Lords Chamber

House of Lords

Wednesday, 12 July 2006.

The House met at three of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Newcastle): the LORD SPEAKER on the Woolsack.

Plastic Bags

Lord Dubs
asked Her Majesty’s Government:

What is their estimate of the number of plastic bags supplied by the retail industry; and what steps they are taking to discourage their use.

The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Rooker)
My Lords, the total number of one-way plastic carrier bags used in the UK is estimated to be between 8 and 10 billion a year. They weigh about 80,000 tonnes. The department is working closely with the Waste and Resources Action Programme and a range of high street retailers to promote reusable bags and to make a further contribution to saving resources and, of course, reducing waste.

Lord Dubs
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that Answer, which moves on a little from the response given by his predecessor a year ago. Does my noble friend agree that we are talking about bags that add significantly to litter, have a damaging effect on marine life and contribute to climate change? If the Government will not put a tax on these bags, as has worked so successfully in Ireland, will my noble friend step up pressure on the retail trade and start educating the public so that we use reusable bags whenever we go shopping?

Lord Rooker
My Lords, the Irish example is not all that it appears because there has been an increase in the sale of black bin liners and other such bags to get round the problem of not having bags from the supermarkets. Nevertheless, the culture has changed. Taxation is a matter for the Treasury, because it knows all about these things. I can only say to my noble friend that when I was a young boy and my mother sent me out to run errands and go shopping each week, I took shopping bags with me. I did that every week, every month and every year, and used the same bags.

Baroness Fookes
My Lords, is any attention being given to biodegradable plastic bags, which would deal with some of the problems that have been outlined?

Lord Rooker
My Lords, that is the problem. From researching heavily for this Question, I understand that biodegradable bags contribute to climate change through carbon dioxide emissions, and that is part of the problem. Biodegradable bags are not an easy answer. Sometimes they degrade in the wrong way and people do not know what to do with them. If the bag goes into landfill and biodegrades, CO2 is emitted. The answer lies in reusable bags. If the supermarkets did not give these bags away—at the expense of other customers, I might add, because the people who take their own bags pay for everyone else to have free bags—or maybe were not allowed to put logos on them, they might change their tune about the waste being created in this country. As I said, there are 80,000 tonnes of plastic bags a year.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
My Lords, the Minister is absolutely right to point out that these bags are used for advertising. They are also used as a security measure—I think that he would agree that when you try to decline them, the response is, “We need to put the shopping in a bag for security reasons”. Does he accept that the point of taxing plastic bags would be to encourage behaviour change so that people would take baskets or reusable bags instead?

Lord Rooker
My Lords, the noble Baroness makes a seductive point, but this all seems to come down to the view that, as there is a problem, the Government should do something about it. There are alternatives to the Government bringing in a tax, which, as I say, is a matter for the Treasury. But if other forms of pressure were put on by parliamentarians, who can introduce Private Members’ Bills from time to time, they might be able to stop these practices and ensure that the supermarkets are allowed to give away only plain bags. That might change the behaviour of the supermarkets—and it is their behaviour that we need to change. They are giving away 200 million bags a week, which amounts to three bags for every man, woman and child in the country. That is an incredible waste.

Lord Roberts of Conwy
My Lords, was not the noble Lord’s mother absolutely right in her reuse of these bags? I certainly reuse them to bin kitchen rubbish before putting it into the black liner. What is wrong with that?

Lord Rooker
My Lords, that is two plastic bags causing a problem for the environment. I plead guilty, but I was referring to old-fashioned shopping bags. What is wrong with an old-fashioned shopping bag that lasts a lifetime and does not cause pollution?

The Duke of Montrose
My Lords, this may be an issue on a slightly different scale, but what effort is made to recycle the plastic bags used by Parliament in sending out stuff to us? Could one persuade the supermarkets to accept such items along with their own plastic bags as a way of recycling?

Lord Rooker
My Lords, to give them their due, some supermarkets have containers for the disposal of these bags. These bags are packaging and are subject to the regulations regarding plastic packaging, and the supermarkets have to make a contribution towards that. Some local authority recycling sites have provision for such bags. On the other hand, there is plastic and plastic, and sometimes you are told that you cannot put certain plastics in disposing areas run by local authorities. More work is being done on this, but the fact is that the waste is being created unnecessarily in the first place. Worse still, most of these bags are imported. It is not as though we are creating jobs by making them in this country.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, my noble friend mentioned black plastic bin liners as being another hazard in this respect. What does he have to say about the fact that many local authorities now refuse to collect refuse unless it is in just such a black plastic bin liner?

Lord Rooker
My Lords, that is an issue. On the other hand, local authorities are now doing far more recycling than they ever did. There is no doubt about that. You can have green boxes and food-waste boxes as well as containers for general household waste, so this is in no way a criticism of local authorities. Tackling the problem of waste is a major issue on a small island such as ours, but we have to tackle it in such a way that we benefit the environment and do not damage it. Whether it is a problem of litter or of plastic bags ending up in the sea as a danger to wildlife, there is no easy solution. Creating less waste is the solution, if you are looking for a single one.

Lord Elton
My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that a considerable number of transparent plastic bags are used to send out papers from this House to Members and that, when there is a single sheet of paper to go, we get not only a flat plastic bag but a slice of cardboard to keep the paper straight, which must be a waste?

Lord Rooker
My Lords, I answer for the Government at this Dispatch Box. I am not answering for the authorities of the House.

Lord Dubs
My Lords, I am delighted with much of what my noble friend has said; he has stated the case perfectly. He is a very good Minister—but he is a Minister and it is up to the Government to do something. If he can convert what he said and his own personal behaviour to government policy, we would all be happy.

Lord Rooker
My Lords, that was my behaviour when I was a young boy doing what my mother told me. These days I am as guilty as everyone else.

Palace of Westminster: Vehicle Access

15:07:00

Lord Campbell-Savours
asked Her Majesty’s Government:

What proposals are being considered for securing easier vehicular access to the Palace of Westminster via Black Rod’s Garden entrance and the underground car park.

The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara)
My Lords, under phase 3 of the Palace protection project, the bus lane outside the House would be removed. The Corus barriers in front of the House would then be moved outwards, making entry and exit easier, particularly for vehicles with large turning circles. The feasibility of phase 3, including costs, is being studied.

Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that comprehensive response, although he did not refer to the tunnel joining the underground car park to the House. What proposals are there in place for the introduction of electronic gates, the removal of buses from the car park exit, which block people as they leave the Palace, and the supply of winter and waterproof clothing for police and car park attendants?

The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, the possibility of a pedestrian tunnel linking the Abingdon Street underground car park to the House has been considered before. In connection with the Millbank House project, the matter may be considered by committees again. However, there are no plans to build such a tunnel. Any such project would have considerable financial implications.

As to the provision of electronic gates in the Corus barriers, there are design difficulties with making the Corus barrier gates automatic and considerable problems with the power supply to them. The intention under phase 3, with the extra room provided by the removal of the bus lane, would be to move to swinging gates as opposed to sliding gates, which would assist.

The bus lane outside the end of the Black Rod’s Garden exit, turning left, is a matter for Westminster City Council and Transport for London. We have asked them to consider moving the bus stop further along the road.

Visitor assistants are issued with waterproof and warm clothing in the winter. However, I have no responsibility for what the police do or do not wear.

Lord Renton
My Lords, will the Government bear it in mind that in the interests of security, and the great need for it, it would be better not to have increased vehicular access to the Palace of Westminster?

The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, it is difficult to know how we would supply the Palace of Westminster with food and drink, and everything else we use—including plastic bags—unless there was vehicular access, and access for Peers as well.

Lord Harrison
My Lords, will the noble Lord the Lord Chairman note that some of us use that bus stop at the end of Black Rod’s Garden? We would not be favourable to it being moved further away from our workplace, thank you very much.

The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, would not mind moving another 20 or 30 yards along the street.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon
My Lords, are there any long-term plans to close Abingdon Street and Parliament Square to vehicular access?

The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, in the longer term there is something called the World Squares for All proposal. It has just completed a feasibility study into the future vision for Parliament Square and its environs. Included in this is a series of options, one of which envisages the closure of Abingdon Street and the pedestrianisation of Old Palace Yard. The first phase of the proposal is under discussion; if agreed, this would see the closure of the road on the south side of the square, linking Westminster Abbey to Parliament Square itself.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester
My Lords, bearing in mind the increasing number of your Lordships who have offices over the road, across Abingdon Green, does not the noble Lord the Lord Chairman, agree that the most pressing immediate need is to improve pedestrian safety, particularly at the traffic lights across the main road? All of us who cross there several times a day take our lives in our hands, particularly when pedal cyclists, regrettably, refuse to take notice of the traffic lights.

The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, I remember answering questions about pedal cyclists at this Dispatch Box in a former role. I think we have had enough questions on this; the views of many Members of the House about pedal cyclists are well known. However, I take the noble Lord’s point; if and when we move to phase 3, the crossing controlled by traffic lights would be thoroughly re-examined.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, does the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees expect the closure of Old Palace Yard to precede the completion of House of Lords reform or to come after it?

The Chairman of Committees
I could not possibly say, my Lords.

Baroness Sharples
My Lords, the next bus stop to the one we presently use is pretty close, by Lambeth Bridge. Surely the transport people will not allow us to have two bus stops close together.

The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, the problem with the bus stop is that if there is a bus stopped at it—which is, after all, what bus stops are for—vehicles attempting to exit the Lords’ car park into that lane have difficulty getting out. Obviously it would be best if the bus stop could be moved a little further along to ease that problem. I do not know what the regulation distance between bus stops in London is, and I am glad to say that it is not one of my responsibilities.

The Countess of Mar
My Lords, should we not be encouraging noble Lords to walk a little further, to keep their figures nice and slim?

The Chairman of Committees
Most probably, my Lords, but the noble Countess need not worry on that account.

Earl Ferrers
My Lords, the noble Lord the Lord Chairman referred to World Squares for All. Does he not agree that one of the proposals is that it should all be pedestrianised in front of the entrance to the House of Lords, which is at present our car park? If so, does he not agree that that would be a thoroughly bad thing?

The Chairman of Committees
No my Lords, I do not necessarily agree. There is no question of us not having vehicular access to the front of the House, but it would be restricted to through traffic. However, all this is a very long way away and not something that we need worry about at the moment.

Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, can I make it clear that we are not asking for the bus stop to be removed? We are asking for coaches and buses to be prevented from parking at the point where Members leave the parliamentary estate because they are blocking the traffic, not buses stopping at the bus stop.

The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, I take the noble Lord's point. I am not sure about the rules for coaches and other buses that stop on that part of the road, but it is a matter for Westminster City Council and Transport for London and we can raise the issue with them again.

Influenza Pandemic

15:15:00

The Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham
asked Her Majesty’s Government:

Whether, in the event of an outbreak of pandemic influenza, they would designate ministers of religion as key workers.

The Minister of State, Department of Health (Lord Warner)
My Lords, the Government recognise that ministers of religion will play an important role during an influenza pandemic. Provisional recommendations for prioritising groups for vaccination have been made in the UK influenza pandemic contingency plan, but no decision to designate entire employment sectors as having a higher priority has yet been made. The needs of ministers of religion will be taken into consideration alongside the claims of other groups.

The Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. However, does he not agree that social stability and cohesion are important in dealing responsibly with a pandemic and that the clergy would have a very important and useful part to play? Would not their explicit inclusion in the Department of Health’s antiviral prophylaxis and vaccination plan be prudent? Perhaps I may press the Minister further. Will he also consider issuing resource materials to local pandemic flu committees on engaging with faith communities, similar to what has been issued by the US centres for disease control?

Lord Warner
My Lords, I agree with the right reverend Prelate that social cohesion is important in handling a pandemic, and I am sure that the clergy will assist in that area. As I said, no final decisions have been taken on designating employment groups as having priority for vaccination. We will consider carefully the points which he makes with the Faith Communities Consultative Council.

Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, nobody knows whether such a pandemic of avian influenza will take place or, if there is one, when. But would it not be sensible for the Government to have preparatory talks with non-governmental organisations such as St John Ambulance and the Red Cross and other similar bodies to prepare them for the possibility that they might deliver doses of antiviral drugs and vaccines to endangered communities?

Lord Warner
My Lords, we have ongoing discussions with a wide range of people including the NGOs and public authorities, and we continually update the UK influenza pandemic contingency plan which is available on our website. On antivirals, we will deliver them, centrally, direct to PCTs and GPs.

Earl Howe
My Lords, does the Minister accept that when it comes to antivirals, we need stocks of a sufficient size to cater for some prophylactic use, not just treating infected patients; and that stocks which are currently held or on order will not enable the NHS to do that to any great extent?

Lord Warner
My Lords, we are currently purchasing a sufficient quantity of Tamiflu antiviral to treat 25 per cent of the population falling ill with pandemic influenza, which is what the current plans are based on. That equates to 14.6 million courses. The last of those courses will arrive in August and September. We keep the prophylaxis issue under review. We are studying a paper by Professor Neil Ferguson, who has expressed views on the issue.

Lord Davies of Coity
My Lords, does my noble friend feel there is a danger of a member of the public reading this Question and mistakenly believing that ministers of religion are to be involved to administer the last rites?

Lord Warner
My Lords, I think that this is a man with no access to a higher authority to be able to answer that question.

Baroness Masham of Ilton
My Lords, if there is a pandemic, there will be people wanting and needing the last rites. Is the Minister aware that chaplains in hospital deal with the dying, and that ministers of religion visit dying people in their homes? If they are not key workers, who are on the list of key workers?

Lord Warner
My Lords, the current proposal is that frontline healthcare workers would be a priority group but, as I said in my reply, no final decisions have been taken in this area on specific employment groups. I assure the noble Baroness and the right reverend Prelate that guidance on infection control is available to ministers of religion attending the dying or deceased.

Baroness Neuberger
My Lords, without claiming access to a higher authority, being merely a rabbi and not a bishop, perhaps I may ask the Minister to consider whether we need to get some of the clergy across the faiths to meet now with others who are to be designated as key workers. However, I appreciate that the decision has not finally been made. There may be deaths, but more than that there may be considerable emotional and spiritual distress in communities. The clergy will need to be there to help to deal with that. Will the Minister consider doing something about it now?

Lord Warner
My Lords, I am informed that we are in the process of asking the Faith Communities Consultative Council to set up a working party to evaluate the business case—if I may put it that way—for classifying ministers of religion as key workers.

The Countess of Mar
My Lords, could the Minister take as an example the rural network scheme, which worked very well during the foot and mouth disease outbreak, when Church of England priests in particular were enormously helpful to very distressed people in the rural communities?

Lord Warner
My Lords, we keep under review all these examples of good practice and I will certainly draw my colleagues’ attention to that one.

Lord Roberts of Llandudno
My Lords, is it possible for the Minister to have a comprehensive list of all those designated as ministers of the various faiths so that they may be kept informed of what actions need to be taken?

Lord Warner
My Lords, I am sure that that is possible. We will study the proposal.

Lord Vinson
My Lords, as there is as yet no sign of a pandemic in the Far East, what is the likelihood of a pandemic in Europe?

Lord Warner
My Lords, I do not think that I am competent to speculate on that. We have put in place provisions to cope with a possible pandemic, and we continue to work closely with the WHO and to keep on top of monitoring outbreaks of various kinds of influenza around the world.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, following the Science and Technology Committee report recommendation that there should be discussion with those who distribute food, can the Minister confirm that there has been a discussion with major supermarket chains and that contingency plans have been made for use in the event of 25 per cent of heavy goods vehicles drivers not being in work?

Lord Warner
My Lords, we are working across Government to engage essential services and encourage them to develop robust business continuity plans appropriate for a pandemic, and we are working with representatives of business through the Cabinet Office business forum to ensure that they have the information they need to plan for the impact of a pandemic on their business. Defra is in touch with the food distribution industry in this area.

Mental Health: Patient Safety

15:24:00

Baroness Barker
asked Her Majesty’s Government:

When they expect to publish the National Learning and Reporting System’s report on women in National Health Service mental health units.

The Minister of State, Department of Health (Lord Warner)
My Lords, we take seriously concerns raised by a National Patient Safety Agency analysis of individual reports on patient safety in mental health services. We have concerns about some information on sexual allegations and are working with the NPSA to establish the accuracy of the most serious allegations. Professor Louis Appleby is leading a review of these reports, which we shall act on. We had already intended to publish the NPSA report on completion of this review. However, as inaccurate accounts have been made public, we shall publish the latest version shortly.

Baroness Barker
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Answer. In 1996, Mr Blair, in opposition, asked the following question about mixed-sex mental health wards:

“Is it beyond the wit of the Government and health administrators to deal with this problem?”.
 

Today, when 25 per cent of mental health patients record that they are held in mixed-sex wards and it has taken the Department of Health more than six months to respond to a report setting out allegations of more than 100 serious sexual offences against women, does he not think that it is time the Government responded to the report fully and quickly?

Lord Warner
My Lords, there are two points there. As I understand it, the latest published figures show that 99 per cent of mental health trusts and PCTs that provide mental health services meet single-sex accommodation objectives. We are working closely with the remaining 1 per cent to ensure that they achieve the necessary standards as quickly as possible. 

The delay in responding to the report has been caused by trying to get to the bottom of the allegations. That is what Professor Louis Appleby has been doing and will continue to do.

Baroness Murphy
My Lords, I accept that the departmental returns suggest that 99 per cent of trusts now have single-sex wards, but does the Minister not accept that in reality at least 25 per cent have makeshift arrangements because they do not have the capital investment to allow them to arrange for separate wards? Those unfortunate arrangements allow daytime occupancy to be joint and rooms at night to be unlocked, often in separate wards but too close to each other to provide appropriate protection.

Lord Warner
My Lords, we know that a very small number of patients, when admitted as an emergency, may be put in mixed-sex accommodation. It is the nature of an emergency that some action has to be taken. However, we have put a large amount of extra money into mental health services, including capital. I will look into any cases where applications have been made for capital money that has not then been granted in that area.

Baroness Knight of Collingtree
My Lords, the Minister said that a very high percentage of providers met an acceptable standard. What is an acceptable standard? Does that mean that women are still at risk in these units, as the report suggests? If that is the case, will he please look at it as a matter of extreme urgency?

Lord Warner
My Lords, I will write to the noble Baroness with the definitions of standards. I think she is aware of them. I do not have time to go through the detail of them here, but I will share them with her.

As I said, there are occasions when people are admitted to a mixed-sex ward in an emergency. A small proportion of providers—1 per cent—are not meeting the standards, and we are working with them to make sure that they do so.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon
My Lords, does the noble Lord recall that in 1994 I sponsored and took through this House a Bill outlawing mixed-sex wards? Ever since that time—12 years ago—I have been assured by Minister after Minister, including the noble Lord himself, that such wards would indeed be phased out completely. Now I understand from the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, and others, that they have not been phased out. Surely, after 12 years, we should have eliminated mixed-sex wards entirely from the National Health Service.

Lord Warner
My Lords, I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord in this area. I say to him that rather more progress has been made in this area under this Government than under the previous one.

Earl Howe
My Lords, can the Minister confirm my understanding that no organisation is specifically tasked with monitoring assaults committed by patients on other patients? Is that not quite wrong? Will the Minister consider the case for drawing up clear national guidelines for how trusts should react when one patient assaults another as there does not seem to be any consistency in this area?

Lord Warner
My Lords, it is the responsibility of the trust that is running the facilities to ensure the safety of its patients. Where there are possible criminal assaults, it is for the trust to inform the police. Work is going on about whether more guidance is needed in this area. I am happy to write to the noble Earl about that.

Baroness Neuberger
My Lords, will the Government institute a robust, transparent and easily accessible reporting system for incidents of sexual assault and harassment in mental health units in general, and for women in particular? If that is to be the case, when will it occur?

Lord Warner
My Lords, this Government introduced the National Learning and Reporting System under the NPSA, for which they have been fully commended by the National Audit Office. This leaked document is part of that work. We are continuing to get to the bottom of that. This has demonstrated that there is a more open culture in the NHS, which is for the good of patients.

Water and Sewerage Services (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

Budget (No. 2) (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

15:31:00

Lord Rooker
My Lords, I beg to move the three Motions standing in my name on the Order Paper.

Moved, That the draft orders laid before the House on 5, 6 and 12 June be approved [Considered in Grand Committee on 4 July].—(Lord Rooker.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Energy Review

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, somewhat exceptionally, I seek to repeat a Statement made by the right honourable Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the other place yesterday. The Statement is as follows:

“Today I am publishing a report setting out the conclusions of the review. Copies will be available in the Vote Office in the usual way. The report is extensive and of necessity my Statement has to cover proposals in some detail.

“Mr Speaker, we face two major long-term challenges: first, along with other countries, to tackle climate change and the need to cut damaging carbon emissions; and, secondly, delivering secure supplies of cleaner energy at affordable prices. Increasingly, we will come to depend upon imported gas and oil as our own plentiful but harder to exploit North Sea reserves decline. The proposals I am announcing today set out our approach to meeting our energy needs over the next 30 to 40 years. Many of the proposals contained in this report will need further consultation. Thereafter, the Government intend to publish a White Paper around the turn of the year.

“The starting point for reducing carbon emissions must be to save energy. If we are to meet our goals of a 60 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emission by 2050, we need not just to reduce carbon intensity through low energy sources such as renewables, but also to save energy. So we make a number of proposals to encourage greater energy efficiency. For consumers we need better information about the amount of energy used, smart metering and real-time energy use displays, better and clearer energy bills and more information for new buyers and tenants on energy efficiency in homes.

“It is estimated that leaving electric appliances on standby uses about 7 per cent of all electricity generated in the UK. So we will work with industry and others to improve the efficiency of domestic appliances and to phase out inefficient goods, limiting the amount of stand-by energy wasted.

“We also propose a range of measures to take us towards a long-term goal of carbon neutral developments—new homes can use around a quarter of the energy to heat compared with the average home. We aim to make the government estate carbon neutral by 2012. We will also provide strong support for the use of on-site electricity generation such as solar panels.

“Energy efficiency will help people on low incomes especially. The review sets out our approach. If we are to make a real difference to reducing energy demand we need a radically different approach. We need a stronger obligation on energy companies to provide energy saving measures and a radical plan to change the way they sell their services.

“We will encourage Britain’s 27 million homes to become more energy efficient, but it is also essential that we incentivise Britain’s big six energy suppliers to work with home owners to make their houses more energy efficient.

“Today, companies have the incentive to sell as much as they can. Instead, we need to give energy producers incentives to make households more energy efficient and to sell them more insulation products. We are consulting on the most effective way of doing that.

“The EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which covers 11,000 high intensity users of energy and the climate change levy are key to encouraging businesses such as power stations or steelworks to save energy and to cut emissions. But there are around 5,000 large businesses and public services in the UK not covered by that scheme. We want to reduce energy inefficiency for these companies too. One supermarket chain in the UK alone is one of the biggest single users of energy in the country. These businesses should be incentivised to reduce their emissions.

“So we shall consult on a proposal for an emissions trading scheme for them along with other options to cut the amount of carbon produced, which is something that they support. It makes economic and environmental sense.

“Saving energy in businesses and homes is essential. But so too is the need to cut emissions from road transport. Fuel efficiency in transport continues to improve, and we will encourage the use of lower carbon fuels, especially biofuels. There will be more cost-effective opportunities to save carbon as new technologies are developed. Company car tax and vehicle excise duty have been reformed to encourage energy efficiency, and we will continue to press the EU to consider the inclusion of road transport in the emissions trading scheme as well as including aviation.

“Last November, we announced in the renewable transport fuel obligation that 5 per cent of all fuels are to be from renewable sources by 2010. Today, we propose that the obligation, after consultation, should be extended after 2010, provided that some important conditions are met. This could provide a further carbon reduction of 2 million tonnes, which is equivalent to taking another 1 million cars off the road once it is fully implemented.

“Providing the right incentives to reduce energy is critical, but we also need to do more to make the energy we use cleaner. We make a number of proposals. Most of our electricity is generated in large power stations, and around three-quarters of our heat comes from gas that is fed through a national network. It delivers economies of scale, safety and, crucially, reliability. The Government believe that we can do more to encourage the generation of electricity on a smaller scale near to where it is used.

“Today, less than half of 1 per cent of our electricity comes from microgeneration. Combined heat and power provides about 7 per cent. We need to do more. There are technical and other obstacles to overcome, but we want to remove barriers to the development of what is known as distributed generation. We can do more to make it more attractive to energy microgeneration and to set up combined heat and power schemes. The Government believe that this is a major opportunity for the UK not just to invest in renewable energy but in other low- carbon technologies.

“The environmental transformation fund, which was announced recently, will provide investment for energy funding services. Details of the scale and scope of that fund will be announced in the spending review in 2008. We will also encourage low-carbon alternatives such as biomass, solar and heat pumps.

“Over the next two decades, it is likely that we will need substantial new electricity generation capacity as power stations, principally coal and nuclear plants, reach the end of their lives. It is equivalent to around a third of today’s generation capacity. Power stations are long-term investments, and we need to put in place the right framework to incentivise investment decisions to limit carbon emissions.

“First, we remain committed to carbon pricing in the UK through the operation of the emissions trading scheme. It is essential that there is a carbon price, to encourage us to use less of it. Today, around 90 per cent of the UK’s energy needs are met by fossil fuels, so we need to do more to encourage renewable generation of electricity.

“The renewables obligation is key to supporting the expansion of renewables. It has brought forward major developments, particularly onshore wind, landfill gas and the use of biomass in coal stations. Far from getting rid of the renewables obligation as some have proposed, we intend to increase it from 15 per cent to 20 per cent.

“We also want to give a boost to offshore wind and other emerging technologies to encourage the growth of other technologies—off-shore, wind or tidal, for example. So we will consult on banding the obligations to encourage these developments.

“The Government also see a continuing role for both gas and coal-fired generation. The Government will convene a coal forum to bring together UK coal producers and suppliers to help them find solutions for the long-term future of UK coal-fired power generation and UK coal production.

“Coal-fired generation continues to meet around one third of electricity demand. Last winter it reached as much as half. This shows the importance coal can play to the UK’s energy security. But to have a long-term future we need to tackle its heavy carbon emissions.

“Carbon capture and storage could cut emissions by 80 to 90 per cent. And we have some natural and commercial advantages—strong oil industry and old oil fields where CO2 can be stored. The next step would be a commercial demonstration if it proved to be cost effective. We are working with Norway and the industry in developing this and a further announcement will be made in the Pre-Budget Report. Carbon capture could lead to saving several millions tonnes of carbon by 2020.

“The Government believe that a mix of energy supply remains essential. We should not be over-dependent on one source. That is especially so if we are to maintain security of supply in the future. We will continue to do everything we can to promote more open and competitive markets, which is why we are backing the Commission in securing an effective implementation of the energy market.

“We will also take steps to secure gas supplies, maximising the exploitation of oil and gas from the UK Continental Shelf. Last month we saw a record number of applications for further development in the North Sea. We also need to facilitate the construction of sufficient storage and import infrastructure.

“Against a background where Britain’s nuclear power stations are ageing, decisions will have to be taken on their replacement in the next few years. If we do nothing, the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear will fall from just under 20 per cent today to just 6 per cent in 15 years’ time. And nuclear has provided much of the electricity base load, contributing to consistency of supply as well as security of supply.

“While some of that capacity can and should be replaced by renewables, it is more likely than not that some of it will be replaced by gas, which would increasingly have to be imported. The Government have concluded that new nuclear power stations could make a significant contribution to meeting our energy policy goals. It will be for the private sector to initiate, fund, construct and operate new nuclear plants and cover the cost of decommissioning and their full share of long-term waste management costs.

“The review makes a number of proposals to address potential barriers to new build and the HSE is developing guidance for potential providers of new stations. For nuclear, new-build consideration of safety and security will be paramount, as it is now. We are setting out a proposed framework for the way in which the relevant issues on nuclear should be handled in the planning process and will be consulting on this before the publication of the White Paper.

“The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management published its interim recommendations in April, confirming its preference for geological disposal of nuclear waste. The committee is to be congratulated on the open and transparent way in which it has conducted its work and the broad consensus it has developed for securing the future long-term management of the UK’s nuclear waste. CoRWM will publish its final report this month. The Government will respond thereafter.

“If we are to see any of these developments, whether they be renewables or conventional power stations, we need to change the planning laws in this country. We will work with the devolved Administrations to make sure that we have an effective planning regime. There are some changes we can make now, for example, bringing together the planning process and consents on the Electricity Act but the Government believe that the current planning regime needs fundamental reform and the Government will consult on proposals to do that later this year.

“The proposals that I have set out will result in a reduction of between 19 and 25 million tonnes of carbon by 2020, over and above the measures announced in the Climate Change Programme review already. We are on course to achieve real progress in cutting emissions by 2020 and on the right path to attaining our goal of cutting the UK’s carbon emissions by 60 per cent by about 2050. These proposals will help us meet our twin objectives of tackling climate change and providing security of supply. The scale of the challenge is great. The proposals I set out show how we can overcome them to secure our prosperity and the health of our planet”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

Since this Statement was made in the other place, it has come to light that the statistics quoted on electricity appliances on standby should have referred to electricity used in the home, not electricity generated in the United Kingdom. Arrangements are being made to advise the other place of that clarification.

15:46:00

Baroness Miller of Hendon
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made yesterday in the other place. I am pleased that Her Majesty's Government are, in theory, considering nuclear energy within the mix that we need to protect the security of supply to our small country, especially considering that we on these Benches had to fight the Government during the progress of the Energy Bill in 2004 to keep the nuclear option open. Indeed, one might argue that, welcome though some of the noises in the Statement are, the gist is more, “We’ve thought about it, now we are going to think about it again—a little more—and then consult on it”, or, as my honourable friend in the other place stated yesterday, 

“not carbon-free but content-free”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/7/06; col. 1265.]

Two years ago the Government had the opportunity in primary legislation to address many of the points that they have raised today. Yet I am sure that noble Lords from all sides of the House will remember that the Government resisted amendments that addressed sustainable energy, microgeneration, combined heat and power, energy efficiency and clean-coal technology, to mention just a few—perhaps because it was an election year. As the energy crisis deepens, we know that the Energy Act 2004 was a missed opportunity and that, with the rapid rise in the price of oil and the depleting gas supplies, the matter is now becoming critical. There can be no doubt that the Government agree with us that security of supply and carbon reduction are the two key priorities.

I will not repeat the comments of my honourable friend, who succinctly laid down the many areas in which there is now a consensus, nor shall I ask the questions that he did, unless there was no answer in the other place. However, I want to ask the Minister what consideration has been given to the flexing of muscles by Russia in the energy field and how that may affect our security of supply at the end of the pipeline.

I started by suggesting that, in theory, the Government seem to be considering nuclear energy. In a well publicised speech, the Prime Minister announced that nuclear power is,

“back on the agenda with a vengeance”.

However, in his preface to the energy review report, the Prime Minister spares 10 scant words to the subject of nuclear power. In his Statement in the other place yesterday, repeated by the Minister today, the Secretary of State said that the Government have concluded that new nuclear power stations could make a significant contribution to meeting our energy policy needs. I emphasise the word “could”—not “will” or even “should”. Is this a diminution of what the Prime Minister said about nuclear power being,

“back on the agenda with a vengeance”?

It is perfectly clear that, perhaps in deference to their vast body of anti-nuclear supporters, the Government, while offering to grasp the nuclear nettle, have done so with heavily gloved hands.

In the very next paragraph of that Statement, the Government said—I précis it—that it will be for the private sector to fund its full share of the long-term waste management costs. The Secretary of State was pressed by several of his Back Benchers in the other place to explain what the full share was. One honourable Member asked him whether it was 100 per cent. To all those questions, no answers were forthcoming, so, on behalf of the House and in the interests of clarity, I repeat the question: is the full share 100 per cent? A simple yes or no will suffice. I assume that nuclear waste from sources other than nuclear power—for example, medical and industrial waste, and isotopes—will not be charged to the generators.

I am conscious of time in a discussion in which many may want to take part, so I shall add only one more comment. In the Statement, the Minister repeated that we need a stronger obligation on energy companies to provide energy-saving measures. The Secretary of State pointed out that energy companies have a great incentive to sell as much energy as they can. The suggestion is that energy companies should be incentivised to sell more insulating products. It sounds to me like trying to get turkeys to vote for Christmas.

The Prime Minister has referred to energy-saving bulbs. They are first class: they save power and last much longer than ordinary bulbs. But they cost several pounds each, and we obviously need to look for things that are not necessarily beyond the pocket of many people. What energy efficiency regulations will be imposed both on new builds and on conversions of existing properties?

Overall, the Statement poses more questions than it gives answers, because it lacks detail and calls for further consultation. How much more do we need? We welcome the Government’s focus on renewables, particularly for planning procedures. However, what else will they do to achieve those targets? I remind the Minister that the Government have had targets of 10 per cent by 2010, 20 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050. Today, 3 to 4 per cent of our energy comes from wind power, so the question is: how will they achieve that? After nine years, six Secretaries of State and three energy reviews, our supply is not secure and carbon emissions continue to rise.

I started by saying that the Energy Act 2004 was a missed opportunity. This Statement has been, as well. It is, as my honourable friend said in the other place,

“a grave and perilous let-down”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/7/06, col. 1266.]

I return to the cry so often heard. It is time, in the immortal words of Elvis, for:

“A little less conversation, a little more action, please”.

15:52:00

Lord Redesdale
My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, although it is rather unusual that we had to have it today. It seems that, through the usual channels, the Conservatives did not ask for this Statement. That is an interesting situation and it is the role of the Lord Speaker to adjudicate in such cases. However, I thank the House authorities for making the Statement available today. It is important, and must be made. Perhaps there is some way in which the usual channels could be changed so that we can get these Statements brought forward.

This is one of the most interesting Statements that I have ever had to talk to. It is the first time that I have been lobbied, as a Front-Bench spokesman, by Members from all sides of the House to make points on one side or the other against their Front Benches. The noble Baroness, Lady Miller, has made a strident and excellent speech in support of her view on nuclear power, but that strident view is not shared by her leader in another place.

Baroness Miller of Hendon
My Lords, I know that this is timed, but I should like to point out that I did not make a “strident” defence of nuclear. I was asking about the Government’s opinion.

Lord Redesdale
My Lords, perhaps a reading of Hansard will elucidate my misconception.

I am split on the Statement, because half of it—up to point 45—is, for somebody who has been fighting for renewable energy, Christmas come early. It is an excellent Statement, setting out many issues that will be welcomed by those fighting climate change and looking carefully at ways of reducing carbon emissions. Some points are very interesting. I find it particularly interesting because, when I took my Renewable Energy Bill through two years ago, the Government had not taken on board the need for some of these measures, but they are now taking them forward with some alacrity.

The issues in which I am particularly interested are smart metering, which should be in every house, microgeneration, eliminating standby, combined heat and power—especially large-scale combined heat and power, which is not utilised at the moment—and energy-saving light bulbs, which should not be underestimated. As has been pointed out, the use of energy-saving light bulbs in this Chamber is saving the House authorities £3,000 a year.

A number of questions have to be asked of this Statement. We on these Benches are against nuclear power for two reasons. The first is waste. Are the Government taking the interim report as the final report? Does the Minister believe that there will be any changes between the interim report and the final report? Is that why the Statement is being made before the final report has come out? The second reason is cost. The Government have clearly said that there will be no subsidies for nuclear power. I find that interesting because, in the past, nuclear power has always cost a great deal more than was set out. Indeed, this paper gives different prices for the provision of nuclear and wind power from the ones given in the 2002 paper. That might be because nuclear power has become cheaper, but I do not believe that wind power has become more expensive. Can the Minister say whether there will be no subsidy in relation to the emission of carbon or through the regulations dealing with carbon release and nuclear? Will renewable obligation credits be extended to nuclear? There is talk of increasing the renewable obligation from 15 per cent to 20 per cent, and the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, has said that he believes that nuclear is a renewable resource. If that is the case, are the Government changing their view and extending ROCs to nuclear?

Planning will be a vexed issue. The report mentions moving to a position where planning considerations can move forward nuclear power stations. I have some sympathy with the Government, because it is ridiculous to have to argue the case for any specific wind farm or power station when these cases have been argued so many times before. However, I believe that the talk of reducing the role of the public will lead to a backlash against nuclear.

My final point is about carbon storage and capture. On page 119, the report states that the Government will look at future schemes on carbon storage and capture. I am surprised that they have not listed the five schemes that are already taking place. I hope that they will consider substantially increasing the amount of money that is available for research and development, as well as implementation, of carbon storage and capture.

The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman)
My Lords, before the Minister replies and before I leave the Chamber, I hope that the House will allow me to clarify the situation of the Lord Speaker regarding Statements. I understand that the House adopted the recommendations of the Select Committee on the Speakership, which did not include any responsibility for the taking and repeating of Statements from another place—that remains the responsibility of the usual channels. The Lord Speaker has responsibility for ruling on Private Notice Questions, but that is a separate issue. I hope that that is helpful. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, would not wish additional powers to accrue to the Lord Speaker.

Lord Redesdale
My Lords, I apologise to the Lord Speaker for giving that impression. There was a great deal of confusion. We used the example of the Private Notice Question in relation to the position of the Lord Speaker. I apologise abjectly for giving the impression that the Lord Speaker is involved in Statements.

15:59:00

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Lords for their contributions, although I thought that the recollection of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, about past policy on renewables, on which his party has been active, somewhat contradicted the views of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, who seemed to be claiming rather too much enthusiasm for renewables. I cannot recall during the debate—

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
My Lords, I realise that it is not traditional to interrupt the Minister, but, for the sake of clarity and because there is such a difference between us, I beg that we refer to the noble Baroness as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon. That would completely clarify that, as the Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer, I do not support nuclear.

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, anyone who has heard the two noble Baronesses discussing energy would never confuse them in any way, shape or form. I did not think that I had to refer to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon, in quite such precise terms because she is the Front Bencher who has just questioned me and it is to her that I am making this response. But I am glad to clarify that point.

I was seeking to say that the party of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has had a helpful position on renewables in the recent past and to contrast that with the rather lukewarm perspective of the Official Opposition until the changes that we have noticed in recent months. The noble Baroness made reference to the Energy Bill, which was some three or four years ago now, but I cannot recall the Official Opposition Front Bench being greatly to the fore on these issues at that time. Suffice it to say that I welcome her enthusiasm and pressure today, as I welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has said in reiterating his position.

The areas of energy policy where we need to be united as a country are future projections and the work that we have to do. It is welcome that a great deal of this review points to important consensus on many of the proposals—and I include renewals within that framework.

The noble Baroness asked us what we are doing about Russia. As was made fairly clear at the time, the Government do not believe that the nation should express undue anxiety on the question of Russian gas supplies. Russia is destined to be an important supplier to Europe. It is in its interest to supply to Europe. That situation has obtained for more than 40 years over very different regimes in the old Soviet Union and through the Cold War. These pressures on energy supply were subject to pronounced political factors. One of the reasons why we seek to emphasise that we need a full range of contributions to energy production in the country, including the nuclear option, is that, if we do not create a framework within which all potential producers can contribute, we will become dependent on foreign supplies over which we clearly have less control than we have had in recent decades over our own North Sea supplies. The whole House will recognise the change in circumstances there. The problem that occurred last winter when for a short while Russia clashed with the Ukraine was, although it rather dramatically emphasised the situation even for the UK, much more an issue of the European market, including the point about Belgium. We made the strongest representations on improving that market to guarantee future supplies.

In the market that we seek to create, in which we expect the possibility of nuclear provision, nuclear producers will be expected to bear the full costs of construction, operation and decommission. I hope that the noble Baroness recognises that, particularly with regard to decommissioning. We also recognise, as the Statement makes quite clear, that her emphasis on energy saving is well placed. A great deal of the Statement is about energy saving, although I want again to correct the point in the Statement about the 7 per cent of electricity wasted through standby devices. That applies to household energy only, not to the vast consumption of energy by other users.

The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, emphasised the issue of carbon storage. He is absolutely right. Breakthrough in that technology could do an enormous amount not only for coal consumption in this country, but for climate change. If we could find a safe, secure and non-carbon-emitting coal usage, that could point the way for China and India, which are huge coal users. That is why that research is so important. We will give full support to the research, but the noble Lord will recognise that these are still early days.

Both opposition Front Benches have acknowledged that the Statement covers the full range of energy options and is of the greatest significance to the nation. On that basis, and as the response in the other place indicated, we recognise that this is a common problem that must be solved through common solutions.

16:06:00

Lord Tugendhat
My Lords, does the Minister accept that if this country is to meet its energy emission targets, have security of supply and continue to grow at a satisfactory rate, nuclear power will play a vital part? When all is said and done about renewables, there are still many problems and uncertainties to overcome. Nuclear power has been tried and proven in France and elsewhere. Will he undertake that the treatment of the nuclear programme will in no way be disadvantageous compared to other forms of energy?

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, we intend to create market conditions in which there are incentives to potential nuclear producers. The background is that nuclear production comprises 20 per cent of our present electricity generation. Of course we are pursuing renewable options with great vigour, but to suggest that through them we could readily bridge that gap within the necessary timescale is to ask a very great deal. That is why it is very likely that nuclear production will play its part in the energy mix.

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
My Lords, I welcome the Statement and the document, which is a helpful step in the consideration of our options, not least because it does not set one form of generation against another, as some people would try to do. However, there is a point that we should try to clear up at this stage. Will nuclear generation capacity still be subject to the climate change levy? That is one anomaly at the moment. Secondly, while appropriate attention is given to fuel poverty in the document, there is no reference to the targets that the Government set themselves for the elimination of fuel poverty. That will be made more difficult by the recent price rises. There may be some slippage, but there is a deafening silence in that area. What is the Government's view of the targets that they have set themselves for the elimination of fuel poverty by 2010 or 2016, depending on which way you look at it?

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the latter point is significant and important for the Government. Fuel poverty creates the greatest distress within families. That is why we set a target. My noble friend is right: the substantial increase in fuel prices in recent years has made that situation more difficult, but I reassure him that the elimination of fuel poverty is an important priority for the Government and we will take steps to make progress in that respect.

My noble friend also asked about the climate change levy. European law does not allow us to exempt nuclear power from energy taxes, although it allows some options to exempt renewable sources of energy from energy taxation. The UK applies these exemptions to combined heat and power and to wind power, but it will be recognised that, when we create the market into which nuclear bids will be made, there will be full understanding of the contours of that market. I emphasise that there is no form of subsidy for nuclear power.

Lord Tanlaw
My Lords, although I very much welcome the underlying principles of the Statement, can the Minister clarify a point that was made yesterday at Question Time when I intervened and stated my declared interest in carbon emissions from the manufacture of steel conductor rails? He may have mistakenly misled the House by saying that the manufacture of steel conductor rails was more energy-efficient than that of aluminium conductor rails. I have approached the manufacturers of aluminium conductor rails, who advised me that they are 25 per cent cheaper to make and more energy-efficient. Perhaps I can give him the figures that will come through to me this afternoon.

The only indication that daylight saving is not practical comes from the house-building side—that leaving the lights on makes it impractical. I have spoken to the author of the paper, which he wrote in 1990, and he is prepared to reconsider the figures and to include heating and the industrial side. However, no study has been made of the effects of daylight saving and why it cannot reduce the total amount of electricity used in this country by 1 per cent as it does in the United States. Will the Minister therefore look at this again and ask the Government to encourage a study similar to those being conducted in the United States?

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord. I apologise to the House if I produced an inadequate reply yesterday. The only thing that I can do, in all honesty, is to write to him in detail about this, but I attempted yesterday to indicate that we had looked at his representation and, as I understood it, found that his proposal did not greatly reduce overall carbon emissions, which was the point at stake. The best thing that I can offer to do is to discuss this with him. I will certainly write to him.

Secondly, on daylight saving, on which the noble Lord again waxes eloquently, he may regret that there has not been sufficient study of the amount of energy that could be saved through changes to daylight saving. It will be recognised that this issue has been before both Houses of Parliament for three or four decades, to my knowledge, and has been proposed and debated on very many occasions, but until there is a political will to effect the change, which has quite considerable implications for parts of the country that would be adversely affected by it, it is not surprising that the Government have not undertaken full-scale research into its benefits.

Lord Taverne
My Lords, are the Government aware that not all of us on these Benches oppose nuclear power? In fact, quite a few of us support it. Is there not something preposterous about some green activists—I do not include my noble friend Lord Redesdale—warning us about the apocalypse of global warning and at the same time advancing ideological objections to the one safe and reliable alternative of nuclear power, which now provides 20 per cent of our energy? In a generally balanced Statement, which we welcome, is there not a certain element of make-believe in trusting that renewables will provide 20 per cent of our energy needs? This is especially true of wind power, which is far more expensive than nuclear power and is environmentally rather destructive because it takes up an enormous amount of land and is harmful to birds. Should the Government not address this without political correctness?

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the Government have been accused of political correctness in a wide range of policies, but never, to my mind, in relation to energy. Clearly, the evaluation of the benefits of wind power has been carried out very fully and the intermittent factor is an important consideration. Wind power is difficult to locate, certainly onshore. Many people may be in favour of it in principle, but not in favour of the towers when they appear in their environment. On the noble Lord’s more general issue, I recognise that there are differences in his party on the virtues of nuclear power. The task of the Government is to identify energy needs and the productive sources from which energy can be generated, which is why we are creating circumstances in which nuclear may make its contribution.

Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, I have given the noble Lord notice of this question, which may seem rather detailed, but I hope that it will seem very relevant. I warmly welcome the proposals in the document—paragraphs 5.132 and 5.133—for a new pre-licensing design authorisation procedure for nuclear reactors as part of a revised planning process. I have been pressing for this for some time and it is very good to see it in the document. Will the noble Lord recognise that this will require a substantial increase—perhaps 25 per cent—in the staff of the Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations? Is the Minister aware that the Health and Safety Executive wrote in its report to Ministers only last month:

“This may be a significant issue for HSE as recruitment of appropriately qualified and experienced staff has proven difficult for NII in recent years”?
 

Will Ministers now swiftly approve the HSE’s proposed pay and rewards measures to address that problem? Is it not abundantly clear that without adequate staffing of the inspectorate, the review’s welcome proposals will be gravely prejudiced?

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me notice of that question, as I doubt that I would have been able to give him much of a reply had he not indicated the nature of his interest. The present prediction for work, excluding new build, is that we will need 192 inspectors. At present, there are 163 in post. The noble Lord has also indicated that a much greater number would be needed under new build. We intend to discuss requirements with the HSE. I reassure the noble Lord that there could be no contemplation of new build and development of the nuclear industry without absolute guarantees on safety, which means a fully staffed inspectorate.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon
My Lords, in the 1980s, I had the honour to serve in another place on the Select Committee on energy. I remind the Minister and the House that many of the proposals being put forward were recommended by that Select Committee in the early 1980s—such as energy saving in homes and factories. The Atkins report recommended that we should proceed very quickly with more combined heat and power. If all those things had been done at that time, including the building of the Severn Barrage which could have provided 6 per cent of our energy, we would not be in this mess now.

I should like to ask two questions. First, on the cost of nuclear power, I understand that the cost per kilowatt hour is estimated to be 2.4p, which is exactly the figure that was given to the Select Committee way back in the early 1980s. But when the industry was privatised and the City got on to the figures, it went up to between 5.5p and 6.5p. What is the real cost of nuclear energy? Does the figure of 2.4p include the costs of decommissioning and the storage of nuclear material?

Secondly, bearing in mind that energy is now one of the top priorities of policy not only in this country but also throughout the world, is it not time that we set up again an independent department of energy rather than subsume it into the Department of Trade and Industry? I hope that the Government will take this request seriously.

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the organisation of government is the preserve of the Prime Minister, but no doubt he will read with the closest attention the suggestion of the noble Lord that there should be a separate department of energy. Perhaps I may also say that hindsight is a wonderful thing. We lived in a rather different environment in the 1980s. It is also true that it is a joy to stand at this Dispatch Box and say that my party had no responsibility for policy during the 1980s, as he may have noticed. If he is being critical, he can leave this Government and my party out of that criticism.

On the more general points that the noble Lord made regarding costs, in a changing situation the evaluation of costs is very difficult. However, nuclear is currently cheaper than wind generation, but it is more expensive than gas and coal; that is the position it occupies. We intend to create the circumstances in which a full evaluation of what can be contributed to the production of energy over the next 20 to 30 years, and that will include careful consideration of costs by potential producers. The nuclear industry will make up its own mind on those issues.

Baroness Noakes
My Lords, following the questions put by my noble friend Lady Miller of Hendon, I should like to give the noble Lord another opportunity to respond. My question relates to the costs of long-term waste management. The Statement referred to the full share of these costs being met by the private sector. The word “share” implies less than 100 per cent. My noble friend asked the Minister to confirm whether or not this referred to the private sector meeting 100 per cent of those costs and she invited him to respond by answering yes or no. I so invite him now.

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the issue is not quite as simple as the noble Baroness suggests. First, we face very substantial historic costs that run into billions of pounds and involve the application of high-level technologies to solve the issues. The noble Baroness will know that CoRWM is to produce its full report by the end of this month and that the Government will respond to it. We are not loading those costs on to the future development of the nuclear industry, but we do say that future costs—build, operation and decommissioning—will be borne by it.

Lord Ezra
My Lords—

Lord Palmer
My Lords—

Lord Grocott
My Lords, it is the turn of the Liberal Democrat Benches.

Lord Ezra
My Lords, the energy review rightly devotes a good deal of attention to energy saving, admits that more needs to be done and recommends further measures. However, is there not a risk, with the round of measures now in place to stimulate energy saving, that consumers will get rather confused? The Statement repeated by the noble Lord refers to “incentivising” the suppliers. Should we not be seeking to incentivise the users? Is there not one way in which they can be really incentivised—a way to really concentrate the mind—and that is by linking energy saving to reductions in council tax? This is something that most of us would have a good go at if we were given the opportunity. It has been tried by some local councils, with the help of energy suppliers, and I believe it has met with great success.

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord who, as ever, is constructive on these matters. It is quite a daunting task to incentivise the whole of the nation to energy saving, although we think that companies can improve the situation by the development of metering systems which convey accurately to the consumer both the cost of their energy—rather than just a series of figures going around in the rather indecipherable way we all recognise—and potentially perhaps the carbon content to show the impact on the environment. That is something which the companies could do and we are looking at the situation. It would certainly help to alert the consumer to the consumption of electricity, particularly against a background—I am sure the whole House will share my concern—where 7 per cent of our electricity is consumed by standby. That is an appalling figure. If we can succeed in communicating that figure effectively to the nation, we may get improvements in that respect.

I shall pass on to my colleagues the noble Lord’s specific proposal in regard to the relationship between saving power and the council tax. It is an interesting and constructive suggestion but I have no comment to make on it at this stage.

Lord Palmer
My Lords, I do not think the Minister had a chance to properly reply to the second part of the question of the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon. Surely we need in this country a new energy tsar and department so that we can have joined-up thinking between Defra, the DTI, the Department for Transport and the Treasury where all energy matters are concerned.

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I always love appeals for tsars. There are very few tsars that I hold in high regard, from Vlad the Impaler to Alexander II. I am not sure that problems are solved by that model. It is certainly the case that we need co-ordinated operations by government departments—it is a very important area—but if one were to ask noble Lords to identify other areas where co-ordination could take place, we would revise the structure of Cabinets almost weekly. The noble Lord must recognise that the Statement represents from the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the Cabinet a significant analysis of the energy needs of this country for several decades ahead and the quite dramatic policies that will need to be put in place in order to guarantee that the lights remain on.

Lord Skelmersdale
My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down—

Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, time is up.

Education and Inspections Bill

16:28:00

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Skills (Lord Adonis)
My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.

House in Committee accordingly.

[The CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES in the Chair.]

Clause 4 [Duty to identify children not receiving education]:

Lord Judd
moved Amendment No. 23:

Page 3, leave out line 8.

The noble Lord said: In moving Amendment No. 23, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 25. There is a great burden of business before the Committee today and therefore I shall endeavour to be as brief as possible.

We have agreed in our deliberations so far, and underlined this understanding, that education is the right of every child. We have referred to the conventions internationally into which we have voluntarily entered as a nation and we have confirmed that we are determined to see our responsibility in respect of those conventions fulfilled. My noble friend the Minister in his very helpful responses to amendments so far put forward has given an undertaking that he will look very closely at an amendment put forward in my name suggesting that education as the right of the child should be there, directly and explicitly, at the beginning of the Bill and on the face of the Bill.

If we are so determined that this right should be recognised, it is surely equally incumbent on us to ensure that the means are in place to deliver that right. It is my contention that some of those in most need of education will, almost by definition, be those most in jeopardy in terms of fulfilling that right. The difficulty, as I see it, is that the responsibility for ensuring that right is distributed among a number of different agencies and bodies. If we are to be certain that the right is being fulfilled, there is a great deal to be said for one body having the universal responsibility for ensuring that this right is turned into practice. My amendment proposes that we should give that responsibility to the local education authority.

The purpose of Amendment No. 23 is to identify children who are not receiving education in such a way that those informally excluded pupils who remain on the register are also covered. I know, because the Minister has been kind enough to indicate to me in correspondence, that the Government will argue that it is illegal for a child to be informally excluded in such a way. Whether it is legal or illegal, it happens. I believe that because of the pressures on schools at the moment in so many respects, not least from the media, there will be a great deal of temptation, whatever we say, for headmasters and headmistresses in certain circumstances to follow that road.

I think that those of us who are concerned about children most in need would say that while we would not question the disruptive potential of such students and the need to protect the interests of the majority of children at school, very often the disruptive child is the one who is most in need of educational support of an appropriate kind. Therefore, this amendment says fairly and squarely, in effect, that it is the responsibility of the local education authority to discover whether children are being excluded in this way and to make sure that arrangements are made.

On Amendment No. 25, the force of what I have been trying to argue is, in a sense, even more acute. Young people in custodial care, psychiatric units and immigration and removal centres are frequently very much in need of the right kind of support. I have recently completed nine years as honorary president of the YMCA in England which, I am glad to say, does a great deal of work with young people in custody. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that all that I have experienced and heard from such programmes repeatedly brings it home that it would be almost amazing if the majority of these young people were not in trouble. They come from such disrupted, damaging home or social circumstances that they are desperately in need of support. Again, I am not arguing that wrongdoing should not be punished, but punishment which does not seek to rehabilitate or to discover the real background to the situation is just a waste of public money, in addition to being singularly unintelligent and unenlightened. Therefore, children in such situations should be absolutely certain that their right to education is being fulfilled.

The Minister has been kind enough to indicate to me that the Government’s case is likely to be that all the institutions that I have mentioned have a responsibility in this respect. However, those of us who have dealt on the front line with these situations will know that, whatever the formal responsibilities may be, they are not always being fulfilled. Even when they are, they are too often being fulfilled to a minimal degree to the letter of what is required but not in the spirit of what is required at all. From that standpoint, it is absolutely logical and sensible, if we are serious in our commitment to the right of the child to education and the paramount importance of that, to ensure that the local education authority is charged with overseeing such situations and making sure that whatever is in the rules and regulations is in fact being fulfilled and the education is being provided. I beg to move.

Baroness Walmsley
I rise to speak to Amendments Nos. 24, 26 and 26A standing in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Sharp. Amendment No. 24 would do something similar to Amendment No. 23 moved by the noble Lord, Lord Judd. It would require the local authority to be the educator of last resort. In other words, the LEA has to find a place for a child who fails to secure a place at a secondary school and an alternative school, home tuition or a PRU for pupils who are excluded, for whatever reason.

It is one thing identifying the children not receiving a suitable education, as this Bill seeks to do, but someone has to have the duty to provide that education. In the current climate of schools becoming independent and having the right to refuse admission to particular children, there is no mechanism to rectify that situation. I am not normally someone who wants local authorities to have a duty to pick up the pieces of other people's messes, but someone must, in the last resort, have the duty to provide a child with an education—the education to which it has a right. That will have to be the local authority.

Amendments Nos. 26 and 26A have already had the implicit support of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, in what he said in his excellent speech. Amendment No. 26 would end the current exclusion of children detained under an order of court from the statutory right to education. It is currently the case that Section 562 of the Education Act 1996 effectively permits the Secretary of State, local authorities and parents to opt out of any obligations under the Act if the child is detained by the order of a court. Although the local authority may make arrangements for educational provision for such a child, it is under no obligation to do so.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child stated in its concluding observations on the UK's second report to the committee in 2002 that it was particularly,

“concerned that children deprived of their liberty in prisons and juvenile detention centres do not have a statutory right to education and that their education is not under the responsibility of the Departments responsible for education and that they do not enjoy support for special education needs”.

Further, in its report on the UNCRC in 2000-03, the Joint Committee on Human Rights concurred. It said:

“We do not find the arguments presented by the Minister for Children and Young People against giving detained juveniles the same rights to education as other children persuasive—indeed we find them puzzlingly contradictory. He argues that such guarantees are unnecessary because the Government is doing all that is required. The same sorts of arguments were made against the application of the Children Act and the consequence was a judicial finding against the Government. We consider that the persistence of the Government's resistance to placing the educational rights of young offenders on a statutory footing is a contravention of the UK's international obligations”.
 

The JCHR scrutiny report on the current Bill also highlights as concerning the fact that as a result of Section 562, Clause 4, which puts local authorities under a new duty to identify children not receiving education, will not apply to children in custody. The report says:

“These will be some of the most vulnerable children in the LEA's area and in our view it would be preferable if the duty to make arrangements to identify children not receiving education applied to them”.
 

Without relevant statutory duties in place, the current situation for young people in custody with regard to education is currently very poor. Many of them start with very poor levels of education, and that is widely considered one of the causes of crime. Prison Service Order 4950 stipulates the requirements for prisons holding children. Education should be provided for at least 15 hours a week and the remaining 15 hours must be spent in accredited educative activities, which may include work-based learning. However, there is evidence, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, that these levels of provision are not being consistently met. In April, in response to a Parliamentary Question, Fiona Mactaggart said:

“The Youth Justice Board … set the young people's secure estate a national average of 25 hours a week education and training provision, rising to 30 when resources become available. Between April 2005 and March 2006, eight young offender institutions … met the national average and eight did not.
 

In the 2005–08 service level agreement between the YJB and the Prison Service, each YOI was set an agreed target for the provision of education and training. Between April 2005 and March 2006, five YOIs met their individual target and 11 did not”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/4/06; cols. 1262-3W.]
 

Less than 50 per cent reaching their targets is pretty appalling, especially when we know that improving levels of education and training to help a young person get a job is one of the most effective levers to help them to avoid reoffending and to keep out of the downward spiral that is too often the result of getting involved with the criminal justice system. Furthermore, a recent inspection report of Her Majesty’s young offender institution, Wetherby, published in January 2005, found that four out of 10 of the young people were not accessing education or training.

The Government in their recent Green Paper, Reducing Re-offending Through Skills and Employment, recognise these serious deficiencies in the current arrangements. In the light of the Government’s own plans, the Government stated during the Committee stage of the Bill in the House of Commons that they do not feel that the repeal of Section 562 is either necessary or desirable. I find that very puzzling. I believe that by failing to end this discriminatory exemption the efforts to improve the situation will be undermined. As long as that section remains in place, it will continue to be a major barrier to the effective provision of education for children in custody.

Amendment No. 26A probes whether the duties placed on local authorities under the Education Act 1996 apply to children in immigration removal centres. Under that Act, children subject to an order of court are currently exempt, but the situation relating to children in immigration removal centres is not clear. Children in those centres are not placed there by order of court. However, there are clear differentials in standards between education provision in mainstream schools and in immigration removal centres, which calls the status of their education provision into serious question.

16:45:00

The following quotation was taken from a recent inspection of Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre last March. It said that the provision for children’s education was unsatisfactory and depressing and that:

“Accommodation for older children was poor, and the broad range of ages and abilities prevented effective work. There was an over-reliance on agency staff, insufficient resources and no system to measure the quality, rather than the amount, of teaching”.

When this issue was debated in Committee in another place, the Minister, Phil Hope MP, said that due to the very low numbers of children detained in IRCs it would be disproportionate to extend local authorities’ education duties to include them, and a more appropriate way to tackle the current deficiencies in the system was through the contract to run the centre. He said:

“Of the three immigration removal centres that hold families with children, two hold families for a maximum of 72 hours”,

while at Yarl’s Wood,

“in individual cases, families with children are held there for longer periods. Most will be held for just a few days prior to removal from the UK”.—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee E, 18/4/06; col. 258.]

If the scale of the problem is so small, it would be a very small burden on local authorities.

Besides, we refute the contention that the scale of the issue is quite that small. Government figures show that of the 540 minors recorded as leaving detention, excluding Oakington, during the fourth quarter of last year, 465 were asylum detainees, a rise of 19 per cent from the third quarter of that same year. Three hundred and eighty-five of all minors had been in detention for seven days or less, 60 of them eight to 14 days and 70 had been detained for something between 15 and 29 days. That is a considerable period of time during the education of a child. A recent report from Save the Children estimates that the numbers are much greater than those quoted by the Government. I will not detain your Lordships by quoting it, but the report is easily available.

The fundamental objection to the current situation is that segregated education provision is regressive and discriminatory. One of the founding principles of the Education Act 1944 was that school-based education should be universally available. Allowing a child’s immigration status to determine whether or not they can attend a mainstream school is a dangerous and unprecedented attack on that principle and may violate the right of the child to be educated under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Earl of Listowel
I support Amendments Nos. 24 and 26. I apologise to the Committee if I have to slip out in the course of the Minister’s response, as it is the annual general meeting of the Associate Parliamentary Group for Children and Young People in Care, and my presence is necessary to make that quorate.

Clause 4, identifying those children who are not receiving education, is very welcome. It seems to me, however, as it does to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, only to go halfway to meeting the need. I shall give the case of Traveller children as an example. Recently a charity, the Ormiston Children and Families Trust, made a presentation on the needs of children of Traveller families. Three such children spoke of their experience of bullying in schools, of their need to hide their identities as Travellers in schools and, on one occasion, of having a brick thrown through their family home. They also spoke with pride about the occasions when they were encouraged at school to go and speak to their fellow pupils about their cultural heritage, and the impact that had on reducing the bullying towards them.

Nearly 40 years ago the Plowden report identified the concerns about Traveller children not taking part in education, and a report from Ofsted, The Education of Traveller Children, indicated that possibly 10,000 Traveller children were not receiving secondary school education. I know that the Government are taking several important steps in addressing this problem. The development of early years childcare, which can help to draw these families into the education system and build their trust in it, is particularly welcome. Will the Minister say—perhaps he can write to me—what progress has been made on that figure of 10,000 children?

I have no wish to burden schools any further than they already are. I welcome the prioritisation of looked-after children in the admissions for schools. We recognise that these children have been let down badly in the past. I welcome what the Government have done, but I hope that they will consider what more could be done for these other children who have been excluded.

I turn to Amendment No. 26. I believe that 28 per cent of juveniles leaving the prison estate reoffend within two months of doing so. On a recent visit to a secure training centre, the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland of Asthal, and I spoke to a 16 year-old young man, Paul. He told us that he had not been in school for several years and that he did not feel that he had much time for it. In the course of his sentence he made several years’ progress in reading ability. The education at that establishment was clearly first rate, although the Committee will be aware that the quality of provision in secure training centres and young offender institutions is variable. What really came through very clearly from all the people we spoke to on that visit, including the wonderful teachers, the social workers and the psychologists, is that when those children leave that setting, it is as if they come off a cliff. That is a recurrent theme. It is particularly true of young people in care who, sadly, too often enter custody. When they leave custody, there is no connection with services to ensure that they are properly cared for. I hope that the amendment will enable a more thorough approach to connect these children with the services they need when they move on. I hope that the noble Lord will consider that.

Will the noble Lord also consider holding a meeting on this and other matters with the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland? If the noble Baroness is to achieve her goal of reducing reoffending, which is very much a priority of hers, clearly the noble Lord’s department and that of the noble Baroness will have to work together much more closely. If I may say so, the closer the Home Office and the noble Lord’s department work together, the better will his responsibility for vulnerable children be discharged. However, I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, carries a very heavy burden and I do not wish to add to it any more than is absolutely necessary.

I am moving to a conclusion. I believe that the National Health Service was charged with the health of those in prison in about 1999, taking over from the Prison Service. Everyone clearly recognised what an important advance that was. When I visited Feltham young offender institution about a year after that event and spoke with the health department, I particularly noticed the significant decline in children and young people harming themselves. It is widely acknowledged that that was an important step forward. So there is a reasonable expectation that if local education authorities were to take responsibility for the matter we are discussing, there might be further improvement in the consistency and quality of education provision in these settings. One per cent of children entering the juvenile estate have a statement of special educational needs, but it is estimated that 50 per cent actually have special educational needs. That is another argument for better joining up the services provided in prisons with those outside. That might well be done by placing these responsibilities on local education authorities.

In conclusion, for all our sakes it is vital that we improve the consistency of the quality of education offered to juveniles and that we ensure they have a school place when they complete their generally short stay in custody or on remand. Both these amendments might conduce to those ends. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Baroness Thornton
I speak in support of Amendment No. 26, to which I have added my name. One year and several months on I once again find myself speaking on the very significant matter of Section 562 of the Education Act 1996, which denies young offenders and others the statutory right to a normal education.

In February last year, with very many of the same cast but with a different Minister, and with the support of my noble friend Lord Judd, we tabled an amendment on precisely this matter. I feel that we have probably not made much progress since then. I feel strongly that it is our duty to ensure that young offenders and those with mental health problems have, at the minimum, the same rights to education as all non-detained children.

I am not going to run through the arguments, which have been so ably outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. I remind the Committee of what the Minister at the time, my noble friend Lord Filkin, said about the issue, because he was not at all dismissive. He committed himself and his department to,

“look within the department to ensure that there is clear and strong ownership of this issue, both at ministerial and official level”.—[Official Report, 24/2/05; col. 1450.]

My noble friend also undertook to look into the research that many noble Lords, including me, outlined in that debate and to look at the evidence—some of which has been repeated today. He also said that he would ask his officials at some stage to organise a workshop with some of the organisations referred to in the debate that are experts in this area, to discuss with the department how best to take that forward.

I am not necessarily expecting my noble friend the Minister to report on that, because he was not the Minister at the time. But I hope that we might see some progress on this important matter and that we will take the opportunity of this Bill—which is about good education for all children—to deal with these children who are outside the Act, and outside the jurisdiction of the department and local education authorities.

Baroness Williams of Crosby
I follow with great appreciation the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. It is not often in politics—and I have had a long life in politics—that one suddenly sees the clear answer to a problem emerging between all parties in an intelligent and thoughtful debate such as this one. But it is increasingly clear—the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, put this very well—that the problem of a very high recidivism rate among young offenders in prisons and young offender institutions can be met only with much closer co-operation between the Department for Education and Skills and the Home Office. I do not want to add much to the eloquent remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, or the highly informed remarks of my noble friend Lady Walmsley, beyond one or two rather stark comments .

A small percentage of children—probably only between 5 per cent and 10 per cent—follow what might be called a “fateful” path. That path often begins with their exclusion from school. Last year no fewer than 389,560 children were excluded from school, in some cases for only a very short time. But they suffered the experience of exclusion, itself a mark of the trouble that the child is in. Some of those children go on to receive anti-social behaviour orders, and some go on to young offender institutions. The one strand that is absolutely clear from the beginning to the end of this fateful process is that these children are neither educated nor trained to enable them to be a part of modern society, demanding as it is.

I was shocked by figures from the then Home Office Minister, Paul Goggins, in a Written Answer to a Question tabled two years ago in the other place by Charles Hendry. Those figures—the most recent I have been able to find—say it all. In 2004, 81.7 per cent of young offenders—more than four-fifths of the total—had a level 1 or lower standard of literacy. In other words, they were at best semi-literate and in some cases absolutely illiterate. Some 78 per cent were innumerate, nearly four-fifths of the total.

We are considering young men and women who already have, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, said, profoundly troubled backgrounds. Then, at a very early stage in their lives, they fall out. They cannot keep up with the education opportunities offered to them. Then, year after year, decade after decade, they sink ever more deeply into a situation in which they can neither cope nor be a part of our society. It is not surprising that such a large number of them end up in young offender institutions and then, all too quickly, end up in prison. Then they are all too quickly written off as members of society other than as those attacking society’s underlying strength and order. The answer lies very much with us.

17:00:00

I wish to cite only one other figure before I say something about Amendment No. 26A. That figure also says it all. My noble friend Lady Walmsley has given the detailed indications of how ineffective so far the attempts to educate young offenders have been, although I give full credit to the Youth Justice Board for the efforts that it has made against an almost impossible challenge. But there is another astonishing figure. It costs £34,924 to keep a young person in a young offender institution and, at present, the annual average figure for those in such institutions is about 6,500. Noble Lords should not forget the figure of more than £34,000. Set against that is the cost of £3,800 for a youngster in secondary education.

The gap between the two, given what the noble Earl said about recidivism, means that year after year, as a society, we pay huge amounts to keep youngsters in prison who—had we caught them early enough, given them proper literacy training and intensive extra support on the lines that the Government, to whom I give credit, are suggesting with personalised education—might have been taken out of this fateful journey which, apart from ruining young lives, costs our society huge sums of money. I am talking only about the costs of keeping them and not the desperate costs for the victims of sustaining the injuries and the crimes for which such young people are responsible.

The answer leaps out. We have to catch these youngsters much earlier. We have to give them the intensive training and help that they need. Frankly, even the Youth Justice Board’s idea of 15 hours of education a week is a poor joke compared with the 30 hours that we expect children who are not in trouble to have, and we have to put that right. This Bill could give the Government the opportunity to tackle the causes of crime in a radical, far-reaching and exciting way.

I wish briefly to mention Amendment No. 26A, which concerns immigration removal centres. I should declare an interest as a patron of the Gatwick detention centre, of which I am extremely proud. It recently received a Queen’s award for the outstanding nature of its work with detainees. In addition to what has already been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and my noble friend Lady Walmsley about immigration removal centres, we should bear in mind another fact. My noble friend gave the figures, which are relatively limited—even the Save the Children Fund estimate of £2,000 a year is not huge. But noble Lords will have noticed that, in the past couple of days, the Government said that they cannot accept the proposal for an amnesty for illegal immigrants, but will take steps to remove them.

Some illegal immigrants have been settled in this country for years—sometimes for more than 10 years. Their children are in school, and they have families that are settled and are sometimes working in this country. You will have a much greater problem removing them; there will be a lot of legal defences and attempts to bring cases; there will be support from neighbours; and there will be the voices of NGOs. Those people will not be deported in a matter of days, which means that, if the Government are serious in their effort, far more children will find themselves in immigration removal centres.

I plead with the Minister to consider carefully the case made by my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Judd. Those youngsters could be there not for four weeks, but for months on end or even a year or more. It is absolutely vital that the Government take steps to make education available to those children who have already been traumatised by the fact that their families are about to be removed. They are even more traumatised if that whole process is slow, long and drawn out and there is bitter controversy, as I fear will be the case.

With that background, I think many of the arguments advanced by the Minister in another place against accepting Amendment No. 26A fall to the ground. I strongly support my noble friends who have tabled it.

Baroness Darcy de Knayth
Having put my name to Amendment No. 26, I wish to add a warm word of support to those so cogently spoken by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and to the convincing support of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, who referred to the debate on this amendment and to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, on 24 February 2005.

Today, I have just received an update from the National Children's Bureau on the statistics that were given earlier. The bureau still says that it is very difficult to access accurate statistical information and to understand whether the number of young people who end up in prison with special educational needs is because they have fallen out of the school system as a result of their learning difficulties not being identified. I hope that some of the amendments to the Bill will help in providing better training for teachers and support people, and in the identification of needs. I hope that my statistics will dovetail with those given by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, rather just being repetition.

The DfES tries to clarify the legal position by admitting that,

“although Statements of Special Educational Need do not apply in custody, there is an expectation that SEN are dealt with according to the Code of Practice”.

That is from the Offenders Learning Journey for juvenile offenders published by the DfES in 2004. The Youth Justice Board also says that it expects STCs and YOIs to comply with the code, but whether they do and whether the expertise of SENCOs is available to every juvenile custodial establishment is unclear. I have not given the Minister notice of that question but I hope that he may be able to touch on it when he replies. If not, perhaps he could write to me before Report.

Interestingly, on its website the Learning and Skills Council, which has responsibility for education provision in YOIs, states that:

“The majority of 15 year olds in juvenile establishments have had little or no formal education or training. As well as low levels of basic skills, many of them have particular learning difficulties that need additional support”.
 

As my noble friend Lord Listowel and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, have indicated, although the Youth Justice Board has prioritised the provision of education and training, health and mental health care, and support in finding accommodation post-release from custody, the way in which a secure regime works makes it difficult to offer consistent, targeted and meaningful services. Sentences tend to be short and transfers between YOIs frequent. For example, the take-up of education in different institutions ranges from 80 per cent in one to 39 per cent in another. My source is People leaving Young Offender Institutions, published by the Learning and Skills Council West Yorkshire in 2004. The same report concludes that, unsurprisingly, research shows that,

“the route to rehabilitation for most young offenders is through the attainment of normal milestones—learning to read and write, attending school, gaining qualifications”—

as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said—

“getting a job, entering further education and training, finding somewhere to live and maintaining stable family relationships”.

I hope that the Minister will respond very positively to the amendment in his reply and that he will give serious consideration to the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, who spoke of setting up a workshop and involving the organisations that have been briefing us on this subject. He said:

“We should probably invite some of the institutions with managerial responsibility for those issues so that we get in the skin of the current state of the system and how it is delivering”.—[Official Report, 24/2/05; col. 1450.]
 

I hope that we have a positive reply from the Minister.

Lord Dearing
Briefly, these amendments are among the most important on the Bill. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, on Clause 24 and the cost of our failure of these children and young people.

First, I commend warmly to the Minister the words “suitable education” in Amendments Nos. 24 and 26A. Any old education will not do, especially for those whom education has failed. It must be apt for these young people, or it will fail again.

Secondly, I do not know exactly what the intentions for the amendments’ delivery are, but I see the local authority being the champion of these young people’s educational interests, with the power and duty to ensure that they get the suitable education they need. It is getting it that matters. They need a champion, which has been lacking, to see that they do.

Baroness Warnock
I endorse everything that my noble friend has just said. I support these amendments; they are some of the most important amendments we shall discuss during the passage of the Bill.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
I also support the intention behind these amendments. I shall not attempt to repeat the eloquence of so many speakers around the Floor. The Committee clearly regards this as important. I simply ask a question of logic in supporting, for example, Amendment No. 24. Clause 4—which I warmly welcome—imposes a duty to identify children not receiving an education. The logic is that, if we were to go to the primary care trust and give a duty to identify ill people, we stop there. The point is that they should be treated and supported medically. Similarly, there is surely a duty and responsibility lying somewhere—and if not with the local authority, where?—for those needing support, having been identified as not receiving adequate education.

Lord Adonis
Clause 4 imposes an important new duty on local authorities to identify children missing from education. The various amendments seek to amend that new duty in different ways, introducing new provisions for children in custody or otherwise in detention.

Amendment No. 23, in the name of my noble friend Lord Judd, extends the duty on local education authorities to identify children on a school roll who are not receiving a suitable education, as well as those who are missing education altogether. We completely endorse and support my noble friend’s concern on this issue, but the amendment is unnecessary. Schools are already under a statutory duty to monitor attendance through the daily attendance register and can access support from the LEA education welfare service when there are attendance issues.

Moreover—and this goes to the heart of the duties on local authorities referred to by my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland—schools are also already required by the Education (Pupil Registration Regulations) 1995 to notify local education authorities of the name and address of every registered pupil of compulsory school age who fails to attend regularly or is absent from school for a continuous period of more than 10 school days. It is then the duty of the local education authority to take appropriate action. The issue of precisely what they do must of course be kept under review and, I am sure, can be improved in some cases. Absence of duty is not the issue, however. Equally, the duty proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in Amendment No. 24, which requires local education authorities to provide suitable education for children identified as not registered at a school and not receiving suitable education otherwise than in a school, already exists under Section 19(1) of the Education Act 1996.

17:15:00

Amendments Nos. 25 and 26, which were tabled by my noble friend Lord Judd and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, concern children detained under a court order but not receiving suitable education. I endorse everything that the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Williams, said so movingly about the fateful path leading from failure to engage properly with the opportunities of school, and to socialise properly in that context, to the problems of youth offending and the huge cost to those individuals, their families and society of them developing in that way. We regard the needs of that group of extremely vulnerable children, most of whom have had a very poor experience of education, as a key priority. We also regard the needs of Traveller children, who were referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, as a key priority; I will write to the noble Earl with the figures that he was seeking.

However, it is not the case that we have been inactive in this area. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, referred to the Youth Justice Board, which took responsibility for overseeing the youth justice system in England and Wales in 2000. Funding of prison education at large, including youth offender education, moved to my department then, and we have seen much closer working between the Home Office and my department as a result. My honourable friend Phil Hope is the Minister directly responsible for these issues, and most people in the field regard the fact that the education department has direct responsibility for educational provision and outcomes in the Prison Service as a significant improvement.

The responsibilities of the Youth Justice Board include responsibility for the funding of education and training in the three types of secure institutions for young people aged under 18. There has been significant improvement in this regard. During the 2004-05 academic year, the average number of hours of education delivered was 24.4 within young offender institutions—a three-fold increase from only seven hours in 2002. In no small part, that is due to a quadrupling of spending on young offender education from some £5 million to £20 million between 2002 and 2005. While I would be the first to accept that there is still more to do, I believe that we have taken significant steps forward and need to keep up the pace of improvements. Further improvements carried out by the Youth Justice Board in addition to increasing the number of hours of suitable education and training include major capital investment, a national audit of need, the introduction of individualised literacy and numeracy programmes and the employment of a large number of extra learning support assistants and additional specialist expertise.

We accept that there is more to be done. Earlier this year, we published the Green Paper Reducing Re-Offending through Skills and Employment, which pledged us to take further steps. One of them was the establishment of a joint policy team involving my department, the Home Office and the Youth Justice Board, on school-aged offender education. That team will consult relevant partners and agencies to develop proposals and I give an undertaking to the noble Baroness, Lady Darcy de Knayth, that there will be consultation with those in the sector. I am happy for that consultation to include noble Lords, and I will honour the commitment made by my noble friend Lord Filkin on that. We will produce further proposals later in the year.

However, we do not see Amendment No. 26 as an effective way forward, although we wish to keep this matter under review as we seek to improve services for young people in custody. Amendment No. 26 would simply apply the existing duties conferred on the Secretary of State, LEAs and parents under the Education Act 1996 to anyone detained under the order of a court and we believe that it would cut across the detailed framework of duties and powers already in place, which we have enhanced, to implement and regulate the education that is provided to children detained under a court order. Simply inserting the new clause proposed here would create significant legal confusion about who is responsible for what inside the prison and secure estate and would not improve the education available to those in detention. We are taking forward a process of continued investment and reform inside the service.

Amendment No. 25, which was tabled by my noble friend Lord Judd, raises two issues. The first is whether young people in custody are receiving a suitable education; I have already set out the steps that we have taken on that. The second is whether to place the duty of identifying children who are not registered pupils at a school and not otherwise receiving suitable education on the LEA within whose area the custodial establishment is located. One problem with that is that that local authority will seldom be the local authority to which the young person will return after he is released from his custodial sentence.

We completely understand the issue that my noble friend raised about the immediate continuity of education after the completion of a sentence. It is precisely to meet that concern that today we have laid regulations that will require schools to keep young offenders who enter custody on the school roll for a minimum of four months. At present, a child can be removed from the roll after four weeks. The new regulations will allow removal from the school roll only where the proprietor of the school does not have reasonable grounds to believe that the pupil will return to the school at the end of the custodial sentence. These changes will apply in England from 1 September and will mean that many more young people are released from custody directly into a school place that is already theirs so that they can experience continuity of education.

Amendment No. 26A is, the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, a probing amendment on immigration removal centres. Three immigration removal centres hold families with children, two hold families for a maximum of 72 hours and one is located in Scotland, to which this Bill does not extend except for technical purposes.

The immigration removal centre at Yarl's Wood, to which the noble Baroness made specific reference, may, where necessary in individual cases, hold families with children for longer than 72 hours, although most will still be held for just a few days prior to removal from the UK. The figures that I have relate to the last two quarters in 2005 and show that nearly 70 per cent of the 995 children who left detention did so in seven days or fewer from immigration removal centres; a further 11 per cent left within eight to 15 days; a further 14 per cent left within 15 to 29 days; and 5 per cent left within one to two months. We know of only one or two cases where detention lasted for as long as three to four months. I think that those figures put the issue in perspective. That is not to say that we do not recognise our substantial obligations for the education of those held at Yarl’s Wood.

As part of the requirement placed on the operator, the centre provides education based on the national curriculum and tailored to the needs of individual children. Ofsted is part of the inspection team that covers Yarl’s Wood. The noble Baroness referred to the recent inspection report on Yarl’s Wood. This inspection report identified areas for significant improvement, and we expect those improvements to be made, but we do not believe that simply extending legal responsibilities of local education authorities would enhance the rate of those improvements. The operators must take responsibility for that issue, and we intend to see that that happens.

I hope that I have been able to give a full response on the issues raised. Work is ongoing on the further steps that we will take to improve education for young people in custody, and we are anxious to continue engaging with noble Lords on that.

Lord Lucas
I have a couple of questions arising from what the noble Lord has said. He referred to Section 19(1) of the Education Act 1996, which allows part-time education. Clause 94 of the Bill imposes an obligation for full-time education on the local education authorities for excluded pupils. Therefore, to match that, should we not amend Section 19(1) so that for the other children, about whom we care presumably just as much, the obligation is there for full-time education?

Secondly, the noble Lord referred to this strange diaspora of children who are in prison or being educated in this or that way by local education authorities or otherwise. Can we have some form of reporting system on the performance of these children about whether the various obligations are being met, so that we can see where the problems lie, how big they are and what we must do about them? I am not aware that the educational performance of children in prison is published. Surely it should be. The educational performance of children in PRUs tends to be pretty patchily reported. Especially as these are children about whom we care deeply—because if we do not look after them well, they will have a great deal of trouble in their lives and we will have a great deal of trouble as a result—we should have a better reporting system than we do.

Lord Adonis
It may be helpful if I respond to that specific point. Pupil referral units are inspected by Ofsted, but I shall write to the noble Lord and copy to the Committee the set of measures that we have in place for tracking performance of the pupils whom he mentioned. Section 19(1) of the Education Act 1996, which I have in front of me, states:

“Each local education authority shall make arrangements for the provision of suitable full-time or part-time education at school or otherwise than at school for those children of compulsory school age who, by reason of illness, exclusion from school or otherwise, may not for any period receive suitable education, unless such arrangements are made for them”.
 

I am happy to take further legal advice, but I take that reference to “suitable full-time or part-time” as meaning that, where suitable education is full time, that should be the arrangement that the local education authority makes.

Lord Lucas
That has certainly not been the case in the past. Local education authorities have used that section to provide part-time education for excluded pupils, which I think is why Clause 94 is in the Bill, making full-time provision compulsory. I do not share the Minister's optimism about how that section has been read in the past.

Lord Northbourne
I share the view that the issues raised in this debate are hugely important, but I shall not delay the Committee. It seems unrealistic simply to throw more and more responsibilities at the local authority. In my experience, there is no evidence that all local authorities either have been able to or have in fact honoured their obligations in any of these respects, especially in relation to excluded children.

More important, I did not hear the word “family” mentioned once. Even when children are very detached and damaged, they have families and they work in a context—they are not individuals floating around. Part of the rethink that we should be having about the needs of those children is how we can integrate them either back into their own family group or, if their family group is totally unsuitable, into some other group so that they can have a feeling of belonging.

Baroness Williams of Crosby
I shall pursue two questions with the Minister very quickly. First, he gave very encouraging figures about the Youth Justice Board and the big increase in the amount of education. I accept that, but can he say whether what is sometimes called “churning”—moving people from one institution to another—has had any substantial effect during the past year or two on the continuity of education in youth offender institutions? A difficult problem has arisen from looking for additional places and beds, which tends to disrupt the educational flow. The other question is whether, given the figure of £34,000-plus that I gave, as against £3,800, he has considered the possibly radical thought that some young people coming out of young offender institutions might go to boarding school.

Lord Adonis
We are indeed considering placing vulnerable children in boarding schools where that would be appropriate and where boarding schools feel that they can take responsibility for them. I agree with the noble Baroness; boarding schools could have a role to play. Indeed, if there was better engagement with the boarding sector, one would hope that some of those children would not end up in the youth offender institutions in the first place. We are considering promoting more boarding education for children in care or at risk. I will write to the noble Baroness on her first point.

Baroness Walmsley
Before the noble Lord, Lord Judd, withdraws his amendment—or perhaps he will not—I will respond on my amendments and thank noble Lords who have supported them. On Amendment No. 24, the Minister said that local authorities already have such a duty. Then why is it not happening? Why are there children who are not receiving suitable education? Perhaps local authorities need reminding.

17:30:00

On Amendment No. 26, I, too, pay tribute to the work of the Youth Justice Board in delivering improvements, but clearly it is not enough. There are three very good reasons for putting the duty on the local authority, despite the reservations of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. The first is continuity, so that the young people do not fall off a cliff at the end of their detention if they are being released into the same local authority. I welcome the Government holding open the school places of those who go to a young offender institution in another local authority. That is a good thing. But there could be continuity of courses if the education of those young people in the young offender institution was provided by the local authority, and they would not have such difficulty in getting a place in a school when they leave.

Secondly, the local authorities have a great deal of expertise with children with special educational needs, on which they can call. There are dozens of SENCOs in local authorities whose expertise could be brought to bear. It is quite clear that those who currently have the contracts for delivering education in prisons do not have that range of expertise.

Finally, it is an anomaly that the National Health Service can have responsibility for the health of all prisoners, without any difficulty with legal clarity, yet the DfES and the local authority cannot have the same responsibility. The Minister said that the legal duty as to who is responsible for the education would be in difficulty, but it does not seem to be a problem for the NHS. It has the responsibility for health, and the prison authorities have the responsibility for security. The split would be exactly the same. I really do not see the difficulty with it.

On Amendment No. 26A, the Minister still seems to stick to his figures and to think that the problem is very minor. I did not burden the House with the figures from Save the Children, but it believes that more than 2,000 children are detained each year. The detention period for those interviewed as part of its report ranged from seven days to 268 days, and half of all the families interviewed were detained for more than 28 days. Some families were detained significantly in excess of that. There is clearly some dispute about the magnitude of the problem, but that disagreement does not detract from the current situation in which the education of these children is being severely disrupted. They should have the same right to an education in the mainstream that any other child has while they are in this country.

The Earl of Listowel
I shall not detain the Committee for more than a moment, but I had not realised that the Government had quadrupled their investment in the education of children in the juvenile estate between 2002 and 2005. I warmly welcome the commitment shown by the Government to these children. I also welcome what the Minister has said about the continuity of education and the fact that school rolls will be kept open for four months. That is an important step forward, which I welcome. It was news to me.

Lord Dearing
I shall ask a very brief question. Does Ofsted inspect the quality of the provision of education to young people in detention centres and prisons? Who is their champion?

Lord Judd
There will be general agreement that this has been a particularly good debate. I would like to express my own appreciation for the contributions made by those who have spoken to amendments that are kindred to my own. I hope that the Minister has listened—I am sure he will have done—not only to the force with which the arguments were put but to the strength of them. I shall make a couple of comments.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, mentioned immigration, and I am very glad that she did. It would be obscene if we, as a country that regards itself as civilised, were to deprive children who were suffering all the trauma, uncertainty and upset of the immigration processes, whatever the outcome at the end, of the right to education. These children have not generated the situation in which they find themselves. We as a responsible nation must fulfil our obligation to support them in every way possible.

I should like to make one further point which I hope will not be regarded as over the top, because I believe it to be highly relevant. We are so often in our deliberations in this House concerned with security and the battle for hearts and minds. How can it be helping in the battle for hearts and minds to send away children who find themselves in a process of that kind, having, on top of everything else, not had the opportunity of any kind of educational support? Is that winning the battle for hearts and minds? Or is it indirectly assisting in the process of alienation on which the extremists play?

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, has again spoken—and again particularly powerfully—on rehabilitation. I think that the whole House respects his direct experience, commitment and genuine belief in these matters. I do not understand how it makes sense in any of our penal policy to punish without a commitment to rehabilitation. I of course accept completely the need for punishment, but the challenge is rehabilitation and how we turn people who have offended, wherever possible, into decent, constructive, productive members of society. That is the big challenge. Locking them up is the easy part. The challenge is to win them back to a constructive part in society. That is a challenge to all that we say is the basis of our civilisation, but it is also economic sense. As has been said in this debate, if we do not do that we are piling up trouble and extra expense for ourselves.

I was very struck by what my noble friend said on the measures that he has just put in place on assisting with continuity of education in this context. We will all be watching with great interest and it was extremely encouraging to hear that. But—I hope that he will forgive my saying so—I do not think that he dealt fully, in his otherwise helpful reply, with my amendment, which was specifically targeted at those who are informally excluded. I believe that the informally excluded is the real issue. Whatever our intentions, I do not think that it is a problem which will easily go away. It would be helpful therefore to give the local education authority a direct responsibility for ensuring that it is tackled.

Incidentally, the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was slightly sceptical—to put it mildly—about piling responsibilities on local education authorities. I would say to the noble Lord, whom I greatly respect, that—if we accept that a local education authority has responsibility for the educational system and that the system is intended to ensure that the right of the child to education is applied—it seems absolutely self-evident and logical, that you therefore give the same body the task of ensuring that that right is being fulfilled.

I believe that in all legislation what is necessary is not what we come to understand in this House through the processes of our own tortuous debate as being the intention and purpose of legislation; it is the clarity, the thrust and the understanding of the legislation in wider society as a whole, particularly by those who have responsibility. It seems to me that the Minister in being helpful has underlined the problem. He has referred to this responsibility here and that responsibility there, and this provision here and that provision there. My amendment and, I think, other amendments have sought to say, “Look, we are all committed to the right of the child to education”. If we are committed to that right, we must be committed to an effective way of delivering it, not one in which people have to delve into the files to see where the responsibility lies. The most straightforward and clear-cut way of doing this is simply to say that the local education authority, in providing and ensuring that a system is in place, is also responsible for ensuring that the right is being enjoyed by every child within its area. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, who is always so effective in these debates, was absolutely right to point out that if at the end of our tortuous deliberations we come to the conclusion that residually the local education authority does somehow have the responsibility—I remain to be totally convinced that that is categorically clear—why not simplify it by stating in the Bill that it is responsible?

The Minister has been helpful, as he always is. We shall go away and consider very carefully what he has said and I hope that that is a mutual situation. We shall also consider whether and how it might be appropriate to return to this matter on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Amendments Nos. 24 and 25 not moved.]

Clause 4 agreed to.

[Amendments Nos. 26 and 26A not moved.]

Clause 5 [School improvement partners]:

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
moved Amendment No. 27:

Page 3, line 22, leave out subsection (1) and insert-
 “( ) A local education authority must, with a view to improving standards, appoint suitable persons (to be known as school improvement partners) to provide assistance and support to head teachers and senior management teams in maintained schools, academies and city technology colleges.”

The noble Baroness said: In moving Amendment No. 27 I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 37, 38 and 40. We move on to Clause 5 which relates to school improvement partners. Just to remind the Committee, the Education Act 2005 introduced a new, lighter-touch school inspection arrangement and established school improvement partners following the publication of the Ofsted/DfES document, A New Relationship with Schools, in June 2004. The Government have described the school improvement partner as the “professional critical friend” which is to play a central role in improving a school. The partners will be accredited by the National College for School Leadership, and the White Paper published last autumn implied that all secondary schools should have a school improvement partner by this autumn and that primary schools should phase them in soon thereafter.

The purpose of these amendments is to make clear that the responsibility for appointing and maintaining the role of school improvement partners lies with local education authorities. Amendment No. 27 would provide that school improvement partners will be appointed to maintained schools—community, foundation, voluntary-aided and voluntary-controlled schools—and to academies, city technology colleges and city colleges of the arts and technology which are at present excluded from their remit. We seek that because we feel strongly that in so far as a critical friend is a good idea for a school, it is also a good idea for academies, CTCs and city colleges of the arts and technology. We would like to see the role of school improvement partners extended to such schools.

Amendments Nos. 37 and 38 provide that the appointment should be made by the local education authority, not by the Secretary of State. What schools need in their critical friend is someone who knows the local scene and understands the context in which the school operates. In effect, we see local education authorities using school improvement partners often as informal pairing arrangements, bringing the head teacher from a strong school into contact with perhaps a less strong school and being able to pass on best practice from one to another. I think that that is very much the role the Government themselves see in this. It is a relationship not only with the head teacher, but also with the senior management team. In that context, we feel it is extremely important that those who appoint are knowledgeable about local schools. This is why we again come back to looking to the local education authority to make the appointment rather than to the Secretary of State. We do not think that the Secretary of State can have the necessary local knowledge of the school to make the appointment.

17:45:00

Thirdly, Amendment No. 40 is in line with the vision of formal and informal pairing between the school improvement partners. We put forward Amendment No. 40 to make it clear that where schools are working either formally or informally with each other under some sort of federation, this can be deemed to fulfil the function of the school improvement partner. In the other place, the Minister made it clear that the Government do not consider a federation to be a substitute for the critical friend in terms of the school improvement partner, yet they are very anxious to promote collaboration. Both the GTC and the Association of School and College Leaders—the old Secondary Heads Association—endorse very strongly this notion of collaboration. They ask in the general briefing they have given us that some sort of incentive towards collaboration should be written into the Bill. Insofar as this is concerned, Amendment No. 40 encourages collaboration in this way and we believe that it is a good way forward to promote the ideas of collaboration.

As to the general issue of school improvement partners, I should like to put two questions to the Minister. First, who will they be? The document A New Relationship with Schools: Next Steps appears confident that they will probably be serving head teachers. The proposal for experienced, credible persons in the role of advising a school on its effectiveness and the ways in which it can improve is, in theory, welcome. In practice, however, there are serious concerns about the capacity within the system for this to occur. Given the current shortage of head teachers, is the department confident that there is the capacity within the system to provide this necessary extra role for head teachers and that they are able to perform it?

Secondly, who will pay for them? If they are appointed by the LEA, will the LEA pay for the time of the school improvement partners? Or, given that schools will be controlling their own expenditures, are schools expected to pay from their own delegated budgets for the time given up by other head teachers to helping them? I beg to move.

The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Ullswater)
I must advise the Committee that if this amendment is agreed to I will be unable to call Amendments Nos. 28 to 32 inclusive because of pre-emption.

Baroness Crawley
I shall speak first to Amendment No. 27 and then to Amendments Nos. 37, 38 and 40, all of which seek to change the nature of the school improvement partner’s role.

I share the wish of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, to make appropriate assistance and support available to all members of the school community, so let me explain the remit of the school improvement partner—or SIP, as I will refer to it from now on—which has elements of both challenge and support and which, as the noble Baroness has reminded us, is part of the lighter touch, less bureaucratic, new relationship with schools.

The “challenge” part of the SIP remit is the key process by which schools are held accountable to their maintaining authority. This part of the remit therefore needs to be determined by the local authority so that the line of accountability is clear.

The SIP, as a “professional critical friend”—as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, quoted—will help to challenge and focus the school’s leadership team on the school’s self-evaluation, leading to agreeing priorities and targets to improve pupil attainment, attendance and behaviour. The SIP will challenge on those key aspects for which the school is accountable to the local authority—the maintaining authority.

The SIP’s support role is important but limited in scope. It is focused on helping identify and broker assistance for the school, relevant to the school’s needs and the needs of the school community, where appropriate. But the determination of assistance for a school is for the school itself. It is not for the school improvement partner to throw its weight around, making determinations. That is very much part of the self-evaluation to which schools have signed up.

Amendment No. 27 covers academies and city technology colleges. In law, these are independent state schools. Therefore, we feel it would be inappropriate for local authorities to appoint their improvement partners. That is not to say that the external accountability of these publicly funded schools is any less important. The equivalent maintaining authority to which academies are accountable is the Secretary of State. Accordingly, the SIPs are contracted to the DfES, and no legislative support is required to do that. By September 2006, we are planning for 45 academies to be working with their school improvement partners.

The amendment would also remove the requirement for the SIP to provide advice to the governing body of the school. That may not be the amendment’s intended effect, but that is what it does. Since a school’s governing body is responsible for the school’s strategic direction, the school improvement partner needs to interact with the governing body as well as with the head teacher. The SIP will offer the governing body a professional view on the overall direction of the school and will have specific responsibility for advising governors on the head teacher’s performance management objectives and the school’s performance management arrangements. The range of meetings and other contacts between the SIP and the governors for this work will of course be for local determination. Quite a lot of flexibility is built into this programme.

Finally, the amendment opens up a potential danger. It does not say specifically that every maintained school is to have a school improvement partner. Accountability, as I said earlier, is essential for every school, and we need to be able to head off decline even in schools currently performing satisfactorily.

Amendment No. 37 would hamper our efforts to guarantee national standards in the ways that local authorities hold their schools to account. School improvement partners will need to provide a consistently high standard of challenge and support to all schools, and be credible to schools. National accreditation is therefore essential to help achieve this and to provide assurance to local authorities and schools about the experience and quality of the individuals they will be working with as SIPs.

We have introduced a system to provide this. School improvement partners are accredited by the National College for School Leadership and the National Strategies contractor, go through a vigorous training programme and are involved in continuous professional development. However, I can assure noble Lords that local authorities will play a key role. They will be responsible for appointing SIPs and deploying them to schools in their areas. The SIP will be primarily accountable to the employing local authority. Authorities will also share with the National Strategies contractor the continuing professional development of SIPs.

Amendment No. 38 goes further than Amendment No. 37 by removing the role of the Secretary of State altogether from the requirements for accreditation and by seeking to remove from the clause the regulation-making power available to the Secretary of State. We have set out our minimum policy requirements on the face of the Bill—that each school should have a SIP and that each SIP should be nationally accredited. Those are the minimum requirements. But as with any policy, there are other more detailed requirements that it would not be appropriate to put into primary legislation but where the Secretary of State needs to be able to legislate if necessary. We have therefore created reserve powers in subsections (3) and (4) of the clause to enable the Secretary of State to put more detailed requirements into regulations should the need arise. We would consider using these powers only in the event of widespread or persistent failure by local authorities to implement the school improvement partner function in accordance with government policies.

On Amendment No. 40, desirable as school federations certainly are—we are enthusiastic supporters—I do not believe that they are an adequate substitute for a school improvement partner. We want every school to have a school improvement partner to reflect our commitment to the potential of every child being fulfilled. Federations of two or more schools can make a major contribution to the raising of standards. We are keen to support federations and other forms of partnership among schools and we are building on the success of these partnerships in our proposals for trust schools.

However, when schools federate they do not lose their individual identities or accountabilities to the maintaining authority. They receive funding individually and they are subject to inspection individually, so the SIP has a separate role for each member school. To facilitate that role, it will often make sense for a single SIP to be deployed to each of the members of a federation, but the SIP role has to remain distinct for each member school. To maintain the integrity of its challenge function it would not be appropriate for the head teachers of schools in a federation to act as SIPs to one another.

Aside from the principled arguments, the amendment proposes a very imprecise criterion be put into legislation—that of two or more governing bodies, head teachers and senior management teams having merely agreed to work together in the way proposed—and I do not believe that that would be workable. On the basis of those arguments I invite the noble Baronesses to withdraw their amendment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, asked whether we are confident that there is capacity in the system for a suitable and adequate supply of SIPs. The evidence so far has been quite positive. I understand that 51 local authorities have appointed secondary school improvement partners and 99 local authorities have said that they will appoint SIPs by September this year. We have had more than 2,000 responses to the advert that went out at the beginning of the year for the four waves of school improvement partners for primary schools. So we believe that the supply is there. They are in the main serving current or former head teachers and some senior school advisers.

On funding, we understand that there will be a need to supplement funding and not have that as a burden on local authorities. The steady state of funding on this is £28 million, of which £21 million will be supplied directly by the department to local authorities. With that, I hope that I have answered the noble Baroness’s questions.

18:00:00

Baroness Williams of Crosby
I apologise to the Minister for asking her these questions after she has spoken, although I believe that that is permissible in Committee. One reason for that is that there are aspects of the SIP proposal that I did not think that I had fully understood, so it has been extremely helpful for her to have said more about it.

There are three things that I find profoundly worrying—and I do not pretend not to be profoundly worried about some aspects of the SIP proposal, although I can see that in some circumstances it could be helpful and useful. First, I echo the question asked by my noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford, which I do not think the Minister completely answered, on the source. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was kind enough to copy to me a letter that he had written to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, on the subject, in which he confirmed what the Minister has just said—that he expected most SIPs to come from the body of serving, retired and in some cases seconded head teachers and that a few additional people might be drawn from school management teams.

My profound worry is, as the Minister will agree, that we face an extremely serious problem about head teachers. More and more responsibility for leadership now rests on head teachers and the problem is particularly serious with primary schools, which is the group to which the Government intend to extend the requirements of the Bill in the very near future. I happened to look through the Times Educational Supplement for this week, last week and the week before and in every case there were five, six or seven pages packed with advertisements for primary school head teachers. In some cases, as the Minister is aware, there have been primary schools that have had to replace head teachers several times—the most extreme example being Dunmore school in Abingdon, which has had 13 head teachers in 10 years, many of them in the past few years.

I raise this because everything in the Bill rests on the capacity and ability of head teachers to respond to a huge range of additional responsibilities, challenges and requirements for standards. I wonder whether weakening the pool of head teachers in this way is wise—and it is not simply me who says that. For example, the deputy assistant secretary of the children’s care services in Oxfordshire responding about Dunmore said that there was a rapidly dwindling supply of well qualified and motivated people to become head teachers. That is sadly generally true.

Secondly, I was not clear—although this may be my fault, in which case I apologise—on the position of trust schools and academies. Was the Minister implying that they would have to have a SIP but that the appointment would be made by a governing body and not a local education authority?

Thirdly, I am troubled about what could be the quite difficult personal relationships between SIPs and the head teachers. What happens if there is a direct conflict? That is one reason why my noble friend proposed the idea that there should be only one SIP; schools might agree to federate just so one would not have personal conflicts about what the objective of the school was. All of us who have been involved in education for a long time will be very much aware that the good head very much cherishes his or her right to make the final decision in his or her judgment. Indeed, you cannot be a good head unless you have confidence in your judgment.

I am troubled by whether SIPs, especially if they are seen to be answerable to the Secretary of State—and I repeat, “seen to be”—might be seen by heads as undermining their authority, particularly if the head has a view about how to conduct education which is not the same as the SIP’s. Can the Minister say something about whether that would go to a school adjudicator and how it would be handled? I ask the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, to forgive me if I am trespassing on his territory, but I know that he and I share a profound concern about what happens if there is a personal conflict or sharp disagreement on strongly held grounds between a SIP and a head teacher, and how that would be resolved.

Baroness Howe of Idlicote
I hope that I may also be forgiven for intervening here, as this is very much on one of the points that the noble Baroness has just raised. The whole business of exactly how this will work was explained by the Minister. That was not clear even from the very detailed letter that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, sent us. I endorse the fact that if the SIP is seen as accountable—and I endorse, too, the words “seen as”—to the Secretary of State, as the Bill seems to imply, rather than appointed by the local authority, that might prove problematical.

I was particularly interested in the percentage quoted in the letter from the Minister. I think that it was a figure of 80 per cent of primary school applicants who had head teacher experience and 50 per cent were still heads. When I read that originally, I thought it was a good idea. It would be a way forward, perhaps, when teachers wanted some flexible working—maybe during a family career break. That would be one very useful aspect. It might also be useful for head teachers getting to the point when they wanted to do less work; it might be a way for them to scale down, while providing their absolutely excellent experience to other schools and head teachers and—very importantly—to governing bodies. That could be a hugely important role. Some governing bodies might know from their own experience in different parts of the education world what was going on outside which might be stimulating for that school; but to have it as a duty so the governing bodies have that extra help will, I am sure, be helpful.

I should like to hear a little more detail about how the Government see the pool of recruitment growing. I should love to think that this will not diminish applications for head teacher, particularly at the primary school level, but will improve the ways of flexible working and perhaps keep more teachers for longer in the profession.

Lord Lucas
I hope that it will draw back into schools all those head teachers who have retired at 60. I know that noble Lords find the idea of retiring at 60 ridiculous—indeed, retiring at 85 is something of a problem for us. A lot of teachers who retire may require a break of a year or two to start to miss school, but they often do after a while, and they should be welcomed back in this role. I am delighted that the Government have found a role for them, but this role sounds like something that has been dreamt up in Communist China, where you have a party representative in every factory. There will be an LEA spy responsible to the LEA in every school. Fine, you will survive that in the ordinary course of events—but if you get difficulties or conflicts, that person will very quickly be regarded as the enemy and not as the critical friend. That is a fundamental difficulty in what is being done here.

The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in his letter to my noble friend, referred in the fourth paragraph to a trial and went on to say that those head teachers who had SIPs,

“especially in relation to the value of challenge and support from a credible professional”,

had said what a good thing they were. Is that information that the Minister would be prepared to put in the Library? Is the result of the trial something that he would be prepared for us to see, along with the subsequent comments by head teachers? It would not damage anybody to make that public, and it would give me a lot of confidence that this will in general work well.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, I see a conflict here. When things are tough, you want someone who sees their role as being a critical friend, but as your friend first, and who is not there to report to someone else. If you are in the business of choosing that person, do you want the choice imposed on you by someone else who does not understand the personalities or your priorities, or, to get the best critical friend, are you going to want to have a say yourself? We are trespassing a bit on subsequent groups of amendments, so I will not speak for too long—although this should all be one group, in my view. None the less, I wanted to enlarge on the points that the noble Baroness raised.

Baroness Morgan of Huyton
We might be getting this a bit out of proportion. My experience is that this sort of role exists now in a fair number of schools and, where it exists, is welcomed by head teachers. The advisers, who are called “mentors” or a range of other things at the moment, work best when they are people with experience, but who are a little more than just friends. Where I do not agree with the noble Lord is that at times they will have to be pretty critical in order to get things moving; if the person was always someone who the head teacher was entirely sure would be a friend before a critical friend, that would be a mistake and would not be worth the investment. We have to be careful and make sure that, while the role is that of a mentor and entails working with the staff and governors, it is also about improving the schools, not just making people feel comfortable.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I am not going to wind up at this point, but I have one more question for the Minister. She mentioned that at the moment 55 local education authorities have appointed SIPs and 99 are in the process of appointing them.

Baroness Crawley
Fifty-one.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
Fifty-one local education authorities have already appointed SIPs. That implies that there are a limited number of people who would take on a duplicate role with lots of different schools. What then is the difference between the role of the old local authority adviser, who was often a retired head who went around and advised current heads, and the role of the SIP? My impression is that what the Government really wanted was a much more intimate, friendly relationship of the sort that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to. That was one reason why we picked up the idea of doing this within federations—you pick your own friend within a federation, to some extent, but their role is to be a critical friend. It seems that this will not work entirely satisfactorily if you get an old education authority hack—this applies particularly to primary schools—with 20 primary schools under their wing, to fulfil the old local education authority adviser role. I would like to know what the difference will be.

Baroness Crawley
I shall reply to the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, to begin with. Where a former head teacher is a SIP, there will be very little difference in the quality of the experience, advice, support and challenge that will be given. The vast majority of the SIPs operating in the future will be current or former head teachers. They will, however, have gone through a vigorous training process. They will not be “old hacks”. They will, for example, have to have looked at, under quite strict conditions, all the new data that are now available to local authorities, schools and the Secretary of State.

Today, for example, we can put together data on children who have free school meals with data on their academic performance. That was not the case even a few years ago. The data are becoming finer and finer. The new SIPs, with that training, will have to be able to deal with that, to talk as a critical friend to heads about those data and to encourage heads to see from those data whether they are reaching their targets. That is just one example of how these people will be under constant professional development and have vigorous training. However, the majority will be head teachers.

18:15:00

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was worried that this might be some sort of Stalinist move, or some sort of spy in the cab. This system replaces the current one in which link officers from local authorities go to schools to advise and to be a critical friend. We have been consulting schools where that system has perhaps not been working too well. Heads want someone who is a peer reviewer, whom they find credible to have that serious and challenging conversation with. Mainly, they want another head teacher. So we are upgrading a system that has existed for some time, whereby a person comes and helps with the challenging aspects of the school’s accountability to the local authority.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Williams of Crosby and Lady Howe of Idlicote, wanted to push me a little further on the supply issue, particularly in the context of the concern expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, about, as she saw it, the problems with people coming forward to be head teachers. As I said earlier, over 2,000 individuals have responded to the first advert for primary SIPs. Eighty per cent of those are people with experience as a head teacher and 50 per cent are serving heads. These are serving heads who have volunteered, knowing the pressures of the job, to be SIPs.

We suggest that the time requirements of the job are quite modest. Typically, there would be 19 days a year per SIP head. That would be in addition to the work that they already do, but the requirements would not take over their current job. We also believe, very much in the spirit of the intervention of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that the system will develop the senior staff of the SIP’s home school by giving them managerial opportunities to deputise. This can have a good knock-on effect for the home school.

Baroness Walmsley
How much will these people be paid? The amount of money being put aside indicates that it is about £1,000 per school. If the rate is £1,000 for 19 days, that does not seem like very much money for highly trained professionals.

Baroness Crawley
I am very happy to write to the noble Baroness about the details of pay. The payment systems will be different for different SIPs. It depends whether you are a current head teacher and this is additional to your responsibilities, or a retired head teacher who is a consultant and who would want a fee for the day. There is not just one system of payment. For maintained schools, it will be up to local authorities to decide, in consultation with the SIP, which method of payment will be most appropriate. I am happy to write to the noble Baroness with more detail on that.

I hope that I have answered all the questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. I am sorry if I did not make my next point clear, but SIPs are not appointed by the Secretary of State. They are accredited by people whom the Secretary of State appoints, such as the National College for School Leadership and the national strategies. The appointment is made by the local authority because the SIP is a key part of the local authority’s accountability for the school. The SIP is accredited by the Secretary of State because we want high standards nationally for all these people and we want schools to be reassured about those standards. However, the appointment is made by the local authority. On conflict, if a head teacher does not get on with—

Baroness Williams of Crosby
Before the Minister deals with conflict, I asked whether not only maintained schools would be required to have SIPs but trust schools and academies, as set out in my noble friend’s amendment, and, if so, who would appoint them and whether they would require the Secretary of State’s approval.

Baroness Crawley
In the case of academies, the Secretary of State would appoint the SIP. However, the SIP would go through the same accreditation process and would have the same role as SIPs for local authority maintained schools.

Perhaps we could explore conflict and what happens if a SIP does not get on with a head, or vice versa, when we discuss the next group of amendments, which cover that.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I am grateful to the Minister for responding at length to all our questions. I am also grateful to those who participated in the debate. We are all clearer about the whole purpose of SIPs and how they will be appointed. The Minister said that the Government wished to change the nature of the role, but I am not sure that that is the case. We looked to the local authority to appoint the person and we accepted accreditation through the National College for School Leadership. However, we argued strongly—and we still argue this—that in the case of academies, city technology colleges and so on the person should be appointed at a local level, not by the Secretary of State. We have parted company with the Government on that issue on many occasions.

We are sceptical about whether we will find enough people to fulfil these roles and whether there is enough money in the system for that. If 19 days are involved, a sum of £28 million has been put aside and there are roughly 25,000 schools in the country, that is, roughly speaking, £1,000 per school. That will not go very far and it is not much of an incentive. Nevertheless, we have had a very interesting debate. I have certainly learnt a lot about the Government’s proposals. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Baroness Buscombe
moved Amendment No. 28:

Page 3, line 22, leave out from beginning to first “a” in line 23 and insert “The governing body of a maintained school must appoint”

The noble Baroness said: I wish to speak to Amendments Nos. 28, 30, 32, 34 and 43 and to Amendment No. 33, which concerns a slightly separate point on SIPs. It is unfortunate that this group of amendments was degrouped. I am concerned not so much about the time taken in debate as about the fact that the debate becomes a little disjointed. One wonders whether to jump up or not. I hope that we might think about regrouping in some instances as we go through the amendments so that there is a more joined-up debate. I will certainly take that on board.

This cluster of amendments would maintain the role of school improvement partners—like the noble Baroness, I shall refer to them as SIPs—but alter the direction to ensure that they would be part of a school’s own management team, rather than imposed by an outside authority.

Amendment No. 28 would change the appointments procedure, putting the appointment of a school improvement partner in the hands of the governing body. The main reason for giving appointment of SIPs to the governing body will be clear to the Committee and the Minister. I remain convinced—as I and my noble friends were at Second Reading—that the schools themselves are the experts on schools. In other words, we would take the issue much further than the Liberal Democrats would. We believe that the schools and the governing body should have this role; even though the local authorities might, in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, know the local scene, that is not enough.

However, the amendment would leave the funding of SIPs to the local authority. This would ensure that, while a SIP was approved by the governing body as a matter of government policy, the school would not be expected to pay for a role that, while potentially very useful, is not a teaching or welfare role.

The Minister’s words in another place seemed to support the concept that schools should have a strong voice in the appointment of school improvement partners. Jacqui Smith stated:

“The final determination of support for a school is for the school itself … Its choices should not be restricted to people appointed by the local authority that maintains it”.—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee E, 30/3/06; col. 173.]

However, the regulatory impact assessment takes a slightly different line. On page 54, it states that SIPs could,

“enable Ministers to enforce the implementation of the SIP function in accordance with their policies”.

It goes on to say that legislation is,

“not required for the activity”,

of SIPs,

“to take place, but to enforce it if it does not, or if it takes place in a way that does not meet Ministers’ policies”.

The disparity in those statements concerns me. SIPs are just that—they are there to work with the governing body of a school to improve its status. They are not called policy commissioners, but the regulatory impact assessment description suggests that that may be the case. What is more, if they are there to ensure that government policy is followed to the nth degree, I do not see why schools should bear the burden of cost. The regulatory impact assessment states that the Government expect the whole SIP project from April 2008 to cost around £28 million, as we have heard—I assume that that does not account for inflation—but that the Department for Education and Skills expects to contribute only £21 million, subject to the outcome of the next spending review. Does that mean that schools are expected to pay an extra £7 million for what I suspect may be a form of full-time inspector? We have heard that the measure is no such thing and involves only 19 days, but we might want to pursue that matter a little further.

It is vital to get the right people to do the job—as the Minister has said, the SIPs need to be credible—not just local authority employees instructed to keep an eye on schools, which has posed a problem in the past and would pose more problems, according to the regulatory impact assessment. I am pleased that there will be formal training for the role, but I am concerned at the extra cost of that training.

It is interesting to note the high percentage of former and serving head teachers who have responded to advertisements to work as SIPs. I take on board very much what Members of the Committee have suggested—that head teachers, possibly more than any others, have much to contribute to that role. However, I question whether a serving head teacher, who is probably crucially tied up with that important role, is able to provide an extra 17 or so days a year. I presume that those 17 days would on the whole be best served during term time. Therefore, I can see a conflict in terms of time.

18:30:00

I am mindful of the fact that out of those people of working age who are qualified to teach, more are not currently teaching than are. The challenge to raise standards in education has many sides. There have been some fantastic teaching initiatives, not least the Teach First scheme. I congratulate the Government on that scheme, which we thoroughly support. But more needs to be done to encourage and sustain a steady stream of people into teaching. I worry that while the role of a SIP will provide an avenue for people who are passionate about education to play a part in its improvement, it might create a diversion from the teaching roles that we so desperately need those people to take on and retain. I have suggested the concept of secondment to the Minister in relation to the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, and I wonder whether he would also consider secondment in this context.

Amendments Nos. 32 and 43 extend that logic. Their effect would be that only those schools that require significant improvement or fall under special measures under Clause 54 would be compelled to have a SIP. I was surprised to see that SIPs would be compulsory for all schools, given that in the White Paper, SIPs are dealt with under a section entitled,

“Tackling Coasting Schools and Coasting Departments”.

As my honourable friend John Hayes has mentioned in another place, while the added-value measurement has its problems, it enables us to identify coasting schools. The White Paper rightly points out that,

“the challenge is to secure continuous improvement”.

No one could argue with that. But it is not quite clear to me why it is absolutely necessary, given the costs of training and remuneration involved, not to mention the other collateral costs of SIPs, to implement them in every school.

The amendments seek to ensure that SIPs would be an elite body for improvement and that the very best candidates would be chosen to ensure continued progress in our schools. My amendments, to ensure that only failing and coasting schools would benefit from their role, have as much to do with wise economics as with an objection to policy. We must ensure that where education is concerned, an effective, carefully thought-out route is chosen, which stands to benefit our schools the most and which makes the best of limited resources. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, mentioned that there might be a figure of £1,000 per SIP. We need to attract the very best; and the very best will command a higher income to take them away from their other role.

I ask these questions out of genuine concern for the role of SIPs. I accept that they could prove to be a useful ingredient in the new drive to improve school standards, which is key. They could be invaluable to schools that are valiantly struggling to improve but need extra support. I pay tribute to those schools and to the head teachers, teachers and governors in them who do excellent work while making progress. I hope that the amendments will go some way to ensuring that those who need the most focused support will get it, and those who are in no need do not prove an unwilling drain on resources.

Amendment No. 33 would ensure that school improvement partners accept the religious basis of a denominational school. It is a probing amendment that reflects concerns expressed by groups representing such schools, particularly the Catholic Education Service, that the school improvement partner might threaten the schools’ distinctive character and ethos. That concern is reflected in the summer newsletter sent to school governors by the Diocese of Portsmouth department of education. A common question asked of education officers and listed in the newsletter is:

“Is our governing body right to be concerned about the forthcoming appointment of a school improvement partner who may have little understanding of what we are trying to achieve as a Catholic school?”.

The answer given by the newsletter is:

“In short, yes … Ideally, School Improvement Partners should have recent leadership experience in the Catholic voluntary aided sector. At the very least they should be fully aware of the legal differences between voluntary aided schools and other maintained schools and they should be sympathetic to the Catholic ethos and understand how it can be developed and strengthened. The CES continues to discuss these issues with officials”.

That could extend to all kinds of other voluntary aided schools.

It is very important that the development of school improvement partners does not lead voluntary aided schools to feel under threat. That is particularly important when one considers the vital role that such schools play in providing a high-quality education for many of the most vulnerable children. For example, in voluntary aided schools where 33 per cent of pupils are on free school meals, an average of all pupils shows that 47.6 per cent achieve five or more A* to C-grade GCSEs, rather than the 40.6 per cent in other schools. Overall, 23.7 per cent of pupils with free school meals at voluntary aided schools achieve five or more A* to C grades, including English and mathematics, compared to 16.3 per cent at community schools.

Similarly, the proportion of pupils with special educational needs achieving five or more good GCSES is 10.4 per cent in voluntary aided schools. That is a commendable record. The record of voluntary aided schools is beaten in these areas only by city technology colleges. It is perhaps for that reasons that so many parents, even non-religious parents, are so keen to put their children into voluntary aided faith schools. It is important that the school improvement partner appreciates the reason for these successes, as that would place him in a far stronger position to make constructive criticisms of the school’s approach. It is also important that SIPs have the confidence of parents and of the religious bodies that support faith schools. I encourage the Minister to consider our amendments as a means of achieving that. I beg to move.

The Deputy Chairman of Committees
I must advise your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed to, I will be unable to call Amendments Nos. 29 to 32 because of pre-emption.

Lord Lucas
I have a number of amendments in this group, and by and large they support what my noble friend has just said. I shall start off with a request and a question. My request is whether I may have an answer to the question that I asked in the last group of amendments about whether we might see the result of the trial.

Lord Adonis
It is published.

Lord Lucas
I would love to know where; that would be a great help.

Secondly, what is happening to Amendment No. 36? It does not appear to be on the groupings list. Perhaps I am just being blind. It has not been referred to. Are we covering it now or later? Some guidance would be appreciated.

The difficulty that I have might be illustrated by imagining that the Minister and his team at the Department for Education and Skills were approached by the Treasury, who said, “We think that ministries could do with a better understanding of financial affairs, so we are going to give you a Minister who is expert in these areas, who will hang around for 20 days a year and make sure that you are up to scratch in these things”. I think under those circumstances that any departmental team worth its salt would say, “No; if we need that sort of expertise we will appoint it ourselves”. It matters a great deal whether the person who is advising you and helping you is regarded, in ordinary day-to-day things, as part of your team and as part of the way that the school works; although you regard them as your peer and as having a lot of independent and real expertise, and you understand at the end of the day that they have responsibilities that run outside the school.

I can see that I am not going to win this argument, and I will wait and see how these things go, but I foresee that conflict will occur. I also think the provision misses a great opportunity, in that these people ought to be operating between LEAs. There is such a difference between the practices of LEAs.

To come back to a matter that I mentioned on the first day in Committee, and which was raised by the noble Baroness just now, there is a lot of data out there. I have looked at these data on special educational needs in primary schools, and children with special educational needs in Windsor and Maidenhead have more or less the same value added as those without them. If you go right down the list to Slough, just a few yards away on the other side of the Thames, children with special educational needs are doing about half a key stage 3 worse than children without them. That difference is not affected in any way by the proportion of free school meals. There is no correlation there. The difference is not affected by language or race, as far as I could discover, and it is not affected by the overall level of results achieved by a local education authority. All of those figures have been run through wonderful statistical engines for me in Oxford, and I can see no correlation whatever.

My conclusion from that is that we have here an effect that depends on the way in which a local education authority supports its schools. If you talk to some of the better LEAs, as we have, you can see just how supportive and effective they are in helping schools deal with the questions that arise regarding supporting children with special educational needs and why they might be doing so well. Well, that is fine; but if Windsor and Maidenhead has its own SIPs and Slough, across the water, has its own, the expertise in Windsor and Maidenhead will never cross into Slough. It will never find out what it could be doing better to vastly improve the average performance of nearly 20 per cent of its pupils—and it has not done so by any existing mechanism.

If there was a system in which SIPs were subject not to LEAs but were appointed by schools, and if I were a school in Slough, the first thing that I would do would be to appoint someone who knew the Windsor and Maidenhead system, because a great deal is going on there that I should be picking up. That would never happen if SIPs were responsible to LEAs, because LEAs are so jealous of each others’ performance. If they were not, that difference would not persist.

While I am concerned at a personal level that the Government’s proposals will not work, they miss a big opportunity for cross-fertilisation between local education authorities in practices that have become common at LEA level.

The Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham
I support the amendments in this group, particularly the probing Amendments Nos. 33 and 35, and I shall refer also to Amendment No. 28. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, was concerned over the grouping and not being sure about whether to jump up. So, I have seized this opportunity of jumping up now to say that a school improvement partner has an important role in a school—and that is obvious. But, if the person appointed is not in sympathy with the character, ethos, or purpose of the school, the advice and support that they offer will not be as effective as it should be. It may even be counterproductive and, in a worst-case scenario, could be disruptive or even destructive.

Local education authorities could make a mismatch and misjudgment—after all, they are only human. However, if, as Amendment No. 28 proposes, the governing body of a school made the appointment, that would be less likely. We on these Benches support the thrust of the amendments.

Lord Dearing
I have tabled Amendments Nos. 35 and 42 in this group, which I shall discuss together. The first concerns the incompatibility issue, to which reference has been made already. The proposal is that if, after two years, it is clear that the relationship is not working, the governing body should be able, if the local authority will not agree to a change, to make application to an adjudicator for a decision on a change. That would not be saying that a person would be unsuitable to be a school improvement partner, but that he would not fit in those circumstances. If this is going to work, the two people must be partners and critical friends.

I have to admit that people whom I have dealt with in my career and whom I have admired greatly would not be the kind of friends who would get on with me. Imagine the reaction of some right honourable gentlemen who have been Secretaries of State if some other right honourable gentleman had walked through the door and said, “I have come to help you for 19 days”. Some relationships just do not work, although they may involve admirable people. So, when the relationship is not working, it is necessary to have the provision proposed by my amendment. Amendment No. 33, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, refers to that point—as did the right reverend Prelate.

18:45:00

We are talking about some 20,000 appointments. If you get 99 per cent right, you would still have 200 disasters—and 99 per cent would be a high score. So there must be a way out of a relationship when the governing body says, in all conscience, after two years, “Look, this isn’t working”.

Perhaps I may comment en passant on the money side—the £2,000 for the 19 days. It works out at very much the same rate of pay as that of a dinner lady at £6.50 an hour. It seems a trifle light and I suspect that a lot of money will have to come from another pocket—not £20 million, but something like £60 million—to pay for this.

So I hope that the Government will be responsive to that practical suggestion. I have seen excellent people in both industry and commerce. People at the head are often strong-minded and opinionated, and they do their magic in very different ways. If you put two wrong kinds of magic together, you get hell.

My second amendment is practical and echoes what the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said about time. Some schools do not need much help, while some need a lot of help, although they may not realise it. The local authority should have power, after consultation with the governing body, to say, “In your case, there should be X amount of time, and in the other case, there should be much more than X”. There should not be a standard ration. Some schools desperately need the help of a wise partner, while other schools need very little, and we should say, “Thanks very much for all you are doing and we will leave you to get on with it”. So I hope that the local authority will have the power in some cases to insist on more time, while in others to say that so-and-so time is enough.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
These Benches have great sympathy with the two amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. The issues being discussed are the degree to which a SIP should be compulsory and the degree to which a school should choose its own SIP. We have much sympathy with both issues. The model that we were picking up from the Government and trying to put forward was one which, to a degree, moved in that direction, although it was still left to the local authority to appoint—but we were looking at the federation model as a self-choosing model. We have much sympathy with the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, which removes the “must” and allows the school to decide its own partner.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
I, too, support Amendments Nos. 33 and 35, because they are essential safeguards if we are to go ahead with the Bill as it is roughly constituted. There may, however, be a better way, suggested in the other amendments in this group, by giving to the governing body responsibility for appointing a SIP. That body will know what its needs are and will have to live with the consequences. That is important, also.

I wish to ask a question about compulsion and the extent to which that might be moderated. If it is compulsory to have a SIP, one could envisage a situation where a head teacher who is about to retire, who is trained and accredited as a SIP, gets a letter on his last day saying, “You are now an accredited SIP”. The next day, the new head teacher gets a letter saying, “Your school requires a SIP, although your predecessor was good enough to run a very good school and be accredited as someone who can help other schools”. Even more improbable would be the possibility of a head teacher being accredited as a SIP and getting a letter appointing them with the PS: “Someone will be in to help you and your school next week”. That is the logic of the compulsion laid out in the Bill.

Baroness Crawley
This group of amendments is about aspects of the appointment of school improvement partners. I shall speak first to Amendments Nos. 28, 29, 31, 34, 39 and 41. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked about Amendment No. 36. I understand that that was debated last week. 

Local authorities have responsibility for the standards and levels of attainment in the schools they maintain, and schools are accountable to their maintaining local authorities. We are introducing school improvement partners to support that accountability. It is therefore right that each school's SIP should work for the local authority under its direction and be contracted to that authority. We expect the local authority to pay attention to the preferences and needs of individual schools when deploying SIPs, which might well entail discussion with the governing bodies. Once appointed to work with a school, the SIP will need to be sensitive and responsive to the views of the governing body. But the role of the school improvement partner is to provide external challenge and support to the school. That challenge and support are more likely to be consistently effective if the SIP is appointed by, and accountable to, the maintaining authority rather than the governing body of the school, which is responsible for the school.

Amendment No. 34, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, seeks to specify that the local education authority shall remunerate the school improvement partner appointed by the school governing body. We believe that the amendment is not necessary. Some local authorities are already employing or engaging school improvement partners, which is quite rightly part of their role. My department also provides funding to local authorities to help them run the SIP programme, and that funding includes an element for the remuneration of the SIP as appropriate.

Amendment No. 42, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, concerns the time that each school improvement partner will spend with the school. The interaction of school improvement partners with schools will not be uniform. Our guidance is that each SIP will devote five days a year to the school, but that is an average for all schools. There is sufficient flexibility in the system which will allow for the days allocated to each school to reflect the needs and context of each school. It is quite right that this level of detail should not be dictated by the department. Local authorities will be able to appoint SIPs and allocate them to schools, reflecting local context and local priorities and tailored closely to the school's individual needs and circumstances.

Amendments Nos. 30, 32 and 43, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, seek to relax the requirement to appoint a school improvement partner to each school. We are committed to the appointment of SIPs for all primary and secondary schools because all schools need to work systematically for improvement. Even in schools that perform well overall there may be underperformance by particular groups of pupils; for example, relatively low achievement by its most able pupils, low achievement by pupils entitled to free school meals, low achievement among members of one particular ethnic minority group—

Baroness Buscombe
Does the Minister honestly believe that that kind of under achievement will be sorted out in an average of five days a year?

Baroness Crawley
As training and professional development allow for high standards of peer review for SIPs, if a school needs assistance in a particular area, I believe that it will be better off with five days a year than without it.

A decline in progress among 11 to 14 year-olds is another example, as is low achievement across all pupils in a specific curriculum subject. Even schools doing extremely well sometimes need that extra assistance and challenge. We believe that we would be letting down many thousands of underachieving pupils if we did not extend the SIP function to their schools. We need to be able to head-off decline in currently satisfactory schools. The introduction of SIPs to all schools is also about learning from others and sharing good practice. In our debates last week, noble Lords talked about the importance of the sharing of good practice. Feedback from SIPs, using local authority and national networks, will support all schools in learning from success in particular schools. 

I turn to Amendments Nos. 33 and 35. The way that the local authority and the school work together on this has to be approached in a spirit of partnership. When a local authority deploys SIPs, we expect it to pay attention to the preferences, needs and characteristics—including religious characteristics—of individual schools and their governing, bodies. We expect SIPs as well as local authorities to be responsive to the individual circumstances and characteristics of the schools they work with, including their religious characteristics. The national assessment for people seeking accreditation to be SIPs strongly stresses that expectation. It is designed to withhold accreditation from anyone who might work with a school without taking account of its ethos, including religious ethos, and other characteristics.

Authorities will therefore need to manage effectively the SIPs that work with their schools. Authorities will use a range of approaches to that task, including feedback from schools and evidence on the impact that advice from SIPs is having on the schools’ performance. The discontinuance of a SIP’s deployment to a school will be one of the available management actions.

If a governing body has serious concerns about the SIP allocated to its school—and here we return to concerns raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Williams and Lady Buscombe—the first step should be a discussion between the authority and the school. Local authorities are also supported by regional co-ordinators from the national strategies who can help to resolve such issues. The local authority and the school are not the only two players; they can call in help when conflict arises—as they may well do, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, suggested.

I hope that that will reassure noble Lords that effective mechanisms are already in place to resolve this kind of conflictual issue. That aside, the use of the schools adjudicator in this area would of course be new work for the adjudicator and outside his current remit. The adjudicator, as noble Lords will know, currently has two main functions: to consider and make decisions on objections to schools' admission arrangements, and to determine proposals to set up, close or make changes to schools.

Noble Lords asked a number of questions and I will try to answer them as quickly as possible. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, asked why not let schools appoint their own SIPs. As the debate on Clause 4 illustrates, society has big expectations of the school system that go beyond the concerns of the individual school and the pupils currently on its roll. An external body has to hold schools to account for delivery of those expectations. The SIP works for that body—the local authority—while acting responsively to the schools. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, also mentioned SIPs that were to be seconded. When a head teacher works as a SIP, the arrangement is effectively a part-time secondment. The head’s school has notice of the arrangement and financial recompense, money which can be used to back up its organisation and to bring in extra resources.

Several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, asked for further details on funding.

19:00:00

Baroness Walmsley
Perhaps the Minister can clarify something that she has just said. Is the money for all this extra work going to the school rather than the person? That sounds like what she meant.

Baroness Crawley
In the case of a current head, the extra money would go to the school. Perhaps it will be clearer if I make a few more comments on funding.

Establishing the SIP function is an important change for a local authority, and the Government are providing them with funding to facilitate it. The level of funding recognises both the cost of the SIP function—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe referred—and the savings to authorities that the SIP function makes possible. The cost of the SIP function arises from the allocation of SIP time to each school and the allocation of time for each SIP to take part in updating and professional development. Savings arise because, when SIPs start work with an authority’s schools, the authority can discontinue the link adviser function through which authorities currently hold schools to account.

We estimated time allocations and costs for the SIP functions from our experience in trials of the new relationship with schools. We took link adviser time allocations and costs from the benchmarking data. We expect SIP work with each school to require, as I said earlier, about five days a year. Our information suggests that the current link adviser work with a school typically takes three days a year excluding any follow-up school improvement work. We therefore need to subsidise local authorities for the extra two days required for SIPs beyond the current school link work and for SIP-related professional development for SIPs who are serving heads. The subsidy amounts to £2,000 per school with authority set-up costs of £380 per secondary school and £770 per primary. That funding is expected to meet about 75 per cent of authorities’ costs. To save time, perhaps I may undertake to write to all noble Lords on funding, payment and costs. I hope that that will be suitable.

Lord Dearing
Those replies were very helpful. I thank the Minister. On my second amendment, on time, all that the Minister said was fine. But I want to be clear that the local authority will have the power to insist, if it wants to, that a school improvement partner will spend a lot of time in a school and the school cannot say, “No, we don’t want it”.

On the first point, about the relationship not working, I welcome all that the Minister has said. However, I had hoped, if there is a clear disagreement between the local authority and the governing body, that after a reasonable period of working with a school improvement partner, an independent person could come in and adjudicate on the matter. It does not matter if it is the adjudicator or whoever.

Lord Lucas
I very much—

Baroness Crawley
As we are in Committee, perhaps I can reply to the noble Lord, Lord Dearing and then the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, can come in.

On the question of time and the local authority, I think I am correct in saying that the local authority can insist. On the other question, perhaps I can write to the noble Lord.

Lord Lucas
I was going to say that I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, will pursue that amendment. It is terribly important that there is a safety valve. Not all local authorities behave as perfectly as they might all the time. When a school is under the cosh for half a decade at a time merely because the chairman of the local authority education committee does not like it—it is perfectly possible; who will be imposed on the London Oratory, for instance?—there must be a reasonable escape. It is certainly possible as the regulations are provided for, but it is not in the draft regulations that there should be any such power for someone to adjudicate. There may be other ways out of it, but I very much hope that we pursue it. And I very much hope that we will get some support from the Liberal Democrat Benches. We would very much like to see this. If we do not get a satisfactory reply on it, I hope that we will pursue it to a Division, if we have to.

I was disappointed by the Minister’s illustration of how the school improvement partner will be using all these figures to point out where a school could improve itself. The best schools were using these figures 10 years ago. The systems ought to be there so that it is obvious to a school that, “We have a problem with our Afro-Caribbean children between the ages of 11 and 14”, or whatever it may be. I know of at least three commercially—or semi-commercially—available systems out there that will provide this information as a matter of course. Yes, the Government can help by providing some base data to feed into these things so that there is an accurate comparison between developments in the world outside. But a school ought to have a system that tells it not only that it has a problem in this area but also how to do better with its 11 to 14 year-old Afro-Caribbean kids. The chances of it being a random SIP appointed by a local education authority are pretty small. At that stage you want to be going out to a much wider audience.

I have always hoped that the Government would create a system that worked for spreading expertise and making it available to schools, but they never have. Beacon status has not worked and its successor has not worked particularly well. A good school will know what is wrong and where to go to put it right. I would support anything a Government did to do that, but the idea that this will be the SIP, or that the SIP should perform the function that the Minister described, I find extremely depressing.

Baroness Crawley
I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, finds the examples depressing. It will be the SIP’s role to call attention to areas where, through self-evaluation, the school realises that it is underperforming in certain respects. We were saying that even good schools can underperform in some respects. The school would talk with the SIP about where it feels it could do better. On the example of the Afro-Caribbean children, it is not for the SIP to say, “I have the answers to this problem”; it is for SIPs to use their experience as head teachers to say, “I know someone or an organisation that might be able to help”. It is brokerage and a directional assistance; it is not SIPs imposing what little knowledge, or the extensive knowledge, they have in a particular area. It is guiding the school to resources and areas that can help tackle the under-performance problems they might be facing with certain pupils or areas of school management.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, raised the issue of the cross-border movement of SIPs. I hope he will take encouragement from the fact that we strongly encourage cross-border movement, which is already happening extensively in the SIP programme. Some authorities—for instance, South Gloucestershire—have all their SIPs from outside their own authority. Requiring cross-border movement is just the sort of thing that we might use regulations for.

Finally, the evaluation of the trial to which the noble Lord referred is published. I will ensure that a copy is placed in the Library.

Lord Lucas
I am grateful and shall remain optimistic. I really hope that this works.

The Earl of Listowel
The Minister has already responded to the questions but I should like quickly to highlight a concern. The debate has been interesting and I am sorry that I could not be present for all of it. It reminded me of my concerns about children’s homes. I hope that the Committee will not mind me briefly raising the subject. The Minister kindly wrote to me recently about the training of staff in children’s homes, but the situation is far worse than I thought. The Government’s target was for 80 per cent of staff in children’s homes to have an NVQ level 3 in childcare by January last year, but—if I have understood the Minister’s letter correctly—in March last year, only 23 per cent had such a qualification.

I have seen consultancy make an invaluable contribution to improving the quality of outcomes for children in children’s homes. Listening to this debate about mentoring for head teachers and about experienced head teachers supporting other teachers, I wondered whether I might plant in the Minister’s mind the thought that, as we look at the Green Paper on looked-after children, we might consider whether there could be a similar model for children’s homes. I apologise for distracting from the main thread of the debate.

Baroness Buscombe
I thank the Minister for her full response to the questions posed, and thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. My noble friend Lord Lucas and I are a little sceptical about local authorities working in partnership. I was pleased to hear what the Minister said about South Gloucestershire, but historically local authorities have tended to work in isolation, jealously guarding their own patch. Having been a district councillor, I know how that plays out. It is a bit like government departments with all those thick walls and glass ceilings.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, to have more flexibility if there is incompatibility between the character or personality of the SIP and the school. We need to avoid a standard ration. We should focus on coasting schools when considering the role of the SIP. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, agrees with us that the appointment of the SIP should be for the governing body.

In relation to that, I think that I have come up with rather a good idea that I shall air now and may propose in an amendment on Report. The Minister spoke about the need for those making the appointment to be able to set themselves apart to play an external role to challenge and support, and I accept that. However, the point that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, made is tremendously important. We need to avoid conflict, and the head of the school and its governing body must be able to work well with that critical friend. So, what if the local authority were to make the appointment but the governing body would interview for that role? That could be a way round the problem. The governing body would have a role in the appointment of the SIP, and can assess the chemistry to ensure that there is a strong chance that that relationship can work well.

19:15:00

We are setting the SIP a huge task in some instances, particularly in relation to coasting schools and schools that are underperforming in a number of ways. We are asking him to give a lot of advice and counsel in an average of five days per year. That is better than nothing, but we must ensure that those five days do not just prove disruptive because they are window-dressing so that we can tick another box. If we just say that too many schools are underperforming but a SIP in every school can help them improve, I cannot see that improvement happening in practice. I urge the Minister to consider focusing SIPs, rather than putting one in every school, and paying them better to work with schools that are underperforming. We should not talk about five or 19 days; they should have real time to mentor and work with schools.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, talked about mentoring for children’s homes; we have mentoring in business and right across the board. Most people who are mature in the role that they play in life appreciate that there are times when a mentor can have a positive role to play and can make a real difference. There is more that we can think about in this regard. We want to help the Government to ensure that the role of the SIP is effective and can make a difference in raising the standard of education in our schools.

I am grateful to the Minister for her response to Amendment No. 33, which was a probing amendment. I take on board what she said about working together in a spirit of partnership, and recognising the individual characteristics and ethos of schools that make them distinctive and in large part rather successful. I thank her for agreeing to write to us in respect of funding. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Amendments Nos. 29 to 43 not moved.]

Clause 5 agreed to.

Clause 6 [Functions in respect of recreation etc]:

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
moved Amendment No. 44:

Page 4, line 16, at end insert “enter into partnerships with other public, private or voluntary organisations in order to”

The noble Baroness said: In moving to Clause 6, we move to the subject of sports and games. We on these Benches welcome Clause 6 and the proposals in it for enhancing the role of the Government and the local authority in encouraging better provision for sports and games for our young people. For too long, there has been no statutory authority for that responsibility, and it has not had attention or resources that it needs.

That said, some of our amendments are meant to probe the Government and some to tease them. Amendment No. 49 is intended seriously and requires team games to be considered. My noble friend Lady Williams will speak to it and to Amendment No. 54.

I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 44 and 45. We were slightly surprised and amused by the way the Bill is framed. Under Clause 6, local education authorities are encouraged to set up,

“functions in respect of recreational and training facilities for children”.

For the purposes of doing so, a local education authority may,

“establish, maintain and manage, or assist the establishment, maintenance and management of … camps, holiday classes, playing fields, play centres, and … other places, including playgrounds, gymnasiums and swimming baths not appropriated to any school or other educational institution”.

We were slightly surprised that the Government have put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that they do not want local education authorities to run schools. They are to commission schools. Now they are suggesting that local education authorities should run holiday camps.

Lord Adonis
Perhaps I may assist the noble Baroness. If she goes on with her reading of Clause 6, she will see that new subsection (3) states that,

“a local education authority must, in particular, have regard to the expediency of co-operating with any voluntary societies or bodies whose objects include the provision of facilities or the organisation of activities of a similar character”.

So, I am glad to say, we are entirely consistent.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
As I say, to some extent we were teasing. As I have read out, the Bill suggests that the local education authority should provide these things directly, although also perhaps commissioning them, but we thought we would help them a little along the way. Therefore, our amendments enable them to go a little further in that direction.

Amendment No. 49, which would add to the end of new subsection (4)(b),

“including facilities for team games”,

and so on, is a serious amendment, and my noble friend Lady Williams will speak to it, but I would like to speak briefly to Amendment No. 54. It would remove the necessity for the Secretary of State to issue guidance to local authorities in terms of fulfilling their functions. In many senses it is an attempt once again to try to get away from the micromanagement that we see so constantly by this Government. There is no need for them to issue detailed guidance on all these sorts of issues. Amendment No. 54 is an attempt to relieve the Government of a few of the pressures that fall on them, because there are many more important things they should be doing. I beg to move.

Baroness Williams of Crosby
Amendment No. 49 stands in my name and that of my noble friends. It concerns team games. I will make my points quickly as I realise we are making heavy weather of the Bill—in my view, quite rightly.

There is considerable concern, reflected in many of the articles in both health and professional educational magazines, about the problem we have with boys in the upper end of primary schools and the earlier end of secondary schools, in their assessment of themselves and their self-confidence. I was in secondary education some time ago, but I remember the exact mirror image with girls. There was an endless discussion of girls’ underperformance, the reasons for it and the lack of confidence they had in themselves as scientists and mathematicians. It is extraordinary that in one lifetime of politics I should have seen this completely reversed and exactly the opposite theme now picked up.

Nevertheless, for many boys, and not least the boys to whom the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, referred in an earlier discussion—those from the Caribbean community—great importance is attached to achievement in sport. It is a way in which young men, and to some extent girls too, measure their achievement and ability and begin to gain self-confidence.

I have been extremely troubled by the effects of the sale of playing fields, which I admit happened largely under a previous Conservative Government. It meant that many schools simply dropped team sports from their curriculum, and in some cases had to bus youngsters long distances to play just for a couple of hours on some remote football field or cricket pitch. In other words, the ability of schools to embrace team games within the school curriculum has been steadily lost.

It is not surprising that youngsters who do not have the opportunity to let out some of their natural exuberance—very marked between the ages of about nine and 14—in what one might call constructive and enjoyable activities make themselves a problem in estates, which often have large signs up saying “No ball games”. It is very sad that we have so steadily closed down on the outlets that youngsters in this age group, both boys and girls, have. To be quite blunt, it has all been made much worse by the profound and understandable concern about paedophilia, which means that it is very difficult now to get anybody willing to lead a Scout troop or Cub pack, or even a Girl Guide company or Brownie pack. More and more youngsters do not have any opportunity to test their physical skills and sense of adventure or, for that matter, to thoroughly enjoy school because they are achieving something somewhere. It is very serious, and I do not think that I sound like somebody harking back to the past in saying so. I have seen so many youngsters on estates in new towns and elsewhere for whom there simply is no outlet and they end up, yet again, watching sports on television but not playing sports themselves.

There is another aspect, which is that team sports are very different from what is slightly pickily described as “positive leisure-time activities”, which often can mean forms of yoga and so on. Those are enjoyable in their own way, but do not build up a sense of belonging together—of commonality and common purpose—which a well refereed team game is able to do and, incidentally, with it building up friendships that may last a lifetime. It is just not the same to play on your computer Game Boy on your own in your bedroom, which is what many youngsters do for their leisure-time activities.

I will not hold up the Committee for long, but it is extremely important that we get team games back into the curriculum. At least a couple of hours a week should be spent on such team games as part of the school day which do not depend on parents busing or driving children back, which often they will not do as they may not be home or they may be too tired to pick them up. We have to bring team games back to make for a more rounded curriculum. I therefore urge the Minister to look very closely at this—the Government's heart is in this—and consider whether we could not strengthen the wording, to encourage authorities and schools to make sure that team games are part of the range of choices children have available for a properly rounded and properly demanding form of education.

Lord Adonis
It may assist the Committee if I come in immediately after the noble Baroness to say that we agree with everything she has said, and that it is encompassed in the current clause.

The sale of playing fields now requires explicit ministerial consent in every case. I know because I am the Minister whose desk these issues cross. The sale of playing fields has almost ceased and only a tiny number are sold each year. They are sold only if our professional advisers are satisfied that alternative arrangements for playing fields are sufficient. In almost all cases, the proceeds of the sale go into investing in sports facilities in the school, typically new sports halls or facilities of that kind.

We have significantly boosted the role of sport and team sport, reversing the lamentable trend highlighted by the noble Baroness that has taken place in the previous 20 years. We have invested £978 million in our PE, School Sport and Club Links strategy with the target of ensuring that, within and beyond the curriculum, 75 per cent of pupils by this year and 85 per cent of pupils by next year engage in at least two hours of high-quality PE and school sport each week. We have made significant progress in that respect. The last independent survey on school sport, which covered the last academic year, showed that overall 69 per cent of pupils in partnership schools participate in at least two hours of high quality PE and sport, which is up 11 per cent in one year. There have been improvements.

In the amendment, the noble Baroness specifically highlights football and cricket. We agree that they are of great importance, and Clause 6 encompasses them. Our concern with the amendment is that it might unhelpfully narrow a local authority’s view of what facilities it should provide if we specifically highlighted those. We consulted more than 11,000 young people in the process of drawing up our Youth Matters Green Paper, which found that they wanted more sports facilities in their area. The provision they sought included requests for activities such as swimming, hockey and netball—the last two of course are also team games. Twelve per cent wanted more youth clubs, 11 per cent wanted,

“the opportunity to try extreme sports”,

such as waterskiing or canoeing, and 9 per cent wanted to see improved provision for dance and youth theatre.

All those are encompassed within Clause 6. We want a significant increase in opportunities for team games, including cricket and football. Measures are in place to ensure that. Our concern about the precise wording of the amendment is that to include it in the Bill might highlight some areas at the expense of others within the duty of local authorities. We think that they should follow local consultation and ensure a balanced extra provision of suitable youth facilities in their area.

19:30:00

Baroness Williams of Crosby
First, I understand that swimming is to be dropped from the curriculum—that is, apparently, the advice that has been given—which means that one fundamental, significant sport may drop out of the provision. Secondly, in some cases about which I happen to know, the provision of sporting facilities has included the provision of large leisure centres that charge substantial sums to people, which is not exactly an alternative. I am not in any way criticising the Government—I know that they are doing their best to reverse the trend—but some aspects give me concern.

Lord Adonis
I assure the noble Baroness that we are paying very close attention to swimming. The fact that advice has been offered does not mean that it will be accepted.

Lord Lucas
I very much agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said. I trumpet the duty at the bottom of page 4. We need a reference of some kind to team games because they require so much space. If local authorities, especially city local authorities, are not told to provide space, they will stick houses on the space or do something else with it. They need to know that they must provide the space and that providing a climbing wall is not a substitute for a football pitch. What, in line 13 of page 4, does “provided for their area” mean? Clearly that is different from “provided in their area”, but does “provided for” mean that it has to be specifically allocated to them or just available to them? That is an odd wording and I do not understand exactly its intention.

Lord Adonis
It means things such as outdoor adventure centres, which may not be in the area but are provided for the area. I assume that that is what is meant. It is quite common, especially for city authorities, to maintain facilities or engage with the voluntary sector in respect of facilities outside their area. I will happily confirm that.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
Will the Minister respond to my other amendments?

Lord Adonis
The noble Baroness said that she was teasing me. I thought that she had accepted that I had responded to the first amendment. We need to read new subsection (2) with new subsection (3), which begins:

“When making arrangements for the provision of facilities or the organisation of activities in the exercise of their powers under subsection (2), a local education authority must”—
 

I repeat, must—

“in particular, have regard to the expediency of co-operating with any voluntary societies or bodies”.

Although I understand that the noble Baroness is trying to tease me, that is my response.

We think that local authorities will find guidance in these areas useful, not least because it can highlight best practice, which they usually find useful when the department makes it available. I would not want local authorities to be deprived of the benefit of any wisdom that we might be able to bring to bear in these matters.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
Some local authorities might like to be deprived of that guidance but, nevertheless, I thank the Minister for his reply. He is quite right: we were teasing him through the first two amendments. The substantive point was the one raised by my noble friend Lady Williams about team sports, about which we feel strongly. I hope that we may find some way and a form of wording to write in the Bill the importance that we attach to them. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Amendment No. 45 not moved.]

Baroness Crawley
I beg to move that the House be now resumed. In moving this Motion, I suggest that Committee begin again not before 8.34 pm.

Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.

House resumed.

General Lighthouse Authorities (Beacons: Automatic Identification System) Order 2006

19:34:00

Lord Davies of Oldham
rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 12 June be approved [31st Report from the Joint Committee].

The noble Lord said: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lady Crawley, I beg to move that the draft order be approved. The order under Section 223(3) of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995 will permit the three general lighthouse authorities (GLAs) to operate the automatic identification system (AIS) as a marine aid to navigation. The order empowers the GLAs to make proposals to the Secretary of State for Transport to operate AIS installations and the Secretary of State to sanction systems with costs met from the general lighthouse fund.

The general lighthouse authorities provide marine aids to navigation services around the British Isles. They are Trinity House for England, Wales and the Channel Islands, the Northern Lighthouse Board for Scotland and the Isle of Man, and the Commissioners of Irish Lights for Northern Ireland. The Commissioners of Irish Lights is in fact an all-Ireland body based in Dublin. This order will apply to its operations in the north and similar powers are available to it in Ireland under Ireland’s Merchant Shipping Act 1894 as amended.

The department and the GLAs are promoting the international development of marine e-navigation systems. The UK has secured a commitment from the International Maritime Organisation to develop a work programme to make that a reality at the global level. It requires a move away from the heavy reliance on traditional aids to navigation to an integrated electronic system comprising satellite navigation systems supported by a separate ground-based radio navigation system. We envisage that this will comprise the US GPS system, plus the European Galileo System with enhancements such as AIS, and the enhanced Loran C long-range radio system currently under trial and development.

All commercial vessels in excess of 300 tonnes undertaking an international voyage are required to transmit an AIS signal. That shows the ship’s name, next port of call, course and cargo details. The system can be interpreted by other vessels and from the land in either graphic or alphanumeric displays. It offers security data and allows ports to assess well in advance of normal reporting times when vessels are likely to arrive.

The purpose of the order is to support the use of AIS as an aid to navigation. A lighthouse, light vessel or buoy can transmit its location and other details using AIS and they will appear on the ship’s display. The GLAs have been experimenting with AIS systems and have concluded that AIS will allow them to reduce the size and range of a number of physical aids to navigation if they can enhance the aids with AIS. For example, light vessels might be replaced with a cheaper buoy plus an AIS signal. Lighthouses might still maintain a light but with a reduced range, again enhanced by an AIS signal.

Ultimately some of the traditional aids might be replaced altogether by an AIS signal. The aid to navigation would not have a physical presence, but the ship’s AIS display would show the aid on its AIS display, with the AIS signal being transmitted from the land. Those developments may take many years to achieve but it gives an indication of the system’s capabilities if it is developed to the full.

The department and the GLAs envisage that the system will ultimately make a major contribution to safety while reducing expenditure on providing the essential aids to navigation service. Traditional costs estimated at £3 million will be met from the general lighthouse fund in the first instance. Savings will come from reducing the scope of traditional aids—although we do not envisage that they will disappear completely. I beg to move.

Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 12 June be approved [31st Report from the Joint Committee].—(Lord Davies of Oldham.)

Lord Hanningfield
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his clear and lucid explanation of the order. I am pleased to say that we are happy to lend our support, recognising the importance of the legislation in improving the safety of international shipping, especially in and around UK waters. I congratulate the Government on being at the forefront of introducing and promoting this new technology. Anything that helps to lessen the possibility of another major incident at sea should be welcomed. Therefore, I will not detain your Lordships’ House too long on the order; certainly no more than is strictly necessary. However, I shall take the opportunity to ask a number of short questions.

First, where will the scheme operate? Is the idea that it will cover all the waters around the United Kingdom, or will it cover simply those areas that experience the greatest density of shipping, such as the Dover Straits? This is a very important point, which needs clarifying. The Minister may recall that, a couple of months ago, we all participated in a Starred Question on improving the safety of shipping around the Minch Strait. If I recall correctly, calls were made then that such an environmentally sensitive area should be covered by just this sort of technology. Given that we have this technology in place, it is strange to restrict it to use in particularly difficult areas.

Secondly, can the Minister give us an idea of the time scale for the introduction of the scheme and, linking this to my previous question, say whether it will be rolled out nationally or just gradually in one or two pilot areas? Finally, I notice in the Explanatory Notes that the shipboard version of this technology is fitted to all vessels over 300 tonnes that have signed up to SOLAS—the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. Therefore, presumably we could still have vessels significantly over 300 tonnes in UK waters without this technology simply because they have not signed up to SOLAS. Indeed, can the Minister tell us what proportion of shipping passing through UK waters has this system already in place? What steps will the Government take to close this anomaly and to ensure that all vessels greater than 300 tonnes have the onboard version of the technology, regardless of whether they have signed up to the necessary convention?

I hope the Minister will be able to help me with my short questions. Other than that, we on these Benches support the order.

Lord Bradshaw
My Lords, I concur entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, has just said. I believe the order is worth while. I have one further question for the Minister beyond those asked by the noble Lord. It concerns vessels of less than 300 tonnes. When is it proposed to withdraw navigational aids? Is cognisance being taken of the fact that many smaller vessels will still depend on less sophisticated technology?

Lord Glentoran
My Lords, I declare an interest as a commissioner for the Irish lighthouse service, which the Minister has mentioned. I support the order and I can assure your Lordships that I have seen the AIS operating live both from the Irish Lights tender and in trial from a desktop in Dublin. It is a fantastic and very simple system. One of the great things about it is that most ships around our coast are less than 300 tonnes—yachts, in other words, of one size or another—and certainly my yacht, and the yachts of most yachtsmen now travelling the seas, will carry a small version of the AIS, which does not transmit but can receive. That means that if you are in a shipping lane—crossing the English Channel, for example—you can see other ships on your AIS screen as targets. They will have their MMSI number, which is in effect their telephone number, and you can talk to them if you are worried about getting in their way or about what they are doing. You can do similar things from a ship’s bridge with land-based navigation aids or with buoys. There is an experimental buoy out now in Larne harbour. One of the important things to ferries travelling in Larne harbour is wave height—believe it or not, there are restrictions on wave heights. The buoy will be able to tell skippers what the wave heights are on the approach to the harbour, and so on. It is a fantastic system, it is not very expensive, and it is being used now all around our coast. In Ireland, we are moving around the coast and starting to make it one of our navigation aids. It really is fantastic.

Lord Greenway
My Lords, I also support the order, and declare a non-pecuniary interest as a Younger Brother of Trinity House. The order designates AIS as a beacon under the terms of the Merchant Shipping Act. As the Minister has explained, this will allow the general lighthouse authorities to fit beacons to aids to navigation that will transmit data on the sea state—we have just from the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, about that—as well as tidal data and the position of the aid, which will benefit ships’ safety. This was foreseen when the AIS first came into operation at the beginning of last year, primarily as a means of communicating a ship’s name, position and next port to shore stations and indeed to other ships.

The general lighthouse authorities—Trinity House, the Northern Lighthouse Board and the Commissioners for Irish Lights—have worked diligently over the past 13 years to introduce new nav-aid technology, which has in effect reduced the cost to the shipping industry, which pays through light dues, by some 40 per cent. The order will allow this trend to continue. We are moving towards an integrated bridge system on ships that will combine radar, electronic charts and the AIS, but, for the time being, as the Minister has said, we still need traditional aids to navigation. Certainly some of the newer technology relies on the GPS, which is subject to the whims of the US military. I welcome the order, and I wish it a fair wind.

Lord MacKenzie of Culkein
My Lords, the order is of particular interest to me as a former serving lighthouse keeper. It is 200 years ago this summer since Parliament approved the building of the Bell Rock lighthouse, the oldest wave-washed lighthouse in existence that still operates. Thus tonight, that lighthouse will give a characteristic white flash every five seconds, and no doubt will do so for many nights into the future. That may come as a surprise to many noble Lords, as satellite navigation is now the primary system used by navigators, but, as we have just heard, it is not 100 per cent reliable, and the relatively expensive back-up of traditional aids such as lighthouses continues to be necessary as we must have two completely independent systems of navigational aids.

Some 200 years on from the decision about the iconic Bell Rock, we can take another big step tonight in ensuring safe navigation by approving this statutory instrument, which will allow the general lighthouse authorities to fit the necessary equipment to use the AIS as a beacon. Until now, it could be used only for trials, and the order needs to be carried so that the GLAs can go ahead and use the AIS as a beacon. As we have also heard, there will be no increase in light dues paid by shipping using our ports as a consequence of the approval of the order tonight. If we do not approve the order, the three GLAs will not be able to develop the system, which will lead inevitably in the future—perhaps some years ahead—to increases in shipping dues.

The beauty of the AIS is its ability to provide real-time data. The plan of the Northern Lighthouse Board is just one example and, complementary to what the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, said about the buoy at Larne harbour, the Northern Lighthouse Board wants to deploy an AIS buoy at Milleur Point at the entrance to Loch Ryan. That buoy would transmit, via Corsewall lighthouse, the actual sea state and wind speed at the sometimes difficult entrance to Loch Ryan. That will significantly enhance the safety of the high-speed passenger craft and other ferries on that busy sea route between Scotland and Ireland.

There are many other ways in which the AIS will contribute, although noble Lords will be relieved to know that I shall not list them. One of them, which might seem to be science fiction to an old lighthouse keeper, is the prospect of virtual aids to navigation. Broadcast from an AIS station, a symbol appearing on a ship’s display can indicate a hazard, even though there is no buoy or beacon on that hazard. If that can be failsafe, it is bound to lead to a considerable reduction in future costs. I hope the House will agree to this work commencing and to further research being done. The motto of the Northern Lighthouse Board and the Commissioners of Irish Lights is, In salutem omnium. For any non-Latin scholars among us, that means, “For the safety of all”. That safety can be only enhanced by the approval of the order this evening.

Lord Boyce
My Lords, I, too, support this order and I declare a non-pecuniary interest as an Elder Brother of Trinity House. I believe that this is an important advance in safety and navigation, and much to be welcomed. As has already been mentioned, it is important to keep in mind craft which are less than 300 tonnes as the system matures in years to come and older systems are phased out. I think that that has been half-addressed already. We can look forward to a reduction in costs as we move away from some of the older and more expensive systems. Finally, I believe that this will keep us in step with other major maritime nations which are going down this route. Not least, it will also chime with the developments in the Ocean Security Initiative, which is now gathering international momentum. We may see this AIS system deployed in other littoral states as well.

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, perhaps I ought to declare an interest as I had an exceedingly good lunch at Trinity House today, but I hasten to add that it was nothing to do with this order or with the lighthouse authority. I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate, particularly the testimony of those who are very much in a position to know about the advantages which AIS will bring to safety at sea.

The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, asked me three questions, which I will do my best to answer. Certainly, the AIS will operate in all waters where there is high risk. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord MacKenzie who identified the crossing of the Irish Sea, which needs attention in these terms. Obviously, places such as the Straits of Dover and so on will be equipped first. It is a roll-out programme. In due course we would expect to see considerable, if not universal, coverage.

Of course, this is dependent on costs. Pilot areas are being organised and operated, but it is clear that the speed with which it will be developed will be dependent on and proportionate to the costs involved. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, will readily recognise that the scheme will be brought into place where there is the heaviest traffic and greatest risk. The timescale is also part of that general position. As the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, and others testified, the system is already in place to a very limited extent in pilot work, but it will take time before it is fully operational. It is an ambitious system. The intention is to cover all vessels except those of 300 tonnes and below, so it is a very big operation.

The noble Lords, Lord Glentoran and Lord Bradshaw, mentioned vessels of less than 300 tonnes. We hope and expect intelligent people operating in waters to be very keen to avail themselves of the latest technology and devices which guarantee the greatest safety. But there are costs involved for people on board ships and we cannot make this mandatory for the smallest leisure craft. Therefore, we will have to have in place the traditional aids, which will give security to vessels unable to fit AIS. Of course, the long-term intention is that all ships of more than 300 tonnes will be fitted with this system. Therefore, we will be able gradually to transform the nature of those traditional navigation aids into the more modern framework.

It will be recognised that the lighthouse authorities have got a long and proud tradition stretching back almost 500 years. Everyone who uses the sea is grateful for their services in the past. In fact, this country is redolent with stories about those who are concerned with safety at sea who have saved lives on very many occasions. It is only right that even organisations as traditional as the lighthouse associations take the fullest advantage of modern technology. I do not think that anyone doubts that this system is a very significant development. It will aid safety at sea against a background of our waters becoming increasingly crowded. The mixture of traffic is also very extensive. We also know that British waters, particularly the Straits of Dover and the English Channel, are the busiest waterways in the world.

We want this system to transform the security situation. It cannot be done overnight, but this order represents the intention of organisations which we hold in the highest regard to pursue new technology and carry on their age-old commitment to safety at sea. I commend the order to the House.

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Motor Vehicles (Wearing of Seat Belts) (Amendment) Regulations 2006

19:56:00

Lord Davies of Oldham
rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 14 June be approved [30th Report from the Joint Committee and 39th Report from the Merits Committee].

The noble Lord said: My Lords, these regulations amend existing legislation and implement a European Directive, 2003/20/EC on the wearing of seat belts in different types of motor vehicle. The directive updates an earlier one from 1991. Some of the new requirements already apply in the UK, for example, to goods vehicles. The changes to our existing requirements may be considered in two parts. The first part relates to children travelling in cars, vans and goods vehicles; the second relates to adults, older children—14 years old and over—and bus and coach passengers.

I will deal with each of these in turn. I will also address the report from the Merits Committee, which draws attention to several matters of policy arising on these regulations. The committee has noted that we are late with implementation, which we regret, and expressed concern that we were not able to secure clearer wording in the directive. My officials strive constantly for wording in directives that can be readily transposed, but they are not always successful. It will be understood that we cannot impose particular wording in directives and we recognise the obvious fact that they obtain across a wide range of countries and, of course, languages which are using different traffic terms.

I should explain three points at the outset. First, current seat-belt wearing requirements are in Sections 14 and 15 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, as amended, and in regulations made under those provisions. The regulations before the House amend Section 15 and the regulations made under Sections 14 and 15. Secondly, the term “child restraint” is used in the directive and the regulations to mean baby seats, child seats, booster seats and cushions. These are used for children of different weights up to 36 kilograms. Thirdly, these regulations deal only with the use of child restraints in the rear seats of cars, vans and goods vehicles. Of course, children in front seats of vehicles need to be provided for as well as those in rear seats. This is provided for now by Section 15(1) of the 1988 Act. That Act was a consolidation and it is a historical curiosity that regulations under this section are subject to negative resolution. So, amending the rules on children in front seats will be done separately, but the intention is that the front seat rules will be made to come into force at the same time as these regulations.

The regulations before the House require children up to the height of 135 centimetres—4 feet 5 inches—to be secured with an appropriate child restraint in the rear of cars, vans and goods vehicles, but they allow all children above that height, and every child aged 12 or more, to wear an adult belt. Children under the age of three will have to be carried in the rear of a motor vehicle in an appropriate child restraint. The new rules will also prohibit the use of rear-facing child restraints where there is an active frontal air bag.

This country has had seat-belt legislation for many years. Observed wearing rates are high and we seek continually to improve them. Seat belts have prevented many road accident fatalities; estimates suggest that around 2,000 lives are saved each year. Total road fatalities are now down to some 3,220 per year and the impact of seat belts is a clear contributory factor to that improvement.

There are two main reasons for the provisions in the new regulations relating to children, the first of which is a practical one. The vast majority of five to nine year-olds just use a seat belt in spite of longstanding recommendations made by the department to use child restraints. Seat belts are designed for adults. An adult belt or a wrongly used child restraint may simply fail to hold a child in during an impact and could cause serious internal injury. Children are not little adults, they have smaller and less developed frames. Babies and children have been tragically killed in accidents because they were not properly restrained. Properly fitted child restraints avoid these dangers and provide children with the full benefit of the safety belt.

The second reason for strengthening the law is that too many children travel without wearing any restraint at all. Our surveys have observed that 8 per cent of children travelling in rear seats are unrestrained; in other words, too many drivers who may or may not be using a seat belt themselves have unprotected children in their vehicles as passengers. Other small children travel on laps, a very dangerous practice that can lead to serious harm. If we are to tackle these matters, it is clear that we must specify the safest means of travel for children of different sizes. It may be a baby seat, a child seat or a booster cushion. We and the shops selling the equipment will make all this clear to parents.

There are some specific exemptions and I shall highlight one to which the Merits Committee referred. The directive states that a child over the age of three who should use a child restraint may travel wearing an adult belt in the rear seat for occasional journeys over a short distance. We believe that that wording is too vague, so the regulations refer to an “unexpected necessity” which requires a child to be driven a short distance wearing an adult belt if there is no appropriate child restraint. The Merits Committee was concerned that even that is too imprecise and uncertain. We do not want to give a general dispensation for all short journeys, including planned and regular trips. If a child travels in the family car, the child seat should be available for any journey, short or long. The same applies to planned journeys in other people’s cars.

But there has to be a little flexibility or we shall cause a good deal more trouble than we would want. We can all imagine unexpected circumstances where it would be absolutely absurd to leave a child behind because his or her child seat is unavoidably unavailable. The Merits Committee noted the difficulty of defining an “unexpected necessity” and what “short” is to mean. Of course, if something is unexpected it is by nature going to be hard to define, and we think it would be unwise to try to pin down in advance all the types of circumstance that might arise. However, I do not see a serious problem in the courts in applying these concepts to individual cases, as they do with so many other general legal concepts.

Put simply, we do not want to be overly prescriptive in what is meant by “short”. Our Explanatory Notes state that a short distance may well vary between town and country, and the courts would take this into account. Cases are likely to be prosecuted only if the facts are fairly clear cut, such as, for example, if it can be proved that a child has no car seat for a regular journey to school. The Government look to parents to use the exemption in this spirit. We will have to keep it under review to be sure that it is not overused.

The regulations also extend the requirement to wear seat belts to adult passengers in buses and coaches in which they are fitted, together with older children, those aged 14 and over. Bus and coach operators will have to notify passengers of the requirement to wear a seat belt by means of an announcement, an audio-visual presentation or signing. These requirements do not apply to a bus providing a local service wholly in a built-up area or where standing is permitted and the bus is designed for it. Many buses are not fitted with seat belts. It is not logical to fit a bus with belts if it is designed to carry standing passengers. Bus and coach travel is very safe in this country and serious casualties are fortunately quite rare. But seat belts do offer passengers increased protection. The majority of minibuses and coaches, and now some buses, are fitted with them. The time has come to require passengers to use them when they are available.

The Merits Committee also noted that at this time we have not extended the requirement to children below the age of 14 in buses and coaches. Our Explanatory Notes make it clear that we need to consult further about how any such requirement could be enforced, taking into account the practical difficulties of requiring bus and coach operators to ensure that children are adequately secured. Other member states are finding that they have the same problem, although they have all agreed that children should be covered by this rule.

We have consulted on these new requirements and they are widely supported. We have used provisions in the directive to make appropriate, specific exemptions and we are implementing it in a practical way. Those whom we have consulted recognise this. The regulations will apply throughout Great Britain, while the Northern Ireland Department of the Environment is preparing separate regulations to implement the directive in the same way there. I beg to move.

Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 14 June be approved [30th Report from the Joint Committee and 39th Report from the Merits Committee].—(Lord Davies of Oldham.)

Lord Hanningfield
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his explanation of this important order. I am happy to say that we on these Benches support the general thrust of the legislation and what it seeks to do. Anything that attempts to cut the numbers of those killed and injured while not wearing a seat belt, particularly children, should be applauded, and I congratulate the Government on that. Indeed, to put the issue into context, in my own county of Essex of the 53 drivers or passengers killed in accidents over the past year, 14—26 per cent—were not wearing a seat belt. That kind of statistic is repeated across the country and it is growing, which is a worry.

As I mentioned, we support in principle what is set out here. Our concerns turn on its implementation where we have a number of serious reservations about how it is to work in practice. Many of the questions that I would like to put to the Minister today are similar to those put forward by my honourable friend the Member for North Shropshire when this legislation was discussed in the other place. There appears to be some confusion surrounding the status of this legislation regarding the involvement of coach and bus operators, specifically in making them responsible for ensuring that children aged under 14 are wearing seat belts. Indeed, no practical way has been identified to enforce this requirement. The Merits Committee, to which the Minister has referred, also raised this as a concern and suggested that the Government should have tried harder to obtain a clear form of words in the directive. Indeed, during the debate in the other place, the Minister of State for Transport said that it would be necessary to re-consult on this aspect—the Minister in this House has also referred to that. However, it is strange that we are considering legislation that to all intents and purposes is very far from being the finished item.

Of particular concern is the exemption for normal bus services, yet the inclusion in the scheme of scheduled bus and coach services such as those taking children to and from school. Who is to pay for the additional equipment required under the order? Will the school bus operators have to resort to local education authority funds for such a requirement—not that that local authority will have any funds anyway? But presumably if these costs are to be borne solely by coach operators, the expense may well push up their costs to such an extent that some of the smaller operators are forced out of the market, with serious consequences for the provision of school transport.

A further point that was made in the other place is how bus and coach operators will enforce such a scheme when other legislation strictly forbids them from touching children. A coach driver could not, therefore, physically place a child on a booster seat or strap them into a seat belt.

The other major issue, of course, is enforcement. The Minister of State in the other place mentioned that he did not envisage police peering into moving cars or measuring individual children to see whether they were over a certain height as specified in the regulations. Those comments appear to be a very public acknowledgement—and, indeed, a tacit agreement—that effective enforcement of this legislation is simply not possible. He also mentioned that there would be instances when the necessary equipment was not fitted to a car for all occupants to satisfy the terms of the legislation. For example, an adult on the school run may be required, at short notice, to pick up more children but may not have the necessary booster seat in place. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, mentioned that you could not leave a child without transport.

The Minister in the other place also said that it would be a good idea for the police to hang around the school gates at closing to give a clear message of what parents are expected to do. There are over 25,000 schools in this country. Was he seriously suggesting that, come four o’clock each day, the police forces around the country would send out a uniformed presence to every school gate, armed with a copy of these regulations and a tape measure? That, of course, would be an absurd proposition. However, I raise it simply to try to get across the difficulties involved in enforcing this legislation. We appear to be running the risk of signing off legislation that is virtually unenforceable. I do not have to tell your Lordships’ House of the very real dangers that such a step entails.

The point was also made about how a parent will expect and encourage a child who may be small for his or her age to go back to sitting on a booster seat. I suspect that no one in the department considered the impact of child and adolescent psychology when drawing up the legislation. Some poor children are obviously very conscious of, and worried about, that. It might sound a frivolous point, but we can all see that it has the potential to cause some serious disputes.

It seems that if this scheme is to work, the public will, as with other new legislation, need to be informed of it through an effective educational and communications strategy and well in advance of its commencement. It is worrying that these regulations could come into force in a matter of weeks and yet the vast majority of people out there will have absolutely no knowledge of these new laws. Have the Government taken on board this worry? Perhaps the Minister will explain how they will be communicating these new laws to the people who will be affected by them.

Finally, I would welcome an explanation from the Minister as to how much this is likely to cost, both to the individual with, say, three small children and more generally. I can see the danger that a family on a low income who can only just afford to run a car could be adversely affected to the point where they simply would not bother to comply with the law at all. Indeed, we could well be looking at a situation where the cost of buying two or three booster seats, which could run into several hundred pounds, would be more than the cost of the vehicle.

As I said at the start of my comments, we very much support the thrust of this legislation. Any measure that can improve child safety and save lives is very important. But we are loath to pass legislation which appears to be incomplete and in need of further attention and, more important, which appears to be unenforceable. I would therefore welcome any assurance that the Minister can provide on the concerns that I have outlined today.

Lord Bradshaw
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, I am concerned about how these regulations are to be enforced. There is a huge burden on the police and it is quite normal that they will enforce things that they can easily enforce; if the laws are difficult to enforce, the likelihood is that little attention will be given to them. I am rather concerned that we are adding legislation that has rather slim prospects of working.

For example, how will a policeman be able to tell how an airbag is deactivated? I went out to my car yesterday and read the manual, but it did not tell me anything about how to deactivate the airbag. I do not know whether my car is peculiar, but I am not sure how it is done. That is only one question among many that I have.

20:15:00

The Minister referred to the fact that legislation is being drafted for Northern Ireland. There is one important difference in the legislation in Northern Ireland compared with the legislation in the rest of the United Kingdom: it proposes to introduce penalty points for seat belt offences later this year, but people aged 14 to 16 and those without licences will have penalty points awarded and when they apply for a licence those penalty points will be activated. So there will be a real incentive for such people to wear their seat belts. That is extremely important.

I have carried out some work over the past three years on road casualties in the Thames Valley. Of the 279 fatalities, 93 were not wearing seat belts, and, of those, professionally trained investigators estimated that 65 would have survived had they been wearing seat belts. That is a startling statistic. If the Government are serious about reducing the number of road casualties, they have to get people to wear seat belts. Most of these people are in the 17 to 25 age category. We have referred to young children but, although child casualties perhaps catch the headlines, being killed in a car crash is the biggest single cause of death in the 17 to 25 age group. I draw this seriously to the Minister’s attention. The Road Safety Bill has not yet finished its passage through the other place and I ask the Minister to consider whether further amendments to that Bill are necessary.

The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, referred to the fact that getting young people to wear seat belts is very difficult. In Thames Valley, we run what is called a seat belt diversion scheme. It is similar to the scheme that we run with regard to speed offences. If someone travels at 37 or 38 miles per hour and has no previous offences, the likelihood is that they will be offered, as an alternative to penalty points, the opportunity to attend a speed course. With speed offences, we get a 90 per cent take-up rate; most drivers accept the speed course as an alternative to penalty points. With seat belt offences, we get a 2 per cent take-up rate, because the alternative is a relatively small fine and is therefore not an effective deterrent. In fact, we have had to abandon the scheme as not being worth while.

But seat belt wearing rates are not getting better. This year, Thames Valley Police have issued 18,000 fixed penalty notices for speed offences; I could add to those the large number that they have issued for using mobile phones. This is a similar offence in many ways. It is not dangerous driving, but the driver is doing something that is likely to lead inadvertently to an accident.

These regulations are possibly a useful step, but they are fraught with enforcement difficulties. Something needs to be done—and that something could be done in the Road Safety Bill. We had a long discussion in the House about the matter when the Bill went through, but we did not succeed in persuading the Government to amend it. However, the Summer Recess will give Ministers another opportunity to consider seriously whether something more substantial needs to be done to make our seat belt legislation more effective.

Lord Monson
My Lords, we have certainly travelled a long way since those relaxed, carefree, politically incorrect days when the great challenge was to cram as many people as possible into a Mini Minor and drive around London, arms and legs sticking out everywhere. For 99 per cent of the time, the police did not give a damn. Rather more seriously, a few years later, in order to save both petrol and wear and tear on parents, two, three or four families—mine included—would get together and share the school run, taking it in turn to carry half a dozen or more children in the back of an estate car, albeit with arms and legs safely tucked inside. Never once did I hear of anyone coming to the slightest harm in consequence, although, no doubt on very rare occasions, it did happen.

Nevertheless, one has to accept that the younger generation, among whom I include the thirtysomethings and fortysomethings, is more jittery—I have tried to use as neutral a word as possible—than ours was. Hence, they willingly accept restrictions on carrying children in cars that our generation would have considered neurotically over the top. Even so, the first part of the regulations is open to some criticism. First, most normal people in this country do not measure their height in centimetres, and never will, any more than they will describe to friends and family the weight of their newly arrived baby in kilograms. If a new James Bond were to appear on our screens—they seem to do so every two or three years—he would be likely to be described in the media as tanned, muscular and 6 feet 2 inches tall, not 187.96 centimetres tall.

When I revisited India recently after a gap of many years, despite many decades of compulsory metrification, and although miles had succumbed to kilometres on road signs, I was delighted to see that in every other respect user-friendly imperial measurements—inches, feet, yards, pounds—were still used in everyday life and in business. In Bangalore, for example, hoardings advertised luxury apartments measuring 900 square feet. At least let the words “approximately 4 feet 5 inches” be used as a supplementary indicator to the 135 centimetres requirement so that parents can know what is expected of them.

Incidentally, halfway down page 2 of the draft statutory instrument, reference is made to,

“a maximum design speed exceeding 25 kilometres per hour”.

Legal limits in this country are still expressed in miles per hour. Curiously enough, one paragraph in the Explanatory Memorandum contains a wonderful jumble of metric and imperial, referring to,

“street lights no more than 200 yards apart in England and Wales or 175 metres apart in Scotland”—

politically correct Scotland. It continues:

“These are roads for which the normal speed is 30 m.p.h.”.
 

Better some imperial measurement than none at all.

More worrying is the nub of this part of the regulations—I refer not to the measurements but the substance. Children who are 135 centimetres tall, or just over 4 feet 5 inches, will in many, if not most, cases find the diagonal strap of a seat belt running across their neck. If there is a sudden stop, not necessarily occasioned by a collision, they could be very seriously injured, possibly even killed. Have the Government taken any detailed medical advice on the possible harm that can come from a strap tightening across a child’s neck?

My main objection is to the second part of the regulations, which introduces seat belt compulsion in buses although, strangely, not in trains. My noble friend Lord Erroll has said that he will support me in this. On average, no more than three people a year are killed in buses and some of these will be in urban buses, which will not be subject to the regulations. We are talking about a possible maximum of one life saved per annum. That is assuming that most people will obey the regulations, which of course they will not; there is no way of enforcing them, especially on double-decker buses, such as the Oxford Tube, which I use from time to time.

Moreover, more and more long-distance buses nowadays have lavatories. Will passengers now be forbidden to use those lavatories, or will the bus operating companies be compelled to remove them? This seems a typical piece of nonsense, emanating from the overpaid, paternalist control freaks in Brussels, aided and abetted by the paternalist control freaks in this country.

As the Minister will know, every American state, every Canadian province and every Australian state can decide its own seat belt laws. Why cannot the ancient nation states of Europe be allowed to do the same? Harmonising seat belt and other road traffic laws has nothing whatever to do with completing a single market. I suppose that I will be told that it was a previous Conservative Government who sold the pass. That may well be so, in which case this Administration cannot be blamed for this particular piece of Euro-nonsense. However, I hope—doubtless in vain—that they might in due course press for greater subsidiarity in this and similar matters.

Lord Cobbold
My Lords, this document is intensely depressing. It contains a whole new batch of regulations at a time when I thought that it was fashionable to try to reduce regulation. The most demeaning of the new regulations is the requirement that children aged three to 11 and less than 135 centimetres in height must use a child restraint in the back seat of cars. Child restraints are designed for infants; they cost money and take up a lot of space in a car. This regulation outlaws parental judgment; it discriminates against families with several children and families from poorer backgrounds, who may be faced with having to buy a larger car or, indeed, a second car. There are other objectionable features in the document, many of which have been mentioned by other noble Lords. It is a further intrusion of the nanny state into personal and parental choice.

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords who contributed to the debate, although the regulations have not received quite the enthusiastic response that I might have wished for. I will do my best to meet the objections that have been raised.

Let me deal with the question raised by the noble Lords, Lord Hanningfield and Lord Bradshaw, as well as by other speakers, about the difficulty of enforcement. We know that seat belts are not worn as frequently as we would wish. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, mentioned mobile phones, and we have all seen people who continue to use them while driving. But that does not alter the fact that seat belts save lives and an awful lot of people obey the law by wearing them. Banning the use of mobile phones by drivers also means that far fewer people use them today than was the case before the law was changed.

Of course we cannot have a 100 per cent response—we do not expect that. But, over time, things gradually become part of the normal operation of people driving cars. The vast majority of people may not be assiduously concerned about safety, but they certainly do not want to be in an accident in which they or anyone close to them gets hurt.

As for enforcement by police, of course we cannot expect police officers to go around in patrol cars peering into every other car to see whether seat belts are effectively fixed, and the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, is also right that we cannot expect the police to appear at every junior school to tell parents what is required. But we can expect the police to act in their normal judicious and intelligent way. Any person involved in an incident of any kind knows that failure to comply with the law will put them in increased jeopardy. Gradually, people will begin to realise that it does not do to defy the law.

20:30:00

I heard what the noble Lords, Lord Monson and Lord Cobbold, said about the nanny state; it is usually the nanny international state when we are talking about Brussels directives. However, let us leave Brussels out of the issue on this occasion. These regulations derive from a Brussels directive, but noble Lords will recognise that Britain is at the forefront of road safety measures because we are proud that we have a better safety record than almost any other state in Europe. It will not do for us to blame our continental partners about this. We are prepared to take initiatives because we think that they save lives and reduce injury.

The noble Lord, Lord Monson, asked whether the Government had taken cognisance of the fact that the wrong size child in a badly fitted seat belt could come to mishap. That is exactly so. We talked about necessary child restraints and proper seats for children because an ordinary seat belt will not meet the requirement for a child. A small child popped into the back of the car and given an adult seat belt may be marginally better off than without a seat belt at all, but in certain circumstances that seat belt might occasion the very injury that we seek to avoid. That is why the regulations consider children as a special category.

We have enough scientific evidence for this and we are not alone in our view—all other European countries also recognise this—that seat belts contribute to safety, as, indeed, do airbags. A feature of the past decade or so has been the improvement in accident rates because of better designed motor vehicles and particularly because of the introduction of airbags. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said that he could not deactivate his airbag. He is not alone in that—a large number cannot be deactivated. I think that mine can, but I have never done so. However, the point is that, if the airbag cannot be deactivated and therefore is in use, we must not use a rear-facing child restraint or seat because we know that that can create more danger to the child.

I recognise the anxieties about these regulations. I frankly and accurately reflected the anxieties of the Merits Committee. We have difficulty in interpreting Brussels directives. The noble Lord, Lord Monson, made great fun of the differing measurements in use. I do not blame him for that, because I find it the source of the most incredible irritation when we are used to one measurement and someone comes along with another. He will have seen that I scrupulously translated centimetres into feet and inches for the purpose of this debate, because I share exactly those concerns. However, despite the difficulties of interpreting and fitting the regulations in with British law, we can see a way of reducing the number of accidents and deaths.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, mentioned Northern Ireland and the penalty points system. If he advocates that system, he will lay himself open to even more criticism from the noble Lords, Lord Cobbold and Lord Monson, because the penalties are even greater for infraction of the law under the Northern Ireland example that he gave. Northern Ireland has the right to make its judgments in this area. It makes them separately from the rest of Great Britain. This order relates only to Great Britain. I hope that I have assuaged some anxieties.

Lord Monson
My Lords, will the Minister answer my question about whether the use of lavatories on long-distance buses will be outlawed?

Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, that is an interesting one. I do not have the answer immediately in my brief. However, perhaps it is safer to use the lavatory when the bus has stopped. I recognise that people move around in buses. We want to minimise that.

The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, said that this was an unfair obligation on the coach driver. We are not demanding that seat belts should be fitted in coaches, minibuses or anywhere else if they do not already exist. However, where they do exist, passengers should be told that the driver and the company operating the system expect those seat belts to be worn. There might be a little label on the back of the seat or an announcement by the driver. Increasingly, coaches have televisions and other forms of communication that could be used. The instruction to passengers should be that the driver expects that, because the bus is fitted with seat belts, they should be used. That is a basic requirement. The bus driver cannot be expected to enforce the law. He has done his duty when he has carried out the operation that I described.

Despite the criticisms this evening, I hope that noble Lords will recognise the good intentions behind these regulations. They are being subscribed to by other member states in the European Community. They are an advance in terms of road safety and I hope that noble Lords will give them a fair wind.

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Education and Inspections Bill

20:38:00

House again in Committee on Clause 6.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Skills (Lord Adonis)
moved Amendment No. 46:

Page 4, line 41, after “activities” insert “which are”

The noble Lord said: In moving Amendment No. 46, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 47 and 48. Amendment No. 48 ensures that the opportunities to participate in positive activities secured for young people under Clause 6 include sufficient youth work activities. That was a particular concern raised at Second Reading, and we entirely share it, because youth work has never been more important. It is met by the new duty on local authorities, which I hope is agreeable to the House.

Amendments Nos. 46 and 47 are minor amendments that improve the clarity of the drafting of the new duty to avoid the unhelpful interpretation that the duty could be fulfilled by securing access to any amount, however small, of educational leisure time activities, so long as it resulted in some improvement in well-being. I beg to move.

Lord Northbourne
I strongly support Amendment No. 48, and with it the amendment tabled from the Liberal Benches, Amendment No. 49. Personal and social development is crucially important for young people today. Personal development is about how to relate to yourself, while social development is about how to relate to other people. These are key life skills—they are particularly key in employment and wealth creation and in family formation and child rearing. The latest Ofsted report from 2005—although there is another one cooking at the moment—suggests that the majority of schools are not satisfactorily delivering personal and social education today. The report suggests that about two in five schools are giving an entirely satisfactory delivery of this subject. I accept that it is not an easy subject to develop in a classroom.

What has happened is that the Government’s enthusiasm for citizenship and the general enthusiasm for sex education has led to citizenship and sex education almost taking over from the rather more general subject of PSHE.

Lord Adonis
Now that the noble Lord has developed his remarks, I understand what he is talking about—which is personal, social and health education in schools. That is not the subject of this amendment, which is about youth work being promoted—

Lord Northbourne
I am talking about this now because I may not be able to be in the Chamber when we come to talk about it, and it seems to me that the two subjects are very closely linked. The Government are inserting personal, social and health education here for out-of-school activities and then, under Amendment No. 67 they are removing personal, social and health education from the curriculum of key stage 4. That subject will arise under Amendment No. 67 and the amendments tabled by the Liberal Benches.

Personal and social education are hugely important. Can the Minister explain why the Government are putting it in here and taking it out in the later clause? I am not unsympathetic to the idea that it may be the better place to have it. Since we are in Committee, I shall not say more now but shall wait to listen to what the Minister has to say. If necessary, I shall come in again with all guns blazing, if we do not get a satisfactory answer.

Lord Judd
As someone who was concerned about these matters at Second Reading, I welcome greatly the moves that the Government have made. It is a very good illustration of how my noble friend listens to argument and responds to it. I express appreciation in that regard.

Baroness Walmsley
From these Benches we too welcome these amendments, but I think I see what the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is getting at. The position of personal, social and health education in the curriculum is an issue we will be coming to somewhat later. Many of us feel it should be mandatory. The noble Lord is right, however, that the personal and social development of a young person does not just happen in a classroom; it happens through leisure, sports, social and interactive activities outside the classroom as well. That is why I particularly welcome the Minister’s commitment to resourcing activities of this sort.

Baroness Buscombe
I rise to support these amendments. There is no question that youth work benefits the community and would be a welcome addition to leisure-time activities. I am hopeful that the Minister can reassure us that no burdensome spending requirement will be imposed on local authorities in order to meet this requirement. While the inclusion of youth work is to be welcomed, we hope it can support inner city sports initiatives such as Inner Cities Cricket, where young people are taught cricket by volunteers, and the National Cricket Council, which has provided cricket bats and red balls.

Lord Adonis
I am grateful for the welcome my amendment has received. We regard it as an entirely appropriate response to the concerns that have been raised, and it was always our intention that youth work should be a key priority in the extension of leisure-time, recreational and positive activities for young people. Having it in the Bill in this way will ensure that it receives that priority.

Now that I understand the noble Lord’s point, I completely accept the connection between youth work and personal, social and health education. I have been fishing around in my papers, but I cannot find the text of Amendment No. 67—someone else must be moving it. I assure the noble Lord, however, that there is nothing the Government are doing in the Bill that in any way lessens the focus of schools on PSHE. On the contrary, we are seeking to promote it steadily in the classroom with a set of measures that I will explain when we come to debate PSHE, including significant additional resources and priority for this area of the curriculum.

With regard to the requirements for key stage 4, PSHE is not yet a statutory subject at any key stage, so the Bill would not make any change that would affect it in that respect. I will look at Amendment No. 67, however, and perhaps the noble Lord and I might speak further about this outside the Chamber. I assure him that there is nothing we are doing in the Bill that in any way lessens the focus of schools on the important area of PSHE. I commend the amendment to the Committee.

On Question, amendment agreed to.

Lord Adonis
moved Amendments Nos. 47 to 48:

Page 4, line 44, after “activities” insert “which are”

Page 5, line 6, at end insert-
 “( ) For the purposes of subsection (1)(a)-
 (a) “sufficient educational leisure-time activities” which are for the improvement of the well-being of qualifying young persons in the authority's area must include sufficient educational leisure-time activities which are for the improvement of their personal and social development, and (b) “sufficient facilities for such activities” must include sufficient facilities for educational leisure-time activities which are for the improvement of the personal and social development of qualifying young persons in the authority's area.”

On Question, amendments agreed to.

[Amendment No. 49 not moved.]

Baroness Walmsley
moved Amendment No. 50:

Page 5, line 31, at end insert-
 “( ) a local authority must have regard to the access requirements of qualifying young persons with a disability”

The noble Baroness said: In speaking to Amendment No. 50 I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 51 and 53 in this group. Amendment No. 50 is intended to ensure that positive leisure-time activities are accessible to disabled young people. Mencap has done some research, and the sad fact is that eight out of 10 young people with a learning disability do not attend any after-school club. Seven out of 10 children and young people with a disability were made to feel uncomfortable at their local leisure centre, and only one in five after-school clubs have any young person with a disability attending.

The amendment is therefore not simply about ensuring that there is adequate wheelchair access; it is not just about physical accessibility. It is also about ensuring that there is appropriate signage or symbols so that disabled people know where everything is. It is to ensure that young people with a learning or physical disability feel there is a safe environment for them.

Such young people are particularly vulnerable to bullying. That often also prevents them from taking part in after-school activities, so they need to feel safe or they will not have the confidence to take part. We might also need to look at the special school transport that often has to be provided for disabled children, to ensure the arrangements made for school transport do not preclude their attendance at after-school clubs or leisure activities during non-school time at leisure centres.

We have a concern that, if this is not clearly stated in the Bill, local education authorities might provide or commission leisure activities that are perfectly suitable for the majority of young people in their area, but not quite good enough for the young people who are most vulnerable and who need access to them—not just physical access, but every other kind of access as well.

I heard recently from Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the Children’s Commissioner for England, what a scandal it is that in this country we do not ensure that children with disabilities have full access to all the facilities that add so much to the quality of life of able-bodied children. He believes that we lag behind other developed countries in that respect. For that reason we have tabled this amendment again—it was tabled in another place at an earlier stage of the Bill—because it is only when you put a legal duty on a local authority that it feels obliged to direct some of its budget at the problem. The Minister in another place said that he felt it was for local authorities to decide how the budget should be spent and which young people would be prioritised, but we feel that for these most vulnerable young people the duty should be explicitly laid out in the Bill.

Amendments Nos. 51 and 53 are probing amendments to seek clarification of the power in the Bill for local authorities to charge for services but also to allow them to provide financial assistance to enable free access for certain deprived young people to facilities and activities in the local area. The amendments also provide us with an opportunity to clarify how these provisions are intended to work with the Youth Opportunity Card and the Youth Opportunity Fund, about which I shall be asking the Minister in a moment.

The amendment was suggested by Barnardo’s, which believes that young people from low-income households and those leaving care should be able to access these facilities and activities free of charge. No child should miss out on these educational and leisure-time facilities to improve their well-being. All these issues come under the five outcomes of the Every Child Matters agenda.

We are probing to clarify the guidance to be given to local authorities on the level of charges for leisure services under this clause, and how these new provisions will interact with the Youth Opportunity Card. Very little detail was given on this issue in another place. The Minister, Phil Hope, said:

“it is up to local authorities to ensure that financial barriers do not prevent young people from accessing the sort of facilities and recreational opportunities listed in the clause”.—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee E, 18/4/06; col. 238.]

Will the Minister confirm that if the costs of provision mean that some children are excluded from activities provided under this clause, under those circumstances local authorities will not fulfil their duty as set out in the Bill to secure access to recreational activities because, by definition, some would not have access to those activities if they were too expensive? Will he explain how the ability to charge for services under the clause fits with the Youth Opportunity Card? Will he give an assurance that the guidance on the circumstances under which local authorities can give financial assistance will include, and stress the needs of, young people from low income families, children in care and care leavers, such as we have specified in our amendment?

The Youth Opportunity Card and the Youth Capital Fund were announced as part of the proposals in the Green Paper, Youth Matters, in July 2005. We very much welcome this additional money to make these facilities available for young people. However, we are very concerned to know how these things interact. I hope that the Minister can elucidate that subject. Leisure facilities that are used only by middle class children and children from families which have the money to enable them to take full advantage of those facilities are not real community facilities. We hope that these will be real community facilities and that local authorities will make decisions that ensure that the most vulnerable children have every bit as much access as those children from more advantaged homes. I beg to move.

Lord Adonis
I am broadly with the noble Baroness in all the objectives she is seeking to achieve. I hope I can assure her that they are included in the Bill and in the intentions of the guidance under the Bill.

On Amendment No. 50, it is vital that young people with disabilities are able to access positive activities in their leisure time. It is also true, as the noble Baroness said, that young people with disabilities often face additional barriers in accessing such provision, and it is essential that those barriers are reduced. However, young people with disabilities are already included under the duty in the Bill, which clearly states that local authorities must secure access to sufficient positive leisure time activities and facilities for all young people in the authority’s area so far as reasonably practicable. “All” includes young people with disabilities.

Furthermore, in securing access to sufficient positive leisure time activities, local authorities will also have to take into account their new responsibilities under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 to promote equality of opportunity for disabled people, including young disabled people. In that Act, positive steps that they must take to see that the duties under the Act are met, such as disability equality plans, are set out. Guidance will also make clear that the consultation required in new Section 507B(8) should include the views of disabled young people, as well as those of any other group of young people who might legitimately claim to face greater barriers to participation in the local area, whether physical, cultural, social or economic.

We also know from research among young people that a lack of information on provision creates major barriers to them participating in positive activities. This is particularly important for young people with disabilities, who may have difficulty accessing information or who may need to know about the accessibility of facilities or the availability of trained coaching staff. Guidance will therefore make clear the need for authorities to consider and address the information needs of disabled young people in their response to subsection (9).

On Amendments Nos. 51 and 53, there can be no doubt that for some young people costs are a barrier to participation in positive leisure time activities, although not all providers of positive activities make charges. For example, local authority youth work provision is often entirely free. Under subsection (5), local authorities may provide financial assistance to facilitate access for qualifying young persons to positive leisure time activities. We do not think that it is right to remove local authorities’ discretion to determine who should or should not be eligible to receive financial assistance. It is through local analysis of needs and the consultation required by this legislation that local authorities will determine how best to secure access to sufficient provision for young people. Authorities will need to determine when this should involve subsidy or payments to individuals, where the funding required should come from, and to whom it should be paid. They should not be bound by a prescriptive list that will inevitably leave out some young people who may be equally deserving.

The same argument applies to Amendment No. 53. The local authority should retain the discretion to determine when to exercise its charging powers and who will be subject to charging. I stress that should a local authority, by charging for services and provision, prevent young people securing access to sufficient positive activities, it will have failed in its duty set out in new Section 507B, which contains an inbuilt safeguard against charging becoming a barrier to participation.

In response to the other questions posed by the noble Baroness, I assure her that guidance on the circumstances in which local authorities can give financial assistance will include young people from low income families. Guidance will also make clear how local authorities should give priority and assistance to children in care and care leavers.

The youth opportunity card, which the noble Baroness mentioned, is a potential vehicle through which young people could pay for leisure time services and products. If the pilots that we are undertaking prove successful and the card is made available nationally, it would not preclude or change the way that a local authority uses the power to charge, but it would offer an alternative method of payment for chargeable services. It could, for example, enable payments to be made invisibly, thereby reducing the risk of stigma that is commonly associated with financial support for disadvantaged young people. It could also enable local authorities to top up the provision that is available for such young people up front, which would encourage them to take part in local activities in the first place. I hope that deals with the issues raised by the noble Baroness.

21:00:00

Baroness Howe of Idlicote
Perhaps I may press the Minister on one point. I think that I am reassured that such matters should be in the hands of the local authority, but can we be assured that there will not be a postcode lottery, whereby some local authorities will charge more or less than others? A club that I know is opening its facilities specifically for disabled young people, rather than ordinary able-bodied young people, and that is that club’s contribution to this problem. Presumably, that should be encouraged.

Lord Adonis
It is by the very nature of allowing local discretion that there may be some local variations, but we intend that guidance will make clear the circumstances in which local authorities can give financial assistance and that that will include young people from low income families, children in care and care leavers. Our expectation is that those services must properly be accessible to all of those groups.

Baroness Walmsley
I am most grateful to the Minister for his reply and I am much reassured by it. I thank him for his confirmation that if it can be shown that the charging regime disadvantages young people who do not have the money or the ability physically to access those facilities, authorities would not be fulfilling their duty. It would be a pity if one had to rely on monitoring such an organisation and then have to prove that it was preventing those young people from having access before something could be done about it. I hope that the guidance will make it very clear to local authorities that they need to focus their attention on the most vulnerable young people in the first place to prevent the need for that monitoring—and then looking for redress.

I have a local authority in mind which made all its swimming pools freely available to all under-16s. The ability of young people to learn to swim—a very important skill, particularly in areas with rivers or that are next to the sea—went up and up. Making those facilities freely available really does make a difference to the way in which young people access such facilities and that can be very important. I am most reassured by most of what the noble Lord said. For the rest, we just have to hope for the best. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Amendments Nos. 51 to 54 not moved.]

Clause 6, as amended, agreed to.

Schedule 1 agreed to.

Baroness Buscombe
moved Amendment No. 55:

Before Clause 7, insert the following new clause-
 “ESTABLISHMENT OF COMMUNITY SCHOOLS
 No local education authority in England may establish a new community school.”

The noble Baroness said: In moving the amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 63, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76 and 89.

These amendments, if accepted, would represent a substantial step towards achieving the new strategic role for local authorities that the Government have set out, not just in the Higher Standards, Better Schools for All White Paper, but in the Department for Education and Skills’ Five-year Strategy for Children and Learners and the 2005 Labour Party manifesto. Amendment No. 55 would prevent local authorities in England establishing new community schools. This is an important amendment that goes to the heart of what the Bill sets out to achieve.

Key to that vision was removal of the power to establish new community schools. Yet, since the White Paper was published, the Government have retreated from their bold aims, and for no clear purpose. Indeed, the ability to establish new community schools completely undermines the very basis of the new commissioning role. The Government perhaps recognised that fact when, in the regulatory impact assessment, they stated:

“At present, some authorities have tended to regard schools as “their” schools and to regard other categories of schools as being outside the local family of schools”.

That is also implicitly acknowledged in the report of the House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee on the White Paper. The committee summed up the goal of the Government as follows:

“The Government is aiming for a clear division between schools as independent providers of education and local authorities as commissioners, enablers and strategic planners”.

The committee’s argument, which the Government seem to have accepted, is that unless all schools are forced to become self-governing, there is no justification for a ban on the establishment of new community schools.

Following that report, the Government retreated. Community schools could be proposed but only with the consent of the Secretary of State. As the Bill stands now, several local authorities will be given the right to establish new community schools although a similar number will be forbidden from proposing such schools. The remainder will need to seek the Secretary of State’s permission.

By removing the right to establish new community schools we would return the Bill to the vision set out in the White Paper. The Government should not fear accepting this amendment because they should realise that they will have our support. I should add that notice of my intention to oppose the question that Clause 8 stand part of the Bill is consequential on the amendment. If the Government were to accept this amendment, Clause 8 would fall.

Amendment No. 63 tackles the issue in a less explicit way by removing the rights of local authorities to establish a new community school through a competition. Amendment No. 76 to Clause 10 would prevent local authorities establishing community schools outside competitions. I invite the Minister to accept at the very least Amendment No. 76. It will ensure that all new community school proposals would have to be decided on through a competition. I would like clarification of the grounds that the Secretary of State will use when granting consent under Clause 10. I would appreciate it if the Minister could confirm that the procedure under Clause 10 is, indeed, for use only in exceptional circumstances. Will he guarantee that local authorities that are forbidden from proposing community schools under Clauses 7 and 8 will not be granted permission to proceed under Clause 10?

Clause 8 deals with the circumstances under which schools will be permitted to propose new community schools. The Government have helpfully provided draft regulations: the School Organisation (Community and Community Special Schools in Competitions) (England) Regulations 2006. Those set out that a local authority will be prevented from establishing new community schools where it has an APA of one or where it has an APA of one and more than 15 per cent of schools are eligible for intervention or less than 15 per cent of schools are foundation schools, voluntary schools, academies, city technology colleges or city colleges for the technology of the arts. Schools with an APA rating of four will automatically be permitted to propose new community schools. All the others will need to seek the permission of the Secretary of State.

A consequence of the Government accepting our amendments forbidding the establishment of community schools is that Clause 8 should not stand part of the Bill. Our amendments to Clause 8 seek to place greater limitations on the circumstances under which a local authority can propose a new community school.

Amendment No. 69 would prevent a local authority proposing a community school if such provision would result in less than one third of places in schools in the authority being provided through self-governing schools. It is very important that local authorities ensure diversity and choice by promoting the development of self-governing schools. Out of 150 local authorities, 86 local authorities have no foundation primary schools and 73 have no foundation secondary schools.

That approach differs from that of the Government in that our amendment refers to the number of places in schools while the Government’s draft regulation refers to the absolute number of schools. We would be interested in probing that a little. Why refer to the absolute number of schools when, ultimately, it is, in the words of the White Paper, increasing the number of places available at good state schools? That is the priority.

Another point where our amendment differs from the approach of the Government is by applying the target on diversity to all local authorities, not only those with poor APA ratings. We are unconvinced that the good performance of local authorities truly justifies exception from the rule on diversity, particularly with the insignificant proportion—15 per cent of schools—which the Government believe should be schools other than community schools. Only a handful of local authorities will be affected by this provision.

If we exclude academies and city technology colleges and concentrate solely on maintained schools, out of 3,385 maintained secondary schools in England, around 65 per cent are community schools and 35 per cent are not. There are relatively few local authorities where fewer than 15 per cent of maintained schools are not community schools. January 2005 data indicate that only six local authorities would fail to meet this target with regard to primary schools and only 21 local authorities would fail to meet this target with regard to secondary schools. If we included academies and city technology colleges and took the APA rating into account, I am sure that the numbers prevented from seeking consent from the Secretary of State would be even lower. I would be interested to know what estimates the Government have made of the number of local authorities that would not be allowed to seek the Secretary of State’s consent under these regulations. I would also like to know on what basis the 15 per cent is chosen, as increasing the proportion even slightly leads to large increases in the number of local authorities that are prevented from seeking consent. A five point increase to a minimum of 20 per cent doubles the number of authorities that would not meet the diversity target, and if we increase the target to one-third of schools, 77 local authorities would have insufficiently diverse secondary schools.

Amendment No. 70 means that local authorities would have to demonstrate that the establishment of a community school would raise standards more than the establishment of a foundation school. I feel this is very important. This is what the Bill should be about, not so much about structures, but about raising standards in our education system. It will demonstrate that the principal justification for the establishment of a new community school must be the provision of high quality education for pupils. If a local authority cannot demonstrate that a community school will raise standards more than a foundation school, I see no reason why the local authority should be allowed to go ahead. The 1997 Labour manifesto stated:

“The judge and jury of LEA performance will be their contribution to raising standards”.

Both these amendments reflect the fact that foundation schools perform considerably better than community schools in terms of academic achievement. For example, if we consider the most recent GCSE results, at community schools 24.9 per cent of pupils received no GCSE passes at A* to C; that is, nearly a quarter of pupils. In foundation schools that figure dropped to 19.6 per cent. The proportion that received five or more good GCSEs, including English and maths, was 38 per cent in community schools; in foundations schools it was 44.2 per cent; in voluntary aided schools it was 49.1 per cent; and at city technology colleges, which are independently run and enjoy the greatest freedom among schools, only 3.6 per cent of pupils failed to pass any GCSEs at A* to C and 65.9 per cent of pupils passed five or more GCSEs. The results are here to see. Indeed, at the Thomas Telford City Technology College, which has an intake that is representative of the national ability range, 100 per cent of pupils achieved 12 or more GCSEs at grade A* to C, and that figure includes English and maths. The pattern displayed by the value-added results is identical.

Our next amendments attempt to ensure that local authorities make a real effort to bring about the new vision of the education system. They reflect the Government’s statement in response to the House of Commons Select Committee report that:

“It is important that local authorities seriously consider all alternatives to secure the best education for their community … and do not just promote local authority community schools as the default option”.

Amendment No. 71 states that where a local education authority wishes to propose a community school, it must simultaneously publish proposals for a foundation school. This would ensure that the adjudicator could always choose to reject a proposal for a community school in favour of a foundation school. It also reflects the commitment the Government gave in the White Paper at paragraph 9.11 that:

“We will expect local authorities to … make their own proposal for a self-governing (Foundation) school, if they cannot find a suitable promoter, in keeping with the commissioner role”.

This emphasises the new commissioner role of the local authority and ensures that an application to propose a new community school does not become the default option for local authorities who do not take their new role seriously. It may be possible for a local authority to use the failure to receive permission to propose a new community school as a justification for inaction and failure to promote choice and diversity. This amendment would remove that possibility, and, I believe, supports what the government are seeking to achieve.

21:15:00

Amendment No. 72 also promotes the new role for the local authority by requiring local authorities to provide the adjudicator and the Secretary of State with a notice setting out their reasons for publishing proposals for the establishment of the community school and, where applicable, their reasons for not publishing proposals of their own for the establishment of a foundation school. That ensures that local authorities justify their decision to propose the establishment of a new community school if they cannot justify the choice of community school over a foundation school.

Finally, Amendment No. 89 to Schedule 2 would give the adjudicator an explicit right to alter a proposal for a new community school into a proposal for a new foundation school. That would ensure that where the adjudicator considers the proposal for a new school, he is aware of his right to accept the proposal with modifications, and therefore is able to accept a planned school as a foundation school instead of a community school.

This is partly a probing amendment. The adjudicator may already have these powers, and perhaps the Minister could expand on that. By explicitly including the power in the Bill, the Government could, with appropriate guidance to the adjudicator, ensure that all such proposals are examined to see whether a self-governing school might be a more appropriate solution to the needs of the area than the community school. I beg to move.

Baroness Williams of Crosby
I rise on behalf of these Benches to raise some objections to the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. The amendment would do two things. First—and I will come back to this point—it would substantially remove the element of valid parental choice. Either we mean parental choice or we do not. If we decide to abolish the alternative option of a new community school, what we are effectively doing is determining the range of choice before a choice has even been made.

Secondly, the amendment would remove the last barrier between the Bill and the possibility of an education Bill that would satisfy the Conservative wish to return to some form of selection. Therefore, this amendment is of the greatest significance and importance in determining the true purpose of the Bill. I, for one, look forward with very great interest to what the Minister has to say about it.

The Conservative Party played a large and extremely constructive part in the creation of comprehensive schools. Even today, in many shire counties comprehensive schools work extremely well and have brought to a large number of children opportunities that they would not have had under a selective system. They have been issues of pride to the county councils and councils that administered and ran them, and have enabled literally thousands upon thousands of youngsters to access tertiary and higher education who never had the opportunity before.

I believe that the comprehensive system in this country has been extremely badly served in its treatment by a very sophisticated public relations system which has given it nothing like the credit it deserves for the remarkable strides it has made and has concentrated on the failures of a very small number of schools. One of the things I remember, having been a Secretary of State, is that the proportion of failing schools in England and Wales is relatively small, probably about 200 to 300 schools, and that it is not a characteristic of one particular sort of school—the so-called community school. It is a characteristic of every single category of school. Regardless of whether we are discussing independent private schools, selective schools, secondary modern schools or comprehensive schools, there has always been an element of failure.

One of the jobs I had when I was Secretary of State was to insist that failing private independent schools be closed. There was a proportion of failing private independent schools; there always will be. One of the wisest remarks ever made by a thinker on education—Michael Rutter, in his famous book—was that in every category there are failing schools and good schools. The key question is what makes a good school, not to assume that one category will define one school as good and another as bad.

The community school is exactly what many parents would choose. We will come to later amendments concerning the centrality for my party of a fair choice being made by the parent—and, where it is appropriate in secondary schools, in consultation with the pupils. That should be the acid test of which schools should be allowed to go ahead. We do not seek to weight the choice; we would not remove a particular category of school from the list; in the last analysis, if we believe in parental choice, it must be valid and made genuine. With great respect, Amendments Nos. 77 and 55 would make that impossible.

I said to the Minister—he took some exception to this, and I now better understand why—that I believe that the playing field in the Bill is not exactly level. He conceded that that was true of capital provision, because academies undoubtedly have some preference for capital buildings. Indeed, they have some preference for new and fine buildings. The average cost now is very high, above £20 million, well above what would be the case for a new community school. 

The Minister argued with great force that that did not apply to revenue. I should have explained earlier that when I referred to some—how can I put it?—bias in the playing field, I had in mind specialist schools rather than trust schools, where there is clearly a small but nevertheless relevant revenue element between specialist schools and community schools that are not specialised. But that was not all that I meant. I was not speaking purely about financial considerations; there are several others. The national curriculum will not apply to independent state schools, as I understand it. School pay and conditions will not be determined nationally and applied to the school, the school will have a greater degree of discretion on the matter. I am not clear whether SIPs will apply, but if they do, they will be set by the governing body and not by the local authority or, for that matter, the Secretary of State.

In addition, the community school is uniquely saddled by having to seek the permission of the Secretary of State, with a very small number of exceptions—the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, has spelled out just how small that number will be. None of us want a poorly performing local authority to set up a new school. I hope that none of us would want poorly performing sponsors of an independent state school to set up a new school. We believe that the same provision should apply across the board, not to one section only. Then there is the issue of how far Ofsted inspections will apply rigorously within the independent state trust schools.

I believe that there has been a very powerful public relations lobby against community schools and in favour of trust schools. One rather amusing example, which I find painful although amusing, appeared in the Times Educational Supplement on 6 June about “a lavish dinner” at which the heads of community schools were invited to apply for trust status by no less a figure than Sir Cyril Taylor. I cannot remember many lavish dinners being offered to heads of state schools not within the circle of those invited to move towards trust status.

It goes far beyond that. There has been a consistent barrage of criticism of our comprehensive schools. That brings me to the second part of what I want to say. I will not go on for long; I know that there is time pressure on the Committee, so I will not repeat the speech, but I want to make this point.

The Minister, who is a very fair-minded man, was kind enough to make available to us the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit study entitled, School Reform: a Survey of Recent International Experience. That is very fair of him and it is a very fair and objective report. The report throws very grave doubt on how far comprehensive schools have done less well than their selective alternatives. I went very carefully through that report. I also went through another report, called Education at a Glance, which covers a much wider range. It is published by the OECD and relates to the figures for 2005. It shows what I was trying to argue earlier; there are really good schools and really poor schools in each category—it does not depend on the category. Perhaps I may remark briefly on the matter.

The OECD statistics go beyond the ones with which the Minister kindly provided me by including additional countries that are not covered by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. They show three things very clearly. First, among countries with selective systems, some of which go back a long way, the Netherlands does very well. It is not in the very top group, but it is very close to it, and it has had a selective system for very many years. Incidentally, it has a very diverse selective system, which includes faith schools, schools set up by parents, and many others, but it puts the emphasis on selection—it is a selective system. At the other end of the spectrum of selective systems— rather surprisingly, given what a powerful and rich country it is—is Germany, which comes out very close to the bottom on both literacy and numeracy, and comes out worst in relation to the impact of social group, occupation and income on educational achievements. Germany has been devoted for a very long time to the three-track system of Hochschule, Fachschule and Technische Schule in a way that has not changed for many years, and it is surprising that it has a very poor record, according to OECD indicators.

Let me be equally fair. In the group that is called “strongly parent-related”—that is, where parents are free to make choices—Denmark comes out as a basically comprehensive but very poor system, largely because it gives almost total freedom to parents to choose whatever sort of school they want, from independent to comprehensive, but it does not have the sort of rigorous inspection that we have in this country.

Finally, we come to the comprehensive group. At one end is Norway, a country with little discipline and a great belief that it was doing well. It is wrong; it is not doing very well according to the OECD indicators of mathematical and literacy achievement. At the other end is Finland, a country that does the best in Europe over the whole spectrum and that has nothing but comprehensive schools and only a tiny percentage of about 2 per cent who opt out of the system. It is simply rubbish to pretend that a system determines the standards that children achieve. That is not true. What happens and what matters is whether schools have good heads, a good vision and a good sense of commitment, and, on behalf of many thousands of teachers and many hundreds of head teachers in this country, I resent the attempt to run down the major achievements of our comprehensive schools.

I conclude by saying that, according to the OECD indicators in this thick book, which I shall put in the Library for anyone who is willing to see it, the United Kingdom actually comes out extraordinarily well. The Minister may want to take some credit for that, although the figures date back to 2000 when 85 per cent of our children were in comprehensive schools and before the system began to fragment into academies and all the rest. That 85 per cent of children in the comprehensive system achieved seventh position out of 41 countries tested by the OECD for literacy, and roughly the same for numeracy. Among the very highest placed industrialised large countries, we were exceeded by countries such as Korea, Finland, which I have already mentioned, and one or two others, sometimes but not always including the Netherlands. However, in our ability to include all our children and our capacity to rate highly according to these demanding OECD indicators, called PISA—the programme for international student assessment—the validity of which no one has questioned, the United Kingdom has come out surprisingly well. Instead of taking credit for that, we run down those very parents and teachers who have achieved that. Yes, we should achieve more, but we should not understate what we have done, and, above all, we should not fall into taking part in what is in essence a political football game on the field of education.

21:30:00

I hope that the Government will reject this amendment. I hope that they will go further and assure us that they are completely objective in the way in which they conduct their competitions between schools and that one school is not weighed against another. In our view that implies that—I will come to this on a later amendment—ballots will be conducted in which parents can legitimately take part, and that the Government will respect parental ability to choose and to have a preference. At least publicly, they state over and again that they believe that. If they accept this kind of weighting, that belief will not add up to anything very much in real terms. I oppose the amendment.

Lord Gould of Brookwood
Once again I have the enormous honour of following the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who I have looked up to for so many years. I still do. First, this is not about selection against non-selection. Selection should be finished, gone and buried. Secondly, comprehensive schools have done a remarkable job. But I ask: have they, for every kid in our country, done the best possible job? I went to state schools. My kids go to state schools and they have done well. I did not do very well at school. However, there is no question that there were pupils in my kids’ schools who could have done. The comprehensive system could have done a lot better, and we could move on and produce a better system.

Baroness Williams of Crosby
In the noble Lord’s view, is there any system which has done absolutely all that it can for every child within it?

Lord Gould of Brookwood
The question that we have to ask—I was involved as a young socialist in trying to get rid of the local grammar school—is whether the system that we went through is the best system. Could we have done better? That was my question, which I think it is reasonable to ask. However, in respect of the amendment, it is absolutely wrong to suggest that no more community schools should be built or developed. That cannot be right. I believe that the strength of this Bill is that it is not a political football. Its strength is that it has taken not this route nor that route, but a sensible, balanced and reasonable way through the middle, which tries to balance the extremely important claims and demands that have been made for community, cohesion and fairness with the requirement now to give our kids more diversity and choice.

I, too, have read a lot of the literature on education in the world today. The greatest amount of diversity and choice, surrounded by a context of local authority and governmental intervention, which ensures fairness for disadvantaged children and the protection of their rights, seems to work best. That appears to be the way forward. It is in Sweden, which has not been mentioned. It is clearly wrong just to say, “Let us move to choice and forget about fairness”. It is also wrong to say, “Let us look to fairness and forget about choice”. We need to find a way of liberating the potential of those kids who do not get a fair chance and have not had a fair chance under the comprehensive system of the past 20 years. We must liberate their potential within a framework of fairness and communities which are supportive and enabling. This Bill does that. The nature of the discussion from both sides of the Committee indicates that most of us feel that it does. Therefore, I ask the Committee to reject the amendment, as well as those which are to come.

Baroness Walmsley
This has been an interesting debate and it is not over yet. I want to refer to the start of the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, when introducing her amendment. She talked about how undesirable it was that local authorities should regard the schools in their area as “our schools”. I think that that is very desirable. It means that those schools belong to the community, which is represented by the elected members of the local authority. It is a good thing if a school represents the community.

Baroness Buscombe
Does the noble Baroness therefore relish the idea of exclusion, because that is what I am saying? Declaring that you are either in the family of schools or outside it is to exclude a large body of pupils.

Baroness Walmsley
Certainly not, and my subsequent remarks will make that clear.

The noble Baroness also spoke of the vision of the White Paper. I am afraid that the vision of the White Paper was unaccountable chaos—unaccountable to the local community. Moreover, the changes the Government were forced to concede, bit by bit, to get the Bill through another place will make their original vision much more accountable to the local community. Competition seems to be the panacea for all ills. The noble Baroness talked about maintained independent schools, and the Government refer to trust schools as maintained independent schools. So far as I am concerned, they are independent of the local authority, independent of the community, and independent of parents. Very few parents have any role at all in the governance of those schools. In that respect, they are also independent of children because they can turn them away willy-nilly if they wish. They are dependent on the state only for funding, because in pretty much everything else they can do what they like.

The noble Baroness also said that unless a community school could demonstrate that it would raise standards, it should not be allowed to go ahead. I do not disagree with that, but I would also like to see the same criterion applied to a trust school or an academy. We have tabled an amendment on those lines to which my noble friend will speak shortly. Unless a trust school or an academy can demonstrate that it really would improve standards in the community, it should not be allowed to go ahead.

My noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby quoted a number of pieces of research in her inspiring speech, but one piece she did not mention was the work of the Sutton Trust. Its research considers voluntary-aided and Church schools, and shows quite clearly that their intake is skewed towards the middle classes with results that correlate closely with the income of the parents. We all know that, in this respect, choice is a very good thing for parents. If parents are sufficiently interested in the education of their children that they take great care over the choice of school, they are much more likely to play a positive part in their children’s education—and that will make a big difference to children’s achievement.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, asked whether we are doing the best possible job for our children. In some cases I agree with him that we are not.

Noble Lords
Lord Gould.

Baroness Walmsley
I am sorry—the noble Lord, Lord Gould. The way in which to help all comprehensive schools to be as good as the best is not to take away their links with the local authority, but to support and resource every one of them, while encouraging every local authority to show the leadership required that will enable schools to support each individual child in fulfilling its own educational potential. That is what we need to do to make sure that our schools are as good as those in Finland, to which my noble friend referred. What is the difference between the Finnish system and that in this country when both are basically comprehensive systems? As she pointed out, in Finland there is very little opting out because the vast majority of schools are comprehensive schools. They get their share of the higher achieving children as well as of those who need more help.

In this country we do not have that system: we have independent schools, voluntary-aided schools, grammar schools and secondary modern schools in some areas; that is the choice of the local people and I would not take that choice away from them. But that is the crucial difference. If you are going to compare a comprehensive school in Finland with a comprehensive school in the UK, you have to look at its intake and at the support it is being given. The vast majority of comprehensive schools in Finland have an intake completely spread across the whole ability range.

It is not diversity and choice that matter; it is quality. If I go and buy a car I do not want a choice of a red, blue, green and purple clapped-out Mini; I want a choice of a Rolls-Royce—and that is what we should be making of all our comprehensive schools.

Lord Adonis
I have a slight difficulty in replying. I have this group of amendments, which seek to forbid the establishment of new community schools; I have the next group of amendments, to be moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, which seek to extend the right for community schools to be established; and I have also heard the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, which I think was more in support of her noble friend. I am trying to work out whether to reply to both groups of amendments now or to reserve my reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, because I assume she is going to make another speech on her next group of amendments.

Baroness Walmsley
If the Minister would find it easier, we on these Benches would be perfectly happy if he were to postpone his response. My noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford will move the next group of amendments but, if the Committee would find that more convenient, we would have no objections at all.

Lord Adonis
I am very happy to do that, in which case I can reply to the noble Baroness helpfully—she said that I try to be fair-minded, and I shall be as fair minded as I can—on one or two points and I hope that it will reflect her remarks.

I agree with a good deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said about the way in which education policy is portrayed. I find myself often at the receiving end of this. Any Minister who has to read some of the claptrap reported in the newspapers about standards in state schools, and who constantly has to reply to it, is familiar with the difficulties that we face often with our media.

I have the highest regard for the noble Baroness, who is grappling with the issues that we are all grappling with to improve our schools, but I think there is a fundamental confusion in what she said in regard to what she called comprehensive schools and what she called community schools. With the exception of grammar schools, which these provisions do not affect at all, all the categories of schools that we are discussing today are, in her understanding of the term, comprehensive schools.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that there were free-for-all admissions. There are no free-for-all admissions: all these categories of schools will have to act under this Bill in accordance with the code of practice on admissions. They will all have to observe the pay and conditions document for teachers, observe the national curriculum, undergo Ofsted inspections and have the SIPs we talked about earlier, whether they are trust schools or non-trust schools. I think there was a fundamental misconception at the root of the noble Baroness’s remarks. We are not talking about selective systems against non-selective systems, so the comments about comparisons between the Netherlands and Germany do not apply in that sense. We are talking about a greater diversity of school management and tying it within a basically comprehensive system. Her party’s proposals would limit that.

I am giving a partial reply, so perhaps I can delay commenting on one or two points. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that she did not want to remove any category of schools—that she wanted fairness between them. With great respect, that is not the case. Her Amendment No. 92 would prevent the establishment of trust schools because it would forbid trusts and trust bodies from effectively appointing the majority of the governors, which is one of the elements behind a trust school. A trust school, where it wishes to do so, is enabled to operate in its governance terms like a voluntary-aided school. In an addition to Clause 18, by forbidding any reduction in the statutory proportion of elected parent governors on a school governing body, Amendment No. 92 would in fact make it impossible to establish a trust school within the meaning of the Bill. So it is not the case that the Liberal Democrats favour, as it were, fair competition between them. They are seeking to eliminate a category of school which, as the figures given by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, show, there is good evidence to think has, in some local contexts, a fair chance of providing a higher quality of education than the existing schools in their governance arrangements. I say that as the first stage of my reply; we will wait and see what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has to say.

21:45:00

The noble Baroness talked about misconceptions. I fear that there are a lot of misconceptions about trust schools and what they are seeking to do. As they are met, I believe that we can overcome some of the prejudice that has been so evident in our debates.

The amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, would forbid local authorities to promote new community schools. Our approach to this issue is fairly well rehearsed. We strongly support diversity, greater self-governance and the role that foundation and trust schools can play in bringing those about. However, we also recognise that there may be a case for a new community school in a particular instance; we have listened to concerns in another place and have defined the circumstances in which that might take place.

The illustrative regulations in Clause 8, which I have made available to the Committee, set out criteria for the circumstances in which a local authority may publish proposals for a community school without the need for explicit consents; they also set out when the Secretary of State’s consent would be required and when a local authority would be disqualified from publishing proposals.

The noble Baroness asked which local authorities would not be able to put forward proposals on the basis of the criteria that we have laid down. A local authority with an APA rating of 1, which is poor, would not be able to publish proposals for a community school. That also applies to the 10 local authorities with an APA rating of 2, with fewer than 15 per cent of foundation or voluntary schools or more than 15 per cent of schools in Ofsted category 4—the category of failure. So the Secretary of State would have discretion with regard to a large number. Equally, there would be no need for explicit consent for the 11 local authorities that have an APA rating of 4, which is excellent. There would be no need for consent for 11 authorities; it would not be possible for 10 local authorities to publish proposals; and the Secretary of State would have discretion in the other cases.

This goes to the heart of the noble Baroness’s concerns. I know that she would wish us to go further regarding the requirements to promote diversity. However, the right to publish a proposal for a community school, which is what we are talking about in the clause, is very different from meaning that that new school will be a community school. The right to publish a proposal is the right of the local authority to enter a community school into an assessment and competition that will be made, into which other proposals can also be entered. In the event of a local authority publishing a proposal for a community school, the decision on which proposal should succeed is made by the independent schools adjudicator, who will weigh, on the basis of their educational merits, the quality of all the proposals. Those proposals could include a voluntary-aided school, a foundation school and a trust school, as well as a community school.

Under Amendment No. 70, local authorities could promote a community school only where the Secretary of State was satisfied that that would lead to higher standards. That is a judgment that needs to be made; it will be made by the adjudicator, who will decide on the proposals on the basis of standards.

Amendment No. 72 would require local authorities to set out their reasons for wanting to promote a community school rather than a foundation school. In practice, a local authority will need to do this. It will need to demonstrate to the adjudicator that the community school that it is proposing will offer improved education, better than any existing or realistic alternative. In practice, the local authority will have to establish a case and, of course, the reasons. If the adjudicator is not satisfied that the local authority has made this case, the guidance that the department will issue will make it clear that the proposal should not proceed, even if there is no alternative proposal immediately before the adjudicator.

Amendment No. 76 would prevent the Secretary of State from giving consent for a new community school outside a competition. The noble Baroness asked for my assurance that this would happen only in exceptional circumstances, and I can give that assurance but we believe that there are exceptional circumstances. For example, a junior school and an infant school, perhaps sharing a single site, may want to amalgamate to form an all-through primary. The authority might consider in that case that a competition was not necessary—a strong case could be made for that—and apply for consent to bring forward proposals outside a competition. We do not want to disturb existing successful arrangements. That would be quite inappropriate in a Bill that is seeking to promote higher educational standards. We can conceive that there will be exceptional circumstances where it would be appropriate for the power to be used and for there not to be a requirement for competition for changes that are not brought about by failure or because completely new places are required.

Amendment No. 89 to Schedule 2 would place a duty on the adjudicator, in deciding proposals for a new community school, to consider whether it would be desirable to alter the proposals to make the new school a foundation school. The noble Baroness said that it was a probing amendment. We do not think that it is a practical proposition. If promoters were interested in developing a foundation or trust school to meet the needs of the area, they would at the point at which the adjudicator was making the decision already have had the opportunity to bring forward their own proposals in response to the notice inviting proposals for the new school.

Equally, however, if the community school proposal is not judged by the adjudicator to be satisfactory, the adjudicator can turn it down, as I have described, and other proposals could be entered in a new competition if a decision was taken to proceed with one. We believe that that is the best and most practical procedure, not least because the adjudicator would be in no position to know whether partners might wish to promote a foundation or trust school if he deemed a community school proposal to be unsatisfactory. When he was making that decision, he would have only the one proposal in front of him. I believe that the position that we have reached is satisfactory.

The big point that I would make to the noble Baroness is the need to distinguish between the proposals being promoted for community schools. Where local authorities have a good track record in standards and diversity, we believe that their taking such a course of action is appropriate. I will be quite frank: we have been persuaded of that course by the debate in another place and by the representations made by my right honourable and honourable friends in another place. A strong argument can be made for competition in that respect. If there is to be fairness in competition, local authorities with a good track record should be able on the same basis as other promoters to promote their proposals. However, that is distinct from the process of deciding between alternative proposals, which would in that case be done by the independent schools adjudicator whose only mission under this Bill is the promotion of the highest educational standards.

I end where I began: all the categories of schools that we have been discussing are comprehensive schools. The fact that one is called a community school, a trust school, a foundation school or a voluntary-aided school does not affect that. We are not seeking to change the comprehensive admissions philosophy, which we believe is right for this country, but we want to enable greater diversity in the management, ethos and character of schools within comprehensive bounds, all focused on the enlargement opportunities and the best possible results for pupils.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said that no single international model works. As one who has spent quite a lot of time looking at international models, I agree with that. There is no off-the-shelf model.

Baroness Williams of Crosby
They do not work entirely according to the categories of selection versus comprehensiveness—that is all.

Lord Adonis
None of them works as a model that we can emulate, I agree. But international elements are well worth studying, including the clear trend in developed countries towards greater diversity in the provision of schools. Equally, we are not seeking in this Bill only to look at international evidence; we are looking at successful models in our own country. Any serious analysis of the data would lead one to believe that that approach is right. There should be an option to promote schools that have different management structures from the classic community school. Doing so can in certain circumstances give new energy, drive, focus, mission and ethos, and it will not endanger the comprehensive principle.

Baroness Buscombe
I thank the Minister for his response. I have written lots of notes in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and the noble Lord, Lord Gould, but much of what I wanted to say has been said for me by the Minister.

I did not expect a great response to my Amendment No. 55. However, I think that it was worth flying a kite, not least to make the point that we are here trying to support the Government to achieve what we and clearly the Government believe is right, which is, as the Minister has just said, to increase diversity and the management ethos and to focus on improving standards in our schools for all our children’s future.

With all due respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, I feel that her speech was somewhat predictable. I resent the notion that somehow because I for my part and from these Benches am doing all that I can to help to raise standards in these schools, I and others are somehow running down all that these comprehensive schools have achieved. I went to one myself. All that I will say is that I think that, without streaming, I would have sunk without trace.

There is no question but that much has been achieved, but we need to do more. The results that I quoted earlier from some of the schools that have been allowed to flourish speak for themselves. As the noble Lord, Lord Gould, said, this is not about selection. It is a shame in some ways that the Government have felt the need to move away from the White Paper, but of course I understand that that was necessary to get the Bill through in another place and maybe it is necessary to get the Bill through in this House. I do not want to do anything to prevent the Bill from getting through in this House, because I believe that it is a step in the right direction.

I keep remembering the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, at Second Reading, who said that this is an interim measure. It is actually a step in the right direction. It is not saying that what has been happening hitherto is wrong; it is saying, “Let us be bold and brave and courageous and try to make it better still for our children’s future”. We all want our children to have better than we had; it is a parent’s right to feel that way—and all of us who are parents feel that way. This is not a political football. At Second Reading, I said that if we could only take politics out of education we would all be a lot better off and this country would be better off—but that is probably never going to happen.

The Government are making a step in the right direction. I have listened with care to what the Minister said about a number of the amendments that we have proposed this evening and I accept his reply. I obviously want to read in Hansard with care the detail of his response to some of my questions about competition and proposals for community schools. But for now I am pleased to feel that we are for the most part trying to achieve the same thing. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 7 [Invitation for proposals for establishment of new schools]:

22:00:00

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
moved Amendment No. 56:

Page 6, line 35, leave out “from persons other than local education authorities”

The noble Baroness said: In moving Amendment No. 56, I shall speak to the other amendments in the group. It might be useful if simultaneously I dealt with Clause 8 stand part, which is logically linked to this series of amendments. I pick up where the last debate left off, because this series of amendments would do precisely the opposite to the series proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. From our point of view, rather than prohibiting the establishment of new community schools, these amendments would establish what we regard as a level playing field between community schools and others and leave it open to a local education authority to propose a new community school where that seems sensible and a feasible way forward.

In proposing these amendments, I think that all of us are very concerned about providing the best education possible for the children of this country. In our debate last week the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, mentioned a fact that I find an indictment of our current education system: 20 per cent of children leave primary school unable properly to read or write. We all know that, once they have left primary school without functional literacy or numeracy, their chances of surviving in secondary school are very small. They are the ones who also have difficulties in the secondary school environment. We also know that that group of children disproportionately comes from disadvantaged homes, and many of them have special educational needs of one sort or another.

One feature of the Finnish system that has not been mentioned is that they assess children, as we do, when they enter school, though not through formal tests—in fact, they have very few formal tests until they are 18. Where they find that children have special educational needs, they concentrate resources to try and counter those children’s disadvantages and make sure that by the age of 10 or 11 they are as close to their contemporaries’ level as they can be. They know that if they do not succeed at that point, it will be very difficult for those children to make their way further on. It is a question of pouring in extra resources.

I congratulate the Government on their Sure Start initiatives, which are moving in the right direction. However, the Minister knows that I do not think we have put the necessary resources into the primary sector, particularly the early stages. The failure of the Government to follow through on the Steer report and get parent and pupil support workers into primary schools is a great mistake. A concentration of support at that stage is sorely needed, for pupils and for parents, and would replicate what is there in the Finnish system. It could help to remove this incredible black mark on our system.

I shall talk about my amendments. In response to criticisms in the other place, as we know, the Government conceded the case for community schools to be established in certain circumstances. We shall be looking at those circumstances in more detail a little later on. We have two opportunities to deal with this, Amendment No. 68 and the Question whether Clause 8 should stand part. For the record, however, from the point of view of these Benches the conditions written into Clause 8 are so circumscribed that they remove all discretion from local authorities.

We do not oppose the idea of competition for new schools, and we are happy to see local education authorities required to compete with other proposals, including those from parent groups. We are unhappy, however, at the degree to which the balance under the proposals put forward by the Government is tipped against community schools and in favour of other providers, and the degree to which the trust school proposals move away from local accountability.

Many of these amendments deal with Clause 7, which is about proposals to establish new schools, and the subsequent clauses, dealing with how those proposals under Clause 7 are to be published, considered and carried forward. It might be helpful if I quickly run through these amendments. Amendment No. 56 takes out from Clause 7(1) the prohibition on LEAs making proposals for new schools. Amendments Nos. 57 and 62 add community schools to the list of schools falling into subsections (2)(a) and (5)(b)(i).

Amendment No. 57A asks that the knock-on effects of expanded sixth-form provision on other schools and colleges in the area be considered. We shall look at that issue when we discuss alterations to schools.

Amendment No. 64 would take out Clause 7(5)(b)(ii), which refers to Clause 8. Amendment No. 68 would add a new clause, to which I shall speak in a moment. Amendments Nos. 74 and 78 would make it clear that the local education authority may proceed to publish its proposals in its own right without having to seek permission from the Secretary of State. Amendment No. 91 applies to alterations to schools under Clause 18 and makes it clear that, should a foundation school wish to reverse the process and become a community school, it can do so, whereas under the Bill it is prohibited from doing so.

In some respects these clauses about new schools may seem rather irrelevant because over the next five years we face a drop of half a million in the number of secondary school pupils in this country. The issue is likely to be—as it has been with primary schools over the past few years—one of closing schools, not opening new ones. But this, and the final amendment in the group to Clause 18 on alterations to schools, raises the whole question of the link between this Bill and the programme of building schools for the future. How far do the Government intend to use that programme of rebuilding to force schools down the foundation trust route? Will an LEA seeking to replace an existing community school with a new building be told that unless it is prepared to make the school into a foundation school, it will get no new building?

Lord Adonis
No.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I am glad to hear that the answer is no.

I wish to elaborate on Amendment No. 68. The proposed new clause defines the grounds on which the Secretary of State can withhold consent to a proposal from a local education authority to establish a community school—it would replace Clause 8—namely, the Secretary of State has to believe that a community school would not improve the education of pupils in the area.

The White Paper had proposed that all new schools would in future be academies, foundation schools or trust schools, and that there would be no new community schools. As we know, this has proved to be highly controversial. The case for local authorities retaining their powers to propose new community schools was well made by the authors of the alternative White Paper, the members of the Select Committee and many others. In response, the Government have accepted that there may be occasions where a community school may be the best option to meet local needs. Therefore, the Bill now proposes that local authorities will be able to propose a community school, provided that the Secretary of State gives consent. Proposals will be decided by the adjudicator, as the Minister made clear.

In Committee in another place, the Minister said:

“The regulations will allow local authorities with an annual performance assessment of 4—the highest score—to enter a community school into a competition automatically, without the need for the Secretary of State’s consent. We should trust those high-performing local authorities to decide what type of school would best serve the needs of their communities. Currently, there are 11 local authorities with an APA of 4 … three groups of local authorities will not be permitted to propose a community school: local authorities with an APA of 1, which are those with the poorest performance in children’s services; local authorities with an APA of 2 and in which less than 15 per cent of schools are foundation or voluntary schools; and local authorities with an APA of 2 and more than 15 per cent of schools in Ofsted category 4—in other words, badly-performing authorities that either have a large proportion of schools that are failing or have low levels of diversity”.—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee E, 20/4/06; col. 317.]
 

“Diversity” here means 15 per cent of foundation and voluntary schools. The remaining 130 local authorities—there are 11 in category 4—will be able to enter the competition with the Secretary of State’s consent. That means that only 11 local authorities are currently able to enter a competition for community schools without the Secretary of State’s veto. This is demeaning, limiting and limited. The new clause that we are proposing provides that the Secretary of State should only withhold his consent to the publication of proposals if he is satisfied that the proposals would not lead to an improvement in the education of the pupils concerned.

It is for those reasons that we question whether Clause 8 should stand part, and we wish to substitute for it our Amendment No. 68. I beg to move.

The Earl of Listowel
I rise briefly to follow up on the discussion by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, of different models of education provision. The Minister will recall from our debates on childcare provision my particular concern that the emphasis on moving swiftly to what is now a majority private provision has not necessarily benefited children in terms of staff stability, training and support. I say this as a challenge to the model that the Minister is following. It was not surprising, when he responded to the noble Baroness, that he said that the Finnish model was very interesting but that we should also look at the best models in this country. When we look around the world, we see that increasingly education systems are becoming more diverse in the models of provision that they provide.

The Finnish model is particularly interesting because it is a comprehensive model. Its real emphasis and investment has been first on teachers, in terms of very long and developed teacher training. Another interesting and distinctive aspect is that children do not start their education until the age of seven, and therefore the opportunity for relating with their families is much more important there. Pre-school does not start until the age of six. In the first years of schooling they have shorter school days, so again they have more opportunity to be with their families.

I am putting this forward to challenge what seems to be the prevailing presumption that our model of provision of education is the one that we should be pursuing. It may be the right one; but from my experience of being involved in caring for vulnerable children, what is most striking is the appalling consequences of not having properly trained staff working with children. The most important thing, which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, made clear on Second Reading, is the need to keep a single-minded focus on supporting and developing those professionals working directly with children and young people, and not to be distracted from that.

I feel moved to say that because to my mind we overlook that in this country. We are a culture that puts particular emphasis on generalism, on being flexible and on taking on different roles. That is an important model for us. The idea of specialism, of a deeply well educated and focused professionalism, is also very important. For children and particularly for vulnerable children, we need to think much more deeply. I say that in the light of a letter that I received recently from the Minister, saying that children in children’s homes are cared for by staff only 23 per cent of whom have any relevant qualification. Get the education and training of our teachers and support right—I know that it has been improving significantly—and you will be going an awfully long way to delivering improved education for our children.

22:15:00

Baroness Williams of Crosby
I very much agree with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. It is certainly the case that one of the distinguishing features of the Finnish system is that it requires all its teachers to have a postgraduate degree. That seems to be a crucial factor in the quality of the education in that country. I pay tribute to the Government for some of the steps that they have taken in that direction, not least in the training of head teachers and senior management staff, but, as a country, we must press much further with in-service training of teachers to ensure that they keep up with the many demands made on them.

I rise to say a few words about Amendment No. 57A regarding sixth forms. It is a probing amendment. My noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford pointed out that we are confronting a decade of dramatic decline in school rolls. We all know that one of the things that makes a sixth form viable is an adequate number of pupils to maintain a range of choices for young people who are going on to take A-levels, NVQs or whatever the higher qualification may be. If the size of a sixth form falls below a certain point, it simply becomes uneconomic to offer a range of alternative courses, and the sixth form then constricts rather than broadens a youngster’s education.

I make no bones about my worry that if a range of trust schools, in particular, academies, are created in a local authority area—most of them will expect and want to have a sixth form because it is part of the traditional prestige of a secondary school which many people involved very much prize, although the Minister may say that that is not true—that may bite into existing sixth-form provision, which will make it difficult for those secondary school sixth forms to be viable.

I have in mind the more disadvantaged local authorities that have set up sixth-form colleges or, in some cases, tertiary colleges to try to meet the needs of their brightest, most ambitious and aspiring youngsters who want to go on to try to get A-levels and other advanced qualifications. I am frightened that in certain circumstances those sixth-form colleges could be undermined. The Minister will know well that they have a good record in secondary education of achieving outstanding results in parts of the country such as Devon, where it is difficult to sustain a sixth-form among a lot of small towns and villages. There have been notable results in those sixth-form colleges.

I shall not press the Minister now—he may wish to answer the point on a later group of amendments—but the issue has been neglected in our discussions thus far. It is extremely important that every last boy and girl who wants it can get sixth-form or tertiary college provision and I am troubled by the difficulty already experienced by some authorities, where the sixth forms are only just viable, as to what might happen if new ones open.

Lord Young of Norwood Green
I wish to respond to a couple of points. It is almost as if some kind of Scandinavian Utopia exists. We should be comparing like with like. Would that the UK was identical to Finland. I do not know whether I really do want it to be identical to Finland but if it was, we would have to accept a slightly smaller population—about 5.2 million—and a country that was ethnically homogenous. That is hardly the case in the UK, where income inequality is one of the lowest in the OECD. I do not agree that Finland is a country that we could aspire to and match, due to the factors that I have just mentioned,.

I agree that the international report mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, is interesting. I have not looked at the OECD report, but I will do so. The international report states that following the reforms of 1998,

“Finns are now free to choose which school their children are educated in”

and that many parents in urban areas now exercise choice. That is a really interesting scenario. The report also states:

“Choice is now exercised by many parents in heavily urbanised areas of Finland—for example in Helsinki in 2002, approximately 50 per cent of children entering secondary schools at ages 12 and 13 requested a school other than the one they were allocated to”.
 

Not all the people who value choice are in the highest socio-economic groups. That is interesting. Even in Sweden, another much vaunted and justifiable example, there is no firm evidence of the impact of reforms, but a decade after the reforms, Sweden has one of the least ability-segregated school systems in the OECD. In areas where children have been encouraged by their local authority to choose and have been given support and information to help them to choose, the least well off appear to take advantage of the choices. So often we hear it said that parents do not want choice, but I believe that is invalid.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
We on these Benches are not arguing against choice. We are arguing that in that choice there should be a level playing field to establish new community schools alongside voluntary-aided schools, trust schools and so on.

Lord Young of Norwood Green
Perception is everything. When I listen to the noble Baroness, I cannot help feeling that she worries about choice. I agree we should not denigrate community schools or comprehensive schools. Many of them have achieved startling successes, but neither should we go in the opposite direction and suggest that somehow trust or foundation schools will be totally untrammelled and free of any accountability. I have heard it alleged tonight that they will not be subject to the national curriculum—that is not true. They will be subject to Ofsted inspections.

We are trying to find a balanced approach. Are choice and diversity wanted by parents? I believe that they are, not just in the UK system, but also elsewhere in the world. Has that choice the capacity to benefit children? Again, I believe it has. It is not the only answer, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, rightly says. We are in a dynamic situation, not a static one, as I believe the Government have recognised. We are being invited to go from one end of the spectrum to the other. On the one hand, we are being invited to suggest that no community schools are allowed to take part in a competition and, on the other hand, it is suggested that practically all of them are. Where should we be? Between a rock and a hard place, between the Buscombe and the Walmsley positions, if I can caricature it in that way. I believe that the Government have got it right when they say that a proportion of the higher or better performing schools should be able to propose a community school for competition. It is a balance and a compromise.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
It seems to me that it is pejorative for the noble Lord to speak of the higher performing schools, as though by definition community schools are low performing schools and voluntary-aided schools are not. I know there is some evidence—the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, cited some evidence—to indicate that there is higher performance in voluntary-aided schools, but when one looks at the Sutton Trust research one sees that that is very closely linked to income.

Lord Young of Norwood Green
Perish the thought that I should be pejorative. I should have said “local authorities” rather than schools. I am not attempting to be pejorative at all. The Government had to make an assessment. We know that some local authorities are failing authorities. We have to be honest. We know there are significant numbers of children who are failed in our current system. That does not mean that I believe, or anyone else believes, that the vast majority fit that description. We are trying to find a way forward which we believe will raise standards in all schools. I think that the Government have got it right with their compromise. The Liberal Democrats believe that they have not, that this goes too far and that there is too much diversity and choice. There is a judgment to be made. I hope that the amendment will be withdrawn.

Baroness Buscombe
I hope that noble Lord, Lord Young, will come further in the Buscombe direction than the Walmsley direction, given that Buscombe has been quoting from the Labour manifestos for 1992 and 1997, the 2005 White Paper and ad infinitum. I feel that I am almost seeking to do the noble Lord’s job for him.

This may sound very controversial, but it has been nagging at me that there is a feeling that if one is going for anything other than a community school, one is somehow leaving the community and that the local authority body that sets schools up and manages them is somehow intrinsically linked with a local authority and therefore with the community. As a punter, I never felt any connection with my local authority until I became a representative of it. I hope I am making myself clear here. Most people who live in towns, villages or cities feel a real sense of connection not with their local authority but with the place that they live in and the community as a whole. To somehow feel that if one moves away from management by the local government structure one is leaving the community is fictitious and completely wrong.

Lord Adonis
I have spent my political life in what Roy Jenkins called the radical centre, and never have I felt more in the radical part of it and the central part of it than in the debates we have been having on the education Bill. It is my great regret that I should be parting company with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who was in the radical centre, but on this issue has moved to the less radical zone. I think she would still see it as the centre, but is less prepared to contemplate change.

My noble friend Lord Young made an excellent speech and the case for change is compelling. If we take a hard-headed, realistic approach to our educational performance in the past 20 years, three things stand out. First, there has been remarkable progress in that time. When the GCSE was introduced in 1988, only one-quarter of 16 year-olds were getting five good GCSE passes. It is now 55 per cent. That is the scale of the progress we have made as a society over that period, and it is very welcome. But 55 per cent is 55 per cent and becomes 45 per cent if English and maths are included. They are the core skills that teenagers require if they are going to be likely to succeed in employment thereafter and to avoid the scenarios that we were discussing earlier in our debate. But while we have made great progress, we cannot be complacent.

In looking at the international evidence to which the noble Baroness referred, three things become clear: our average performance as a country has risen substantially in the past 15 years, and that is to be applauded; our top 25 per cent are as good as the top 25 per cent in terms of performance anywhere in the world and we have a fantastic top end in the state and private systems; and the gap between our highest and lowest performers as large groups—not just the extremes—is much higher than in the rest of the OECD and is still at proportions that cause concern. That is why these reforms and the preparedness to consider them are important. We have higher average achievement and very high top-end achievement, but we still have a very long tail of low achievement which is unacceptable, as are the disparities in performance. We have higher performance, but there is still much to do.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, put his finger on the third key priority, and I come back to it time and again, as we are spending so much time discussing structures and legal reforms in the Bill: we will achieve nothing without steady investment in our teachers, our head teachers and our support staff. As I said on Second Reading, the Government are making huge additional investments in those areas—in qualifications, salary levels and staff numbers. That investment is going into schools and resulting in more and better teachers irrespective of category of school.

In response to the noble Baroness, I re-emphasise that we are talking about trust schools, community schools, voluntary-aided schools and foundation schools where the investment in people and facilities is equal and the pay and conditions apply equally across the different categories of schools, as does the curriculum and inspection.

22:30:00

Putting all that together, I say to noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches that we come back to their Amendment No. 92. They accuse us of not having a level playing field. However, I believe that the proposals we have set out provide a good range of opportunities and rule out local authorities from promoting community schools only where their own performance is of a level where I think any reasonable-minded person would think that they are not suitable to promote schools.

One category of new school that we are talking about is the trust school, which is basically the application of the tried, tested and largely successful voluntary-aided model outside the faith sector. The Liberal Democrats’ Amendment No. 92 would forbid that model being established in the state system. So there is not a level playing field as far as our colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches are concerned.

Liberal Democrat Members also make the confusion—which I think the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, put her finger on—that a community school, in its engagement with the community, is to be judged only by the degree to which a local authority controls the school, the number of governors it appoints to the school and the degree to which governors on the governing body are elected by parents. Although we think it important that parent governors play a role in the school, use of the criterion alone is a fundamental misconception of what necessarily makes a good school or a school that is absolutely committed to community cohesion and engagement in the community.

I do not want to rehearse everything I said in response to the previous group of amendments. Perhaps I can briefly address the issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, of sixth-form provision. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, was absolutely right to say that the demographics mean that there will be a smaller secondary population over the next 10 years. However—and this is a key point in understanding trends in post-16 provision—on the basis of a rising performance in schools, particularly in schools where it is rising faster than the trend, it is an absolutely realistic expectation that the number of post-16 students will continue to increase and will probably do so substantially.

Because we have historically had such a poor record in participation beyond the age of 16, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that that will increase over the next 10 years. Indeed I think that we would be defeatist if we did not work on the assumption that we will have a declining secondary population overall, but with a rising population of pupils staying on at school and in college beyond the age of 16. It is the lowest-performing schools that have the lowest rates of post-16 participation, and they tend to be schools without sixth forms—or, to think of it in more modern terms, post-16 provision. Post-16 provision will increasingly be collaborative; it will not be the free-standing sixth form trying to offer the whole range of qualifications and courses but a post-16 provision which may well be shared with other schools or the local college.

I believe that it is absolutely right that we should be seeking to promote more post-16 provision in schools, much of it on a collaborative basis, provided that it is linked to realistic assumptions about increases in the post-16s staying-on rate on the basis of school improvement and the rising proportions gaining qualifications. That is a realistic scenario to which we should be working.

The noble Baroness referred to the excellent sixth-form colleges—and I pay tribute to them. The sixth-form and tertiary college sector has been one of the most successful parts of our education system over the past 20 years. The sixth-form college sector is bursting at the seams it has been so successful. Colleges that were built for 1,000 to 1,500 students are in some cases now catering for well over 2,000 students. One outstanding sixth-form college I visited recently in Winchester has substantially more students even than that. The idea that colleges of that kind, which are now supremely successful, cannot co-exist and, indeed, add significant value to the work of schools in developing collaborative provision is wrong. We need to have a sensible scenario that puts a value on collaboration.

Baroness Williams of Crosby
I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way for a moment. I fully agree with everything that he has said, but I am concerned that there are still some parts of the country where the staying-on rate is well below the national average. I agree that it may well improve but if there are 500,000 pupils coming out of the secondary system, while coincidentally in some parts of the country there has been a low staying-on rate that is only slowly beginning to improve, there is a danger that the first-rate sixth-form or tertiary college may find it difficult to continue expanding in the way that he was talking about.

Lord Adonis
Obviously I accept that we need to behave sensibly in this area. The Government seek to behave sensibly in all these areas. There will be a role both for thriving tertiary and sixth-form colleges but also for steadily more post-16 provision in schools.

On what the noble Baroness said about the history, let us be clear what happened. It was the grammar schools and the more successful schools in the system as it was in the 1960s and 1970s that had sixth forms. By and large, it was the secondary modern system that was 11 to 16. To my mind, it is not the model for the future to have schools that stop at 16. All our emphasis in the education system must be to promote staying on beyond the age of 16.

Few Members of this House would, without serious thought about what will happen beyond the age of 16, want their child to attend a school that stops at the age of 16—that does not have a sixth form or teachers who are capable of teaching post-16. On the principle that I always observe in education policy that what I want for my children I should want for people at large, my presumption is that we want steadily more schools to have a stake in post-16 provision, taking real ownership for the destination of their students beyond 16 and having real intent to push them into participation beyond that age—which probably means having some element of provision.

On Amendment No. 57A, FE institutions are already consulted when it is proposed that schools add sixth forms. The effect of proposals on existing provision is taken into account. At the moment, proposals must be published and consulted on. That will not change under the Bill.

I think that I have covered most of the points raised through the amendments. In conclusion, as my noble friend Lord Young said, we have struck a sensible balance here between allowing local authorities that have a good track record and can show that they support the principle of diversity to be able, in appropriate circumstances, to promote community schools while ensuring that there are strong incentives for diversity, especially in areas where local authorities are lower performers. That is the basis of the amendments that we tabled in another place, Clause 7 and the guidance that backs it up. If the Liberal Democrats cared to withdraw Amendment No. 92, so that we can have trust schools, we might find ourselves almost approaching a point of consensus.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I take issue with the Minister about Amendment No. 92, which, as far as we are concerned, merely requires that there should be a larger proportion of elected parent-governors on trust school bodies. We find it very odd that the trust school model diminishes the role of elected parent-governors. I cannot see that that would prevent a foundation being set up. But we will come to that in due course; we are certainly not going to withdraw that amendment now. However, as for Amendment No. 56, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Amendments Nos. 57 and 57A not moved.]

Baroness Crawley
I beg to move that the House do now resume.

Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.

House resumed.

House adjourned at twenty minutes before eleven o'clock.