Unrevised

Members present

Lord Goodlad (Chairman)

Baroness Andrews

Lord Bichard

Lord Borwick

Lord Bowness

Lord Eames

Baroness Hamwee

Baroness Humphreys

Baroness Stern

Lord Woolmer of Leeds

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Rt Hon David Laws MP, Minister of State for Schools, and Lord Nash, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools, Department for Education

Q1 The Chairman: Can I welcome you to the Committee? Thank you very much indeed for coming. This is a formal evidence-taking session, on the record and being webcast live. A verbatim note is of course being taken, which will be put on the public record in printed form and on the parliamentary website. We shall a send a copy of the transcript for amendment of any errors. Could I ask any Members of the Committee who have any relevant interests to declare them, so they can be recorded in the transcript? Okay. We published, Ministers, as you know, a report in January last year about the Government’s approach to consultation and we said that, if it was handled properly, consultation improved the formulation and implementation of policy. Could I ask what you see as the reasons for consultation by your department and what value you give to it?

Mr Laws: There are two main reasons why we think the consultation is extremely useful. The first is that it is an important part of our policymaking process, and there are certainly some areas of policymaking—I can think of some areas that we are working on at the moment—where the potential policy solutions are not absolutely cut and dry; there is a range of potential options. Having a consultation that engages with those people who have expertise has real value in improving the quality of the policy product. The second thing, which is linked to the first but maybe slightly different, is making sure that you do not inadvertently miss issues that may not be fundamental policy questions but issues that could be omissions or errors or things that you have not thought through. Sometimes even when you are not expecting to change course significantly based on the consultation results, there still may be things that you can usefully pick up from the consultation process.

The Chairman: Do you review the department’s handling of past consultations and apply any lessons to future incidents?

Mr Laws: We do when we are challenged by bodies such as your own and potentially the Select Committee, but otherwise the way that I suspect I and my colleagues—although Lord Nash will want to speak for himself, I suspect—try to deal with this is to make sure that, when we are making policy decisions and when there are consultations under way, we look very carefully at the feedback and the conclusions from those, and not only read the papers that are usefully prepared for us, which are put together by officials summarising consultation responses, but sometimes go behind them. As you know, there are sometimes enormous responses to the consultations, which will be routinely summarised. Sometimes they will appear to be quite straightforward and they will not need a lot of scratching around and studying the papers themselves, but sometimes one might need to read all the consultation responses. I can think of occasions where I have spent quite a lot of hours reading consultation responses on areas that have been particularly controversial, or where we have wondered whether the direction of policy needs to be rethought more fundamentally.

Q2 Baroness Andrews: Good afternoon. You will know that we received written evidence from the Association of School and College Leaders, and it gave us some figures: between 1 January and 31 August this year, your department issued 38 consultations that were relevant to the association, and the average time for consultation was seven weeks. Now, clearly this indicates a tremendous turbulence in terms of change, which drives consultation, and my question is really: how concerned are you at the speed of change and the impact it has on those consultation processes? Could you say something about whether it is reasonable to ask schools to reply so often and so quickly to matters, some of which, as you describe yourself, are about making policy, not just addressing some gaps in policy, as it were?

Mr Laws: Yes. We now try to make sure that the length of consultation is related to the seriousness of the issue and the amount of time that people will need to ponder it. In the past there was a natural default to go for particular consultation lengths, but sometimes you are consulting over something that is really quite straightforward and people do not need very much time to respond to it, and having three months as a consultation process for the sake of it seems excessive. However, there are other occasions where there are really meaty, difficult issues where large numbers of people have very strong views, and where you will want to make sure that there is a longer period of time. We try to make sure as best we can that we are responsive in terms of length of consultation to those factors.

Baroness Andrews: Do you discipline yourself in the sense that you decide not to go out to consultation sometimes when you would quite like to? How do you mediate?

Mr Laws: No. Our default is basically to go out to consultation unless there is a very good reason not to. What we are more rigorous about doing is looking at whether the length of consultation is proportionate to the issue. Sometimes through the government clearance processes we will get Ministers in other departments asking why on earth we have chosen a consultation period of a particular length. Sometimes they will think it is too short; sometimes they will think it is too long. We have to give thought to the amount of consultation time rather than just deferring to an assumption about all consultations.

Q3 Lord Bichard: I was slightly surprised to hear you say earlier that you do not monitor the consultations that take place; you look at them individually. Would you be able to tell us how many consultations took place from January to August? The figures we have are only those that ASCL were interested in. Could you tell us how the average period of consultation changed? In other words, was it getting shorter, or was it getting longer? Thirdly, how many consultations strayed into the school holidays?

Mr Laws: I cannot give you those numbers off the top of my head. I would be very happy to do a note for the Committee if you would find it helpful to look at some of these things. My sense is—and you are probably more aware of this than I am—that some of the guidance in the Cabinet Office about consultations changed a couple of years ago, and the automatic assumption of 12-week consultations changed. My guess is that, over departments as a whole the average timespan of consultations will probably have contracted. Lord Nash may have a different view on this from me, but in the absence of somebody challenging either the number that we are putting out in a particular period of time or whether a particular consultation has been managed wrongly, we will see it as our responsibility as Ministers to make sure that each consultation is a properly managed and serious process. On things like school holidays, I dare say there can be cases found where we have not done things in an exemplary way, but we are certainly conscious of consulting over periods when teachers and others have plenty of other things to do, and we bear that in mind sometimes in the length of consultation, allowing more time if it is over a particularly sensitive time of the year.

Lord Bichard: However, there are no statistics you have today to show whether or not that is having any impact—in other words, whether or not you are consulting over school holidays. The allegations that are made are that there are too many consultations taking place during the school holiday period.

Mr Laws: I do not have them with me today but I would be very happy, if your Committee wishes, for us to provide data on that.

Q4 Lord Bichard: Regarding the School Premises Regulations 2012, we were told that 52% of respondents opposed the proposals on outdoor space. That was not clear initially, and we were told the reason for that was that the consultation process was, I quote, “somewhat taken over” by apparently misguided concerns that the regulations would make it easier to dispose of playing fields. There are two issues there: one is, notwithstanding that last point, would it not be reasonable to draw to the attention of this Committee the fact that 52% of people did raise this as an issue? Secondly, should the department not take some responsibility for the fact that the public apparently were confused as to what this all means?

Mr Laws: Yes, I do not know whether it was the public; I suspect that all this went past the public a little, because the people who engaged in our consultation—and there were a lot of them—would not on the whole be ordinary members of the public. My recollection is not as clear as it might be, because I was not in the DfE at the time, but I recollect even from outside the department that the whole issue of school playing fields was quite a controversial one. There were arguments about whether Governments had been selling off school playing fields; there were arguments about whether this particular Government was looking to accelerate or make it easier to sell off school playing fields, which certainly was not the policy intent.

This particular consultation, which was across a whole range of issues, arrived at a time when the playing fields issue was particularly sensitive and people were, therefore, inclined to question not just what they saw on paper but potentially what the motivation was. That I think is what led some of the people who responded to the consultation to be more cautious and concerned about it than in time they have been justified in being, because they can see the intention was not to do some of the things that they were worried about and to make it easier to sell off playing fields without proper scrutiny.

Lord Bichard: With respect, school playing fields have been a sensitive issue since 1944, if not 1844, so it cannot have taken the department entirely by surprise. If there are 52% of people raising this as a cause for concern, should this Committee not have been informed about it? Should the wider public not have been informed about it?

Mr Laws: I do not want to suggest that all our consultations throw up things that are unpopular, because they do not, and you will see from most of the questions in this that the majority of people supported what we were proposing. There were only two or three areas where the majority of people were not in favour of the changes, but it is not unusual for Governments of all parties to find that feedback from consultations is not universally welcoming of all proposals. That is certainly cause for us to look very closely at what we are doing and ask questions about whether what we are doing is right, but we also have to consider whether we accept the criticisms being made. Sometimes those criticisms may come from a particular group of people with one concern, who may not represent the views of the vast majority of people. After all, we got 176 people or something who responded, but that is a tiny proportion, by any measure, of the number of teachers, head teachers, schools, let alone people in the country.

Lord Bichard: The very simple question I am asking you is: do you not think the explanatory memorandum might have pointed out that 52% of respondents raised concerns about the proposals on school playing fields?

Mr Laws: The explanatory memorandum is supposed to be read against the very detailed, long consultation response document, which we did prepare, which we did put out, which is very detailed and which really highlights all of the views, support and criticisms or concerns about different proposals. The document you are talking about is a very short one. It is supposed to be a pithy summary. It is not in any way supposed to be an all-embracing summary of the consultation response. We really do that through publishing separately what the consultation responses were. My experience is that these documents are always very transparent and straightforward, and sometimes they make for uncomfortable reading for Governments, because they highlight areas where not everybody is supporting government proposals.

Lord Bichard: Did that longer document make it clear that 52% of respondents opposed the proposal on outdoor space?

Mr Laws: I am sorry I am glancing up, but I must not miss a Division if it occurs in the Commons, because we are under strict instructions.

The Chairman: I have my eye on the screen. Do not worry.

Mr Laws: Oh, good. For each question that came up in the consultation, there is a separate section in the response document. It highlights, for example, on external space, which I think is the issue that you are concerned about, that 52% of the 147 responses said that they were not basically supportive of it, versus 35% “yes”. Then, in a number of paragraphs, it sets out some more detail on this. I think we have been quite clear about it in this area and all the others.

The Chairman: Okay. The bell has gone in the Commons. Minister, thank you very much for your attendance. I gather there may be two votes, so we will continue with Lord Nash.

Mr Laws: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Q5 Baroness Andrews: I am sorry the Minister is going. I will have to address my question to Lord Nash. I wish to pick up on what the Minister said about going behind the lines in some consultations—not just taking the surface judgment of, “This is how the consultation has panned out”, but interrogating the consultation. I am just wondering, in terms of Ministers themselves, do you interrogate the interrogation? Would you have known, for example, on this case and the next case, indeed, that there was a significant number of people who were in disagreement with the Government? Would you have interrogated that, would you have expected officials to draw your attention to it, or could you have found out for yourself?

Lord Nash: I cannot answer on school buildings, because that is Minister Laws’s responsibility, but on independent school standards, most certainly. We have an analysis of the consultation, and we have in fact been having ongoing discussions with the Independent Schools Council on this and are very aware of their points, which is one of the reasons why we have not, apart from the SMSCregulations, published the rest of the standards. The answer to your question, Baroness Andrews, is yes.

Q6 Baroness Humphreys: My question relates to the regulations. Can I ask the question of Lord Nash?

The Chairman: Of course.

Baroness Humphreys: It is about the washing and toilet facilities in schools. Your department’s written evidence says that most of the correspondence received since the regulations were made relates to the washing and toilet facilities, but the 2012 explanatory memorandum again did not mention that 51% of respondents opposed the proposals. A submission to this inquiry from the Independent Schools Council makes the point that having a single set of regulations applicable to all schools is unworkable, mainly because of schools that cater for pupils with complex needs. Did your department take sufficient account of concerns voiced about these aspects of the regulations during consultation? The second part of the question is: did your commitment to having a single set of regulations override any willingness to listen to genuine objections to this one-size-fits-all approach?

Lord Nash: This would be much better addressed to Mr Laws. I can say that when it comes to complex and special education needs, we are very careful to take into account any consultation and points on this, but I will have to write to you unless he gets back in time.

Q7 Baroness Stern: I hope my question is generic enough not to cause you any anxiety. It is about the questions that are asked in consultations. We have received evidence that consultations often ask what consultees think about a proposal with answer options of “yes”, “no” or “not sure”. We received evidence from somebody who said, “In many cases I wanted to respond ‘yes but subject to’, ‘no unless’, or ‘not sure until we are provided with further information’”, and he warns that this form of consultation can encourage “simplified and superficial engagement with the questions”. I have two questions for you. First, do you agree that this form of simplified questioning risks oversimplifying the responses to the point of making them not extremely useful? Secondly, is there some way that the department ensures that it delves a bit more deeply into the complexities of what is proposed above the “yes, no, not sure” formula? Thank you.

Lord Nash: It is always a fine line between making sure that the answers to responses are short and to the point, so that they are clear, and providing respondents with enough opportunity to comment. We have a comment box in our consultations so that we do not just rely on simple yes or no answers. We are very careful in framing the questions, and I myself have on a number of occasions thought that the initial shot at the questions was a bit too black and white, but it may be that in one or two cases we have thought we could perhaps develop this and be a bit better at it, yes.

Baroness Stern: Could I perhaps ask a supplementary? It was interesting to hear about the comment box. Could you give us an indication of what you do with what is in the comment boxes, which presumably may give you a yes but then may modify it? When we hear how many were in favour and how many against, we do not get “so many were in favour”, “so many were in favour with huge modifications”, “so many were just about in favour if they had to be pushed”. I just wonder how you deal with what is in the comment boxes.

Lord Nash: We look at whether or not there is a consistent comment and whether or not that is a comment that has been stimulated by one pressure group and, therefore, it is the same comment over and over again, or whether it is coming from different directions. If it was the latter case, obviously that would carry a great deal of weight.

Q8 Lord Bowness: Can I follow Lady Stern’s point? I understand, Lord Nash, you take account of the comments and see whether they are coming from one source, and whether they are sort of duplicated, but the question I want to ask is: do you qualify the numbers in the result of the consultation as a consequence of the comments, whether they are from one source or another? In other words, if 50% of the yeses are qualified, either with one qualification or multiple qualifications, do you nevertheless put them down, as it were, in the yes box?

Lord Nash: In the case, if I may, of the independent school standards in relation to SMSC and other matters, we have had about 1,500 responses. These will be published when we publish the result of the consultation imminently. We have analysed those quite carefully, and 900 of them come from the Christian co-operative organisation that are making the same point maybe about same-sex marriage. We do look at that quite carefully, yes. That is not really a yes or no response in this case. It is a question of interpretation of the law. We have had extensive correspondence with them and many letters with them and others on this point during the course of the consultation and subsequently.

Lord Bowness: I am sorry. I obviously did not make it clear. Does “yes, but” go down in the results of the consultation as “yes” or in a separate category?

Lord Nash: I will have to write to you about this. It is a good question, and I will try to write to you with a rather more specific answer.

Q9 Lord Eames: In a sense my question overlaps with something that my colleagues were pressing you and Minister Laws a few minutes ago about. Can I press you a bit further on the question of timing? In particular, the example I take is the independent school standards regulations. Now, if my information is correct, there was in fact a six-week period given for this consultation. When Minister Laws was with us he answered one of my colleagues and used the phrase, “We always give consideration proportionate to the issue”. Now, bearing in mind what has already been said this afternoon, do you honestly think that six weeks at that time of the year is giving proportionate importance to this issue? If so, can you tell us more about what thought went into this?

Lord Nash: Yes. The six weeks consultation relates, as it turned out, to the SMSC regulations on British values. This follows the Birmingham Trojan Horse, which had been well trailed, and we know that the school system generally was following this. The slight change to the regulations in relation to SMSC in relation to British values—and it is a slight change, from “promote” to “actively promote”—is not something that should trouble the vast majority of schools. However, in those cases where they are not promoting British values, and we may take the view that this might result in a climate that is more likely to breed extremism, we felt that this was a special case, an urgent case, and that is why the consultation was relatively short. We did have, though, as I say, many responses, and it was being well trailed both in the press and in statements made by the two Secretaries of State.

Lord Eames: Perhaps I did not express it clearly enough. I understand the importance of it and I understand this whole question of British standards, but I just find it hard to understand, in the light of what Minister Laws said to us before he had to leave us, whether this “proportionate to the importance” plays a role in all cases, or are you highlighting this particular one?

Lord Nash: This is the one that I have been most concerned with, and this is the one that has the six-week timeframe. We think that, in view of the importance of schools teaching British values, which of course, as I say, would be the vast majority, and the importance of those few schools that may not be, it was important, frankly, to get on with it.

Lord Eames: I will finish with this point. I cannot equate in my mind the importance of an issue and the proportionate attention you give to the question of a consultation. If it is that important, would that six weeks in all honesty give ample importance to the responses to such an important issue?

Lord Nash: We think in this case that the issue was well trailed. First, it had been well trailed for months that we would be making changes to independent school standards. I wrote to Graham Stuart, the Chairman of the Select Committee, on this in March. It has been well trailed. We had been having discussions with the Independent Schools Council for several years in relation to this. In the particular case that was only six weeks, which is the SMSC regulations, we felt that the issue had been well trailed and it was sufficiently important to the school estate. We have had a lot of responses to it, and the changes were small. We felt that, because of the particular nature of the issues that they were designed to address, it was important that there was some level of urgency but, despite that, we think six weeks was enough in this case.

Q10 Lord Bichard: The actual period for most schools was four weeks, because there were two weeks in the summer holidays when they would have had some difficulty in consulting with, for example, governors. However, if it was such an important issue, Minister, why did it take the department 10 weeks to publish a response? The response was not published until 24 October. Now, I understand that there may well have been a number of responses, but surely the weight of the department’s officials could have produced a response before then.

Lord Nash: Which regulations are you talking about?

Lord Bichard: I am talking about the independent school standards regulations.

Lord Nash: We have not actually published a response yet.

Lord Bichard: In which case I have misleading information, but it makes it even worse, does it not?

Lord Nash: We have not published a response. We plan to publish the response very imminently, at the same time as publishing the guidance, because it has raised a number of misconceptions, and we feel it is important that, at the same time as publishing the response, we publish guidance so there can be no further misunderstandings.

Lord Bichard: My point is underlined by that, is it not? If you have allowed four weeks, in effect, for consultation, and then we are now 13 weeks after the end of the consultation and we still do not have a response or the guidelines, is that not rather strange?

Lord Nash: We think this case is unusual. There have been a lot of people who we think have essentially got the wrong end of the stick and we need to make sure the guidance is clear, and we do not think it would be helpful to publish our response and then guidance, and create more misunderstanding. The guidance should come out at the same time, and getting the guidance absolutely right has required a great deal of discussion, particularly with lawyers.

Lord Bichard: I do not mean to be difficult, but this is the second time this afternoon that we have been told that those who have been consulted did not understand the consultation. Does the department not have some responsibility to try to ensure, whether it is the public or informed groups, which it would have been in this case, that they have sufficient information to understand what the consultation is about?

Lord Nash: I do not think it is so much that they did not understand the consultation. Some may have not entirely wanted to understand the consultation, and it is important that we do not allow that kind of situation to continue, and that when we come back with clear guidance, it is absolutely clear. I do not think the consultation was unclear. We were clearly consulting on fundamental British values and I do not think it could have been clearer—the fundamental British values have been clear since the Prevent strategy in 2011. We have not changed the actual wording of what fundamental British values represent, and indeed independent schools have had to follow these since January 2013. I do not think it was a confusing situation.

Lord Eames: Is there a danger, Minister, that what you have just said to my question and to my colleague’s question is that the department prejudged the results of the consultation?

Lord Nash: No. We were planning to publish Part 4 of the standards at the same time as the changes to Part 2, and as a result of the consultation we have in fact delayed publishing that while we have been having further dialogue with the sector. When we publish the rest of the independent school standards, you will see we have made quite a few changes to the draft as a result of the consultation.

Q11 Baroness Andrews: To pursue this a little further, you said you were confident that the timetable for the consultation was appropriate because you had trailed the debate with schools and yet, when the consultation happened, a lot of other issues were thrown up by the schools, who clearly found themselves, I would imagine, in the forefront of a pretty toxic national debate about British values in the context in which it was being conducted. This is a very general question, but do you think it raises issues about the extent to which we expect schools, or indeed other agencies sometimes, to deal with some very powerful political ideas in a short and exposed period of time? Schools were very much in the front line in the context of that debate, and I wonder whether the department is concerned about that—whether there is an issue about how to manage that, especially in relation to the consultation, which, as Lord Eames said, might have been stretched in order to accommodate the controversy that was surrounding the argument at the time.

Lord Nash: I think I said that the shortness of the consultation was not driven entirely by the fact that it had been trailed; it was partly driven by the fact that the changes in relation to SMSC were minor, and this was a very important point. However, I will repeat that since January last year all independent schools have had to promote the fundamental British values as defined in the same way as they are now defined, and all we have done is make it clear that they must actively promote those values. As a result of Birmingham, we discovered rather shockingly that there were schools that were not promoting, or certainly not actively promoting, these values, and we do not think that is a healthy state of affairs.

Baroness Andrews: The context had changed a lot by September, had it not, given the flair up around the whole Birmingham situation? The schools were replying in a slightly different context from earlier exchanges.

Lord Nash: Frankly, as far as schools are concerned, we have had pretty little pushback about this issue.

Q12 Baroness Hamwee: My first question—and I would like to come back to something else if I could—is a more detailed point, I suppose, on part of Lady Andrews’s question. The department has told us on this point about active promotion of fundamental British values that the debate started earlier than one might have thought, not because the point had been in place for some time and trailed before but because of a Statement to Parliament by the Secretary of State on 9 June. We were intrigued as to how much the department expects schools to monitor, other than through intelligent reading of good newspapers, what is going on in Parliament and whether they are alerted to parliamentary Statements against the possibility of a forthcoming consultation.

Lord Nash: I would imagine that normally schools are fairly disinterested in these matters, but this was a special case. There was widespread media coverage for months in the run-up to the Statement, which I know was followed actively by the school system. If they did not see the precise Statement, they would have seen a lot of newspaper coverage on it, and schools were also alerted by other means. In March the Independent Schools Council provided in its newsletter a link to my letter of 28 March to Graham Stuart of the Select Committee announcing the reform programme and mentioning changes to the independent schools standards, and noted the launch of the consultation on 23 June. Again, although as a general point, Baroness Hamwee, I am sure you are right, in this particular case there was a lot of focus on it.

Baroness Hamwee: We should not be led too far down the track of generalising from this particular, I think.

Lord Nash: I think you should not. I would accept that we should not either, and we do not plan to be.

Q13 Baroness Hamwee: Can I just go back to the detail of timing of consultation? Let me wrap up a number of questions together. How much do you allow for the onward consultation that umbrella bodies have to do? Then, if you get a reply from an umbrella body, how much do you try to unpack what Lady Stern was talking about: the “yes, maybes” from the stronger “yeses”? How much weight do you give to it because it is an umbrella? Do you look at individual schools’, in this particular instance, own responses and count them as well? How do different bodies count against one another? Does an individual who is a parent count less than the chair of governors? You understand my point about a hierarchy.

Lord Nash: Yes, and I have already said that I will write with some more detailed analysis to the yes/no issue. We try to bring some balance to it, but I would not want to think that any one person is thought of as being any more important than any other, and just because we get the same representation often couched in the same words again does not mean that we say, “Oh, that is 900 times one”. I mean, it clearly expresses a consistent strength of feeling, so these things have to be taken in the round in a balanced way, but we have certainly, in relation to the independent school standards, thought about these issues and these replies very carefully. That is one of the reasons why it has taken us some time to make sure we couch the guidance in a way that is very clear.

Baroness Hamwee: Does allowing for onward consultation figure in the thinking about how long the consultation period should be?

Lord Nash: At the end of the formal consultation?

Baroness Hamwee: No. When you launch a formal consultation, some people, some bodies, may be able to respond without going out more widely to a membership—I use the term very generally—while others will need themselves, if they are representative bodies, to gather in the representations.

Lord Nash: Yes, we certainly consider that.

Q14 Lord Woolmer of Leeds: As a Committee, we have always been clear that government departments should publish a summary of consultation exercises before they lay the relevant draft statutory instruments before Parliament. These regulations were laid on 8 September but the department did not publish the consultation summary by the end of October when we reported to the House on the regulations and, as you say, it has not been published yet. Can I ask you two or three questions of principle as opposed to getting bogged down in the specific case? Do you agree that Parliament and stakeholders should be fully informed about the outcome of consultation exercises at the same time that the draft secondary legislation is laid? That is the first question. How would you expect draft legislation to be assessed, say by this Committee, in the absence of key information about the reactions of interested parties?

My second issue of questions of principle relates to the explanatory memorandum. Mr Laws, the Minister, touched on this earlier, and I thought he referred to the explanatory memorandum as a very brief, concise document. Typically the explanatory memorandum refers the outcome of consultation, if a report has been produced, to a webpage. I wave at you the number of draft pieces of statutory instruments we had before us, and I have to tell you this is a modest amount by the standards of this Committee. We take the view that the explanatory memorandum should have at the very least a concise statement of the key issues that were raised in the consultation and, in considering the draft that it has now put before Parliament, the Government’s response in amending or otherwise the draft regulations in the light of consultation. That brief summary, which I would have thought Ministers would want to have before them anyway, would help this Committee to understand the key issues that arose and how the Government responded to them, as opposed to a 10, 15, 20-page document on every piece of draft regulation we have.

Do you think Parliament should be fully informed of the outcome of consultation exercises at the same time that the draft legislation is laid? How do you expect this Committee to assess properly the draft regulations if it does not know the outcome of consultation? Thirdly, why is it that explanatory memoranda do not as a routine summarise the key issues, because there will have been key issues, and the response—how that modified or otherwise the draft legislation?

Lord Nash: The consultation principles document that the Government published last autumn states that consultation responses should usually be published within 12 weeks, which would have been on 27 October in relation to this ISS consultation. Our intention at one stage was to publish a single response, but our target for revising the other standards has now moved to January. We recognise the desire to see a response in relation to the SMSC standard, and we shall be publishing that imminently.

We do accept—I do accept—that Parliament is assisted in assessing new legislation if consultation response documents are issued at the same time as regulations are laid. That is the ideal, and I accept we have not met that in this case, and I can only apologise for that. I have tried to explain why, but I accept we have not. Although the standard is not changed very much in terms of the wording, the changes have had a high profile and we want to get it right. As I have said, this has taken some time and we want to make sure that the response and the guidance are published at the same time.

I take entirely Lord Woolmer’s point about key issues and the summary document. I spend my life trying to get officials to reduce telephone directories into simple summaries. We seem to have lost the art of précis in this country—something I would like to bring back into the curriculum—and I will take back your point. I shall certainly try to ensure that any consultations I am involved in have some clear summary of the key issues in them.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: On that point—and I will finish on this—this relates specifically to explanatory memoranda. I cannot tell you how useful it is in explanatory memoranda, when you are faced by myriad draft regulations, to have highlights, because that may well lead you to go back and look at the full document, but to expect us to read over a weekend what amounts to several dozen consultation documents online is practically impossible.

Lord Nash: It is almost rude. I apologise. We will try to ensure we do better in future.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: That is encouraging, but it would be very helpful if you could take that message back to other departments.

Q15 Lord Bowness: We have touched on a number of the aspects in this question, but I want to emphasise perhaps the date of implementation rather than the consultation. They came into force, as I understand it, on 28 September, three months after the consultation was launched. Those three months included the holidays, and I think the Minister suggested that the department took note of things like school holidays, but equally I understand, from the answers you have been giving us, that you thought everybody knew about it anyway and the discussions had been ongoing, and that really they should be in a position to respond. I do not know whether that is your view; I do not want to put words in your mouth, but clearly the school holidays do present a problem, and I wonder how you really think schools can implement major changes at what is really short notice. Equally, I noticed you said discussions were still going on about the vast majority of the contents of these regulations, so why did we bring them into force on 28 September?

Lord Nash: We brought into force the SMSC part.

Lord Bowness: But are there no discussions going on about that, then?

Lord Nash: No. We have had discussions about that and we brought those into force on 29 September, as you say. The change there was very minor and, as I have said, only a small minority of schools would need to do anything different from what they were doing in relation to British values and, frankly, I think we would all agree that those that do need to do something different should get on and do it as quickly as possible, because it is disturbing, as Birmingham showed, if they are not. I do not think there is a major change. In relation to most schools, what we are asking them to do would be intrinsic in their ethos already.

Lord Bowness: Are you, however, having further thoughts in the light of the representations that you have received about timescales, rather than about this particular issue? Are you going to give some further consideration to this? The Association of Schools and College Leaders commented to us, with or without justification, that they considered the consultation process “entirely inadequate for respondents to feel that there was a genuine desire for their voices to be heard”. How genuine was the desire to hear those voices that did not agree with the principles in the proposals?

Lord Nash: As I say, we will not be implementing the remainder of the standards until January, and we have had further discussions in relation to many of those standards. The only one we have implemented is the one that had, frankly, a very minor change.

The Chairman: Ministers, thank you very much for joining us, and particularly for Mr Laws’s engaging in the democratic process athletically in coming back to us.

Mr Laws: Apologies for not being quite as long as I had planned, leaving Lord Nash by himself.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for being with us.