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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 42: 42: After Clause 16, insert the following new Clause— ““Access to information for post-care adults (1) Regulations may make provision for the purpose of assisting post-care adults to obtain information held by local authorities and voluntary organisations in relation to their personal and family history. (2) Regulations made under this section may authorise or require local authorities and voluntary organisations to provide appropriate support, including information and advice, to post-care adults who require it. (3) In this section ““post-care adult”” means a person aged 18 and over who has at any time been in the care of, looked after or accommodated by a local authority or voluntary organisation.”” The noble Baroness said: I thank the Committee for the opportunity to revisit an issue that I raised at an earlier stage. At this hour I do not propose to detain the Committee for long, but I return to the issue for two reasons. First, I wish to signal my intention to continue to pursue the matter of access to records and to information on former-care adults until action is taken to improve to an acceptable level the standard of service to those adults. It is simply not good enough to recognise that standards of information-giving vary radically but to do nothing about it. It is wholly understandable that records may have been lost over the years. However, it is wholly unacceptable that identical information about a former-care adult and their family can exist in different places but that access to it may vary dramatically according to the policies, procedures and, crucially, the interpretation of the Data Protection Act that are adopted by each authority. I return to that issue. Similarly, I return to variance in the availability of support to people seeking to find their care records and, crucially, to find out about their identity and care history. In our debate on 17 January, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, agreed with me that there is a need to review the way in which current guidance is implemented. He said: "““Because of the revisions that we have undertaken to make to guidance under the Children Act, we will review that. I will personally ensure that we take account of what the noble Baroness has said as we review it next time round.””—[Official Report, 17/1/08; col. GC 587.]" At this stage and at this hour, I simply wish to ask the Minister when a review of the guidance is likely to take place. Will it include an assessment of the extent to which varying implementation of the Data Protection Act is consistent—or inconsistent—with Article 8 of the Human Rights Act? Will it include consultation with, in particular, former-care adults and professionals in the statutory and voluntary sectors? I continue to raise this matter in the knowledge that noble Lords may be fed up with hearing me do so. It is crucial to people who are late on in their lives and who are still suffering from the effects of not knowing their family story or their personal history and, in some cases, having doubts about their identity simply because of the variance in practice about letting people have access to their files or explaining to them why the information does not exist. That is crucial to a small number of individuals who I believe deserve to be treated equally. They should not have to face some kind of postcode—happenstance—lottery that depends on whether the social worker that they happen to meet on a given day has an interpretation of the law that is different from that of another social worker. I beg to move.