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Education and Skills Bill

Again, I seem to be holding the centre ground between two views put to me by noble Lords. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, began by saying that we were in a potential police state, with people having powers to extract information, something which currently does not apply. I pointed out that the tracking system and the database will operate in the same way as the current Connexions tracking system. It is appropriate for that tracking system, which is not national at the moment, to move to local authorities because they will be the responsible bodies for managing Connexions and for promoting participation. The noble Lord wants to move in the direction of a single national database, which I understood the noble Baroness was particularly opposed to. That might raise wider concerns, but it is not the Government’s policy to move in that direction. However, that is emphatically not the status quo. The status quo is a local system of maintaining data through the existing Connexions databases.