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Health and Social Care Bill

I am sorry to intervene but I find doing so irresistible. During the passage of the legislation that integrated the regulators, I raised substantial concerns about the method of Ofsted’s regulation. In fact, I was sent by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to see the chief inspector to be reassured that the inspection would meet all needs. What I say next I say simply because it illustrates the concern that we should all have. The regulation of services and delivery of services are different things. It is all to do with methodology. The methodology of Ofsted is very different from that of CSCI. I have found—I say this as a service provider; we have two schools that have been inspected by Ofsted and I have personal experience of my local school—that Ofsted regulates by a tick-box method of aggregates. CSCI regulated by looking at the whole situation, so that a variation on a certain set of levels could be taken into account. I think that I have quoted this before but Dame Denise Platt has said that there may not be enough bits of space in a room but if the atmosphere in the home is good, the staff are good and the people are happy, that can be balanced against the other bits of the regulation. I say this now in order to endorse what the noble Earl, Lord Howe, is saying: that very different forms of regulation are being put together here. I think that is what the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, was trying to illustrate, and I now understand that some bits of regulation are different from others. I say this so that it is on the record: I am not convinced, despite all I have seen, that the integration of the inspectorate—which was for a good reason, at the end of the day—has been successful in Ofsted. We therefore need to be incredibly careful in ensuring that the methodology of inspection, not the methodology of the combination of the services, is clear and related to the service being inspected rather than to a particular way of doing things that has worked in another area. What worked in schools with regard to education will not work in children’s homes.