My Lords, I rise to speak in favour of the power to test new ways of working and am therefore against those amendments which seek to remove the relevant clauses from the Bill. In doing so, I strongly associate myself with the comments of my noble friends. I have reflected carefully on the arguments made by the proposers of these amendments and I know that they are motivated by the best wishes for very vulnerable children. I take their warnings seriously. Noble Lords may know of my own involvement in running schools, so I am deeply aware that the duty of safeguarding young people and children lies heavily on the shoulders of those who look after them. Our first responsibility is to keep children safe; even more so when the home life of a child does not offer sanctuary. It is right to move cautiously before we put any of this at risk.
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Having acknowledged the great duty of care faced by social workers and others who work with children, it seems to me that attempts to remove the power to innovate from the Bill are a mistake. Progress relies on the process of discovering new and better ways of doing things to maximise welfare. Our unique human capacity is to apply our ingenuity, our creative spark and our entrepreneurial spirit to solve problems that we face as a society. It is simply not the case that all solutions are already out there and that if only we could find them and spread them more evenly, the problems would be solved. Rather, progress relies on using the individual’s imagination, harnessed to prior professional knowledge, to create innovative solutions which can be found to be effective or otherwise only through implementation and evaluation.
This kind of approach, which my noble friend Lord Farmer described so elegantly as “agile”, is increasingly used within the public sector to tackle some of our greatest challenges. Housing associations have created solutions to housing need that councils never did. Sponsored academies allow charities to try new approaches to education in areas of chronic underperformance. We now have innovation funds in the DWP, and in the criminal justice system we have pilot schemes for tackling recidivism. They all faced opposition, yet much good has been done as a result of them.
Without successful interventions, the vulnerable children who are the subject of the Bill face dreadful life outcomes. What group could be more in need of innovation given the deeply complex web of challenges that they face? We need new thinking, harnessing the ingenuity and creativity of social workers and others, to make sure that vulnerable children have a better chance of a better life. On that basis, I strongly urge noble Lords to make sure that the power to innovate and test new ways of working stays in the Bill so that it can play a central role in the policies of this Government and future Governments, in order to give vulnerable young people a greater chance to flourish in life.