On Wednesday the Prime Minister almost pleaded with the Leader of the Opposition to withdraw her wrecking amendment to the Schools and Children’s Wellbeing Bill. I can’t imagine why. Given the size of his parliamentary majority, there was no prospect of the Government being defeated and the Bill being lost.
The occasion was the second Reading of the Bill. The opportunities to improve a bill by amendment come at committee and report stages. To be orderly at second reading, an amendment cannot seek to improve the bill, on the contrary, it must be fatal to the bill e.g. “That this House declines to give a second reading to the xxx Bill because…”. Hence the term ‘wrecking amendment’.
The PM’s concern was that the Opposition were using their amendment merely as a ruse to secure a vote on a public inquiry into sexual grooming gangs just to achieve the political objective of embarrassing the Government with a vote that it didn’t want, and in which ministers would have to whip their members to vote contrary to both popular will and the advice of Andy Burnham, their most successful regional mayor.
The PM appeared to be horrified that the Tories would be so destructive as to vote against a perfectly good bill just because it didn’t contain provision for an inquiry, notwithstanding that it contained so many other desirable measures. When, in any event, the Tories could have supported the bill as it stood, then moved amendments at latter stages to include the inquiry.
Of course, it was -partly- a political ruse: It was important to secure a vote on a matter which had hit the headlines in a big way, even though the Government didn’t want the embarrassment of the issue getting a further airing.
For my own part, I am not an enthusiast for public inquiries. They are very expensive and time- consuming. On this occasion however, I think that Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who himself commissioned one of the earlier enquiries, was right in his assertion that there is proper scope for a limited national inquiry to pull together the threads from the local inquiries and explore the question of why the establishment failed comprehensively. Such an inquiry would not impede proceeding swiftly the recommendations made on the basis of the earlier findings.
The PM’s concern about the Opposition’s naked political expediency by voting against a sensible measure just to embarrass the Government is however, quite misplaced. We would have voted against this frightful Bill in any event.
Though the Bill does include some measures to improve child protection, nevertheless it undermines the long-standing combination of school freedom and accountability that has been the foundation of the dramatic improvement in England’s educational standards. These were first introduced by Tony Blair with the enthusiastic support of the Conservative Opposition. These successful policies were then extended under the following Tory years. This Bill now seeks to abolish academy freedoms which have been at the heart of that success. It ends freedom over teacher pay and conditions, making it harder to attract and retain good teachers. It ends freedom on Qualified Teacher Status, making teacher recruitment harder. It removes school freedoms over the curriculum, leading to less innovation. It repeals the requirements for failing schools to become academies and for all new schools to be academies and it will undermine school improvement and remove the competition which has led to rising standards. The Bill will make it harder for good schools to expand, reducing parental choice and access to a good education.
It is just dreadful.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
