Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and other noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I have been given some reassurance by the Minister, but I am not entirely happy with what he said because in talking about Amendment No. 22 and the duty of the IRO to give the child information about advocacy, he again talked about advocacy in relation to complaints only. The only thing that gave me some comfort was when he was talking about multi-disciplinary working: the advocate working with the social worker and the IRO. If that works well, it could be that the child might receive some advocacy before he found it necessary to go into the formal complaints process, which is what we are trying to pre-empt by providing greater access to advocacy. It can be much more effective to get things sorted out much earlier than when it is necessary to go through the formal complaints process. On Amendment No. 23, the Minister suggested that local authorities already have a duty to provide access to advocacy. However, my amendment refers to, "““the sufficiency of the provision of independent advocacy services””." As I understand it, the existing duty is to provide advocacy predominantly in the situation where the child is going through the complaints process, although I was slightly encouraged by what the Minister said about it not being totally restricted to the complaints process. Given that there is not enough advocacy around, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of advocacy interactions with children will be in relation to complaints. I understand the difficulty the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, has about the spending commitment we might be making if we pass this amendment because it is difficult to know how much uptake there would be and what the corresponding benefit there would be in savings that might come from better decision-making on behalf of the children. Will the Minister consider commissioning some research taking a particular local authority or group of local authorities where children would be provided with advocacy far ahead of the complaints stage to see what that might produce in savings? The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, Voice and I firmly believe that there would be better decision-making which would save the great cost when placements break down, which always involves the local authority in greater costs. If we had better decision-making, we would have fewer placements breaking down and there would be savings. It would be helpful to have serious research comparing the cost of providing that additional advocacy, finding out how much additional advocacy the young people would request and offsetting that against the cost of placements breaking down because of the lack of advocacy. That would give us some idea of what this sort of provision could cost nationally, if it was rolled out. I understand the difficulty of assessing that economic figure, but I am sure it is not beyond the capability of some clever researchers to give us a reasonable estimate. We are hearing from children and from organisations such as Voice how positive the experience can be, so I am a little disappointed that the Minister is still talking about advocacy and access to it in relation to the complaints process only. However, there were two or three little chinks of light in what he had to say, so I am slightly reassured, but I cannot promise not to come back to him at some stage with further requests for advocacy. Will he write to me and consider undertaking some serious research on the matter? In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 23 not moved.]