Clause 1 - School travel schemes
School Transport Bill
10:15 am
Sir George Young (North West Hampshire, Conservative)
I shall speak to amendment No. 61, in my name, and say, at the risk of breaking the consensual atmosphere, that it is not a probing amendment.
Local authorities are free to decide whether to involve themselves in a pilot scheme, and throughout our deliberations we have heard what I call the ''Twigg defence''—if they do not like it, they do not have to do it. That is a legitimate response. Indeed, on Tuesday the Minister said:
''There is no compulsion in the Bill; neither is compulsion implied by it.''—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 9 November 2004; c. 67.]
If the Bill was to be consistent, however, local authorities would be able to withdraw from the pilot as easily as they could enter it; but under paragraph 9(1) and (2) of proposed new schedule 35B to the Education Act 1996, a local authority that enters into the scheme cannot withdraw from it without
''the consent of the appropriate national authority.''
The libertarian streak that inspired most of the Bill has been temporarily put to one side, and the authoritarian streak has re-entered those provisions. My amendment would withdraw it.