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6.16 pm
Mrs. Claire Curtis-Thomas (Crosby): I rise to defend the Government's actions on the protection of children, specifically in my capacity as chair of the all-party group on abuse investigations.
In the past five years, 35 police authorities throughout the UK have conducted more than 80 extensive inquiries into historical cases of sex abuse in care homes. Many hon. Members will know of my concerns about those inquiries, but it cannot be denied that energy, time and money that has been spent on them. I estimate that perhaps as much as £500 million has been spent investigating complaints involving thousands of cared-for young people throughout the UK in the past five years. Under the previous Administration things were not perfect, and many children living in children's homes were neglected. We need to understand what it was like then for children in care homes who were preyed on by abusive carers. Young people attempted to complain, but whether or not the complaint was acted on was at the discretion of the person they spoke to. The lack of prosecutions over a long period was indicative of the collective failure of the agencies responsible for the care of vulnerable young children.
We must be realistic and fair about the reasons for the failure of the agencies that care for children. We have already acknowledged that the vast majority of professionals working in this area do so because they are passionately concerned about the welfare of the children. However, historically, they have worked with administrations that were procedurally inadequate, and those inadequacies militated against the effective management of complaints. Significantly, there was no statutory relationship to bring the agencies working with vulnerable children together. That serious omission invariably meant that agencies receiving complaints were completely unaware of complaints made in other areas.
Those omissions were partly addressed by the Children Act 1989, but until then, a child making a complaint could have spoken to a significant number of people, none of whom were connected together administratively. Hence there was no collective understanding of the extent of abuse endured by a child. The Children Act sought to address that administrative failure, but it took years to implement. Crucially, it was introduced at a time when social services budgets stood still at best, and in many cases were being dramatically eroded. The measures detailed in the Children Act called for funding, which simply did not exist. It was all talk, and the lack of funding left the vulnerable, vulnerable.
That huge funding omission was addressed in September 1998, when nearly £1 billion—£880 million, to be precise—was invested in the quality protects programme to improve children's social services, sure start and the Connexions service. I could speak at length about those additional services, which meant a great deal to vulnerable children. Many authorities throughout the country, including my own, desperately needed the money. It was not the lack of concern in social services departments that led to complaints being ignored, but lack of funding to pay for an adequate number of appropriately trained staff who could respond comprehensively to complaints.
Cash was needed not only in social services departments, but in all the other major public sector agencies involved in child care, to allow them to support joint agency approaches and resolve complaints by children effectively. The police needed further funding, and the enormous children's fund has allowed them to do much good work. The education departments needed huge amounts of funding to employ appropriately qualified staff to work in schools. Health care providers and all the other agencies working with children received dramatic funding uplifts. The Government continue to invest substantially in those areas.
Now, when a child makes a complaint the public authorities have a duty to refer the complaint for investigation. The environment in which looked-after children live has changed radically in the past six years. The Government have passed—and, crucially, funded—a raft of legislation designed to protect vulnerable young people, including the Care Standards Act 2000, to improve the inspection and regulation of children's care services, and the Protection of Children Act 1999, which strengthened safeguards against unsuitable people working with children. The Sexual Offences Bill currently going through the House creates a new range of offences designed to offer children under 13 the maximum protection. I can also give testimony to the good work of my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Ms Shipley) in introducing the child protection register.
The situation is still not perfect, but the system now not only reacts to complaints made by looked-after children but is proactive, recognising that many of those children may not have the confidence to make a complaint of their own volition. If the police receive a complaint from a looked-after child, they will interview that child and all the other children who have ever lived in the home, irrespective of their age—an extraordinary commitment to the vulnerable.
I was especially pleased when the Government made the decision to continue to care for children after the age of 16. The acknowledgement that children over 16 still need care was such an important and long-awaited move. They are now looked after, and I am delighted with that measure. There is still a great deal to be done, but we have introduced measures that adequately demonstrate our commitment to children and the vulnerable.
6.23 pm
Virginia Bottomley (South-West Surrey): The House will be aware that this place legislated for the protection of animals several decades before there was legislation to protect children. It is appalling that in this day and age children are still so cruelly treated.
I welcome the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). His enlightened and principled approach was enormously heartening. It took me back to the speech by the late Lord Joseph to the Pre-School Playgroup Association on the cycle of deprivation, when many of my own thoughts about child care began. I speak as someone who for many years was chairman of a juvenile court, and I have a mental health background rather than a local government background. I have been involved in the Children's Society and, as the Register of
Members' Interests shows, now spend a great deal of time trying to bring effective good managers who are committed to the cause into many of our leading charities and public services.It is a serious matter that we have not seen more action following the Laming report. The report is, as all would expect, outstanding. Lord Laming is one of a number of extraordinarily eminent inspectors of social services. We have been well served by their contribution, including those of Sir William Utting and now Denise Platt. The contribution that they make must be heard. It is pragmatic, sensible and to the point.
What so many people forget is that dealing with child abuse is one of the most difficult things for any professional worker. If children are removed needlessly, as they were in Cleveland, social workers will receive abuse for getting the decision wrong. If children are left in a home or a children's home where they lose their lives, the social worker is all too easily blamed. Social workers, unlike doctors, are more likely to leave the front line the more experience they get, so the least qualified and least experienced people will be doing the most difficult jobs, exercising the judgment of Solomon and facing the rage of the parent or carer if anyone dare suggest that they might be injuring their child. That is no excuse, but people need to understand the enormous pressures that social workers face.
The crisis regarding child care professionals is very serious. I looked up the figures. In 1995 there were 11,500 applicants for social work places, but by 2001 that figure had fallen to 4,000. That is very serious. The subject of child abuse and neglect also suffers various fads and fashions, such as satanic abuse, and I have to say that the whole issue of politically correct behaviour is also important. We need to learn the lessons about how many of the children who are affected come from ethnic minority homes. I well remember—as will my noble Friend Baroness Howarth, from her Lambeth days—the concept that a child from an ethnic minority family should expect a different sort of chastisement from that which a child from a white family should expect. That is unacceptable in this day and age, and we must consider all the aspects of practice. I also want to mention data protection problems. Too often people are afraid to record on file that injuries are suspicious and may relate to non-accidental injury or child abuse, because the files are open. We must look very seriously at that matter.
It was my privilege to take part in the implementation of the Children Act 1989. In that regard, I pay the greatest credit to the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who undertook the most detailed consultation with the different agencies in a very open spirit before implementing the legislation. The programme of training was phenomenal. In particular, it involved the judges and the legal profession, as well as social services and social workers.
I want to make two further points. This debate is about vulnerable children. It is appalling that a child a week should die as a result of injury caused by adults, but three times that number die on the roads, and many more die by taking their own lives. If we want to get our priorities straight about the problems faced by young people in our generation, child mental health is critical. I urge the Minister for Children, in her new role, to look into child mental health and at the work of Young
Minds, and to understand the suffering and pain caused to young people and the epidemic of suicide among them. The suicide rate among young men has almost doubled in the past 20 years.I am sceptical about the nature of the hon. Lady's role, and troubled by the fact that her post is within the Department for Education and Skills. The group that nobody has mentioned today is health visitors, who have greater licence to enter a home and ask a family to remove a child's clothes than those in any other professional group. It has to be said that teachers are not the most skilled in this area. Their record on truancy and casting difficult children into sin bins, getting them out of their way so that they can teach the main cohort, does not make them the people who are naturally most alert to child abuse and neglect.
As often as not, the issue is about the relationship between social services departments and health-related departments. They are both Department of Health responsibilities. It is hard enough persuading Health Ministers to fight for the social services budget, but it is very difficult to understand how a junior Education Minister will fight for the social services and health budgets. I remain to be convinced.
There is no simple answer—and for the children whom we are talking about, cost shunting is often at the heart of the problem. They are expensive children with needy, difficult families. It does not matter whether it is the Home Office, the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Health or a social services department that ends up funding their care—we believe in joined-up Government—but there is a cost at the local level, and we must look very carefully at how that works in practice.
I wish the Minister for Children well with her responsibilities: I cannot stress their importance strongly enough. We have to learn the lessons of this appalling latest episode. To err is human, to fail to learn is unacceptable, and to cover up is unforgivable. We have to be open and diligent in working to ensure that every child has as stable and happy an upbringing as possible.
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