My Lords, I will introduce a totally different note into the debate. I want assurances from the Government that corporate parenting will not be used as an excuse for not working with the natural parents while the child is in care. One of the major failures in this country is that while the child is in care, we do not do any work with the natural parents. We send children back from care to their natural parents more than they do in most other European countries. I went to look at this in Denmark and Germany when I was Minister for Social Exclusion. I was looking at why we in this country did so badly with children in care. They cost us more and the outcomes are poorer, which means that we should learn from what goes on elsewhere.
What the social workers in Berlin said to me was, “We don’t pretend that we can be substitute parents. We know that we have to be the bridge between what has gone wrong and where they might go”. That means that they were prepared to take them in earlier, but when I went to breakfast in one children’s home, three mothers were there. I have to say that they were clearly fairly dysfunctional, but as soon as the children went out to school, the key workers did some work with those mothers. They said that the children might never go back home, but anyone in this Room who has worked with children in care—which was my first job in Newcastle—knows that it did not matter how long they had been away from home or how bad things were there: the children wanted to know about their families. I am concerned that we sometimes say, “Right, they are in our care now and we can look after them. We’re not going to spend any time with that dysfunctional natural family”. I believe having that in our system is one of the reasons why we fail.