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Looked-after Children

I can assure my hon. Friend not only that we did that, but that we looked at how we reward social workers, who work in the most difficult situations. As I have said, that is why we are also looking at the training of social workers. We have nearly completed that work, which we are doing now because we could not do it as thoroughly as we wanted before. In the generality, however, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North is absolutely right. We pay minimum wage-plus to so many people working in early years—we did an inquiry into early years—and they are the most poorly trained people in the work force. There is no doubt that things are getting better, but they are not getting better fast enough and we need crossover, particularly into residential care. We said in the report that level 3 qualifications should be the absolute minimum, but in residential care we found the lowest paid, the lowest rewarded and valued, and the least trained people in the social care work force. That is not good enough and it has to change. Residential care should be as good as we can get it. We should experiment, pilot schemes and copy some of the good practice that we saw in Denmark and this country. Size matters a great deal—my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley said that 12 or 14 for a unit was quite big—so it is important to get it right. Let me make a general point. The care should be absolutely fantastic, but that will not come cheap—I remind the House that people in Denmark pay 50 per cent. income tax and 25 per cent. VAT. However, if such care is a touchstone or a litmus test of how civilised we are as a society, we should persuade our constituents to pay the money and make the necessary sacrifices.