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Education and Skills Bill

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that point. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) posed just such a question to the Minister, and I hope that he will be able to clear it up. The fear is that there will be inconsistency, that different areas will apply this provision in different ways, that the guidance is poor and that this legislation has not been properly thought through. A central tenet of this Bill was to criminalise and ultimately to jail young people. That has been rightly dropped, but the fact that it was in the Bill until such a late stage suggests that it, like so many of the new Labour initiatives of the past 12 years, has not been properly thought through. Yet again, those with least in our society will be let down by a failing Labour Government.