Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, it is apparent that academies will have more money in their fist, so to speak, than community schools. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has just made clear, an enormous amount of money can be withheld by the local authority, which will now come into the academies’ own purview for them to spend. The difficulty with having an outside agency to lay down frameworks or even to observe the frameworks is that there is enormous variety from one local authority to another in the amount that they hold back and the amount of these services—the noble Lord read them out—that they provide. Authorities such as the London Borough of Wandsworth, where I live, withhold less than 5 per cent from school budgets for their central services, whereas others withhold well over 20 per cent to provide centralised services. The inequality will be very apparent. I share the wish expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to have some way in which to demonstrate that fairness is being exercised and is being seen to be exercised, but it would be difficult to do that, given the huge disparity at present. Of course, it will be possible for schools, once they become academies, as they do now, to contract back with the local authority for some of these services, which will return that money to the local authority. However, in many cases—it is the case in Hackney, for example—very few of the academies do that.