My Lords, I support the amendment of my noble friend Lady Howe.
I welcome the Government’s Amendment 33C, which would require local authorities to publish what action they intend to take following parents’ comments about the local offer. However, I am keen to know from the Minister what mechanisms will be in place to ensure that parents have a key role in shaping what this action to be taken by local authorities will be. The Government have consistently and rightly stated that the local offer should be responsive to local needs. Unless the Government accept the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, to ensure that parents and young people are joint partners in developing an action plan to improve local provision, is there not a danger that the local offer will be responsive only to the needs of local authorities and not local families? While welcoming the Government’s amendment and supporting the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, I would just ask the Minister those two questions. The second of them is really about how the Minister proposes to respond to the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has made.
I will speak mainly to my own amendment in this group, Amendment 33D, which would require the Secretary of State to make,
“regulations setting out the standards and quality of the special educational provision, health care provision and social care provision which local authorities must meet in their local offer … issue guidance to local authorities on how to meet these regulations, and … publish information on these regulations accessible to the families of children and young people with special educational needs”.
I will speak fairly briefly because we had two long debates in Grand Committee and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, has just spoken very eloquently to this amendment. I am very grateful to her for that—she made a very good argument for the case being put forward by the amendment.
As I said, we had a couple of very good debates in Grand Committee on the provisions of the Bill relating to the local offer. I moved an amendment which sparked a discussion about the kind of framework which needed to be put in place to regulate the local offers that local authorities made, to ensure that they met certain standards of consistency. The amendment took its cue from the animating principle underlying much of the legislation emanating from the Support and Aspiration Green Paper, which was that parents of children with special educational needs needed to be freed from the tangles of bureaucracy that were making it so difficult to access the services which could best meet their children’s needs. The amendment was couched in terms of the minimum standards which local authorities must meet in their local offers. The flaw in such an amendment was quickly pointed out: it could all too easily lead to local authorities simply working to the bare minimum and usher in a race to the bottom. At the same time, it provoked a bit of reaction from noble Lords who had a history in local government, who were at pains to point to all the good work local authorities do, the undesirability of constraining their room for manoeuvre too much and the need to leave them alone to get on with things. I was at pains to be conciliatory and to acknowledge that in my reply but, on reflection, I think I may have gone a bit too far.
The underlying thrust behind this legislation is the need to free families from the bureaucracy which ties them in knots and to redress the balance between local authorities and families attempting to assert their rights. I remember the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, making the point very persuasively that, although one did not want to hamstring local authorities and unduly constrain them in what they can do, it was not wise to set up a completely new system like this without exercising a measure of central oversight. That is a very familiar distribution of responsibilities between central and local government and the education service.
My amendment is not unduly prescriptive in dictating to the Secretary of State what he must do; it merely requires that he make regulations setting out, as I have said, the standards and quality of the special educational provision, health care provision and social care provision which local authorities must meet in their local offer, issue guidance to local authorities on how to comply with these regulations and publish information on the regulations accessible to the families of children and young people with special educational needs. This is a very moderate obligation to lay on the Secretary of State and, depending on what the Minister says, I reserve the right to seek the opinion of the House when my amendment comes up as we go through the Bill.
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