My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply and for the positive things that he said from which we can draw encouragement. I was particularly pleased to hear him talk about the national role of the department in information provision and confirm that there will be campaigns around landmarks in the Dilnot report to carry that forward. Equally, there are some things on which, if I may say so, he still is not quite there. Nobody advocates direct referrals—nobody. I accept his argument—everybody does—that you cannot just send people to say, “You have to go and see so and so”, or, “So and so is your man”. The other extreme is to say that you do nothing. You provide, for
example, a list of suitably qualified advisers within the local authority area; you tell people how to get hold of them. We should not set up straw men, whom nobody is advocating, in order to fend off suggestions that need to be acted upon.
Some things the Minister said would be valuable to follow up in writing. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, will agree with me that it would be fascinating to see the monitoring suggestions as a substitute for the poll that he suggested, because if they work, that is fine and we will not press it, but if they seem to fall short, that would be different. I think that there will be room to ask the Minister for further discussions with the movers of this amendment so that we can narrow even further the ground before us. I do not pretend to be fully satisfied as I stand here tonight. I gave my reasons earlier why I do not think that the Government’s amendments to the Bill complete the picture, but we are making progress, as we all want to, and we are having a good dialogue. With the Minister’s help, I want to carry that forward before Third Reading, at which stage we will see whether an amendment is needed. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.