My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his response. He said that there were no plans to amend the ratios at the moment and I am sure that that is the case. However, we were doing some future planning, thinking about what might happen in the future, and trying to ensure that there were further guarantees going forward.
The Minister talked about the advantage of the provision being in secondary legislation as allowing more flexibility in changing circumstances in future. That is precisely our concern—that in future, if there is a need for changing circumstances of the kind that I addressed in my opening remarks, such as the need to increase places at short notice for three year-olds or four year-olds, this would be exactly the sort of measure that the Government might bring back into play, given that they have considered it in the past. We believe that there is still merit in having this in primary legislation, if only because, if there were any suggestions of change being necessary, it would enable proper parliamentary scrutiny to take place so that it could not be done simply by the Secretary of State. This may be an issue to which we return. For the time being, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.