---

Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Amendment No. 52 is part of this group. Its aim, like that of the noble Baroness’s amendment, is to ensure that there is a body to take responsibility for a number of things, perhaps the most important of which is that the child is involved in all the processes. That applies to the individual child’s involvement in their particular circumstances—accommodation or whatever—in the care of the local authority and to the services generally that the local authority provides. There must visibly be a body with responsibility for those things. We shall have to wait and see whether that makes sense in the long term, given the way in which everything is being reframed. However, my impression is that almost everything in the social service world is being interconnected—at least, that appears to be the aim. There will be an important duty to keep one another informed about the different aspects of the work that is going on. Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child gives children the right to be consulted. However, as I understand it, our Government is not one of those who are regarded as having consulted children sufficiently.