Clause 2 - Power to suspend statutory requirements etc.
[Part I]Education Bill
5:00 pm
Mr Phil Willis (Harrogate and Knaresborough, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 41, in page 2, line 22, leave out ''may'', and insert ''shall''.
This simple amendment goes over some of the ground that we covered in clause 1, so I shall be as brief as possible. It puts the onus on the Secretary of State to say why schools and LEAs should not have the powers, instead of their having to satisfy rules that she might set. We have examined the legislation and the extent of disapplication and believe that the Secretary of State should simply assume that all schools and authorities should have the powers, subject to regulations that she might lay down about the disapplication of specific pieces of legislation. We fully accept that she may want to disapply all of a particular piece of legislation. Given those parameters, we believe that the principle should be that schools and authorities shall have the powers rather than that they may have them.