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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I sometimes reel under his replies, and then I remember that I read somewhere in a profile of him that he speaks at 100-and-something words a minute and realise why I have to go back and read everything again in Hansard. I thank him for what he said about the national targets. I shall say something about local targets, as the Minister raised them. There is a feeling out there—we read about it every now and then in our newspapers—that some children are removed from parents and put up for adoption when that should not happen. That gives social workers a bad image. When we did our social workers’ commission, social workers felt very strongly that any targets—we chose national targets, but even locally driven targets—that took away their autonomy to work to find the right placement for a child did not help in setting a positive image for them doing the proactive work they want to do. Seeing as we are not quite as pressed on time as sometimes, I wonder whether the Minister may like to comment on that, even though it is not in my amendment.