Education and Inspections Bill

A couple of years ago, as a member of the board of the Audit Commission, I was part of a team that looked at work on choice in public services. The public survey showed that there was not unalloyed joy at the idea of choice in public services. Most respondents expressed concern about how they could make those choices, whether they would have the right information to make them. They were concerned that the choice agenda was a way of removing responsibility to provide good services and leaving it to people to make choices—in other words, shifting responsibility to the consumer to make the right choice rather than it being for the state to provide services. Respondents were very clear that they might take one set of views when they were shopping at Tesco or Sainsbury’s but they did not want to make those sorts of choices on education or health. That said, these Benches feel that if one takes a market view of public services and if choice is to be a big issue, we want genuine choice in a free market. The skewing of the market proposed in this Bill is such that, if this were a private sector concern, the Office of Fair Trading would leap in almost immediately. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Gould, and the Minister that we do not want to take away from people the choice to remain with their local school if they want to. Please do not remove that by starving it of resources in order to spend those resources somewhere else. Let us have a genuinely level playing field. Further to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, we must accept that not all parents are either able or willing to exercise choice and to go though these processes in the same way. We must never see the situation where a child’s future is decided by the aspiration of the parents and not by their own ability or their worth.