We sum it up in Nottingham in slightly different words, but to exactly the same effect—we talk about building the social and emotional bedrock for young people. If young people have the ability to interact, to learn and to resolve arguments without violence—the basic things that most middle-class parents teach their children—it is virtually impossible to fail in terms of educational attainment, aspiration to work and raising a decent family. That is why it is important that such things are built into provision from the earliest point, instead of chasing after the problem later, by which time it is all but intractable without the expenditure of massive amounts of money and person hours.

In addition to building young people's social and emotional bedrock, in Nottingham we are working directly to address young potential fathers. We fund a specialist health development worker for young men and have commissioned research by Dr. Peter Gates at Nottingham university on how best to identify potential absentee fathers and communicate with them. That research builds on the work that we have done with young girls, and it will result in a hard-hitting DVD and appropriate sex education materials to accompany it.

I know that the Minister will agree that more needs to be done nationally to target teenage boys, through the benefits system, and in enabling them to make mature decisions about parenthood, and encouraging them to delay sexual activity. Nottingham could be an example of how to tackle the problem in both the immediate and the long term. It is not only about swatting the mosquito, but draining the swamp. We need to build for the future through a long-term programme of investment.

Any materials used need to be easy to follow, and not beyond the comprehension of teen parents who left school early—or even of the average MP. The Family Planning Association does good work in this sphere, with community projects targeted at young men. It made getting the message across to boys the theme for its annual contraception week last year.

The message may be getting through: according to NHS statistics, the number of men attending NHS contraception clinics leapt by 20 per cent. in 2006-07, and there was a huge 54 per cent. increase in those aged 15 and 16. These signs of improvement must be enhanced by further work to provide young men with the social and emotional basis for sensible decision making.

I was pleased to see that in February the Ministers with responsibility for public health and for young people announced an extra £20.5 million to support young people and help them to access contraception. Do the Government actually know what that money has been spent on? Do the Government know the extent to which it is being used to track real boys as well as real girls? Otherwise, it could be business-as-usual syndrome instead of a sharp, systematic identification and face-to-face contact with those who need it before they even consider sexual activity. In other words, we should have outcomes with specific people rather than just allocating more money.

That is not as daunting as it might sound. Even in Nottingham, only 417 teenagers had babies last year. That is a perfectly manageable number when it comes to getting to know those people, their siblings and their associates as part of defining a broader at-risk group with whom we can then work very directly with some serious pre-emptive education. We will not do that unless we identify where money is going and what it is being spent on and get some real outcomes noted and reported to the centre so that they can be properly tracked.

Although improvements to the benefit system are an important step and the focus of tonight's debate, it must be remembered that under-16s or under-18s who are full-time students or who are getting income support or income-based jobseeker's allowance do not pay maintenance under the current rules. We need to find other ways to reach those fathers and to ensure that they are involved in their children's lives.

I welcome another initiative of the Government's, which is the requirement in the Welfare Reform Bill that a father's name be recorded on the birth certificate. That might seem obvious to many people who read or listen to this debate, but it is not a current requirement. Four in 10 babies registered without a father are born to teenage mothers. This welcome change will not only make it easier to track down who owes maintenance, for example, but it will also enable the transmission of messages to the father to highlight the importance of that father's being in the child's life as that young person grows up.

Let us not forget that two out of three teen fathers are resident at a different address from the mother. Rebuilding that family unit with every possible assistance and support is clearly something that would be beneficial to the child when they were growing up. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister could tell us whether that provision will also entail a corresponding requirement to inform the father that he is named. That would not only be a safeguard against being falsely named but, for those who are truly and properly named as fathers, it could be a channel of communication to help deliver them from the status of outsider in their own child's life. They can then undertake the responsibilities that fathering a child must entail.

I say that with some feeling. In some senses, I feel that I have come full circle in talking about this issue. Around 1989-90, I led for my party on social security on the first Child Support Agency Bill. Few things separated the parties on that Bill, but one thing that was very apparent was that we were not listening to anyone outside. We were not listening to Families Need Fathers or to battered wives. We did not have proper pre-legislative scrutiny. The result was that we reinvented that Bill—you can correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Deputy Speaker—on at least five subsequent occasions. How many broken families, how much misery and how many suicides did that oversight cost us?

We now have a chance to put the history right. We have created a new commission to oversee this area, which is not just about punitively chasing and tracking down teen fathers or any other fathers. It is about developing policy and bringing those young fathers back into the family in a literal sense so that we have a chance to rewrite some of the unfortunate history that there has been in this policy field.

I look forward to the Minister's reply. I am not flattering her when I say that she has done a truly remarkable job in the short time that she has held this portfolio. Great progress has been made and I hope that she will confirm the Government's commitment to a balance between carrots and sticks, to much better cross-departmental working and, above all, to committing to find ways to intervene early, which is cheaper and more effective, rather than late, which is both expensive and less effective. If she does that, there will be many teen fathers who will be part of a family rather than apart from their family. Above all, many babies and children being born today in our country will be raised with a father and a mother, and will be much more able as both individuals and citizens of our society. They will be among the foremost to be grateful for a Government who take that opportunity and challenge.