Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Hampton

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I was going to rise very briefly to speak to Amendments 243, 249 and 260 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to which I added my name, but the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, has put it far better than I possibly could. I was going to talk about concerns about the home-schooling fraternity, but my noble friend Lord Crisp has put it far better than I could. I have also been persuaded by my noble friend Lord Russell and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, that Amendment 251 is extremely powerful. I am greatly looking forward to the Minister’s reply to these powerful arguments.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I should just say “ditto” to that, should I not? What the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said is hugely important, as is the response from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the words of my noble friend Lady Spielman. It is unclear how this set of amendments is going to work. It unclear whether they are proportionate. We would like to get a good understanding. We can see that there is a purpose and that they are important, but we have concerns about how the demands of this Bill fit with reality and are going to work in particular circumstances. I will not go into the detail of the amendments that I have in that space—I will wait for the Minister’s reply—but I will pick up on some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Wei on his amendments. Amendment 245 provides that, if a private tutor teaches online and never sees the child in their home, there should be no need for that tutor to supply a private address. There are other aspects. It appears that a company has to provide details of all the people it employs. What happens with online companies where you are not interfacing with anyone at any obvious location but are just interfacing with the software? It is really hard to read what you are supposed to produce and why it is reasonable to produce it.

Amendment 248 highlights the absurdity of trying to quantify every minute. Many parents rightly say that their children learn continuously through conversation, trips and hobbies, without rigid slots. Precise time-logging is trying to force home education into a classroom straitjacket.

Amendment 260 and, in particular, Amendment 261, which my noble friend Lord Frost has supported, seek to address what is breathtakingly open-ended stuff. What is required here and why? What is the underlying purpose being served? We have to be careful about going in for open-ended data collection. Those of us who have been here for a while will remember what happened after we passed RIPA, and the way in which local authorities started using it to find out parents who might be cheating when it came to saying what their address was in school applications. Anything that is collected under such a register does not just sit quietly in a database; it becomes available throughout government and will be swept up into the profiling systems used by the police and the security authorities.

We know from history and from the work of those such as Professor Eileen Munro that these systems tend to record deficits, not strengths, and to build up negative pictures of people. This results in children from black and other ethnic minorities being racially profiled as being bad. People worry about them and so something appears in the database, and then they are seen as a problem. That information will appear everywhere that the authorities look them up. We need to be really careful about how we allow information to be collected.

I do not see any practical provision that would allow anyone to know what is on the register or to correct what is on it. There must be some process for making it accurate when the local authority has added stuff of its own volition—it does not have to tell anyone that it has done so, and the information might be completely daft and inaccurate. There is no provision for how information should be assessed and removed. We need to look carefully at this. Dr Stephen Crossley’s work on the troubled families programme illustrates that this leads to intrusive interventions justified by mass data trawling and families being

“bullied to no good effect”,

with little evidence of positive outcomes.

In this area, we should legislate with humility about what the state can know and manage and about what is useful and practical. We should be careful about turning supportive families into defensive ones, educational flourishing into compliance anxiety, or safeguarding into a byword for intrusive bureaucracy.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Hampton

Committee stage
Wednesday 18th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 204, 205 and 206 in the names of my noble friends Lady Kidron and Lord Freyberg, and of the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Clement-Jones, in what rapidly seems to be becoming the Cross-Bench creative club.

I spent 25 years as a professional photographer in London from the late 1980s. When I started, retouchers would retouch negatives and slides by hand, charging £500 an hour. Photoshop stopped that. Professional film labs such as Joe’s Basement and Metro would work 24 hours a day. Snappy Snaps and similar catered for the amateur market. Digital cameras stopped that. Many companies provided art prints, laminating and sundry items for professional portfolios. PDFs and websites stopped that. Many different forms of photography, particularly travel photography, were taken away when picture libraries cornered the market and drove down commissions to unsustainable levels. There were hundreds if not thousands of professional photographers in the country. The smartphone has virtually stopped that.

All these changes were evolution and the result of a world becoming more digitised, but AI web crawlers are different, illegally scraping images without consent or payment then potentially killing the trade of the victim by setting up in competition. This is a parasite, but not in the true sense, because a parasite is careful to keep its victims alive.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support these amendments. I declare an interest as an owner of written copyright in the Good Schools Guide and as a father of an illustrator. In both contexts, it is very important that we get intellectual property right, as I think the Government recognised in what they put out yesterday. However, I share the scepticism of those who have spoken as to whether the Government’s ideas can be made to work.

It is really important that we get this straight. For those of us operating at the small end of the scale, IP is under continual threat from established media. I write maybe 10 or a dozen letters a year to large media outfits reminding them of the borders, the latest to the Catholic Herald—it appears not even the 10 commandments have force on them. But what AI can do is a huge measure more difficult to deal with. I can absolutely see, by talking to Copilot, that it has gone through my paywall and absorbed the contents of the Good Schools Guide, but who am I supposed to go at for this? Who has actually done the trespassing? Who is responsible for it? Where is the ownership? It is difficult to enforce copyright, even by writing a polite letter to someone saying, “Please don’t do this”. The Government appear to propose a system of polite letters saying, “Oh dear, it looks as if you might have borrowed my copyright. Please, can you give it back?”

This is not practically enforceable, and it will not result in people who care about IP locating their businesses here. Quite clearly, we do not have ownership of the big AI systems, and it is unlikely that we will have ownership of them—all that will be overseas. What we can do is create IP. If we produce a system where we do not defend the IP that we produce, then fairly rapidly, those IP creators who are capable of being mobile will go elsewhere to places that will defend their IP. It is something that a Government who are interested in growth really ought to be interested in defending. I hope that we will see some real progress in the course of the Bill going through the House.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Hampton

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I was at Second Reading. I am a teacher and an optimist, and I genuinely trust the Government. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, we all desperately want this to succeed; we want the 13th iteration to be the Bismarckian iteration that actually cuts through and cuts down flab. We were talking about this and I said that it is like trying to amend fog. We have the sunshine coming through, but at the moment we cannot really see it.

Amendments 21 and 33 seem like a sensible idea because there is a real worry about something going into a government department. I will talk about my amendments later but they are all about scrutiny. There seems to be less scrutiny rather than more once something has disappeared into a government department, which is slightly strange. If we could get Skills England to being a statutory body, out in the open and with more scrutiny, people would have a lot more belief in it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I share many of the concerns expressed by noble Lords. The Bill should by no means leave the House in the state in which it entered it. It is important that whatever body Skills England occupies has a great deal more status than the Government have proposed. I just do not think that what they have proposed will ever work in Whitehall. We need to take more care with the preservation of the relationships that have been established by IfATE, which make it work so well. I do not see anything in the transition proposed here that does that and, as I said at Second Reading, I would like to know what is going to happen to the Careers & Enterprise Company.