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Education and Skills Bill

Committee is the point at which to exercise the imagination. I can see a local authority saying that in order to establish what a certain young person is doing and whether he really is behaving as he should, it would be interesting to know if he has previous convictions which involved him in doing things when he ought to have been studying. The noble Lord looks as if I am straining at the possible, but we have experience of authorities vastly exceeding the constraints we thought we had placed on them under one piece of legislation. Therefore I return to what I said before: it is best to have the constraints set out precisely in the Bill that is to provide the powers. I shall not go on further because I am sure I have made myself clear. We shall have to see what happens next.