Compensation Bill [HL]

I cannot give the noble Lord the level of detail that I would like because my colleagues and I have not reached that point. We have started to pick up examples of where action taken in a particular way has had a dramatic effect to distil common concerns. For example, I am confident that the way that Knowsley council approached this—identifying where claims were coming from, involving the police appropriately; and looking at how it was tackling concerns about housing repair and so on—provides common threads that we could suggest to all local authorities. I am also keen that we start to develop new and different ways that government could support local government, although I do not have them yet. We could talk to colleagues in the Home Office about where the police could best be involved, if appropriate, and look at how the courts are beginning to take this issue seriously—I can think of two prosecutions so far that I have been made aware of through the press, although there may be others. I may be at an earlier stage than the noble Lord would like me to be, but I am clear that we need to find practical ways in which public authorities, in particular, can use their resources to tackle the problem in their communities. That may mean enabling them to work alongside other organisations, to develop individual approaches, or to pick up on some of the broader questions about tackling this raised by the Knowsley experience. That is a nebulous answer to a specific question. For me, this is about enabling us to tackle the problem by good example and practice and by using things that we know work, rather than by central government re-inventing the wheel and telling local government what it should do when there are good examples out there. That is what I should like to do in the next few months.