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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

My Lords, when I first came to your Lordships’ House, the kindly noble Lord who was coaching me said: ““There is a thing called speaking in the gap. Know about it. Never do it””. This is the first time in two years that I have been tempted to do it. I find it irresistible, out of a sense of obligation to others who have been placed in a similar situation to mine. I have never admitted it to this House, but I think that I am classified as some sort of mental defective. That may have become apparent to most of you during the past two years, but I want to explain how it occurred, and why I believe that one potential impact in this otherwise excellent Bill needs a little attention. In 1940 we were bombed and evacuated. We came back to London in January 1945 and I was sent to the local school. The local school had also been bombed and was overrun with rats and mice. As a result, we had a cat in the classroom the whole time. Nobody knew it at the time, least of all me, but I had the worst cat allergy ever. I can get cat allergy from just sitting next to a cat owner in a theatre. As a result my eyes streamed and closed, and I could not hear or understand a word of what was going on. In 1947 the school reported me to the local education authority as unteachable. I was classified as educationally subnormal—that was the phrase on the certificate at the time. The authority was quite right. I could not even read the 11-plus exam paper. I was first asked the alphabet and I could not get beyond the letter F. It was a great misfortune, but it had one great benefit. My mother contacted my father, who had left us at the end of the war. He came back and never left my mother again. He also engaged a retired schoolteacher who taught me to read in three weeks, and four years later I played for England at chess. So I could not have been that stupid. Eight years later, I gained entrance to Oxford but could not take it up because there was not enough money. My point is that many years later, when I was 24, my career had prospered to the extent that I had got a very good job in Ford Motor Company and was offered a very good promotion at a point where it had to bond me, because it was a big financial-exposure job. When they tried to get me bonded they could not, so instead of confirming the promotion they called me in and said, ““We have got to fire you because you are registered as a mental defective. We found it on the record. You didn’t declare it when you joined us””. I was horrified at this and pleaded. Eventually they let me keep my job in Ford albeit at a lower level, and I had another 10 wonderful years there. More recently, in the two years I have been here, I have been on the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee. One day I found myself at an interview with people from the Department for Education about an instrument that was coming through. I recounted this story to them and said, ““Why am I still on the record? Why not have an arrangement whereby it is cancelled when you work your way out of it, so that it doesn’t haunt you for the rest of your days?””. I was told that it cannot be removed. It is there for ever. I get up in the gap today to say to you: please, do something about this and, please, do not let the past cast such a long shadow on those who, like me, had the problem and got out of it. Thank you.