Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response, and I thank all noble Lords for a really interesting debate. We said it would be controversial, and so it proved. I will not speak for long as we are getting late again, as usual, but I say very quickly to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that I genuinely have real sympathy for the children she mentioned and how it makes them feel. I am a big believer in the voice of the child; it would be hypocritical to say otherwise. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that in some senses this is a reactive Bill, while we are dealing with problems that we have here and now. As my noble friends Lord Nash and Lady Barran said, a root cause of a lot of the problems that we have spoken about on all these days in Committee is capacity. We have to address the fact of capacity and its geographical spread. I particularly thank my noble friend Lady O’Neill because she brings her experience and is able to tell us what it is really like and what actually happens. I was really pleased that she said she thought this could be helpful in grappling with some of the problems that local authorities face, because if my noble friend says it could be helpful then it probably will be helpful. I was very encouraged by that, and it might be helpful in other areas. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. I think I was slightly ill advised on the extent of the supported accommodation market and the levels there. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, made some really interesting points. I was going to suggest that the Government take her up on the offer of the round table because I was very interested in social value procurement, but they are doing that already. I kind of knew, having sat through last Thursday’s debate, that I was going to end up in the Minister’s “not everything’s for legislation” box, and so it proved. I take the point. Of course there is a wider body of work; on the last amendment that I spoke to, I mentioned the money that the Government had put in and the wider body of work, and I am very happy to acknowledge that. I just think the difference here—everyone says this—is that while it is great to have better data and to have that improvement with local authorities, I am not clear how it will help the smaller private providers and therefore the problems of capacity that we have mentioned. Unless we mandate that publishing, I do not think it will happen—and that feels a little one-sided, so I am afraid this is back out of the “not everything’s for legislation” box. On that note, and with that in mind for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.