Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I, too, support the amendment. I am one of the people who were unable to attend Second Reading, and I was enormously grateful to the Minister for his letter of 3 December, which he copied to me, in which he commented on various things that were said. However, I was interested to note, on reading the Second Reading debate—he will not be surprised that I am interested in the children who end up in custody—that 10 of the 16 speakers mentioned the problem of children in custody, but, unfortunately, the Minister did not. It was not mentioned in the opening or the winding-up speech. I was therefore, frankly, disturbed by the second paragraph of his letter of 3 December, which states: "““However, we believe that children should only be brought into care where it is necessary to protect them from harm. It is important to ensure that young people in custody are safeguarded and protected from harm, but we do not accept that this requires them to be looked after and the state to assume a formal parenting role for them””." I wonder whether, on reflection, the Minister believes that that is actually the Government’s position. I hope that it is not, because if ever there was a group of people who need to be looked after and to have formal parenting roles assumed for them by the state, it is those in care who go into custody who, without that provision, will have none of it. I was therefore extremely concerned. This debate is not the time or place to cover the issues of custody, which we will come to in later amendments that I have tabled, but I cannot help being concerned that here, at an early stage, we are talking about co-operation and insisting that it must be there, because only if there is that co-operation will those wretched people in custody receive the care that the state must give them.