Child Poverty Bill

Those points are very well made. My response is that the framework of the Bill and the requirements for the need assessments and the local strategies should drive people to address that. More than that, we are going to issue guidance around all this, so it should be very clear to local authorities what their responsibilities in this matter are. I was trying to deal with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, about a cost-benefit analysis. He will understand that if part of the strategy that emerges is the need to make better additional provision for kinship carers, issues will arise about how much that should be and what should be the baseline. Until all the detail of that is worked through, any cost-benefit analysis would be at best very crude. I come back to the point that the Bill is not about writing the strategies. It provides the framework within which the strategies should be developed and driven. Until those strategies are developed and refreshed every three years and evaluated on the basis of annual reports, some of the information that the noble Lord would quite reasonably like to see cannot really be provided in the terms that he asks for.