16th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, my amendment would ensure simply that the statutory guidelines could be scrutinised by Parliament in the lowest form of scrutiny we have: namely, the negative procedure. My amendment could not be more simple or reasonable. It says simply that the Secretary of State must lay the guidance before Parliament and may bring it in by the negative procedure. That procedure, as we all know, allows the guidance to take immediate effect, but would permit parties in Parliament, if so minded, to debate it. Just as with the thousands of other SIs which pass through here every year, there would probably be no debate, no objection and no vote—but at least our excellent Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee would get a chance to have a look at the regulations. That is all my amendment seeks.

I criticised the Bill at Second Reading on these grounds, and also because we had not seen a draft of the guidance that we were being asked blindly to rubber-stamp. Well, I am able to give some mild praise to the Minister before I start on some mild criticism. The department has now published the draft guidance, which is very helpful for all of us. I appreciate that it may change and that more people and organisations may have input into it, but this House has usually demanded, and rightly so, to see any draft guidance or draft regulations that we are being asked to take on trust.

For the avoidance of any doubt, I thoroughly approve of the Bill and am not opposed to it. Indeed, if there was an opportunity to have the other place deal with our amendments before the end of this Session, I would push this amendment to a vote, and I would put down another amendment insisting that all schools create, either by themselves or through parents or a charitable trust, a system for used and second-hand uniforms. As a soldier in a Highland regiment, the only bit of new kit I had, out of scores of items, was boots and socks. Everything else was used, cleaned, repaired, refurbished and reissued—and by God we were proud to wear it. The only thing I rejected was second-hand long johns—I assure noble Lords that they do not want to wear second-hand long johns from a Scottish soldier.

When I spoke at Second Reading, I said that I was speaking in a personal capacity and not as the chair of the Delegated Powers Committee. Since then, the committee has met and published a report on the Bill, and it has identified, in its usual and meticulous way, the inappropriate delegated powers in the Bill that my amendment seeks to address. I can tell the Committee that I had no part in those decisions or discussions. I was absent when the Delegated Powers Committee approved the report, so I have not influenced its decision. However, I am informed that the committee wholeheartedly approved of the line that I took at Second Reading: namely, that the guidance should be subject to some simple parliamentary scrutiny.

Since Second Reading, the department has produced a delegated powers memorandum, and I am grateful for that. It should have been done in the first place, but the Department for Education is not unique in that failing—not by a long shot. The department makes four justifications for the guidance not being subject to the negative resolution procedure. First, it says that the guidance will be drafted after consultation with parents, schools and stakeholders, and taking into account comments made by parliamentarians as the Bill progresses through Parliament. But the Delegated Powers Committee says, “That is all very jolly good, but there is no justification for the finished guidance not then being scrutinised by Parliament if Parliament wishes to do so”.

Secondly, the memorandum states:

“The Department produces a large amount of detailed and technical statutory guidance to support schools and the wider education sector”,


and, since that has not been subject to parliamentary scrutiny in the past, the new guidance is simply consistent with past procedure. The memorandum uses the phrase:

“Parliament has already determined that guidance should not be subject to Parliamentary scrutiny.”


Has Parliament actually determined that? Correct me if I am wrong, but did Parliament ever make a decision in principle that it would not scrutinise any guidance from the DoE? Is it not the case that guidance has already been issued, and Parliament has been unable to challenge it—unlike as we are able to do today? It is more an act of omission than a deliberate act of commission not to scrutinise guidance from the department. In any case, as the Delegated Powers Committee report points out, what was done in the past is irrelevant: each Bill should be considered on its own merits, and this Bill deals with nothing other than statutory guidance.

Thirdly, the department’s memorandum says:

“The statutory guidance is not equivalent to … Education Codes of Practice”,


which are

“broad and extremely detailed texts which … have many aspects which are controversial and may require debate and amendment.”

It says that this is a “very limited document”. Well, the Delegated Powers Committee says that the fact that the guidance may or may not resemble a code of practice does not mean that parliamentary scrutiny of it should be ruled out. The Bill is concerned exclusively with a certain type of guidance, yet Parliament has been asked to sanction the production of guidance that will never be required even to be laid before Parliament.

It may be a limited document, but it is far from non-controversial. We have all seen the excellent briefing from the Schoolwear Association, and it strikes me that there will be strong arguments made by different parties about branded items and single supplements. Indeed, there were quite firm and differing views expressed at Second Reading in this House on branding and single suppliers—indeed, seeing the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, in his place, about the fact of having a uniform in the first place. While we may all instinctively think that multiple suppliers will deliver cheaper items, that may not necessarily be the case, and I can envisage legal challenges arising from various quarters. I simply say that it cannot be right that the courts will end up interpreting legal guidance that Parliament will never have seen.

Fourthly, the department says that the guidance will be published in such a manner that it will be accessible to all who need to see it. I should ruddy well hope so, but that has nothing to do with letting parliamentarians have a look at it, even in the most minor of parliamentary procedures, before it is published. If an entire Bill can be dedicated to the cost aspects of school uniforms, the resulting guidance is important enough to be subject to a parliamentary procedure.

I am glad that the memorandum does not seek to make the point, which was made at Second Reading, that the guidance cannot be approved by regulations because it would have to be amended regularly. The department has kindly confirmed, in a Written Answer to me, that the current guidance has not been amended once since 2013, so there is no justification for resisting parliamentary scrutiny on the grounds that the guidance would have to be constantly amended and brought before Parliament.

Finally, I will make one observation—or rather, a political guess. I think the House will want to see more and more of our homegrown regulations and guidance. Until 31 December 2020, the Government could bounce through thousands of regulations implementing EU law and we all knew that it was pointless challenging them, since we had to implement them verbatim. All that has changed. I suspect that the whole voracious judicial review industry is waiting to challenge every regulation made by Ministers, because the Government will no longer have the watertight excuse of saying, “No point taking us to court, my learned friend. It’s not us, guv, it’s the EU”.

As we make our own laws, so this House will want to challenge more of our own laws. The debate on this little Bill and guidance is just a taster of what I foresee, and what I welcome, happening in Parliament when this House is back in full physical mode and our 850 Members are looking for things to do. However, that is a more philosophical debate for another day.

I end with the conclusions of the Delegated Powers Committee report:

“The fundamental problem with the Bill is that the statutory guidance affords the maximum of discretion to the Government with no opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny. Accordingly, we recommend that the guidance should be subject to parliamentary scrutiny, with the negative procedure being appropriate in this instance.”


I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s response and I beg to move.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, when a balloon has the air let out of it, it appears to be merely a piece of useless rubber. I have a view about what I call the “Chope approach” to Private Members’ Bills—Christopher Chope, as Members will know, has familiarised himself with just about every piece of private Members’ legislation going through the House of Commons in order to filibuster or find a way of blocking it. I really hope that the mover of the amendment will respect the fact that this is a very small but important Bill in terms of what happens in real life, out in the school communities that our children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces attend.

I hope that this afternoon we will lay aside this amendment, which is designed to block the Bill if it is pressed; the mover acknowledged that himself, of course. He also talked about the Scottish long johns. My grandchildren’s school—Windmill Hill in the north of Sheffield—has a little scheme along similar lines. We were talking only this morning about how important that approach is in helping to ensure that nothing is wasted and that no one feels as though they are disqualified from being able to present themselves effectively because of their income. That is what, in essence, this Bill and the guidance are all about.

It has taken 50 years to get to this point, it has to be said. So often, the issue of school uniforms was about class and the quality of the school you went to. It was about grammar schools versus secondary schools; the grammar schools took pride in their uniform and their distinguishing features, and others often felt resentful. Times have moved on—thank God—but I recall that, over 40 years ago, we should have learned in my party about how disastrous referenda can be when you hold them with the distinct intention of ensuring that, if you are defeated, you will carry on regardless.

In Sheffield at the end of the 1970s, just before I became the city council’s leader, it decided, because of the enormous cost of school uniforms, the class nature of what was taking place and the fact that poor people were struggling to keep up, that school uniforms should be abolished and put it to a referendum of all parents. The parents were in fact a couple of decades ahead of the city council and voted to keep school uniforms and to develop them in the schools that did not have them. The city council, in its arrogance at the time, decided that it would, on political grounds, do away with school uniforms whatever the vote. We learned a lot from that. I certainly learned that if you are going to ask people their opinion, you respect it.

This afternoon, we are respecting the desire of schools, whether they are local authority schools, multi-academy trust schools, or individual free-standing trust schools, to display the pride of parents and pupils in the school they go to and the quality of the education they receive, so that they can go forward in life not embarrassed at having been unable to afford the uniform, but proud to have been able to adopt it.

The Bill is very simple: in its small way, it allows that possibility by ensuring that the old-style disqualification of competition, availability and access is set aside. I cannot see how anyone, from any political party, could possibly oppose it.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Lord Blencathra

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 8th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it was a delight to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, move the amendment. I recall her saying in an earlier debate that everything that could possibly be said had already been said. I suspect we shall hear the same in this debate. It reminds me of a time 30 years ago when I was a junior Whip in the Commons pushing through hundreds of Lords amendments. I had a deal with the opposition Labour Party; colleagues were speaking for one to two minutes each. Then the great MP, Sir Ivan Lawrence, got up and said, “Everything that could possibly be said on this amendment has been said, but not by those of us qualified to say it.” With his having spoken for 20 minutes, the deal fell through and we were there until midnight. I hope that will not happen tonight.

It was also a delight to listen to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon. He is a wee bit older than me, but I would love to have lived in that golden era where constituents loved their MP, did not want any boundary changes, were committed to the community and must have been appalled at having general elections where their MP could possibly be lost to them. It was a wonderful era and I wish we had it now. He mentioned there are many sheep in his constituency. In my part of Cumbria, there were infinitely more sheep than voters and my opponents used to claim that it was where my majority came from. Therefore, I congratulate the noble Peers who have proposed these amendments and spoken in favour of them. I commend them because they did so with an extraordinary degree of earnestness and a straight face.

Anyone who has not participated in the boundary changes game might have been fooled for a moment into believing there was a great mass of constituents who cared passionately about the exact boundaries of their constituencies and the necessity of retaining a relationship with the same MP. Who are we kidding? Let us be honest: the vast majority of constituents have not a clue where their constituency boundaries are and could not care less. They care about the politics of the MP and using their vote to change the Government, as we saw last year. Once an MP is elected, constituents care about issues and someone to take them up on their behalf. Boundaries are irrelevant. I only ever had one constituent who cared passionately about the boundary and that was the late Earl of Lonsdale, who was deeply upset that Willie Whitelaw, as he then was, implemented the 1983 boundary report which put a bit of Lord Lonsdale’s beloved Westmorland into the Cumberland/Penrith constituency.

All of us who have been MPs in a former life have played the boundary commission game, which is a bit like Monopoly but with electors in play rather than money. We try to land a ward or a parish which gives us the voters we want and try to get rid of wards which are unhelpful to our majority. Instead of playing with hotels and railway stations, we use rivers, roads and mountain ranges. We would happily split Park Lane if it aided us and disadvantaged our opponents. The Labour and Conservative parties would give away Park Lane to Lambeth if it helped them retain the seat or win the seat of Kensington and Chelsea.

We have all produced spurious arguments why our constituency boundaries must or must not be changed and have cited ancient history, travel-to-work areas or strong community ties. While there may have been some truth in these facts, the motivation for advancing them was all bogus.

I recall in Grand Committee the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, mentioning that the River Tamar could not be crossed because it was a boundary since pre-historic times. I can imagine the Neanderthal Lib Dem predecessor to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, a good party hack, arguing before a Palaeolithic boundary inspector that their caves in Devon were a distinct community and different from those in Cornwall.

The real motivation behind the representations made by Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative Members and their parties to the Boundary Commissions and the inspectors is to carve up as many seats as possible to give the party more seats. There is nothing wrong or immoral about that, and in my experience the commission has never been fooled by any of these bogus political representations, no matter how hard or earnestly we tried.

What makes the work of the inquiry inspector more difficult is when there is a wide range of constituency sizes, thus permitting political parties to mount a range of suggestions for wards and districts to be included or excluded. I support the 10% range in the Bill, from a low of 95% to a high of 105%. My noble friend Lord Hayward, who called himself a political hack—he was a brilliant political hack—tells me that the model constituency will be 73,000 electors. This permits constituencies ranging from 69,350 to 76,650. That is almost 7,000 electors to move about and it should take care of all claimed, so-called unique communities which cannot be split, as noble Lords have argued.

Amendments 12, 13 and 14 would increase the range not to 7.5% but to 15%. Amendment 14 goes even further—to suggest an extraordinary 20% range. If the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, were accepted, one could have a constituency of 65,700 sitting next door to one of 80,300—a 15,000-elector variation. It was noticeable that all noble Lords from the Opposition who have spoken did not mention those figures. It is always: “A slight tweak here, a little difference there, a small percentage change here and there”. The figures are astronomical. I suggest that those figures are utterly unacceptable. They undermine the principle of having constituencies of similar size and electors having an equal vote. I say to my noble friend the Minister: do not play the Opposition’s Monopoly game; do not pass Go and collect 15% and 20% ranges; stick with the range in the Bill.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I think parliamentary language allows me to use the term, balderdash. In a stroke, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, dismisses the constituency link and the identity that people have in communities with one another, speaking to their Member of Parliament and expecting that Member to speak for them. That is why dividing communities, which so often happens with the narrow range, is not about the Member of Parliament and whether people hold them in contempt or could not give a damn about the boundaries, but about the community of interest that people have in their area and the expectation of a voice to speak for them.

All of us know that political parties put forward the best possible case to the Boundary Commissions to ensure they maximise their success in parliamentary elections and local elections. However, to dismiss the notion of a small additional variation in the way that the noble Lord just did is to be contemptuous of the electorate, citizenship and identity. If we want equality in the numerics, as the Minister said in response to Amendments 2 and 3, then let us have a national list system—the noble Lord has actually made a good case for it. Let us have total equality in a crude form of proportionality: the political parties put up their list, the electorate vote, and they get straight down the line the number of seats that the electorate have allocated themselves. None of us wants that, do we? Even the Liberal Democrats do not want a national list system, because they accept the importance of the community link and the identity that goes with it.

The way in which we have started to debate this gets off the point, which is that the Government have accepted that there are five exceptions. At a stroke, they have accepted that it is important to recognise difference, identity and geography. Those who had previously pressed for a larger variation have accepted that getting as close as possible to numeric values does matter—without employing a dreadful algorithm that could do the job for us, leaving us to pick up the mess afterwards. Therefore, 5% to 7.5% gives a greater ability to the Boundary Commission and those working for it to use common sense and ensure that people do not have a boat to get across the Mersey or, in the case of Iain Duncan Smith in the last proposal, to spend three hours going around a reservoir. It is about identifying what really matters, which is common sense, and the proposal of 7.5% in Amendment 13 does that.

I will say one word on Wales. I said in the Grand Committee that I was deeply impressed with the case that was made in relation to what the proposals would mean for Wales. It would matter in terms of the valley identity; it matters greatly. People made the case that, although they had travelled well out of Wales, many people had not actually travelled between the two adjoining valleys because of the nature of the geography. As I said in Grand Committee, my great-grandfather was born on the edge of Brecon and Radnorshire, and I was impressed, again, by the way the description of the travelling time and the size of that constituency affected the ability of the Member to do their job on behalf of constituents.

If we get back to constituents, identity, citizenship and the reason we have elections and the link represented by that crucial Member of Parliament with a voice for, speaking on behalf of and understanding their community, as well as the role of Parliament, we might just take a deep breath and say “When we start arguing on the head of a pin, that is when we turn off the electorate for good.”

Prisoners (Disclosure of Information About Victims) Bill

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Lord Blencathra

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, these little amendments are straightforward—at least, in my view. If passed, they would make it mandatory for the Parole Board not to release any prisoners who refused to divulge where and how they have disposed of the bodies of their victims. I have built in an exception for the minority who may have genuine and irreversible memory loss and are therefore unable to state that.

The reason for the amendments s quite simple. We all know that even when there is no criminality but a person is killed and no body is found, or someone is lost at sea, relatives find it very difficult to get closure. But where someone has been murdered, we have all seen the terrible distress of the parents—for example, of the Moors murders victims or of those murdered by the IRA—when the perpetrators will not reveal what they did with the bodies. It is, we are all told, one of the most difficult things for relatives to contend with. Can one imagine the anguish and the sheer injustice of it if a convict refuses to reveal what they have done with the victims, they continue to thumb their nose at the relatives of the victims and the Parole Board, but they can still be considered for early release?

My noble and learned friend and other noble and learned friends may say, “Well, don’t worry, in those circumstances the Parole Board would be highly unlikely to release that convict”, but why should it be at the discretion of the Parole Board based on its “belief” as to a person’s honesty and integrity?

If a convict, in full possession of their faculties and their memory, refuses to divulge what they did with the bodies of their victims, why should the Parole Board be put in the invidious position of having to come to a subjective judgment based on psychologists’ reports. Parliament should say that, in such circumstances, no one will be considered—I stress “considered”—for early release until they say what they have done with the bodies. If a convict refuses to admit that they have done anything wrong in killing someone, would they be considered for release? I believe not. Thus, if they will not talk about the disposal of their victims, they should automatically be excluded from any consideration of early release.

It is not as if the Parole Board has a great track record of coming to the right judgments, as we have seen in the Worboys cabbie rapist case. He should never have been considered for early release and is rightly still behind bars.

Only last week, Mr Justin Russell, the Chief Inspector of Probation, released a report stating that the number of murders by offenders released on probation rose from 70 in 2015 to 114 in 2018, an incredible increase and a fifth of all homicides in England and Wales. Of these, two-thirds had been assessed as “low or medium” risk on release, which meant that there was a lesser level of supervision and checks by probation officers and police.

This is not the time or place for me to set out my views on the naivety of many on the Parole Board, who swallow any old guff that the psychologists put in front of them: that a convict has seen the error of their ways and is now safe to release. Indeed, I do not have to make that observation, since the statistics that I have just cited speak for themselves.

Sociopaths, psychopaths, serial killers and rapists such as Ian Brady, Worboys and Joseph McCann are incredibly devious and calculating. If they can qualify for consideration for early release by keeping quiet about what they did with the bodies, why on earth should they own up? By doing so, they might trigger a further investigation which could lead to a further charge for another murder. Also, there might be such revulsion at how they disposed of the bodies that no Parole Board would ever dare consider them for early release. Therefore, there is an incentive for them to keep quiet and let everyone think that they killed their victims nicely and gave them a Christian burial.

We should use the certainty of no consideration for early release as the only weapon we have to get those people to talk. The Parole Board cannot do that, since the Bill allows them to consider their application and come to a belief judgment. If we remove that possibility, there is a chance of getting them to talk about what they did to the bodies. For the sake of grieving relatives and for the sake of justice, I beg to move.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments because of the change that took place when the challenge to the right of the Home Secretary went through the judicial system and the safeguard that existed was therefore withdrawn. I do not share the view that the Parole Board is full of naive people. It has an incredibly difficult job and needs all the support and guidance it can get. I have my own disagreements with it, including on the case of David McCauliffe, who has been in prison for 32 years and did not commit murder or rape, although he did commit some totally heinous crimes.

I speak to this amendment because, like other Home Secretaries, I had to deal with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. When Keith Bennett’s aunt, on behalf of the family, made her appeals to me to see if we could get an identification of where the little boy, Keith, was buried, my heart went out to the family. It was one of those distressing moments that Home Secretaries and now Justice Secretaries have to deal with in cases of murder, particularly where the body has not been identified and there is not therefore the opportunity to grieve properly or to lay the remains to rest. Winnie Johnson, Keith’s mother, died in 2012 without ever knowing where he was. No parent should have to put up with that.

As I have spoken about already, like my predecessors I was able to block the release of the Moors murderers because the power then existed with the Home Secretary. For reasons relating to human rights—it was not to do with the incorporation of the ECHR into the Human Rights Act but with the appeal that went through the judicial system—that power was taken away and, as described, now rests with the Parole Board.

In the circumstances, we are asking the impossible of the Parole Board: to make a judgment on a situation in which somebody has knowingly refused to identify the place in which they put the body of the individual they murdered. For the parents of a child, that is so horrendous as to require a much more rigid approach than we would normally take in giving judges and the Parole Board, quite rightly, the discretion they need to deal with cases. That is why I am in support.