Following the decision of the House last night on motion 16, relating to the presentation of public petitions, I am announcing today the new arrangements that will come into operation for petitions presented on Monday 1 March.

The names of Members wishing to present public petitions formally before the daily Adjournment debate at the end of the sitting will now appear on the Order Paper. Accordingly, Members will now need to give notice in person in the Journal Office on the third floor above the Chamber. The deadline for giving notice will be the rise of the House on the previous sitting day. When giving notice, Members will need to have with them the front page of the petition, certified by the Clerk of Public Petitions in the Journal Office.

Just before we come to the daily Adjournment debate at the end of the sitting, I shall call in turn the Members whose names are listed on the Order Paper to present their constituents’ petitions. The Member will make a brief statement limited, as at present, to describing who the petition is from and what it is about, and, finally, reading out the prayer that sets out what the House is being asked to do. The Member will then bring the top page of the petition straight from the Member’s place to the Clerk at the Table, who will read out the title and hand the top page back to the Member, who will then put the whole petition, with its supporting signatures, into the bag at the back of the Chair.

Members may continue to place valid petitions in the bag behind the Chair in the usual way informally at any time during a sitting of the House. All petitions, whether presented formally or not, are printed in Hansard, forwarded to the relevant Select Committees, and sent to the Government Department most closely concerned. Observations received from the Government are also printed in Hansard.

The right to petition Parliament is one of our oldest and most cherished parliamentary traditions. The changes that I have announced today will refresh and improve an important democratic mechanism.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will remember that on 9 February, at column 771, we had an exchange about the inadequate answering of parliamentary questions by the Department for Work and Pensions, and you gave me what I thought was very sound advice suggesting that tabling a further question on the Order Paper or raising a point of order on the Floor of the House would concentrate the minds of Ministers. I did indeed do that. Before the recess, I tabled a lengthy question asking when a range of questions—up to 30—would be answered. You can imagine that yesterday, when that question was due for answer, I was not very impressed to receive a further holding answer from the Minister of State. It seems to me, Mr. Speaker, in the light of our exchange and the significant number of unanswered questions, two of which date back to last year, that this is a case of Ministers treating the House with contempt. What may I do to get answers from Ministers given what I have already done?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. Regular attenders at sittings of the House will know that he is persistent and feisty, probably beyond comparison in the House, in highlighting the phenomenon of unanswered questions or those to which tardy replies are given. He must continue to be persistent. I know that no Health Minister—[Interruption.] Order. I was going to say that no Health Minister is on the Government Front Bench, but the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) is getting ahead of himself. The Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Lincoln (Gillian Merron) is on the Treasury Bench, and she is always a keen listener; I know that she will hear the point that I am making.

Ministers must reply quickly to parliamentary questions, and the replies that are provided must be substantive rather than merely formulaic. They should not be replies along the lines of “I hope to reply as soon as possible.” When the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper) has waited for a period of several days or possibly weeks—this goes for all Members—the Member is entitled to a substantive reply. I hope that it will not be necessary continually to repeat this point. The hon. Gentleman and other Members will be aware that the tracking system means that this information is becoming available for public view, and I have a hunch that he will not wish this matter to remain secret and will probably want to give it the widest possible coverage.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. When a Minister gives a holding answer saying that they will write to the Member concerned, how long do you expect that holding answer to last before we get the substantive answer?

It is very difficult to be precise, because—I hope Members will accept the validity of this response—it rather depends upon the terms of the question, how much information is sought and the difficulty and possible cost of obtaining it. However, I say to the hon. Gentleman, whose point of order is helpful, that it should be a matter of only a few days and no more than that. As a matter of course, I should think it very odd, and frankly worthy of comment and objection, if a substantive question did not receive a substantive answer within, for example, a week. We need a timely exchange. That is what Members expect, and I think most Ministers would accept that it is legitimately required of them.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Further to your very helpful statement on petitions, which I am sure the House will welcome, may I ask what the position is as regards electronic petitions? Are they to be recorded on the Order Paper or just in the general official record?

That is an extraordinarily good point of order, to which the answer is that a system of the kind that the hon. Lady hankers after does not yet exist; it is a matter of work in progress. She rightly points to the need for further developments, but work is taking place, and I hope that she will content herself today with the holding answer that I have provided. [Laughter.] I am very glad that the House is in such a good mood—this is all very encouraging.

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require providers of rental accommodation to ensure that the accommodation complies with certain minimum standards of thermal insulation; and for connected purposes.

Mr. Speaker, it is—[Interruption.]

Order. I should perhaps have said—I think it has now happened—that Members leaving should do so quickly and quietly. I am sure that the House will want to hear the hon. Gentleman’s ten-minute rule motion.

I can only concur with your views, Mr. Speaker—Members want to hear this.

It is a rather sad fact that in this country of ours, some 400,000 private tenancies are currently occupied by people who are defined as being fuel-poor—those who spend more than a fifth of their income on the fuel necessary to heat their home. That is largely because those homes are very poorly insulated. It is, I believe, the incontestable view of all that the need to improve the thermal insulation of domestic properties of any kind of tenure is of paramount importance, for obvious environmental reasons such as those related to global warming but also for financial reasons for those who occupy them and for social welfare reasons. It is a matter of practical fact that excess cold puts people’s health, and indeed their lives, in jeopardy. We know that more people die during the cold months of the year in this country than in comparable countries, or even in countries with much more extreme climates, because of relatively poor insulation.

The thermal comfort element of the decent homes standard now extends to private housing the same consideration that has historically applied to social housing, but there is a big gap between private housing and social housing, and to an extent between private housing and those in owner-occupation. The problem in the private rented sector is that the private tenant has no capacity whatever to make improvements through investment in insulation and so on, which would allow the thermal efficiency of their property to be improved. But nor, alas, do landlords necessarily have an incentive to improve, at least not in the current circumstances.

As we know, the Government have already made significant steps, which I very much welcome, to bring about a change in the private rented sector. For example, the introduction in October 2008 of energy performance certificates means that all properties will in future have something that tells us how thermally efficient they are regarding insulation. In addition, the Government introduced in 2006 the energy saving allowance, which gives landlords up to £1,500 per property to introduce insulation improvements. However, the problem with that scheme, frankly, is that landlords often do not know that it exists; and even when they do, the incentives are still too small to make a real difference.

I strongly welcome the fact that tenants can access the Warm Front scheme in England and the equivalent schemes in Scotland and Northern Ireland. However, that applies only to tenants who directly qualify for such assistance. I also welcome the fact that local authorities have power under the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (England) Regulations 2005 to class as a hazard the very worst-insulated properties and to take specific action. However, that happens only in the very worst properties and not, alas, those that are bad, but not so bad as to attract the attention of local authorities.

The “English House Condition Survey 2007” contains some startling statistics. In the jargon—which I am afraid is what this is—of the standard assessment procedure, the efficiency of property insulation is measured on an index from nought to 100, with 100 being excellent. The 2007 survey shows that the value of the housing stock in England increased from 42 in 1996, which was poor, to 50 in 2007, which is in the okay region of operation. That real improvement is because of Government publicity and the activities of social landlords and owner-occupiers.

Social landlords do the best in the survey—spectacularly. Their score on the index is 58, which is a good performance. Alas, for both owner-occupiers and private tenants, the score is still only 48, which is below what we regard as acceptable, and owner-occupiers still have a long way to go. However, there is a significant difference between owner-occupiers and private tenants, namely that the private rented sector, ironically, has a far higher proportion of very well insulated properties. Some 10 per cent. of private tenancies are in the very good category, whereas only 4 per cent. of owner-occupiers are. At the same time, although only 10 per cent. of owner-occupiers are in the worst categories, some 16 per cent. of private tenants are in conditions in which excess cold is threatening to their health. Some 400,000 people are in such private tenancies, of which 124,000 are described as vulnerable people—either the elderly or people who have sickness or disability problems that make them especially vulnerable to extreme cold.

The time has come when we need legislation to move things forward and to incentivise landlords, and sometimes to offer the stick as well as the carrot. The Bill therefore seeks to do a number of things. It seeks to introduce a minimum thermal efficiency standard, which will say at the beginning that the very worst properties should no longer be in the private rented sector. That standard should progressively move up through the thermal efficiency ratings, so that landlords know that they have an incentive—the stick—to ensure that their properties are improved.

The Bill also seeks to make it illegal to put a property on the private rented market if it can be improved at reasonable cost, even if it is already above the legal minimum as defined elsewhere in the Bill. That says to landlords that if cavity wall insulation, for example, which is relatively cheap in the scheme of things, can be used, it ought to be used. Landlords should be progressively forced to make such improvements. However, we also need the Government to look at incentivising landlords, as well as providing a stick. While it is not part of this Bill, I hope that we will see an extension of the existing scheme to give landlords an incentive to invest in the insulation of their properties by way of grants. We should also consider whether it is possible to reduce value added tax for energy-saving improvements to property.

Many hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens live in homes that are badly heated. Most of those homes are not simply badly heated because people cannot afford to heat them—although that may well be a significant part of the equation—but because the insulation is grossly inadequate for the purposes of modern living. It is in that light that the Bill is timely, because it will draw the attention of private landlords, their tenants and other agencies to the need to bring those standards up for environmental reasons, for the financial benefit of tenants and, in the end, for reasons of social welfare and health. For those reasons, I commend the Bill to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Tony Lloyd, John Austin, Miss Anne Begg, Mr. Ronnie Campbell, Colin Challen, Jeremy Corbyn, Mr. David Drew, Mrs. Linda Riordan and Mr. Paul Truswell present the Bill.

Tony Lloyd accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 30 April and to be printed (Bill 71).

I beg to move,

That the Seventh Report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights (House of Commons Paper No. 371) be referred to the Committee on Standards and Privileges.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights met on 9 February to discuss a draft report on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It emerged at the start of the meeting that Trevor Phillips, the chair of the EHRC, had recently spoken to at least three members of the Committee about its consideration of the draft report and the publication of written evidence with the report. In our view, these discussions could constitute a contempt of both Houses in that they may have been an attempt to influence the views of certain members of the Committee shortly before it considered a draft report directly relevant to Mr. Phillips in his role as chair of the commission. We therefore recommended that the matter should be subject to investigation by the privileges Committees of both Houses, and so I ask the House to refer the matter in accordance with my motion.

I am a recently appointed member of the Committee that has referred this matter to the House for referral to the Committee on Standards and Privileges. As the subject of one of the telephone calls referred to by the Chairman of the Committee and—as far as I am aware—the only Member of this House who received such a telephone call, I felt that I should make my view on this matter clear. It is right that I tell the House that I do not believe that Mr. Phillips has acted in contempt. He wanted to discuss whether the proposed report would be fair because he believed—rightly, as it turned out—that parts of the evidence that the Committee received would be redacted in the final report. I do not know how he knew this, and I did not ask him how he knew this.

The point of privilege is to ensure that Members of Parliament are free to say what they wish, and I wish to assure the House that there was nothing improper in the call or any attempt to interfere with my ability to say what I wished.

Trevor raised two other issues—

Trevor?

Yes, I used his first name. That is usual when having a conversation with someone. For example, were I talking to the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), I would not call him the hon. Member for something, and nor would I call him by his surname—I would call him George. [Hon. Members: “Sir George!”] I would actually call him George, not Sir George.

I raise this point, because I am concerned about the lack of fair process in how the Committee’s inquiry was conducted. I was shocked, as a newly appointed Committee member, to discover that this inquiry—the Select Committee’s first inquiry into the work of the EHRC since its inception—had no terms of reference. Its only call for evidence was a notice reporting evidence from a group of commissioners who had resigned and inviting short statements in advance of evidence from Trevor Phillips as chair of the organisation. I was able to attend only one evidence session, and I must say that it was more like a show trial of an individual than an inquiry into the work of an organisation.

I was not surprised, therefore, to receive a note from Trevor Phillips, following our telephone call, suggesting that if, as he feared, the report contained inaccuracies and unfair criticism, he would be within his rights to ask that the allegations be made without the cloak of parliamentary privilege. I think that he is right, although, given that the final report has not been drafted, I do not know whether it will be either unfair or inaccurate, and I will do my best, as a member of the Committee, to ensure that neither is the case. I believe, however, that the Standards and Privileges Committee should, as well as considering the report of the allegation of contempt by Trevor Phillips, also ask to see how the Joint Committee on Human Rights worked and consider carefully whether it operated in a way that was proper.

I know that I am not the only Member of the House to feel that the claim of privilege by Members who have behaved in an apparently criminal fashion in relation to their expenses is abusive—

Order. I say gently to the hon. Lady that we must not go down that route, and it would help our proceedings were she to withdraw her last sentence. She can then get on to—or back to—the terrain where she and the House were very safe.

I certainly do so, Mr. Speaker.

The overuse of the concept of privilege risks undermining it as an important concept providing a vital freedom for Members of Parliament to say what they need without interference from the courts. If we are to preserve this vital concept, we need to use it well and sparingly, as was advised by the 1966 Select Committee on privileges. To imply that Members of Parliament might be inhibited in their work by a telephone call by someone whose career might be put at stake by a report that they are considering is, in my view, a misuse of this valuable concept.

I shall not detain the House for long, but this debate raises an important issue. I do not wish to trespass on the investigations to follow shortly from the Standards and Privileges Committee, and I believe that the whole House is in your debt, Sir, for giving this business priority today. The issue of privilege is tremendously important for every Member of the House.

I am glad that the Leader of the House is here—her presence is one of the reasons that I have risen to speak. In 1997, knowing that the issue needed contemporary examination, the Government very wisely set up a Joint Committee of both Houses, presided over by a Law Lord. I had the great good fortune to be asked to sit on the Committee, and a former Leader of the House—now Baroness Taylor—also sat on it. We went into the whole area of privilege in great detail, taking evidence from witnesses not only from this country but from abroad.

We deliberated long and carefully, and we produced a unanimous report that was widely welcomed both inside and outside the House. Again without wishing to trespass on any current issue or possible current issue, let me say that it was important to establish whether we should retain the whole idea of privilege. Our Committee was unanimous that we should retain it, as a vital protection for each and every one of us, and at any time. Having reported to the House and received a favourable response from the Dispatch Box, we hoped very much that our recommendation that there should be legislation on the law of privilege would be accepted and that a proper statute would be laid before the House before too long.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the overwhelming majority of Members use that privilege responsibly? There is a vanishingly small number of occasions on which that privilege has been abused, either for personal interest, or on the basis of vendetta or gossip.

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. Our Committee indeed felt that, on the whole, privilege had been used properly, as it should have been. Nevertheless, we thought that something going back over 300 years deserved a new statute, and we recommended this. The Government responded perfectly favourably. The Opposition also responded favourably, but since then nothing has happened. The report is on the shelves gathering dust. As this Parliament ebbs towards its close, I hope that whoever is the Leader of the House after 6 May or whenever—that is, whoever is in the driving seat as far as Government business is concerned—will persuade the Prime Minister of the day that such legislation deserves priority in the new Parliament.

I shall leave it at that, Mr. Speaker. You have helped us today by giving us the opportunity to have this brief debate, from which I hope will flow a speedy investigation by the Committee to which the matter has been referred. However, I also hope that the wider issue of privilege will not be forgotten, and that we shall have a pledge in the first Queen’s Speech of the new Parliament to legislate on the matter.

I intervene very briefly in this debate to echo the remarks that my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) has just made. There is one thing that worries me about the process, because I can think of nothing more damaging to the reputation of an individual than to have a paper laid before this House with the words “Allegation of Contempt” on it.

I take privilege very seriously, but like many Members I am not sure what it is about, what its ramifications or wider reaches are, or how it impacts on witnesses or those who take part in Select Committee proceedings. I am nervous about this case, in that there is no notification to witnesses or participants who come forward to assist a Committee in its deliberations that they might be at risk of offending against the privilege of the House by taking the actions that, in this case, Mr. Phillips took. That is my caveat about this case. We are talking about a very censorious process, if the participant or the affected witness is unaware of what privilege amounts to in such cases.

The Question is as on the Order Paper. As many as are of that opinion say Aye—[Interruption.] As many as are of that opinion say Aye, to the contrary No.

Question agreed to.

Sorry, the reason for the hesitation was that I had the distinct impression that the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), who has already made his case, was seeking to say something further. He might have been doing so, but I am not aware that there is provision for such; in fact, I was fairly convinced that there was not, and I am reinforced in that conviction by those who know. I therefore hope that the House will rest content.

rose—

The hon. Gentleman is never to be silenced.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I wanted to respond to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), by simply pointing out that she was a very new member of the Committee and had not participated in most of the inquiry. Her views might therefore have been somewhat clouded by the fact that she had not heard most of the evidence at first hand, as we had.

The hon. Gentleman is an experienced Member—to be precise, we came into the House together in May 1997—and he is therefore very well aware that that does not constitute a point of order. However, it was an interesting point of debate and he has registered his views firmly on the record.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendment 67.

I welcome Members across the House back to our deliberations on this important Bill. I hope that Opposition Members will recognise that elements of the amendments are a result of our discussions in Committee, and that I have reflected on the points that were made and come back with what I hope are helpful proposals.

As I have said, the new clause and the amendment arise from the debates in Committee. We have listened carefully to hon. Members, and are therefore proposing these important changes, which are designed to clarify the local government ombudsman’s role as a provider of redress for the pupil and parent guarantees. New clause 17 will amend the parental complaints system that will form part of the redress for parents and pupils alleging a breach of the guarantees.

During our debate in Committee, many Members raised concerns that from time to time, complaints relating to a school that could serve only to absorb unduly the time and attention of a head teacher and governing body, with no real potential for a beneficial outcome, might be made to the local government ombudsman. In Committee, I provided the assurance that section 207(5)(b) of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009—the ASCL Act—is already framed so that the ombudsman may decide not to investigate a complaint, or to discontinue it, if he believes that the complaint is vexatious. He will have this discretion with any complaint, including those made in relation to the pupil and parent guarantees.

Having listened to the debate, however, I have concluded that it would be appropriate to strengthen this discretion to provide an even stronger safeguard for heads and governors. So subsection (2) of new clause 17 will amend the ASCL Act to allow the ombudsman discretion in cases where the complaint is “frivolous or vexatious”. This will ensure not only that the ombudsman will be able to decide not to pursue complaints that are clearly not in the best interest of parties concerned—vexatious complaints—but also that he has a clearly stated power to decline or discontinue investigation where complaints obviously lack merit or would be disproportionately costly to investigate, given the potential benefits—that is, frivolous complaints. I hope that hon. Members will welcome this change.

Subsection (3) of new clause 17 is a technical amendment extending defamation privilege to head teachers. It amends section 216 of the ASCL Act to ensure that any statement made by a head teacher in correspondence with, or subsequently published by, the ombudsman in a decision does not lead to the ombudsman or head teacher being sued for defamation. This small but important change will enable head teachers to be entirely candid in their views, and permit their evidence to be given and considered more openly, which can only promote the proper investigation of complaints. The amendment merely extends to head teachers the protection that already applies to governing bodies and local authorities under the Local Government Act 1974 or the ASCL Act.

We have made it clear in previous debates on the guarantees that it is not our intention to enable parents and pupils to pursue civil claims through the courts if a local authority, governing body, other proprietor of a school or head teacher does not meet one or more of the guarantees. However, we listened to Members’ concerns in Committee—including points raised by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb)—and we agree that this could be made more plain. The amendment will ensure that this is clear on the face of the Bill.

The amendment refers to “liability in tort”, which covers, most importantly, both liability in negligence and liability for breach of statutory duty. It will put beyond doubt that parents and pupils will not be able to pursue claims for damages through the county courts based on the individual guarantees in the document. It is, of course, right to say that parents and pupils already have a number of pre-existing rights, which will be unaffected by the changes implemented by the amendment. It will apply solely to the impact of the guarantees themselves. The amendment does not need to seek to prohibit a claim under contract law, as there is no way in which the guarantees can create contractual relations between schools and parents. We consider that any claim for contractual liability would be entirely unsustainable.

I hope that those brief introductory remarks will show that I have listened to the points raised by the hon. Members for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) and for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, and tried to take them into account and include them in the new clause and the amendment, as I said I would.

I am grateful to the Minister for his courtesy and careful consideration of the deliberations in Committee, but the Government new clause is a frank admission that the pupil and parent guarantees set out in clauses 1 to 3 are likely to lead to a proliferation of complaints. That is likely to happen, however, with or without the new clause, when we have an education system in which 9 per cent. of boys leave primary school without being able to obtain any grade in the key stage 2 English SATs. In other words, they are leaving primary school completely illiterate. Given that we also have an education system in which 40 per cent. leave primary school without having mastered the basics of reading, writing and maths combined, there is plenty of scope for complaints under these guarantees, particularly under guarantee 2.2, on page 24 of the guarantee document, which states that

“the curriculum is tailored to…every child’s needs so that…every…pupil receives the support they need to secure good literacy, numeracy and ICT skills, learn another language and about the humanities, science, technology and the arts”.

The new clause amends the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, particularly sections 207 and 216, which relate to the complaint procedures that are the mechanism under which the guarantees can be enforced—to the extent that they can be. As the Minister has said, the new clause is designed to change the complaints procedure so that the local government ombudsman does not have to investigate complaints that he considers to be “frivolous”—an addition to the word “vexatious”, which is already in the Act.

This follows concerns expressed by the teacher unions about the pupil and parent guarantees, particularly the concerns of the Association of School and College Leaders, which believes that

“the creation of these guarantees will open the floodgates for increased litigation against schools. The introduction of these guarantees has the potential to create a ‘whingers’ charter’ and bring a proliferation of frivolous complaints by a minority of litigious parents, thereby serving to increase the work load of school leaders and undermine the work that schools have done to create more positive relationships with parents.”

It is obviously right to ensure that the local government ombudsman does not have to investigate frivolous or vexatious complaints, and it is right that head teachers are protected from defamation suits in their communications with the local government ombudsman on these matters. There is absolutely no guarantee, however, that the ombudsman will be able to remedy any of the complaints about the standard of education provided. Tony Redmond, the current local government ombudsman, said in evidence to the Committee:

“I do not think that it is the role or responsibility of local government to change a school”.––[Official Report, Children, Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2010; c. 5, Q11.]

He went on to say that all he could do was make recommendations. He said that

“we are also conscious of the fact that in terms of the curriculum and teaching, some of those things might step outside the jurisdiction of the ombudsman”.––[Official Report, Children, School and Families Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2010; c. 7, Q5.]

In other words, the whole process is a complete waste of time. All it will do is add yet another layer of bureaucracy and waste to an education system already deeply mired in bureaucracy and waste.

Government amendment 67 is, as the Minister has said, a concession to both Opposition parties following our amendment in Committee that sought to make it clear that the pupil and parent guarantee did not create legal obligations under either the law of contract or the law of tort. Our original amendment said:

“A pupil or parent guarantee shall not be capable of creating any obligation in respect of whose breach any liability arises in contract or tort.”

That amendment was lifted almost word for word from section 111(6) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, which was introduced to prevent home-school agreements from being enforceable in the courts.

The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting point, but does he not agree that there is a difference between this Bill and the 1998 Act? The home-school agreement is obviously a contract—a specific contract between home and school, which people must sign. It is relevant to an individual parent, an individual pupil, an individual school and an individual family. That is why the Act excluded it in terms of contract. The position in the Bill is entirely different. It is not necessary to rule out contracts, because no contractual agreements arise as a result of the guarantees in the Bill.

That says something about the extent to which the Minister feels that the guarantees are worth anything. Normally, if a private sector service provider gives a guarantee for the quality of his or her work, that is regarded as a contractual guarantee, just as the home-school agreement could constitute a guarantee. Although the Minister may well be right, I believe—this was the thinking behind the provision in the 1998 Act—that it is safer to include this provision in the Bill to ensure that that no action can be taken under contract law in future. There is surely no harm in including it.

I am not a lawyer. We have had this discussion before, and the hon. Gentleman has conceded that he is not a lawyer either. I am advised, however, that there is no contractual agreement. I can see that a home-school agreement, involving the signing of a specific document, constitutes an individual contract between the pupil—or parent—and the school, but I see no analogy between that and the guarantees in the Bill.

If the guarantee is a real guarantee, there is a high likelihood that it will give rise to contractual rights. If, however—as is probably the case, which is why I will not be calling for a vote on this issue—the guarantees are not really worth very much and this is merely political posturing, the Minister is right, and it will not be possible to enforce these provisions in the courts, regardless of whether that is explicitly ruled out in the legislation.

The guarantees represent an expensive and bureaucratic approach to trying to raise standards in our schools. They are, in effect, the last refuge of a Government who know that they have not delivered. This new clause and amendment go some way towards mitigating the downside of some of the implications of the pupil and parent guarantees, however. For that reason, we will not oppose them—but they will not create one single thing that will help to raise standards in our schools.

I start by thanking the Minister for Schools and Learners and his team for the generally productive approach they took in Committee, and I also thank him for starting today’s debate with a small olive branch of consensus, before we move on to the dissent that is likely to permeate the rest of our debate. He has listened, to some extent, to the criticisms of clauses 1 to 3, and in response he has offered some small and rather modest gifts to the Committee and the House to try to dispose of a few of the problems that will arise if the guarantees are ever implemented, which we must doubt. We support him in seeking to remove “frivolous” complaints, and we agree with his points about not creating legal rights that could result in legal action, with parents and pupils suing for damages.

However, our main problem with clauses 1 to 3—in this regard I agree with the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb)—is that the Government have drawn up the pupil and parent guarantees in such a vague and unhelpful way. Goodness knows what the ombudsman is going to make of trying to enforce those guarantees, which the Secretary of State and his advisers cobbled together one evening a few months ago. No ombudsman will be able to make a serious job of enforcing the types of obligations and supposed guarantees set out in the White Paper.

The hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton cited just one of the flawed pupil guarantees. I have cited in the past, and shall cite again in future, the pupil guarantee that specifies that every 11 to 14-year-old should enjoy

“relevant and challenging learning in all subjects”,

and develop their

“personal, learning and thinking skills so that they have strong foundations to make their 14-19 choices.”

We are told that that will be phased in by September 2010. The Minister is a fair-minded person who must know that our criticisms are entirely right, and I put it to him that it will be impossible for any ombudsman service, regardless of how many staff it has, to make head or tail of most of the pupil and parent guarantees. Indeed, if we read the small print of some of these guarantees, we discover that in the commercial sector people would get into serious trouble for seeking to present them as guarantees.

For example, the guarantees on access to physical education and competitive sport are phrased in such a way that although they give the impression that there is a guarantee of five hours of sport—or culture, or whatever—the truth is that all the Government are talking about is “access” to those things, which could be delivered in a series of very unconvincing ways that would mean that the vast majority of young people would not get five hours of any of them, because they are available in such a way that they cannot be taken for granted. Meanwhile, however, a head teacher—or more likely a Secretary of State—would be able say, “Hurrah, we’ve delivered all these wonderful guarantees, and young people can have access to these things.”

If the Secretary of State had come up with even a couple of sensible guarantees that were outcome focused rather than input focused, and had linked them to giving freedom to schools to make their own decisions about how to deliver them, we might have supported him. He was in the Treasury back in the early days when all those delivery targets were set. They often focused on inputs rather than outputs, and then the Treasury realised that it had got it all wrong. Because he is so experienced and knows all the flaws of setting targets in this way, he should not, as Secretary of State, have come up with such a lot of nonsense: so many guarantees that are unenforceable, or focus on inputs. He must know that he has cobbled these guarantees together on the back of a fag packet. Although he has sought to do that to create some dividing lines for electoral purposes, the guarantees deserve to be put in the waste paper basket before the election, rather than being implemented in such a way that they will be extremely difficult for any parent or pupil to enforce, and will give the ombudsman service an impossible job.

Of course the Liberal Democrats welcome this small olive branch; we do not want to be churlish and we are grateful for all concessions. I hope that I have not struck a note that has implied any lack of charity or enthusiasm—[Interruption]—or, indeed, any churlishness, in response to these small concessions. However, they are very small concessions, they sit on top of a very big problem, and they do not address the flaws in clauses 1 to 3.

I sometimes wonder whether it is worth coming forward with concessions; if those are the reactions that I get for doing so, I will just do full-blown opposition and get on with it. However, I welcome the limited welcome given to these concessions, and just wish to make a couple of points before allowing us to move on. They are important concessions and changes, and they directly relate to some of the problems that the hon. Members for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) and for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) set out. We have tried to respond to those so that the document becomes more workable and we do not encounter some of the problems that would have arisen had we not amended the Bill.

The document is being consulted on for 12 weeks—I do not recall exactly how far through that process we are, but it is about seven or eight weeks—and people are responding to that consultation exercise. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I go to meetings, people talk to us about the guarantees and they do not see them as being fit for the waste paper bin. People are engaging with us about the real effort that we have made to lay out, for the first time, what the state’s offer should be to parents and to pupils in terms of state education. This was not a “back of a fag packet” effort; serious discussions took place over a considerable time so that we could put forward a document setting out what a parent and a pupil can expect in terms of education.

Let us go into fantasy land for a moment: if, after an election, we had a Conservative Government or a Liberal Government—[Interruption.] It has come to something when I am barracked by my own side as well. I would have a wager with the hon. Members for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and for Yeovil that if and when this becomes law, they will not abolish it.

indicated dissent.

This is an interesting point. I do not believe that they would abolish it, because when it is set out with the guarantees on one-to-one tuition, on sport, on recreation, on culture, on languages, on learning, and on parents being kept informed both online and through proper consultation—through parents evenings and so on—parents, teachers, pupils and the general public will see that, far from being a useless piece of bureaucracy, it is a live document that, for the first time, sets out what the state’s offer is on the educational entitlement of the young people of this country. With those brief comments, and having taken note of the overwhelming gratitude that I have received for introducing these provisions, I commend the measures to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

New clause 17 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 1

Publication of information by Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs) in England and Wales

‘(1) When a LSCB deems it necessary to conduct a Serious Case Review (SCR), the LSCB will—

(a) carry out an initial management review to identify any immediate concerns within 72 hours of deciding that a SCR is necessary;

(b) commission an internal investigation if the child or his immediate family has received social care services from the local authority in the past two years;

(c) commission a SCR.

(2) The LSCB will commission the SCR from an author approved by a body established by the Secretary of State by order made by statutory instrument.

(3) The LSCB will publish the SCR in full, excluding only information that may lead to the identification of living parties.’.—(Tim Loughton.)

Brought up, and read the First time.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: new clause 10—Reasonable punishment—

‘(1) The Children Act 2004 is amended as follows—

(2) In section 58 (reasonable punishment), after subsection (4) there is inserted—

“(4A) Only a person with parental responsibility for a child within the meaning of section 3 of the Children Act 1989 can justify battery of the child on the ground that it constituted reasonable punishment.”’.

New clause 21—Publication of serious case reviews—

‘(1) When Local Safeguarding Children Boards commission serious case reviews these shall be published in full within 60 days of completion, subject only to the redaction and anonymisation which is necessary to protect the welfare and reasonable expectation of privacy of those persons mentioned in the Serious Case Review.

(2) The Local Safeguarding Children Boards must also ensure that within 12 months of the publication of the serious case reviews there is in each case an independent evaluation of the extent to which the conclusions of the review have been acted upon.’.

Amendment 35, in clause 28, page 25, line 26, after ‘with’, insert

‘for the purposes of a serious case review’.

Amendment 36, page 25, line 29, leave out ‘its functions’ and insert ‘a serious case review’.

Amendment 37, page 25, line 33, leave out ‘function’ and insert ‘serious case review’.

Amendment 38, page 26, line 8, leave out ‘its functions’ and insert ‘a serious case review’.

Amendment 39, page 26, line 8, at end insert—

‘(6A) The Board will disclose, on request, the names of the persons and bodies from whom it has requested information except in cases where disclosure would threaten the anonymity of a child or his family.

(6B) Section 28 will apply to LSCBs when commissioning Serious Case Reviews which, unless they can be shown to be harmful to the welfare of the subject of the Serious Case Review or his siblings, should be published in full, subject to appropriate considerations of anonymisation and redaction.

(6C) The Secretary of State shall direct a body to maintain a register of suitable, qualified authors of Serious Case Reviews and to monitor their quality which should be available to LSCBs commissioning Serious Case Reviews.’.

Amendment 40, page 26, line 11, leave out ‘its functions’ and insert ‘a serious case review’.

Amendment 88, page 26, line 11, at end insert—

‘(8) Provision must be made for appeals by those persons who consider it to be unreasonable or improper to supply the specified information to the Local Safeguarding Children Board under this section.’.

Amendment 41, in clause 29, page 26, line 21, after ‘with’, insert

‘for the purposes of a serious case review’.

Amendment 42, page 26, line 24, leave out ‘its functions’ and insert ‘a serious case review’.

Amendment 43, page 26, line 28, leave out ‘function’ and insert ‘serious case review’.

Amendment 44, page 26, line 41, leave out ‘its functions’ and insert ‘a serious case review’.

Amendment 45, page 26, line 44, leave out ‘its functions’ and insert ‘a serious case review’.

Amendment 46, in clause 30, page 27, line 4, leave out ‘may’ and insert ‘will’.

Amendment 47, page 27, line 6, at end insert

‘and of the effectiveness of Local Safeguarding Children Boards in England and Wales.’.

Amendment 90, page 27, line 10, leave out ‘may’ and insert ‘shall’.

Amendment 48, page 27, line 13, at end insert—

‘(c) requiring the naming of partners listed under section 13(3) that are not cooperating appropriately with the Board.’.

This group of amendments concerns a very serious subject: serious case reviews. This is the first opportunity that we have had since the baby Peter tragedy, more than a year ago now, to put forward our proposals, which we have been making for some time, as part of the relevant legislation. It is particularly important that we can do so today because, as you might know, Mr. Speaker, we did not reach this part of the Bill in Committee, so we were not able to have any debate about the operation of local safeguarding children boards or, specifically, our amendments on serious case reviews.

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that, if we had seen only the executive summary, we would not have been aware that, on 31 separate occasions, nine agencies were involved that could have intervened, and so possibly have prevented the subsequent events from taking place?

That, of course, is exactly right, and it is why we need much fuller accounts of what goes wrong in tragedies such as the Edlington and baby Peter cases than can be provided in brief serious case reviews, however comprehensive their title calls them.

We definitely need a radical overhaul of how serious case reviews are commissioned, compiled and published, as well as of how they are subsequently learned from and acted on. We need that to restore public confidence in child protection, and morale in the social worker profession. We also need it to ensure that all the agencies involved in safeguarding children can see clearly where mistakes have been made and can work to ensure that they will not be repeated, on their watch and in their patch, in the future.

In the past 18 months, I have travelled widely around children’s services departments. I visit local authorities most weeks to speak to the people in the front line and the ones who manage those departments. Some children’s organisations claim that they do not agree that serious case reviews should be published in full, and I am sure that, as usual, the Minister will give us a litany of them before long. However, despite those claims, the overwhelming view among the child protection social workers at the sharp end whom I meet is that they would be in favour of the full publication of serious case reviews.

Full publication of the reviews would be in their interests. More importantly, it would be in the interests of vulnerable children and families, so I was pleased to see the stance taken by the British Association of Social Workers, which was confirmed in The Times just last week. The association is the professional body for social workers, and it is headed—very skilfully, I might say—by a former colleague of the Minister in this House. He has committed BASW to campaigning for full publication of serious case reviews. The association represents the professionals who have to deal with these problems every day of the week at the sharp end. They now see the merits of exposing the weaknesses in serious case reviews, as opposed to suppressing them and keeping them secret, as has happened for too long.

In The Times of 18 February, Hilton Dawson said:

“It’s vital that these reviews are transparent and can be seen in full, subject only to the need to preserve individual anonymity. These reviews are vital learning tools and it is imperative that they are made widely available.”

There speaks the head of the professional body for social workers in this country. A former social worker himself, he incidentally had experience for a short time as a Labour Member of Parliament in this House.

In addition, Community Care magazine, the bible of social workers—[Interruption.] That name causes some tittering from the Secretary of State, but the magazine is used very widely by the social worker work force. The magazine has also committed itself to the publication of serious case reviews, and has been waging a very forceful campaign to that end.

I quote from a recent copy of Community Care:

“Serious case reviews are usually published only in summary. This limits learning. Community Care recommends that reviews be published in full so that practitioners can use specific details to inform their practice according to their experiences and roles. There is some resistance but it is possible to publish without harming anonymity . . . Names can be removed and reviews could be collated and distributed centrally, thereby disassociating them from specific local authorities, teams and known cases. It would help if reviews focused on learning not recrimination.”

I fully agree with that. The purpose is not a witch hunt or a blame game. It is to find out what went wrong, to learn from it and to make sure that it is less likely to happen in the future.

We will never abolish cruelty to children outright. There are evil individuals in society who will always seek to do evil to vulnerable people, including children—incredibly. What we can do is to make it as difficult as possible for those people to be able to perpetrate their crimes, and to make sure that everybody is working together to ensure that those opportunities are as limited as possible for the perpetrators of such crimes.

It seems to me that the hon. Gentleman should be rather less surprised by the attitude of the British Association of Social Workers. The purpose of serious case reviews is not and should not be to seek individual blame, but unless a fuller account is given than the one that is available in executive summaries prepared by organisations, it may be much harder to see the resource issues and the issues of institutional practice and culture which underpin so many of the meaningful conclusions that should be drawn from such reviews.

I agree. It is not merely a case of identifying certain individuals who did not perform the job to the required standard. It is necessary to find out why. Were there enough staff to cover the cases? Was the case overload too great? That has been the situation in many local authorities. Were resources not available when they were needed? Was all the work going on in the department reactive rather than preventive? Were social workers spending far too much time at their computers, having to fill in assessment forms, as is now the case?

According to Unison, up to 80 per cent. of a social worker’s time in child protection is spent filling in assessment forms, rather than at the sharp end with those children. Surely the most likely way of preventing harm to vulnerable children and families is for a professional, well-trained, well-resourced and well-motivated social worker to knock on a door and spend quality face-to-face time with that vulnerable family and the child. The social worker would then be able to make an informed decision as to whether intervention was required and at what level, rather than trying to second-guess it from a computer screen or from papers a long distance away in an office.

Serious case reviews should consider and analyse such questions in order to draw conclusions and make recommendations. That cannot be properly communicated in the space of an 11-page executive summary, whether or not it is called comprehensive, and that is the sort of thing that we need to know.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the absence of more detail in serious case reviews makes it difficult to look for patterns? It is the analysis of patterns that is key in identifying the circumstances where intervention is necessary. He is probably aware of Birmingham’s analysis, from which the council found that judgment was very poor. We need to analyse patterns, and for that we need detailed serious case reviews.

The hon. Gentleman is right. It is no good just looking at a serious case review in isolation, though we need to do that in full. If there are clear systemic weaknesses affecting many children’s services departments, that is a serious job for central Government to undertake, rather than a localised issue for a local authority. One of my amendments, which I shall come to later, deals with analysing the work of local safeguarding children boards, which refers to the hon. Gentleman’s point.

There have been objections to the publication of serious case reviews, along the lines that social workers would be compromised in their work if the reviews were published in full, or that the identity of the children and families involved would be revealed. Clearly, many social workers working at the sharp end do not buy that argument. I do not buy that argument; I never have. Publication is in the best interests of social workers.

Inevitably, when there is a tragedy such as the baby Peter case, the Doncaster case or others, social workers are always panned first. It is always assumed that if a baby or child who was on a local authority’s radar dies in gruesome circumstances, it must be the fault of social workers. In some cases, that is true; in many cases, the system is at fault, as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central (Jim Cousins) said; and in many other cases, other agencies have not done their bit. In the case of baby Peter, the paediatrician, whom we have heard about in the news this week, potentially had some shortcomings, and the police did not come out of it very well, either. However, social workers are always at the front of the queue to be panned, and they are always at the back of the queue to be congratulated and praised when things go right. They usually do go right, but that does not make for good news on the front page of a tabloid newspaper.

The Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families heard evidence that many children’s social workers are the least experienced in the work force. They are put on the most complicated and difficult cases at the beginning of their career, and they can arrive in post having had placements and training that did not include children’s social work. We need the full picture to ensure that, as my hon. Friend rightly says, social workers are not hung out to dry when there is systemic failure and a lack of support for often young and inexperienced people who are doing their best. We need to ensure that the true picture is seen so that people are not made scapegoats when they are not personally at fault.

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. We know that part of the problem is the huge case load placed on social workers, particularly those in child protection, and the worryingly high vacancy rates, which on average exceed 15 per cent. across various authorities, but in others, particularly those in London, are as high as 40 per cent. Newly qualified social workers, with hardly any on-the-job training in often complex and sensitive child protection work, are thrown in at the deep end with really challenging cases. However, social work is not a science or a clear case of black and white; it involves experience, intuition and sensitivity—qualities that one cannot learn just from a book, but must learn on the job, preferably alongside a mentor who has years of experience to pass on.

The morale of social workers has been so undermined, partly because of those high-profile tragic cases, that there is a serious problem with people going into social work. We have expressed serious reservations about the standard of training that many social workers receive; about the entry qualifications, which need to be higher, for a social work degree; about the low pass mark required to obtain that degree; and about the lack of on-the-job training for social work graduates.

That is why back in 2007, in the report that the Conservative party commissioned on the role of children’s social workers, we made specific recommendations about newly qualified social workers and raising the standard of training. I am pleased to say that at long last Moira Gibb’s social worker task force has taken on board many of those recommendations, but they should have been taken on a long time before we reached this desperate impasse.

There is a further question. Why would social workers not want to co-operate with a serious case review that was going to be published in full? Why would they not want to co-operate with an investigation, when their profession may or may not be at fault in the tragic death of a vulnerable child? However anonymous and unpublicised serious case reviews are at the moment, that did not stop the names of key players in the baby Peter case and other tragic cases being splashed all over the front pages of certain newspapers. It did not stop the identity of culprits and, indeed, of children and siblings being exposed and made available in a matter of seconds on the internet.

Clearly, it should be possible to publish a full serious case review without compromising the identity of the key players involved. That is why our amendments are heavily subjected to key caveats: first, that serious case reviews should be published in full only where such publication did not compromise the welfare of surviving children or siblings, and it would have to be shown that that was the case; secondly, that those serious case reviews would be duly anonymised; and thirdly, that they would be appropriately redacted where that was necessary, say, to protect the identity and sensitivities of surviving children and families.

We have researched widely how we think that the new system should be structured. After deliberations with social workers, directors of children’s services, departments of social work, academics and others, we think that a practical and suitable way ahead is to base the model of publication of serious case reviews on the practice that has existed for many years in mental health homicide reviews. Mental health homicide reviews are published in full, with various names of individuals anonymised—they may refer to “Dr. A” or “Nurse B”—and they are made widely available. It is generally agreed that they are good, thorough learning tools from which a much wider constituency of professionals can learn from the mistakes that have been made and determine what changes to the system, locally or nationally, need to be made to try to avoid their happening in future.

The mental health homicide review into the tragic killing of Jonathan Zito ran to 177 pages. It was a tragic, but thorough and worthwhile report. One could contrast that with the 16-page executive summary on the death of baby Peter, which was found not to be worth the paper it was written on and had to be rewritten after the whole case came to light back in November. Why cannot we use a model, if not based on, then certainly much closer to, that which already exists and has worked perfectly well for many years for mental health homicides? The practice in those cases is that following a murder involving a patient who has recently been treated by the local mental health service, there must be an immediate investigation to identify what urgent action needs to be taken within 72 hours—a succinct internal investigation that is urgently done and urgently acted on. That is followed up by a much longer—in the Zito case, 177 pages—in-depth review, which is then published, subject to the various caveats about protecting anonymity, and so on.

In new clause 1, we suggest that following the death of a child in connection with local children’s services, there should be an initial review within 72 hours, and then a full-blown serious case review commissioned by an author approved by a body established by the Secretary of State under an order made by statutory instrument. It would then be incumbent on the local safeguarding children board to publish the serious case review in full, excluding any information that might lead to the identification of living parties.

Subsection (2) refers to the authorship of such serious case reviews, because another issue comes up when we look at how they are commissioned. At the moment, it is up to the local safeguarding children board to find an author for a serious case review and commission him or her to produce the report, which is then written and submitted to the board.

We need to ensure that the professionalism, probity and independence of serious case reviews are protected if they are to be meaningful, credible and effective documents. The trouble is that after the baby Peter case, Ofsted produced a report revealing that, at that stage, no fewer than 41 per cent. of the serious case reviews that were being produced on behalf of local safeguarding children boards were unsatisfactory. The quality of the reviews was seriously called into question.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the point made in new clause 21 that the assessment of compliance should be independent?

Absolutely. That is entirely in harmony with the approach in our proposals. We need a very clear wall between the commissioners and the authors of reports. For the same reason, we need to ensure that whoever comes in subsequently to conduct an audit has no agenda of their own or conflict of interest. However, that could still mean someone whose name is held on the register that we are proposing. Someone with the professionalism, background and training to carry out initial SCRs could also carry out the audit to find out whether a review had been acted upon. The answer to the hon. Lady is yes—her proposal is very much along the same lines as ours.

Amendments 35 to 38 and 40 to 45 have the support of a number of outside organisations, notably the General Medical Council, the British Medical Association and the Children’s Rights Alliance for England. Clauses 28 and 29, to which the amendments would apply, are very widely drawn in that they establish a statutory obligation to provide information to LSCBs for any or all of their functions. That could include the release of confidential information about children, parents, siblings or, in a clinical context, patients. I have a deal of sympathy with the GMC and the BMA, which are concerned that if people are statutorily obliged to provide information to an LSCB, when the purpose for which that information is required is not made clear, there is a serious risk to patient confidentiality. In addition, the CRAE has expressed fears about the breaching of child confidentiality, particularly regarding information given by one child about another. The requirement included in clauses 28 and 29 is very wide ranging, and we therefore think it should be modified. Our amendments would specify that such information could be required only in so far as it can be shown to be necessary for the compilation of an SCR, and on an anonymised basis.

I have some questions for the Minister. I would be grateful if he could say why the clauses are so widely drafted. Is that a further response to the Laming review, because the measures seem to go well beyond the scope envisaged in his second review of last year? Will the Minister define more closely the circumstances in which such information will be required? There is also a question regarding the Data Protection Act 1998, which specifically requires that information is collected for a specified purpose, because under the clauses, nothing will be specified. May we have more detail about specified purposes? On what grounds, for example, could an agency withhold information? Could it withhold information if it believed that there was a risk of breaking the confidentiality of a child, a pupil or a patient? The CRAE has further said that any sharing of information by public bodies must be necessary, proportionate and in the pursuit of a legitimate aim in order to comply with human rights law. The question of whether the clauses as they are structured comply with that is a serious one.

The final tranche of proposals in this group is made up of amendments 46, 47 and 48. Amendment 46 would require the Secretary of State, by regulations, to make provisions for Ofsted to conduct reviews of LSCBs’ performance of their specified functions. Clause 30 provides that the Secretary of State

“may by regulations make provision”.

This is an old favourite in Committees—although we did not have the opportunity to make the argument there this time—because we think that “may” should become “will”. Questions have been raised about the way in which local safeguarding children boards operate. For example, there is confusion about the boards’ exact role and purpose vis-à-vis children’s trusts. After the baby Peter affair, the Secretary of State made changes to the composition of LSCBs which amounted to adding two lay members, but I am not sure how that improved their quality other than by increasing the size of the tables around which the boards sit. I worry that any decisions that LSCBs make will always be subject to the lowest common denominator.

I have serious qualms about Ofsted’s ability to inspect children’s social care departments, because there is a severe shortage of children’s social care experts working for, or on the board of, Ofsted, but the operation of LSCBs needs to be examined on a better defined and more regimented basis. If it is to be the inspecting body, Ofsted should also review the effectiveness of LSCBs as a whole. Are they working properly and how do they interact with other agencies? That is the purpose of amendment 48. We suggest that LSCBs should be able to name and shame those agencies that, for example, have not co-operated with them in the compilation of serious case reviews. That is the flipside to the earlier amendments that we tabled about the supply of information for serious case reviews.

The amendment also has another purpose. As matters stand, Ofsted does not inspect the way in which agencies work with each other in child protection. Clearly, a common feature of the failings that lead to serious case reviews is the weaknesses in inter-agency working. We think that Ofsted needs to look at that area of child protection and the operation of LSCBs much more carefully. Joined-up working is always an important part of the process and too often it is one of the failings that contribute to the tragedies that we see.

Those are the four sets of amendments within this group. I have some sympathy with the new clause tabled by the Liberal Democrats about serious case reviews, but they have also tabled new clause 10 on the definition of reasonable punishment. Children’s Bills, in my experience in the last nine years in which I have been dealing with them, would not be complete without somebody trying to hijack them by imposing anti-smacking provisions, and this Bill is no different. True to form, that is what new clause 10 seeks to do. I make no comment on the suitability of the new clause, other than to say that I am aware of the technical problem about the operation of certain religious organisations that have genuine concerns about whether corporal punishment may be used. However, I am also aware that the Secretary of State requested, in his letter on 28 January, that Sir Roger Singleton look into that matter in more detail. Given that we are awaiting the outcome of his deliberations, there is even more reason why, in this case—