Lord Lucas (Con)

My Lords, I am very grateful for that reply. I completely understand that this is a direction in which the Government do not want to take at the moment, but I cannot recall, in my unexpectedly long time in this place, seeing any structure like that of the chief scientific advisers that really enabled collaboration between departments. It gives each department a sense of ownership of the policy, that it is in some way its own, rather than something that some other department is trying to impose on it. Looking at long-running problems, such as how to care for the elderly, we see that the inability to get a few government departments to work in collaboration with each other causes immense problems, such as bed-blocking in hospitals, and questions about whose budget something is supposed to be on. The difficulties of working cross-departmentally are legendary and real. Clearly, Skills England is setting out to have cross-departmental impact. I wish the Government great fortune in that, but I hope that, if things start to prove sticky, they will turn their minds back to doing something, perhaps within Skills England, to produce a structure that makes collaboration work. The more we can do that within government, the more we will solve some of the big problems that have proved intractable in terms of making government work well. I am happy to withdraw the amendment; I do not expect to be here to bring it back.