Clause 42
Education and Skills Bill
1:30 pm
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, Conservative)
That is extremely helpful. Will the Minister then also set out who else can serve on the panel? Can councillors fill all the positions on the panel, with the exception of the chair? Can council employees serve on the panel, subject to the Minister’s intention that they cannot chair it? If the answer is yes, how does that make the panel independent? The clause does not refer to attendance panels being independent, nor indeed do the famous explanatory notes, so it would be helpful if he could clarify that point.
The Government’s White Paper—I presume it is a White Paper—called, “Raising Expectations: from Policy to Legislation”, says at paragraph 4.33:
“If the young person wished to challenge the Attendance Notice it would be referred to an independent adjudication panel, which the local authority will set up”.
That document therefore refers to an independent panel. Furthermore, in the Minister’s letter to the hon. Member for Yeovil of 13 February, which was copied to all Committee members, there is an explicit reference in the third paragraph to an “independent attendance panel”. Clearly, the Government have applied “independent” to the panel in their policy, but it is not clear from the clause that, other than the chair, the panel will be independent of the local authority that first issued the notice. Clarification from the Minister would therefore be helpful.
Amendment No. 85 relates to the costs that will be incurred by the local authority in establishing and running the attendance panels. It says that clause 42
“may not come into force before the Secretary of State has published a report setting out his estimate of the total annual cost of the establishment and operation of attendance panels.”
I presume that such an estimate has already been prepared by the Government in introducing the Bill. The purpose of the amendment is principally to enable the Minister to share that information with the Committee.
Subsection (3)(b) gives the Secretary of State the power to make regulations to enable local authorities to pay allowances to members of an appeal panel. Could the Minister spell out how much these allowances will be, the conditions of payment, how many members each panel will have and the likely frequency of their meetings? The Local Government Association is obviously anxious about the provision and the possible result. It is only too aware of countless new duties imposed on local government by central Government without sufficient funding to match.
The LGA said in its briefing that local authorities
“will want to be involved in the drafting of regulations regarding the constitution of attendance panels to ensure that they are not overly bureaucratic, burdensome or costly.”
Will the Minister therefore spell out his thinking on the regulations so that the Committee can be reassured that attendance panels will not be overly bureaucratic, burdensome or costly? An estimate of the likely annual cost of operating these panels would also assist our deliberations.