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Points of Order

4.20 pm

Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You may not be aware of a serious security lapse at Buckingham Palace this afternoon, when protesters gained access to the balcony used by the royal family. In the light of what is an extremely alarming development in the current security situation, Mr. Speaker, have you any information on whether the Home Secretary plans to make a statement to the House this afternoon or this evening?

Mr. Speaker: I was not aware of the incident, because I have been in the Chair. Nor am I aware of whether a statement is to be made.

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire) (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. The Deputy Leader of the House confirmed today that we would be returning regularly in September as part of the programme of Government business. I wonder if you have had time to look at the staircase leading from just outside the Tea Room to the lower ground floor, and to establish whether it is safe.

A good deal of the building has been cordoned off on health and safety grounds. Anyone visiting a building site in a similar condition to some parts of the Palace of Westminster would be issued with a hard hat. As far as I know, most Members have not been issued with such a hat.

Mr. Speaker: I make no mention of the House's decision to come back for a fortnight; that is up to the House. However, I take the hon. Gentleman's point. I am concerned about the fact that some parts of the Palace of Westminster leave a lot to be desired in terms of health and safety. It is not only the safety of Members with which I concern myself, but that of staff and visitors to the House—and, indeed, those who are working in this environment. I shall therefore invite my officers who are responsible to ask for a health and safety report on the situation around the Palace. I am certainly not happy that the situation exists, and I do not think that this is a good environment to invite people to enter. I look forward to answers to many of the questions that Members have raised.
 
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Orders of the Day

Children Bill [Lords]

Order for Second Reading read.

4.23 pm

The Minister for Children (Margaret Hodge): I feel very proud and privileged to present the Bill to the House. It is a year since we published our Green Paper "Every Child Matters", in which time we have engaged in extensive discussion and consultation on our proposals. We have listened carefully, and in some instances we have amended our plans to reflect people's views and concerns. I am delighted that our determination to place children and young people at the heart of our programmes has been so clearly demonstrated by the fact that 3,000 of the 4,500 responses that we received to the consultation came from children themselves.

In the past year, we have also embarked on a wide range of programmes and activities to proceed with the programme of change. This is not about a quick political fix for the short term; it is a programme of fundamental reform involving the transformation of children's services, which will take time to deliver. If we are to succeed in our ambition, we need legislation to facilitate and underpin our reforms.

The Bill provides the legislative spine for a hugely ambitious agenda. By itself it is not enough, but without it we will not succeed in the pursuit of our ambition to enable every child to realise their potential, or in our determination to secure a step change in how we safeguard and protect children. Our aim is to maximise opportunity and to minimise risk; to respond better to the additional needs of some children by ensuring that all our universal services respond better to the individual needs of every child; and to raise the importance of children and families on the political and public policy agenda by prioritising their needs and aspirations at Government, local government and community level.

The reform agenda is driven by the outcomes that children themselves told us matter. We consulted them widely and they told us that they want to be healthy, to stay safe, to enjoy themselves and to achieve, to make a positive contribution to society and to achieve economic well-being. The centrality of these aspirations is reflected by their inclusion in clause 7. Those are broad and general aspirations, and translating them into objectives and priorities for action is critical, but we have started that work by developing public service agreement targets for the next spending review period across many Government Departments; by developing comprehensive performance assessment targets for local government; and through the national service framework for children's health services, which we will shortly launch with our colleagues in the Department of Health.

I should point out how delighted I am that my hon. Friend the Minister with responsibility for community, from the Department of Health, will wind up today's debate, and that my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Paul Goggins), from the Home Office, is also here to support it. That makes it
 
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transparent to the House that we are joining up across Government Departments to achieve our agenda for change for children.

Mr. Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre) (Lab): I join my right hon. Friend in praising the array of talent on the Front Bench, but regret that a Minister from the Department for Constitutional Affairs is not present. Will she assure me that the radical policies that this Government are putting in place—particularly those on schools and the devolution of power to them—in no way clash with the co-operative agenda that we are trying to establish to ensure that children's services are integrated and work well across the board?

Margaret Hodge: That issue was raised during the summer by a number of interested parties. Independence and interdependence are two key drivers of our reform programme, and the fact that the Minister for School Standards is here today, and that he and I have together written recently to all chief executive directors of education and of social services, demonstrates our determination to get schools strongly engaged in the agenda.

Mr. Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con): The right hon. Lady referred a moment ago to the aspirations contained in clause 7. Does she accept that they are best delivered and supported when children have access to both parents, even if those parents have chosen to live apart? What steps is she taking in this Bill to prevent one parent from unilaterally preventing their children from accessing the other parent?

Margaret Hodge: As the hon. Gentleman knows, we have always said that in the tragic circumstances where parents separate, it is generally in the children's interests to maintain contact with both parents where it is safe for them to do so. That principle underpinned the Green Paper, published just before the summer recess, on these very difficult issues. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will respond to that consultation process, and once we have consulted we hope to produce some clear propositions—both in legislation and in policy—to advance the agenda set out in the Green Paper.

Two key policy principles underpin our approach in this Bill and in all else that we do. We want to reconfigure services around the needs of children rather than in the interests of traditional professional hierarchies, and we want to shift our effort to prevention and early intervention while at the same time strengthening child protection in all the services that touch children's lives. Nobody can disagree with our desire to refocus services in that way. We also know that those changes make sense in children's lives.

We are beginning to garner strong evidence from some of the Government's most successful and innovative programmes to affirm our approach. For instance, evidence from local Sure Start programmes is beginning to tell a powerful story of how early intervention with services joined up around the needs of a child and their family can make a profound difference. In a Sheffield Sure Start, we have seen a 27 per cent. increase in breastfeeding rates among mothers. In a Sure
 
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Start in Whitehaven in Cumbria, 25 per cent. of known smokers stopped smoking during their pregnancy. In Scunthorpe, 56 people were helped into work in one year alone, while in the Sure Start in Church street, Westminster, library membership increased by 11.5 per cent. In Corby, the number of children starting school with a special educational need was reduced by 10 per cent., while in east Hailsham child protection re-registration rates are down from 8 per cent. of 0 to 3-year-olds to 3 per cent.

Achieving that radical, whole-system reform of our services is, however, a mammoth endeavour. It requires genuine partnership across professional boundaries and a fundamental cultural change, which can be facilitated and encouraged through legislation, hence the Bill, and also depends on us employing a broad range of levers—from investing in training to promoting new leadership skills, from joining up funding at local authority level to joining up policies at central Government level and from being clear about the accountabilities and responsibilities of all those who work in the children's work force to being clear about the outcomes that we expect from all the services that we fund.

Reforming children's services means that we must work in partnership. That lies at the heart of the Bill: we want to join up people around the needs of the child by making multi-disciplinary working the norm and reinforcing it through co-location and common skills and training.

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