My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 33 and 35, to which I added my name. It is very clear from the Bill that government Amendment 54 is much narrower than Amendment 33. I do not want to get into the detail of that amendment—we will discuss it in due course—but it relates only to the power-to-innovate section. From my reading of the Bill, it does not have the more general effect that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, does. So there is still an issue, even if one accepts the good offices of the Government on Amendment 54.
Perhaps we might explore a little more the issue of profit. We started to do this in Committee and I think that we got into a bit of a muddle. I am not a staunch supporter of public monopolies, so I do not have a problem with a degree of competition. I was at the event that LaingBuisson organised for the department on the whole issue of market-making, particularly in relation to failing organisations. I am not sure whether the Government have ever published the report that LaingBuisson produced—but it certainly did produce a report. I spoke at the conference, where there was a strong feeling that there were certain functions that needed to be carried out by a state body. I think that the question of whether you could contract out some of those services to a not-for-profit social enterprise or a voluntary organisation started to get a bit fuzzy, but there was a very strong core feeling that some of the services charged with statutory child protection were not areas that you could contract out. Then we went through a range of services where people were more or less comfortable with the idea of a degree of profit-making.
Here, it is important to be very clear about what we mean by profit-making. I mean profits that are available to be distributed to the shareholders of the organisation. I do not think that we could run very good services for children in their entirety if we did not accept some voluntary organisations running the services on a contract basis. However, that is on the basis that they are perfectly entitled to create a surplus in some of their activities in order to reinvest that money in the services they provide. That is a perfectly reasonable proposition, and we certainly do not want to put anything in the Bill that stops people having a contract with local authorities, not to make profits in the well-understood sense of profits to be distributed to shareholders but to run the services efficiently so that they can engender some kind of surplus that can be reinvested to make the services better, particularly as demand for some of those services increases over time. So the Government need to come clean about what happened when they had this interest and set LaingBuisson loose on the whole market-making issue, because it has raised a great deal of concern in the wider world of children’s social care about their intentions. A little more clarity on what they are in this area would be very welcome.
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On Amendment 35, we know that looked-after children have, over many decades, had bad outcomes—that is why we are soldiering along trying to improve these services. However, it is only a pretty long time after the event that we get any kind of clear measurement of how bad the situation was. This amendment would enable us to build up a database and to see, in a more timely way, whether things are improving—and improving both nationally and locally. It would make it easier to find out where the hotspots of poor performance were in some of these service areas if we had this kind of data collection.
We have pre-legislative impact assessments so that we can look at legislation and try to understand what its impact is likely to be. Why do we not have post-legislative impact assessments and collect data to assess how well Parliament’s intentions have been delivered? The amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has produced would enable Parliament to better understand what has happened to its legislation in this particular area.
I would have thought that any well-run organisation such as a local authority would not object to collecting this data because it would want to know how well its services were performing. That is all part of being a well-managed public body. So I cannot see what the arguments are against the principle of Amendment 35. It is all about getting value for money, good performance and better outcomes for children—so what is not to like about an amendment of this kind that makes a local authority a better manager of its particular services?