The three speeches/headings immediately before

1. 1 earlier: Robert Syms

   First, may I make something clear for the record? Earlier in the debate, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) seemed to think that my generally cheerful and happy demeanour meant that I disagreed with his points about child pornography and the internet. I wish to state that I felt he made some very sensible, solid and powerful points about the protection of children, with which I wholly agree.

   May I also say that it is a pleasure to follow my parliamentary neighbour, the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke)? She made some excellent points about the protection of children. I know she feels strongly about that and has done a lot of work on it. It was nice of her to talk about Poole maternity hospital, too-and I know that she enjoys being a grandmother. All of us in Poole want to have a better maternity hospital. We all have an expectation of this project going ahead, and I hope we can somehow get through the current financial problems so that Poole can have a maternity hospital of which we can all be proud, and which is fit for purpose for the century.

   I have been trying to work out how many Queen's Speeches there have been since I was first elected to Parliament. I certainly vividly remember the first one I attended, which was in 1997 and was replied to by Sir John Major. It was clear at that stage that the new Government were in the ascendancy; the place was packed with Labour Members. Some of us who had arrived in this place for the first time were keen to make a contribution, but the Conservative parliamentary party as a whole was very dispirited; that was clear from how empty the Conservative Benches were. In that respect, things have changed a lot over the subsequent 12 or 13 years. This is the Queen's Speech of the current Government of course, and yet we have had only one contribution from the Government Benches so far-although we may have another powerful contribution in a moment. It seems that we on the Opposition Benches are keener to contribute than Members sitting on the Government side.

   The Labour party abandoned clause 4 but it still seems to think that Whitehall knows best. It still thinks that if it pulls a lever, passes a law, or has a press conference in London, that will change the world. Indeed, a substantial number of the Bills that have gone through Parliament have had elements that have not been enacted or have not been introduced. From my experience of the past 13 years, I firmly believe that the only way of getting proper public services that are delivered well is to trust the people who are delivering them and those who are the recipients of them. I truly believe that decisions made in Dorset are generally better than decisions made in Whitehall. In terms of, for instance, the police authority, the fire authority or local government, an awful lot more can be done if we give people the resources and let them get on with the job, rather than always try to second-guess and always be introducing changes.

   My experience of the health service over the past 12 or 13 years is that there has been constant change-health authorities have been changed, and there have been mergers. However, I have never known a change in the NHS or in local government to have either saved money or delivered better services; indeed, it is often a distraction from the delivery of decent services. If my party is fortunate enough to win the confidence of the British people in the middle of next year, one of the lessons that I hope my Front-Bench colleagues will learn is not to go in and immediately make fundamental changes. We should leave people in post, let them do the job, and give them clear targets. The "Whitehall knows best" approach is unsustainable.

   I was going to mention home education, which my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) dealt with eloquently and in more detail than I had intended to do. There are many parents who are committed to educating their children-some because their children have special needs or autism, and it is the only way they feel able to educate them-who feel they have been stigmatised, although I know that that was not the Government's intention. They already undergo an inspection regime, which they feel is fundamentally wrong. I therefore hope that if the education Bill becomes law before the election, we can iron out some of these difficulties.

   The speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) was measured and sensible, and it is a great pity that politics is to lose somebody who can make such a contribution; there are too few people in this Chamber who are thoughtful. He made some very good points, none of which I disagreed with. For example, he made a very good point about social mobility. One of my first experiences of politics involved Wiltshire county council. Several teachers who had retired decided to reappear on the county council. Most of them had grown up in areas of great poverty; some were from south Wales, and their fathers had been miners. They were able to enter and make a contribution to teaching because the education system was able to give them the qualifications and skills and get them out of the mining villages. As all the social statistics are saying, we have lost some of the social mobility that our grammar school system, in particular, provided for many of our less fortunate constituents. I hope that a Conservative Government look to tackle that issue. The idea behind Disraeli's "one nation" conservatism is to give everybody the opportunity to use the skills that they have to get on. We have lost a lot of that.

   What do I support in the Queen's Speech? Well, the Flood and Water Management Bill is a good one; water is a valuable element. Subject to seeing the detail of the Child Poverty Bill, I think it a good thing that we will be legislating in that area. I do not think there is any great disagreement with the bribery Bill, and we Conservatives agree with the cluster munitions Bill. There are many Bills that we partly support.

   I hope we will have the opportunity to table amendments to the Financial Services Bill that reverse what happened to the Bank of England. One reason why we are where we are with our finances is the changes undertaken in the first flourish of the current Government: they gave independence to the Bank of England, but took away that large and important element of bank supervision. The country lost a lot as a result, and the Financial Services Authority has never fulfilled the same role with the confidence that the Bank of England showed.

   It is interesting that we have a Bill that promises the halving of our deficit. I am always a little suspicious when people put into Bills aspirations for the longer term, rather than actions to deal with the given issue. We have a major problem with the public finances, and it will be a priority for whoever is elected in the middle of next year. Unless we tackle it, our children and grandchildren will be paying the very real costs of dealing with the heavy level of debt and the associated interest payments, which will divert money from important public services unless we grasp the nettle at a very early stage.

   Inevitably, it was a short Queen's Speech. We know that a lot of it will not be enacted before the general election, and that there will be a lot of "boxing" and political debate over the next six or seven months; that is politics-we are all trying to put the best case for the future of our country. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) and our Front-Bench team now have a coherent policy programme that they can put to our country. That will make a major difference. I can honestly say that whereas the last three general elections were a foregone conclusion, the next one will be a fight, and there is a real chance that we can have a change of Government. That is what the British people want, and I hope it is a Conservative Government.

2. 2 earlier: Graham Stuart

   The hon. Lady is absolutely right that the two issues-safeguarding children who might be at risk and ensuring a suitable education for all children-have been mixed up. As I say, the data on the safeguarding issue suggest that elective home education in and of itself is not a problem area, although there may be groups covered by that heading and certain children who need greater support. We do ourselves no favours by mixing up the two issues.

   The Badman report's recommendation 7 said:

   "That designated local authority officers should... have the right of access to the home".

   That applies not after being given cause for concern or because the local authority has reason to believe that the child is not being properly educated or that the child is at risk or because of any issue whatsoever. This is a profound right to enter the home as the local authority sees fit. The recommendation also states that those officers should

   "have the right to speak with each child alone if deemed appropriate".

   The Badman review thus recommends that local authorities, some of which will have significantly let down the families and the children concerned by failing to tackle fully any under-performing schools or by leaving children and families traumatised and upset, should be given the right to march into the home to start monitoring and make an assessment of the child's education. That is fundamentally wrong and if the Secretary of State's intervention on the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) means that that will not happen, it is good news. I say to the Minister of State, Department of Health, the right hon. and learned Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien), who is in his place on the Front Bench, that I would be most grateful if that assurance could be repeated in the summing-up speech. That would provide enormous reassurance to people.

   If we think about light-touch registration, it sounds perfectly reasonable at first. We do not want children below the radar or children who are not known to anyone-that is what moved the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole and one can go along with her on that. If, however, we look at the detail of how it might work, we need to think about what "light touch" actually means. Does it mean that there is a registration system at local authority level and that the local authority then does nothing with it, or are we going to ensure, as Badman recommends, that every child who registers is visited within one month of registration? Local authorities do not have the resources to provide for that, so I can easily see that instead of the scarce resources of local authorities being used to give support where it is most needed-to families that are crying out for the extra support-we will end up with a bureaucratic procedure whereby the limited, overstretched staff will be forced to go around visiting family after family after family even though there are no issues and no concerns.

   In the meantime, under a system that is supposed to ensure the provision of education and safety for children, what will actually happen-and it is typical of this new Labour Government, who are so wedded to bureaucracy and databases-is that the families most in need will be let down, because local authorities will not have the resources that would allow them to do something positive with the information that they are given. What else could happen? If local authorities obtain, in one way or another-from central Government or from their own resources-additional funds to invest in home education, and if we follow the Badman recommendations, we shall see local authority officers repeatedly entering homes and monitoring educational progress.

   A fundamental principle of our system of government has been that parents are responsible for delivering the education of their children. It is parents who should take the lead, not the state. I fear that this draft Bill may change fundamentally the relationship between the state and parents, and that from now on the overarching responsibility for the welfare and education of children will be assumed to rest with arms of the state. The state will have to come in and satisfy itself that local authority officers cannot be sued and that their defensive position is watertight. We do not want them to get into trouble, so if we follow the Badman recommendations, they will have the right to enter homes.

   I have another reason for asking the Minister to ensure that we hear a repetition of the Secretary of State's earlier pledge that local authority officers would not go into homes-if, indeed, I heard him aright. In June the Secretary of State wrote to Badman, saying that

   "LAs need greater powers to monitor...home educated children must be seen regularly in their education setting".

   That clearly suggests that local authority officers would go into the homes of home educators, but it also suggests that the Secretary of State fails to grasp the nature of much of home education. There is not necessarily a classroom in the home. Home-educated children are educated in libraries, in local leisure centres, in the park and when visiting country houses. They are educated everywhere, and a great deal of their education takes place on an autonomous basis: in other words, the child leads the education.

   Academics have studied this matter, including one at the Institute of Education in London. He said that he was sceptical at first, but has become convinced that autonomous education, including many of the alternative approaches adopted by home educationists, is tremendously effective, ensuring that children are educated in a way that is sympathetic to their needs and interests.

   I hope that the Minister will tell us what percentage of home-educated children the Government expect to register. Will only families in one place be pursued and possibly prosecuted? Will peripatetic families escape the net? How much will be spent on ensuring that all children, or as high a percentage as possible, are registered on the various local databases? And-this is a key question for many home educationists-should failing local authorities be allowed to decide what a suitable education looks like, when so many of their own schools and institutions are not delivering? Is that right? Is it right for the state to take away from families the overarching responsibility to ensure the education of their children?

   Why cannot the Government adopt a humbler approach? Why can they not invest more money in research, enabling us to gain a better understanding of who is not at school and who is being educated at home? Why can we not be given a better understanding of where problems might lie among electively home-educated people? Why can we not have a voluntary registration system, perhaps involving additional financial support for families educating children at home? The present position is absurd. A home educator told our Select Committee that one father had to pay £1,000 to cover the cost of GCSE exams taken by his daughter, although he was a taxpayer like the rest of us.

   Why do we have to go down the compulsory route? Why do this Government always think they know best? Why can they not work with people on a voluntary basis, build up the picture and then and only then-with a complete picture and a real understanding of the risks in respect of safeguarding and education-come forward with proposals, which might involve compulsory registration if there is due and proper cause. Due and proper cause does not currently exist, and I sincerely hope those aspects of the Children, Schools and Families Bill that deal with home education will not become law.

3. 3 earlier: Annette Brooke

   I endorse the hon. Gentleman's point. Does he agree that one of the big problems is the confusion of education and child protection? If I am teaching in a school, I am hopefully trained to recognise signs of child abuse and will report it to the appropriate authorities, which will not have to set out to solve it. Is not the problem the attempt to wrap this all into one, instead of being clear about what the issues are?