Baroness Berridge (Con)

My Lords, I wish to follow on; in fact, my noble friend has given an introduction to the comments that I wanted to make in relation to Amendment 260 in the names of my noble friend Lady Barran and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. She mentioned phrases such as “not push it too far” or “take a step back from this”, and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, outlined on a previous group that this should be proportionate reporting and information collection, which is really important. On Amendment 260, we get down to the clauses— I am a lawyer by training and have been in government as a Minister, and I know that government loves such clauses—which require the collection, if it is reasonable to obtain it, of “any other information about the child’s characteristics, circumstances” or needs. The only caveat to that is that those should be included in the register “for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”. My first point in relation to that is that that is new paragraph (m), so we have already asked for an awful lot of information before we have our lovely “scoop it all up” clause. But is “characteristics” limited to protected characteristics? That is a separate paragraph in Clause 31, so I suspect it is not. What kinds of characteristics will be asked of families in relation to their children, what kinds of circumstances and what limit on that or on their needs? Obviously, we are not talking about special educational needs because that, again, is somewhere else. It is an enormously wide power for them to be able to reasonably obtain this information. The only limit on it is “for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”. Part of that limitation is well known. It apes the Children Act, which says that we are there to promote and protect the safeguarding of the welfare of children. But here it is about the safeguarding of education, a slightly new concept that is there as a key limitation, in the way the paragraph is put together, on what local authorities can ask of families. So I strongly support Amendment 260 on that kind of “scoop it all up” information about parents in these circumstances, particularly parents who may have, for good reason, withdrawn their children. I can see all kinds of headlines and problems if this kind of information, on such a broad basis, is asked of parents by the local authority. I think that there will be legal challenges to define such a broad clause that the Government seem to want, and that it will be the subject of complaints of intrusion. Although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, obviously this is not to take back that presumption that it is the parents’ right, but such a wide clause that gives the local authority such extensive powers to ask for basically any other information risks changing that presumption, or at the very least it creates a perception for parents that it has been changed.