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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I cannot believe that the Government intend by the inclusion of this clause to hit the provision of education and training for young people with learning difficulties or with a disability. While I entirely support what the noble Lord, Lord Rix, and two opposition Front Bench spokesmen are saying about the importance of providing adequate provision for those who have special needs, and about the fact that such provision might cost more than would be the case for young people without those special needs, I cannot believe that that is what lies behind the inclusion of this clause. I am sure that the Minister will put us right on that issue. My problem with the clause is that I cannot quite understand why we need to say in legislation of this sort that a local education authority should make the best use of its resources and that it should avoid provision that gives rise to disproportionate expenditure. It goes without saying that every local authority should make the best use of its resources in everything it does and should not have disproportionate expenditure, which I take to mean unnecessarily high expenditure when it could be done just as well for less money. Why has this clause been put in the Bill? It looks like central government, in teaching-grandmothers-to-suck-eggs mode, telling local government what to do. We already have extensive regulation of local government expenditure, with a lot of pressure on value for money through the work of the Audit Commission. We already have Ofsted inspecting local education authorities—not just their educational provision but the work of the authorities right across the piece. In that inspection of work, Ofsted is looking at value for money and at whether a local authority is having regard to its expenditure and making the best use of scarce resources. This, frankly, is overegging the pudding.