Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

Since we are forming a set for Amendment 117, I will stand up now, having attached my name to it, and will focus chiefly on that amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has stolen my starting line with her final line: nothing about us without us. I first used that phrase in a debate on rather similar amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill. I think that your Lordships’ House and the country are increasingly coming to realise that we have to listen to children far more. In this context, I will cite an interesting case from the past week, where a 14 year-old who had been tricked by his parents into going to Ghana took his parents to court. The Court of Appeal ruled that he should have the right to come back to Britain, as he wanted to do. That is an interesting court case that shows how, generally, our legal system is starting to listen more and more to children. It is important that our legislation does so and that that is in the Bill. This raises issues that I will come back to on a later group, but the basic point about the regional care co-operatives is that they will take decision-making further away from local authorities. People have been studying this, and the care review evidence group, for example, said that “care will need to be taken that these structural reforms do not dilute local accountability mechanisms”. Making sure that children are actually heard in the making of regulations is in some way a counterbalance to the risk that quite a lot of experts have identified in taking this approach.