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Lord Coe: My Lords, in her Statement, the Minister properly referred to the protection of the public and the use of the £120 million of lottery money. She will be aware that that sum was given on the basis that the stadium could properly house football, rugby league and athletics. There has already been talk about a facility costing nearly £12 million to raise a demountable track and we are told that the time involved will be some 17 weeks. Given that the stadium would be out of use for nearly 17 weeks, does she genuinely think that the stadium will be "athletics compliant" and that there is any incentive for the future owners of Wembley to bid for the World Athletics Championships? She will also be aware that we lost a World Athletics Championships last year. At the time, her department announced a study by the PIU into future strategies to attract such sporting events to these shores. Will she give the House an update on the progress that has been made and tell us when we are likely to be able to deliberate on its findings?

Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Coe, is absolutely right about the importance of protecting the £120 million. I am sure that he will have seen the Sport England report that makes it clear that it is possible for an athletics platform to be put into the new stadium at considerably lower cost than would have been the case under the original concrete plans and that it can be installed and removed much more quickly.

With around 30 events a year, there should be no problem for those running the new national stadium to plan ahead for a major international athletics meeting. As the noble Lord knows very well, we are not of course talking about frequent athletics meetings—we could use Birmingham, Sheffield and Crystal Palace for national events. We are talking about the occasional international event of major importance. We should now celebrate the fact that we will at last have an international as well as a national location for athletics if the project comes off.

The noble Lord also asked about the PIU. The PIU project team will develop an overall strategy for guiding the Government's decisions on sports policy,

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including major events of the kind to which he referred. We expect the project to be completed in the summer.

Baroness Billingham: My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement, which was honest, clear and rightly self-critical. I do not think that anyone could possibly claim that this project had been smoothly managed. However, we must face the fact that we are where we are. I suspect that there have been far too many deadlines and misleading headlines.

Would the Minister be so kind as to confirm two basic principles about the project? First, will she confirm that the FA is funding the project and that Wembley is its preferred venue? The FA has said that perfectly clearly and it is negotiating with banks in order to achieve that end. Secondly, will she confirm that there will be no additional government funding, apart from the funding that has already been stipulated—the £20 million that has already been earmarked for the infrastructure? That has been said many times but people have clearly not taken that on board. That is a very important point for those who are watching this debate very carefully.

It is now possible that we have but 10 weeks before completion. It would be a tragedy if we drew back at this moment. That point was made clearly in the other place this morning by a Liberal Democrat spokesperson. I hope that the House will give a ringing endorsement to the proposal that Wembley is the preferred option. The sooner that that is achieved, the better; if that is done, the sports lovers of this country will be best pleased.

Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, I am grateful for my noble friend's remarks. I confirm that the project is being funded by the Football Association and that Wembley is the association's preferred venue and choice. I can say absolutely categorically that there will be no additional government funding, over and above the £20 million that is still on the table for infrastructure improvement, to ensure that people can travel between Wembley, London and points farther afield. I am grateful to my noble friend for her general comments on the Statement.

Of relevance to a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay—who I see shaking her head—is that David Moffett, the relatively new chief executive of Sport England, told the Select Committee in another place that Sport England's handling of the project could have been better. We ought to recognise a willingness to concede that the matter might have been handled more effectively. We should be grateful to Mr Moffett for that.

Education Bill

4.21 p.m.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Skills (Baroness Ashton of Upholland): My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

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Moved, That the House do now again resolve itself into Committee.—(Baroness Ashton of Upholland.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

House in Committee accordingly.

[The DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (Lord Murton of Lindisfarne) in the Chair.]

Baroness Blatch moved Amendment No. 202:

After Clause 48, insert the following new clause—

"APPEALS PURSUANT TO DECISIONS OF THE ADJUDICATOR
In section 25 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 (c. 31) (adjudicators) there shall be inserted—
"(5) The Secretary of State shall make arrangements for a body to hear appeals pursuant to decisions of the adjudicator.""

The noble Baroness said: The amendment poses the question whether an original jurisdiction should be allowed to exist, with no room for appeal—except by judicial review on procedural grounds only. It raises also the technical question of whether Section 86(7) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 makes it possible for the adjudicator to treat entry to a test as an expression of preference for a school.

We all know that organisation committees and adjudicators were set up to allow the Secretary of State to pass to an elected, unaccountable body the responsibility for making decisions that are tiresome for a Secretary of State, including the merging or closing of schools and the alteration of school structures at local level. That development wrote out of the loop the responsibility of local education authorities and put such decisions at arm's length from the Secretary of State. The most significant deficit is that parents, school communities and schools themselves are in no position to counter the adjudicators' absolute power.

If, when an organisation committee receives a proposal written in the organisational plan, one sector of the committee takes a different view, the proposal automatically goes to the adjudicator for determination. The adjudicator can uphold the majority or minority view, alter the proposition or substitute a wholly different decision. There is absolutely no appeal to the adjudicator. We and members on the Liberal Democrat Benches were extremely disquieted by the advent of organisation committees and adjudicators because they were unelected and unaccountable and adjudicators were given absolute power.

At least one adjudicator has already been taken to the courts and found wanting because he had exceeded his powers. The Government's answer was to extend the adjudicators' powers—so if the same decision were made today, it would not be against the law. It certainly would be against the interests of people locally and of schools.

The Government argued that committees and adjudicators would bring decision making closer to the people. Anyone who has examined the areas for which adjudicators are responsible will know that they are extremely wide—they extend far beyond local authority areas. In my area of Cambridgeshire and

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East Anglia, the adjudicator could not possibly know all the nursery, primary and secondary schools in Cambridgeshire because that individual is responsible for several county areas—yet that one person has absolute power.

Different adjudicators have different ways of working. There ought to be a test of fair process—not just correct process, in terms of judicial review. As I said, the only recourse open to a school community or parent body is to make an adjudication the subject of judicial review on the basis of process only, not its merits or demerits. That is a most unsatisfactory state of affairs.

My preference would be to see adjudicators removed from the 1998 Act, but if we must live with that unaccountable aspect of local decision-making, there ought to be a process of appeal. If the Minister argues that there was not previously the right of appeal to the Secretary of State, that is not true. There was a system of review and judicial review. Those of us with experience of local authorities, particularly on the Liberal Democrat Benches, know that they had to make judgments about the number of places available; and took views on mergers, closures and additional schools. Such propositions were considered at working party level and there would be road shows, talks to local communities; and discussions with governors, parents, and parish and district councils.

After the working party, a proposal would go before the primary and secondary sub-committees and the county council. Then the decision would go to the Secretary of State. If there was concern about a proposal before it reached the Secretary of State, parents could approach the Secretary of State—himself an elected individual—through their Members of Parliament and make their input. The people who submitted the proposal in the first place and the individual decision-maker were elected.

The Government should be generous with the amendment and at least allow appeals to the all-powerful, all-pervasive adjudicators. I beg to move.

4.30 p.m.

Lord Pilkington of Oxenford: I underline what my noble friend said. Since the end of the 19th century, it has been a tradition in this country that local authorities should play a prominent part in education, in particular in relation to the more delicate situations, such as school closures and entry problems. It is a fairly novel development in English education for that role to be handed over to an official appointed as a result of patronage. As my noble friend pointed out, one can escape that only by judicial review. But judicial review is an enormously expensive process. It is possible that large local authorities could afford it, but schools and parents could not unless they had a large amount of money.

In addition, adjudicators have not always been as careful as they might be. For example, in Kent, when they considered the matter of choice of schools after someone had tried to get into a grammar school, the

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adjudicators did not consult the grammar schools in the county. Another adjudicator subsequently altered the decision of his predecessor. That was a messy situation and, had the county been able to afford it, it would certainly have made mincemeat of the Government at a judicial review.

I do not understand why the Government cannot allow appeals. We all know why the situation occurred. The Secretary of State did not want angry parents or angry local authorities on his doorstep. The best way to avoid that was to appoint, in the French Napoleonic manner, an official who would do the work for him, and not allow appeals. That is a denial of democracy, and a Government who care about the people should do something about it.

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