Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I hope that I can give a complete reassurance to the noble Baroness on this issue. The view of the Government is clear. Social work practices will be functional public authorities for the purposes of Section 6(3)(b) of the Human Rights Act. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, concern about the status of social work practices under the Human Rights Act arises from the litigation in the case of YL v Birmingham City Council concerning a private care home and the recent judgment of your Lordships’ House on the question of whether such an organisation is a public authority for the purposes of the Human Rights Act. However, the Government consider that arrangements with social work practices are fundamentally different from the arrangements in question in the YL case. In the YL case, it was concluded that a private care home was not exercising functions of a public nature. But in reaching that conclusion, their Lordships laid great emphasis on the fact that the private care home was not exercising any delegated statutory functions. The authority’s statutory duty was to make arrangements for the provision of care and accommodation and that duty had not been contracted-out or delegated to the care home. By contrast, the functions that will be the subject of arrangements under Clause 1 will be functions of the local authority itself. Those functions are imposed by primary and secondary legislation and the discharge of the functions will be funded by the local authority. For these reasons, the Government are clear that social work practices will discharge functions of a public nature and will, automatically, be public authorities for the purposes of Section 6(3)(b) of the Human Rights Act. We also believe that they will be fully covered by the duties laid down by the Disability Discrimination Act.