Education Bill — Control of Regulation — 23 Jul 2002 at 18:29

The majority Content voters passed an amendment to the Education Bill. This vote was about a Lords amendment that had been rejected by the House of Commons with regards to controlling the amount of material that is sent to schools by public bodies. It came back to the House of Lords to be debated and voted on again.

An alternative amendment (14A) was proposed by Baroness Ashton of Upholland. This was opposed by the Conservatives and Baroness Blatch proposed another alternative amendment (14B) which kept the same spirit of the original Lords amendment.

Again the government disagreed and proposed amendment 14BA which was the eventual amendment that was voted on. This differed from the Conservative amendment in that rather than putting a legal duty on the Secretary of State to control regulation it merely requires the minister to "have regard to" controlling regulation.

In the debate Baroness Blatch explained why the Tories wanted a legal duty on the Secretary of State to limit regulation and guidance to governing bodies and teachers as follows:

• "The most frequent reason given by most teachers leaving the profession is the same—too much bureaucracy, too much interference and too many government initiatives."^[1]

However, Baroness Ashton thought the amendment proposed by the Conservatives might increase the level of prescription that schools face:

• "Through this Bill we have set out to deregulate. We have been absolutely clear about saying that we believe that education legislation is over-prescriptive and that the level of regulation is too great. And in a very consistent way, we have set out in this Bill to begin to change that. The way we have done it is this. We have taken a piece of over-prescriptive primary legislation and repealed it, but taken a power to make secondary legislation. We have made clear that the regulations we will make will be significantly less prescriptive than the primary legislation that has gone before. But the crucial point is that if we cannot make regulations, we cannot deregulate."^[2]

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• [1] Baroness Blatch, House of Lords, 23 July 2002
• [2] Baroness Ashton of Upholland, House of Lords, 23 July 2002

Debate in Parliament | Historical Hansard | Source |