Children and Families Bill

Baroness Massey of Darwen Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

Amendment 26 is in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen. Our two amendments relate to support for children returning home from care. Perhaps the best way to illustrate quickly what this is about is to give a couple of illustrations. Here is a quotation from a female caller to ChildLine:

“I’ve been in and out of care from a very young age due to my mum hitting me, neglecting me and taking drugs. Social services would come and take me away and I would spend some time in care, then mum would promise to change and I would go back home for the whole situation to start again. I don’t understand why social services keep giving me back to mum if they are going to end up taking me away again”.

Recently, I met a group of young care leavers, who shared with me their experiences. A 15 year-old girl—a lovely, lively young girl—had been promised that she was returning to a well equipped home. She found that there was no cooker and no microwave, and that she was sharing a pull-out sofa-bed with four other members of the family. There was no support. She had been doing well educationally in care, but when she went home her results plummeted. Another young woman did not want to return home. Her social worker offered to take her to McDonald’s; lo and behold, she was taken back to the family home and told that she had to stay there. I am sure there is good practice, but there is clearly a lot of work to be done.

I turn to the detail of my two amendments, which are supported by the NSPCC, the Family Rights Group, the Who Cares? Trust, the College of Social Work and TACT, the largest independent fostering and adoption agency. Returning home to a parent or relative is the most common outcome for children who have been placed in care. However, approximately half the children who come into care because of abuse or neglect suffer further abuse when they return home. Social workers often feel unsupported and lack the time and resources to support the children whom they return. In over one-third of cases, children returned home without an assessment. Parents’ problems often remain unresolved. Practice is highly variable in different local authorities. The Bill should be amended to require local authorities to assess, prepare, support and monitor a child’s welfare when they return home, and to ensure that parents know what support they are entitled to, just as has been developed in changes to adoption. It is vital that we improve support for all looked-after children if we are to protect our most vulnerable children from harm, and thus extend the entitlement in Clause 4 to support for children who return home.

Further research has shown that two-thirds of children who returned home remained with a suspected abuser even after concerns had been identified. Over one-third of children return home from care without an assessment, and a further 8% return after only an initial assessment. Research highlights children returning to households with a high recurrence of drug and alcohol misuse: 42% with drug misuse and 51% with alcohol misuse. Recent statistics published by the Department for Education show that almost half of children who return home re-enter care. In total, two-thirds of children who returned home experienced one failed return and one-third had oscillated in and out of care twice or more. A report published by the Department for Education concluded that appropriate services and support in place for a child and parents from the beginning of the care episode, throughout care placement and after the return home could significantly reduce the cost to the local authority. It costs around £2,650 per placement in care but it only costs £193 per month to look after a child in need. It therefore makes good financial sense to ensure that children and families get the support they need.

In a new Department for Education consultation on permanence, there have been welcome proposals in this area but they apply only to voluntarily accommodated children and, although it is more likely for such children to return home, it is important that support is also provided for all children returning home from care. Most importantly, the Government’s current proposals do not ensure effective assessment or that children returning home—and their parents—receive the support needed to increase the likelihood of a successful return.

I mentioned a recent meeting with some young people. In summary, they all found that they had not been given enough information about why they were returning home and their views were disregarded. One of them said that she had been promised regular monitoring for months after her return home, gradually reducing over time. She received two brief monitoring visits. None of them had received any substantial support to integrate back into the home and rebuild relationships, nor had their parents’ problems improved enough for them to stay at home safely. They all agreed that there needed to be more support for children and their families when they returned home and for this to happen over a longer period of time.

This amendment aims to increase the chances of successful return home from care for all looked-after children by requiring local authorities to adequately assess, prepare, support and monitor the welfare of the children when they return home from care, in line with support that is proposed, in Clauses 4 and 5, for children who are adopted. I look forward to the Minister’s response and beg to move.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 26 and 29, in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. I will briefly state the arguments for my Amendments 30 and 31, which refer to improved support for special guardianships.

I want to reflect on some of the things which came up in Committee last week about children wanting to know; children having experiences and having a voice. We know, from children’s own stories, that support for them is not always there when they return home from care. Returning home to a parent or parents is the most likely outcome for children who have been in care and this can be the best result, but NSPCC research shows that about half the children who go into care because of abuse and neglect suffer the same when they return.

I will illustrate this with something I heard at the weekend, at the opening of a centre in Brighton which supports young people whose parents are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Children may be placed in care because one or more parents are addicted. The parent or parents go into treatment and are rehabilitated: they get clean. The children return and family stress may mean that the parent turns again to drugs or alcohol. The parents need support and the child needs support. I know from my experience as chair of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse that some local authorities and drug or alcohol agencies provide excellent information and support for parents, but others do not. So often in services, we end up with a vicious circle of rehabilitation and relapse—be it drugs or prison, abuse or neglect—with children in the middle. A recent report from the Centre for Social Justice talked of children falling between the cracks, and so they do. We have in the Bill an opportunity to strengthen local authorities’ responsibilities towards children returning home from care and increase the chances of it being a successful return. If that return is not successful, not only does it cause more stress for children and families but it is expensive, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, said. Improving things is not likely to cause extra expense to the LA; it is likely to save money.

One key is assessments of the needs of the family and the child. It is worth asking families and children what they need rather than making assumptions about it, assuming that everyone is the same or that they simply need information. As Amendment 26 suggests, information is important, but it is not everything. Information about support services should also be in place. More than one-third of children return home without an assessment taking place, and assessment is not necessarily ongoing. Assessment should not be a one-off. Needs can change. I know that successful treatment for an addiction means revisiting the initial assessment regularly. The Department for Education produced a useful data pack entitled Improving Permanence for Looked After Children in September this year. It has messages and questions for local authorities, such as: what are all the assessment and decision-making processes for return to home from care? What services are available for returning children to their family? How do services link across children adult and specialist services—for example, can access to parenting programmes and drug or alcohol programmes be part of a “return to home” plan? What action are you currently taking to improve return on practice?

All those questions are important, but perhaps the most important is the linking of services. So often, services are parcelled out into child, adult, mental health, drug and alcohol, but often there are significant overlaps which are not recognised or responded to. Following a child’s return home from care, neither they nor their parents have a right to any support, and children often end up, as we have heard, back in the same situation—as I said, a vicious circle. Children have said, “I was left to it. I have been in care because my dad assaulted me. Since I have been home, he has been threatening me, pushing me around. I have been cutting myself and I feel like I want to die”.

We all know that behaviour change is difficult. It is perhaps especially difficult for troubled families. The needs of such families—of all families and their children—must be addressed before a child returns home. Engaging with families has been identified as an opportunity to enable the return home to be successful. Personal budgets are important and Clause 4 suggests that they should be available to parents of an adopted child. It is vital that that is extended to children returning home. I hope that the Minister will respond sympathetically to the amendments.

I shall say a quick word about my Amendments 30 and 31, which refer to special guardianship support services and personal budgets. I shall not go into detail on the amendments; they are self-explanatory. Their aim is simply to ensure that improved support for adopters in the Bill in the form of personal budgets and better information about support is extended to special guardians who, like adopters, are providing a permanent home for a child as an alternative to them being in the care system.

I am aware that this issue will come up again but, meanwhile, I hope that the Minister will respond favourably.

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[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, no doubt the Minister will enlighten us but what I am saying is that where local authorities have discretion around the quality of the social work practice that they will deliver to different groups of children, as they do, it means that some of those groups lose out. Demonstrably, by the statistics, it appears that children who are sent home from care are sometimes sent too early or without thorough assessment, do not necessarily get the ongoing support and are not monitored sufficiently. Those kinds of things happen with other cases—with child abuse cases, perhaps. However, it seems as if in many local authorities a decision is made that the child can go home but the focus of attention does not continue on to that child, which is more likely to result in breakdown.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

I shall comment briefly on what the noble Viscount said. One of the main issues is that the children and parents have no right in law to support—support is discretionary.

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[Baroness Young of Hornsey (CB)]

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest as someone who has had direct experience of the childcare system and of accessing social services care records.

This amendment is informed by the experience of care leavers and by professionals in the Access to Records campaign group, which comprises, among others, the Care Leavers’ Association, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, the Childcare History Network, the Post Care Forum and Barnardo’s and is also supported by the charity TACT.

Whether they have spent all or part of their childhood and/or adolescence in the care system, for too many the current system simply is not working in a consistent, helpful way. At the moment, care leavers apply under the Data Protection Act for access to personal information held in care records, but unfortunately the DPA is often misinterpreted by local authorities, with some organisations severely restricting the information made available. There are too many examples of care leavers receiving such incomplete and heavily redacted records that their case histories are rendered virtually meaningless. Furthermore, the service given by local authorities is erratic and inconsistent: some are enabling and supportive while others are bureaucratic and obstructive. Some seem so concerned about negligence claims and media headlines that their position is defensive from the very beginning.

The relationship between practice and legislation was brought up in discussion on the previous amendment, and it is key here, too. Our argument is that, although there are regulations and guidelines in place, they are not working sufficiently well. Before I go into the detail of the amendment, I want to say something about the rationale behind it.

Many of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, last week in relation to Amendment 25 resonated with me, because very similar issues concerning identity, belonging and knowledge of family history are relevant to this amendment. The question, “Who am I?”, is fundamental; it is a question necessary for us to recognise our sense of self and our status as a distinctive and unique human being. We understand that responses to that question are highly complex: we are the sum of our experiences and memories, and of what other people tell us and how they respond to us. Some experiences are indelible and remain with us through memory; some experiences, even though they are an essential part of our experience of the world, may none the less be forgotten, especially if they have produced trauma of one kind or another.

If you have been brought up in care, you come to think about what kind of person you are and where you have come from, asking, “Who am I?”. However, these questions may be unanswerable. Who is there to tell you at what age you accomplished something or about a specific difficulty you had, or the circumstances of your early life? How is it possible to accumulate the kind of knowledge about yourself that people brought up in conventionally caring situations take for granted? It may be your story and your journey but it seems to belong to the state in the form of records, whether they are hand-written, type-written or whatever.

Several thousand people ask to see their records and many of these requests come from people in their middle or later years. The lifelong needs of adult care leavers are at least as pressing as those of adults who have been adopted, although this is rarely recognised in respect of access to care records and the aftermath. The DPA enables care leavers to see personal information about them on their care files. The problem is that when asking a local authority to see these files, care leavers’ experiences range from a response which is at best enabling and supportive and at worst bureaucratic, restrictive and inconsistent with the corporate parenting role. There are some examples of good practice but we want the Government to ensure that local authorities work with the Information Commissioner’s Office to enable care leavers to have all the personal information they are entitled to, and to exercise their discretion regarding third-party information in a less restrictive way.

As I have suggested, despite the requirements already in place, we think that the standard and quality of case-record keeping is not consistent across the children’s services sector. Organisations need to be mindful of keeping older records safely and under secure conditions, whether they are paper, scanned or microfilmed. We have heard too many instances where organisations with poor archival records and retrieval systems respond to the care leaver’s request for personal information with a statement that the files or records cannot be found, without any sense of the profound impact that that can have on the post-care adult. Without support, the persistence necessary to obtain care files places a substantial psychological and emotional burden on the individual, who may already be very isolated. Even if they are not isolated, the impact of disturbing revelations can have repercussions on current relationships and families.

We also need to make sure that we can track where records have moved to: for example, a children’s home might have been closed or a voluntary organisation wound up or absorbed into another organisation. Not being able to find records on that basis is also frustrating and works against care leavers. Regulations could provide a framework for the coherent transfer of care records systems across childcare service providers.

Our evidence suggests that the response from the authorities is often not focused on the rights and needs of the individual care leaver. Again, this echoes other points that have been made in respect of children. Although we are clearly talking here about adults, they still have rights and needs as care leavers that are not being respected by the rather defensive attitudes often displayed by local authorities, which seem to be worried about potential criticism or fearful of litigation.

Similarly, when it comes to sensitive personal data, care leavers can find that many data controllers interpret existing provisions narrowly and that the information withheld significantly reduces clarity about the information they want to access. There are circumstances where organisations can withhold information, and there are plenty of guidelines on that. However, again we come to this point: they are not being implemented consistently or necessarily in the best interests of the adult care leaver who is seeking to find out more about their past, particularly when it comes to relatives. Even if somebody gets hold of their care records, there is then the issue of whether they understand how and why the data controller has made decisions about what information is provided and about what has been withheld, redacted or left out. In relation to that, there is also the need for adult care leavers to at least be offered the opportunity to have some kind of support in going through what is often a difficult situation to navigate.

We understand that some data controllers feel nervous about making disclosures of a sensitive nature that particularly affect other people’s personal backgrounds—for example, a mother or father or other relative—and we want to make sure that data controllers have adequate protection in such circumstances, hence the latter part of the amendment. To summarise, care leavers seek information about their past for all kinds of reasons. It may be that they are starting a new relationship or becoming a family, or perhaps they have been bereaved.

I should like to give a flavour of the experiences of some adult care leavers who have been in touch with, particularly, the Care Leavers’ Association. In one instance, a care leaver—let us call him Arthur—wanted to connect with his records because he was coming to a new phase in his life. He was told that he had come into care because his mother was admitted to hospital but he was not told why. It was considered that the reason for her admission was private and that he had no right to know. It turned out that his mother had suffered from a long-term, severe mental illness.

A second example is of a social worker who took a boxful of records, unsorted, and handed them over to someone on their doorstep and went away again. So there was no support or help through that difficult situation at all.

Another care leaver said:

“I am now at the stage in my search of having applied to Council X three times, Council Y once … Council Z and Council Q as well as making numerous Freedom of Information requests about the children’s homes and other institutions I was kept in as a child”.

Again, the implication of this is that if your own family and children ask you, “What was it like? Where are the photographs of you? What was your family like?”, and you do not have that information, having to persistently knock on the door can be very debilitating.

The Care Leavers’ Association says:

“Care Leavers above a certain age are … a largely invisible group whose rights and needs to access basic information about their family background and childhoods are continually being denied. This discrimination needs to be addressed to ensure that they can access crucial information that may profoundly affect the decisions they make in life. Care leavers’ fundamental human right to access their social care files should be recognised in legislation and fully supported so that they can make sense of their past and go forward into the future”.

I beg to move.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Young. This is a very important issue. I applaud her efforts in challenging the current problems for care leavers in accessing their records and I respect her poignant experiences and her descriptions of the loss of identity, the “Who am I?” and the journey.

The treatment of care leavers can be about blatant discrimination and defensive responses. I have been told by two people how much distress and frustration this has caused them. As the noble Baroness said—I want to underline some of these matters—there are many forms of such discrimination. Those that I have heard of relate to organisations which have poor information, or have a reluctance to seek out information and respond that the records cannot be found—that they have lost the records. In one case, I heard that records had been moved. As the noble Baroness said, children’s homes close and organisations merge. Where do these records go? How does the care leaver find them? What help is there for them to find them?

Some local authorities or voluntary organisations become defensive or evasive, despite the fact that a care leaver has the right to access personal information. The request for information may also involve another person who has to give permission, although it may be deemed possible to give the information without permission, but some organisations which control those data may interpret the rules very narrowly. I know of one person who is still trying to access information after a year of trying. Redaction of records may occur, as the noble Baroness said. In this case, surely local authorities and voluntary organisations should provide explanations and offer counselling and support to those who receive their care records.

There needs to be flexibility about who can provide the information. People change residence. It should be possible for another local authority or voluntary organisation near where the care leaver lives to provide information and support the care leaver. People who have been in care may be desperate to access information about their life—just as those who have been adopted may wish to access records. To remove part of someone’s life history is surely cruel and unnecessary. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

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Moved by

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

35: Clause 9, page 9, line 15, at end insert “and section 23B(8A) and monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of that local authority in discharging its duties under sections 23C (4B) and 23CA and advising them on ways to improve”

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 37 in my name. Amendment 35 is about the effectiveness of local authorities with respect to care leavers. At its core is the need for monitoring and evaluation of their effectiveness.

In a debate on a previous amendment, I spoke about the Department for Education’s data pack on improving the performance of local authorities with regard to looked-after children. This data pack contains checklists and recommendations. I will not repeat the advice given there, but simply say that monitoring and evaluating effectiveness is good not only for clients—in this case, care leavers—but for the local authority. The duties on care leavers are set out in the Children Act 1989 and are clear. We all know that local authorities have many duties, and perhaps not much money, but surely evaluating practice is an important one. There is also good practice to share. After all, if local authorities do not monitor and evaluate practice, how do they know what is going on and how it might be improved? I was intrigued by the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, which seemed to be about the difference between “should” and “must”. Guidance is presumably the “should” bit, but guidance is not always respected. Does that therefore give rise to the need for a “must”?

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[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this short debate, and the Minister for his clarification. I am particularly pleased that the issue of monitoring and evaluation of practice is coming up quite consistently; it is terribly important. I also look forward to seeing how the Department for Education guidance, which I have quoted already, is played out in practice and implemented. I shall be interested to see how local authorities use that guidance to improve practice.

My noble friend Lady Morris emphasised how looked-after children miss out, and talked about champions of spending. I am pleased that the Minister could confirm that the virtual school head will be made statutory. Again, I look forward to hearing how exactly that role will now be defined. Will it include the pupil premium, which is a very interesting and important issue—perhaps, as my noble friend Lady Morris said, in conjunction with schools? In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 35 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, have my name on the amendment and support it wholeheartedly. The noble Earl, in his introduction, used the word “normalising”. We are trying to normalise the relationship between the young people and their foster carers because, as my noble friend Lord Storey pointed out, most young people who grow up in their birth family do not leave home at 18. They stay on.

I was interested in what the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said about the pilots. It did not have an adverse effect on the recruitment of foster carers; indeed, it had a beneficial effect. It occurs to me that the Government might be a little concerned that if we make it a right for young people, if they and their foster carers wish it, to stay on until 21, it will take away foster parenting places for other children coming into the system. Frankly, I think that we should be putting more effort into turning the tap off and giving more support to families so that children can safely stay with their birth parents, but that is an argument for another day. That might be the case, but I have a suggestion that might fulfil some of the need without the problem of taking away a foster-caring place for some other child. I have promoted this idea to successive Children’s Ministers over the past few years, who all say, “That sounds like a good idea”, but nothing ever gets done.

Many children go off to university or college, or to work somewhere else when they are 18, but they maintain a close and supportive relationship with their birth families. Why not allow foster parents, if they so wish, and the young person wishes, to have a sort of little stipend or retainer to act as a supporter and adviser to the care leaver for the next few years when they have left the bedroom in the house? That bedroom would then be freed up. A lot of young people who get on very well with their foster parents go back and visit them and ask for advice anyway. But many of them, knowing that the parents may have taken on another foster child and will be busy, would be hesitant to go back to the foster parent and ask for help and advice when things go pear-shaped, such as their accommodation or education plans going wrong, or they have trouble with their employment. Whatever it is, they would have somebody officially who was being paid a little bit by the state to help them and stop new arrangements breaking down. It is when they break down that the state has a great deal more cost liability to try to put things right. There is an existing relationship of trust, understanding, knowledge and emotion. If the Government cannot accept the noble Earl’s amendment—I very much hope that they will—perhaps the Minister will consider my suggestion of a sort of halfway house. The parent could retain that relationship formally and, one hopes, the care leaver would have no hesitation in going back to that person for advice if things went wrong.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. I have heard the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talk about this halfway house before. It is not a bad idea, but I hope that we can go the full way, for two reasons. First, there is the cost-effectiveness, which one or two people have mentioned. We sometimes forget that early intervention can actually save money in the long run; we should not forget that. Early intervention is not just about babies or children but older people. This example applies and it can be effective in this case. Cost-effectiveness was the first thing that I wanted to mention.

The second thing is the incredible importance of education, which has also been mentioned. Young people in education tend not to get pregnant when they are 15 or 16, they tend not to misuse drugs or alcohol, and they tend to do better if they are encouraged in that education. Like the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I was very impressed by the young woman at the meeting we had last week, who talked about the importance of education to her. As we know, education is such a key thing for all children, but particularly for these children. Therefore for me, cost effects on education swing this towards the Minister accepting this amendment.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I will not repeat all the arguments that have been made, but of course, I want to support this. However, I will take it from a slightly different angle. I am quite sure that the Government do not want to take away from the determination that the local authority has to do its work. I know that devolution is important, and that the independence of the local authorities, such as it is, is valuable. Therefore I can understand that that might well be a government point of view. I can understand that the Local Government Association may have some concerns about additional responsibilities being added in statute, and I can understand some of the arguments, such as that if we have older young people in placements, they may block placements when we are short of foster-parents.

I have looked at those issues. It is quite clear that unless there is something absolutely straightforward, either legislation or regulation, in this area, local authorities will not be consistent in their care of over-18s. I have numerous case studies, which I will not read out now, but they have made me think that I need to speak about this in this way, rather than supporting the independence of local authorities, as I usually do as a vice-president of the LGA. Time and again, we read of young people—and I have met them alone, and with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel—who tell heartbreaking stories of their education and of how their success in other areas is being stymied because they have to leave their family in which they have all their relationships. We are failing significantly to understand that emotional context.

Noble Lords have talked on numerous occasions about their own children. Sometimes you do not get rid of them until they are 30. They do a lot of things in between, and you still take them back. I have not had children of my own but I have brought up more than most, and I know about that trauma. Secondly, I understand that fostering, and numbers, are now improving, and that we have to look at that in a different way. It was explained to me—and this is not an area in which I have recent expertise—that foster parents who take adolescents often retire, as has been said, but also tend not to take small children when they need a placement. You need a different set of skills and you are looking for different foster parents. The idea that these young people are blocking a foster place is not a real one.

I can understand that the voluntary way forward is preferred by the Government. It will not work in present circumstances in local authorities, pressed as they are, unless there is some very strong legislation or statutory guidance.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

I am asking that Amendment 43 be decoupled from this amendment because it deals with a quite different issue. I wish to speak briefly to the amendment moved by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, if the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, will allow me. It is extraordinary that there are children in this country, from wherever they have come, for whom the local authority fails to take some sort of action. I do not often say this but, in my day, children would be seen as having no parental cover whatever and there would be no doubt that the local authority would have had a care order. There is no doubt that that would have happened in the past. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, agrees.

I understand why we want fewer court proceedings. Having been the chair of CAFCASS, I absolutely understand that. They are expensive and are often not helpful to the child’s experience, never mind that of the local authority. Under the 1948 Act we had a way of ensuring that children were placed under the equivalent of a care order by a process in the local authority. In the days of Sections 1 and 2 of the Children Act 1948, one lot of children went to court and the others went through a process in the local authority. We should ask the officials to look at this. Without a doubt we have a national responsibility to protect this small cohort of children. I have come into contact with them because I deal with serious sexual abuse issues. The girls who are trafficked are seriously sexually abused. It is not just prostitution; it is abhorrent prostitution. Unless we find ways of protecting these youngsters they will just slip away and disappear, not of their own choice. I support the noble and learned Baroness in her attempt to find a way that is not expensive but which secures these children’s futures.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, an issue that is not directly relevant to this amendment, but which is akin to it, is that of parental responsibility and the accommodation that these children go into. I know that these highly vulnerable children are put into shocking accommodation. They are followed by traffickers, drug dealers and criminal gangs. They are abducted and disappear or something even more terrible might happen to them. I want to emphasise that parental responsibility must include decent accommodation for these children.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I advise the Committee that I wish to decouple my Amendment 234 from this grouping. I apologise; I did not watch carefully enough the information from the Whips’ Office this morning.