Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do believe that that is a straight cop-out. Parliament has to be clear on what it means. There are two competing notions of need here and Parliament needs to state, before it charges the Secretary of State with these responsibilities, which one it means. As for judicial reviews and legal challenges being rare, there was one point when I was in the job now being done by the noble Lord, Lord Hill, when I was barely out of the High Court and the Court of Appeal on challenges to academies, most of them with support from the National Union of Teachers and a good number with support, one way or another, from bodies associated with local authorities. So Parliament needs to be clear on what it means. We come then to ““undue detriment””. Again, there are two competing views of what this is. It could be taken to mean making another school or schools totally non viable or it could be taken to mean that it would have a serious, definable or appreciable impact on another school or schools. Again, there is a fundamental difference between those two concepts of detriment—whether the detriment causes a school to become non viable or whether it simply has an impact or an appreciable impact. Again, Parliament needs to be clear which of the two it means. This goes to the central point about school improvements as well. The noble Lord’s amendment says that the Secretary of State may not allow a new academy to be established if it causes undue detriment. I have to say that in many cases it is the dealing with the undue detriment that should be the duty of the Secretary of State or the responsible local authority using the huge array of school improvement powers available, including those that the Government of whom I was a member provided over 13 years. The idea that parents should not be able to access new or additional school places in areas where the schools are not providing good quality places simply because the provision of those places will cause detriment to other schools fundamentally ignores the interests of parents and their right to have a decent quality school to send their children to. If there is not such a decent quality school and someone is prepared to do something substantive about it, they should be applauded and not put through the legal rigmarole that the noble Lord is proposing, which will work fundamentally against the interests of parents, particularly in places where schools are not of a high enough quality. The imprecision of the language, where it is not clear what the definitions of essential terms such as ““detriment”” and ““need”” will be, will ensure that the only people who will gain from this are the lawyers, who will make huge fees while this is fought out in the courts over many years.