I am grateful to the hon. and learned Member for Harborough for raising some important questions. I do not think that he addressed his amendment at any stage, which is a good thing because I do not agree with it and I might say why right at the end of my remarks. Instead, he used his amendment as a vehicle for expressing some proper concerns about the intensive fostering scheme, which I think the whole Committee agrees is a bold, imaginative scheme with enormous potential, if it is allowed to work and if it has the resources to make it work. I do not want to suggest that it is not well worth considering and including in the Bill. However, there are some important questions, which we will discuss further in the context of schedule 1 and which we have already discussed, albeit superficially, in our earlier consideration of the Bill. The hon. and learned Gentleman set out some of the concerns.

Resourcing is not peripheral; it is absolutely central to the operation of the measure. I do not want to be unkind to the Minister, but I do not think that he answered precisely the questions put to him this morning on this subject. There was certainly no clarity about how the measure will be funded, but that will be critical to its operation.

My local authority experience is years out of date. I was the leader of a county council with social services responsibilities and, certainly in my time, although almost any amount of resource could be put into social services and it would be used effectively, they would still require more to deal with vulnerable people. The limitation was always the budget that was available, rather than the demands that the services put on the budget. I am clear in my mind that any directors of social services—although  they are not called that any more; they are called all sorts of other things that reflect the Children Act 2004 and what flowed from it—or any officer of an authority who has responsibility for child protection will grasp an opportunity to shift significant amounts of expenditure off local authority budgets on to a central Government budget. However, I want to be clear that that is what is envisaged, because although the Minister said this morning that his Department and the criminal justice system would have responsibility for organising implementation of the measure, I was not clear whether there would still be a duty on the local authority to provide. If there is, that would be an onerous duty for many local authorities.

There is a distinction—I come back to the point because I do not think that we have clarified the position—between what is required for the child’s protection, which is clearly part of the duty of the local authority but is no part of a criminal justice disposal, and what will be required in making orders under the Bill. The latter is part of a criminal justice disposal and is therefore not purely for the child’s protection, but its purpose, quite properly and significantly, is to seek to provide an environment where the young person is less likely to reoffend.

We need to understand the system that will get us from A to B—that gets the young person into an intensive fostering place in each local authority area in the country. Is the Department going to maintain lists of approved intensive foster parents for each criminal justice area? Will those individuals be funded directly from Department of Justice funds for the very difficult job that they will be doing? Alternatively, will the Department, at the time of disposal, simply ask the local authority whether it has any foster parents who might fit the bill and work on an ad hoc, or an ad hominem, basis? Which is it going to be? It will require significant resources, so what thought has gone into the provision?

Without some clarity it is hard to accept at face value that the disposal will be available in every court across the country to every young offender who would benefit from it. If it is not to be so, we shall have a postcode lottery, to use a hackneyed term, in the disposals that are available to particular magistrates benches.

Is it envisaged that the foster parents who are engaged for the purpose will be in the same local authority area as the young person, or indeed the court before which they appear? Or is it the intention to take children out of inner cities to a—for them—totally alien environment to remove them from the temptation and pressures that they might otherwise experience? There is an argument for doing that. There is a case to be made for saying that the best thing one can do for a young offender in Lambeth is to take them away from an inner-city environment to a suburban or rural environment. That has happened in the past. There is a school in my constituency that is intended for young people who display behavioural difficulties. It is a local authority school, but it is not run by Somerset local education authority; Bristol education authority does. It is miles out in the country, although it is not in the middle of nowhere. It is in a very sweet little village, but it is certainly a long way from St. Pauls or Knowle West in Bristol, or the other places where the children at the school might have come from. Is that what the Minister of State has in mind?

If the Minister of State cannot provide that clarity here and now, will he write to the Committee to tell us how the scheme will work? It would put a lot of minds at rest to know that sufficient thought has gone into its working, and into the duties that will exist for local authorities, and to know that the scheme has been discussed with the Local Government Association and others, so that there is clarity as to the source of funding for supporting particular individuals.

The placements must be very special placements if they are to work successfully. It will not do a young person much good to simply put them into a standard local authority home—not a foster home—and expect that that will do the trick of dissuading them from criminal behaviour. All the evidence shows that it is unlikely to do so, despite the best will in the world on the part of those who are trying to operate such homes. We need clear assurances that there are sufficient numbers of people who can address the problem and who have a high degree of altruism and the ability to care for what may sometimes be disturbed individuals, and that we have a way of funding them.

Let me return to the amendment—