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Education and Inspections Bill

I wish to speak briefly to new clause 64, which I tabled, and other amendments. I hope to be brief because I sat through 55 hours of the Bill in Committee and listened to numerous amendments—some 500 were tabled, but only a handful were accepted. I do not need to detain the House at any great length, partly because I am confident that new clause 64 will not be accepted either. However, I throw bouquets to Ministers in the hope that one of them may be picked up. The Secretary of State spent more than an hour trying to reassure Labour Members about the Bill. It is in everybody’s interests, certainly of Front Benchers on both sides of the House, to claim more for the Bill than it contains. It is in the interests of the Prime Minister, because he wants to show that he can still bring in something radical, that he is not a lame duck and that he believes in the state being the enabler, not the provider. It is in the interests of those who oppose him on the left of the Labour party. I accept that they have strong principles on this issue, but they also want to burnish their belief that the Prime Minister is some kind of closet Tory—I do not think that he is. It is also in the interests of my Front Bench colleagues to claim more for the Bill than it contains because they want to set out their stall as a constructive Opposition—an understandable and correct point of view. The truth is, as everybody knows, that the Bill will not make much difference to the educational establishment in this country. Indeed, the Secretary of State assured us that these radical new schools—which according to some opponents of the Bill will allow middle class parents to opt out of the system—will remain in the local authority family. Numerous clauses in the Bill will enhance the powers of local authorities, the Secretary of State and local adjudicators. It is nonsense to suggest that the new schools will be anything like the grant-maintained model, and I see no reason why anybody has anything to fear from them. A fair number of schools may take up the offer to change status, but given that some 63 per cent. of schools are already community schools, the Bill will not amount to an historic change. My Front Bench colleagues have made the point, and I agree, that this Bill is not an historic change like the education legislation in 1944 or 1988, but we still need to have this debate. The speech by the hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) was excellent and he put his finger on the issue. It is in the interest of those who support more schools having independent status not to have ballots. If we are honest about it, we do not want ballots because they favour the forces of conservatism. People do not like change. Those who were opposed to grant-maintained schools on any basis whipped up sentiment against them, but parents could be persuaded because they are conservative and do not want change. That is why the Secretary of State does not want ballots and why my party does not favour them. We recognise that we made a huge error in introducing ballots for grant-maintained status, because it led to the politicisation of the system. It was only because of opposition in the House of Lords, which certainly represents the forces of conservatism—radical Conservatives like me are always worried about it—that we introduced ballots.