Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent

The noble Lord raises an incredibly important point. We live at a time when people do not want to trust our institutions and we have given people far too many reasons not to trust us. There is responsibility on every single one of us, both the Government and the Opposition, but also everyone who seeks to hold public office, to rebuild trust in every one of our institutions. I cannot imagine how it must be for the victims, especially for the families who had young children and who would immediately have trusted their doctors and their teachers, to have ended up in this place. Every touchstone of our society let them down, and it took us far too long as a country to accept what had happened to them. We have a duty to the people who were touched by this horrendous scandal to fix what was broken. But the noble Lord is absolutely right that we also have a responsibility to wider society to demonstrate that the state is, can be and must be a force for good, that the state exists for a reason, that the establishment is not a bad word but a good word, and it can and should help communities up and down the country. So the noble Lord is absolutely right that the Government have committed to spend whatever it takes to fulfil our commitments in terms of compensation. We say many times in this building that we must learn from mistakes made, but we have to do more than learn; we have to act, and I hope that we will do so going forward.