Lord Brady of Altrincham (Con)

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow my noble friend in supporting the amendment, which is in his name and mine. I am conscious of the hour, so I shall be brief in endorsing the point that my noble friend made. This is a modest amendment in that it seeks only to place a duty on Ministers to do something that we surely would all wish them to do anyway. It is crucial because it seeks to make the huge error of closing schools during the Covid pandemic far less likely to be repeated. Many of us thought, at the time, that it was a mistake to engage in protracted school closures and that it would be immensely damaging. The excellent work of UsForThem, run by the splendid Molly Kingsley, helped to highlight the problems that were going to be caused. These harms were always going to be significant, but the evidence since the end of the Covid restrictions, as my noble friend pointed out, suggests that our fears five years ago were actually a gross underestimate of the damage that would be done to children and young people. The repeated lockdowns and school closures constituted, in my view, the biggest public policy disaster in modern history. The fact that the interests of children and young people were treated so lightly is a disgrace. The damage to mental health, to education and to levels of school attendance have all been, and continue to be, profound. The lessons from Sweden, Florida and those few places around the world that took a more measured and intelligent approach is proof that many of our restrictions delivered little if any benefit while doing immense damage. This amendment would ensure that, should there be pressure to repeat school closures in a future emergency, the government response would have to be transparent and that the criteria used to decide on school closure and opening would have to be clear and available to the public and to Parliament. It would ensure that Parliament would have a role in making those decisions in a way that Parliament was denied during the Covid period. I urge the Government and the Committee to accept it.