Clause 42
Education and Inspections Bill
10:45 am
John Hayes (Shadow Minister (Vocational Education), Education; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
You will not let me range too widely on the point, Mr. Cook, because I am responding to what the previous Minister said, but there is an argument that the Bill goes a very long way towards increasing the scope and powers of the adjudicator. Indeed, adjudicators will need to be wise people to deal with all the extra things that they have to do as a result of the Bill. The new Minister may want to focus on that for a moment. However, I do not wish to stray from proper consideration of what the previous Minister said about the amendment. The new Minister will have read that his predecessor acknowledged that there was no desire to encourage vexatious complaints, which is precisely why we believe that they should be covered in the Bill. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will intervene on me to give some feel for the number of complaints currently heard, the percentage that is agreed, and whether adjudicators believe that they are vexatious. The Minister obviously does not want to intervene, but no doubt he will come back to us on those matters.
I was not entirely convinced by the previous Minister’s argument that omitting such provisions from the Bill would not lead to a trend of unacceptable objections. This Minister no doubt appreciates that people make their case based on particular personal reasons—we have all had that in our constituencies. A parent, or even a group of parents, may be unhappy with the arrangements at a school, but their case is not always based on a clear, empirical argument; sometimes it is based on all kinds of other things, and it would not be right to go down the road of clogging the system with unnecessary objections.
That was the case made by the Opposition, and the previous Minister replied. At the outset I said that the amendment was a probing one. For that reason, and also so as not to introduce an unnecessary note of contumely early in the new Minister’s career, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.