My Lords, I have listened with great care to the amendments. There is a common note here which my noble friend might wish to take up. There are few happy points in the Government’s ill-fated food strategy, but one was the desire for better data. One thing that has come from this debate is that, if we are to have any means of assessing the success of this Bill, we need the data to do so.
Some amendments seem appropriate and others perhaps not; I will not discuss them one by one, but I suggest my noble friend gives some assurance to the Committee that the Government will look carefully at the data provided—how it is provided and how simple it can be made—so that there is some really appropriate way to have accountability. One of the issues in this Bill is accountability, and one of the main ways to have proper accountability is to have proper data. That is the common theme of everything that has so far been put forward.
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Having heard the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich—the diocese in which I reside—it is important for those of us in very rural areas to remind the Government constantly of the special position of schools in rural areas. The reason is that our nation has become overwhelmingly metropolitan, as are those most concerned with education at the centre. It is therefore necessary for us to remind Ministers all the time that they should be asking, “How does this affect what happens in the countryside?”, which is increasingly important as we find more and more villages without the resources they once had and the understandable paucity of rural transport.
The two things come together. We need better data; it needs to be presented in an easily accessible way for us to hold the Government and academies to account. It also needs to have a special bias, if I may misquote the right reverend Prelate, not to the poor but to the poor rural areas.