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Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Hunt. I apologise to the Committee that I did not speak at Second Reading, so I shall keep my intervention short. There is a great desire on the part of the new coalition Government and the Secretary of State to free lots of schools, but there is a paradox in that that requires his dictatorial powers to free everybody—he will lay down what freedom means to everybody. Our task is to ensure that the Secretary of State makes it clear to us in the legislation in what sense he is not taking away powers from your Lordships and another place. We need to scrutinise that, because there are a lot of anxieties about the scale and ambition of this project and the haste with which it is being implemented. There is also a worry that there might be some unintended unfairness to schools left outside the academies field or to local authorities. It would be good if the Minister could make it clear that considerations of fairness and equity and not taking powers away from the legislature arbitrarily will be adhered to.