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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, what will that lead to? It will lead to debate taking place in every local authority up and down the land. What will that lead to in turn? It will lead to a patchwork quilt. I give noble Lords an example—it is not hypothetical. During the 1980s, many noble Lords will have followed events in Liverpool. If an ideologically motivated city council takes it into its head to oppose all state schools, it would be able, under the amendment which has been crafted this evening, to deny places in faith schools. It would be able to impose a new Test Act. Its local thought police would decide whether someone had faith. I am not exaggerating the situation: that is precisely what would happen. How will they be able to prove it one way or another? If the noble Lord’s amendment were to be successful and become law, we could easily find ourselves in a situation where people lied to admissions authorities to get their children into a school. How would we be able to prove that they told the truth? This amendment opens the way to that situation. It would achieve one other undesirable thing in the localist setting: if I wanted my children to go to a faith school which took a more benign approach, and could afford to send them there, I would be free to move to a neighbouring authority—in this hypothetical example, to a borough such as Wirral or Sefton. Is that in the interests of social cohesion? Is it in the interests of the disadvantaged? Is it in anybody’s interests? I hope that noble Lords will oppose the amendment.