---

Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not want to repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, has said. I also have to ask for the leave of the House as deputy chair—I clearly have a vested interest. I begin by thanking the Government for the money that they have already put into the system. When the noble Baroness and I were invited to see whether CAFCASS was viable, which it certainly is—I think that is what we were really asked to do, rather than get it going—we had to see whether the budget met the needs, because no one actually knew. Now we know that it is not really adequate to meet the baseline service. Most of the services that you are involved in will put somewhere near 3 per cent of their budget into training, although it depends how you add that up. At the moment, we have hardly any training budget. We train by our staff putting in, and by conferences that other people are putting in, and by helping each other to improve the service. We need to improve all that. To do that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, said, we have halved the staff at headquarters, significantly reduced the senior staff and devolved our services. That is a modernisation programme in a year that many organisations would give their eye teeth to have achieved. It is a substantial achievement. We do not need the megabucks that we have already been given to make the difference. We need enough to make the service work, to have decent training and to have basic IT for our case-recording service, which will save time and money if we can only get it up. I know there are particular funds for IT. If only we could get some of that money. We need enough to ensure that, as has been said several times here, we can pay a decent staff a decent wage to do a decent job. Every day matters. Every day, we have to ensure that children are not waiting to have their reports; that they are not waiting to be seen or to be heard. That is our commitment, but we need help and support in order to achieve it, as well as for the surrounding services and CAFCASS to be involved in the development of contact centres and the kind of work that it is doing extraneous to the day-to-day work in court. We have been helped considerably by the Government. We are grateful for that. To complete the job we need that help to continue.