Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, before my noble friend responds, I hope he will permit me to speak. I am sure we all very much welcome the completely consensual approach in the Committee today in seeking how best to respond to the problem. The difficulty is that the stats do not exist. Even my noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, who have been working with colleagues in Grandparents Plus and the Grandparents’ Association, do not know whether we are talking about 200,000 or 300,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 grandparent and kinship carers of these children, and for how long, and at what cost, and at what age, and so on. The problem is that we cannot start on that building block. Most of the panel surveys do not pick this stuff up. Perhaps we have not asked the right questions. It is then very hard to go on to do a spreadsheet outcome, although I would dearly love to see it. That is why this amendment is asking that, if we cannot do quick and dirty because we do not have enough stats, can we at least build up appropriate stats over time? That is why I hope that my noble friend will think about an amendment to ensure that we identify this as an issue that the commission has to take on board. I think that would satisfy us. The second point that I wanted to ask about was that my noble friend made an interesting comment in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, about local authorities. He seemed to suggest, if I heard him correctly, that he was going to write to local authorities to get them to clarify their response and their relationship. Until we have the hard stats on which we can develop a well founded policy, I think I understood him to say that local authorities are going to be required to ensure that kinship placements, even of children who have not come into the formal, looked-after care system, will none the less get a degree of appropriate financial support. I understand the burden on local taxpayers and the like, but none the less they should have a degree of appropriate financial support to allow those children to remain in—I shall not call it the black care system—the informal care system that family members often represent. Can my noble friend help us on that so that we know that some of us can go back to our local authority and say, "You are going to do this, chums"? They will need to start collecting the data and thinking about strategies to provide appropriate support for children who do not need to go into the full bureaucracy and the high costs of the full, looked-after care system.