Perhaps I may take the Minister back to his opening remarks, which were meant to reassure me because he had a couple of Department of Health officials behind him. However, the Minister is not taking seriously the machinery of government issue.
5.30 pm
I am a member of a committee set up by this House to look at the sustainability of the NHS. We are taking evidence from the Department of Health and the Department for Communities and Local Government about the workforce issues, which straddle adult social care and NHS staff. We are told today, rather blithely if I may say so, that actually what the Government are now trying to move towards is a workforce which is regulated for social workers within the Department for Education with some involvement—we know not what—from the Department of Health.
The Minister seems quite jovial about this, but it seems extraordinary to me that we are dealing, in one part of government, with social workers as though they are linked to the NHS for adult social care and that their improvement needs to be engineered through that department, but somehow, along the way, they have been slipped into the Department for Education. I have to tell the Minister that this is very unconvincing and rather serious machinery of government. I hereby give him notice that I am going to write to the Cabinet Secretary to ask for some explanations about the machinery of government and how it is working in this area.