Lord Crisp (CB)

My Lords, I want to say a few words about Amendment 254A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, to which I have added my name. I want to spell out what I suspect noble Lords understand fully, which is that there are issues here. In certain cases, where perhaps one parent has been abusive to their child, partner or spouse, it is vital that addresses are not made available to that parent. Perhaps I could just go back two or three steps and preface my remarks by saying, first, how much I appreciate the warm remarks on home education made by the Minister in opening. They set a much better tone than has tended to come through in this debate. Something else that I omitted to say at the beginning is that my thanks go to the Minister and her officials for the excellent meeting we had. It lasted much of the day and, frankly, they were very open and willing to discuss things; that was very helpful. I do not know how much movement we got out of it—we will see during the course of today—but it was helpful to have that meeting and to understand things clearly. As all noble Lords have said, there is an issue of balance here between supporting the good people who are providing home education because it is best for their children, or for another good reason, and supporting the missing children who are abused or neglected or have missed out. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made an important intervention on this. We need to get that balance right. We discussed with officials the issue dealt with in Amendment 254A. It was said that this could be picked up in regulations or whatever, but there needs to be something in the Bill to help parents who are specifically worried about safeguarding. This amendment is probably as simple as it gets in pointing out that where there is a concern about abuse, or an order standing against one parent, this should be handled by an authority in an appropriate fashion.