Lord Wei (Con)

I thank the Minister and my noble friend Lady Barran for their comments. Frankly, I am disappointed. I feel that many of the measures that I have proposed are designed to help our wonderful officials, who work in local authorities and are struggling under a huge workload, to focus their efforts with the register, which will create a lot of, let us say, false positives as well as genuine areas where intervention might be needed, and a huge amount of work. That is the focus of these amendments. The point I wanted to raise about asylum seekers was that asylum seekers are obviously very vulnerable, but under the Bill, the moment when the details of the asylum seeker’s children are in the register, the clock starts ticking. They have two weeks to do it, they have to report X number of people’s email addresses and names, they might not even speak or write English, and yet the clock will start ticking. Of course, local authorities and we as a society need to support asylum seekers, but are we willing to put them through such an onerous process if they choose, for whatever reason, to home-educate? I am not sure that this has been really thought through. It is not any part of my design to exclude asylum seekers from the support that local authorities can provide; it is just trying to be practical. While I recognise and really applaud the officials working on the front line—already under huge pressure and struggling to work out, within all the noise of all the many databases they have access to, where they should intervene—my concern is that without exemptions such as these, this is going to make their life much more difficult and may indeed lead to safeguarding scandals and problems because they have not been able to get around to the families and children who really do need help. I am grateful for what has been said. I will reflect on it and may return to it at a later stage but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.