Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

I welcome an awful lot of what the Minister said and what His Majesty’s Government are trying to do. My heart sank slightly when I heard the piece about relying on statutory guidance, which was obviously written for her beforehand. I have worked very closely on a variety of Bills over the past four or five years with the Children’s Commissioner, the Victims’ Commissioner and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. If the Minister were to sit down with each or all of them and ask them about the experience they had of overreliance on statutory guidance, she would get some very mixed messages. Statutory guidance is effective only if the degree to which it is complied with is monitored; it is of no use whatever if the organisations that are meant to carry it out know that nobody is looking over their shoulder or calling them to book if they do not comply. This again comes back to the variation in practice across the country. So I ask the Minister, her colleagues and the department to talk to some of those commissioners, to understand the historical and the live experience they have in dealing with some of the statutory guidance we have put into some of the legislation that has come through the House in the past three or four years, to see how effective it is and what we can learn from it.