Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
MONDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2004
LORD LAMING
OF TEWIN
Q20 Mr Gibb: I absolutely agree with
everything you say, and you raise an issue that goes right to
the root of our key three public services involving health, crime
and education, where the public is not happy. You have hit the
nail on the head about the problems in those three areas. In terms
of social services, do you think we can tackle that underlying
poor-quality management by continuing to have social services
accountable at the local level, so that accountability ends in
a very small area of Britain; or is there not a case now for social
services, just as an example and leaving the other two things
on one side for the moment, for having social services as part
of a national organisation with a proper pyramidical modern structure
of management, where social services directors locally are accountable
to a more experienced director of social services at a regional
and national level?
Lord Laming: Chairman, I have
to say that I take an entirely diametric view. Whether it be the
Health Service, the police service or the local authority service,
management ought to be as close as possible to service delivery,
and accountability ought to be as close as possible to service
delivery. In the Victoria Climbié Inquiry there were far
too many people in senior positions who claimed that they did
not know and could not know what was happening to Victoria Climbié
and other children at the front door. In some ways in our public
services the management has got too distant from service delivery,
and too much time of management is taken up keeping the organisation
going rather than thinking about what is happening at a local
level. I strongly believe that communities are best served if
they have an involvement in their local services and have confidence
in their local services, which means that we do not want national
models, in my view. I would like to think that even within a local
authority, the kind of service that is available, and the intensity
of the service available, in a very poor housing estate was quite
different from the service that might be available in some other
parts of the same authority.
Q21 Mr Gibb: How do you improve the
quality of management?
Lord Laming: By being absolutely
clear what we expect of managers and what their job is. Far too
often managers in big organisations see their role as defending
the organisation and serving the needs of the organisation; whereas
we ought to be judging managers on the way in which they serve
the public. These are public services for the benefit of the public,
and therefore the test is, as I keep saying, what happens at the
front door. I think there is too little preoccupation at the front
door. Too much of that is left to the most junior staff, the lowest
paid staff, the most inexperienced staff. We ought to be making
sure that we have people who are experienced, senior and who are
judged by what is happening at the front door. I have seen some
good services at local level since the Victoria Climbié
report was published, where there has been a senior manager in
the room with front-line workers, providing effective support
and supervision as the workers come in. I rather like those models.
Paul Holmes: You said that the Climbié
tragedy was 10 years after the 1989 Act, but that really the 1989
Act had not been properly implemented. You said that five years
on from your inquiry, Ealing, the authority at the centre of all
this, had got worse. You have agreed with Kerry that social workers
were difficult to recruit and retain, especially in the urban
areas where the problems are most acute; so there are some systematic
failures. We have just explored whether it is the quality of the
management that is to blame. How far can you comment on whether
the administrative and decision-making structures are the problem,
which Every Child Matters is trying to move around; and
how far is it a problem with cash and resources?
Lord Laming: Chairman, I think
a very important factor is that of the turnover of social workers
and retention of social workers. There is a huge difference between
authorities, and indeed between teams in authorities. You can
understand why this happens; to be absolutely blunt, if I were
a social worker working in some teams that I have experienced,
I think that I would want to get out as quickly as I could. I
think that some teams are quite dysfunctional; they are badly
led, badly managed, and the staff are badly supported. In other
teams, social workers—no doubt police officers, nurses and
doctors the same—despite the workload are very happy teams;
people are confident in what they are doing; they are confident
in the management and confident in the leadership, and the turnover
rate is dramatically lower. My view is that we are on a losing
wicket if we go on thinking the problem is solely about recruitment
of social workers or solely about the number that are trained
as social workers if we do not address the retention of social
workers. Training social workers to have them leave within a year
or two years is not good. One of the things that I hope the inspectorate
will increasingly do is look at the retention of front-line staff
and look at why staff decide to give up. That said, I believe
that we are indebted to front-line staff. When I trained to be
a social worker, I expected to be one for the rest of my life.
I was very happy being a social worker, in that I had worked very
hard to become a social worker. I was a probation officer in those
days. I had worked extremely hard to become a probation officer,
and I thought that it was a great privilege and a great opportunity;
but I had the good fortune to work in an extremely well-managed
and well-supported department. I think that as a society we should
value social workers more, not only in providing them with support
and help but also recognising that in salary and conditions of
service. It is a very demanding job.
Q22 Paul Holmes: Kerry made the point
that social workers often complain that they are massively overloaded
with cases and that they are fire-fighting rather than properly
managing a case load, and you have talked about pay; so it is
a resource issue?
Lord Laming: I find the resource
issue quite difficult, if I am absolutely frank—and I wish
to be with the Committee—in that it is very easy to say
"we need more resources". I am sure everybody is tempted
to say that. However, I want to say frankly to the Committee that
I do not want more resources to produce more of the same, because
more of the same, frankly, is not good enough. We have to get
into the equation an evaluation of outcomes. More resources must
be linked with better outcomes, and better outcomes are about
better service to people. If you think of Victoria Climbié,
she was only alive in this country for 10 months, and during that
time she was known to four social services departments, three
housing departments, admitted to two different hospitals; she
was referred to two different child protection teams in the Metropolitan
Police, a specialist unit at the NSPCC: resourcing was not the
issue. The issue was that nobody stopped to say, "What is
a day like in the life of this child? Why is this eight-year-old
never in school?" These are not difficult questions, and
so I think we have to increasingly say, "more resources will
be allocated if you can demonstrate better outcomes for children."
Some authorities are doing that.
Q23 Paul Holmes: In relation to that,
if Every Child Matters is looking at how social services,
hospitals and police integrate better, when you get down to the
front line what do you suggest should be done in terms of the
skills and training that social workers, supervisors and team-leaders
have? Should there be changes there?
Lord Laming: There are a number
of things I would like to see happen. First, I believe very much
in specialism, specialist knowledge and specialist skills. The
idea that a social worker can be an expert in mental health, learning
disabilities, the needs of elderly people and children, is fundamentally
wrong. I would like to see social workers being expert in their
particular field, and that means knowing the legislation, knowing
what their role is, having confidence in the systems, and being
clear about the responsibilities of other agencies. Secondly,
I do not think that social services should be treated as the catch-all;
that when there are problems for other services, if they refer
the child to social services that means they can abdicate their
responsibilities. Every one of them has a unique and distinctive
responsibility, and a continuing responsibility, whether it is
in the Health Service—whether it is a GP, a health visitor
or a police officer. They have a continuing responsibility. I
think that we need to get that clear. Thirdly, in the future,
local authorities from the chief executive to the lead member
on children's services, to the director of children's services,
should have to demonstrate what arrangements they have made in
their local area for each of these agencies to play their separate
role, and to exchange information in an appropriate manner. I
do not mean being insensitive to privacy, but to refer information
in ways that are agreed between the agencies, but when the child
is at the centre of this process.
Q24 Chairman: Lord Laming, are incidents
like the tragedy of Victoria Climbié an increasing
phenomenon in our society, or a declining one, giving a broad
brush?
Lord Laming: I cannot answer that,
Chairman, with any authority, because different people attach
different importance to different bits of research. Some people
will give a certain number of deaths of children per year, and
other people will say "yes, but they were not children that
were known to social services or known to the services as being
a child at risk". I hope you do not feel there is anything
glib in what I say on this subject—because I feel this very
strongly—but too many children in our society are not getting
the services they need and the protection they are entitled to
at this stage. Until that changes, whatever the numbers are, we
have to keep on working away to say it is not good enough and
that we have to do better.
Q25 Jonathan Shaw: Lord Laming, the
local safeguarding children's boards are going to be statutory
in place of the voluntary area of child protection committees;
are you satisfied with that response? Do you think that that will
provide an effective means of protecting children and co-ordinating
services, despite not all of those organisations having a statutory
requirement to co-operate? There was some debate on this around
the Bill, which I am sure you are familiar with.
Lord Laming of Tewin: Yes. I think
it is a huge step forward because I think that what was evident
in the Victoria Climbié Inquiry was that other services
took the view that if they referred a child to Social Services
then that basically meant that it was now a Social Services responsibility.
As you gathered from what I said earlier, that is not a view that
I share at all. I think that the local safeguarding boards are
a significant step forward. I think that I would like to think
that in future any evaluation of a local children's service would
begin with a few simple questions, like: what do you know about
the needs of children in your area? How do you know about those
needs? How are you addressing those needs, collectively? Persuade
me. I think the boards would have a big responsibility to do that.
Q26 Jonathan Shaw: If you had a seat
on this Committee, Lord Laming, and the Minister was in front
of you, what would you be looking for her to be telling the Committee?
What would you recommend to the Committee that we need to look
for as we conduct this inquiry?
Lord Laming of Tewin: I think
that that would be rather presumptuous of me. I will tell you
what I would like to at least put in your minds. I think that
the Children Act forms a good foundation. I think that there will
be some tendency out there for people to become preoccupied with
a small number of structural organisational factors and, therefore,
give the impression they have complied with the Children Act,
whereas I think that the great possibilities the Minister has
is to persuade these authorities—not just local authorities
but all of the authorities—that the well being of children,
more than the safety of children, is their collective responsibility.
Therefore, we are not going to be mesmerised by minor organisational
structural features. We are going to be targeting the outcomes
for children. Good experience for children, good experience in
their early childhood, confidence in the future for these children,
an ability to think that society is good for them and that they
want to contribute to society and good role models. I think the
Minister for Children could be supported in that.
Q27 Jonathan Shaw: You described
when you left Hertfordshire Social Services after being the Director
there for many years. Let us just suppose you were just beginning
your job as a Director of Social Services in 2004 and this had
landed on your desk. If you had you time again, what would be
your starting point and what would you envisage your department
to look like in terms of its relationship with other departments
over the course of the next two years?
Lord Laming of Tewin: The best
director of Social Services I have seen, the best Social Services
departments in operation that I have had the pleasure of seeing,
are much better than I was as a Director of Social Services, very
much better. The biggest change that has happened in the services,
that needs to happen in all the services, is what I describe as
a change from senior officers being administrators to senior officers
being managers. That is something that may seem fairly easy to
say, but it is very difficult to implement because I think that
when I was a Director of Social Services the emphasis was very
much on complying with certain things like keeping within budget,
making sure that staff got paid and all the fundamentals were
in place in terms of good administration. I think that what is
now needed is something much much more sophisticated and more
difficult, which in a complex organisation where you depend upon
a diversity of skills and a wide range of people fulfilling different
jobs and where there are huge demands upon your service, then
you are never going to have such resources behind you that you
are going to meet all need. You need to have a clear set of priorities
and to give front line staff very clear leadership and for the
staff to know that at the end of the day you are accepting personal
accountability for what happens in the organisation. I attach
enormous importance to the head of the organisation being personally
accountable for what happens in the organisation because I think
that is not only right but I think it is a huge message to staff
about the way in which this organisation conducts its business.
Q28 Mr Gibb: Can we talk about the
database. I understand you recommended such a database, how it
has been proposed. Can you just answer the question about whether
this is a good use of resources. It is likely to be an expensive
item; experience shows they do tend to become very expensive.
Would that money not be better spent improving management and
improving the quality of people employed on the front line?
Lord Laming of Tewin: I think,
Chairman, this is the really important question, if I may say
so, because I personally do not want to see an all-singing all-dancing
mega national computerised programme, as it were, but what I do
think is very important is to recognise that a child might be
on a large number of databases, but (a) the databases are not
coordinated, (b) they cannot speak to each other so information
cannot be easily exchanged, and (c) it means that no one service
ever gets a full picture. What struck me in the Victoria Climbié
Inquiry was the number of witnesses in Phase 2 when we had seminars
where we drew people from all around the country, where people
were saying time after time: it is only after the child has died
that we all come together—as you are sitting together now,
Chairman,—and people put on the table what they knew about
this child and its family. It is only then that we realise something
of the full picture. Had any one of us had that perspective before
we would have acted earlier; it may be expensive in one way, but
it is hugely expensive with the death of a child if we do not
get it.
Q29 Mr Gibb: If you do not want an
all-singing all-dancing national database does that mean you want
a locally administered database?
Lord Laming of Tewin: One of the
things that I recommended was that the departments set up pilots
because I think this is a complicated area, especially if we just
take London. Families can move across the street and be in a different
borough. There is no point in having a database that is borough-based.
What we know about children who are abused is that they can be
quite often presented in different hospitals, even hospitals just
two or three miles down the road. They go to different accident
and emergency wards. People tell a different story as to why the
child has the injuries. I think if we are really going to take
seriously the fact that we need to use the information which is
already in the system then we need to have a database that is
comprehensive in relation to being able to have it used by all
of the key services, but also which is able to pick up previous
attendance at accident and emergency, previous injuries, potential
injuries to children. On the other hand, I think that it is a
database which is about highlighting contacts with children. It
is not a database which necessarily has all the material on it.
It is enough to know that this child was in hospital last week
or last month or whenever it may be and then get the information
from the hospital. You do not have to have all the information
on the database. I do think the protection of privacy in that
is a very important matter.
Q30 Mr Gibb: It sounds like you are
talking about a national database.
Lord Laming of Tewin: I am talking
about a national database to do this specific function, but not
a national database which has a lot of personal information on
it.
Q31 Mr Gibb: It will be a national
database but locally there would be a database.
Lord Laming of Tewin: Let me say,
Chairman, I made the recommendation because I am not a computer
literate person. I am one of these people who need a lot of help
in this area. There are those who are much more skilled than I
am.
Q32 Mr Gibb: You want the database
to be done nationally. Perhaps you want the payroll to be done
nationally as well for the Social Services department. I cannot
quite understand: you want these things to be locally based organisations
yet you want the database to be national. What else do you want
to be national in terms of Social Services?
Lord Laming of Tewin: Having a
database which is national does not imply national service. Nowadays,
the opportunity to manage information is so much more sophisticated
and easier that you can exchange information between services.
Whilst we were actually sitting on the Victoria Climbié
Inquiry we were pressed to take on other deaths of children. The
ones that we were asked to take on, like Victoria, they moved
between authorities. The new authority had not picked up that
the previous authority had concerns or had not picked up what
the concerns were of the previous authority. We do have to take
this seriously, but on the other hand I think that we can do it
on the basis of highlighting the involvement of other agencies
without putting the content on the data.
Q33 Mr Gibb: I understand that. You
want to have all children on this database do you?
Lord Laming of Tewin: The reason
I recommended a pilot is because I know that there are 11 million
children or something in this country. It did seem to me that
what we must not do is create a database that nobody is going
to use; that would not be by any means the biggest database. As
I understand it, the vehicle registration database, the Passport
Office, National Insurance, Social Security systems have much
bigger databases, but the difference with this database is that
many more people could input information and many more people
could access information. That needs to be controlled because
there are real issues there. That, frankly, is a step beyond me.
That was why I recommended pilots.
Q34 Mr Gibb: Will parents have access
to the data retained on it about their own children?
Lord Laming of Tewin: Yes. For
years and years, Chairman, I have believed that nothing should
be on a case file that is not known to a parent. In other words,
when I was in practice I operated on the basis that anything that
I wrote on the case file, the person concerned could be aware
of it. I could not tell them what a psychiatrist had written because
that was their information, but anything that I wrote, I believe
very much in transparency. I believe it is patronising in the
extreme to say that people cannot cope with what you believe and
write about them or their children. Therefore, yes, whatever is
on the database parents should know about it.
Q35 Mr Gibb: Will they then have
access to see the thing referred to? You say you do not want full
information on the database, just have references to the fact
that there was a hospital visit or whatever, a question from the
social worker. Will they then have access to the ongoing file
that it refers to? It implies that they would?
Lord Laming of Tewin: I believe
in transparency. I believe in not patronising people. If there
is a concern about somebody's child or a concern about their parenting
skills I think workers, whether they are doctors, nurses or social
workers or police officers, should be mature enough to say to
a parent, "I am concerned about this child. I am concerned
about these matters. The reason why I need to investigate this
is because of X, Y and Z."
Q36 Mr Gibb: If an error is discovered,
what are the procedures for removing that error from the file
and the database? For example, if a parent were accused of Munchausen's
syndrome by proxy, for example, and it turned out that it was
an erroneous accusation, would the fact that there had been an
accusation of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy be removed completely
from the file or would then an adoption agency asked for information
about that parent's suitability to adopt children be informed
that there had been a false accusation of this syndrome?
Lord Laming of Tewin: Chairman,
I operate on a simple principle which is that any database that
I am on—and I hope the same for you—you should know
you are on the database and you should have opportunity to correct
anything you think is wrong. I do not believe in this day and
age that we should support any system which is based upon secrecy.
Q37 Mr Gibb: You would be in favour
of removing the erroneous information from the file which would
then not be referred to again by the authorities when quizzed
by people accessing the database?
Lord Laming of Tewin: Yes. If
somebody said that I had a poor credit rating and the database
said that I had a poor credit rating I would like to have the
opportunity to correct it if it was wrong.
Q38 Mr Gibb: Do you think that is
what happens at the moment in Social Services departments?
Lord Laming of Tewin: In my view,
and it is only my view, good work should be based upon a measure
of openness, trust, and transparency. If I had tried to practise
this some years ago before I had grey hair, and I hope that I
would practise this now, I remember when I first started as a
probation officer I used to let everybody know that I was working
with, that I kept a case file. I let them know exactly what I
was putting on the case file. Every couple of months or so I would
review with them their progress as to whether they were fulfilling
the conditions of their probation order. If they were not, I would
tell them what I had concerns about and if necessary I would tell
them I was going to take them back to court for failure to comply
with the probation order. Personally I do not accept that work
of this kind requires any degree of secrecy.
Q39 Mr Gibb: A final question, Chairman:
what should we, as a Committee, be alert to? What should the Committee
be alert to over the coming months of the implementation of this
database?
Lord Laming of Tewin: Anybody
that tries to simplify the issues because I think that they are
extreme complicated. Secondly, I think that matters of confidentiality
are hugely important, but there are issues that have to be managed
and you have to be aware of how people are managing them. I have
always said to people: as long as you can demonstrate that any
action you take you can put your hand on your heart and say you
took it in the best interests and the well being and safety of
the child rather than for any other reason, then that is action
which should be defended.
|
