Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

In view of the time, we have probably been around this one for long enough. But, actually, the Minister is not quite right. If any local authority is open to set up a pilot in anything and does not need any extra funding for it, it does not need any funding to set up pilots in social work practices. If they want to have, or try out, social work practices, they could have a pilot. There is no need for extra money to encourage them to undertake one. There should be, as we were suggesting earlier, a level playing field on this issue. The Minister has still not responded to the final points I made about the content of the evaluation. He pointed out that the evaluation will be rigorous, detailed and all the rest of it. But there are particular things which must be looked at, including the delivery of Every Child Matters, the role of the local authority as a corporate parent, the resources available to local authorities, the access for children in care to other local authorities and wider local authority services, the recruitment, retention, pay and conditions of social workers and the stability of the care system as a whole—the wider environment which we were looking at in the points we made.