My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 14 to 17 in my name in relation to Clause 3, which, as we have heard, grants the Secretary of State a new power to direct local authorities to outsource their adopter recruitment services to another local authority or to a registered adoption agency by amending the relevant part of the Adoption
and Children Act 2002. We understand that the driver for the Government seeking these powers is to tackle the shortage of people approved to adopt. Certainly, we share this starting point with the Government.
I listened with great interest to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and it is clear that there is deep concern about these provisions and where they might be taking adopter recruitment services in the future. For me, that is the key issue, as I will explain. I have no disagreement in principle with the power for the Secretary of State to intervene in individual underperforming local authorities as in subsection (3)(a) of new Section 3A under Clause 3. As a Minister, I issued many such directions. Indeed, my first point is that there already are substantial powers of intervention, including the ability of the Government to outsource services when local authorities are underperforming. Perhaps the Minister will explain why these powers in subsection (3)(a) are necessary.
However, it is difficult to see how intervening in an individual local authority can solve or address the wider problem of the national shortage of potential adopters, which brings me to the powers under subsection (3)(b) and (3)(c) and where our concerns lie. Those powers would give the Secretary of State the power to remove responsibility for adopter recruitment either from entire categories of local authorities or from all local authorities at a stroke completely.
There are both practical reasons and reasons of principle why those two powers are problematic. First, on the practical reasons, local authorities currently recruit and approve about 80% of adopters. Moving many or all local authorities from this task would seriously compromise the adoption system when there is already an acknowledged shortage of adopters.
Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, elegantly pointed out, the voluntary and not-for-profit sector has made it clear that it does not have the capacity to take on the recruitment of the numbers of adopters that would be needed. The third reason is very important. Given that local authorities would retain responsibility for the placement of children and for seeing them through to adoption, it seems to me to be wholly undesirable that they should have no stake in the adopter recruitment process. We actually want local authorities to be more willing to use adopters approved by other agencies. This is more likely to happen if local authorities retain some responsibility for recruitment and are still part of the adoption system so there are some strong, practical reasons that I would like the Minister to address.
In discussion with the Minister this week, he said that the problem of adopter shortage was not in any case primarily one of underperformance by individual local authorities. In his view this was system failure at the national level, particularly because of the disincentives for local authorities to recruit more adopters than they need for their own individual populations and the reluctance, as he perceived it, of agencies to work collaboratively. Again, there have been really positive moves in that direction, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out, albeit perhaps recently. That might be so: it might be system failure, as the Minister said, and if the Government wish to review adopter
recruitment and propose a radically different system, they are of course entirely free to do so. But if the Government wish to come forward with a new system that would take responsibility for adopter recruitment away from local authorities and give it to some new or different kind of agency, I put it to the Minister that they should come to Parliament with those proposals now for wider scrutiny and debate.
My objections to subsections (3)(b) and (3)(c) are therefore fundamentally ones of principle. It seems quite wrong to go partway along that path to pave the way for wholesale outsourcing or privatisation of adopter recruitment through the negative resolution procedure set out here without spelling out for Members what the endgame here is. I asked the Minister whether he had a vision of where he would like these services to end up and he said no, he did not. However, I cannot see the point of the power in subsection (3)(c) unless the Government have at least some desire, if not the intention, to move towards providing the recruitment of adopter services in a very different way.
In our view, the powers in subsections (3)(b) and (3)(c) are a step too far unless the Government set out their further vision. Our Amendment 14 would delete them from the clause. Amendments 15, 16 and 17 would address the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, raised were the Government to retain the ability simply to intervene in an individual authority by instituting: that it should be by the affirmative resolution procedure; for the Secretary of State to give reasons for direction and to allow the authority to ask for a review; and for the Secretary of State to revoke any direction should he desire so. Amendment 17 would address the point that the direction should be based on the quality or performance of the local authority in providing these services.
With those amendments, this would be a reasonable and proportionate mechanism for the Government to use when they believe a local authority could do much better at adopter recruitment. They would take away the possibility that the Government could slide through an entirely new system on the back of a negative resolution procedure in relation to subsection (3)(c).