argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Defence Modernisation Programme — House of Lords, 2018-01-29
Topic: Government Operations
Judith Anne Jolly (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, the 2015 SDSR called for swingeing cuts to civil servants across the whole department, but of course it is civil servants who can deliver some of the savings that we have talked about this afternoon. Can the Minister update us on how successful the department has been at reducing the number of civil servants?
House of Lords: Allowance — House of Lords, 2018-03-27
Topic: Government Operations
Richard Newby (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I, too, congratulate the Leader on securing this settlement. It is modest but it protects the current level of allowances after years during which they have fallen and provides the basis of a regular uprating in the years to come—and it is closely linked to what happens in the Commons. In the current environment, I simply do not believe that a more generous settlement was politically possible, so it is very much to be welcomed In my view this does not mean that we have anything like a satisfactory approach to allowances. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, produced a simple political fix when he introduced the current system, and, while it has met what I am sure were his objectives—namely, a system which survived without inviting much adverse comment—it is by any logical perspective deeply flawed. In the past 10 years, I have seen my allowance in effect doubled—I lived in London when the Strathclyde measure was introduced—and then, when I moved last year to north Yorkshire, halved again. These changes have borne no relation to my participation in the affairs of the House Colleagues who have lived outside London for the whole period have seen a real terms fall in their allowances of nearly 20% at a time when London accommodation costs have increased faster than the overall rate of inflation. Personally, I can see no reason why, within a slowly rising funding envelope, we should not move towards a position in which expenses start again to reflect the actual costs incurred by Members who live outside London. I think that would be a much fairer system. However, I realise that there is no consensus in the House to move in such a direction and that the overall funding available to the Lords is likely to remain tightly constrained for the foreseeable future. That being so, I reiterate my thanks to the Leader for securing the increase she has announced today.
Northern Ireland (Regional Rates and Energy) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-03-27
Topic: Macroeconomics
David Trevor Shutt (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the gap. In the brief time I feel I ought to spend I want to speak about the Northern Ireland Budget (Anticipation and Adjustments) Bill. What we have had in Northern Ireland is Stormont rule, direct rule and now, civil servant rule. I am sure that when there was Stormont rule the Stormont Assembly would have had something akin to a public accounts committee, and therefore there would be some scrutiny of expenditures. I recall well during my 18 years in this place, when there was direct rule I spent many hours scrutinising the Northern Ireland budget—only scratching the surface, quite frankly; nevertheless, some work was done on that. My concern is that under this civil servant rule there is no scrutiny at all. This document tells us of many billions that have been spent in the 361 days of the current year and the four days that are left, and more billions for the beginning of next year The noble Lord, Lord Hain, mentioned early in the debate his concern about money being available to assist people who were hurt and damaged in the early days of the Troubles. Surely, any form of scrutiny could have looked at that and insisted that money be put into the budget. Similarly, we do not know whether there is money in the forthcoming budget that will not be required—that wonderful phrase that I learnt in local government, "virement", can be used here This Bill talks about anticipation. What does the Minister anticipate can possibly be done? Can there be a new way of thinking about scrutiny—the creation somehow of a scrutiny body, whether it is made up of Members of this House, the other place or, indeed, Members of the Assembly, who are not being used fully at present? Surely, it is right that there should be some scrutiny of civil servant rule.
GKN/Melrose Takeover: Update — House of Lords, 2018-03-27
Topic: Macroeconomics
Susan Kramer (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I want to press the Government a little more on one or two of the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. One of those is the timing of the letter. The Minister will be very much aware that, presumably, it was meant to elicit information and to express some government concerns to be taken into consideration by the shareholders of GKN before they exercise their votes. However, as he will know, many of the shareholders have already declared —and I think he will confirm that a declaration once made cannot be retracted. In addition, the remaining shareholders have largely had all their internal meetings to come to their final decisions, and cannot pull those meetings back together to reconsider in the very brief timeframe of the next 48 hours. Therefore, if this is something other than public relations, will he explain to me how it is meant to inform shareholders, because I do not understand that? Will he especially, in that case, confirm that he still takes the view that the Secretary of State can call in this transaction, in whatever form it goes through, if concerns remain following the vote I scanned through the Melrose response very quickly but there seems to be no mention of the 6,000 workers. There are various assurances on other points but I saw no mention of them. Will the Minister comment on that? I am also concerned that all the various declarations seem to have a timeframe of five years. Considering the length of time needed to plan measures such as the industrial strategy and the sustainable relationships that need to be developed in the aerospace, defence and other fields, five years seems an infinitesimal period. Will the Minister explain why that short timeframe apparently reassures him, because I am not sure that it does me Does the public interest definition need to be looked at again as it does not mention workers’ rights or pensioners and does not refer to the industrial strategy, which is supposed to have a much more important role now? Airbus, for example, has expressed concerns about a potential new owner, which could undermine the direction in which the Government are trying to take industry in this country. My last point concerns an issue I do not fully understand. However, the Minister may be able to help me. I understand that many of the shares are held by arbitration houses, and that rather than buying them and paying stamp duty they have them on loan and are exercising them in that format. Is that really appropriate and is it something else we should look at?
Electricity Supplier Payments (Amendment) Regulations 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-03-27
Topic: Energy
Lynne Featherstone (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, capacity markets and contracts for difference have been a roaring success and came in during the coalition years when Ed Davey was Secretary of State—we would expect no less. The regulations will pass today, but it is absolutely right to question any rise in cost, particularly when a small proportion of it is passed on to the consumer. It is always important to keep an eye on costs and particularly when renewing a contract with an entity that is effectively the sole supplier in the field, thus making competition on pricing an impossibility—there is no one competing, so they get more Having read the debate in the other place, the rationale given for the steep rise in costs to the Low Carbon Contracts Company and the Electricity Settlements Company since commencement, is basically the expansion of the number of providers, as the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, mentioned, from 46 to 447—which, of course, is a good thing—as well as the need to cover disputes. I too am very interested in the information on exactly what those disputes are and look forward to reading that in due course. We need to remain vigilant that all costs are properly scrutinised I could not help but note that the Minister in another place, Claire Perry, in order to assuage any concerns over the creeping inflation of costs beyond what they should be, said: "I am always keen to run the calculator over these companies’ calculations. As the Minister ultimately responsible, I will continue to do so".—[Official Report, Commons, Delegated Legislation Committee, 19/3/18; col. 8.] I am impressed with the Minister’s personal intervention in this mission and trust that her background in banking and finance mean that her use of a calculator is unimpeachable—but I hope there are some accountants keeping an eye on this too. I simply wish to reiterate that companies in receipt of large sums of public money need strict monitoring. On the basis that this will happen, I am content that the regulations should pass.
Artificial Intelligence — House of Lords, 2018-04-26
Topic: Technology
Christopher Fox (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, the Select Committee report and the Made Smarter review made quite a lot of the opportunity of bringing smaller and medium companies into the AI revolution and using it to make themselves more productive and competitive. How does the sector deal help that?
Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Michael John Storey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, before I turn to the amendment, I want to say that of course no one wants to see pupils being excluded, but I have to tell noble Lords that all the meetings in the world with the Minister will not change things unless we are prepared to put in the resources to support special educational needs and to deal with all the other things that cause children to get into trouble in our schools. Teachers have a right to teach and pupils have a right to learn. A disruptive pupil can often destroy a classroom and a school. We want to change that system, and I agree that we should not have exclusions, but it is about resources I support the amendment. It is absolutely bizarre that, as a society, we do not have a clue how many children go missing from the education system or how many are being home educated. We have responsibilities towards children. There are very good home educators. I have been looking at the guidance for parents on home education. It is a charter to do exactly what you want What is the legal position of parents? You can decide from an early age that there are no requirements. What is full-time education? There is no legal definition; you are not required to do this and you are not required to do that. If your son or daughter is enrolled in a school and you decide to take them on holiday in term time, guess what. You end up in court. But there are no legal requirements on parents teaching their children at home to do anything. On the curriculum, we had a long, anxious and worrying debate about British values. If you are home educating, you do not have to teach those values at all. The guidance to home educators, which we proudly say is the full guidance on what has to be done, is a charter to do absolutely nothing What should we be doing as a minimum? First, it is right that we should ensure that local authorities have to record those pupils who are being educated at home. Parents should have to register that fact. But there are other issues linked to that, one of which is resources. When there is a problem, we often blame local authorities, but when there is a difficulty, we often ask local authorities to do something about it. If we are going to ask local authorities to do this work, there have to be the resources for them. You cannot just say, "Right, we’ll pile this pressure on local authorities". Local authorities that do this work will need additional resources Again, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was right when he said in passing, "You know what, every pupil is worth a sum of money". When that pupil is taken out of school and home educated, that money is lost to the education system; it goes back to the Treasury. Would it not be nice if that sum of money were used in some way, perhaps to support young people and excluded children or to give some resource to local authorities to ensure that this area is monitored properly? I support the amendment.
Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Michael John Storey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, we very much support the amendment. It is a huge decision when you decide to teach your child or children at home. Yes, there is a very large home-school movement in this country. They network together, work together and support each other. In fact they have an annual five-day festival every year of home educators from all over the country. I have been invited to attend this year’s event and perhaps other noble Lords might like to come along and see them at work. However, they are on their own. There is no support and no advice. What happens during the period of exams? Where do the pupils sit their exams? They need help and support in that direction. What happens when they might actually want to use some of the facilities of a local school? Maybe the local school will be anxious to oblige, and the local authority can provide a brokering role. So I think advice and support are really important I suspect that the issue of resources is crucial. You cannot do this properly and make those provisions unless those resources are available. I shuddered slightly when the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned special educational needs, because already in mainstream schools there is a major funding issue over SEN. I do not know how we could make those resources available in the home education system; we should do, but it is quite a complex area. So this is an important amendment to support.
Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Michael John Storey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): This is an opportunity to, and I hope the Government will, consider the points made. It is shocking that we have hundreds of thousands—well, not hundreds of thousands, but thousands—of children missing from our education system and no idea where they are. No society should allow that to happen. When teaching started, there were school rolls. A pupil’s name was put on the school roll, there was an annual census, the local education authority collected all the details and they were submitted to the then Department of Education During the Labour Administration, there was concern about missing children, so they brought in what was called the unique pupil number. The idea was that when each pupil started schooling, they would have a number which would follow them through the education system so you would know where they were, they would not go missing, they would not fall off the cliff. I was quite comfortable with that and thought what a good idea it was, but it did not work in practice. I recall from my final years as a headteacher a particular issue with a pupil and a family. The family took the pupil out of the school, went to see the local authority, did not get the school they wanted, so moved to a different authority. I wanted to find out what had happened to this pupil. There was information about his progress, special educational needs—a host of information that the receiving school should get. Nobody had a clue where he had gone. It was a legal requirement that a receiving school had to use that unique pupil number, but he just vanished and was never heard of again in the education system. I did not realise that if a pupil went to an independent school, that number does not go with them either. There is a whole area here that we need to understand. I am not suggesting a Big Brother or Big Sister, but we need to ensure as a society that we know that our children are safe, not being put in vulnerable positions, and part of that safety is understanding the progress of their education and where they go.
Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Technology
Dominic Hubbard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): Very briefly, just to comment on the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, it would be interesting to get some feedback either now or later on why other mediums of passing on information are used. I work in a world where I am not comfortable with information coming in paper form—or, indeed, with any written text—but I have found coping strategies to deal with it. However, a film does not have the stigma of something scary. You can open it up and it is a very good way forward; it can contain quite a lot of information. No matter what else we do, I suggest that somebody takes that idea and keeps it in mind. You should use this medium more often, because it is a great way of getting across the essence of what you are doing. I hope that other people will use it more, and the Government will do it and find ways to explain that it is available. The most disastrous situation is that you get a series of texts telling you where on the web you can find the film explaining the text. It happens.
Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Dominic Hubbard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I have a degree of sympathy with this set of amendments. As the noble Lord suggested, some of the problems I see with Clause 2 might be addressed here in some way The noble Lord spoke about different types or facets of assessment getting in the way of each other, and that happens. Somebody who has failed at school because of a special educational need often acquires psychological problems—the two of them fit into each other. There is usually not just one thing—it is a package or a spiral, although whether it goes up depends on what is happening. Therefore they have to be taken into account together It is essential that we do not get overly prescriptive about people with different learning patterns or needs. If you are to deal with people whose learning patterns and possibilities are different, they will need a different approach, and unless that is taken on board, you will guarantee a degree of failure. The unfortunate thing about schools at the moment is that they are slightly overregulated, which means that you make the possibility —indeed, the probability—of failure higher in certain cases. I therefore hope that the Government and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, are careful to take this on board. If you get prescriptive, you will get it wrong, because you are guaranteeing that your prescription does not fit.
Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Michael John Storey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, briefly, on safeguarding, many home educators bring in people from outside to teach in particular subject areas, and it is absolutely important that we make sure that all the adults are checked by the Disclosure and Barring Service, which is what my amendment seeks to do.
Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Dominic Hubbard (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): Perhaps I may respond to that. Although I am severely tempted, I shall not call a Division now. If we put in "an appropriate education" we will cover these points. It will be a building block. If we put it in as an absolute—"must", "shall", "will", whatever you want—we will be dancing on the head of a pin. It depends on the context in which you take it. We know that because we have all done it. I have had 30 years of playing with those words. If we do that and keep in the age-related provision—even if we put caveats after it—we will still have the initial provision, which means you will have to have discussions on it The Minister is studiously looking at a piece of paper but perhaps I may ask him whether we have a legal definition of ability and—I am looking for the Bill; it is nice to know that long sight comes to rival dyslexia in my life—aptitude. He says that they are important but I do not think aptitude can come in if you have not had a proper assessment in the first place. You cannot assess aptitude if you do not have the right range of environment to find out what it is There are all sorts of problems here. If you have another form of words you do not need those three provisions in the clause because the number of people affected by it—20% of the population have special educational needs but you can probably double that for this group to 40%, or maybe only 30%—is enough to colour this legislation’s effectiveness unless there is something in there to say that you are not going to place this stress on them. Dyslexics are the biggest although not the only group—they are not the only pattern but they are the most commonly occurring pattern—and, unless we deal with this issue, the legislation will fail a large group of its clientele. We cannot have that. Other forms of words can go in such as an "appropriate education" If there is an appeal, the group that will have the most problems dealing with it will probably be the dyslexics and—guess what?—it runs in families. We will be creating more problems than we need. Just change that and make sure that it is done. I hope the Minister will give us guidance that the Government will not look unfavourably on this. If we do not change this it will create more problems than we need to have. Perhaps the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, will have something more positive to say on that comment.
Privately Financed Prisons — House of Lords, 2018-06-27
Topic: Law and Crime
Jonathan Marks (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, new, modern prison places are sorely needed, but do not the failed Carillion maintenance contract, the CRC contracts that we have just discussed and other MoJ contracts show how far the ministry needs to take a serious look at its contracting procedures, just as Rory Stewart accepted when he was before the Justice Committee yesterday, assessing tenders in a realistic and much more rigorous way? How does the department propose to improve its contracting procedures for these new prisons? Furthermore, Mr Gauke’s effort to get prisoner numbers down by cutting the number of short sentences, saving money in the process, is welcome. What proposals do the Government have to ensure that their prison building programme seeks to combine cutting numbers with transforming prisons, in both public and private sectors, to focus on rehabilitation and training rather than just containment and punishment?
Civil Liability Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-06-27
Topic: Macroeconomics
John Kevin Sharkey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, a key focus of our discussions of Part 2 has been to reduce the time taken to reach the conclusion of the first review of the PIDR. In Committee, the Minister encouraged more discussion about how to do that, and on Report the Government accepted amendments that brought forward very substantially the first determination. We were very grateful for that and for their very constructive involvement There were, however, two remaining issues to do with the timing of the first review. The first was on the 90-day period from commencement that the Bill gives the Lord Chancellor before he must trigger the first review. The second was on the absolute discretion given to the Lord Chancellor to decide when commencement should take place.