---

Child Poverty Bill

To save the Minister getting up and down, I wonder whether I might add my two cents’ worth. I wanted to ask him about two points. The first is in relation to data. It seems to me that it will be impossible for local authorities or the Government to be able to deal with informal arrangements between parents and kinship relations or other carers. Nobody could ask them to do that. However, the majority of the cases that we are talking about today have come through the local authority going to a member of the family, godparent or other friend and asking them to look after a child in need under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, on which I want to ask a second question. That will be a record in the local authority. That information is available. The authority may need to scrabble through its documents, but I do not see why that would do any harm. The government department would then have the data on every child placed with a kinship family in the past five years, say. That information is available to be obtained and I would have thought that those behind the Minister would say that that could be done. That would give some very valuable data. Local authorities, under the social workers, will have it in their records. Secondly, I was profoundly disturbed to hear that the Minister had been fed with Section 17 of the 1989 Act, under which the local authority has responsibility for children in need. I would like to know whether the Minister has any evidence that any local authority anywhere within England and Wales has ever paid a kinship carer under Section 17 of the 1989 Act. I would like to bet £5, if that is not improper, that they have not done so.