Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

The Secretary of State does not make his point any clearer by simply repeating himself. What does not help us is his coming along today with new clauses of primary legislation that contain no detail. We are expected to pass a new clause that will impose new targets, on top of flawed performance indicators, without knowing the details of it. I am even more worried now, because he clearly has not been reading the report by the author whom he commissioned. If he were to do so, he would find out that this is additional bureaucracy, not replacement bureaucracy, in too many cases. I could go through a list of performance indicators, most of which he appears to be blissfully aware of; the important thing is that we should not have bland and vacuous targets, which could have unforeseen consequences, one of which I have mentioned. Let me give the Secretary of State a series of questions, so that he can tell me whether these are going to be the targets when we are eventually provided with some of the detail. Are the targets going to be bare targets about reducing the number of children taken into care for child protection purposes?