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Tim Loughton: Before the Minister gets completely carried off to fantasy island, will she confirm that, to make up the cuts that she was proposing in the children's fund, the Government will take money from the youth offending teams programme? Will she confirm also that the budget for children's fund projects in 2005–06 has not been confirmed and is still vulnerable? Will she confirm that all the programmes she is looking at go only to 2006? There has been no commitment from the Government—we have not had the next spending review—on any of the funding being sustained beyond 2006. Before accusing us of cuts that we have never proposed, will she give us guarantees that these schemes will continue after the next election, in the unlikely event that she is still in a position to do something about it?
Margaret Hodge: The hon. Gentleman must read speeches that are put into the public domain on behalf of the Conservative party so that he is clear on what his party is committed to. I can confirm that we have not cut the youth offending teams programme in any way; I do not know where he got that idea from. He is correct that we will settle the 2005–06 funding for the children's fund programme once we have the outcome of this year's spending review.
Virginia Bottomley (South-West Surrey) (Con): Much of this debate has been about funding, but I am not clear whether there is a relationship between child abuse and funding. There are two key issues: data sharing, and how one requires a child to be seen whose parents are not producing the child. Will the Minister require a child to be produced for a school nurse or health visitor when there is concern about its well-being?
Margaret Hodge: The right hon. Lady is correct to draw attention to those two very important points. I shall cover them as I move on. I wanted to set a context, because vulnerable children will be supported to develop their opportunities only if their lives in the round are supported by action from government in the round.
Since we launched our Green Paper we have seen the richest and most significant debate on children's services for over a generation. I in no way apologise for having engaged in that debate and having had a wide consultation, which enabled us to listen to many voices as we formulated the Bill that we presented in the other place this afternoon. We received 4,500 responses to our consultation. Most gratifyingly, two thirds of the responses were from children and young people themselves. That, I hope, reflects the way in which we intend to work over the coming period.
We are dealing with vital but difficult issues. We shall succeed only if we ensure that children's voices are at the heart of our endeavours and if we work closely in partnership with all our stakeholders, so that together we can build on what we learn works to improve the outcome for all our children, particularly vulnerable children. That approach, of working in partnership and having children's interests at the centre of our concerns, will inform all our reforms.
Social services departments have not, as the Opposition suggest, been kept in limbo, waiting for the Children's Bill. They have been fully engaged in working with us to make sure that our proposals are soundly based, workable and right, and that they will help to bring about a step change in the opportunities for the safeguarding of all children.
I accept that we have much left to do. Lord Laming's report on the events leading up to the death of Victoria Climbié and the joint chief inspectors' report, "Safeguarding Children", set out a number of challenges. However, we have not, as the Opposition suggest, failed to act since Lord Laming published his report. Indeed, of the 708 recommendations, only one has been rejected. We have fully implemented 60 and we have started work on all the others, but I accept that we need to go further.
We need to tackle the issues identified in both reports, of ill-trained and overworked staff, often not properly supported by their managers.We need to do more to recruit, retain and train good-quality staff to work throughout the children's work force. We need to ensure that senior managers, right up to chief executives, accept responsibly and accountably for the actions of their staff. We need to address the weaknesses identified in the way in which area child protection committees work, with insufficient authority and few resources to carry out their functions. We need to become better at sharing information across professional boundaries and within professional organisations, and across local authority boundaries, so that children are less likely to fall through the net.
Mrs. Laing: Given what the Minister has just said about sharing information, on which I entirely agree with her, do the Government propose to amend the Data Protection Act 1998?
Margaret Hodge: We shall ensure that, as we have laid out in the Green Paper, there are no inhibitions within the Act that will prevent the necessary sharing of information between professionals and across local authority boundaries.
We need to develop the very difficult multi-agency working that we know makes sense, and we need to ensure that individual agencies are clear about their
roles and responsibilities in protecting children. We need further to shift from intervening after things have gone wrong to supporting children and their families to prevent things from going wrong.Most important, we need to make sure that the well-being and welfare of children are at the centre of the assessment process and the decision-making process. Nobody asked Victoria Climbié what she wanted or how she was. That must not happen again.
Our Children's Bill sits within a much wider context of reform. As part of that work, we are preparing the budgets for the next spending review period, and we will sharpen accountability with a more coherent system of targets and a better performance management system with stronger inspection levers. We are creating much simpler and more flexible funding mechanisms, with decisions being taken as close as is practicable to the front line. We will ensure investment in the skills, leadership and motivation of all who work with children, young people and their families. We are strengthening partnership working by developing the children's trusts, children's centres and the extended schools programme and by legislating on duties to co-operate.
Mrs. Annette L. Brooke (Mid-Dorset and North Poole) (LD): I understand that some children's trusts are now in operation. Given sufficient time, will a full evaluation of their work be published?
Margaret Hodge: It is extremely important that, throughout the reform programme, we evaluate all the initiatives as they move forward and learn from that evaluation. However, it would be dilatory to wait until we have a full evaluation before moving on to the next step and it might lead to accusations of not working in the best interests of children as quickly as possible. We will continually evaluate and amend what we do to in the light of what the evaluation tells us.
We shall also support the culture change and the improvement that we want with a programme of support, coupled with proportionate intervention in areas where children's services fall below acceptable standards. As we have already outlined, the Bill will support our reform agenda.
In a historic move, we intend to establish a children's commissioner for England, and children will help us to choose the first one. The commissioner will be independent of both Parliament and the Government, ensuring that the views of all children, particularly the most vulnerable, are gathered and that they influence the development of policies for children, young people and families.
Our Bill will ensure that all the agencies that are important in children's lives work together to improve children's well-being and safety. We shall strengthen the safeguarding of children by creating statutory local safeguarding boards with specific duties on the key agencies both to safeguard and protect children within their own organisations and in partnership with other local agencies. The Bill establishes clear accountability for children's services with the appointment of a single
director for children's services and a lead member in every local authority, building on the good practical experience on the ground in counties such as Essex.Our Bill not only introduces statutory duties on organisations in the public, private and voluntary sector to work together, but removes the barriers that prevent them from doing so. We are legislating to establish an integrated inspection framework so that services are judged against common standards and are assessed on how well they work together to achieve better outcomes for children. We are providing for new intervention powers for children's social services to bring them into line with the powers that we already have for education. We are also legislating in the difficult area of establishing a framework to enable better sharing of information across all services. Finally, the Bill also contains proposals to improve the educational attainment of looked-after children and to beef up and improve the regulation of private fostering.
The Bill is a crucial piece in the jigsaw of reform. It stands alongside the development of children's trusts, which will provide a joined-up approach to the planning, commissioning and delivery of children's services. It stands alongside our commitment to create more extended schools, providing a range of services—often beyond the school day—for children, families and the wider community. We see the development of such structures as supporting our standards agenda and our social inclusion agenda. Only by supporting every child can we raise achievement levels in every school, and only by raising the educational achievement of vulnerable children can we help to ensure that they are given an equal opportunity in our society.
The Bill stands alongside our work force strategy. We have already raised the number of people choosing to train as social workers. We are looking at new routes into working with children, and are developing training programmes so that all professionals share a vocabulary and an understanding of child development, which will enable them to fulfil their statutory duties properly. We are developing leadership programmes and establishing sector skills councils to help us drive our reforms forward.
Our programme for change is wide in its range, strong in its component parts and innovative, exciting and important in what it means in terms of better outcomes for children and their families. It is not a hotch-potch of unrelated and opportunistic points to be scored in the comfort of a debating chamber. It is not an incoherent set of gripes cobbled together to little purpose. It is not a less than honest statement that pretends to care about vulnerable children, while being intent on cutting investment in the very services we have to protect and safeguard the future of children.
Ours is a radical and coherent set of policies and programmes that will help to ensure that every child in our country enjoys the opportunity to realise their potential and really grows up safely to be healthy, to enjoy their childhood, to benefit from a good education, to contribute positively to their community and to find economic well-being. Ours are policies that will ensure that children do not fall through the net.
All Members who sincerely wish to protect the most vulnerable children in our community have no option but to reject the ill-thought-out proposition put forward
by the Opposition and to support the amendment in the name of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and other members of his Government.
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