Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for her support for the pilots on social work practices. Amendment No. 5, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and Amendment No. 6, spoken to by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, seek reassurances that the evaluation of the pilots will focus on what happens not only within the social work practices themselves but in the wider workforce in the local authorities concerned. I am happy to give those reassurances. The evaluation of the pilots will encompass the quality of service both in the social work practices and in the local authorities concerned, including local authority child protection services; it will take into account turnover of staff in both organisations; it will assess the capacity of the local authority to be a good corporate parent under the social work practice role; it will draw out the impact on local authority staffing and finances; and it will look at the effectiveness of interagency working, including access to a range of services. In short, it will be a robust evaluation that will do everything that Amendments Nos. 5 and 6 would have it do. I hope that that meets the concerns that have been raised. Through Amendments Nos. 3 and 4 the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, seeks to ensure what she calls a level playing field for the evaluation of social work practice pilots. Amendment No. 3 would permit any local authority that wishes to implement a new initiative for improving services for looked-after children to do so with the permission of the Secretary of State. I assume that Amendment No. 3 is also intended to provide that the local authority in question should be given a similar amount of funding as the local authorities piloting social work practice to ensure a like-for-like comparison. The Government understand the theoretical concern behind these amendments but we do not think there is a real issue here in practice—simply giving the figures makes the point. The total budget for the social work practice pilots is approximately £6 million over three years. Over that same period total local authority spending on children’s services runs into the billions. There is nothing stopping any local authority using its share of that spending to pilot any other arrangements it wishes within the law, and it does not require the permission of the Secretary of State to do that. Even if we look just at projected increases in spending, the social work practice budget is tiny. In the Comprehensive Spending Review for 2008-11 we are making about £300 million available specifically for improvements to services for children in care, which dwarfs the £6 million provided for social work practices. Furthermore, local authorities wishing to introduce innovative new ways of organising social care services for children and families have just had the opportunity to bid for up to £200,000 extra a year through the Children’s Workforce Development Council remodelling social work delivery pilots project. This is broadly the same amount that will be available to local authorities participating in the social work practice pilots. We expect the social work development council to publicise the results of those pilots, therefore acting as a spur to best practice more widely in the way that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, asked us to do. So we really do not think that there is an issue here in respect of level playing fields. Amendment No. 44, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, together with his Amendment No. 6, would require the Government to publish and lay before Parliament a report of the evaluation of the social work practice pilots within three years of Royal Assent to the Bill. In Grand Committee I explained at length why the appropriate piloting period should be five years rather than three, and I thought that the case for five years was generally supported at that stage. It will be roughly a year after Royal Assent before the pilots are up and running. We want to ensure that social work practice pilots have a full two years of operation before an evaluation report is prepared, which means that we are looking at three and a half years at a minimum before the report of the evaluation could be published. It is important that we do not get into a situation where the evaluation report is rushed or ill considered because the evaluators are struggling to meet an artificial deadline set down in primary legislation. That is the reason we have gone for the five-year period, but if it is possible to produce the evaluation report in a shorter time, we will do so. The noble Earl attributes his Amendment No. 44 to the clerks’ exercising their vigilant eye on the Bill’s provisions. He seeks to elicit a commitment from me that the Government will undertake pilots and will not simply move to make the social work practice model available to all local authorities, which could happen theoretically simply by commencing Clause 6. I give him that commitment. We intend to make a commencement order to commence Clauses 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 for the purposes of piloting social work practices shortly after Royal Assent once we have identified which local authorities will take part in the pilots. As I have made clear before, we will not commence Clause 4 unless a decision is made on the basis of the evaluation of the social work practice pilots to make the model available more widely. I believe that the concern of the noble Earl is fully met in the assurances I have just given.