Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

I can provide the assurance that CAFCASS will be responsible, not local authorities. As we were trying to work out the reason behind the amendment—because I rightly divined that the noble Earl would raise the issue of contact centres—I assumed that he was being exceptionally ingenious and was seeking to put the obligation to sustain and develop more contact centres on local government. He thought that that, area by area, would be a way of ensuring that their funding was more secure than simply being dependent on the centre. I thought this was a very ingenious way of seeking to make contact centres a part of maintained local authority provision, even though they are entirely run by the voluntary sector. It is, of course, a part of their great strength that they engage fully with the commitment of the many voluntary associations that are engaged in their provision and which come together in the National Association of Child Contact Centres, which does excellent work in this area and is keen to do more. But it would not be appropriate to make that a local authority responsibility. The noble Earl was actually seeking some assurances from the Government about the future of the centres. In the first instance, let me say that we have made a significant commitment to developing additional centres. The noble Earl stole my best line because he quoted the figure; £4 million is a very substantial figure for investment. In fact, it is £3.5 million next year, rising to £4.5 million in 2007 and 2008. It is more than my life is worth to make commitments as to what will come out of the next comprehensive spending review. All I can say is that the baselines going into spending reviews are a very good position to bat from in securing resources thereafter, and that will be the baseline for the provision for additional contact centres. The commitment from the Department for Constitutional Affairs is in seeing that there are proper and—I stress—supervised contact centres where that is appropriate to ensure the safety of the children and parents concerned. Our commitment to that is absolute, and we will see that there are resources in the spending review to meet that commitment. The figure of £3 million rising to £4.5 million in 2007–08, to which I referred, enables a very substantial improvement to take place in supervised contact centres. It enables us to provide significant funding to 14 such centres, the funding in each case rising to £250,000—in the case of the new supervised contact centre in Bristol, we are providing £265,000—so significant resources are at stake. That has enabled 14 supervised contact centres to be established; we believe that that provides a good infrastructure for delivering the requirements under the Bill, but of course there is room for further improvement, and we are mindful that further improvement will be needed in due course.