Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)

My Lords, in responding briefly to the debate, I would first like to thank everybody who contributed. There is a wealth of knowledge and experience in this Room today. We made the same point about wishing to reform the system and make it better for children and parents. With that kind of background, we should be able to make progress; I hope that we might see some in years to come. The Minister’s response was as full, open and honest as ever. I can only speak personally but I am always grateful that it is the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, who has this job. This is such an important area, and I trust no one more than I trust her to try to get it right; that is the background and the amount of trust that I have in the noble Baroness’s leadership role. Having said that, this is a really tough issue. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, pointed out—the committee also felt this—if you have the money and the wherewithal to go to court and have your system looked at individually, you will not suffer a lot of the things that we have been complaining about today. If you have to use the state-run system, it cannot treat you as an individual; it treats you using a formula. That is the problem that we have. Given that those are the circumstances, all I will say is that of all the services this system needs to be the best that the state can offer, but I do not think it is. My worry about the Minister’s response is that they need to bite the bullet on this issue and go for big change. That is my gut feeling, having been a chair of this inquiry for a couple of months. I will have to reflect on whether what the Minister said—about having limited changes to the calculation and the formula, limited changes to enforcement and no movement yet on administrative liability orders—amounts to the radical change that needs to happen. I say this from my own experience as a Minister: you can never have radical change without hurting someone. If you are going to hang around till you have an answer where no one is a loser, you will never change anything. My one word of warning is that my judgment, and I think that of the committee, is that radical change is needed. It will not be done without pain to someone, but that will be less pain than we have in the system at the moment. Having said that, I am very grateful. I wish the Minister and her team well and hope that, collectively, we can pursue this in another forum.