My Lords, Amendment 43A addresses a comparatively specific range of concerns, so I shall use my best endeavours to speak to it comparatively briefly. In a meeting that I attended earlier today, I was told that the obligation to use my best endeavours laid on me a pretty heavy obligation.
In Committee, I introduced an amendment to require local authorities in England to establish and maintain a register of sight-impaired and severely sight-impaired children and young people ordinarily resident in their area. The Care Bill currently going through Parliament lays a duty on local authorities to establish and maintain registers of sight-impaired and severely sight-impaired adults. It seemed odd, therefore, that no such obligation in relation to sight-impaired and severely sight-impaired children was included in this Bill. These registers play a critical role in enabling local authorities to assess population-level need for specialist visual impairment services and support, and to plan for their provision. The Government argued
that an obligation to maintain registers of disabled children exists under the Children Act 1989, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this obligation is widely disregarded and, in any case, is not effective. The RNIB—and here I declare my interest as a vice-president of that organisation—has recently discovered by means of a series of freedom of information inquiries that a fifth of local authorities do not have a register of disabled children at all.
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The Minister agreed in Committee to meet me to discuss the matter, and I am grateful to the Minister and the officials for the discussions that we have had. Given the requirement to maintain registers of disabled children, the Government are understandably reluctant to introduce a requirement to maintain further impairment-specific registers. The Government’s view is that the best way forward is to make the requirement to maintain the registers of disabled children effective rather than start setting up further impairment-specific registers. This amendment is therefore designed to assist the Government in this enterprise and give them the necessary tools by providing that the Secretary of State should issue guidance on how local authorities can most effectively discharge their duty to maintain registers of disabled children under the Children Act 1989. It is a modest and, I hope, helpful amendment. I hope very much that the Minister may be willing to accept it. I beg to move.