Lords Sitting of 13 November 1996

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Lichfield.
Lord Daresbury—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

Springvale University Campus Proposal
Lord Holme of Cheltenham Lord Holme of Cheltenham asked Her Majesty's Government:
Why they are withholding support from the Springvale Campus Project in Belfast (the so-called "Peaceline Campus").
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Baroness Denton of Wakefield): My Lords, the University of Ulster's Springvale university campus proposal is a major proposal involving significant resources. The Government had reached no decision when the University of Ulster decided on 4th October to put the project in its current form on hold.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that somewhat disappointing Answer. Does she agree that with a visionary and key project such as this what she has said is not just in marked contrast to the enthusiasm expressed originally by the Secretary of State but is almost tantamount to rejection? Further, does she agree that it imperils £30 million of non-governmental support which the University of Ulster has identified; frustrates the potential of going to the Millennium Fund for additional money; and, what is most important, withdraws a point of hope and initiative from people in an area when they sorely need both those things?
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, I refer the noble Lord to my first Answer which says that there is no proposal on the table. It is difficult to make mythical decisions. Much work is being done to bring hope to north and west Belfast. I was pleased to announce this morning that the biggest drop in unemployment in parliamentary constituencies has been in those two areas, which proves that our targeting of social need is working. I know that the University of Ulster and the Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education are together looking at smaller projects which could be regarded as modular moves which would not take away hope. There may be an unsubstantiated promise of £30 million, but that does not tell us where to find the further £60 million or £70 million which is needed.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, if the Government are absolutely determined, as it seems that
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they are, to withhold support from the Springvale Campus Project since they have dithered for so many months about what they are going to do, will the Minister kindly explain in what ways they plan to increase funding for higher education in Northern Ireland where it is desperately needed?
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, waiting for the university to do a feasibility study and then ourselves doing an economic study of its impact is not my definition of dithering. Northern Ireland has the significant achievement of 41 per cent. of its youngsters going to university. I do not believe that we can be criticised over higher education.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, would not a positive decision on this matter be the greatest possible confidence-building measure that the Government could deliver in Northern Ireland? Is the Minister aware that this proposal has the support of both local constituency MPs, coming, as they do, from opposing political traditions?
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, many activities in Northern Ireland have the support of all parties. That message may not get out as often as it should. Not everyone is in conflict with everyone else. The project could not happen without other parts of education being affected. Such considerations have to be taken seriously. We wait to see what is brought forward by the University of Ulster in a different format. But there is great hope in these areas and there is great spend in the economic area, including the bringing of jobs, which seems to me is the best inspiration of hope.
Lord Glentoran: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that this project is not just another campus project but is more of a regeneration project in what is perhaps one of the most divided and difficult communities of our Kingdom? Furthermore, does she agree that, were it successful, the gains in forwarding the peace process could be remarkable?
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, I assure my noble friend that we encourage the development of innovative proposals, which is important for this area. However, I strike a note of caution as regards his depressing depiction of the scene. A great deal of work is being undertaken and much support is being given to attract new investment to the area. For instance, £15 million-worth of support was given for F.G. Wilson to come into the area, and we are acquiring a new business park. We are beginning to see change and we are encouraging people there to take charge of their lives.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, it would not be proper to pretend that the change should happen at the expense of some of the other admirable projects mentioned by the noble Baroness. However, she referred to the gap in funding between the £13 million identified by the University of Ulster and the £100 million cost of the project. May I urge the Minister to look at the

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example of the Scottish Office—I hope that she will agree that she should do so—in relation to the Highlands and Islands University, where its positive and active support is part of the case being made for the Millennium Fund?
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, we examine everything that is happening in order to learn from it. However, I stress that our first responsibility is to examine the needs of Northern Ireland. Perhaps I may draw attention to the fact that the Scottish Office does not have to find £20 million in compensation for damage done during the summer.

Rabies and Quarantine Regulations
2.45 p.m.
Lord Carter asked Lord Carter asked Her Majesty's Government:
When they expect to complete the risk assessment of rabies and quarantine announced by the Chief Veterinary Officer of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to the Royal Society of Medicine on 3rd May 1995.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, no such risk assessment was announced. The Chief Veterinary Officer indicated in May 1995 that if the arrangements for protecting the UK from rabies were to change an assessment of the risks would be carried out at the appropriate time. The Government are now looking again at these matters. If any changes were to be made these would have to take as their starting point the paramount need to protect the health of people and animals in this country.
Lord Carter: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer. Perhaps I may remind him that at the symposium on Rabies in a Changing World, held at the Royal Society of Medicine on 3rd May 1995, the Chief Veterinary Officer said:
"We will carry out our own risk assessment",
and later,
"The Ministry of Agriculture is taking a positive line. We are listening and will carry out our own risk assessment analysis".
Therefore, why has there been a change of stance since May 1995? Does the Minister agree that any sensible review of the existing policy on rabies and quarantine must be based on a proper and thorough risk assessment?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, I believe that there is a slight misunderstanding of what the Chief Veterinary Officer said. Yes, there will be a risk assessment if and when there are proposals for change.
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley: My Lords, I hope that no risk will be taken. I have seen a man die from rabies; I have had to shoot my own dogs; and, with 200 others, I have had to undergo 12 daily injections in
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the stomach. As the disease is so close now in Belgium, will the Minister assure the House that every precaution will still be taken?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, yes, indeed.
Lord Wyatt of Weeford: My Lords, will the Minister assure us that no attention will be paid to the views of the present Governor of Hong Kong, who wishes to bring his dogs back to this country without quarantine when he leaves there in 1997?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, whatever other change we might make, we would have to take into account the proximity of Hong Kong and China; China being a country where we believe that dog rabies may well be endemic.
Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior: My Lords, is the Minister aware that two risk assessments have been carried out; the first by the Commission of European Communities in 1991 and the second in New Zealand in 1994, which is most revealing? Will he place both those documents in the Library for further consultation?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, if we have documents which are capable of being released and are public documents I shall certainly place them in the Library.
I am aware of those documents and of the fact that risk assessments have been carried out. However, the New Zealand assessment was of a theoretical vaccination procedure, which we agree can produce protection equivalent to quarantine. We are not interested in a theoretical procedure but in a practical procedure which would guarantee the same level of protection.
Lord St.John of Bletso: My Lords, does the Minister agree that a review of quarantine laws would be somewhat difficult for the Government ahead of the general election next year? Does he further agree that if the system of pet passports were to be introduced, and if as the British Veterinary Association has recommended, a system of electronic tagging were to be introduced, there would then be no justification for the quarantine laws not to be reviewed or to be totally scrapped?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, as I said, we are certainly reviewing the current regulations and we are doing so very much in the light of the technical advances to which the noble Lord referred. But the question is how it would or could be implemented in practice. There is also the matter of how we may achieve European Union agreement to any proposals which we may make which concern us and which are likely to take some time, even with the best will in the world.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that six months is a very long time in the life of a dog, equivalent to three-and-a-half years of our lives?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, indeed, I am well aware of the inconvenience and unhappiness caused to many

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people by the current quarantine regulations. But that must be set against the inconvenience and unhappiness which would be caused if we had rabies in this country.
Lord Hayhoe: My Lords, in view of the rather curious reference to the Governor of Hong Kong, is my noble friend aware that the Governor has made it absolutely clear that he will abide by the regulations in force when he returns to this country? It is monstrous to make any suggestion to the contrary in this House. Will my noble friend tell us how many animals in quarantine have been identified in the past 12 months or two years as actually having rabies?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, I am quite well aware that my right honourable friend will follow the customs of this country and will obey the law. I can also tell my noble friend that there have been no cases of rabies in quarantine in recent years.
Lord Carter: My Lords, it is rather curious that the Minister's answer to my first supplementary question put a gloss on the statement of the Chief Veterinary Officer which is not supported if one reads the whole discussion. Can I ask the Government to make it clear that they will not decide to review the policy and then have the risk assessment because that would be the wrong way round?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, a risk assessment must compare the current system with a new system. We must reach the point of having a proposed new system before we can have the risk assessment.
The Countess of Mar: My Lords, is it not the case that dogs, cats and foxes are not the only carriers of rabies? I read of a goat giving rabies to a child which it had nibbled. Also, there was the recent case of the bats which had rabies. Can the Minister explain why quarantine regulations apply to dogs and cats but not to any other animals?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, my understanding is that the quarantine regulations apply principally to pets and if the noble Countess had a pet goat, the regulations might apply to it.
Lord Strabolgi: My Lords, is the noble Lord satisfied with the conditions in the quarantine kennels because from what one reads in the press, many of them seem to be below standard?
Lord Lucas: My Lords, I believe that the conditions in the quarantine kennels have been considerably exaggerated for the worse. There is a code of practice which we are very much encouraging and helping to supervise but as I am sure the noble Lord is aware, the legislation is deficient in that we are unable, under the law, to impose welfare requirements on quarantine kennels.
The Earl of Liverpool: My Lords, when conducting a review, will my noble friend bear in mind the amount
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of smuggling which it is generally agreed is taking place? Sweden had approximately 300 or 400 animals coming into that country per year before it adopted the inoculation, tagging and blood-testing provisions. In the first year in which those provisions were in operation the figure rose to 6,000-plus animals coming in. That must indicate that there is a very high level of smuggling taking place.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, I believe that smuggling will take place under any system because any system is likely to impose considerable cost and inconvenience on people who are bringing pets in and out of this country. That means that there will always be a temptation for people to smuggle.

UK Visitors: Figures
2.53 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Croy Lord Campbell of Croy asked Her Majesty's Government:
What is their estimate of the number of overseas visitors to the United Kingdom, for holidays, sport and conferences, in 1995; and what is their forecast of the equivalent number in 1996.
The Earl of Courtown: My Lords, the International Passenger Survey suggests that, out of the record 24 million overseas visitors to the United Kingdom in 1995, 10.5 million came primarily for holidays and nearly 600,000 came to attend conferences. The survey does not record the number of people coming to the UK for sport.
The British Tourist Authority estimates that, in 1996, the UK will receive 25.8 million visitors. We do not expect that the proportion of people visiting for holiday purposes or for conferences to be radically different from 1995.
Lord Campbell of Croy: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his encouraging reply. Does he agree that there is no reason why the numbers should not continue to increase, as will the value to the national economy? Since our history and heritage are prominent attractions, is it possible to entice visitors at all times of the year, thus reducing the seasonal aspect of employment in our tourism industry, and to spread them to different parts of the country, thus avoiding the mass overcrowding and traffic jams which have detracted from cultural centres in other parts of Europe?
The Earl of Courtown: My Lords, my noble friend is quite right. The British Tourist Authority predicts that the number of visitors will increase in 1996 and that it will be another record year. That will continue the encouraging trend of recent years and suggests that we are maintaining our market share. My noble friend referred to historic attractions and all-the-year-round appeal. Great historic buildings and other indoor heritage attractions make an important contribution to attracting tourists all the year round.

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My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has asked the chairmen of the tourist boards to review the use that we make of our heritage attractions with all the relevant bodies.
Lord McNally: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the Financial Times estimates that the Treasury receipt from Euro '96 was some £64 million? Does that not make it extremely short-sighted that the policing of that competition was left entirely in cost terms to the local authorities concerned? If we are to attract major sporting and cultural events which bring hundreds of millions of pounds into the country and tens of millions of pounds to the Treasury, we must have a better way to police it than leaving it to the local authority where the event is to take place.
The Earl of Courtown: My Lords, I do not agree with the noble Lord. I believe that Euro '96 was a great success because it attracted 250,000 extra visitors to this country and generated revenue of an extra £100 million. One must look to the future, and the world cup is the next logical step, building on the success of Euro '96.
Lord Clark of Kempston: My Lords, does my noble friend not agree that the fact that the UK tourist industry last year attracted 24 million people, and the fact that they spent some £12 billion, is a great boost to our invisibles? Does my noble friend not agree that the attraction of the UK is not confined to tourism? Because of its competitive position, the UK is very attractive to inward investment. Would it not therefore be a folly to sign up to the social chapter and a minimum wage?
The Earl of Courtown: My Lords, I heard somebody say "planted question" but nothing could be further from the truth, although this is my number one answer. My noble friend is quite correct. That is an area of great concern to us all. As we are aware from the Statement made by my right honourable friend the President of the Board of Trade, which was repeated by my noble and learned friend Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, action is being taken on that matter.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, does the Minister agree that wear and tear and damage to historic buildings and monuments is a consequence of the number of visitors who go to see them? Is he satisfied that English Heritage takes that into account in its budget for future years in view of the expected increase in the number of tourists? Does the grant paid by the Government to English Heritage allow for that increase in expenditure?
The Earl of Courtown: My Lords, I cannot answer that question in relation to the funding of English Heritage. However, it is quite interesting to note that the Environment Select Committee of another place
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in July 1995 concluded that compared with other activities, tourism does not cause significant damage to the countryside.
Viscount Ullswater: My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree that at least 20,000 new jobs were created in tourism in the year to March 1996? Does he further agree that the industry has the potential for creating over 250,000 new jobs in tourism in the next 10 years? Bearing that in mind, does my noble friend agree that any change in that level of investment in future jobs—and I am thinking of the proposed minimum wage and the introduction of the 48 hour-week directive, which are so favoured by the Opposition—would have a really serious impact on the number of jobs and on the level of service for the future in this fiercely competitive global market?
The Earl of Courtown: My Lords, my noble friend is quite correct. It is clear that the directive would have serious implications if applied to the tourism, leisure and hospitality industries. The British Hospitality Association has said that it could affect 15 per cent. of the workforce of the hospitality industry and cost up to £100 million per year.
Lord Donoughue: My Lords, as noble Lords opposite have so inappropriately introduced politics into the matter, can the Minister confirm that the balance of trade on tourism under this Government, which was always in surplus under the Labour Government, has in fact, for the first time in history, turned into deficit? Does the noble Earl further agree that the key to the future success of our tourist industry is nothing to do with the marginal matters mentioned but lies in two areas: first, we must improve the quality of our product, mainly through investment in training; and, secondly, we must invest in marketing? Can the Minister say why the Government have no visible, coherent strategy to achieve that aim?
The Earl of Courtown: My Lords, I was glad to hear that the noble Lord considers matters of yesterday as only "marginal" as regards the business of this country. The noble Lord also commented about the deficit on our balance of trade on tourism. Of course, since we came to power in 1979, people have been able to afford to go on holiday abroad—
Noble Lords: Oh!
The Earl of Courtown: Of course, they are very lucky to be able to go abroad on holiday. Indeed, I try to do so occasionally; but I also holiday in this country. When people think of their holidays, it is just as important for them to consider visiting attractions in this country. I know that I have not answered all of the noble Lord's questions, but, if he would like to repeat them, I might try again.

Falklands: Landmine Clearance
3.2 p.m.
Lord Dubs Lord Dubs asked Her Majesty's Government:
How many landmines have been cleared in the Falklands since the end of hostilities there; what has been the cost of this operation; and what is the estimate of the number of landmines still to be cleared and the area of land affected.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe): My Lords, about 4,300 landmines have been cleared since the end of hostilities in the Falklands. We believe that there are still around 26,000 landmines in nearly 120 separate minefields, covering some 20 square kilometres of ground. It is not possible to determine how much mine clearing activities have cost since the end of hostilities as these records are not held centrally. There is currently an eight-strong team in the Falklands spending half their time on minefield inspections, repairing fences around them and disposing of landmines. The cost of personnel for this team is £176,000 per year.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, is it not a matter of concern that, 14 years after the end of the Falklands War, such large proportions of the Falkland Islands are still too dangerous for people to walk on? Further, is that not something to which the Government could attach rather more urgency, so that the people of the Falklands could have the scourge of landmines removed from their islands as quickly as possible?
Earl Howe: My Lords, as I am sure the noble Lord is aware, there are many quite major difficulties associated with mine clearance. But, principally because of the difficulties involved in detecting the mines, many of which are plastic, and the dangers to the personnel involved, a decision was made to cease the clearance operations in 1984 and to mark the minefields clearly instead.
The Government and the Falkland islanders welcomed the offer first made in December 1993 by the Argentines to pay a third party to demine the Falklands. We are looking forward to discussing the next steps with the Argentines and with the United States, who have agreed to manage the project should a practical way forward be agreed. We hope that it can.
Lord Taylor of Gryfe: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that Edinburgh University is conducting a research project on a mechanical device to clear landmines more rapidly and with less danger to the operators? That experiment is being carried out with some success and has been financed by charitable funds. Would it not be appropriate for the Government to finance that project?
Earl Howe: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, for drawing that project to my attention; I was
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not aware of it. Nevertheless, on the broad subject of research, we continue to treat such research into the means of detecting non-metallic mines as a matter of considerable priority. The MoD is exchanging information with the United States and our European Union partners on a number of promising new technologies in the field. We are also working with humanitarian mine clearance agencies to seek to identify military technology which could be applied to humanitarian mine clearance tasks.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, is my noble friend the Minister aware that I personally exploded one of the mines near Port Stanley? Is he further aware that the mines have been scattered about a very large area, quite uncharted by the Argentinians, and that, therefore, to try to clear them up would be an extremely dangerous and hazardous job?
Earl Howe: My Lords, I am most concerned to hear that my noble friend was involved in the explosion of a mine on the Falklands. However, she makes a valid point. Even if one could clear a certain area which is demarcated, one could never be absolutely sure that the area was completely clear and safe for people to walk on. That is a consideration which we should bear in mind.
Lord Judd: My Lords, does the Minister agree that the Question tabled by my noble friend highlights the immense humanitarian implications of the use of anti-personnel mines in warfare? Have the Government been able to study the interesting statements by leading US military personnel who question the need for the use of such mines? Will the Government now undertake a fundamental review of whether we ourselves should ever contemplate the use of anti-personnel mines? In the meantime, are the Government prepared to issue an order refusing the military the powers to use them?
Earl Howe: My Lords, as I am sure the noble Lord will agree, the key objective is to reduce the danger to civilians. I do not believe that a unilateral renunciation by the UK would achieve that aim. We have to balance the humanitarian concerns that we all share with a continuing military requirement. If we can convince the major producers, exporters and users of anti-personnel mines to ban these weapons, then the United Kingdom would be willing to join that consensus. We will also ban them if suitable alternatives can be found.
However, the safety of our troops must remain paramount. We have said that we are keeping some stocks of anti-personnel mines, and we reserve the right to authorise their use in exceptional circumstances where Ministers are absolutely satisfied that there is no alternative to ensure the protection of our troops.
Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor: My Lords, can the noble Earl say whether the Argentinian authorities have given full co-operation in tracing the remaining

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minefields? If they have not done so, are they not in breach of the Geneva Convention under which all minefields require to be recorded in detail and kept note of? Indeed, that was certainly the case during the last war?
Earl Howe: My Lords, the noble Earl makes an important point. I believe that the Argentines have been as helpful as they can be. However, the problem has been a distinct lack of detailed records. We know the approximate area of the minefields and they have been fenced off, but we have very little precise knowledge of where the mines were laid.

Business of the House: Debates this Day
The Lord Privy Seal (Viscount Cranborne): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. In moving the Motion, perhaps I may take this opportunity to draw your Lordships' attention to the guidance on the Speakers' List that speeches in the two debates, other than those of the mover and the noble Lord winding up, should be limited to 14 minutes and 11 minutes.
Moved, That the debate on the Motion in the name of Lord Hayhoe set down for today shall be limited to two hours and that in the name of the Baroness Perry of Southwark set down for the same day to three hours.—(Viscount Cranborne.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Social Security Fraud
3.9 p.m.
Lord Hayhoe Lord Hayhoe rose to call attention to the campaigns of the Department of Social Security to combat fraud within the social security system; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, there were press headlines yesterday and today about fraud within the European Union. As earlier debates and exchanges in your Lordships' House have shown, there is much general support for the tough and determined action which is required to deal with this wholly unacceptable problem. Today we are debating an equally unacceptable fraud within our own national social security system. I trust that this short debate will show the same widespread and general support for effective campaigns to combat this selfish and monstrous abuse of our benefit system.
I am delighted that two of my noble friends, Lady Anelay of St. Johns and Lord Rotherwick, have chosen this debate in which to make their maiden speeches. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, brings great authority to these issues with her long experience as a member of a social security appeal tribunal and of the United Kingdom Social Security Advisory Committee. I fear that I do not
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know the noble Lord, Lord Rotherwick, but I am told that he builds aircraft. I therefore wish him well in his parliamentary take off. We look forward to both their speeches.
As was widely recognised in all parts of your Lordships' House during debates on the Housing Bill in the previous Session, one of the most consistent subjects of complaint by constituents to their Members of Parliament concern people jumping the housing queue to the detriment of sound and solid citizens who have been waiting patiently. During my 22 years as an elected Member of another place I found that another major area of complaint, which aroused equal emotion, concerned fraudulent claims for social security benefits of one kind or another. Let us make no mistake about it, neighbours and nearby local residents, particularly those living on housing estates or in close knit communities, almost always have a good idea of those who are abusing the system.
I must confess that as a Member for a west London constituency I was quite familiar with the anguish and frustration referred to by Frank Field, the Chairman of the Social Security Select Committee in another place, during the debate on benefit fraud on 18th June when he quoted from a letter he had received that very day which stated:
"Do you and others at Westminster know the depth of my anger and anguish when I stand in line in the Post Office to pay £2.95 to send a letter by special delivery and at the same time watch a foreigner in front of me collect seven £10 notes and take his mobile phone out of his bag? I am just one of those contributing towards the £70 but could not afford a mobile phone or the cost of the calls. I want to know when anyone is going to do something about all this because I know the people of this country are being destroyed. I write to you although I know Peter Lilley is actually the man in charge".—[Official Report, Commons, 18/6/96: col. 711.]
The letter was addressed to Frank Field rather than to Peter Lilley. I shall return later to that comment about my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. Having mentioned Frank Field, I at once pay tribute to his quite outstanding work as chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Social Security. The committee's report Housing Benefit Fraud is an important and instructive document which deserves careful study, together with the Government's reply which was published in June as Cm. 3299.
Inevitably, estimates of fraud are tentative. These can provoke somewhat and argument, as was seen in another place last June. However, there can be no doubt that within the total social security budget of some £90 billion a great deal of fraud exists. I hope my noble friend the Minister can give us the latest figures but there seems little doubt that more than £3,000 million of public money, taxpayers' money, is involved. The two main areas of fraud are income support and housing benefit.
Fraud takes many forms from individual claimants massaging details of their claim, or not disclosing essential facts, to collusion between employers and employees and between landlords and tenants. Housing benefit provides a wide range of opportunities, particularly as it is dealt with differently by the various local authorities responsible for it.

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Payments are often made direct to landlords, some of whom are serious criminals, rather than to claimants. There are evilly-motivated individuals and gangs who deliberately milk the various systems and more and more sophisticated methods of fraud detection are required to deal with this serious crime. At this point I pay tribute to all those who investigate fraud. It can be difficult and dangerous work and all concerned deserve our thanks and respect.
There are some quite extraordinary cases of fraud on record. I refer just to one. I understand that in Oxford in 1982, 254 people were recorded as living in one four-bedroomed house. Presumably all of them were claiming and receiving benefit. People living abroad have been claiming benefit from addresses in the United Kingdom and then having relatives or friends forward the payments to them overseas. False identities, multiple identities, overseas bank accounts, phoney illnesses, forged papers are but some of the devices used to frustrate the system.
I am delighted and encouraged by the steady progress being made to combat fraud. I believe that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State fully deserves the praise that he receives, often from rather unexpected quarters. For example, the Social Security Select Committee in another place stated in the opening paragraph of its Housing Benefit Fraud report,
"the Secretary of State for Social Services, Mr. Peter [Alley, has shown himself to be one of the most intellectually able of Ministers and the most determined to combat fraud".
Apparently even more favourable words were proposed to the committee by the chairman, Frank Field. Such consensual behaviour seems more appropriate to this House than another place and it is therefore a real tribute to the Secretary of State. He took over as Secretary of State in 1992 and has given top priority to the fight against fraud. In that year fraud savings were some £500 million. By 1991–26—the last full financial year—they had nearly tripled. The Government expect to save some £1.8 billion in the current financial year. I have seen estimates that savings will amount to £5 billion a year by the turn of the century. I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister could give us more information on that admirable objective.
I have looked through a number of press releases from the Department of Social Security which set out some of the initiatives and campaigns directed against fraud which are underpinning the significant improvements that are being made. The "Spotlight" campaign, launched in March in Croydon, Haringey and Enfield, and since then extended to other areas, appears to be working well.
The "Beat-a-Cheat" telephone hotlines are proving a useful innovation. Of course some people were worried that those telephone lines would be used to settle personal scores. I believe others were worried about what could be described as "sneaking" or "grassing" on mates. However, benefit fraud is a selfish evil and an old fashioned, kid glove approach is quite inappropriate to deal with it. Fortunately there are enough solid citizens who are providing accurate
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information to specialist staff in the Benefits Agency, or to local authority staff who deal with housing benefit, to justify this anonymous tip-off approach. I understand that over 100,000 calls have already been received. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to bring us up to date with the success rate in identifying fraud which has arisen from the information which has been received through the "Beat-a-Cheat" telephone hot lines.
I gather that good progress is being made in recovering lost or stolen order books by the use of bar code scanners. The books are now identified in a unique fashion. If they are stolen or misused, they can often be identified. I hope that my noble friend will give us some update and a progress report on the rewards scheme for Post Office staff who identify stolen or fraudulent order books and giro cheques.
I have but skimmed the surface of the enormous range of activities deployed in the fight against benefit fraud, but more can be done. Even greater co-operation from the Post Office is required. Much fraud is linked with mail being redirected by the postal service. I hope that the department has overcome, or will soon overcome, the refusal of the Post Office to implement the "do not redirect" imprint on benefit payment envelopes; and access to the computerised mail redirection database of the Post Office would also be very helpful to those investigating fraud. Further effort is required to bring greater order to the whole system of national insurance numbers. It is generally satisfactory, but, like Topsy, the system has grown and grown over the years and is now in some disarray.
A most important element in the prevention of fraud will be the widespread use of the new benefit payment cards which are now being introduced. However, like credit cards, I imagine that criminals will be searching for ways to manufacture forgeries. I hope that the authorities are keeping in close touch with banks and others who face similar problems so as to share technical expertise and help outwit the crooks.
Last but by no means least, I have not forgotten the benefit fraud Bill. This Bill should help by giving fraud investigators the tools and access to the information they need. It will increase the range and severity of penalties for benefit fraud. It will improve local authorities' performance in dealing with housing benefit and council tax benefit fraud. It will provide incentives and pressures upon them so that those who have lagged behind in these campaigns can be made to catch up with those local authorities which are setting good examples. Perhaps the Minister will let us know when he expects the Bill to be published. The more that can be done to share information between local authorities dealing with housing benefit and the Benefits Agency the better. At present I understand that the computers do not talk to each other. I hope that ways will be found for allowing that to happen.
I want to end on a more fundamental note. Detailed plans and programmes for preventing and combating benefit fraud are of high significance, not just for the

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money that can be recovered and saved, but because success will help stem and reverse what might be called the culture of fraud acceptance which in its way is twinned with the culture of dependence which so many of us seek to reverse.
I began by talking of the anger of ordinary people against the fraudsters in their midst, on the housing estates or in local communities; but I have also noticed, in particular among younger people, a willingness to accept, even sometimes to admire, the fiddling, the petty swindling and fraud of public authorities. This corroding trend must be fought, resisted and defeated, and effective campaigns to combat benefit fraud will help to achieve just that. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.25 p.m.
Baroness Anelay of St. Johns: My Lords, I crave your indulgence. I stand before your Lordships in some trepidation having been introduced to this House a mere eight days ago. On that day one of the supporters of the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, told me that when he took his seat, he was given some advice by a senior Member of this House: that he should settle in before making his maiden speech and that about three years should do the trick. I only hope that by the time I sit down today, your Lordships are not all wishing first, that I had also been given that same advice and, secondly, that I had heeded it.
But I could not resist the temptation to add my voice to this debate because my work in social security over the past 20 years has shown me that social security policy touches all our lives. I have sat as a lay member of a social security appeal tribunal and worked for 20 years with my local citizens advice bureau. This work has reinforced my belief that campaigns against fraud, in particular those which seek to prevent fraud, are vital because they protect the interests of genuine claimants—and it is their needs which are of importance to me.
The security and control programme launched in July last year has already complemented existing detection methods with an increased emphasis on the prevention and deterrence of fraud. The programme consists of more than 30 separate projects. I promise noble Lords that I do not intend to list them all. Some of those, like the Housing Benefit Matching Service, rely upon the development of information technology systems. But other projects rely upon the good old-fashioned human system of look, listen and learn. One such project is the extension of home visits and 1 million of these are being made to income support claimants during the current year 1991–27. While I was sitting as a member of an appeal tribunal earlier this summer, the presenting officer gave details of a successful home visit day—successful from his point of view because his local office had given one week's notice of its intention to visit eight long-term claimants. Then, hey presto, six of those claimants had phoned the office the next day to tell him that he did not need to visit them after all because they
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had "just got a job" and would be signing off immediately. He was not a man to believe in coincidences.
But home visits are also of great value to genuine claimants. They are just as capable of uncovering under-claiming as of revealing over-claiming. The home visit is much valued by honest claimants because it gives them the chance to discuss all their circumstances in private, in familiar and reassuring surroundings with all their evidence to hand.
Cheats can give all claimants a bad name and can deter those who are genuinely in need from claiming benefits to which they are entitled. During my years working with my local CAB as a voluntary adviser, I came across far too many cases of people who would not make a claim because they did not want to be tainted by association with those who fiddled the benefit system.
If potential claimants can be confident that cheats can be readily identified and prevented from making a fraudulent claim, they can be more confident about making a claim themselves and retaining their good name.
So I welcomed the announcement earlier this year that a benefit payment card would be introduced for use by those who collect their benefit from post offices. This should virtually eliminate instrument of payment fraud which currently runs at between £150 million and £200 million each year.
The instrument of payment fraud which so often grabs the newspaper headlines is that which is carried out by organised gangs stealing or counterfeiting order books or giros. This type of fraud is already reducing as a result of the introduction recently of measures such as the electronic stop notice system, the redesign of giro cheques and order books, and the introduction of secure delivery. But it is the introduction of the benefit payment card which should at last all but eliminate this type of fraud.
There is another type of false identity fraud which is far less well known publicly but is particularly vile. It involves loan sharks who prey on those who are vulnerable. I well remember one particular case. A mother who had recently been deserted and left with three small children had borrowed just £30 for a new jacket. The debt of £30 was to be repaid at the rate of £2 per week over a period of a year. But after six weeks she stopped paying. She had just received a large heating bill covering the time when her husband was still living at home and bringing in a wage. She was on income support. She paid the heating bill and for a while managed to dodge the loan shark. Finally, however, he tracked her down at home. He grabbed her handbag, took the child benefit book and "persuaded" her, with the help of two other gentlemen in the background, to sign enough counterfoils for him to be able to obtain money at the post office—not the £92 that she still owed, but over £200. The family was therefore forced to go without child benefit for several weeks as a lesson to her and her friends that she should never again fall behind with her payments. That is not an unusual story now. But it

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could be a thing of the past after the introduction of the benefit payment card. I am pleased to note that child benefit customers will be the first to be issued with the payment cards.
I have been impressed with the plans for this system. Those who designed it have taken into account that it is important to combine the need to fight fraud with the need to provide a flexible service to claimants. That is the sign of success in any benefits system: the ability to be fair to all, yet meet the needs of the individual. Fraud endangers access to benefits by the genuine claimant. I welcome measures that are being taken now and will be taken in the near future to detect, and above all prevent, the commission of fraud. In that way we can protect the vast majority of claimants who are honest. That must be the best course of action.
3.31 p.m.
Earl Attlee: My Lords, the honour falls to me to congratulate the noble Baroness on her excellent maiden speech. I am very relieved that she did not wait three years before talking on these matters. It shows the advantage that this House enjoys. We have many Members who have a great depth of experience in their subject.
I declare an interest as president of the Heavy Transport Association. I shall say just a few words about the manifestation of benefit fraud.
The authorities regularly carry out what are known as multi-agency checks on goods vehicles. Every time they do such a check they find several drivers who are claiming social security benefit while they are working. The Government's idea might be to ban those drivers by removing their vocational driving licence so that they can no longer perpetuate such fraud. I would counsel against that.
This type of fraud gives rise to unfair competition for operators who would like to work legally. I therefore propose that, instead of attacking the drivers, who are largely being forced to carry out benefit fraud, it would be better to attack unscrupulous operators by taking away what is known as their good repute. An operator needs to be of good repute in order to retain an operator's licence. The Minister, having previously held a post at the Department of Transport, knows all about that particular aspect. I hope that the opportunity will arise during discussion on the benefit fraud Bill to address this particular point.
3.33 p.m.
Lord Rotherwick: My Lords, I should like to thank noble Lords, the officers of the House and the staff for their kindness and succour. Without it, I suspect that a new boy such as I would be lost for ever, roaming the maze of corridors and chambers in this House. My grandfather, a Baronet, was elevated to this House in 1939, with the motto, "Caute sed irnpavide"—cautious but fearless. Any government wishing to succeed with a £90 billion social security budget must be cautious but at the same time fearless
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in reducing the fraud which runs at present at some £3 billion. One must welcome the proposed benefit fraud Bill to tackle these concerns.
Monday was Remembrance Day. At the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, most of us stood in silence for two minutes remembering those who gave their lives for their country. Today, social security looks after the needs of the survivors and widows. Against the background of the courage and honesty of those who gave themselves to serve their country, we must view deception and fraud in the social security system by selfish individuals as abhorrent.
There are those who claim that a loss of around 3 per cent. from a £90 billion social security budget is inconsequential in the context of the overall budget. The attitude of some to fraud is to pretend that it is not very big; another attitude is that it is not very important. It has also been said that shoplifting is just a case of lone parents and other poor people helping themselves to a treat. However, I feel confident that most people feel committed to rooting out fraud, however small or unimportant. The benefit fraud Bill will galvanise poor-performing authorities to investigate fraud, enable better detection of fraud and bring forward more meaningful measures for punishing fraud.
To lose around 3 per cent. of the social security budget, amounting to approximately £2.7 billion, through fraud might seem small to some. But it represents some 9.5 per cent. of the pension budget. The mind boggles at what good that large amount of funds could achieve if placed in the right hands.
At present, each working person funds the social security budget by £15 every working day. However, the Benefits Agency must be applauded for detecting 400,000 welfare cheats last year, 10,000 of whom were prosecuted and were mainly persistent offenders and gangs.
At present many offenders, by the very virtue of being on social benefit, live on minimum resources. One of the punishments in this area is simply to return the money. Many of us might be encouraged to buy vast numbers of lottery tickets if our stake were handed back when we lost. The lottery system would fail if that were the case. In this area prevention rather than penalties must be the way forward. The identification of valid claims using the most up-to-date technology will surely be invaluable; whereas draconian penalties must be the way forward for sly, fraudulent landlords.
Our attitude in aggressively tackling such fraud is of paramount importance. I believe that the majority of people agree. The new "Know of a benefit rip-off? Give us a telephone tip-off" advertising campaign has resulted in a highly successful hotline. It opened in the summer and received 70,000 calls in eight weeks. It seems that there are those who pay attention to such values as truth and honesty.
Sadly, nearly half of all estimated fraud occurs in income support. The sombre statistics show that the largest group to commit such fraud is lone parents;

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18.5 per cent. of lone parents commit income support fraud. However, I am glad to tell the House that only 3.5 per cent. of pensioners commit similar fraud.
The second most common type of fraud involves cohabiting couples claiming to be single. It represents 28 per cent. in this category. At a time when we are concerned about the social fabric, it is worrying that in some situations such attitudes prevail.
Perhaps the saddest and most tragic deception is to be found in the area of asylum seeking. Britain will remain a haven for those who are genuinely fleeing from persecution. However, at the end of the period from 1988 to 1994, 10 times as many people claimed asylum as in the year 1988. Yet fewer than one claimant in 10 is found to be a genuine refugee and therefore a genuine social security claimant.
It does not matter how small or trivial welfare cheating is. It is the issue that is important. It must be vigorously arrested. I welcome the benefit fraud Bill. I hope that above all it will drastically reduce such deception and dishonesty and will kindle better attitudes, akin to the attitudes of those who gave so much in armed struggles in order to preserve the freedom and honesty of this country.
3.40 p.m.
Lord Birdwood: My Lords, it is rich pickings in a debate with so few speakers to have two maiden speakers, and I am delighted to be in a position to be following both. In my noble friend Lord Rotherwick we heard the voice of compassionate outrage. He spoke for the silent millions. In the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, we had that joy in the House of hearing an expert with decades of experience. I was particularly pleased that in the trifling six minutes that she allowed herself, she brought out the point that fraud militates against the honest claimant in that the honest claimant is reluctant to be seen in the company of the fraudster. That is an extremely good point and I had hoped that it would be raised in this debate. It was nice that it was raised in a maiden speech.
The usefulness of a debate in advance of the publication of a Bill sometimes escapes me. I do not disapprove of it as a sort of mini vox pop exercise. It provokes some focused thinking from the Front Benches. But one feels that, defending or attacking, one is punching empty air. When preparing what I should say this afternoon, I skimmed some relevant papers, such as the Housing Benefit Fraud Report of last May from another place, the fraud and security section in the appropriation accounts from the same source, the debate in March and Questions in both Houses. It seemed the least I could do as a courtesy to the House this afternoon, but it had the effect of confirming to me how very out of my depth I should be if I pretended to any expertise in this crucial area of political management. In any case, others who will speak this afternoon have spent entire careers looking at these issues. We are fortunate to be able to share in that depth of experience.
My own thoughts have turned to the problems of fraud at the sharp end of the benefit linkage. It seems to me that, even at the level of superficiality which my
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reflections must occupy, there are issues which bear repeating. I shall take as a given that the benefit fraud Bill is an important and welcome outward sign of highly creditable central initiative. The Government have a good record in combating fraud and seem likely to meet or exceed their targets. The benefit fraud investigation service seems logically organised in, I think, nine areas in England and Wales, something like 13 areas for the UK in total.
The manning levels of these areas in the service are largely appropriate, or would be if the service had the right tools for the job. The management information system (MIS) has the unlovely acronym of FIBS, standing for "fraud in benefit" or whatever. FIBS is now five years old, which in MIS terms is very old. It is built on SUPERBASE, which, though rugged enough in its original application, is less than amenable to network use. I am told by the people who have to make it work that, in computer-speak, it is constantly falling over.
One of the problems of trying to patch and mend an older system is that exasperation turns to distrust which turns to fear. I am worried that we could be on the way to turning the men and women who man the fraud service away from an easy acceptance of the next generation of technical tools which they must have—not may have, but must have—if the fraud Bill is to meet its next thresholds of target.
I have homed in on the issue of fraud at the point of claim because it is at that point, the contact moment between the claimant and the cash box, so to speak, that the tools which the Government could implement now would transform the accuracy of matching claim to claimant. The Bill will address the barriers to information comparison, which is the minimum default procedure that its drafters will tackle. My experience in other environments where very large databases are shared leads me to hope that, for instance, risk-assessment architectures in expert systems will feature critically in the implementation procedures. A mortgage company can deliver overnight a solid decision on the validity of a request. I believe the benefit service takes nearly three months to obtain a result with data of a lower level of complexity. I am sure that in the agency as a whole there are teams working with tools such as regression analysis to cope with this.
Perhaps what I take for granted should not be taken for granted; namely, that the staff whose job it is to have the contact with the claimant must always be separate from the fraud service's employees. This, in agency terms, is probably heresy. Claim-level staff are not equipped to behave like pocket detectives. Their job is already stressful enough, but this process, which one might call "post-referral identification and detection matched against point-of-claim", can have an immediacy which the technology can deliver and which will be a real disincentive to the attempt at fraud.
There are now enabling technologies to deliver process improvements against low-level fraud. I say "low-level fraud"; and I think this point needs to be made. We are talking in statistical terms of many individuals doing what people do when they have nowhere else to go in their own lives and are often

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driven to take care of others who are dependent on them. That is a profoundly different issue from organised fraud, from fraud on the scale where it becomes a minor industry. Perhaps—just perhaps—the strategies for these categories need different Bills. However, it will be argued that fraud is fraud, whether one-off as a personal act of despair or inner-city endemic to family survival where the normative ethics are as remote as Athenian Greece or indeed whether it is a business based on the systematisation of crime and greed. It is a point worth debating, though.
I wanted to use my inexpert contribution to this afternoon's debate to widen our reflections on social security fraud in order to say something about the nature of our society. There is broad agreement among people who make it their business to look into the future that full-time work will cease to be the automatic expectation of an adult in a developed society. Work will be project-based, transient, remote and even possibly an elite activity. As this scenario unfolds, we shall see unprecedented strains in the stuff of society, tectonic strains which will cut across demographic boundaries. As an earthquake brings buildings down, so these changes will crack and tumble social structures which seem to have been part of our landscape for ever. At the same time, we are troubled by a seeming loss of moral self-worth, expressed by the endless questing for new moral absolutes. We cannot look into each other's minds to find reassurances about a general morality, so we are forced to look only at each other's behaviour. It is the only evidence we have. It may be blindingly obvious to state this, but all a government can do is to measure what a person has done against the rulebook which applies at the time, which we usually call the law. The media is luckier in this respect; it can prattle on about moral changes, make moral judgments, wring its hands or point the finger.
A moment ago I touched on the changing nature of work. As is usually the case, changes in society are taking place before any act of Government can respond. As I speak, all developed communities continue to make hard distinctions between work and welfare. All politicians, without exception, metaphorically draw that boundary in the sand: "This is work," they say, "and this is welfare." Politicians know their business, and they read correctly the deep resentment which colours the attitudes of those in work to the welfare moonlighter or the bent landlord.
Where my argument is leading, based on irrevocable trends in the patterns of work itself, is toward work and welfare, rather than being areas with a hard-edged boundary between them, having to start to blur together. Of course, that is already happening, with government after government lubricating unemployment statistics by stealth. I believe my own party to be more honest about those figures than any other political ideologies on offer. It is no accident that socialist societies trumpet their full employment status, at least until real life catches up, as it always will.
Any observer of a community where a legal framework has evolved for the management of that society will be confronted by the paradox that in terms of perception, there are individual acts which are wrong
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but not illegal; and there are individual acts which are illegal but not perceived as wrong. Anybody knows what I mean. Destroying hope in another human being is wrong but not illegal; inadvertently going into penalty on a parking meter is illegal but not exactly worth an entry by the recording angel.
Benefit fraud is unusual in terms of social perception, because it is uniquely pervasive, and for the honest claimant—or indeed the honest taxpayer—uniquely offensive. Benefit fraud is theft. Notwithstanding the ebb and flow of our view of wrong, theft can never be any part of this country's sanctions of what is right.
3.52 p.m.
Earl Russell: My Lords, we have been privileged today to hear in this debate two notable maiden speeches. I listened with pleasure to the noble Lord, Lord Rotherwick, who said, many things with which I agree and said them very well. I should also like to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, not only to the House but to a very much smaller body: the team of social security specialists in the House. Since the death of the late and much loved Lady Faithful!, the Conservative Back Benches have been very short of specialists in social security. I look forward to hearing the noble Baroness on many future occasions, arguing with her on a few, agreeing with her on others and always learning from listening to what she has to say. I shall take up later a few points that she made but, since I agree with them all, I shall not thereby make them controversial.
When I think about the subject of this debate, I remember a highly successful advertising campaign run by the Conservative Party in the long climb back towards the general election of 1964. The opening and paradigm advertisement in that campaign had a large picture of a CND demonstrator waving a placard saying "Ban the Bomb" and the caption was "Meanwhile, the Conservatives sign the Test Ban Treaty". Today, the boot is on the other foot. The Conservatives have started a campaign against social security fraud and meanwhile Liberal Democrat councils have scored more success in combating social security fraud than have councils of any other party.
Having said that, I do not feel that any of us should come into this debate claiming moral superiority. There may be other reasons for that, as well as the excellence of our councillors which is very great, but I shall not attempt to argue in those terms. We are all agreed that fraud is theft and fraud is wrong. Fraud takes money out of the pockets of those who should have had it and puts it into the pockets of those who should not have had it. I hope we can take that as something which we all feel equally in every quarter of the House. There is nothing new about it either. In 1614 a beggar was arrested outside St. Margaret's, Westminster. It was found that in his pocket he had £30, which was then approximately two years' wages for an ordinary labourer. He was offered an acquittal but discharge if he would give £5 to the poor. He plea-bargained it down to £4 and got off. So there is nothing new about any of this.

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Dealing with fraud is hard, long, slow and dull work. There are not many headlines to be got from it. Combating fraud also is a function of the accuracy of the system as a whole. So one should look at the accuracy of the delivery of benefit as something general: the more organised the system, the less easy it is to defraud. I look forward to the fraud Bill and, as the noble Lord, Lord Birdwood, pointed out, there is a lot that we cannot say until we see it. It is clearly right that there must be interchangeability of government data. But that will involve a fairly considerable check on the accuracy of government data. It has been suggested that many government agencies, particularly I am told the DVLC, hold a lot of data which are not entirely accurate.
There are certain tests which work against fraud must pass. One relates to justice and accuracy. In the haste to condemn the guilty, we must be equally sure that we acquit the innocent. By the way, we have had benefit agency figures quoted for amounts of fraud among different categories of people. Those figures are taken together: confirmed fraud and suspected fraud. People cannot be condemned because they are suspected of a crime. It is like the case in the papers when I was a boy of someone prosecuted for loitering with intent to press Button B. The magistrate threw out the charge and I was very glad that he did.
In considering accuracy we also need to be careful of targets. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Boyd-Carpenter, once asking the Minister how he knew the amount of undetected fraud. He did not receive a particularly convincing answer and the question needs to go on being asked. So, when I hear about targets I wonder how they have been arrived at and how accurate they are.
Secondly, we need to consider the test of proportionality. In that context, I was very pleased to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, had to say about under-claiming. It is an equally serious problem. I agree with her that combating fraud leads to under-claiming. We should look with equal intensity for people who ought to be receiving benefit and who are not doing so. For that reason it was a little unfortunate that the fraud hotline was instituted at the same time as a cutback on the helpline. It gives a slightly unfortunate impression.
There is another case where proportionality is an issue. I have sent in Questions for Written Answer but the Answers have not yet arrived. I asked how many people are employed and at what cost in combating social security fraud; and how many are employed and at what cost in the Serious Fraud Office. I shall read those Answers with interest and I hope that others will do so too. That needs thought also.
We have to consider the effectiveness of measures. In that context, I am glad of what the noble Lord, Lord Hayhoe, and many other speakers had to say about housing benefit fraud by landlords. Landlords are in a position to do that much more easily and on a much bigger scale than many other people.
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I was interested also in what was said about collusion with an employer in relation to income support. I wonder whether a minimum wage might make the temptation to do that a bit less than it is at present. I will look at that with interest; the situation needs monitoring. I say no more than that. I will also watch with a certain amount of anxiety what the effect of the "change" programme on all of this may be. I know and I am glad that the fraud programme is ring-fenced from the change programme. But I come back to the point with which I began; that a disorganised department is more easily defrauded than a well-run one. So there is perhaps a risk that if the change programme were to go too fast it might become easier to defraud the Department of Social Security than it is at present. That will need watching as we go along.
In relation to the benefit payment card I agree with what has been said. On other occasions I have heard the Minister give very good answers to the questions asked today about the danger of somebody stealing a benefit payment card for purposes of fraud. I hope that he will be able to repeat those answers and reassurances a little further.
The other point that worries me is the use of fraud allegation for demonology. There is nothing new about that. It goes right back to,
"Hark, hark, the dogs do bark.
The beggars are coming to town".
It always seems to arise at periods when the burden on the system is heavy, and indeed it is natural that it should. The last part of the reign of Elizabeth I is a case in point. I shall therefore be glad to hear the Minister say at the end of the day that the vast majority of social security claimants are honest and that nothing any of us have said in this debate is in any way meant to cast doubt on that.
I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, said about the danger of giving all claimants a bad name. Widespread fraud does that. But widespread campaigns against fraud risk doing it also. So we must all—I am addressing myself too—be careful about that as we go along.
I am afraid I share some of the anxieties in relation to the benefit of a cheat hotline. Reliance on the informer has always been risky. It has been done many times before in many other contexts, usually in hunting either for heresy or for witchcraft. Of course, whether or not the information is true is not the same question as whether it is given in malice. The story told by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, about the child benefit book and the loan shark is a good illustration of that point. I shall remember it and, if I may, I may quote it again.
We may therefore be encouraging malice even where genuine fraud is being detected. That would not be unmitigated gain. There is also a risk of informing for profit, especially in cases like the Post Office system where there is a bonus for informing. There used to be professional informers who made their living from it. In the city of Gloucester one of them was dealt with by being thrown into the River Severn. There was one who used to work at the Somerset Quarter Sessions who was appropriately named "Mr. Knowman".

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I do not want to see anything like that system coming back. If there are to be reports, they must be on a small enough scale to make sure that they give no rise to temptation of that sort. With those safeguards we are doing something important. But I hope the attempt to combat fraud will continue carefully, laboriously, dully and with those safeguards in mind. With that, I am happy to support the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Hayhoe.
4.4 p.m.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, I am sure I speak for the Whole House in first thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hayhoe, for introducing this debate in such a sane and balanced way so that he commands the assent of the Whole House. Again I am sure that I speak on behalf of the Whole House in congratulating our two maiden speakers, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and the noble Lord, Lord Rotherwick, on their thoughtful, stylish and well-informed speeches. We hope to hear from them again very soon.
The significance of this debate is that it concerns the accuracy of the delivery of benefits. The DSS has too often fallen short on the accurate delivery of benefits in three ways. First, we have had an unacceptably high rate of departmental error in calculating and paying out benefit, not just as regards the Child Support Agency where still one quarter of all assessments are wrong, but also as regards income support, where only 78 per cent.—barely three-quarters—of the payments are accurate according to the National Audit Office and the Benefit Agency's own quality support figures.
Secondly, not only do we have an unacceptably high rate of error, but also—this was mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Russell—we have unacceptably low rates of take-up, especially in family credit where only two-thirds of families with children claim the benefit to which they are entitled and with pensioners, some 700,000 of whom are on state pensions and fail to claim the income support top-up to which they are entitled worth £14 a week. That would float many of them off poverty and enable them to afford winter heating.
Thirdly, we have had and continue to have a worrying and unacceptably high level of fraud. The DSS survey in 1994 showed that nearly 10 per cent. of income support and 8 per cent. of unemployment benefit claims were possibly fraudulent. Other research suggests that perhaps one in five housing benefit claims may be equally dubious, and that is the subject of today's debate.
I am sure that there is no division between us in this House on all those concerns—the need to minimise error, the need to increase take-up and the need to reduce fraud. We all agree that fraud is theft; that every pound fraudulently taken is a pound denied to someone in need. It is not just about saving money; it is also about the integrity of the welfare state itself. If the welfare state is perceived to be riddled with petty and not so petty fraud, it will not inspire the confidence of those who are funding and contributing to it. People will not willingly see their taxes going into a system where they believe millions and billions are creamed off in fraud.
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The Government have been in office for 17 years. It is only in the past couple of years, prodded in large part as the noble Lord, Lord Hayhoe, generously acknowledged, by the work of my honourable friend in another place, Frank Field, that the issue of fraud has come so much to the top of the agenda. The Government estimate that perhaps £3 billion has been lost in fraud. It may be more than that if we take some of the more pessimistic figures in relation to housing benefit fraud. But only a small proportion of that is being uncovered by government. Much of that fraud has been a byproduct of government policy. Why has it increased?
First, over the past 17 years we have seen a growth in part-time, low paid, irregular and insecure work in which people at the bottom of the wages pile are churned on and off benefit into low paid work and back again on to benefit. For example, they may be on income support but have part-time work as casual building labourers, minicab drivers, care assistants and cleaners and do not report it. They are often encouraged not to report it by unscrupulous employers who can then pay low wages instead. Some of them simply fail to resist temptation, though they should do so.
The problem has been worsened by the increase in means-tested benefits which are now double the proportion of DSS budgets that they were in 1979. Now, for example, a husband is likely to lose income support benefit if his wife is in work, and there may be the temptation not to declare. Equally, we have the situation of lone parents—lone mothers in particular. A lone mother may share her bed with a boyfriend, but not necessarily the household budget, and given that the boyfriend is too often unreliable, it is not surprising that she may feel that financially she is on her own.
However, others are clearly not possible victims but downright rogues. The DSS reports that one inspector found a roofer 20 feet up at 8 a.m. who claimed he was bird watching. Another fraud inspector arrived at an Oasis concert site at 7 a.m. to find that the stage hands on his presence fled behind trees, where they stayed for several hours until they realised that the inspector was not going to go away and then they trickled out. A similar surprise awaited the van driver who brought the portable toilets and the bus driver who brought a load of fans. There are undoubted rogues, and they should not be tolerated, but nonetheless to some extent we must take responsibility for the growth in the part-time, low paid, insecure work which has churned people on and off benefits very rapidly. The temptation then not to declare earnings has increased.
A second reason for the growth in fraud is that the DSS system itself has become more complex. Since 1988 the National Audit Office has refused to pass income support accounts because the error rates are so high. The line between error, where the department overpays, and fraud, where the customer does not repay that overpayment, is a slender one. Many such territories have been created by government themselves. For example, when government insisted that mortgage payments covered by income support be paid direct to the building societies without appreciating the administrative complexity that would follow, they landed many customers in arrears through no fault of

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their own and many were exposed to risk of repossession. The system broke down because the Government changed policy. The result has been significant problems in the accuracy of income support, a direct consequence of government policy.
A third reason for the growth in fraud is that the Government have reduced home visits. In 1979 there were 6.5 million home visits to a much smaller number of claimants, not just encouraging people to take up benefits but also detecting fraud. Two years ago the figure had fallen to barely half a million visits. Belatedly, the Government are realising the wisdom preached by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, today, that home visits are essential if one is to ensure that accurate information goes into the DSS data base. As Peter Lilley wrote to William Waldegrave when the Treasury Secretary was proposing to cut the administration of the DSS by a further 25 per cent. and therefore also such possibilities as home visits:
"Your proposed settlement on running costs fills me with despair. Quite apart from the political fall-out as the service becomes more chaotic, I am convinced … that we would be cutting off our noses to spite our faces".
Mr. Lilley was absolutely right. As government have cut back on home visits, as government have cut back on the running costs of the department, so we have seen fraud increase.
More worrying also is the growth now not of what I might call victim crime or rogue crime but of organised fraud in which giro books are stolen or forged and in which false national insurance identities circulate. We now have around 2 million insecure national insurance numbers floating around the system and no way to check. It is true that we are going to have a new passport system, but anyone who has acquired a forged national insurance identity will be asked identification questions which they will easily be able to answer as they will have given the DSS that information in the first place. We hope the Minister will be able to assure us that in the new fraud Bill there will be more stringent methods of controlling national insurance numbers than we have so far been told about.
Finally, and most worrying of all, is the organised crime associated with housing benefit, a point to which the noble Lord, Lord Hayhoe, drew attention. In the past five years the Government have deregulated housing rents. Housing benefit has doubled in real terms since 1990. Two-thirds of that housing benefit-65 per cent.—is paid direct to landlords, very often as a condition of tenancy. It has become a charter for cheating. Perhaps one of those payments in five is corrupted. The fraud may well exceed £2 billion out of the £11 billion spent currently on housing benefit. Some greedy landlords are milking £100,000 a year out of the housing benefit system. They claim for tenants who do not exist, they claim for tenants who speak so little English that they cannot contradict and they claim for tenants who have moved on or died.
Local authorities want to tackle this problem. I hope the Minister will resist the temptation of fingering local government for its inability fully to tackle landlord fraud. This year 90 per cent. of local authorities have
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met and exceeded the targets laid down by central government and are detecting around three times as much fraud in cash terms as just a couple of years ago. Yet local authorities—this is another example of government policy contributing to the growth of the fraud culture—continue to have their hands tied behind their backs by government.
The Government have been notoriously soft on landlord fraud. Not many months ago we completed the Housing Act. We on the Opposition Benches moved amendment after amendment to give local authorities more powers to tackle landlord fraud. All of those amendments were resisted by government. We asked that local authorities should be able to withhold payments from landlords where they were in doubt about their honesty. Local authorities wanted, but were not allowed to demand, proof of identity. Local authorities wanted, but government refused them, a list of all the properties that the landlord owned so that they could cross-check with other information. Why did the Government refuse local authorities that power? I fear that it was because they believed that to do so would be hard on landlords.
We wanted, but government refused to let us have, a national licensing system of houses in multiple occupation. That would have had a huge effect on checking fraud. We were not allowed to have lists of redirected mail from post offices, which again would have been a huge help to local authorities tackling landlord fraud. On top of that the Government cut the subsidy for managing housing benefit and tackling fraud and allowed landlords to gain repossession within eight weeks rather than 13 weeks, thus increasing the pressure on local authorities to deliver housing benefit speedily without necessarily going through all the checks.
In the recent Housing Act we tried amendment after amendment after amendment to strengthen local authorities' powers to tackle landlord organised fraud. The Government resisted every one of those amendments. The Minister may not have been responsible for all of the stages of that Bill but some of us on these Benches moved the amendments that were resisted. It may be that the provisions we asked for then but were refused will be in the new fraud Bill, in which case we will welcome it.
Instead, we have had Operation Spotlight, in which inspectors have parachuted in. We hope that the effect of their spotlight will be to continue to deter fraudsters. But we need to see more evidence that it will. At the very same time as the take-up helpline was closed down we have seen the opening of a fraud hot-line, which has received around 100,000 calls. But as far as we can tell from the research so far done, about half the calls are unreliable and grudge inspired.
Coming through the system there is the fraud Bill, which seems to have as its main purpose that central government will use their inspectors to encourage local authorities to pursue fraud more vigorously. If the Government had accepted our amendments on the Housing Bill, a good deal of that would have been quite unnecessary. There is also Project Work, the latest activity of government, in which two pilot areas were

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tested. From 4,000 people on their Project Work training schemes, the Government have shown that only 8 per cent. moved into work but perhaps double that number have been deterred from claiming benefit. These statistics need to be scrutinised with care, but they nonetheless suggest that there is a large amount of low level fraud out there that must be checked. What is worrying is the assumption that, in terms of motivating people to work, compulsion is required at a time when there are eight people pursuing every job vacancy. The problem is not compulsion and a lack of willingness to work, but the poor quality of training which is on offer.
If the Government are serious—as I hope they now are—in tackling fraud as we have been pressing them to do, they will tackle the issue of landlord fraud and give local authorities the powers they need. They will increase home visits not just from 500,000 to 1 million, but nearer the much larger figure that we had a few years back. They will also tighten up and clean up the National Insurance system so that we can be assured that people are not falsely claiming benefit to which they are not entitled. These three things alone will almost certainly save £1 billion of fraud money. We would welcome the Minister confirming that those things will be included in the fraud Bill.
Perhaps I may make one final point. All of us in this House want to eradicate fraud from the benefit system. There is no division about this. We want to see a renewed welfare state built on trust. The other side of that proposition is that people who are entitled to benefit also get it. Can we hope that the new information technology in the new fraud Bill will give benefit to those who at present do not get the benefit to which they are entitled? We hope that it will allow very many elderly people and families with children living in poverty to be floated into a better and higher standard of living. As I say, if the Government use Project Work and the fraud Bill not just to penalize culprits but to rebuild our trust in the welfare state, to that degree it will have our support. We welcome the Government to a belated concern for the issue of fraud after 17 years of stewardship.
4.21 p.m.
The Minister of State, Department of Social Security (Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish): My Lords, my noble friend Lord Hayhoe has tabled a vital issue for debate. Indeed, I thought that I was going to be able to say that the debate had been conducted pretty well in a spirit of all-party agreement, but the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, managed to introduce perhaps more controversy into the debate in her speech than the sum of the controversy put in by all the other speakers. I may be unable to resist the temptation to take up one or two of the points that she made.
First, I join other noble Lords in welcoming the maiden speakers to our midst. I congratulate them on their speeches. My noble friend Lady Anelay is no stranger to social security matters. As she told us, she served for some time on the Social Security Advisory Committee of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and for about 14 years, I believe, she has been a member of a social security appeals tribunal. On the other side of
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the fence, so to speak, she has had a long relationship with the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux. Given her background and knowledge, which I knew about when I saw that she was among those who were to come to this House, I would have been greatly disappointed if I had had to wait three years for her to help me in these debates. Her help will balance to a considerable extent, I believe, the efforts of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, opposite me.
My noble friend Lord Rotherwick made some very telling points in his maiden speech. His career includes an interesting cross-section of interests, one of them being horse racing and horses. So perhaps your Lordships will be able to go to him for tips about the horses which are most likely to succeed. My noble friend reminded us of one very important matter, which I often repeat at the Dispatch Box—that is to say, the cost and size of the social security budget. He redefined £90 billion in a way that is perhaps more meaningful to most of us who cannot really think in terms of billions of pounds. He reminded us that it actually costs every working person every working day about £15. That money goes to a number of different groups. Many of the people in those groups thoroughly deserve the benefits. The working man contributing his £15 and indeed the population at large are, I am sure, perfectly happy to make that contribution.
We have an increasing number of elderly people which affects the cost of pensions. We are to have a debate on that issue next Wednesday. We have a rise in the number of single parents, a subject now being addressed by the wider public looking at some of the consequences of that rise other than the straightforward financial ones. We have sickness, incapacity and unemployment.
Once again today we have the extraordinarily good news of another monthly fall in the unemployment figures. This time there has been quite a large fall, taking unemployment in Britain down to 7.2 per cent. That is splendid news. Indeed, Eurostat, which compiles the unemployment figures for the whole of Europe on a common base, points out that across Europe unemployment rates remain constant at nearly 11 per cent. whereas we in the United Kingdom are virtually alone in having falling unemployment.
Looked at conversely, we have 70 per cent. of our people of working age with jobs in Britain compared with 65 per cent. in Germany and 59 per cent. in France. It would have been nice if the noble Baroness—who normally chastises me by reminding me that one of the reasons for the £90 billion budget is unemployment—had recognised that once again today, as is the case every month, it is the success of the Government's economic policies which have brought about the fall in unemployment. I shall resist the temptation to remind your Lordships, as noble Lords were reminded at Question Time, of the dangers that signing up to things like the European social chapter will bring to the successful economy we have had in this country—the rise in jobs, the fall in unemployment and the attraction of inward investment.

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I return to the debate and to my noble friend Lord Hayhoe. He reminded us of the sterling work that my right honourable friend Peter Lilley has done since he became Secretary of State for Social Security. In a careful and painstaking way he has tackled all the benefits one at a time. He has looked at them, how they have grown, and why, and what we can do to make certain that the help we give to people is targeted on those who deserve it. In addition, he has looked at safeguarding the benefit system from fraud.
What we want to do is shift the emphasis as far as we possibly can away from catching people who are making fraudulent claims to making it pretty difficult for people to make such fraudulent claims; in other words, to deter them from making them. In addition to the work done in my department under the guidance of Mr. Lilley, we have a new inter-departmental ministerial committee on countering benefit fraud which was formed last July. It is chaired by the Secretary of State for Social Security with senior Ministers from across Whitehall. That group mobilises the full force of the Government in the fight against benefit fraud.
A number of your Lordships referred to the fact that very soon we shall be seeing a Bill which will further strengthen our hand in the fight against fraud. The Bill's purpose is to make social security fraud a much less attractive proposition. It will do so in two ways. First, it will give fraud investigators the tools they need to catch and penalise fraudsters. For example, access to data held elsewhere in government will make it much harder for fraudsters to lie or conceal information. New options for penalising those who commit fraud will make it plain that fraud is not a soft option. We can and will take sanctions against the fraudsters.
Secondly, the Bill aims to improve local authorities' performance against fraud by a process of inspection and recommendation, backed up by the power to impose financial sanctions on those which do not improve.
Meanwhile, we are pressing ahead with our existing programme of anti-fraud work. In July 1995 two nationwide programmes of visiting new customers and reviewing existing claims for income support were begun. New claims for the job seeker's allowance were included from October. Virtually—of course, virtually—all claimants are honest. I am happy to make that point. I believe that I was invited to do so by the noble Earl, Lord Russell. But we do have to protect the system against the dishonest minority. So the Benefits Agency selects new claims in high risk categories and then carries out home visits to check that people live where they say they do, are who they say they are, and that all the other relevant personal and financial circumstances are correctly reported. That subject was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Anelay.
These initiatives are proving to be very cost effective. Almost 300,000 new claim visits were carried out in the past financial year, resulting in savings of £162 million. Reviews of selected existing claims, which are targeted reviews, are also being carried out by visit, post or by telephone. Almost 550,000 targeted reviews were conducted last year resulting in a saving of £79 million.
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Those are highly targeted reviews. We try to identify those groups where we know from our experience there is likely to be the highest incidence of fraud. Those are the ones we target for visits.
In March this year we launched a "spotlight on benefit cheats" campaign, which has been mentioned once or twice. It involves a series of month-long anti-fraud drives in specific areas across the country with special area-based publicity before each drive starts. The objective is to encourage people who have drifted into benefit fraud to put their claims right before the campaign starts. There are many people in that category who have just drifted into it, perhaps because they have taken up a bit more work. They are given the opportunity to put their claim into the correct position as soon as they can and before we start our investigation. We shall then bear down hard on those who have failed to take the opportunity to come clean.
Each campaign involves the national benefit fraud hotline, with local exercises matching data across benefit to detect inconsistencies—a point made by my noble friend Lord Birdwood who spoke about the use of IT—higher profile visits and other checks on customers, and the use of bar code scanners in selected post offices to detect stolen order books. My noble friend Lord Hayhoe and a number of other noble Lords mentioned that. About £200 million of savings were achieved last year through using bar code scanners. They are an important tool, and bridge the gap between today's technology, using order books and girocheques, and what will happen in two or three years' time when the benefit payment card, to which I shall return, has been rolled out in its entirety. In those specific areas we have also had special drives on employers and self-employed people who are likely to be involved in benefit fraud. We are giving a higher profile to all benefit fraud, including housing benefit fraud, in particular—the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, will be happy to hear—where the landlord is involved.
The total amount of benefit fraud stopped by the first phase of campaigns is about £42 million. In addition, in some of those areas and in other parts of the country, we have taken part in recent road stop exercises, as mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. We have made considerable savings there. In addition to the few lorry drivers we picked up, who are working and claiming, we have found a number of people doing the same thing in the taxi business where checks, not merely in the special areas but across the country, can often reveal people who are claiming and at the same time working.
The noble Baroness referred to the case—amusing, if it were not so serious—of the outdoor pop event, which I have to admit took place in Scotland, where the benefit fraud office found vast numbers of people coming to work who were also customers of the Benefits Agency. They were taking a day off from the Benefits Agency to help set up the pop concert. There are a number of different cases: the unemployed man who receives benefit but works as a night watchman because that is the easiest way to go to and from one's work without the neighbours seeing. His wife, too, claimed benefit by saying that she was a single parent, but she did it

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twice—once from her mother's address and again from her sister's address. Or there is the man who claimed incapacity benefit, and had been doing so for the past 15 years, who planned a trip to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. His other interests included marathon running, tug-of-war competitions and abseiling. There is a lady who lives abroad and returns to Britain each time she becomes pregnant. She registers the child in this country, claims child benefit, and then returns to her home land and her family.
In a way those cases are amusing, but they are serious because, taken together, they add up to a great deal of money and give the impression, when one reads of them, that everyone who is on benefit may be on the same lines. That, as I have said, is just not the case.
The national benefit fraud hotline we have now wheeled out is one of the successful elements of our spotlight campaign. The public response has been considerable. There have been about 100,000 calls. We have made savings of about £15 million. Some of the calls give us enough information to follow up clearly; others do not. There is no evidence of a huge number of malicious calls. Many calls are far from that. Partners—these days one has to call them partners, I suppose—splitting up seem to be a small seam of reporting with the partner who has been split from, so to speak, deciding to report the other half for whatever chicanery they are up to. In one case, two or three hours later, the person phoned up again and said, "Can I take all that back? He has come back to me."
To tackle fraud effectively we need to be one step ahead of the fraudster. In looking at our programme of benefit reviews, as part of our strategy we are trying to establish how much benefit is incorrectly paid and identify the causes of those incorrect payments. The noble Earl, Lord Russell, mentioned that in the general term of accuracy of the social security system. Via the change programme and policy simplification we are addressing how we can achieve our objective, much more often than not, of paying the right benefit to the right person at the right time. That involves some simplification of the systems and the use of IT.
Also on the use of IT, we come to the issue of national insurance number fraud. We are taking steps to address that kind of fraud and to use datamatching and the searching techniques, mentioned by my noble friend Lord Rotherwick, which give us powerful tools in the modern world to pursue people who are attempting to defraud the system—attempting to be people other than who they are.
One important point I have mentioned to the House previously—a number of noble Lords have referred to it this evening—is the move to the benefit payment card and away from the old fashioned girocheque system and payment book, both of which are open to fraud. They also lay people, especially elderly people, open to theft. A thief knows that an elderly person is likely to have a book in her handbag and that if he can steal the bag he may well obtain a benefit book with a number of payments in it which he can use fraudulently in post offices.
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We believe that the payment card will be easy to use. We are starting with child benefit. The first steps of the process are taking place in Stroud but it will take a while to introduce. It is a big programme. It is not just the card, or the reader: it is the large system behind it called the customer accounting and payment strategy. This is the computer system which will control payments in all post offices around the country and ensure that the person obtaining benefit is the right person.
The new technology we are beginning to introduce is reflected in other areas such as datamatching departmental records and some of the other records held within government.
Within the Benefits Agency itself a generalised matching service has been developed which matches the internal benefit data bases to look at inconsistencies. The two classic ones, I suppose, are the child benefit base and the income support database. Many claims are not fraudulent. It is just someone giving a middle name in one application and not in another, but they can easily be eliminated. The person can be shown to be one and the same person. Where a suspicion of fraud remains, that can be passed on. There are major savings on those databases.
Lord Marlesford: My Lords, I am listening with enormous interest to my noble friend. Does he agree that many of the measures he is putting forward as a means of limiting social security fraud could be more easily dealt with if there were to be one national identity number rather than the use of names? Once they have the right number one can at least ensure that one does not have a multiplicity of applications from the same people.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: My Lords, my noble friend invites me to go on a slightly different tack. I know that he is interested in this, but all that I shall say to him is that if you are to base a system on national insurance numbers or national identity numbers you have to be jolly sure that you have created a system which ensures the security of those numbers. If they are not totally secure, fraud could be made easier. One must be cautious about assuming that a national identity card will necessarily mean that fraud, especially organised fraud, can be avoided.
I remind the House that we are talking about serious, multiple-identity fraud involving both income support and housing benefit. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, that we take housing benefit fraud very seriously because such fraud can be large scale and organised. Someone was recently sentenced to five years' imprisonment for fiddling considerable sums of money from us. He had claimed incapacity benefit and, under a number of different guises, had managed to persuade doctors that he was schizophrenic and suffered from stress and nervous disorders. He was also claiming unemployment benefit in other guises. He had set up 15 false identities in order to claim benefit. Another chap was an asylum seeker—whether bogus or not has not yet been finally determined—but the one sure thing is that he had set up four bogus identities under which to claim various benefits. Fraud is a problem with all

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benefits. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, rightly pointed out, housing benefit is a fertile area for such organised crime.
I was pleased to hear the noble Baroness coming to the decision that housing benefit fraud is a real problem. Back in 1993 Mr. Keith Bradley said in the other place that the Government had overestimated the level of benefit fraud and that there was some danger of overstating the amount of fraud in the system. In that debate, on 16th July 1993, Mr. Bradley also said that we were expecting local authorities to achieve targets that were far too high. He said that,
"the recovery targets set for local authorities are unrealistically high. I know that there is a lower level and a higher level, but my investigations across the country convince me that many local authorities find it extremely difficult to hit even the lower targets … the Government have set the targets unrealistically high".—[Official Report, Commons, 16/7/93; col. 1251–2.]
Clearly, that is another U-turn by the Opposition on their road to the manifesto. Just two or three years ago they said that we were hugely overestimating the size of housing benefit fraud. I am now told we are hugely underestimating it. What we are doing is treating such fraud very seriously. We have laid down what we believe are realistic and challenging targets. In 1991–24 the savings amounted to £92 million. They had increased to £224 million in 1991–26 and are projected to rise to £260 million this year. We provide practical encouragement to authorities in anti-fraud work by providing financial incentives and allowing them to share in the savings they achieve.
I have already mentioned the introduction of a national housing benefit datamatching service which we are going to implement along with other data changes relating to the way in which we use information technology. We are starting a pilot project in December run by the local authorities to target organised fraud, including landlord fraud, across the London boroughs. London has a bad reputation simply because there are so many housing authorities cheek by jowl and the same people can set up scams in one borough, do the same thing in the adjacent borough, and if the two computers do not talk to each other they can never be found out. That is an important aspect which we, and the local authorities, must tackle. There is also a new challenge fund. Local authorities can bid for money in order to implement anti-fraud initiatives of their own. There is a project to research, develop and pilot a range of key verification measures to improve and standardise the checks made by local authorities to help to ensure that fraudulent claims do not enter their system on the housing benefit side—and that they do not enter our system on the income support side. There is a lot of work that we can do together. I believe that with IT we have some powerful new tools in the fight against organised landlord fraud and against landlord and tenant fraud.
In conclusion, benefit fraud is a criminal activity. We are determined to stamp it out. I am pleased that I have the support of the whole House in our endeavours. In the past financial year £1.4 billion of fraud was detected and 400,000 fraudsters were caught. As my noble friend
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Lord Rotherwick said, 10,000 fraudsters were prosecuted with a 99 per cent. conviction rate. I have outlined the wide range of measures that we have taken, and are taking, to deal with this difficult issue. We identify fraud against social security as a major problem. We have declared war on fraudsters. We are attacking fraud on all fronts. I believe that we are winning because we are willing to tackle it as hard as we possibly can. Our message is clear: there is no future in fraud. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hayhoe for initiating the debate and to my two noble friends for their maiden speeches. I am grateful also to all other noble Lords who have spoken for their support in this battle which I believe we can win.
4.45 p.m.
Lord Hayhoe: My Lords, we have had a useful and well-informed short debate. I thank the Minister for his detailed reply. I thank also the select band who have spoken, including of course the two maiden speakers from whom we hope to hear again soon.
As was acknowledged by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, I tried to avoid controversy in opening the debate. I am glad that the general mood was consensual. It is good when the House is like that. Perhaps inevitably—certainly not unexpectedly—a note of some controversy entered the speech from the Opposition Front Bench, but why should the habits of a lifetime be changed? One accepted that that was quite liable to happen.
However, one clear message has surely come from the debate: benefit fraud is theft. It is wrong. It is abhorrent. It is inexcusable and it is unacceptable. More than that, prevention is better than detection. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Educational Choice
4.47 p.m.
Baroness Perry of Southwark Baroness Perry of Southwark rose to call attention to the importance of choice and diversity in the education of four to 19 year-olds; and to move for Papers.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to debate some of the most important aspects of the educational landscape. It would be easy in the light of the current press preoccupations to do nothing today but deplore the state of our schools, the crisis in discipline and the poor performance of teachers with more and more gloom until we had talked ourselves into a state of collective despair. I do not believe that that would be helpful to teachers or to pupils—nor would it address issues about which we in this House are most concerned.
I spent 17 years visiting schools and colleges as a member of Her Majesty's Inspectorate. As chief inspector I read my colleagues' reports of the hundreds of school and college visits that they made each year. Since then, although working in higher education I have been privileged to visit schools and to talk regularly

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with teachers and heads in their schools, in private and in conferences. I therefore have good evidence when I say that the overwhelming majority of our schools are well ordered industrious institutions with good relationships between teachers and pupils and with good standards being achieved. In our justifiable anger at those examples where teachers are failing either to maintain discipline or to teach the basic skills to an acceptable standard, we should remember that the bad examples are far outnumbered by the good.
We have long known that there were problems with a minority of schools and a minority of teachers. The difficulty is in knowing how to tackle the many different influences which bear on those problems. Issues such as the training of teachers, the content of the curriculum, the structure of examinations, increased autonomy for schools and the training of head teachers have all been tackled by the Government in the past few years. But even more fundamental than those is the relationship between parents and schools and the concerns that we all share about examples where the basic trust between the two seems to have broken down. It is for that reason that the Government's initiatives in the past decade have been designed to ensure that parents and pupils are at the heart of all educational policies.
If schools are to serve the needs of their pupils adequately and to meet the aspirations of parents they must establish a real partnership with parents from the start so that parents feel in every sense a real commitment to the school and to the job that it is doing. This commitment, however, is immeasurably stronger if there has been a conscious choice on the part of parents to send their children to a particular school and if there is adequate information on which the parents can base what is, after all, one of the most important choices they have to make for their children. This is why so much of the Government's recent policy has been directed towards ensuring that parents have a very full range of information about the schools within their neighbourhood. Every school must now publish a yearly prospectus which describes both its achievements and what it has to offer. The prospectus includes examination and key stage test results, comparing them with local and national results. It also lets parents know about the standards of discipline within the schools because it records the rates of unauthorised absence or truanting. For secondary schools, the prospectus will record the jobs or further education which school leavers have pursued.
Parents will also find a description of the school's aims, the values it hopes to give the pupils in its care, the moral and spiritual guidance which it offers and how it deals with children who have special needs arising from exceptional gifts or exceptional learning difficulties. In addition to the very full information via the school prospectus, parents now receive reports from the Office for Standards in Education, which inspects the schools at regular intervals. These Ofsted reports, as we know from the press, are of intense interest to parents and employers.
The Government have made this information available because they recognise that a full knowledge of the ethos and performance of the school is the first
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step towards enabling parents to make a real and informed choice about the right school for their child. Once they have made that choice, it is vital for the school to engage the parents as true partners in the learning, discipline and moral values of their children. The knowledge and concern which parents naturally have for their child is an enormous resource for the school, and the pilot projects in home-school partnership, involving parents as intelligent supervisors of their children's homework and other activities, are much to be welcomed.
We have come a very long way in recent years towards meeting the goal which the Prime Minister set in 1991 to empower parents within the education system so that they can make better informed choices about what is best for their children. But the parents' right to choose means choosing the school which suits their child and their family. No parent wishes to see a child fitting into some predetermined mould which ignores the very special ability and needs of the individual child. Under the Parents' Charter, parents have a right to expect every school to do its best to make sure that every child does as well as he or she possibly can. This is a very demanding standard, but it is the least that parents have the right to expect. It is demanding also in that it requires a very wide range of schools from which parents can choose and a very wide range of opportunities within those schools. The individual needs of children cannot be met within a uniform comprehensive system.
As pupils get older they increasingly need to make choices for themselves and they need information and guidance in reaching the right choice of a future career or programme study. For this reason, I very much welcome the provisions in the Bill now being considered in another place which are designed to ensure that pupils receive adequate careers education and advice with access to information about career and educational opportunities after they leave school. The importance of such information and advice cannot be over-estimated. All the best efforts in the world in providing a good education and raising achievement are diminished if, at the end of the educational experience, pupils cannot apply the knowledge and skills which they have acquired to their adult working lives.
At the age of 14 and again at 16 young people now have a range of choices which they may make within the school curriculum. They are still guaranteed, of course, access to the breadth and balance of the national curriculum, but in addition they now have options in specialist fields such as languages, the performing arts, humanities and technology. The introduction of the GNVQ (the general national vocational qualification) has further extended the range of choices which are available to this age group. It is now possible for them to combine academic study with a qualification which introduces them to basic understandings in a broad career field.
The move towards parity of esteem between vocational and academic education has been one of the most important developments of the past decade. Young people and their parents are able to make choices about an appropriate and attractive future career, no longer

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hindered as they were before by issues of status and dreaded academic snobbery. Too often in past years young people were forced into academic choices where they under-performed and were unhappy instead of choosing broad vocational courses where they could have excelled. The policies of the past decade have provided us with a range of diverse institutions representing nothing short of a revolutionary change in the former all-too-uniform landscape of education.
Successive legislation has given increasing levels of independence to schools at the individual institutional level, extending their financial freedom to a freedom to specialise in specific areas of the school curriculum in which they have a special contribution to offer. In the new Education Bill, the Government have proposed that schools may select a larger percentage of their pupils, choosing their own selection criteria. These criteria enable a school to select young people with a special talent, perhaps in the performing arts, languages, technology or humanities, or even in sport. Comprehensive schools selected only on the basis of geography and neighbourhood—this element of selection allows a mix of social backgrounds, sharing talents and aptitudes instead of class. Furthermore, the parent of the secondary school child has a choice between schools still within the LEA system, Church schools, grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges as well as schools in the independent sector. Thanks to the provision of assisted places, whose number is to double to 68,000 following on the Prime Minister's announcement last year, access to the independent sector is no longer limited to those whose parents have the ability to pay. The popularity of this scheme among parents is annually demonstrated by the numbers who apply and the scheme has ensured that the independent schools have a wider mix of social backgrounds among their pupils. It also, of course, provides access to education of a very high standard indeed to those who could not otherwise have exercised such a choice.
This diverse range of schools for 11 to 16 year-olds is matched by the very wide range of choices available for 16 to 19 year-olds. A 16 year-old can now choose the type of further education and training best suited to his individual interests as well as to his individual abilities. If he chooses to remain in the sixth form he may choose A-levels or GNVQs, thus ensuring that the option for a vocational as well as an academic route is kept open. Increasingly, many are choosing to move into one of the dynamic further education colleges to which this Government have also given financial autonomy and entrepreneurial freedom. Because of this, these colleges now provide courses which match the needs of students and employers, unchannelled by any form of LEA planning. The popularity and success of these programmes for 16 to 19 year-olds is dramatically demonstrated by the increase in the number of them who now stay on in education after the age of 16. In the five years from 1981–28 to 1991–23, the proportion of 16 year-olds in full-time education rose from 48 per cent. to 71 per cent. and the Government propose an additional 25 per cent. increase in the
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numbers in further education and are well on target. Modern apprenticeships and national vocational qualifications have, since their introduction, provided work-based opportunities for a wide section of that age group and have ensured that young people move into a properly gradated and externally monitored system of training when they enter the work place.
The record of the city technology colleges founded by private sector investment has been a very proud one indeed. Located in some of the most deprived inner city areas of the United Kingdom, the CTCs have succeeded in raising the performance and standards of those young people; have provided them with expert teaching in well-ordered and pleasant buildings; and given them a sense of their own dignity which has been heartening to observe. The commitment and faith of those who have founded such CTCs—and my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham is an outstanding example of a benefactor and proprietor of two such colleges—has brought a new element into public sector education in this country for the first time since the days of the great humanitarians of the 19th century.
The diversity of schools and the diversity of institutions at all levels, which has been made possible by the increasing autonomy which this Government have given them, has produced a healthy competition among the schools and colleges. That competition has provided them with a motivation towards excellence and has developed in schools a will to meet the needs and aspirations of all pupils and parents in a way in which very few other measures have been able to do in the past.
Parents now not only exercise choice but exercise real influence over the nature and content of the school curriculum. Of course there are many matters which are still not right in the education system and much work still needs to be done. Reforms in teacher training were initiated in 1983 and continue today. Reforms of examinations and curricula have gone a long way to raise standards and to increase choice. The introduction of an orderly system of national vocational qualifications led by employers and responsive to their needs has done much to make this country more competitive in the international market.
The autonomy of institutions has enabled them to meet the needs of their clients in a flexible way. The healthy competition in which they now engage has directed their attention towards raising their performance, so ensuring that pupils and students really do have the opportunity to perform as well as they possibly can, just as the Parent's Charter promised.
Better careers guidance and parity of esteem between vocational and academic work has encouraged more young people to choose a vocational rather than an academic route and both they and their future employers have benefited from that choice. Everything in education takes a long time to bear fruit and we cannot expect the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s to bear immediate fruit. But the first signs are there. Massively increased participation in post-compulsory education and a steady increase in pupil achievement are a validation of the Government reforms. The teaching profession and the

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talented people who run our schools and colleges have responded magnificently to the challenges which those changes have laid upon them. I have every confidence that the exercise of parental and student choice among an increasingly wide diversity of institutions matching the needs of young people and of society is working towards an education system of which we in this country will become ever more proud. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.3 p.m.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving us this opportunity to debate the importance of the concept of choice and diversity in the education of four to 19 year-olds. I hope the House will pardon me if my own small contribution is rather unusual. I would like to offer a few thoughts on only one word. I will be short, superficial and serious.
I must confess that I have never been entirely easy with the overarching importance which the party opposite seems to give in the vocabulary of education to that idea of choice. I remember watching Mrs. Thatcher as she then was after one or other of the Conservative Party's election victories—I cannot remember which—addressing the workers at Conservative Central Office and congratulating them, and then exhorting them to new and further efforts and saying, "We must give them more choices". The implication seemed to be that choice is, in itself, an ultimate good, and the more choices one has the better one's life will be.
If I beg leave to doubt its supreme moral value, it is perhaps because I have never been convinced of the ultimate importance of consumerism. I once walked into a vast supermarket in Washington DC in search of a packet of cornflakes. I was confronted with a great aisle marked "cereals" which stretched away into the middle distance, and I was obliged to inspect something like 50 to 60 different brands, styles, combinations and varieties of cereal products.
I felt I had vastly more choice than I either needed or wanted, and if I had been able only to select between three or four really high quality products, that would have been enough. In the world of cornflakes, then, so far as I am concerned, more does not necessarily mean better. It may similarly be so in the realm of education. More schools do not necessarily mean better schools. More different schools do not necessarily mean better education unless they, in their differences, are equally good. Wide parental choice is not necessarily good if parents are ill-informed, careless or do not want it. More choice among available schools is not necessarily the most important choice a parent must make for the child. Staying at home and teaching the child to read, setting its imagination alight in a one-to-one parental teaching relationship may be even more important.
In any case, the concept of choice is not simple and transpicuous, especially as applied to a realm so complex and dynamic as education. Rational choice theory is, I am informed, an area of study which currently interests some economists, and is worth deeper
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exploration. But it begins with the axiom that rational choice is only possible if two conditions are satisfied: first, if all consumers have perfect knowledge; and, secondly, if all consumers possess the means to achieve their choice. It is manifestly true that both conditions fail for most of our population in the matter of choosing a school for a child.
In the world of contemporary education, however, it is necessary first to ask the question: choice for whom? I take it that we would all agree that just as Sainsbury's, Tesco, Safeway and the like are the providers of cornflakes, so the providers of education are the state, which provides a variety of schools, and the private or independent sector, including the Churches, and philosophical groups like the Steiner schools and the Montessori schools. The "consumers" of schools—to use the hideous jargon—can be only the children and to some extent the parents, and the exercisers of choice can be only the children, the parents and the schools themselves.
If this be granted, it is immediately obvious that the children themselves have very little choice indeed. In nursery and primary education they will normally go where their parents send them and that first choice will have a strong determining influence on where their secondary and tertiary education takes place. If your parents send you to Sunningdale or the Dragon School you are likely to go on to a school in the independent section and thereafter, with comparative ease, to a university, quite possibly one of the older and more prestigious of those institutions.
The fallacy which needs to be exposed, however, resides in the next category—the parents. If I have £5 in my pocket and I go to the supermarket, I have the absolutely free and unfettered choice to select whichever packet of cornflakes I like provided that the cost of that packet is not more than £5. It is not so with education. Be parents never so rich, never so powerful, they do not have an unfettered choice among the available schools because the schools themselves have the right to refuse a place to any child without giving any reason. You can be refused by Winchester: you cannot be refused by Weetabix.
Neither is the unfettered choice the privilege and prerogative of the schools themselves. Parents can only apply—they cannot choose—and schools can reject an application for any reason they like, but boarding schools have to fill their beds and the comprehensive school has to fill its available places or else they are on the slippery slope to failure.
So the concept of choice in education is not singular: it depends on who is choosing, and between what. Children have initially small, but gradually increasing, powers of choice as they grow older; independent schools have wide powers of choice, limited by quantity and quality of applications and the need to break even financially; maintained schools have in the past had virtually no choice (you take what you get), but some are now offered some choice of pupils on grounds of ability. That is good for them but bad for the other schools to which the rejected must go. Parents have always had one choice at least—between a state school

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and an independent school—if their income was sufficient to make that choice meaningful, and it has been the policy of the present Government to increase the choices of school available to parents.
But is this increase in choice of schools what parents want? Is it their highest priority? What evidence can be adduced that they place choice first? They may, but I beg leave to present one fact which calls the possibility at least into question. Parents already have some choices but, according to DfEE statistics, in 1994, the latest date for which such statistics can be provided, 89.3 per cent. of all pupils were in comprehensive schools. Most of those must have been in their local comprehensive school.
What most parents seem to consider most important, then, is a school firmly established in their own community, close to home, which cares for each child, establishes good standards of behaviour and gets good, acceptable academic results. Parents seem to want high-quality schools more than they want choices among schools.
The wisdom of the tribe is frequently displayed in its proverbs. Perhaps I may remind your Lordships of one English proverb, first recorded in 1594 in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (Act I, Scene I, line 135). Your Lordships may care to look it up in by far the finest edition of that play in the Arden Shakespeare; I forbear to say who edited it. That proverb says,
"there is small choice in rotten apples".
5.13 p.m.
The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving me this opportunity to speak and for introducing the debate. I should like to speak in favour of greater diversity in the schools curriculum, with reference to the moral debate and to the growing interest in global awareness, or development education. I believe that our children's understanding of world affairs has become more and not less urgent. I feel that the time has come for greater recognition of this in school inspections and in the next curricular review.
This is already an acknowledged area of formal education, recognised at various levels and in several subject areas such as geography, history, modern languages, English and drama and of course religious education. It crops up in cross-curricular themes such as citizenship and environmental education. Above all, it is popular with teachers and with pupils and apparently even with Ofsted, though it has yet to be fully identified within the formal curriculum. For those less familiar with it, the Development Education Association publishes valuable guidelines for teachers and there is a special supplement in this week's The Times Educational Supplement.
For obvious reasons there is a lot of interest in this subject within the aid lobby. In the last week alone three conferences involving teachers, local authorities and aid agency staff have been held in London on this subject, addressed either by the Minister for Overseas
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Development, the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, or by the new Shadow Overseas Development Minister, Clare Short.
The British Council, through its Central Bureau, the BBC through BBC Education and the DfEE itself are also interested parties, although I wish they had more opportunities to demonstrate it. There is a strictly educational reason for this interest. Development education is an ideal vehicle for the SMSC (the spiritual, moral, social and cultural) development of pupils which is already a clear requirement of the curriculum. The study of international affairs, human rights, social justice, conflict resolution and citizenship all present immediate examples of good and evil in the world today. Of course, I accept, following yesterday's important debate of the noble Earl, Lord Longford, on moral education, that knowledge of the Gospels, and the story of the Good Samaritan in particular, may seem sufficient. But such is today's outpouring of international news that children today need more interpretation of world events which may not be available to them at home. Such is the cultural diversity within this country, and the expertise within the aid agencies, that we already have the resources with which to inform and guide this interpretation.
The recent initiatives of Frances Lawrence, the report of the values forum of the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority and Nick Tate's proposal to introduce "critical thinking" on moral values, all fit in with the need to bring development education into the mainstream of educational inspection and assessment.
I do not under-estimate the problems. One has been of definition—the ability of Ofsted to measure performance in development education. The difficulty here is not lack of interest, but priorities. The inspectors' workload is enormous, and they are now being asked to refine their reporting and keep to the main issues. They cannot be expected to know how much development education is already going on in schools, unless the schools themselves inform them.
However, there are encouraging signs that inspectors do like to demonstrate the kinds of initiative which go with global perspectives. Perhaps I may give your Lordships one example. A west country school recently impressed the inspectors with a Caribbean theme which included a visit to Brixton. It was the first time that those children had had any direct experience of another culture. Many teachers have their own experience of working abroad in other societies or in overseas partnerships and they can use these in many contexts in the school.
Money, of course, comes into it—for materials, teacher training and manpower. The Overseas Development Administration believes that development education is important, not least to advertise the UK's aid programme and the ODA's own services to schools. But it cannot, as an agency for aid, spend a very high proportion of its reduced budget in the UK. The European Union, to its great credit, has taken up a lot of the slack and has directly assisted a lot of regional initiatives to help teachers. The aid agencies do a lot, though they have had to cut back many of their programmes in the past two years.

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The Labour Party promises to do more through a development education council. I believe that the DIEE, in its various disguises, is well disposed to development education. It would be comforting to hear the Minister confirm that in his reply. A lot of progress has, for example, been made in the area of environmental education.
In summary, I believe that schools, informed by the non-governmental organisations and their local communities, have shown the potential to develop materials and to deliver education on many international issues which could be more widely shared at various levels of education. This Government still have an opportunity to assist that process in the next curricular review if they really believe in it. The evidence is that schools are now taking it on, but acceptance often depends on the ingenuity of teachers rather than the system, which can sometimes appear to work against them and against diversity in education.
I look forward to hearing the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, on this subject as we have worked together. I am sure that she shares many of the opinions I have expressed.
5.20 p.m.
Baroness Young: My Lords, I, too, wish to start by thanking my noble friend Lady Perry for introducing this debate today. She has chosen a most important subject. I believe that education is top of the political agenda in this country. I begin my remarks by referring to a matter which she mentioned; namely, the completely untrue belief held by some that much of the education system is in a state of collapse. I pay tribute to the overwhelming majority of teachers who do a good job in our schools, often in difficult circumstances, and who deserve our support.
It will no doubt be much to the surprise of the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, when I say how much I enjoyed his speech. Of course, I always enjoy his speeches. First, I love his Welsh accent which does us all so much good and carries us along. One sometimes wishes he would put his words into verse. I must certainly look at the version of the works of Shakespeare which he edited so that I, too, can mention a few quotes the next time I speak. I particularly enjoyed his speech this afternoon because it is so unusual to hear the ideas of "old" Labour. I began to wonder whether I was hearing him correctly. The noble Lord was in effect using the argument that because everyone cannot have choice, no one should have any choice. He should speak to one or two of his colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench—I would not dream of naming names—who do not seem to take quite the same view of that matter. They put choice in education top of their agenda. In effect the noble Lord was saying—this was believed just two years ago—that there was no more need to choose where to send one's child to be educated than to choose where to post a letter.
I think that choice is important. One may make a joke of it, but it is a serious matter. Its importance for parents and pupils cannot be over-emphasised. Choice has raised standards and it is raising standards. However, as
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my noble friend quite rightly said, that takes a long time. It has been a case of choice backed by information. I do not think any government have ever provided parents with as much information about schools as have the present Government. I recall that when I was an education Minister the first Bill that we put through in 1980 required information to be given to parents about schools and required schools to publish information about themselves. They are now required to publish information about their curriculum, their examinations, their pastoral care and other matters because if one is to exercise choice it must be informed choice. I believe that one of the reasons that we now have this welcome figure—I am sure we are all agreed on that—of 71 per cent. of the school population staying on beyond the compulsory leaving age is that there is such a wide variety of schools for pupils to attend. My noble friend Lady Perry touched on that matter.
As regards grant-maintained schools, there are now over 1,000 educating some 600,000 pupils. The number would be considerably higher if so many schools had not been discouraged from adopting grant-maintained status at the ballot stage by those who should know better. There are 15 city technology colleges and 30 language colleges. There are 151 technology colleges. The results are available for all to see. Ofsted's annual report produced earlier this year showed that just over 900 secondary schools were inspected. Over 20 per cent. of those were grant maintained, but of the 32 that were identified as outstandingly successful schools, 13, or 41 per cent., were grant maintained. In the list of 70 good and improving schools, 31 per cent. were grant maintained. The fact that those results have been achieved is a measure of the success and the help that is being given to pupils. I wish to emphasise how important it is to have GNVQs alongside A levels. It is extremely important that we should achieve the highest possible standards in vocational education.
In the time that remains to me I wish to touch on what I consider to be an important aspect of the diversity that we have given to parents and pupils; namely, the assisted places scheme. That scheme is popular with parents and with pupils. I am pleased that it is to be extended in the new education Bill to come before Parliament. The assisted places scheme provides a much wider choice. In 1991–26, 42 per cent. of all free places were given to families whose gross incomes were less than some £9,500 a year. Some 60 per cent. of the places were allocated to pupils from families whose incomes were less than £13,000 a year.
Pupils in assisted places schemes have done extraordinarily well in public examinations. In 1995 the pass rate of assisted places pupils in public examinations was over 94 per cent. at both GCSE and A level, which is better than that achieved in independent schools generally, or indeed in maintained schools. Some 51 per cent. of assisted places pupils achieved either an A or a B grade at A level, and 77 per cent. achieved either an A or a B grade at GCSE level. Some 90 per cent. went on to higher education. Some research has been produced recently on the advantages of an assisted places scheme. That research shows that assisted places pupils were entered for significantly more A and

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AS levels than their counterparts in the maintained sector. As measured in the annual performance tables published by the DfEE, the overall benefit for assisted places pupils was an average of between 3.2 and 6.2 points. When one translates that into grades, one finds that the overall advantage for assisted places pupils amounted to between one-and-a-half and three A level grades over all subjects taken. It is well known that for many sixth formers two or three grades at A level constitute the difference between acceptance and rejection for a popular course at one of the more sought after universities. That is quite a remarkable achievement.
I am quite certain that someone will say, "Ah, but of course it costs so much more to provide an assisted place than one in a maintained school". However, that is not the case. The average net cost to the state of an assisted places pupil in 1991–26 was £3,700. The standard spending assessment for local education authorities for pupils under the age of 16 in secondary schools is £2,600, and for those over the age of 16—that is, those in the sixth form—it is £3,600. The comparison of costs is not exact as maintained school pupil costs do not include either capital costs or administrative costs, whereas in the case of independent schools those costs are included. When one takes that factor into account, there is barely any difference at all between the cost of an assisted places pupil and the cost of a pupil in a maintained secondary school. That is relevant to the important debate about the amount of money which might be saved if the assisted places scheme were ended. My figures show that at the end of the day no money would be saved by that course of action, and the only people who would suffer would be the children themselves. It is also claimed that the assisted places scheme results in the brightest pupils being "creamed off' and leaving the maintained system. In fact only 1 per cent. of the pupils in any age group are assisted places pupils. Therefore the argument hardly stands up to analysis. But even if it were true, one has to ask whether it is right to sacrifice the child for the sake of the school. I think that it is not. The scheme has given to many pupils a benefit which otherwise they would never have had. It not only benefits the pupils but the country as a whole when those pupils are qualified.
I believe that it is a remarkable scheme. I am glad that it will be extended. I wish that it could be further extended because it is a scheme that many parents want. The scheme is for the benefit of pupils and not of schools.
It is very sad that the one certain pledge of the Labour Party for the next election is that it would phase out the scheme, but such a course would just damage the opportunities for many pupils. I am sorry that the Liberal Democrats are so uncertain about the issue. So far as I can see—I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Walliswood, will correct me if I am wrong—the Liberal Democrats have said that they will end the scheme and replace it with something from central or local government. However, as I have seen no
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details I do not know what they would do. It would be helpful if the noble Baroness would explain their position to us.
This is one of the most important aspects of the argument about diversity. However, I do not refer only to assisted places. I wish to speak in some detail; this is a matter of important public policy. The assisted places scheme was introduced because the last Labour Government removed the direct grant from a number of the best schools in the country—schools that were the backbone providers of scientists in this country. In removing that grant, ironically, at a stroke, the Labour Government managed to create more independent schools than any other government. I am sure that that was not intended, but it was what occurred. The assisted places scheme was brought in to make up for that loss.
I wish to commend what the Government have done. I hope that the scheme will be increased for the benefit of all.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, before the noble Baroness sits down, will she accept from me that I have not been so flattered since I cannot remember when. However, to describe me as old Labour is a most serious accusation. I am new to the point of being scarcely conceived. Will the noble Baroness do me the honour of reading carefully tomorrow what I said in the Official Report; and, when we next meet, will she show me where I said that because all cannot have choice no one should have choice? I prepared my speech very carefully. I read every word; I did not improvise at all; and I never said that.
Baroness Young: My Lords, I do not wish in any way to quarrel with the noble Lord. I shall certainly read his speech carefully.
5.32 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, choice and diversity in education is of great importance, as has already been proclaimed by my noble friends Lady Perry of Southwark and Lady Young, but with far greater authority and expertise than is at my disposal. I do not know the difference between new and old Labour so I shall not try to entertain any such suggestion. I regard the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, as a great expert on educational matters and as having a fair-minded approach. To be perfectly fair to the noble Lord, I have to say that I did not really understand what he said. I shall have to read his speech. Although I read philosophy at Heidelberg before the war, I still cannot come to grips with what he said. Is the value of choice when set against the evils of enforced unanimity greater or less? I do not ask for a reply. That is how I shall seek to approach the problem if the noble Lord will try to understand and forgive me.
However, I think that the noble Lord will agree that choice and diversity are also of importance to those in the murky backwaters away from the mainstream, some with a high IQ rating, who have serious learning difficulties either unrecognised or in want of appropriate remedial treatment.

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At the outset perhaps I may thank my noble friend Lady Perry of Southwark for introducing this debate, which affords an opportunity to consider this aspect of their choice. In that context, my noble friend Lady Perry referred to children with SEN in the context of choice of school, choice of subject, vocational and academic, and in particular for the 15 to 19 year-olds. My noble friend also said that many things were not right in the education system. I lead on from there in this context. The concern is for those and their families for whom there can be no realistic choice in any regime of diversity unless innate frustrations engendering indiscipline are alleviated; and until the barriers to learning have been recognised and broken down. Only then will a potential aptitude on which any informed choice may be made become apparent. Surely choice and diversity assume the touchstone, "each child according to his potential aptitude". On that no doubt the Minister might well agree without reservation.
If the bedrock of the educational system is that it is able to contain indiscipline and truancy, and to encourage good behaviour, so be it. But proposals to detain pupils, to exclude pupils or for compulsory home school agreements, would have no relevant or remedial effect on those in want of treatment for serious learning difficulties.
It is well established that disruptive and violent behaviour is often caused by dyslexia unrecognised or untreated. There is a critical shortage of speech therapists. There is no obligation upon the governors to appoint an SEN co-ordinator with any specialist training.
A review by way of clarification is warranted not only to define the respective legal, financial and specialist staffing obligations of schools and of the LEA but also to identify funding arrangements as to requisite provision for children with SEN. Such matters do not fall within the limited intendment of the Education (Special Educational Needs) Bill due to be read for a second time this evening. But there is much hidden, unknown, unused, latent potential aptitude which inhibits rational choice at all events during those crucial formative years, say, from about five or six to 19 years.
Perhaps my noble friend the Minister may care to look into this. I ask him to be good enough to do so, and to leave a letter in the Library. That would be a gesture of good will on behalf of a Government that I support and shall continue to support which would be much appreciated.
5.39 p.m.
Baroness Platt of Writtle: My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to my noble friend Lady Perry for the subject of this debate. I join in her tribute, and the tribute by my noble friend Lady Young, to our many good schools and teachers. There is no doubt in my mind of the need for diversity in the provision of education in schools and colleges in order to provide for the immense variety of children's needs so as to take full account of the range of their talents and therefore also to give their parents the freedom to exercise choice.
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I welcome the adoption by the Government of a national curriculum, so that when families move house their children can still progress steadily through a familiar curriculum, which also ensures that all children will build their future education on a common base, including the basic needs of good English; efficient numeracy; familiarity with science and technology; modern languages; history; geography; art; music; PE; and, last but by no means least, religious education.
As children grow older if they are well taught their talents begin to blossom. I am very much in favour of setting by subject rather than streaming, so that high abilities can be stretched and encouraged and remedial work can be given to those who are struggling with a particular subject. That education needs to be broad-based if young people are to be well prepared for their lives, especially their working lives in the 21st century.
Recently the Parliamentary Scientific Committee, which includes Members from both Houses, industrialists and academics, held a seminar on "Competitiveness and Success in British Industry". It emphasised the need for manufacturing industry to attract enough of our brightest and best youngsters and the need to set industry in its true position, reflecting wealth creation, betterment of quality of life and exciting career opportunities. The committee emphasised the need for more partnership between schools and industry and commerce, so as to give children imaginative work experience on which to base their later choice of career. That is happening, but needs to take place in every school.
Careers guidance is very important. Careers staff need to have successful work experience themselves outside the teaching profession if they are to be able to advise children in an informed and realistic way. The report of the Parliamentary Scientific Committee recommends that,
"it should be a requirement that teachers with careers advice responsibilities have had at least a short spell of structured working in industry".
The Government, in their new education Bill, lay emphasis on the importance of careers advice. I hope that they will include that requirement in the careers advice section of the new Bill for all careers teachers and advisers. As my noble friend Lady Perry said, poor careers advice through lack of knowledge can be counter-productive.
There are many reports of a shortage of skilled engineers, especially in the North-East, where there is much inward investment in manufacturing industry. Noble Lords will not be surprised that an engineer refers to this important engineering field. I hope, too, that the Government will continue the "top flight" bursary scheme, which attracts able young people into the engineering profession. The Neighbourhood Engineers scheme and the Women into Science and Engineering campaign, set up by the Engineering Council, provide important adjuncts to the curriculum in this important field. As engineering is not a school subject and therefore very few teachers, if any, will have first-hand experience, it is a very important matter. Successful and interested parents who are working in the field

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themselves can help children to make informed choices by encouraging their firms to set up co-operative schemes with their children's schools so that the children can experience the excitement and challenge of solving realistic industrial and commercial engineering problems. Young Enterprise and the Young Engineer for Britain competition encourage interesting, unusual and essential talents in children which will stand them in excellent stead when they leave school and lead to jobs where there are clear skills shortages.
Charitable work in schools on behalf of the less advantaged, and participation in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme, with its accent on service, give young people a marvellous outward-looking attitude towards other people, which, again, is so vital to future successful careers. It is also important in its own right, and many young people in my experience carry out excellent service to other people. I wish that it were given more publicity.
Selective schools taking a small proportion of the ability range, as in Essex, do of course demonstrate how their students can achieve outstanding success in their specialist subjects. They can work at a fast pace and approach the boundaries of those subjects so that they are well prepared for demanding university courses and learn to work hard themselves on an individual basis in their future careers.
At the same time, local comprehensives can be very successful in sending young people on to university and other further education. The publication of results has encouraged greater success in those schools. Now, about 30 per cent. of the age group proceed with their education beyond school. I was interested to hear my noble friend Lady Denton say this afternoon that in Northern Ireland the figure is 41 per cent.
The assisted places scheme can give inner-city children from families living on low incomes the opportunity to take up places in independent schools. That is a precious freedom of choice for those parents. Inner-city parents can otherwise feel that they have little choice by which to offer their children the upward chances that they so badly want.
Grant-maintained schools are developing, through the initiative of their very locally oriented governing bodies, very interesting specialisms for their schools: technology; drama; music; perhaps single-sex groups in maths and science; modern European languages and exchanges with schools abroad. I refer to schools near home, in Essex, and there are many more examples elsewhere.
Parents clearly appreciate those kinds of choices, which they can take up to match their children's special abilities. If parents choose a school, they back it; and co-operation between teachers and parents is probably the best guarantee of success for their children, as my noble friend Lady Perry also emphasised. The child senses that co-operation, is aware of the joint aims of school and home and therefore knows where efforts should be applied to achieve those aims. New Clause 30 in the education Bill, proposing home-school
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partnership agreements, is an excellent idea. I wish it well. I am sure that it will be a great help to better school morale.
Another important choice comes at 16. Many middle ability children do not feel sufficiently valued in school. They will be vital to our prosperity as a nation in the future and can be very successful in non-academic ways with which schoolteachers may not sympathise or which they may find difficult to encourage. I am greatly in favour of those young people being given a free choice and actively encouraged to enter local colleges of further education at 16. The courses provided will be very much more practical and vocational, whether in business studies, retailing, design and technology or engineering. The choice is legion, especially since the colleges have become independent. The young people perhaps succeed in initial City and Guilds and NVQ courses, and realise for the first time their latent abilities and capacity for success in new fields of which they have not previously been aware. A fresh start becomes a successful career path for the future.
Young people are succeeding in many new fields which they would never have attempted before. Life-long learning is available locally in both further and higher education if the opportunities are grasped. Freedom of choice and diversity of provision, particularly in close co-operation with local employers and TECs, can open doors for young people that were firmly shut in days gone by. Long may those opportunities be available under the present Government.
5.49 p.m.
Lord Diamond: My Lords, the fact that I shall detain your Lordships for a very short time means that I have plenty of time in which to offer my deepest apologies for the fact that I was not in my place to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, open the debate. I was informed only this morning that the first debate would be the longer one and the second debate the shorter and therefore I was late, for which I repeat my apology.
Those like myself who might
be described as "hexameter friendly"
Notice with pleasure the fact
that the "choice and diversity" title
Fits so well with the rules
which govern this classical metre.
Classical too is the theme
on which I wish to address you.
Most of us will, I am sure,
accept that a broad education
Should be provided for all,
irrespective of family income.
Only will those so endowed
live out their lives to the fullest.
But—and there's always a "but"—
"broad" does have so many meanings.
Mine is the one which includes
some study of Greek and of Latin.
That's why I chance my arm
in adopting the metre of Virgil;
Thus underlining my case
for reversing the prevalent practice.

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Too few schools now give
their pupils a grounding in Classics;
Nor does the curriculum
find space for classical culture.
Hence are so many denied
the true meaning of everyday English.
Everyone here knows well
that today is Mercurii day.
Scores of our words every day
are of Latin or Greek derivation.
So too abroad do we find
most words have Classical sources,
Making the Englishman's taskߞ
if he's also a Classical studentߞ
That much lighter, of course,
as he tackles the foreigner's language.
Now most students findߞ
so lots of research has establishedߞ
Learning time is reduced
for those with a grounding in Classics,
No matter what is required
to be learnt nor what is the problem.
Later in life they find
that their understanding has deepened.
Then are they fully aware
of the roots of their civilisation.
Schools serve needs of today,
forgetting the many tomorrows.
Long-term gain can be lost
through premature specialisation.
Great enlightenment comes
with the study of Rome and of Athens:
Clear as a bell is the mind
which has conquered irregular verbs and
Nouns. But we've seen what perhaps
I could call a decline in declension.
Hence I propose, my Lords,
a return to the teaching of Classics.
5.53 p.m.
Baroness Brigstocke: My Lords, I should like to add my thanks to my noble friend Baroness Perry for initiating this valuable debate. As a former Classics scholar (though it is so long ago that I have forgotten my verbs) I should like to say how much I appreciated the words of the noble Lord, Lord Diamond.
I shall concentrate on secondary schools. I speak from a diverse background in education, having taught for seven years in what was at the time a voluntary-aided grammar school in London, and then for two years in an independent school in Washington DC in the United States, before becoming a headmistress, first of Francis Holland School in Clarence Gate and then, as High Mistress, of St. Paul's Girls' School in London, totalling 25 years as a school head. For the past three years I have been Chairman of Governors of Landau Forte College in inner-city Derby, one of the 15 CTCs in the country which have already been mentioned.
As a founder trustee of the Technology Colleges Trust, together with another Member of your Lordships' House, the noble Lord, Lord Quirk (who is sorry that he cannot take part in the debate today), I am enormously proud of the stimulating learning environment being
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provided by the city technology colleges, most of them in deprived areas, which cater for students aged 11 to 19 from the full range of abilities and backgrounds, making the greatest possible use of contemporary technologies, establishing partnerships with local industry and piloting some valuable innovative schemes.
One of the most valuable innovations is that students and staff in CTCs have a longer school day and year than those in most state-maintained schools in the United Kingdom. There are 25 hours per week of formal lessons, plus at least six hours of enrichment activities. In addition, the CTCs are open for 200 days a year.
A second innovation is that several CTCs now operate a five-term year, which consists of five eight-week terms, separated by four breaks of two weeks and a four-week summer holiday. This is a unique break with the normal European tradition of a three-term academic year, and the benefits are immense.
Landau Forte College, by the way, has always provided the opportunity for post-16 year-olds to take A-levels and GNVQs side by side. Another CTC, Kingshurst, prepares its post-16 year-old students for the international baccalaureate.
The 15 CTCs have now spawned a whole new range of 151 technology colleges plus 30 language colleges. I understand that it is the Government's intention to have more than 200 of these specialist colleges in place by the end of the year. They are all successful schools which have each inspired sponsors, notably local businessmen, to donate £100,000 for the enhancement of the curriculum in technology, mathematics and science, thus building on the pioneering experience of the original CTCs.
Perhaps I may, by the way, tell the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, that Landau Forte College has recently started an optional class in Latin.
However, CTCs, technology colleges and specialist language colleges are not the only schools doing well these days. Last week I sat on an educational panel for a distinguished charitable foundation, which gave me and my fellow panellists an opportunity to learn about the truly broad and diverse group of secondary schools which were applying for grants to improve their buildings or to provide extra equipment. Some of them were independent but a large number were grant-maintained schools. It would be invidious to give names, but I should like to describe two particularly impressive schools. I have not visited them myself, but I quote from the very full and comprehensive reports of the panellists who had visited them.
The first school is on a split site, the larger part having been built in the mid-1970s on a very cramped inner-city site with only the most limited outdoor space, the other part having been built in the 1890s, about 10 minutes' walk away across a busy road. The school became grant maintained in 1989 after bitter battles with politicians and some local councillors. Fortunately, the local education authority is now more relaxed. Today, the school has over 1,100 pupils aged 11 to 19ߞboys and girls in approximately even numbers. The entry is almost all from the immediately local area with a radius of no more than about 2 miles and there is no academic

981
selection. In terms of ability, the intake is slewed to the lower end and few have a reading age as good as average on admission. The surrounding area can be described bleakly as "inner city" with a patchwork of mean streets and many signs of social and economic deprivation. There are many boarded properties and much local crime. The school appears as an oasis of calm and good order in a threatening area of violence. Many of the parents are unemployed and for many families English is not the first language as there is an overwhelming majority of pupils from ethnic minorities. Yet such is the fine atmosphere that all the pupils seem to get on well with each other and there are few problems of religious origin. It is a truly splendid example of good English secondary education operating in a community where many of the parents themselves have had little formal education.
The other school, which is seeking technology college status, is in an equally deprived inner city area. Although it has over 100 statemented students and another 30 pupils with learning difficulties, the morale is high, the grounds and school plant are well maintained, the pupils wear uniform and there is a very positive attitude among students and teachers, giving an overall impression of good behaviour and confidence.
In my remarks today I have concentrated on the many hopeful signs of improving standards and confidence in individual secondary schools in different parts of the country. We still have far to go but the best way to restore our school education system to its former glory and our teachers to their former position of prestige and respect is to adopt best education practice, praising effort and achievement while encouraging teachers, governors and parents to have the highest aspirations for all the children in their care. And the children, of course, need to learn to concentrate, to work hard, to control their behaviour, to think of others and, above all, to think.
6.3 p.m.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, on my way here this morning through Great Smith Street, I passed a familiar office building, on the front of which was blazoned the letters DEE. At first, I thought those were the entry requirements for one of the new universities, but I understand that it is the current acronym for the department about which the noble Lord, Lord Henley, no doubt will tell us in his winding up speech. I may say that he has been saved a good deal of trouble by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, who gave us an admirable account of what has been done in the way of improving and increasing the variety available in our education system. I only regret that neither the noble Baroness nor any other speaker mentioned one important aspect of diversity; namely, single sex schools, since it is my opinion that, while my co-education may be good for some, single sex schools have clearly been shown to be very good for others.
We are no doubt embarking on a period in which education, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said, is likely to be a staple of our debates. It is reported, indeed, that the Member of Parliament for Hartlepool,
982
Mr.Peter Mandelson, the acolyte of President Clinton, was asked by Mr. Tony Blair what the theme of the Labour Party should be in the coming election and he replied, "Education, education, education—stoopid!" That seems to me to be curious advice. One would have thought that an Opposition party would select some area in which central government had complete control—finance or social security, for example—and would endeavour to find weaknesses which, if it came into office, it could remedy. But to choose education is to choose the one area of public activity in which the Conservatives have not been in control. It has been almost wholly controlled by local authorities, which in turn have been ruled by Labour Party, or in some cases nowadays Liberal Democrat, majorities. On education, as in other matters, I find the distinction rather difficult to draw.
It is not merely a question of political control which has enabled local authorities to resist in turn most of the changes that the Government have sought to make in order to improve the education system—resistance to the establishment of grant-maintained schools, city technology colleges and so forth. But it is not simply a political question. The other matter that we have to face, if we look back over the past couple of decades, is the complete symbiosis between the Labour Party and part of the educational establishment. For instance, the Institute of Education of the University of London, which has done about the same amount of damage to British education as Columbia Teachers' College did to American education in the 1920s and 1930s, has constantly been associated, and still is, with the Labour Party. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, whose presence this afternoon would have been welcome, was an ornament of that institute at one time.
I say that because, whatever may be done about a variety of schools, methods of selection, choice or organisation, fundamentally what makes a difference and in the long term will make a difference is the quality of the teaching—the dedication need not be questioned; in question is the quality—the expertise and the approach which teachers have to their task. I am very moved by the testimony of the noble Baronesses who preceded me to the work that has been done and the improvements that are being made in schools in various places under very different circumstances. But we must not let ourselves be carried away into a feeling that everything is all right.
We still have to face the fact that many recent surveys show that in important respects, particularly in the early years of education, in regard to both numeracy and literacy, our pupils by and large do not measure up to their counterparts in a number of other industrial advanced countries with which we are in economic as well as cultural competition. Until one sees a way through that, until one can say that a British child of nine, 10 or 11 has reached the same level of competence in mathematics—particularly in mental arithmetic—and in English—particularly in the ability to communicate—we cannot regard ourselves as being more than at the beginning of a process of improvement. While I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, that

983
we should have Latin and Greek everywhere if we could, let us start with reading, writing and arithmetic everywhere when one can.
It seems to me that there must have been something wrong with the general attitude towards that basic task to explain why it has not been performed satisfactorily. In retrospect, some of the mistakes are obvious. For example, the use of pocket calculators make it unnecessary for children to learn the basic elements of mental arithmetic. There has been an opposition to learning by heart—what is called "rote learning" by fashionable educators—which has made the English language less valuable to children and less valued by them. We can see therefore in retrospect what has been wrong, but I do not believe that we have yet grasped what we are still doing wrong.
So far as I know the only contribution which the Leader of the Labour Party made to the education debate was the expression of the desire to have more computers in schools—no doubt ultimately to connect them up to the Internet; in other words, to provide more ways by which children can avoid the genuine tasks of learning the elements.
From my point of view, looking back, I suggest that what a child needs in a school is, first—if the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris had said a little more about this I would have agreed with him—a healthy and safe physical environment. Secondly, the child needs pen and ink and access to books. That, in the early stages is all. What does the teacher need? The teacher needs a blackboard, chalk and—though I know the noble Lord, Lord Morris, will not agree with me—occasionally, the cane.
We must therefore seek to reinsert into the school system quite simple things, quite apart from the importance of variety and choice, which become more important as children are differentiated by their talents and possibilities. The trouble is that this debate will only take place within the Conservative Party. The Labour Party shows itself to be uninterested.
In preparation for this debate I read the Second Reading debate on the Education Bill in another place yesterday afternoon. It was depressing. There were many speakers from the Opposition Benches, nearly all of whom claimed to have been teachers of one kind or another and many of whom wore as a badge of pride the fact that they failed the 11-plus—that suggests the examiners knew what they were doing. None of them had anything substantial to say other than to repeat the mantra "Comprehensive education; the same for every child; nothing else is of the slightest importance".
As long as that is the case, we will not have a great debate. It is a pity, because this has happened before. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Callaghan, is not in his place. I remember, as do other noble Lords, no doubt, when he called for a great national debate in 1976 or 1977. He was so thoroughly sat upon by the then Shirley Williams that he was never allowed to do what he set out to do. It would be good to have a national debate and it would be good if it were not confined to a single political party. I hope this afternoon that we have done a little—particularly my noble friend Lady Perry—to set us off on the right track.
6.15 p.m.
Baroness Cox: My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble friend on the characteristically lucid and comprehensive way in which she introduced this fundamentally important topic.
I wish to concentrate on the principles underlying choice and diversity; to commend the Government for achievements to date in putting those principles into practice; and to welcome further measures proposed in the Bill now in another place. For too long freedom of choice has often been the prerogative of those who can afford to pay for independent education or to move to areas with good schools. Those unable to exercise those options had to accept the education on their doorstep, even if they were unhappy with its quality. I must emphasise however, that there are many good state schools and excellent, dedicated teachers. But there is now an abundance of research which also shows too many schools providing inadequate education resulting in serious under-achievement.
For example, a census of all LEAs shows that, on average, within every LEA, 11 year-old pupils at the top achieving primary schools are nearly four years ahead in English and five-and-a-half years ahead in maths compared with those in the lowest achieving primary schools, even in similar catchment areas. Reports from Ofsted also show too many schools seriously failing the children in their care. There is therefore a need to achieve accountability and to ensure that all children receive the best possible education. Accountability can best be ensured through maximising diversity and choice, hence the importance of choice. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, is not here to hear that response to his belittling of the importance of choice.
I wish to focus on two aspects of policies now being proposed to promote freedom of choice and diversity of provision; first, measures to strengthen grant-maintained (GM) schools by increasing their freedom to develop in ways which they believe will be in the best interests of their pupils and the communities they serve; and, secondly, measures to help to raise standards in schools, including the introduction of baseline testing for children entering primary schools. I shall also refer briefly to the importance of the requirement for all schools to publish information, including details of examination and test results—a point rightly emphasised by my noble friend Lady Perry.
GM schools feature prominently in the provisions of the Bill now under consideration, and rightly so. They are an enormous success. An independent survey by Research International in July this year found, inter alia, that since being freed from LEA control, in grant-maintained schools one-third have increased staffing levels by more than 10 per cent. and one in 10 by more than 25 per cent.; 82 per cent. have increased spending on books and teaching equipment; 85 per cent. have increased special needs provision (47 per cent. to a great extent); 62 per cent. have offered new subjects; 60 per cent. have improved their position in performance tables.; 83 per cent. have spent more on non-teaching staff; 67 per cent. have spent more on

985
teaching staff; 42 per cent. have lowered their pupil-teacher ratio; and 76 per cent. reported an improvement in staff morale.
Those results justify the conclusions drawn by Sir Robert Balchin, chairman of the Grant Maintained Schools Foundation. He said,
"This survey shows that children are given better educational facilities if they attend a GM school instead of an LEA school, especially if they have special needs. GM schools employ more teachers than LEA schools do. And those teachers receive better support, better development of their careers and are happier at work in GM schools than in LEA schools".
He continued,
"The weight of evidence for these conclusions is now overwhelming and places a question mark over the future of LEAs as presently constituted … On every single measure, the GM sector proves again and again that schools can outperform LEA bureaucracies. It is time for the dead hand of bureaucracy to be removed from state school management once and for all".
These findings also provide strong evidence to underpin those proposals in the current Bill relating to the inspection of LEAs and measures to increase their accountability for the quality of service they provide for their schools.
I now turn to the role of diversity and choice. As I have already emphasised, there is abundant evidence of serious problems with regard to educational standards in much of the state sector. There is an alarming increase in the numbers of children aged seven who cannot read, despite already having spent two or three years in school; there is an even more alarming increase in the numbers of pupils entering secondary education who are functionally illiterate and enumerate; Ofsted reports highlight inadequate teaching in far too many schools; and—a point made by my noble friend Lord Beloff—international comparison shows that British children are under-achieving compared with children from other countries, in ways which we cannot afford as a nation if we are to hold our own in the international arena.
In addition to research evidence, I give one example from personal experience, as sometimes a story can be more telling than statistical data. I refer to an experience from the war zone of Nagorno-Karabakh, that embattled, besieged Armenian enclave where 150,000 Armenians have been fighting a bitter war for the right to live in their own land. Last winter, I took a parcel of gifts from a primary school in Streatham to a class of 12 year-olds in a bombed-out school in the capital city of Stepanakert. The school, like every other school, had no windows, no electricity, no light or heating. In temperatures of minus 10 degrees, the pupils sat wrapped in coats, mufflers, hats and gloves. Within one hour of receiving the gifts from the British school, each 12 year-old Armenian pupil had written, with no help from their teacher, a personal letter to one of the British pupils. Those letters were written in flawless English. Each one of those Karabakhi children speaks and writes Armenian, with its unique script; they each speak and write Russian, a second language and a second script; English is their third language and their third script, but their spelling and grammar were better than many 12 year-old English pupils.
986
I shall give but two brief examples:
"Our capital city, Stepanakert, used to be a beautiful"—
spelt correctly—
"city, but it has been spoilt by bombing. But I do not want to write about sad things; I want to write about happy things".
Another 12 year-old pupil wrote:
"I like to read foreign"—
spelt correctly—
"authors, Alexander Dumas, George Sands, Mark Twain".
How many British 12 year-olds would be capable of writing such letters, even in English, let alone a third language and a third script? How much is this a measure of our failure as a nation to enable them to achieve their potential?
It is against a background of under-achievement that I believe we should welcome all efforts to promote better education for all our children. In primary schools, we should be encouraging every measure to ensure that all young children are assessed from the beginning of their education, and regularly thereafter, to ensure that each child is realising his or her full potential. For those who oppose testing for primary school children—there are many of them, especially from the party opposite—I suggest that their opposition is damaging and groundless: damaging, because unless teachers and parents know how children are progressing, they cannot help them effectively; and groundless, because contrary to all the scaremongering about allegations of "stress" created by testing young children, recent research shows that children enjoy tests. They find them interesting and they appreciate the opportunities of quietness and concentration which they provide.
Finally, I touch briefly on the publication of test results, another issue which has created a great hullabaloo. The advantages of choice and diversity can only be effective if relevant information is available to parents and the public to inform choice and to evaluate the quality of education being provided by different schools and different types of school. Information on school and pupil performance, including test results at key stages 1 and 2, set within whatever context is appropriate, is essential for accountability and the responsible provision of education. I therefore ask my noble friend if he will say when the Government will publish performance tables for all schools, giving key stage 1 test results in reading and maths, as they originally intended to do.
I conclude by commending the Government on the proposals in the new Bill, which will do much to enhance diversity and choice in our education system, diversity and choice which have been stifled by ideological commitments and bureaucratic self-interests for far too long. The time is ripe to build on past achievements and to take education forward in ways which will give all parents and young people the maximum freedom to choose the best education available for each and every child and student. Choice cannot continue as a prerogative of the relatively well-off; it must also be available for all those who have so far been denied it: those whom we as a nation have failed; those trapped in inner cities, with no option but to attend local schools, far too many of which have

987
failed to enable the children to realise their potential. We must move forward to try to achieve high quality provision, diversity to respond to different aspirations and needs, and the genuine choice which is the hallmark of a free and caring society.
6.26 p.m.
Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, on giving us the opportunity to debate such an important subject. Disraeli said:
"Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends".
Those are still appropriate words today.
As the father of six children, aged from 22 down to four, I have experienced an enormous amount of choice and diversity in their education, particularly as they range from a university graduate to a child with special educational needs. I obviously take a close interest in the subject of special educational needs and I was most interested in what my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway said on the subject earlier. I warmly welcome the recent announcement of £10 million funding under the new schools access initiative. This will enable almost 800 mainstream schools to make better provision for disabled pupils. The code of practice on special educational needs has been widely welcomed. Ofsted published in April a report on the code's first year, drawing attention to improvements in many schools.
I have been enormously impressed by the facilities provided by my own county council and local NHS trust. However, there is a need to set up a multi-agency system to speed up decisions, with one source of funding. In so many special needs cases, there is no clear line as to who is responsible financially. Is it education; is it health; or is it social services? At the moment they each tend to "pass the parcel", which is particularly stressful for some parents, already traumatised by facing up to the reality of a special needs child.
Currently, in order for a child to be referred for a statutory assessment, which may or may not lead to a statement of special educational needs being produced, the school has to prove that it cannot meet the child's needs within its own resources. In other words, it is in the interest of the school to highlight the child's difficulties and failures rather than successes in order to be allocated appropriate resources. I should be grateful if my noble friend the Minister could look at this problem with his colleagues in the health and social services departments. I would also welcome government leadership to enable all agencies to define much more clearly their roles and responsibilities to these children and to their families, from the first moment concerns are expressed, whether the child be pre-school or school age.
It seems to me that the whole thrust of this Government's education policy is to introduce choice and diversity. Children do have different talents, interests and needs like my diverse family, although they do have one thing in common. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Moms of Castle Morris, will be
988
interested to know that that is a taste for different and very exotic cereals at breakfast. It is difficult for a single type of school, particularly at secondary level, to serve the full range effectively. The most able need to be stretched and the least able need help to develop their particular talents.
I am particularly interested in the specialist schools programme. Specialist school status is intended to bring about a long-term change in the school, so that its specialist subject becomes solidly grounded as part of the school's identity. Specialist schools have proved popular with sponsors, parents and pupils. The 181 existing technology and language colleges provide for 180,000 pupils and have between them raised some £18 million in sponsorship. Current budgets allow for the programme to expand to 250 schools, and, because it has been so successful, I understand that the Government will be looking at expanding this further.
Parents want a good education that suits the individual talents, interests and needs of their child. They do have a choice of a different range of schools and there is now much more freedom for schools to meet parents' wishes with the ability to switch from one type of school to another, should the child's development require it.
The Government's aim is to promote a much better match between what parents want and what schools provide. The recent education reforms have given power back to parents who have exercised their right to choose by voting to take over 1,100 schools out of local authority control. That means a greater diversity, with schools specialising in particular subjects, or types of pupil, and looking at what parents actually want. They can match their child to the most appropriate school, as happens in Germany, Holland and Switzerland, where selective secondary school systems are highly regarded.
It is most parents' ambition to send their children to selective schools. This was borne out in the Association of Teachers & Lecturers' survey, carried out by the Harris Research Centre, indicating an overwhelming majority of parents in favour of selection. It is also shown by the high ratio of applicants to places. As an example, it is nearly 5:1 for the King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham against a typical ratio of 4:1 for other grammar schools. Labour is opposed to any form of selection in schools, and David Blunkett said in 1994,
"I have no truck with middle class, left-wing parents who preach one thing and send their children to another school, outside the area".
Despite this, some Labour Front Bench hypocrites send their own children to selective schools while pledging to deny this choice to the electorate.
One can sympathise with their reasons. A recent Ofsted report on schools in Labour-controlled London boroughs has revealed appalling results. Over 80 per cent. of seven year-olds and four out of ten 11 year-olds had reading ages below their actual age. Nine out of the ten worst performing authorities are Labour controlled.
There are two areas that I should very much like the Minister to consider. First, could some grammar schools offer the international baccalaureate, which is welcomed

989
by English universities? This would give parents even greater choice and opportunities for pupils to prepare for a more global style of citizenship. Secondly, can schools be encouraged to forge more links with employers, chambers of commerce and technical colleges, to develop apprenticeship schemes? Some time might be spent in either schools or colleges on courses that meet employers' requirements and other periods used gaining experience with the companies themselves.
I am much involved with the motor and motor sport industries, and, as a country, we must continue to produce enough engineers to enable companies, with their leading edge technology, to keep ahead of our competitors.
6.35 p.m.
Viscount Chelmsford: My Lords, education is not my area of expertise, but I have a considerable interest in it. My background is insurance, information technology and management. I agree wholeheartedly with my noble friend Lord Beloff, when he says that there should be more learning by tables and that the calculator is used too much. But I hope that he will agree with me that both the calculator and the computer have their place in education. It is just that they are not being used correctly in his examples.
In 1984 I was fingered, just by chance, by my company to attend a City fundraising exercise on behalf of a then unknown man named John Abbott. I do not believe that we would have gone if the Prudential had not been leading us and told us that they wanted us. John Abbott was electrifying. He told us that children should learn how to learn and that that was more important than worrying about the curriculum. Children should learn how to do things for themselves. They should learn how to make decisions. Things would change so fast in their life time that they had to be equipped to learn as adults.
He thought that computers were key to achieving change. He saw that he would be able to run schools with only 85 per cent. of the existing number of teachers when the computers were up and running. The remaining 15 per cent. would be put out into the local community to try to find out from the children what it was that was needed in the community. In addition, part of the time would be used for retraining. Meanwhile—and that is why we were there—he wanted funds for three years to obtain 15 per cent. extra teachers, which is 115 per cent. of the number of existing teachers, for his schools and computers. His project was called Education 2000. He had seven schools in the Letchworth area. Interestingly, he was mixing public sector and private sector schools together. A head teacher was drawn from the schools to run the project and there were regular meetings of teachers together with activities involving pupils and the local community.
Three years later my own company and others started funding something reasonably, but not wholly, similar in Ipswich for 12 schools, which was called the Ipswich
990
Initiative. It had support from Suffolk County Council and Suffolk Training and Enterprise Council. I quote from the latter's report in 1993:
"This active partnership between schools business and industry works to educate people for change and, besides preparing them for a technological future, promotes the skills required for a life long learning process".
That is a phrase we hear a lot these days.
One year later saw the start of a similar scheme called Coventry 2000. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry is chairman and three schools are involved. They are run by the wife of my noble friend Lord Butterworth. She is both vice-chair and co-ordinator. Coventry 2000 aims to prepare young people for the challenge of later life; a culture change in preparing students for life long learning; how to do it and how to enjoy it. How to enjoy it is a subject I shall come back to.
By pure coincidence today Lady Butterworth kindly sent me a copy of the latest school report. It reveals that an award in the form of a grant—quite a lot of money—was recently made in order to achieve multi-media centres in the three schools. Now a fourth school—it has technology college status—wishes to join the other schools as part of Coventry 2000. So the scheme is doing well.
This year an interesting development took place in Ipswich. It was decided that as the schools were now so well advanced there was no longer the need to pull out a headmaster especially to run the Ipswich Initiative. So the formal side was abandoned. The TECs were so strong in involving the community that that side was running extremely well. The companies were still producing funding for them and weekly teacher meetings were continuing.
So what have we got? Letchworth started in 1985 with seven such schools; Ipswich had 12 in 1988 and Coventry had three but now has four. I dare say that there are others I do not know about because I am not that close to the concept. Are they just a freak in the general scene of choice and diversity in education for four to 19 year-olds? That might have been the belief when they started but is less so today. The whole climate has changed.
Perhaps I may offer your Lordships one or two quotations from the top places in evidence. In its first annual report to the Commission, the EU's Information Society Forum states that the information society must become the lifelong learning society—that phrase again—that education and training must include homes, communities and organisations, and that the teaching professions need help to adapt to the changing situation so that the new opportunities can be fully exploited.
I was recently sent a copy of the speech made at the annual Lloyds-TSB forum—I was not able to attend—by Sir Geoffrey Holland KCB, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Exeter, in which he stated:
"The new technologies transform access to learning: they make it possible for the student to study at a time, place and pace of her or his choosing. They make learning student-centred and call for a redesigned role for the teacher, as the supporter of the learner, rather

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than the fount from whom all wisdom flows. They dramatically reduce the unit costs of learning and they can make learning fun and an adventure".
Here we have "fun" again.
Both those statements focus on the redesigned role of the teacher. Telecoms companies today queue up to give infrastructure to schools. Corporates can easily be persuaded to give terminal equipment, but it is what the schools do with the infrastructure and equipment that counts. I offer your Lordships a 1995 quotation from Dr. Peter Cochrane, head of advanced applications and technologies at BT Martelsham:
"In my childhood, the home was a desert and the school an oasis of learning. Now the home has the computer and is itself an oasis. It is the school that is now the desert".
Not everybody may agree with that.
What does business have to say about education? Not too long ago the RSA's report, Tomorrow's Company, was published. The best UK business talent had been working on it for a year. The report asked the following questions:
"How do we know that our current educational approach and our curriculum material are adequate to prepare people for tomorrow's business world? Do we include students, parents, employers and the wider community in our efforts to bridge the academic and vocational divide? Do we link the concept of employability with that of life-long learning? Do we reflect the need for multi-skilling, rather than for qualifications matched to particular industries?"
The answer so far must be "not in general" although a beginning has been made by schemes like Education 2000 which deliberately involve local communities, schools and teachers. The TECs are doing the same. However, quite soon I think that the answer to those questions will be "yes" as the tide is turning, and will continue to turn, towards student-centred learning, teacher support and continuous adult development for careers which require new skills training more than once in a lifetime.
Perhaps I may quote Sir Geoffrey Holland once again:
"We need to raise expectations in this Country (in the UK). We expect too little of each other".
That relates to something my noble friend Lady Cox said a moment ago. It is a devastating comment.
In reviewing the skills that need to be raised, I conclude on a sobering note. The 1996 White Paper on competitiveness refers to a skills audit that was carried out jointly by the Department for Education and Employment and the Cabinet Office. The audit tells us:
"In the UK about one fifth of adults have problems with literacy and numeracy that seriously affect their participation in the labour market. Those who fail to reach foundation level in these two basic skills are five times more likely to be registered unemployed".
I have been encouraged by much of what I have heard today about education and the movement forward. Like many people, I was depressed about the subject, so hearing of all the exciting things that are happening has been good news. On the basic problem of numeracy and literacy, however, we have a long road ahead.
6.45 p.m.
Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: My Lords, I speak today in place of my noble friend Lord Tope who is unable to be present. Noble Lords who were present
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when the noble Baroness, Lady Young, was speaking will no doubt have observed that when challenged by her on a matter of Liberal Democrat party policy I had to run for my text. I shall refer to it again later.
I find it interesting that the Motion does not say in what respects choice and diversity are important. In the course of an interesting and valuable speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, told us pretty much why she thought they were important. The noble Baroness and other speakers have claimed that choice improves quality. Unfortunately, the noble Baroness and others seemed to couple that with the idea that the maintained sector and comprehensive schools were incapable of producing quality. I entirely disagree with that claim.
I am grateful to have heard so many distinguished contributions. I simply cannot compete with the expertise of a considerable number of those who have spoken, including past Ministers, head teachers and university experts. I was particularly interested when the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, reminded us that, when judged internationally, our standards today are none too beautiful. I see that the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, is nodding. She suggested that standards were even worse than the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, had stated. I have to ask why that is the case after 17 years of single party government. Mention has been made of the literacy of seven year-olds. We must remember that we have had 15 generations of five to seven year-olds passing through our schools since the present Government came to power and rather fewer generations of five to 12 year-olds although still a considerable number. There has been a good deal of time at the disposal of the present Government to achieve something in respect of raising standards.
We on these Benches have no wish artificially to limit the variety of schools available to parents and children. Indeed, in the pre-school area we should like to see a partnership between the maintained, voluntary and private sectors to achieve a wide range of provision. We look to LEAs to provide what we call "light-touch" guidance and advice to schools rather than heavy-handed uniformity.
It is in that context that I reply to the challenge laid down by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, on the subject of assisted places. My book states—I can read because I did not go to a modern school, to follow what the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, suggested—that we would phase out the assisted places scheme but allow local education authorities, if they so wished, to set up locally determined partnership schemes such as special needs bursaries or arts and sports initiatives to support pupils at independent schools. That was stated in a far broader context than I can go into now, but it is the key response to the question that I was asked. As a parliamentary candidate I was asked that question on a number of occasions and I always said—this also appears in our document—that the object of public policy should be to ensure that all children in our country receive an education of the same quality as I received when I was at a private school. That does not mean that they all have to go to private schools. That is what the public sector should try to achieve.

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The noble Baroness, Lady Young, spoke about comparative costs. Again, I shall not go into detail, but every child on the assisted places scheme who goes to a private school will be the beneficiary—not necessarily at a cost to the public purse—of far more money being spent per pupil, because the school will be contributing to the cost of that pupil's education, than is spent on pupils in schools in the maintained sector.
Our belief is that high quality education for all pupils from three years to 19 years, and throughout life, should be our aim so that we can enable students to prepare for work and therefore contribute to the nation's competitiveness—a theme raised a couple of days ago in a different context—to enable them to be good citizens, and for the enrichment of their own quality of life. I disagree that that means, as the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, said, that all comprehensive schools need to be uniform.
Whereas the Government and most of today's speakers stressed the diversity of institutions, we stress the ability of each pupil in each school to exercise increasing choice as they grow older so that they receive the education that makes the most of their talents and corresponds to their aspirations.
As a sideline, perhaps I may say that at present not everything in the curriculum is wonderful. I agree with the comments made by the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, on the need for a greater appreciation, for example, of what goes on in the wider world. I would add to that a greater understanding and knowledge of what goes on in the EU which will be the context of everyone's lives in the future, whether they like it or not, so they may as well learn something about it. I could bore all noble Lords to death, but I will not, by saying what I believe to be wrong in the history curriculum at present.
We are committed to high quality nursery education for all three year-olds and four year-olds whose parents want it; to small classes in primary schools; to an increased professional standing for teachers through the establishment of a general teaching council, among other methods; to a post-16 provision which offers quality academic and vocational courses, or a mixture of both, to off-workplace education for all 16 year-olds to 19 year-olds in work; and, finally, the opportunity to carry forward education throughout life.
The merging of the SCAA and the NCVQ, projected in the most recent Education Bill, is welcome in that context. NVQs and GNVQs have, as far as I am aware, failed to impress most employers so far. Better standards and accreditation are essential. There may be merit in the measures contained in the same Bill to use a baseline assessment of children at five as a tool to measure the achievement of pupils and the value added offered by schools. That builds upon the work of LEAs in that field.
Overall, however, the Government seem obsessed with the structure of the maintained sector and to giving schools unjustified powers to alter the provision of education in a locality, without any democratic input, by allowing increasing amounts of selection and positive discrimination in favour of GM status. They apparently
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have also a naïve belief in the powers of the market place to deliver education as easily as fish fingers. That is my choice. Cereals were the choice of the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris. I share some of his doubts about the virtues of choice per se.
The disadvantages are that selective schools select the pupils. It is not the other way around. Secondly, the creation of an artificial market place is expensive, as witnessed by the £20 million cost of the nursery voucher scheme which has been described by Westminster City Council as a bureaucratic nightmare. I notice by the way that although the Motion speaks of education of four year-olds to 19 year-olds, not one Member of the Benches opposite mentioned nursery vouchers as giving greater choice to parents. I thought that was interesting.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, with respect, I mentioned five or six to 19 year-olds in relation to children with special educational needs. I am on these Benches, I should think.
Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: My Lords, I beg the noble Lord's pardon if I misinterpreted his speech.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I did not misinterpret it!
Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: My Lords, I obviously misheard what the noble Lord was saying, and I am sorry. The scheme has been described by Westminster City Council as a bureaucratic nightmare. I do not believe that it would have been accepted by the Government had it emerged from the European Commission.
A market place may guarantee quality for some, but it would be at the expense of others. I repeat, for human, social and economic reasons we need all our children to be well educated, not just some of them. Excellence for the few must not be bought at the cost of mediocrity or worse for the many. Surely we have learnt that lesson by now.
The changes which many noble Lords have commended and which the Government have put forward seem to be aimed at reducing or eliminating the powers of the LEAs. Yet light-touch LEAs can help enormously with analysing success or failure and their causes, by providing curriculum and management advice, and by ensuring that all children have the benefit of the best possible education.
I agree with the interventions of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway—I agreed with the main thrust of his comments—and those of the noble Lord, Lord Astor of Hever, on the importance of supporting children with special needs and the requirement for a multi-agency approach to the needs of some children. Those children, too, deserve the best that we can offer. That is an area in which LEAs can play an important and valuable role.
I came today from the last annual meeting of the ACC at which I had the great benefit of being able to listen to two senior county education officers telling us of the immense strengths LEAs can offer through partnership with schools in supporting, guiding, analysing performance and stimulating improvement while

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maintaining the local democratic input into the education system. Let a thousand flowers bloom, but let us remember that they will do so better and bloom more gloriously in a well designed and well tended garden.
7 p.m.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving us the opportunity to debate this subject. I join previous speakers in asking what is the intention in and benefit of having greater diversity of choice. Few would disagree with the Labour Party's stated objectives, first, to ensure that in economic terms we develop a high-tech, high added value, high wage economy; and, secondly, that all individuals are given the opportunity to develop their potential talents. Will the return to a form of diversity with increasing selection by ability help to achieve that?
Yesterday, at the conference mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Walliswood, the deputy Prime Minister expressed great delight, pride and pleasure in this country's success in increasing the number of young people going into higher education. I hope that we in this Chamber can agree that that is a tribute to the work of our schools, parents, pupils, colleges, local education authorities, members and officers and national government when they have managed to work together. Sadly, they do not always work as closely together as they ought. There is no doubt that we must never be complacent and that much is being done. My noble friend Lord Morris of Castle Morris pointed out that in 1994 89.3 per cent. of children in secondary education were at a comprehensive school in their locality. They too are part of that celebration of success.
The pattern of provision has been tried and tested. Perhaps I may cite an example because I am troubled by the constant party political toing and froing over selection. The former Conservative authority of Solihull consulted the local population about whether they wished to abandon comprehensive education and return to a selective system—that is, selection by ability— and the people said no.
The real issue is on whom we should be focusing our real attention. All the international comparisons show that it is not the top band of young people who go straight from school to university whom, by comparison with other countries, we fail most. It is the pupils who leave school having achieved the average of their age cohort. For the moment I shall leave on one side the issue of whether the average level is higher or lower than it ought to be. Most people will agree that, no matter how high the standards, we shall never achieve a uniform level of success at exactly the same point and age for every child.
What do we do for those children who leave school seeing themselves as average? My personal and political experience in local government is that there is a legacy of the damaging effect of people being told that their ability is such that they cannot go to the local school of their parent's choice where selection is on the grounds of ability. That is the experience of
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those of us who have grown up in and watched this system and are concerned that too many people did not go to grammar school. I know that the Minister will challenge me if I use the term "secondary modern", so I shall use the term "the schools left for those who fail to achieve the necessary academic levels required by schools which select on ability; the schools left for those children to attend, if there is room, without regard to their academic attainment". Nowadays Conservatives reject the term "secondary modern".
Are we going to achieve anything by returning to selection, or is there a better way of raising the expectations and aspirations of those who leave school feeling that they are average? As a result of the work that has been done, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrat Party and many illustrious Conservatives in the field of education have recognised that early excellence is most important. That is why we in the Labour Party wish to ensure that there will be access to nursery education for all three and four year-olds whose parents wish them to have it. That is an objective; a way of moving forward.
Secondly, the head-start experience in America shows that social and academic benefits have been gained by injecting the right level of resource into early childhood education. It is a tragedy that in some of the most deprived areas more such nursery education schemes are not going ahead as from tomorrow. That could be done were the Government this week not wasting £1 million of a total of £3 million on TV and radio advertising encouraging people to apply for nursery vouchers. Why, why, why? I am sad that the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, is not in the Chamber because I well remember his contribution on the subject of well targeted scarce resources. I do not believe that TV and radio advertising is likely to be high on the noble Lord's list of what is necessary.
The Labour Party is committed to a maximum class size of 30 for half a million five, six and seven year-olds and recognises the importance of ensuring that that is funded. I agree with so much of what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, about the importance of working together to ensure co-operation in raising standards in our schools. The unification of academic and vocational qualifications for young people within this age group is critically important.
I go further and say that the Labour Party's new deal for the under-25s, its Life Long Learning Initiative, and its commitment to training opportunities for 7 million adults in work with no qualifications are part of raising standards in our schools. All the evidence shows that the children who achieve most in terms of the added value of the educational experience are those whose parents start from a weak base. The child watches the parent take up adult education and learns alongside the parent. The aspiration to success gives the child a hope for the future. Therefore, we should unite in saying that helping to offer parents opportunities is a way of improving the system.

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Furthermore, it is extremely important that we ensure that parental participation—the projects which have been so successful—is built upon. A blueprint from Whitehall does not work because circumstances, for instance, in rural Norfolk and the heart of Liverpool or London will be different. However, we must encourage parents to participate. That does not take up a great deal of additional financial resources but it takes human resource time from our teachers. Part of the process of switching resources into the early years and improving the class size helps parents and teachers to work more closely with young people.
Twenty per cent. of pupils have special needs. Should we have had a debate today about whether schools should have the right to exclude pupils with special needs? Are the pupils with special needs who are prevented from achieving the high academic standards set by schools wanting to recruit on the basis of academic attainment to be allowed to bypass the special educational needs legislation?
It has been a very interesting debate. The points which have been raised have been made with a great strength of conviction and commitment. I care passionately—and I know that I am not alone in that regard in this Chamber or alone on this side of the Chamber—about the quality of education which we offer to all our children. If I believed that the most able children could not be catered for in a comprehensive school I would not have sent my own children to one and I would not argue that comprehensive education is a good idea for other people's children. I am a passionate believer in that.
In Lancashire County Council, over 95 per cent. of pupils were sent to the school of first choice before the idea of parental choice was a gleam in the Government's eye. We worked together with our voluntary-aided partners. I find it sad that schools and educational establishments must be freed from the fetters of LEA planning control. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, said, a well-planned system is better than a warring system with children falling between stools and not having their needs met.
The noble Baroness, Lady Young, made an interesting contribution about whether or not we are talking about old or new Labour. I am Labour. I have always been Labour. I suspect that the noble Baroness has always been Conservative. I suspect that we have both modified our views. We may have been soft left, right, wet, dry, old or new in the course of our political careers. However, I respect the noble Baroness's commitment to high quality education and to moral and family values. I urge the Government, rather than spending money unnecessarily on the assisted places scheme, to spend the money instead on the most vulnerable children right at the beginning.
There is so much that could be said on this subject. Of course the Labour Party has made pledges as regards nursery education and maximum class sizes. Of course there is a need to look at the whole issue of streaming and setting. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Platt of Writtle, that streaming is not
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a good idea. I should like to know how it is possible to set if half of the children from a family are in a selective school and the other half are in a different school along the road.
My noble friend Lord Diamond referred to the importance of making sure that long-term gains are not lost.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: Thirteen minutes.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, I understand that the time that I am taking is an acceptable time within the rules of the House. I should say to the noble Lord as regards selection by ability, the most tragic thing of all is if long-term gain is lost because of a premature sense of failure by young people who feel that they have been rejected by the system.
I cannot comment on the comprehensive range of contributions to the debate. We have an excellent system but we must not be complacent. Let us not turn our education service into warring tribes and factions. Let us work together for every child.
7.14 p.m.
The Minister of State, Department for Education and Employment (Lord Henley): My Lords, I start by echoing other speakers who have thanked my noble friend Lady Perry for introducing this debate. My noble friend, with her 17 years in the inspectorate followed by years in higher education at both the South Bank and now Cambridge, knows very well just what can be the product of our schools. For that reason, it is worth starting by echoing what was said by my noble friends Lady Perry and Lady Young and what the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, has just said that there is much which is excellent in our education system. I should not like to echo what I thought were the words of the noble Lord, Lord Morris, who echoed the words of his noble friend the noble Lord, Lord Williams, on another occasion in implying that the education system is, as the noble Lord, Lord Williams, put it an abyss and as the noble Lord, Lord Morris, described it, as something akin to a barrel of rotten apples.
This has been an extremely interesting debate and we have had many very interesting contributions. Moreover—dare I say it?—it has also been a very interesting debate in terms of the absences from our regular education debates and from the various Bills which I took through this House in the previous Session. Where are all the old friends—if I can call them that—from the Benches opposite who so regularly tormented me in relation to the Bills which went through and on other educational matters? Where are the noble Baronesses, Lady David and Lady Hayman, the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby and Lord Dormand of Easington, who spoke only yesterday, I think, on educational matters? It is interesting that they are not here and I miss their presence. All we had was the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, with his quite excellent poetical speech, which I must read very carefully, in favour of the Classics. What a discipline it would be for us all if we all had to speak in metre. On that, I congratulate the noble Lord.

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However, I find the absence of other noble Lords from the Benches opposite, which are rather deserted, somewhat interesting.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord will give us the list of the absentees from his own Benches who normally take part in education debates; for example, the noble Lords, Lord Elton, Lord Ashbourne and Lord Skidelsky. In commenting on absences, he is taking up time and will not be able to comment on the speeches of those who are here.
Lord Henley: My Lords, I shall comment on all noble Lords who have spoken. My noble friends Lord Elton and Lord Ashbourne spoke in yesterday's debate on morality in education. But the noble Lord will recognise that many noble Lords from this side of the House have spoken in today's debate. It is worth pointing out that there are some fairly strange absences and I should love to know where those people are. Are they at some interesting Labour re-education camp being retrained in whatever is the next shift in policy to come from the party opposite? That really would be life-long learning.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: Rubbish.
Lord Henley: The noble Lord, Lord Morris, made a very interesting speech on choice. I did not agree—and he would not expect me to—with very much that was in it. I see choice as a virtue in itself and a virtue in both education and supermarkets. We believe that extending choice and diversity is central to our education reforms and our commitment to those principles is based not on any exotic theory but on plain, simple common sense.
I believe that virtually all noble Lords who have spoken this evening are parents. Every parent knows that children are different one from another and those differences tend to increase with age. Young people have a wide range of talents, interests and needs. Stretching the most able, supporting the least able and developing a wide range of aptitudes, interests and ambitions are all very challenging tasks.
It is difficult for any single type of institution to carry out those tasks equally well and that is particularly true at the secondary level and even more so post-16. We want to have a better match between what the institutions provide and what young people and their parents—and I am glad that my noble friend Lady Perry emphasised parents—want. We believe that the best way to achieve that is to promote diversity and to facilitate choice. That means encouraging schools in the mainstream sector and other publicly-funded institutions to develop particular strengths; for example, in teaching particular subjects or types of student, and I shall return to that in due course. It also means giving parents and young people information about and access to the widest possible range of education and training provision in the maintained, voluntary and private sectors.
We know that parents and young people want real choice. We believe also that choice and diversity play a crucial part in raising education standards. They do that in three ways. First, they encourage competition
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between providers, inspiring effort and enterprise and attacking the complacency associated with captive markets. Secondly, they help institutions to build on their strengths and focus their efforts and resources. Thirdly, they strengthen the motivation and commitment of parents and young people who have been able to choose a type of education or training suitable to their talents, interests and needs.
For all those reasons, the Government have worked very hard to promote choice and diversity. I should like to look at some of our achievements. The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, said that no one had mentioned this, but we introduced the nursery voucher scheme which will enable all four year-olds to have three terms of nursery education before compulsory schooling, if that is what their parents want. That will be in the private sector, in the maintained sector and in the voluntary sector. I am pleased to say that my right honourable friend was able to announce today plans for that scheme to go nationwide from next April. I should point out to the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, who quoted a figure of £20 million as regards administration, that most of that £20 million will go on inspection. Is the noble Baroness really saying that nursery schools should not be inspected? Indeed, whatever scheme we introduced, we would have to spend money on inspection. I believe that to be quite right. It is a justifiable expenditure by the Government.
I turn now to schools. Our commitment to parental choice in education for children of statutory school age is just as strong. It is very easy to forget that when we came to power parents were, in effect, allocated a school for their child. I appreciate that some LEAs are better than others. I see the noble Baroness shakes her head, but I accept that Lancashire is better than some others that I shall mention later. For example, I should like to refer the noble Baroness to Islington, Southwark and others.
As I was saying, it is easy to forget that parents were allocated a school for their child and that popular schools had their admissions restricted to protect the unpopular. We changed all that by requiring local education authorities to give all parents the right to say which school they wanted their child to attend. We introduced more open enrolment to remove artificial barriers to admission.
We have also encouraged schools to become more responsive to parents and pupils by requiring school budgets to be mainly pupil led. That means that parental choice can directly influence individual schools.
To drive up standards, choice must be properly informed. So we have made sure that parents have access to more hard information about individual schools than every before. Again, that was something that my noble friend Lady Young stressed as being very important. School inspection reports are now published, as are school and college performance tables. As I believe was noted, a liberal former headmaster said that possibly the publication of the performance tables had done more to raise standards than any other single reform by this Government.

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Further, through the assisted places scheme—and I am glad that many of my noble friends mentioned this—we have given children from low income families access to the independent sector. Over time, we intend to double the total of 34,000 places currently available. As, again, my noble friend Lady Young made absolutely clear, abolition of the assisted places scheme would save virtually nothing. It is not the panacea that the party opposite seem to think that it is, in terms of somehow levering money in to impose an artificial and arbitrary standard class size on all schools.
To increase diversity of schools in urban areas we established the 15 city technology colleges. I thank my noble friend Lady Perry for what she said about the CTCs and, indeed, my noble friend Lady Brigstocke who has personal experience of such colleges in Derby. Both of them were able to tell us how well those colleges have been doing, are doing and how well they will be doing in the future.
As my noble friend Lord Astor made clear, we have encouraged state schools to specialise through the Technology and Language Colleges programme. I believe that my noble friend Lady Brigstocke took the opportunity yesterday when a Question was tabled on the teaching of modern foreign languages to mention the importance of the new language colleges. There are now about 180 of those specialist schools and, over time, we hope to expand that number thus catering for some 180,000 pupils. I can only hope that we can expand that figure much more in the future. However, I have to say that the initial programme was three times over-subscribed; in other words, the number of schools which felt that they could make such a commitment and raise the necessary money from the private sector was three times greater than what we could live with.
We have also given all state schools the option of becoming grant maintained. GM status offers the highest degree of autonomy available within the state sector, giving schools greater flexibility to develop distinctive characters and strengths. Over 1,100 schools—and that is true of both ordinary schools and special schools—educating some 700,000 pupils have become grant maintained and the sector continues to grow. Some 20 per cent. of all secondary pupils are now lucky enough to benefit from the grant-maintained schools. I suspect that that figure might be somewhat higher if they were lucky enough to be the children of a Member of the Shadow Cabinet in another place.
My noble friend Lady Young said that not enough schools had gone grant maintained. I should point out to her that in some nine out of 10 schools parents have not even been given the chance to have a ballot. However, in those schools where there has been a ballot, some three out of four have gone grant maintained. I should like all those LEA-appointed governors, and others, of the non-grant-maintained schools just to consider whether they might wish to offer to their parents the option of having a ballot to go grant maintained.
I should point out to the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, that I believe his party still represents a threat to grant maintained schools. His party is hostile
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to GM schools and its policies would undermine them. As I understand it, from its Diversity and Excellence document published last July, the attack is in three parts. First, they would be forced to have two LEA councillors to act as governors. No doubt those councillors would be as hostile to GM schools as is the Labour Party. Secondly, a Labour government would snatch back some 10 per cent. of their budgets and hand it straight to the LEAs themselves. Finally, the Funding Agency for Schools would be abolished and funds would be routed to schools through the LEAs. I do not think that there would be much left of the grant-maintained school after that.
I move on to post-compulsory education and education for 16 to 19 year-olds. The latter now have more choice than ever before. Every young person is entitled to suitable education or training. They can choose from a wide range of general and vocational qualifications, such as GCSEs and A-levels—and I was grateful for the mention by my noble friend Lady Perry and other speakers of GNVQs and even NVQs—and they can mix and match these to suit their needs. They can also choose from a diverse range of high quality providers: school sixth forms, further education and sixth form colleges and work based training.
I believe that much has been achieved but there is more to do. As I mentioned earlier, today we announced our plans to extend the nursery voucher scheme nation wide. That will be well received. The week before last we published our Education Bill which received its Second Reading in another place on Monday. That does yet more inter alia further to extend choice and diversity. Before I move on to choice and diversity, perhaps I should mention—as I believe the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, did—that that will also lead to the merger of SCAA and NCVQs. That was welcomed by the noble Baroness and I am grateful for that. There is also provision for the school partnerships which were mentioned by my noble friend Lady Platt, parts of which relate to careers advice.
One of the most important points about that Education Bill is the fact that it will further extend choice and diversity. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Morris, said that there was not actually that much choice in the system. However, as I understood the gist of his argument, that was, therefore, a reason for further restricting choice. My view is that if there is not enough choice, we should be doing what we can to extend that choice. That is what the Bill will do.
We believe that schools which select some or all of their pupils by ability or aptitude are an essential part of a diverse education system. At present, there are relatively few schools of this kind and their geographical distribution is very uneven. We want parents in many more areas to have access to selective education. That is why we want to encourage more schools to consider introducing or extending selection.
Now is not the time to go into that Bill in detail. We shall have time enough to do so when it comes from another place to this House. I certainly look forward to introducing that Bill. I also look forward to the support that I am sure I will receive from my noble friends when

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we come to the Second Reading and, indeed, the later stages of that legislation. I can predict, as regards large parts of the Bill, a fairly customary hostile reaction of the parties opposite as they make their usual knee-jerk reactions to any sign of progress in this field. I look forward to the reactions of the local education authorities. I was grateful to my noble friend Lord Beloff for pointing out just how poorly some Labour local education authorities perform. I think of the 10 worst authorities for GCSE results, nine happen to be Labour.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, does the Minister accept that if there were to be a league table showing the 10 worst results by county councils, the Conservative councils could only account for one of the 10 because they only control one of the county councils? There is hardly a Conservative council in sight in local government to perform badly, average or poorly.
Lord Henley: My Lords, there are a number of Conservative authorities and I shall say a little about them. The Bill quite rightly will extend the ability of Ofsted to inspect local education authorities. I imagine there will be a number of local education authorities who will not welcome that. But I think that when they look at an authority such as Islington, they might ask why it is that some prominent parents in Islington—I refer to the Leader of the party of the noble Baroness—prefer to send their child to a grant-maintained school in a Conservative authority, using the choice and selection that we have granted. Perhaps the inspectors would also like to ask Southwark why a prominent parent there, Ms. Harman, prefers to send her children to selective schools in Tory Bromley. Those are points worth making. The party opposite accuses us of having done nothing in 17 years—which is not true—but the noble Baroness must accept that the worst schools and the worst LEAs are in areas where Labour has been in power, and has probably been in power since the Ark.
A number of other points have been raised by a number of different speakers and I wish to touch on those briefly in the few minutes remaining to me. The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, mentioned the importance of placing greater stress on overseas development matters in the curriculum. Obviously that is something that schools can pursue at the moment within the constraints of the curriculum. I must remind him of the moratorium that we have at the moment on changes to the national curriculum. That is something that can be addressed by SCAA or its successor body in any future changes, and in the next curriculum review.
My noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway raised a number of concerns about special educational needs, some of which we shall address in his Bill which we shall deal with after this debate. If I may, I wish to address other points by means of correspondence, as he requested. I wish to respond to two of the points raised by my noble friend Lady Cox. First, I am grateful for her support for baseline testing. I think that is something that noble Lords on all sides of the House would
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welcome. It might in time provide us with yet more useful information for the performance tables. Secondly, as regards the performance tables, as she knows, we already have them for secondary schools. We are extending the performance tables to the primary sector with effect from March of next year. Getting them out will be a mammoth logistical task. In the first place we intend that they should only include the key stage 2 results because that is obviously the important result in terms of the performance of the schools. Bearing in mind the logistical difficulties, in the future we might consider extending these to the key stage 1 results.
My noble friend Lord Astor asked whether schools could use the international baccalaureate. That is open to them and is something they can pursue as and when they wish. My noble friend also asked about the desirability of schools improving links with employers and with local businesses. That is important. I can give him two fairly encouraging statistics on that. Some 98 per cent. of secondary schools now have links with local business and therefore can arrange work experience for their pupils. The figure for the percentage of businesses that have links with schools is, sadly, somewhat lower, but at 58 per cent. I think it is still an impressive figure and it is one that we could improve on in future.
I have mentioned a great deal of what we have done and I have mentioned what we intend to do further to promote choice and diversity in education for four to 19 year-olds. They are the clearest possible illustration of the Government's commitment to these principles. We believe strongly that the needs of individuals, and the needs of an increasingly complex economy and society, can be met only by a diverse education system offering real choice to young people and their parents. Choice and diversity are not optional extras. They should be integral parts of our education system in the 21st century. This Government will see that they are.
7.35 p.m.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: My Lords, it falls to me now to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in what I think has been an extremely informative debate demonstrating the rich diversity available in the education system. I particularly wish to thank my noble friend the Minister for his full reply to all who have spoken in the debate and for the encouraging way in which he has demonstrated that the policies of the Government are directed to increasing diversity and choice not only within the private sector—as some speakers from the opposite Benches seem to believe—but for the almost 90 per cent. of children who are in the state sector.
I, too, was disappointed that we had only three speakers from the Labour Benches, but I thank those who spoke. However, I was disappointed to hear in the speeches from the Front Bench opposite that there still seems to be a stubborn refusal to see the relationship between choice and quality. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, that when I am directed to only one supplier to buy my apples, if my supplier offers me rotten apples I must take the rotten apples. If I am allowed to exercise a rich choice among

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many suppliers, I can make sure that I buy only good apples, and the supplier of rotten apples either has to improve and start to sell good apples or go out of business. That is precisely the point about consumer choice in education. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Education (Special Educational Needs) Bill [H.L.]
7.37 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. It is cast in a form which is unintelligible without a series of side glances at the patchwork quilt of primary and secondary legislation which governs the regime for children with special educational needs under the Act of 1996. At this hour and on this occasion of Second Reading it would not be appropriate to indulge in any such exercise. But the purpose of the Bill is entirely straightforward and entirely clear.
Clause 1 confers status on a child with special educational needs if the child is of sufficient understanding which is collateral to that of the parent. Clause 2 provides machinery for resolving the question of sufficient understanding if it were to arise. Clause 3 is designed to maintain the status quo on review or otherwise pending appeal where the LEA has determined to amend a statement, to vary provision made in a statement or to cease to maintain a statement. It draws a distinction between interim provision and substantive decision in this regard which was not judicially recognised by the Court of Appeal in a recent decision in the case of Re M (1996), and in this respect changes substantive case law.
The main purpose of the Bill is to seek to confer upon the child with special educational needs the right to make representations, to receive notifications and to exercise rights of appeal if of sufficient understanding. By definition we are concerned with children with special educational needs under the age of 19 years registered as pupils at a school and with parents who need not be natural parents but who may only have parental responsibility or care of the child. There are many unfortunate circumstances in which a child under the age of 19 has little or no support from his parents, where the parents have lost patience or interest in the child, or where relationships have broken down. There are many cases where the child and his parents may disagree as to the appropriate educational provision to be made, school included, especially where the child is over 16 years and the parents are not his natural parents but have only responsibility and care, or if there is only a single parent. It is a situation not uncommon with children with special educational needs.
To clarify the situation, under this regime there are three stages: first, the assessment stage by the LEA; secondly, the appeal stage from the LEA to the tribunal; and, thirdly, the process of appeal from the tribunal to
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the High Court. According to laymen and lawyers—I put them in that order—who toil in this field, there are defects in this regime which work manifest injustice—hair cracks in the foundations which this Bill seeks to rectify.
As regards the first stage—the defects at the assessment stage—the Bill seeks to remove those defects (I seek to synthesise quite simply the complexity of the draft) by providing that if the local education authority proposes not to assess, not to make a statement, not to review, not to amend, or not to maintain a statement, then notice of such proposals must be given to the child who shall be entitled to make representations to the LEA in his own right and to appeal to the tribunal in his own right. That right of appeal to the tribunal will also be extended to the contents of the statement including any question arising as to change of named school on which, again, the child is to be afforded the right to make representations to the LEA. As a measure of safeguard, as regards amendment or cessation of statement by decision of the LEA, such decision, if notice of appeal is given, shall be stayed pending determination on appeal so that the statement shall remain effective. In substance, that is the simple explanation of the purpose of the remedial provisions affecting stage one.
As to the second stage, the tribunal is a statutory tribunal whose proceedings are governed by the Tribunals and Enquiries Act 1992 and by the tribunal regulations of 1995 (Statutory Instrument 3113). What I shall say will surprise your Lordships. I am telling the House how it is done and how it has been represented by laymen and lawyers to the Education Committee of another place. This is not a fairy story although it may sound like one. Under the regulations as implemented, the child does not normally attend before the tribunal. His views are not normally heard by the tribunal. If he attends, he does so as one of his parents' witnesses. If there are more than two witnesses, then it is only by leave of the chairman. He has no enforceable right to attend the tribunal. He has no enforceable right to speak to the tribunal even if of sufficient understanding. Concern was expressed in a memorandum. Under the Bill he would be given such right.
Appendix 19 to the second report of the Education Committee in another place, to which I have referred—it is available in the Library—was submitted by the Education Law Association and the London SEN Tribunal Group. The report states that there is a general reluctance to accept evidence direct from children, and that Children Act questions and the decisions of social services are not considered. Members of that association and group include barristers, solicitors, LEA and parent representatives, and educational psychologists. They took the view that the allocation of three hours was insufficient in many cases; that there was undue pressure of time; and that vigorous questioning by the chairman during the course of submission hindered the presentation and tended to confuse. Furthermore, regulation 15 was implemented in practice so as to inhibit the attendance of a solicitor before the tribunal if he instructed counsel. As appeal to the High Court is only on a point of law, such attendance is obviously

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essential in order that a proper note may be taken of the whole proceedings. The effect of such an inhibition is compounded by the requirement under regulation 30 that reasons for the tribunal's decision need only be in summary form, a lesser requirement than obtains for any other statutory tribunal.
Regulation 15 would in effect be annulled by Clause 4 of the Bill, and regulation 30 would be amended to remove this derogation from the provisions of the Tribunals and Enquiries Act as to the requirement to give reasons. It may well be that during the passage of the Bill other amendments to those regulations may be proposed by noble Lords in implementation of the Bill.
As to the third stage, and the defects arising there, it was decided judicially by the Court of Appeal in the South Glamorgan case of 1995 that as the tribunal was a statutory tribunal an appeal must be made under what is called Order 55 of the Rules of the Supreme Court and not under Order 53 applicable to judicial review. It was said also that the powers of the court under Order 55 were not more limited than those under Order 53. But the defect in this regime, which may only be rectified by primary legislation, is that the child with SEN unlike other children is in effect disenfranchised as all his rights vest in the parent.
Under Part IV of the 1996 Act, the child with special educational needs, unlike other children, was disenfranchised. As a result, all his rights vest in the parent. It is no longer possible for that child to appeal to the High Court through a next friend or parent with legal aid granted as of right across the board as in all other child-related matters.
Children with special educational needs are wholly dependent upon a parent whose means so often have to be set aside to pay for expenses, special provision or medical treatment for a long, unpredictable period of time; or the parents may be disinterested; or the parent may disagree with the child as to the appropriate educational provision; or it may be the parent with whom relationships have totally broken down. It is in that parent that the whole right of making an appeal to the High Court vests. The child now has none. Before this regime the child could go by judicial review to the High Court in his own right and as a matter of course legal aid was granted.
This is not a mere matter of money. The sums involved are of derisory consequence. It is no freebie bonanza for the speculative no-win, no-fee lawyer. There are no damages to cover any costs if there is a win; by judicial decision damages do not arise in this context. So there is no fear of encouraging speculative litigation. But safeguard for the interests of the children alongside those of other children is a question of principle; it is not just a question of money in any event. This is an anomalous two-tier dispensation as regards the interests of children which is tilted against those who are disadvantaged and have special educational needs as compared with other children who have no such disadvantage.
I apologise for having spoken at such length. It was accepted by my noble friend Lady Blatch and by the House when this regime was before us in 1993 that it
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was experimental and that if problems arose in the course of implementation remedial measures would be introduced in subsequent legislation. That was the clear understanding. The injustices to which I have referred, in particular that of disenfranchisement of the child, vesting its rights in the parent and the consequences to which I referred, were not foreseen by me. They were not foreseen by my noble friend Lady Blatch, not foreseen by any noble Lord in this House and, looking at Hansard, not foreseen in the other House either. I have spoken to my noble friend Lady Blatch.
If your Lordships are satisfied that there are defects in the regime, I ask that we give the Bill a Second Reading in the hope that the Government will come forward, honour their undertaking and not oppose it. I commend the Bill to the House.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time. — (Lord Campbell of Alloway.)
7.55 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Lichfield: My Lords, I strongly support the noble Lord, Lord Campbell. There is a question of just principle here. I have one concern. The noble Lord's remarks about the first stage may have resolved it; however, because I am not clear and have not had time to make it clear, I wish to raise that concern. It hovers around the words,
"the child if of sufficient understanding".
The Bill provides that any question arising as to whether a child is of sufficient understanding should be determined by the tribunal with a right of appeal to the High Court. However—and here is my difficulty—if it is desirable that the child should be involved in the process but the LEA considers that the child is not of sufficient understanding, then the LEA will not serve the notices on the child. But if the child never receives the notices, how is the tribunal at the next stage to be asked to determine the question of whether the child is of sufficient understanding? Unless I am confused, that is a loophole and it worries me.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell, is rightly concerned that the child's interests may not be properly represented by its parents. But that could be the case whether or not the child is of sufficient understanding. Surely the child should receive notices in any event. The child's interest can then be represented by a friend or professional person who is in sympathy with the needs of the child.
In the light of those concerns, would it be possible for the Government to take responsibility for ensuring that the principle of the proposals put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, is upheld? I hope that the Government will make a statement informing the House that they will bring forward amendments which will close this loophole in the law and ensure that the child's rights are protected.
I therefore urge noble Lords to support the principle underlying the concern expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell. Many parents of children with special educational needs are very reluctant to discuss those needs. We should ensure that such children have the right to representation, and that representation will be sensitive to the mobility and/or communication

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difficulties relevant to each child It would be most unfortunate if the involvement of such children in tribunals merely underlines further the particular special needs that they have and cannot manage to surmount.
Surely we need to recognise the integrity of all children and provide the means whereby those who are disadvantaged still have access to the means of support. I trust that, if my fears are unfounded, other speakers or the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, will help me. However, I want to make very clear that I strongly support the whole thrust of the Bill.
7.58 p.m.
Baroness Darcy (de Knayth): My Lords, I welcome this Bill, so comprehensively introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway. The noble Lord, who has long been a tenacious defender of the rights of children with special educational needs, made a compelling case for the need to rectify certain problems that were not foreseen during the passage of the 1993 (now 1996) Act. As he said today and in the debate on 29th October, it was accepted at the time that,
"if problems arose in the course of implementation remedial measures would be introduced in subsequent legislation".—[Official Report, 29/10/96; col. 253.]
The noble Lord speaks from first-hand and close contact with others involved daily in this area. I have no direct experience and I therefore consulted the Independent Panel for Special Education Advice (IPSEA). Here I should declare an interest because I am a director of IPSEA. It is not a paid position and I am not involved in any practical sense. IPSEA is a charity which provides telephone advice to parents, representation at the Special Needs Tribunal and second opinions from professionals, who are also prepared to be witnesses for parents at tribunal hearings. All these services are free. IPSEA therefore has probably more experience than anyone in dealing with these matters. It has a great deal of countrywide, direct, daily experience of the working of the Act and of any problems which may come to light.
I should like to concentrate on two points: first, that legal aid is not available for challenging the decisions of the tribunal; and, secondly, the fact that LEAs can, and do, discontinue special educational provision before the tribunal meets to consider the parents' appeal. I shall not go into the wider question of the rights of the child with special educational needs because I do not feel competent to speak on that. It seems to go very wide indeed. I very much associate myself with the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield.
IPSEA warmly welcomes the two points that I have mentioned which the noble Lord's Bill deals with. Indeed, when it submitted both written and oral evidence to the House of Commons Education Select Committee in January this year, one of its main concerns was about the legal aid barrier to challenging a tribunal decision. As the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, stated so very clearly both today and on the 29th October (at col. 254 of Hansard) all children other than those with special educational needs can proceed to judicial review through their next friend with full benefit
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of legal aid, irrespective of the financial circumstances of their parents or their next friend. The sole exception to this rule in child-related matters is an appeal to this tribunal. Only a child with special educational needs who comes from a very poor family which would qualify for legal aid or from a rich family which could afford the considerable cost of High Court action will be able to challenge the tribunal's judgment on a point of law. This will not only debar most children with special needs from pursuing an appeal to the High Court, however good their cause, but it will also have a wider spin-off effect because it will block the development of case law. This was something which concerned IPSEA. I quote from paragraph 7 of its submission to the Select Committee:
"With Legal Aid unavailable to children, IPSEA is concerned that the full advantage of Part III [now part IV] of the Education Act will be lost. The Act is likely to require interpretation from case law, particularly in the next few years, to clarify the law both for parents and Local Education Authorities. Certainly, our experience of Tribunal judgments, although in the main positive, has revealed ambiguities and inconsistencies which call for guidance from the courts. It makes economic sense to have these matters brought to and resolved by the court, rather than perpetuate tribunal appeals arising from continuing ambiguity".
IPSEA asked the Select Committee to examine the issue carefully and to recommend to the Government that the law be changed.
This situation is surely something that must be put right. It is clearly the child who will benefit from a successful appeal to the High Court and who stands to lose if the appeal cannot be made. In this sense it is clearly the child's appeal, notwithstanding the fact that the parent is the party, and it is quite illogical that the child cannot be entitled to legal aid. I understand that IPSEA suggested various ways of resolving this dilemma. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, has proposed one way to resolve it. I look forward to hearing the comments of the Minister on the noble Lord's solution.
I should like to give a very enthusiastic welcome to Clause 3, which ensures that the statement will remain effective until the appeal is finally disposed of. In its submission to the Select Committee, IPSEA asked the committee to recommend an immediate change in the law. It felt that this situation was not something that Parliament had intended to create and that the disruption it would cause to a child's education had not been foreseen. At the moment a child may be, and quite often is, removed from the named school and indeed may be without a school place altogether until an appeal has been heard, which may not be for five to six months. The interesting thing is that the statistics in the tribunal's annual report show that it is in precisely this type of decision—namely, on needs and provision, on Parts 2 and 3 of the statement—that the tribunal upholds challenges from parents in 78 per cent. of the appeals. Therefore the education of the children in 78 per cent. of cases has been needlessly and pointlessly disrupted for about six months. Clause 3 is therefore most welcome. Furthermore, it would not impose any extra administrative burden on local authorities. An authority would simply have to inform a parent six months in

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advance that it thinks a child will no longer need special educational provision and that the statement will therefore not need to be maintained.
I do not know what the Minister will say. I hope that he will be enthusiastic, at least on the two aspects that I have dealt with. He may disagree with some of the detail, but will he say whether he agrees that, in particular, the removal of the legal-aid barrier and the protection of the statement until the tribunal's decision is made are much needed improvements which address matters that need to be put right? I very much hope he will respond positively. I hope your Lordships will give the Bill a Second Reading so that we may iron out any problems when it comes to Committee.
8.6 p.m.
Lord Addington: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, is something of a champion in the area of helping children with special needs. Indeed, when the Education Act 1993 was going through Parliament, he was one of the major players in trying to obtain the provisions for a code of practice and representation rights. One might say that he was the bit to the drill for which the rest of us provided the power; he was the cutting edge.
If the noble Lord missed something, it makes me feel slightly better about myself because I have certainly missed many bits of legal jargon. If the noble Lord can occasionally miss something, I feel a little better.
I do not think anybody will find ground for disagreement on the main thrust of this Bill, which is that the child himself has rights as an independent unit, not merely as an adjunct to the parents. This is fundamental, and the noble Lord put it very clearly. This is the important point.
With regard to drafting, etc., I shall continue in humble vein. The right reverend Prelate spotted a loophole rather more accurately than I could have done, although I think I was able to follow what he said. I hope that the Minister will agree with me that the words do not matter, it is the aim of the Bill that is important. We must ensure that children have the support given by this Bill at all times and that they have it in their own right.
The main criticism that I have heard about this Bill from other organisations is that they believe it may lead to more legal procedures. The Minister nods his head—he usually shakes it, but he is nodding it now. We must try to address this point. The tribunal decides whether a child has sufficient understanding. I suggest that we should come up with a working definition of "a child". We are talking of a child here as someone who is under 19. I would suggest that a young person under the age of 19 may well have a very good idea about certain educational procedures. I further suggest that, if the educational procedures are inappropriate, or if the young person feels that they are inappropriate, they will not work, anyway. The child's rights are centrally important here.
Surely the Government can come up with a definition which will make clear who is included within the definition, thus excluding a considerable area for
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potential disagreement and legal time. If it is removed, I hope that the whole of this House will agree that the argument is incontrovertible. We have a major line of argument that a person should be consulted and has rights in his own capacity. If that is taken on board, and surely we have much common ground here, there must be a way forward. Even if it is not stated in exact terms in the Bill, there must be grounds for some step forward. We are talking only about bringing in the person who is directly affected by the process into that process. Surely, that is incontrovertible.
8.10 p.m.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for bringing forward and explaining the Bill and permitting us to consider the needs of a very important sector of our society—children with special educational needs—whose redoubtable champion he has long been, to the admiration of the whole House.
This is a Private Member's Bill and, as is customary, my party takes no view on it. Therefore, I speak personally and not representatively.
The Bill confers rights on children with special educational needs and changes the provision made for appeals to the Special Educational Needs Tribunal and appeals from that tribunal to the High Court. I should like to deal with those proposals in reverse order, after making one preliminary point which I feel is important.
The Bill deals with rights and with process. It does not and could not deal with resources. Yet, to my mind, the question of resource allocation is of first importance in daily practice. Those whom I have been able to consult in the teaching profession assure me that their most pressing problem is—to use the vulgar jargon—getting a child "statemented". I deplore the verbalisation of a perfectly serviceable noun, but I take the point. Teachers regularly find that a child has special needs and it is obvious what those needs are. That may be (and often is) corroborated by a doctor or psychologist and a request is formally submitted to the local education authority under the 1993 Act, now consolidated in 1996.
However, the law has enacted that so soon as a statement of special needs is issued in respect of any child the local authority is responsible for providing the money to implement and maintain it. I need hardly remind your Lordships that local education authorities are not flush with cash; and they have pressing problems. Schools are crumbling, with a £3 million backlog in repairs; one in 12 children leaves school with no qualifications at all; and a third of all primary school children are in classes of over 30. Is it any wonder that LEAs tend to look carefully at all requests for SEN statements and sometimes take longer than one would like to make decisions when each decision is an ineluctable, unalterable and legally enforceable spending commitment? Surely, the most urgent need is for resources to be made available to speed the decision process and to permit necessary statements to be issued and implemented.
The 1993 Act does, however, permit an appeal. It is that process with which the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, is concerned. Clause 4 allows a solicitor to be

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present at tribunal hearings when the child is represented by a barrister and it requires tribunal decisions to be given in full (Clause 4 (2)). It is a matter of balancing appropriate legal representation against what is considered to be a desirable informality. The president of the tribunal, in the interests of keeping tribunals small and informal, has said that he will exercise his discretion under the regulations, so that the representation on both sides must be limited to two. Thus, if the parent is one person, that leaves only one place for a lawyer, leaving banisters aggrieved that they cannot be accompanied by solicitors. Clause 4(2) is widely felt by the educational community to be a request to get more paperwork out of the tribunal with which to form an appeal.
The SEN Tribunal was established with all-party support to resolve disputes about the special educational provision for children. On the whole, it seems to have succeeded, despite enormous difficulties. The president, Mr. Trevor Aldridge QC, and his staff have worked extremely hard and well. Views of local education authorities about the effectiveness of the tribunal are sometimes related to the fortunes of the LEA before the tribunal. Anecdotal evidence suggests that tribunal decisions have tended to put up costs and the local authority associations are surveying their member authorities on that issue at present.
Concerns have been expressed that the effect of tribunal decisions has favoured children with certain disabilities over others. A difficult issue is that many parents (or voluntary bodies representing the interests of the disability) are paying for legal representation, which on the whole means that the LEA has to reply in kind. The intention of both central and local government on its establishment was that it would be—in the jargon phrase—a "lawyer-free zone". It seems that current practice pushes up the costs. Perhaps I may remind your Lordships of what I began by saying. If tribunal costs go up, LEAs have less money to issue statements of special educational need; borderlines are moved as resources go down and children have to wait longer; and consequently they suffer increased deprivation. Justice for one means injustice for another. There are no easy answers.
Clause 3 deals with the special case where a local education authority proposes to amend or stop maintaining a statement. It proposes that the statement should remain in place until after the appeal process has been exhausted. That seems to me in principle a very necessary improvement to the present law and it is meet, right and our bounden duty that we should support it. Not all LEA decisions are made in heaven and Clause 3 would enforce a very proper discipline.
Clause 2 requires the tribunals and the courts to decide whether or not a child is "of sufficient understanding". I am not a lawyer. I am a literary critic, writer, teacher and poet, and the way in which lawyers use language is a mystery to me and always will be. But I am seriously concerned that this proposal might open up a whole new field of possibilities for lawyers to dispute in court how to interpret "of sufficient understanding". That again would increase the costs of any action and divert money from the primary purpose
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of providing appropriate teaching for SEN children. I realise that to define "sufficient understanding" is as difficult for a lawyer as to define "combat knife". But I am sure that, if the noble Lord could attempt a definition, it would greatly improve the Bill's chances of acceptance and greatly reduce its cost.
Clause 1 is, of course, the heart of the matter. It proposes the obviously laudable idea that the views of the child should be taken fully into account in any decision made about that child. But again, I confess that I am worried about some of the implications. Although giving explicit rights to children was not considered with the passage of the Education Act 1993, I understand that it has always been possible for children to attend appeal hearings at the tribunal. Children can give their own views and answer questions or make a written statement. My worry is that most of the children are likely to be under 11, with learning difficulties, and they are unlikely to have views very different from their parents. Giving children a key role in making an appeal, rather than their parents, would push children to the forefront of the appeal system, which, given that these children are often some of the most vulnerable members of our society, may have unfortunate consequences. Is it not possible, indeed likely, that such a change in procedure might do more harm than good?
At a deeper level, I am concerned about the whole question of children's rights. I accept that there can be no such thing as animal rights because there can be no rights without concomitant duties and animals cannot have duties. But children can have duties as they develop. So I argue that they must have developing rights. I think we are all agreed about that on all sides of your Lordships' House. I do not always agree with Bishop Bill Westwood, formerly of Peterborough, and I miss him in his place. I consider him dangerously unsound on the liturgy; but I listened to him on "Thought for the Day" on Radio 4 last week, and I was impressed by what he said:
"It's not a matter of children's rights, it's a matter of us having responsibilities towards children, whether as parents, or friends, or teachers, or simply as fellow citizens of a decent country".
That last phrase struck home to me, even just before the weather forecast.
The Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, at its very heart, seeks to protect and empower some of the most vulnerable people in our society, and in that aim I support it entirely. I am not sure, however, that in its present form it wholly succeeds in that aim, and I hope that he will feel able to take away the suggestions that I and others make today and reflect upon them and, perhaps with the help of people in the established SEN organisations (I think of institutions like the Royal National Institute for the Blind, for example) seek answers to the problems we have posed. I would certainly be profoundly unimpressed by any suggestion that we should depart from our usual decision that this Bill be now read a second time.
8.20 p.m.
Lord Henley: My Lords, on the occasion of this debate there is much with which I can agree with the

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noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, with one brief caveat; that is, that he seemed to imply that there was insufficient expenditure by the LEAs on special educational needs. I remind him that most LEAs, quite rightly—they have a good record in this regard—spend 10 per cent. or so of their schools budget on the additional expenditure required for children with special educational needs over and above what is required for the majority of children. The Government's provision for local authority settlements was a good one last year. We will be announcing it again shortly, following the Budget. Our record speaks for itself. We have made sufficient money available to the LEAs and they have been able to make sufficient money available for special educational needs; though I accept that many would like more—that is ever the case.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Campbell for the way in which he explained the objectives of his Bill. The Bill reflects the great interest that my noble friend has shown over the years in special educational needs issues. I discussed these matters with him at a much earlier stage and corresponded with him about them. I therefore know of his commitment in this area.
It will be apparent that the Bill raises some difficult issues. I am grateful for the careful way in which the noble Lord, Lord Morris, dealt with a number of those. In the time available to me I should like to focus on the issues raised by the first clause, though I shall comment briefly on the Bill's other proposals.
This House, far more so than another place—it is always an advertisement for this House—considered very carefully the arrangements relating to SEN and the tribunal in particular during the passage of the Education Act 1993. I should like to remind the House of two points raised during our discussions then because I believe they remain pertinent.
During the Committee stage my noble friend Lady Blatch said that the tribunal should provide a simple and straightforward means of resolving disputes between parents and local authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, talked of the dangers of turning the tribunal into a highly formal lawyer-dominated process. He said he was sure that this House would not like that to happen. I feel no less sure that that remains the view of most Members of this House. However, the Bill could undermine both those objectives.
Perhaps I can start by offering a compressed sketch of the SEN procedures. Following the SEN Code of Practice which this House endorsed, schools respond in a staged way to a child's special educational needs, monitoring progress and providing additional help if what is offered so far has not proved successful. For that small proportion of children for whom a mainstream school cannot by itself provide, the school or parents may ask the LEA to carry out a statutory assessment. As we know, that is a thorough process involving educational psychologists, the school and often medical and social services, and the parents and the children themselves.
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In most cases such an assessment leads to a statement of special educational needs. That will be drawn up in draft by the LEA and sent to the parents for comment. There is therefore every opportunity for input from the parents and the child. Only where parents are dissatisfied with aspects of that process, or of the eventual statement, does the question of appeal to the SEN tribunal arise. The tribunal is intended to be a last resort and a final arbiter. That is why the tribunal that hears each appeal comprises two members with extensive experience in special educational needs, with a legally qualified chairman. Appeal beyond the tribunal is only to the High Court, and then only on a point of law. So far, since the Act and the code of practice, of the 2,000 parents who have appealed to the tribunal, only 54 have subsequently appealed to the High Court against a tribunal decision. The High Court has upheld the parents' appeal in only four cases.
In Clause 1 the Bill, at over 20 separate points in the existing legislation, would allow a child if of sufficient understanding—I shall return to those words—to be a party in their own right as well as their parents. I believe that that one feature of the Bill alone is enough to render it inoperable. For example, what if a parent and a child want different things? The parent may believe that one school is best able to cater for their child and should be named in the statement, while the child wants another. Who takes precedence? At present the tribunal focuses on the child's needs. If a child disagrees with his parents, the LEA will bring that out in its evidence. The tribunal already makes every effort to establish the child's view. I cannot believe that my noble friend wants to see children with special educational needs pursuing cases in the teeth of opposition from their parents.
In any case, even to operate those provisions involves identifying whether a child is of "sufficient understanding"—Clause 2. The questions of the right reverend Prelate reveal the impracticality at the core of the Bill and I do not believe that those are issues that can necessarily be resolved by adept drafting. No doubt my noble friend, with his expertise, will attempt such a process. When looking at "sufficient understanding" we must ask how a tribunal is to determine that. Even if we could define the phrase in practical terms, I do not believe that anyone in this House can say what proportion of children with special educational needs sufficiently severe to require a statutory assessment would be held to have "sufficient understanding".
That core provision of the Bill is impracticable. Even if it were not, it would at once be to the detriment of the children concerned by putting them, as the noble Lord, Lord Morris, said, in the spotlight where they may not want to be and—dare I say it?—if it is not to the detriment of the children, those are arguments that could be to the benefit of the legal profession. I cannot accept that increasing the legal stakes in matters of complex and sensitive educational judgments that arise in virtually every SEN case

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would necessarily benefit the children concerned. Nor—I make this quite clear—can I overlook the fact that the costs would escalate all round.
One other damaging effect of the Bill arises from the fact that, in order for a child to qualify for legal aid in an appeal to the High Court, he would have to be the original appellant to the tribunal. Even if we assume that the 90 per cent. or so of parents not legally represented when they appeal to the SEN tribunal would be aware of that, it implies that the child may be pushed—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Morris—perhaps undesirably into the forefront of the case. Even then, I doubt whether it would achieve my noble friend's objectives. It would be a route open only to children of "sufficient understanding".
I may say in passing that keeping legal intervention in the workings of the tribunal to a minimum is decisive for me in considering the Bill's proposals to allow a solicitor as well as a barrister to attend hearings. At present, as I suggested earlier, only around 11 per cent. of parents are legally represented at hearings. I wholly support the president of the tribunal—Mr. Trevor Aldridge—in his wish to keep both hearings as informal as possible. He has, for that reason, so far decided not generally to allow "dual legal representation", though he has permitted it exceptionally. He has undertaken however to review that issue by the end of the year. I certainly would not wish to press further than this without seeing the conclusions of the review which he will be conducting at the end of the year.
The Bill, in Clause 4, would require tribunals to provide reasons for their decisions in full rather than in summary form. Quite apart from the question whether it is appropriate to amend through primary legislation a provision contained in secondary legislation, this falls also at the hurdle of legal bureaucracy. A summary decision is typically three or so pages long. I do not think parents would necessarily welcome the delays inevitable if full written decisions had to be provided—perhaps up to 25 pages in length. Nor would parents necessarily welcome the technical detail entailed. Indeed, Mr. Justice Latham found, in his decision of July of last year in S v. the Special Educational Needs Tribunal and the City of Westminster that the decision of the tribunal in summary form was,
"an admirable example of how matters should be dealt with".
I should mention the two remaining provisions of the Bill, both of which are unnecessary. One, Clause 3(1), attempts to provide an extra right of appeal when, after an annual review of a statement, the LEA decides not to amend the statement. In effect, a more powerful version of the same right is already in place. A parent can usually seek a reassessment of his child and can appeal to the tribunal if the LEA refuses the request. Since a reassessment is more onerous for the LEA than amending a statement, authorities are already likely to be responsive to parents in those circumstances.
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The second remaining point, Clause 3(2), which concerned the noble Baroness, Lady Darcy (de Knayth), relates to the continuation of a statement where a parent appeals to the tribunal against an LEA's decision to cease to maintain the statement. There is, in some cases, a genuine difficulty here. But I believe it is one which is much more likely to be resolved by flexible local action than by hard and fast statutory rules. For that reason the Department for Education and Employment has recently issued guidance to LEAs. Until we have more evidence of the scale of any potential problems, I do not believe there is a case for change, particularly statutory change, at this level.
It has always been the intention of the Government—and I believe this House—to make the SEN tribunal as user-friendly as possible. It is a tribute to the president and his staff that they have largely been successful in so doing. This Bill would very much undermine and endanger that achievement. Having said that, I shall not, in the usual manner, oppose the Second Reading of the Bill, but I have to say to my noble friend that Her Majesty's Government cannot give their support to it.
8.33 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. Nothing that my noble friend Lord Henley said causes me the slightest surprise. It is a firm attitude of government that has been represented throughout all our discussions—courteously entertained but stonewalled. It is for that reason that I introduced the Bill. Broadly speaking, in principle, it appears to commend itself to all sides of the House. I am grateful to noble Lords for their support.
Clearly, grudgingly, my noble friend Lord Henley said that by convention the Government would not oppose the Bill. If the convention were not there, they would have opposed it tooth and nail. But we have to fight on for what we believe in and take issue with the Government, who I, in other ways, support. I am grateful for the suggestion made by the right reverend Prelate which I shall take up. It was supported by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and it was supported to some degree in a different form—we all have our own views and our own ways—by the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris. I agree that we should probably amend so that the child should have notice in any event. If the right reverend Prelate were to table an amendment, I would immediately be disposed to accept it. Other noble Lords may wish to table other amendments. That is something which we can consider at the Committee stage on 11th December. It is difficult to take it further today other than to express my gratitude for the suggestions that have been made.
I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I strongly resent that snide remark by my noble friend Lord Henley suggesting that the Bill might be of no benefit to the child but of some benefit to the profession of which I am a member. I do not think it very amusing. As he was or is a member of that profession, I think

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it comes ill from him in any event. There is none of that about this Bill. The Bill is presented as a matter of principle and not to "fat cat" the legal profession.
Lord Henley: My Lords, I totally withdraw the remark if my noble friend took it in that sense. What I was trying to get over was that I believed that the Bill would not be of benefit to the children because, as we made clear earlier, this is an area which one wants to keep as far as possible lawyer-free. That was the original intention behind the tribunals.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says. I am grateful to him. I do not quite understand what it means.
I want to make one other point. The suggestion that there is some idea that the Bill would run against the user-friendly concept of the tribunal or would create a system which was not informal is nonsense. That concept is consistently held by the department—I
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cannot go too far because my conversations with the department were confidential—but perhaps I may put it this way. Nothing that my noble friend has said on the Floor of the House tonight surprises me. I maintain that there is nothing in the Bill which runs counter to the concept that we all have—that this must be user-friendly and informal. All we want is a measure of means of obtaining justice.
The question about the position of the child at this hour is too important to deal with. All your Lordships are concerned that the position of the child should be restored to what it was before this regime was introduced and put on the same basis—I am putting it very simply—as with all other children. With that, if your Lordships will allow, I commend the Bill to the House.
On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
House adjourned at twenty-two minutes before nine o'clock.