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Mr. Dawson: Is my hon. Friend aware of cutting-edge research into the way in which social interactions and parents' behaviour can have physical effects on the brains of very young children that affect the way in which they behave throughout their lives? Is it not therefore incredibly important that we reach out to the parents of very young children and help them to manage their children appropriately?

Mr. Hinchliffe: I have not seen the research, but I am sure that my hon. Friend will let me have a look at it. He reinforces the point that I was making.

Other than the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the present UK position has been criticised by the European Court of Human rights, by the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Health Committee—both all-party Committees—and by every child protection agency in the country. We should listen to bodies that are in the front line of child protection every day.

I thank my right hon. Friends the Minister for Children, who is no longer in her place, and the Secretary of State for Education and Skills for the time that they have taken to listen to me and many of my colleagues on the question of reasonable chastisement. We have engaged in lots of dialogue over a long period and I genuinely hope that that dialogue will continue. I appreciate that media attitudes make the issue a difficult one for any Government, but clause 49 as amended is full of holes, which worries me very much. The briefing note sent to hon. Members by Save the Children says that clause 49

"will lead to greater legal ambiguity, professional uncertainty and parental confusion about what is, and is not, acceptable".

I am not a lawyer, but I spent a long time in child protection, and in my view the clause is naive, totally impractical and frankly dangerous. We have to do something about it.

Clause 49 relies on "wounding" and "bodily harm" in defining an offence against a child. In practice, though, as one or two of my colleagues know who have had experience in child protection, it is frequently difficult to prove whether such bodily harm has occurred when children are injured, sometimes quite seriously. Indeed, the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole referred to the fact that people mark in different ways. In another place, on the Lester amendment, the point was rightly made that there are clear ethnic differences about what may be visible on a child's body.

Invisible injuries are often the most painful and dangerous. I spent 20 years playing rugby league, and I speak with feeling about some of my injuries. The worst was to a rib cartilage: there was nothing to see, but the doctor told me it was worse than having broken ribs. I could not move for around six months without acute pain. Nothing could be seen: there was no bruising or
 
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anything else to see, but that was a serious and painful injury. On several occasions, I certainly had head injuries when there was no visible sign but when the fact that I was seeing double or treble indicated that something was rather wrong.

The clause, as amended, does not address the practical reality of the situations with which social workers, the police and child protection agencies will deal with day to day. It will be helpful to the lawyers, who will laugh all the way to the bank. Frankly, though, it will not help the child victims of serious assault.

When the Children Act 1989 went through the House, I served on the Committee and moved an amendment to remove reasonable chastisement as a defence. We failed to do that, and we were perhaps before our time; I have frequently been before my time but I hope it will come. We were defeated, I suspect, because we did not have the evidence at that stage of what had happened with our policy in other countries. Now, as I said when I intervened on the Minister, 12 European countries have prohibited all physical punishment, and we can see from their research the positive impact of what they have done. If anyone wants to read some of the detailed research, I can let them have copies. Latvia and Romania are the most recent, and I mention Romania because it is only 10 years since I was there with a voluntary organisation, helping the Romanians to construct a child care system. Since then, they have gone past us in their advanced thinking on child protection and have taken the commonsense measure of giving children equal protection in law against assault.

I hope that we can continue to have the dialogue that the Minister for Children indicated she was willing to hold. Eighty children die each year in the United Kingdom at the hands of their parents or carers.

Mr. Win Griffiths: We have heard before the figure of 80 children dying, which is terrible. We also need to remember, though, that thousands of children are physically abused all over the United Kingdom every year.

Mr. Hinchliffe: I entirely agree. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children told me not long ago that at least one child in every classroom in the country is being seriously assaulted, and that is a worrying figure.

To have any credibility on child protection, the Bill has to ensure that children have the same protection in law as adults. We have time to put that right, and I genuinely hope that we will manage to do it before we get the Bill into law.

7.4 pm

Mr. James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): I welcome the opportunity to take part in the debate, which is on a subject of the highest importance and on which we probably do not spend enough time. Like my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), I support the aims of the Bill and the Bill itself, and I welcome the tone that he took. When the Bill goes into Committee, I hope that the Government will respond in kind to his constructive approach and to
 
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constructive comments from Members on both sides of the House. I believe that there are still some improvements to be made.

I approach this matter in the spirit of the Laming report on the Victoria Climbié case, which, in many respects, forms a vital part of the background to the Bill. I interpret the spirit of that report, at least in part, as being the fullest and widest acceptance of responsibility for the welfare of children, especially those who are the most vulnerable. In the case of those children who are most at risk, front-line social workers, who have all the burden of face to face contact with children and families and who are in receipt, no doubt, of a less than princely reward for doing so, should not be left to shoulder all the responsibility when things go wrong. In saying that, I am mindful of the view explicitly expressed by Lord Laming:

"Having considered all the evidence, it is not to the hapless front-line staff that I direct most criticism for the failure to protect Victoria Climbié."

He found that the greatest failures lay elsewhere, higher up the chain of command. In the spirit of his report, we need to ensure that there is an appropriate acceptance of responsibility at all levels, up to the highest levels of local authorities, and beyond to this House and Ministers.

With that in mind, I welcome the Bill's principal provision for focusing minds on the welfare of children—the creation of a children's commissioner. The Bill has been very much improved as a result of debates in the other place, so it was with some disappointment that I heard the Minister say that the Government plan to overturn clause 2 as it stands and to go back to the original form of clause 2. Having studied it, I think that the current clause 2 is an improvement, and I hope that that will be fully considered in Committee.

There are other respects in which the Bill could be further improved, and those will need detailed consideration. Concerns remain about the independence of the commissioner, which is a key point if we are to have effective provision. When the Bill was published, the commissioner looked too much like a champion of the Government rather than a champion of children. In the other place, Lord Northbourne graphically referred to a "castrated children's commissioner". The provisions have been improved, but further improvements could make the commissioner much more clearly independent of Government. As the Bill stands, even in its improved form, and by contrast with the position in Wales, the children's commissioner is to be appointed by the Secretary of State and to be eligible for reappointment at the end of his or her five-year term entirely at the discretion of the Secretary of State. That is hardly a configuration suggesting the presence of the attributes that Lord Northbourne suggested might be lacking in the children's commissioner.

What is the flavour of the relationship suggested by clause 5 (1), which provides that the Secretary of State can direct the commissioner to hold an inquiry? The word used is "direct" as opposed to "request". Again, that contrasts with the independence granted to other children's commissioners in that regard.

The Bill has been much improved since it was first published, when there was a widespread perception that the commissioner needed to be made more independent,
 
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but still more needs to be done to buttress the independence and the effectiveness of the commissioner. I hope we will hear from the Government in due course, in Committee, what more they propose should happen, for example, as a result of the reports from the commissioner—something that they have undertaken to do. We must ensure that the commissioner's work is effective and that it is listened to and responded to.

It must be right to encourage co-operation and closer working between different services. We wait to see how much progress is made towards the creation of children's trusts. Surely we should aim to measure children's trusts by looking for demonstrable improvements in the care of children—improvements that are commensurate with the scale and cost of the administrative reorganisation that will be necessary to create such trusts. It is not enough for Ministers to reel off long lists of new names and new bodies. It must be demonstrated that there have been tangible and commensurate improvements as a result of the investments being made.

I welcome the provisions in clause 9 relating to information databases, although my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham made some important points in that regard. The matter needs to be further debated. There has been a constructive debate so far, but I demur from the views expressed by the Liberal Democrats. The data-sharing provisions are a step forward. I make a plea to Ministers that, in the detail of the provisions, we ensure that the overriding considerations are the welfare and safety of children, and that those come before any other concerns. If there is a conflict between the safety of a child and the technicalities of data protection, let us avoid a situation in which those charged with a child's safety are afraid to act because they are worried about the data protection provisions. Let the safety of the child come first, and let it be the overriding consideration. It may be the intention of clause 9(11) to make that clear. I hope it will be made crystal clear when the matter is debated in Committee.

I also welcome the provisions relating to the educational achievement of children in care and the spelling out of a duty on local authorities to promote the child's educational achievements, although I note that that appears in the miscellaneous provisions in part 5. In my view, it is far more important than that. I welcome the fact that the educational performance and well-being of children being looked after by local authorities has been mentioned today from all parts of the House.

I accept that other work is being done on this topic, and rightly so. As has been observed from all sides, children in care lag behind other children in educational achievement. The statistics for children being looked after have already been given: only 8 per cent. of young people in year 11 who had spent at least one year in care gained five or more GCSEs graded A to C, compared with 50 per cent. of all young people. Only 1 per cent. of them go on to university. If a school were producing such results, it would be soon be put into special measures, if not closed down altogether. We cannot allow a situation to persist in which children in care lag so far behind other children in an area as crucial as educational achievement, with their life prospects so badly hindered as a result.
 
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Another issue that should have received greater prominence in the Bill is the role of parents, with which I shall deal in a moment in another context. The importance of the role of parents is dealt with in a rather perfunctory way in the Bill as it stands. It is dealt with in three lines in clause 7(3)—three lines in a 44-page Bill. I would welcome hearing rather more about parents.

That brings me to the aspect of the Bill that has brought parental rights into the sharpest focus: the issue of chastisement of children. My hon. Friend was right to make a plea that we should not allow that to overshadow the rest of the Bill, but we cannot avoid a debate on it because for many people it is an important subject. It may surprise Members in some quarters of the House that my approach to the matter is rather coloured by my personal view that physical chastisement is a wholly ineffective way of administering the discipline that children sometimes need. My own observations lead me to the view that smacking, and certainly the use of an implement such as a cane, does no good whatever, and could conceivably do some harm.

The case has been somewhat overstated from the Labour Benches, particularly by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mr. Griffiths), who made a sincere speech about his strongly held views. The case of Victoria Climbié, which has been prayed in aid in this context, is not the right example. The injuries in that case went way beyond anything that could have fallen within the ambit of reasonable chastisement. I remember that the pathologist said that they were the worst injuries he had ever encountered and the worst he had ever heard of. That is way beyond the subject of today's debate.

There is an issue, however, in the case of the repeated use of moderate chastisement, which would fall outside the ambit of clause 49. I have some concerns about the long-term effect of the repeated use of physical chastisement on a child.

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