My Lords, I obviously support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has said, although I am not going to go through the long list of experiences that I have experienced as a director of social services, as an assistant director and a social worker, and even more so, working with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which dealt with predatory grooming adults and how they got in touch with children.
I am concerned about how we work through two parts of this. One is how we make absolutely sure that the vetting is solid and absolutely reliable for all the reasons the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has said—and how we set performance standards—but also, at the same time, as having some flexibility in who the young person might see as the person who is going to be their personal adviser. I think this is more complex than it looks on the surface. I think we could set standards of training—we have all done that in our time; we could have a vetting system and place it on a register, although I would say 130 days to get a vetting back from the Met police at the moment seems to me a scandal, and
is interfering with the recruitment of appropriate social workers right across the piece. But we have to look at how we have both of those things together, with the young person having some choice about who they want to be their mentor. There may be people in their lives, such as a teacher who stuck with them right through their school or a foster parent who struck right with them. Are they seen as different from personal advisers, who are a sort of profession apart? I have not yet conceptualised who those people are in relation to all the other people who are supporting the young person, and where the standard is set. The one thing that is absolutely clear is that whoever they are, they must be vetted. In my day, we had people called children’s homes visitors, and we learned the hard way what happened if you did not vet appropriately those visitors, when young people disappeared on to the street. I would underline that—it is quite a complex question.