Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Shipley

Report stage
Tuesday 11th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I have learned a lot in the last 10 minutes. I did not know all of that detail.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

There is more.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

Well, I just hope the Minister might be able to put our minds at rest. The word “gerrymandering” springs to mind. I sincerely hope the Minister can allay any concerns we might have about that. I think the words “sham consultation” were used. I hope the Minister will be able to put our minds at rest on that. It might be helpful if she just said that there was no truth in these rumours at all and that there will not be any overfast consultation on this matter.

That leads me to say that, although I am not a signatory to Amendment 53A, I very much support it. I hope the Minister will be able to explain a little more what the Government’s thinking is on that. However, I am a signatory to Amendment 52. This is all related; there is a serious issue to address. Had I realised that this was going on when I signed Amendment 52, I would have signed Amendment 53A as well.

I have three amendments in this group, Amendments 37 to 39, which would all do the same thing. I will keep this very short because I have no intention of pressing anything to a vote, but I am still surprised that the Government have these clauses in the Bill. I have never understood them. Those of us who have been in combined authorities or have worked in or around them, sometimes with mayors, know that the public have got used to the title “mayor”. I want to eliminate these clauses because the titles that the Government propose as options are confusing to the general public. The reason given comes at line 25 of page 35 of the Bill, which says that the CCA can consider having a title that it feels is more appropriate than other titles that are offered as options,

“having regard to the title of other public office holders in the area of the CCA”.

I recall the Minister explaining in Committee that that was because there were other public officeholders called “mayor”: the mayor of a county, or a lord mayor. Those areas that have been working with the mayoral model for a combined authority for some time have got used to it.

I find the alternative titles offered in Clause 40 confusing. The mayor could become a “county commissioner”, which is used in other countries but is not part of British constitutional thinking. They could be a “county governor”. Of course, if these are combined counties, presumably they would be the governor of two counties. Equally, you could have a “governor” without their being a “county governor”. I find this very confusing.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps Mr Street could be called the Governor-General?

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

Governor-General of the West Midlands—there, my Lords, is a thought. We are now starting to laugh, and I think there is a danger here that the general public will just not understand what all these titles are for. I would immediately say a school governor, a prison governor or the governor of a US state. We can think of various possibilities, but a governor of a combined county? I really do not think that fits with the structure of local and subregional government that we are talking about.

Under Clause 40(2)(c) the title could be “elected leader”. This is very strange, because councils have leaders and those leaders are elected—so I am not clear what the difference is between the “elected leader” of a CCA and the leader of a council. The constituency may be different: that is, it is the whole electorate for the mayor, but for the leader it is the councillors of that council who have to vote to elect that person as the leader of the council as well as leader of the group. This is getting too confusing.

The next thing could well be that if a mayoral CCA is entitled to call its mayor something else, can other combined authorities that have been in existence for a number of years change the title of their mayor? I just do not know why we are going down this road at all. I just say all that to the Minister. There may be something that I have not thought of that she can alleviate my concerns with, but I just wish that this clause and the associated clauses would just go away. It is not something that I want a vote on; I just hope that I will not have to stand up when the statutory instrument comes through for the creation of a CCA and ask why it is that the name has altered to something like a “county commissioner”, which the general public do not comprehend.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Shipley

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am going to speak to Amendment 97ZA, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. Unfortunately, because of today’s conditions, she is not able to travel to your Lordships’ House.

If the noble Baroness were here, I think she would first say that a lot of progress has been made in how we support those with learning disabilities and autistic people in the last parliamentary Session. The Health and Care Act saw the introduction of mandatory training for all health and social care staff to ensure they are better able to work with people who can otherwise struggle to find a voice within the complex system designed to support them. She would also refer to the Down Syndrome Act, which acknowledges the gaps between the intent of existing legislation such as the Equality Act and the Care Act and its implementation in practice. That is a rationale which underpins the amendment I have signed.

We know that many autistic people and those with learning disabilities can have complex needs across the breadth of the public sector and experience so many barriers to accessing support. What happens in childhood can determine their lifelong trajectory, whether this be in a positive or negative way. For example, for some children and young people this may be the beginning of a downward spiral of school exclusions and admissions to mental health facilities. That is how the journey to long-term segregation in an ATU begins—journeys that the Department of Health and Social Care’s oversight panel chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, is currently trying to reverse.

Clause 54, “School attendance policies”, gives little regard to the way that neurodiversity and chronic health conditions can affect a young person’s development and how their educational needs may differ from their peers. This is important because people with learning disabilities and autistic people have higher rates of physical health and mental health comorbidities. This is particularly so for autistic children in mainstream schools.

I am very grateful that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, wrote to Peers following Second Reading to try to address the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Hudnall, that the attendance clauses in the Bill would penalise pupils with SEND and those with autism. In the letter she said:

“We are clear that schools should authorise absence due to both physical and mental illness. Schools should only request parents to provide medical evidence to support absence where they have genuine and reasonable doubt about the authenticity of the illness. We are also clear that schools pressuring a parent to remove their child from the school is a form of off-rolling, which is never acceptable.”


That was very welcome indeed, but as she knows, the words of Ministers do not always turn out to be adopted in practice everywhere throughout the school system.

The importance of this is in the statistics. In 2022, her department stated that persistent absence—defined as missing over 10% of available sessions—involved 12.1% of students; hence the legitimate concern about this, which I understand. However, the rate is nearly three times higher among autistic pupils, at over 30%. Exclusions of autistic children have more than doubled from 2,282 in 2010 to over 5,000 in 2020. There is a big question here: why is it so much higher?

In 2020, Totsika et al published what I think is the only peer-reviewed study into school non-attendance for autistic students in the UK. They found that non-attendance occurred in 43% of their sample of just under 500 students and that autistic children miss 22% of school. Some 32% of absences were attributable to illness and medical appointments, and:

“Truancy was almost non-existent.”


This study found that going to a mainstream school, as opposed to a specialist school, increased the chances of missing school by nearly 100%.

Autistic people experience higher rates of physical and mental health difficulties compared to their neurotypical peers. Anxiety is a predictor of school non-attendance for all children, but we also know that anxiety is more common in autistic children, with approximately 40% having a clinical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder and another 40% experiencing subclinical anxiety symptoms.

The DfE has guidelines around managing non-attendance and support for students with SEND or medical conditions. This includes a duty to ensure suitable education, including alternative provisions or reasonable adjustments and that the local council should

“make sure your child is not without access to education for more than 15 school days”.

However, we know from experience with the Autism Act 2009 and the Down Syndrome Act that, just because it is written in guidance, it does not mean it happens in practice.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, shared with me the example of one parent who wrote:

“My local authority has not accepted medical evidence that my daughter can’t attend school due to severe anxiety... Now we won’t get tuition help and all her further absences will be unauthorised!”


This is despite supporting evidence by a chartered psychologist. She goes on to say:

“Imagine forcing someone with a physical illness to come to school when a doctor says they can’t?”


Another parent has written to us saying that

“Fining parents for school absence due to school-based anxiety is … counterproductive”.


The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, is based not on a few cases but many. It seeks to confirm the Government’s commitment to ensuring that SEND students are not disproportionately penalised by the Bill. There is a duty to implement existing guidance in day-to-day practice. I hope the Government will be sympathetic to the intent of the noble Baroness’s amendment.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to speak briefly to Amendment 91, in my name in this group, which aims to clarify the provisions on school attendance orders to ensure that they should only be issued when, in the opinion of the local authority, this course of action is in the best interest of the child in addition to being expedient.

The Minister may remember that we debated this in Committee. The Bill says clearly that school attendance orders can be issued where “it is expedient” to do so. I had an amendment which said that it should be in the best interests of the child, not that it could be “expedient” to issue a school attendance order. In reply, the Minister said that the word “expedient” was in the 1996 Act anyway and that the test would be the same.

For avoidance of doubt on this matter and to have a clear record, it seems that the best way to proceed is to take my amendment, in which I have not deleted the word “expedient” but have added that it is

“in the best interest of the child”

to have a school attendance order. The benefit would be much greater clarity, and I hope the Minister can agree to my suggestion.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Shipley

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I return to the subject of grammar schools with two modest amendments, which I am sure the noble Baroness will wish to accept. I have always taken particular interest in grammar schools, having been brought up in an environment of selective education. This was compounded by direct experience of the failure of the Buckinghamshire education system through my eldest daughter, who had the misfortune to be living there for her secondary education and attending a secondary modern school. More generally, I recoil still at a system which essentially labels the majority of 11 year-olds as failures.

The move against grammar schools was supported hugely by parents when it happened. I was genuinely concerned when I saw Sir Graham Brady MP recently suggesting that, when this Bill goes back to the Commons, it should be amended to remove the statutory ban on new selective schools. We know he has received support from other Conservative Members of Parliament. I say to the Minister that if the Bill comes back amended in that way, we will fight it tooth and nail in your Lordships’ House, and will expect at least a day to debate it.

My two amendments are very modest and address issues relating to the 1998 legislation. It was introduced in good faith but, as time goes on, one sees that it needs to be improved, and this is what I am seeking to do here. I have some experience in this. In Birmingham, the local authority where I live, my wife was a leading member of the campaign to use the legislation to allow a ballot to remove selection from the eight grammar schools in the city. She and others discovered that, under the legislation, only parents in primary schools which have sent five or more children to grammar schools in the last three consecutive years were allowed to vote, thus denying parents in other schools the franchise.

Of course, the schools denied the franchise were predominantly schools with higher levels of free school meals, and those that got the franchise were in the most prosperous neighbourhoods. That is not surprising, as data shows that it is predominately middle-class children, whose parents have the money to pay for private tuition, who pass the grammar school exam. This is not a meritocracy, as is sometimes claimed by Conservative MPs, but a bought privilege for those with money.

In my two amendments, I first want to reduce the 20% of qualifying voters to 10%. That is the same as is required for the recall of an MP. It is not unreasonable to set the level there. When the legislation was introduced in 1998, we were run on paper as a country; we know the world has changed. So secondly, I am suggesting that we allow electronic communications in relation to regulations. I know from the meeting I had with the Minister this morning that, because of the academy grammar schools, there will be new regulations. I ask that this be considered as part of the revision of those regulations.

My other two amendments in this group, Amendments 102 and 103, are on a completely different matter. They are about strengthening the rights of parents and increasing the public accountability of schools. Given the development of the admissions system around academies, instead of what previously was a unified system where the local authority provided all the information and you went through the local authority system, a parent can often be faced with a multitude of applications to academies in their area. It can be very confusing. I propose a straightforward extension to the existing remit of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. I want to enable parents to seek an independent investigation into complaints about admissions to academies if they think their child has been wrongly denied access to their preferred choice of school. The other amendment proposes an equally practical, but perhaps even more important, extension to the rights of parents: the right to complain about what goes on within the school itself.

In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, in response raised five points to justify rejecting those amendments: that there was a route for complaints through the independent Office of the Schools Adjudicator; that the School Admissions Code has improved the process for managing in-year admissions; that the Government will consult on a new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools and a back-up power to enable local authorities to direct an academy trust to admit a child; that every academy trust must have a published complaints procedure; and, finally, that her department provides a route for independent consideration of complaints about maladministration of appeals in relation to academy schools.

I am very grateful for the Minister’s full response but it does not go far enough. For instance, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator does not make decisions on individual complaints about the admissions appeal process. On the School Admissions Code, although the changes that were made are welcome, they do not in any way address the lack of independent redress for school admissions for academies and free schools or the underlying fragmentation of the admissions complaints system for parents. On the new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools, I would just say that powers of direction are not a substitute for parental access to an independent appeals and complaints process. Finally, on complaints directly to her department, my understanding is that her department focuses on whether a school has followed the complaints process, rather than carrying out a fresh investigation into the substantive matter complained about. I hope that the Minister will give some consideration to that.

All schools are going to become academies. The Minister’s previous arguments about wishing to maintain the freedom of academies has to be balanced with a proper accountability system. I wonder whether the review she is chairing might look at this. It seems to me that one key element of allowing academies to continue to have the freedoms that they enjoy is that there are some safeguards in the system. I would argue that having the Local Government Ombudsman as a backdrop would be one of the building blocks to allowing academies to continue to have their freedoms.

Having said that, I hope we can give these and other amendments a fair wind. I beg to move.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, my name appears on Amendments 47 and 106. I want briefly to say that I am very strongly in favour of all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. Amendment 46, in particular, is very powerful, and I hope the Minister will think carefully about it.

I turn first to Amendment 47, which relates to the provision of school places by academies. There is a problem here which needs to be solved before it arises. Local authorities in England must have a power to direct academies in their area to admit individual pupils and to expand school places. As I said in Committee, the question that arises is around what happens when there are not enough school places for a local authority to fulfil its statutory duty—for example, if there is a new housing estate and school places have to be found for the children living there. Given that local authorities should in my view have some power over appeals, local authorities must have the power to be more directional than the Bill currently permits.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Shipley

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, the Clause 28 stand part notice is in my name. Because it is about grammar schools, I think it is right to have it in this group, in talking about admissions policies.

I very much empathised with my noble friend Lord Knight when he spoke about the traumas of year 6 for not only the children who have to take SATs but the parents who have to choose—or attempt to choose—a secondary school for their children. It was also interesting to hear about the parallel between private hospitals choosing their patients and schools choosing their pupils. Often, the difference between health and education is that, in the main, our best hospitals are based in urban areas, with some of the poorest people, serving them. In a sense, I am not sure that education has ever quite been able to pull off the support that the health service has often given to the poorest and most deprived people, imperfect though that may be.

Clause 28 is concerned with grammar schools and academies but it has prompted me to ask the Minister a wider question: what is the Government’s general policy in relation to grammar schools? We know that, in 2016, the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, said that she wanted to allow for an expansion in grammar schools. It was in the 2017 manifesto but nothing appeared in the Queen’s Speech; more recently, the Government have said that they do not want to see an expansion in the grammar school system. However, rumours and briefings often come out saying that, actually, the Government would like to see a change in policy.

We have already seen a number of so-called satellite grammar schools open or get under way. Basically, this is a back-door way of expanding the grammar school system. Satellite schools bear the same name as the host grammar school. They are often located several miles away. Eventually, of course, it will lead to two separate schools being established. We know that the county council in Kent seems determined to expand its selective schools despite all the evidence showing that the Kent system is a poor one in terms of overall outcomes for the whole of the student population. Grammar schools in Kent do nothing more than attain the results that you would expect if you selected for high attainment—hence my noble friend Lord Knight’s comment about schools choosing their pupils.

As Comprehensive Future has stated:

“What is there to stop any grammar school from creating a whole chain of satellites stretching from Northumberland to Land’s End?”


This is not an academic argument because there have been suggestions that the Bill could be amended by Conservative MPs when it goes to the Commons. The Evening Standard has reported that the Government refused to rule out lifting the current ban on new grammar schools, while the Telegraph has reported that the Government are open to expanding academic selection. Indeed, Chris Philp MP was quoted as referring to his plans to amend the Schools Bill to support new grammars. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s exact position?

I am afraid that I am old enough to have experienced the wretched old grammar/secondary modern system, and the 11-plus, which condemned so many children to be classified as failures at the age of 11 and to be sent to schools with fewer resources and less ambition. That is why the move to a comprehensive system was so popular. It is interesting that the movement started in some of the shire counties. I lived in Oxford, and Oxfordshire and Leicestershire were determined to get rid of grammar schools in the 1950s and 1960s because they did not want all their children to be branded as failures at the age of 11. In 1953 and 1957, Leicestershire started to experiment with comprehensive education, expanding it throughout the whole county in 1969. Oxfordshire started in 1955 and 1957, subsequently expanding throughout the whole county as well.

Why did parents support this? It is very simple. Those arguing for grammar schools present only the image of children passing the 11-plus and going to grammar schools, and their subsequent achievements. They do not refer to the large number of children—around 70% in Kent—who are told aged 11 that they are failures and then attend underresourced secondary moderns. There is plenty of research to show that in those areas with a grammar school system, achievement is lower. Look no further than Kent and Buckinghamshire. Grammar school systems continually and consistently undermine educational achievement. According to the DfE, in 2019, the GCSE pass rate was 11 points below the national average in Kent and five points below average in Buckinghamshire.

Claims that grammar schools give a foot up the ladder for poorer children have, again, been debunked comprehensively. Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that in the remaining grammar schools, the percentage of pupils from poor backgrounds is lower than ever: 2.7% are entitled to free meals, against 16% nationally. Once the pupil intake of grammar schools is taken into account, based on factors such as chronic poverty, ethnicity, home language, special educational needs and age in year group, Durham University analysis shows that grammar schools are no more or less effective than other schools.

Finally, the poorest children in Kent and Medway have a less than 10% chance of getting into grammar schools, while for children in the very richest neighbourhoods, it is over 50%—schools choosing their own pupils. I want the Minister to say that there is no intention of changing the policy with any amendments that any Conservative MP might seek to move in the Commons, although whether the Bill reaches the Commons is a question that we are all interested in. Assuming that it does eventually reach the Commons, I hope that the Government will say today that they will have no truck with that.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 78 and, with my noble friend Lord Storey, Amendment 162.

Amendment 78 deals with the issue that we were discussing earlier about the provision of school places by academies. It says that the Secretary of State must, within six months of the Act being passed, make regulations which provide local authorities in England with the power to direct academies within their area to admit students or expand school places. An example of why that could be important would be a new housing development of some significance which alters the balance of pupil numbers in a particular geographical area. Broadly speaking, our amendment is very similar to that of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. He uses “guidance”; we use “direction”. It is also similar to Amendment 160, which will be spoken to shortly.

The problem is simply that councils have a statutory duty to ensure there is a local school place for every child who needs one, but they currently do not have the power to direct academy trusts to expand school places or to admit pupils. This amendment would introduce a new backstop power for local authorities to direct trusts to admit children as a safety net.