Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I am seriously worried that the Secretary of State is shaking his head, because he now needs to have a very close and up-front conversation with Lord Laming as he has misunderstood the reasoning behind the approach taken by the author of the report that he commissioned. That is seriously worrying—[Interruption.] I do not support some of the recommendations in Lord Laming's report and I have detailed those. I could detail all the recommendations that the Conservatives do support, if the Secretary of State would like me to do so. The relevant point that I am trying to make on the three new clauses that we are discussing is that we risk adding to the bureaucracy that has been the biggest enemy of effective social work practice for too many years. We have to get that system right. We already have numerous performance indicators, to which these new clauses, in particular new clause 22, will add targets. One such indicator is that initial assessments for children's social care are to be carried out within seven working days of referral. That is a good proposal, but the trouble is that in practice what has happened in certain authorities is that in order to meet that performance indicator, certain departments have written an assessment that includes the name and address of the child only—the rest of the assessment is blank, yet that counts as an assessment to meet the performance indicator. The Secretary of State seems to be shaking his head, but that is happening and it is not what he and I want to achieve. He and I do not want to achieve that target if in our doing so the target becomes meaningless.