Education Bill

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the amendments of my noble friend Lord Northbourne, which he seeks to insert at a rather appropriate place in the Bill just under the heading ““Early Years Provision””. The amendments describe measures that the noble Lord thinks would be effective. I was not clear how the measures would stop unwanted children being born. Nevertheless, focusing rather more attention on things such as flexible working for both parents might allow a greater sharing of responsibilities. I am glad to say that that is the pattern today, whereby the country is using the talents of both sexes in producing well-balanced children for the future and making certain that we make the most of our intellectual and productive abilities when competing in an increasingly global world. I am more particularly interested in Amendment 3 in this group, where we are told of the need to get more information for parents—and for the wider world, I would have thought—about what went on in previous generations. That is a particularly important issue. As it happens, I have had a rather busy day dashing from one place to another. I had time to dash up to my room where I found a letter from the noble Lord, Lord Hill, in answer to a question I raised some time ago, which gave some rather useful information. My question had been: have we got and, if not, should we not have, information about families that have failed in the past and how many of them have gone on to reproduce, sadly, without sufficient support from the state, from volunteer organisations or whatever, and to perpetuate, I am afraid, the same sort of dysfunctional activity? Surely, if we had that information, we could do rather more between us all—the state and perhaps even more importantly, the localist approach—to see that this happened rather less frequently. The noble Lord, Lord Hill, very kindly answered this by writing that something like a third of children who turned out to have problems had probably had this kind of dysfunctional parents. Another third have disappeared, which I hope means that they will have become the sort of citizens who do not get into trouble, but the middle third are very likely to fall into these sort of problems as well. So the facts that we have show us. I suggest—and I would very much like to hear the response of the noble Lord, Lord Hill, to this—that if we have not now got facts that reflect the actuality of 10 years, 20 years or 30 years ago, we should start collecting them now. Then we would have facts on which to base whatever actions we feel it necessary to take in the future. I know that we have a lot of plans, they are very good plans and I commend the Government for them and the noble Lord, Lord Elton, in particular, because one of the issues he has been campaigning for is that there should be early assessment of children before they start school—this is now an accepted policy. So we have a really good starting point. I am afraid that it would probably cost a little money to get this research done, but surely this is the time to take practical action and get the whole process going. That is quite enough from me, but I am very much looking forward to what the noble Lord, Lord Hill, will say when he replies.