Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I entirely accept the noble Baroness’s point—not about my not being a Minister tomorrow; it is only six and a quarter hours away and I fully intend to last that long at any rate—about the fact that so much local authority action depends on the decisions taken by those authorities. That is the nature of local democracy. These decisions should be taken at local level. I meet this debate all the time in schools. If part of the justification for having local authorities is to enhance local decision-making and the capacity of localities to do things differently if they wish, it is very difficult for a Minister to say that we think that there is only one way to do things and to seek to determine precisely how much money should be spent on it. There are two sides to this. I accept that local authorities are free to spend some of these resources in different ways, but that is in the nature of local democracy, which we hope will have other beneficial effects, including a greater emphasis than we would otherwise have on local experimentation and innovation to address the sort of issues that the Committee is grappling with this afternoon. Not only is the funding that we are talking about a very small part of the overall funding given to local authorities for children’s social care, but it is also a very small part of the £300 million that I mentioned earlier, announced with the White Paper for the implementation of its proposals in the Comprehensive Spending Review period. Only a very small fraction of that £300 million will go on social work practices. The great majority will support the other measures set out in the White Paper.