Education and Skills Bill

I should like to know more about this Connexions database. What sources of data are this based on? Under Clause 12, we are telling local authorities that they have to establish the identities of these people. My impression of the Connexions database, which I admit that I have never gone into in detail, was that it was not a complete database; that it was a best-efforts database; and that therefore it would have a lot of holes in it. Given the points made by my noble friends, one can understand why. Many young people will be quite mobile. There will be no easy way to track them because they are not formally employed. Connexions does its best. If we are giving local authorities an absolute obligation to track these people, we are letting them in for a deal of expense and we are looking to produce something which is much better than is there at the moment without explicitly making the financial provision necessary to do that. I also question whether the best way of handling this really is to do it through 100-odd separate databases that are meant to communicate with each other. That is a recipe for total chaos. In order to have effective communication between databases, the whole database schema has to be set in advance. For example, you can just about crawl from one police database to another. If the Minister has ever tried to register a firearm, he will know how long it takes to deal with registering a firearm in one county when you are living in another. It can take for ever and it takes for ever for the people on the computer to make the connections and get through. To have 100 systems scattered around the country that are written and run differently, which are supposed to be working together to track relatively mobile young people, is a recipe for not achieving anything. If we could at least have a national structure for the database with a local view on it, there is a hope of noticing that someone who was supposed to be in Newcastle has turned up in London.