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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, has put the argument about the difficulty of inspecting schools and children’s homes by the same methodology very eloquently. The methodology that Ofsted uses fills four boxes and in those boxes you either pass or fail, rather like school exams. In a children’s home, you cannot pass or fail; you have to be helped to reach the standard, which is that the children are going to be properly cared for holistically. Simply closing the home down—which is what happens if you are actually on the lower end of adequate—or not taking any more children into that establishment is unthinkable. I have personal experience of Ofsted refusing to allow young people to be taken into an establishment until it was brought up to another level, although the establishment was going to continue to operate. Those difficulties put the whole establishment at risk because of economic viability. Fortunately, it brought itself up to standard, as one would expect. I agree with the noble Baroness about the integration of services. We have reached this point; as we have said several times this evening, we are where we are. It breaks my heart to disagree with the noble Earl, Lord Howe; he knows that I am a huge admirer of him. Those services now on the ground are becoming integrated in terms of service delivery in schools and local authorities. That does not mean that you cannot change the method of inspection. That is the core of the problem—that Ofsted believes that it has an answer. Just as social care could learn from the methodology of Ofsted, because it has rigour, Ofsted too could learn about the holistic approach to services that are looking after children in terms of body, mind and soul. That is the less important message that I want the Minister to take away. After all, I was the Member who was sent to see the chief inspector because I was so determined, during the debate, to try to prevent the break-up of this regulation. Now that it has happened, further reorganisation would be disruptive. We must press for a different methodology.