My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that comprehensive response and to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for her comments.
I also support the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, which came from a different angle, as it were, from the rest of the group, but nevertheless were very meaningful. As I said in respect of Amendment 30, the importance of having speech, language and communication needs assessed and treated is that unless they are, the children who are the subject of this Bill will not be able to understand or engage in any of the changes the Bill proposes. As I said in that debate, when we in the all-party group conducted our review of the link between speech, language and communication needs and social disadvantage, we discovered tremendous inconsistency all over the country, both in the understanding of what was needed and in the training of the people who were responsible for doing the assessing. We discovered, for example, that in Northern Ireland, the social services and the health visitors worked together very closely, but in other places the two were not connected. As I mentioned, we discovered in Walsall that continuous training was done throughout the secondary school stage, but that was rare elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In talking about children previously in care, we are talking about the needs of people who have slipped through the net much earlier.
Therefore, I am very concerned that the Minister should suggest that these amendments are not necessary; I think they are. She mentioned the Communication Trust, which is a considerable partner in the all-party group that I have with worked very closely. There would be considerable merit in the Communication Trust, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and the ministerial Bill team having a discussion before we come to Report, so that hopefully, the Government can decide that they can include such a provision in the Bill, rather than our proposing amendments such as this. Such a provision is very important to the Government’s achieving their aim. I know from talking to both organisations that they would be very happy to do that, and I suspect that a number of noble Lords would like to be involved in that discussion.
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