My Lords, I understand exactly what the Minister means about Section 17, but I cannot understand how that relates to this piece of the Bill. When we were discussing education with the previous Government, I remember being very forceful in saying to them, “You’re saying, ‘education, education, education’, but without ‘welfare, welfare, welfare’, children will not learn”. Unless we attend to the social care needs of children, particularly those children with disabilities, we know that they will not have the facility to learn. We know that unless there is help from specialists or social workers, if you have a child with serious behavioural problems at home, they will never get into ordinary school or even be able to survive properly in remedial school, and will end up in specialist residential care. That whole range of services will be needed as part of the social care package for those children.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, we are encouraging the Government to look at the whole, to get the thing together, to look at welfare alongside education and to look at how the two things interrelate. Those children will all have healthcare needs as well; very few children with those sorts of disabilities will not have healthcare needs. I thought that the Government wanted to pool all those services together in the interests of those young people.
Under Section 17, one would certainly not want children needing protection or suffering from neglect falling into a different priority; the local authority must look at them across the piece. I think that the word “must” helps them to do that, but having something in the Bill for those young people at least encourages local authorities to look at the whole.