Surely it should be obvious that if you put up the cost of something you put people off buying it? Economists see this as the absolute basis of economics – the use of incentives to deter and encourage. How Whitehall, then, thought making child care cases up to 2,500% more expensive for local authorities would in any way help children who would need help is anyone’s guess.

Shovelling the costs of dealing with some of society’s most vulnerable elements, in other words children, on to local government was never going to work, as the NSPCC, for example, has consistently maintained.

So anyone who has been following this farrago may now be tempted to have a pre-emptive sigh of relief that Lord Laming’s report on the protection of children, commissioned following the 2007 death of London toddler ‘baby P’, states that when a council intervenes the level of court fees may ‘sometimes present a barrier’. He wants to see ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that the fees do not act as a deterrent, or he wants them scrapped.

Sadly Whitehall doesn't seem to agree, saying ‘there is no evidence that the fee increases have made a difference to the statutory duty that children’s services have to protect children' and that 'local authorities were given more than sufficient funding to cover the increase, £40m in all’. Leaving aside the Sir Humph-speak in the first response, the second is a bit of a joke - £40m? You couldn't even buy half a now-scrapped electronic filing system for the courts for that.