Childcare Bill

I am not sure whether that is shutting me up or whether I have the opportunity to say two brief things. I usually am brief, and I will continue to be so. I, too, do not want to get into the discussion about disability that we will probably have in a moment but this debate gives me the opportunity to say two things. First, I declare an interest as an ex-director of social services. Having run most of these services at some point in my life, and knowing the extraordinary difficulties that local authorities face in managing, my view is that few other organisations are as well placed. We always want to replace something that we have with something better; it is like the CAFCASS situation. Let us make work the thing that is going to work, rather than thinking that we can do something better. Local authorities, on the whole, are doing a hugely good job for thousands of children; I would like to put that on record. I have said to the Minister that we really need to value them and the staff who are struggling daily to provide these services and work of quality, and who care about children to the depths of their hearts. However, having said that, and although I accept the noble Baroness’s reassurances, we know from research—I do not have it with me but I can get the references quite easily; I think it is Tunstall—that Section 17 is implemented very patchily and that the assessments are made on a different basis. It is a postcode lottery of services, and it links to the local authority’s capacity and that word ““sufficiency”” again. It is particularly true when you consider disabled children or those with very special needs. I quote the example of a child of extraordinarily destructive behaviour, whose relatives will not look after him for more than two hours at a time, and whose parents cannot get that child provision. You can imagine what that does to the single mother who also has a difficult adolescent child, and you can imagine the likely outcomes for that child. It is not that there is ““sufficient”” provision; again there is the gap—sufficient for what””. Children with specialist disabilities have a particular difficulty with the childcare that they receive.