I am grateful to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome and to all those who have contributed to the debate, whether from the Labour or Opposition Benches. As I said, we must get the area under discussion right, and there is not much room for party political banter.

Like the hon. Gentleman, I found the LGA witnesses the least satisfactory in the sense that they were the least inquisitive, the least curious and the least questioning about the Bill. I do not know enough about the individuals who gave evidence, but I, too, was surprised when they seemed to be fairly relaxed about the financial burdens that would be placed on local authorities as a consequence of intensive fostering. That might be a function of representing Birmingham and Coventry, which are two large local authority areas, but Leicestershire, part of which I represent, has a revenue budget of about £750 million for the entire range of activities. I dare say that Birmingham has a larger budget than that, but Leicestershire is always having to look carefully at its annual budget to see whether it can afford the things that the Government, by statute, require it to do already without having to face a further bill for £250,000 to carry out a justice function.

The Minister said that the fostering requirement is based on crossing the custody threshold. Let me put aside for one moment my worries about the fostering arrangements and whether they are always a good thing. If the requirement works for the more serious offences of those crossing the custody threshold, why restrict it to that? Why not allow it to be used to prevent the young person in a difficult family from reaching the stage at which he does cross the threshold?

I come back to the book “Wasted” by Mark Johnson. He used to spend weekends on an entirely voluntary basis with a married couple who were teachers at his school in Kidderminster. During those weekends—as he admits in the book—his behaviour improved immeasurably. It was when he went back home that he fell into his old habits. When his teaching family moved to another part of Worcestershire, and he was unable to join them at weekends, things got worse and worse. At that stage he had not done anything that would have crossed the custody threshold, but clearly he was benefiting from contact with that other family. I would be interested to know more about the 13 placements and the 36 youngsters who have been sentenced to the system in Staffordshire, London and Hampshire. Can I be assured that those people were placed with real families, and not local authority homes? There is a provision within the Bill, if foster  parents are not available, for children to be placed in the care of the local authority, which would mean putting them into children’s homes or other institutions and that would defeat the object.