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Childcare Bill

My Lords, I come at this from the point of view of the child. Every time a setting closes, a child is unsettled; in fact, a lot of children are unsettled. They must then start making relationships with a new set of staff in a new, unfamiliar place. Such needs are particularly difficult for children with problems such as autistic spectrum disorder. We need a whole heap of common sense, such as was obviously completely absent in the planning of the examples just given by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton. It is not unreasonable to expect a local authority to pay attention to the location and quantity of provision, to competition between settings and whether one is duplicating the other. They should not encourage the opening of too many places too near others, as long as the existing provision is of suitable quality. Obviously, there are some provisions that are not good quality which should go to the wall; that is only right. But when you have perfectly good ones competing with each other and neither is viable, somebody must bring some common sense into it. That should probably be the local authority.