My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in the debate on these amendments today and for the supportive comments made by many of your Lordships. I am also grateful for the care with which the Minister has responded: to some extent, I am somewhat reassured. I was interested to hear what she said about centres of excellence and that seems most welcome. In Wales, for instance, a fostering charity that provides services has to find its own mental health professionals, because there simply is not enough of a CAMHS in that particular area of Wales to provide for it. I can imagine, as the noble Baroness says, that there will be areas where there is a deficit of expertise, and therefore the principle of drawing in from the best elsewhere—as provided in the academies programme—is a good principle to utilise.
The noble Baroness referred to the strengths and difficulties questionnaire and to the fact that the initial and ongoing health assessments look at the emotional and other needs of young people in care. That is welcome. However, given the experience of these children before entering care and that that they are pulled away from their families into the care system and have that trauma too, I feel that that is not sufficient. They need at the very beginning to see a specialist and to have a specialist assessment. I do not want to push that too hard but, as we speak, I remember a young woman who had been through the care system and whose brother was in the care system with mental health difficulties. She must have been 22 or so and she said to me that what she would have liked to have had when she first went into care was a therapist to speak to and somebody to stick with her through the care system—they had one mental health professional to stick with her through the system—and she wished the same for her brother, who was having difficulties.
I am going to make a slight detour and I hope that your Lordships will forgive me. These are difficult issues. In the past, the Department for Education used to employ civil servants who had a long tenure and a lot of experience in one particular area. For instance, the recently deceased Rupert Hughes was one of the chief civil servants behind the Children Act 1989, under Baroness Thatcher’s Government. I used to serve with him as a trustee for several years. One did not realise his important background from meeting with him but from hearing about it from others and seeing how important his memorial service was to so
many people who knew of him. He was a hugely important figure. In dealing with these systemic responses to the difficult questions that we are discussing today, I wonder whether the Minister might consider what more might be done to ensure that there is a continuity of experience within the Civil Service to deal with these difficult problems over time. I do not think that it was this Government—the Conservative Government—who got rid of these longer tenure civil servants but in the past they frequently had more people like Rupert Hughes.
I am sorry for the digression. There is much to be welcomed in what the noble Baroness has said and in the investment that has clearly been made by the Government. I thank her for her helpful reply and other noble Lords for their comments. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.