My Lords, I hope that the Minister sees Amendments 135B and 135C as a helpful attempt to get over problems with the way that the Bill is currently worded. There are two clear issues: one is the muddling together of regulation and improvement and the other is independence.
The Minister made a very decent argument for a new regulator focused solely on social work. Many social workers agree with that. Indeed, that is exactly what Amendment 135B would do, but it would not muddle it with improvement and, of course, the regulator would be independent. I was a little confused by some of the things that the Minister said about independence in the debate on the previous group. He talked about moving the whole thing closer to government but he also talked about operational independence. Those sound like two conflicting things to me. Given that the HCPC is both financially and operationally independent, what it is about the way it has operated its independence that make the Government think that the new body should not be independent?
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Moving to improvement, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has put together an amendment to which we have added our names, which gives a clear mandate to a new agency charged with improving standards within social work, improving the profession’s status and attracting more people to it. There are probably lessons to be learned from what happened to the College of Social Work, which was set up at a cost of about £5 million. I think that the total funding was about £8 million, but the set-up fees were about £5 million of that. Other professional colleges hold a full range of functions necessary to be both financially stable and credible. However, the College of Social Work suffered from the fact that it was vulnerable from the start because of an ongoing lack of coherence about its core functions.
That is why Amendment 135C, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is clear about what the mandate for the new improvement agency would be. That is very important because the confusion to which I have referred had a great impact on the work and sustainability of the College of Social Work. The new professional body must have a clear and explicit mandate and set of functions, and have a sustainable business plan. Noble Lords on this side of the Committee feel that that package would be very helpful to the Government in achieving their objective, which we all agree with, of improving the quality of social work, and doing so fairly quickly if we are to build on what has gone before.