Examination of Witnesses (Questions 153
- 159)
MONDAY 20 DECEMBER 2004
DAME GILL
MORGAN, MR
JOHN COUGHLAN,
CLLR JAMES
KEMPTON, MR
DAVID HAWKER
AND CHIEF
CONSTABLE TERRY
GRANGE
Q153 Valerie Davey: I welcome you
all, especially at what is, for everyone, a busy time. If we were
not concerned for improving children's services before Christmas,
then I cannot think whenever else we might. I should like to put
on record the apologies of the Chair, who is out of the country,
but will say that we are a smaller, but perhaps keener committee,
with one other member hoping to join us fairly soon. We have looked
on several occasions now, and taken evidence on several occasions
on this very important subject of Every Child Matters.
We reckon that amongst you, with your professional organisations
behind you, you bring a particularly significant contribution
to our deliberations. If each of you would like to say a word—and
I mean a few words, but not many—as introduction, we would
be very pleased before we start our questioning.
Dame Gill Morgan: I am Gill Morgan,
Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation. That is an organisation
made up of NHS and statutory organisations. We currently have
92% all NHS organisations in membership, and that includes primary
care trusts as well as hospital trusts. Our other interest in
this is that one of the things we have recently been involved
in doing is negotiating the new GP contract, and we have a continuing
responsibility for the maintenance of that contract.
Mr Coughlan: I am John Coughlan,
the Corporate Director for Social Care in Telford and Wrekin Council,
and I am here as the Co-Chair of the Children and Families Committee
of the Association of Directors of Social Services, the ADSS,
a national body which accounts for its membership all the directors
of social services in England and Wales, and acts as the professional
representing their views, particularly in dialogue with government.
Cllr Kempton: I am Councillor
James Kempton, representing the Local Government Association.
I am Vice-Chair of the Children and Young People's Board. In the
LGA we have already re-organised around the theme of children
and young people, as many authorities are doing at the moment.
Aside from that, I am also the executive member for children and
young people in Islington.
Mr Hawker: I am David Hawker,
Director of Children, Families & Schools for Brighton &
Hove City Council, and I am Vice-Chair of the Association of Directors
of Education and Children's Services, which represents directors
of education for the 150 local education authorities and an increasing
number of directors of children's services—about a third
now out of the total.
Chief Constable Grange: I am Terence
Grange, Chief Constable of the Dyfed-Powys Police. I lead for
the Association of Chief Police Officers on child protection,
the management of sex offenders, and all things pertinent to private
violence. There is another ACPO group, the Youth Issues Group,
which deals with matters to do with children other than child
protection.
Q154 Valerie Davey: Thank you very
much—a distinguished gathering! I wonder whether you often
meet, but perhaps in the future under this remit of Every Child
Matters you may indeed; but we are pleased to have you together.
Although this is quite a large gathering, we will not expect each
of you to answer every question. The theme clearly is collaboration
of bringing together the different structures that you represent.
How important do you see this to be. Terence, you have perhaps
been less involved than the other groups. How important do you
see this new approach?
Chief Constable Grange: I think
the Association of Chief Police Officers would argue that to date
the police force have been, by mistake, peripheral to all discussions
about children, particularly Every Child Matters. We would
argue that if you look at the function of policing, a wider look,
we are absolutely essential to any development in this area. We
have done studies going back to 1997, where we looked at all the
predictive causes of future difficulties with children, and police
engagement in those areas; and we would say that we are absolutely
crucial to these discussions. What surprises us is that we appear
to be consultees of last resort. We would argue that we should
be fully engaged at all times.
Q155 Valerie Davey: Do you expect
to be, as a result of the new structures which are proposed and
do you think this will improve the situation for children, not
just for police officers and the way they work, but for children
concerned.
Chief Constable Grange: We would
hope to be. We do not expect to be because the evidence so far
is that when the DfES and the Home Office have had their discussions,
then they talk to us. We would expect that if we were engaged,
there would be far better outcomes for children.
Q156 Valerie Davey: David, does that
provoke a comment?
Mr Hawker: The general point is
right. We need to do a lot of work at local level. Where I am,
for example, we have the local chief of police on our chief officers'
group for the children's trust, and that is an appropriate model
I think in terms of engagement at the right level, not just as
a consultee of last resort but as part and parcel of the strategic
and management arrangements for the whole thing. It is particularly
important in terms of child protection and also in terms of youth
justice; but there are other dimensions to it as well in terms
of the police involvement around school security, around behaviour
management and around community safety, which also need to be
part of the whole picture. I would certainly agree with ACPO that
it is very important that at local level police are fully engaged
in the development of children's services. What we do need are
the right kinds of signals from the DfES and the Home Office to
enable that to happen and to make it an expectation that it will
happen at a local level.
Q157 Valerie Davey: Gill, does health
feel a little on the fringe of this as well, or do you feel you
have been more integrated into the discussions and plans for the
future?
Dame Gill Morgan: In preparing
for today we did a straw poll of members to answer that question.
The view from PCTs is very positive. They feel that they have
been actively involved at a local level, that they are in the
heart of thinking about things. They see some practical problems
but there are absolutely no complaints about engagement. I think
we are downplaying the involvement of the police because in the
overall children's agenda there are very many sub-components,
and there are some excellent examples of the police being actively
engaged in partnership: drug action teams; alcohol strategies;
crime and disorder partnerships, which PCTs are statutory members
of, and run by the police; youth offender teams, ACPCs, and many
primary care organisations and strategic health authorities have
very good information-sharing protocols with the police. Whilst
I agree that the police need to be intimately involved, there
is some very good practice to build on at the moment across the
country.
Q158 Valerie Davey: John, given that
social services have always been central to this, do you see the
extension of this work across so many different groupings being
an improvement for children?
Mr Coughlan: Yes, I do. I fully
support what has been said about the crucial need to involve the
police, and also about our own meeting as a group. There is a
body called the inter-agency group, which has been running for
two or three years, which has been crucial to the development
of this agenda; and the police were founder members of that group.
Outside of government dialogue the agencies are working very,
very well together; and that was developed through the document
Serving Children Well, which we think was a blueprint for
Every Child Matters, some nine months before Every Child
Matters was published. We do think there is a very positive
framework at a national as well as a local level. As far as social
services are concerned, we very much support the development of
the integrated agenda as described in Every Child Matters.
We have concerns about some of the structural prescription that
has come through the legislation, but generally speaking we think
that those concerns need to be put to one side, now that we are
on the path we are on, because of the need to make the integrated
agenda work. That has been a position that ADSS has taken obviously
with some difficult self-examination because of the need for us
to look at the roles of our membership and our services within
what will be the new frameworks in local authorities. We are very,
very pleased indeed that local authorities have been given the
lead in this agenda, because we think that is where it should
rightly sit.
Q159 Jeff Ennis: Continuing on the
theme of integrated working in practice, what are the key challenges
that need to be overcome to achieve this Utopia, because I do
not think it will be easy to achieve, certainly not in the short
term.
Cllr Kempton: Clearly, one of
the challenges we are all responding to is the need for leadership
in the area, both from government and national organisations but
also for local government to respond to the leadership role which
has been set out for it within the Children Act. That is a significant
set of challenges for us, but one which local government feels
ready to take up—and the evidence is that it is well able
to do that. We have been running 35 pilots, which were started
as children's trusts under the Serving Children Well banner,
and they have been going for some time now. There is some really
good evidence of progress in there from around the country. I
can give you specific examples of where authorities like, for
example, North Lincolnshire has established some very good practice,
but which has been built around relationship-building rather than
structural change. There is also good practice from places like
Sheffield and Bolton, and I could go on. There is therefore quite
a lot that we are looking to build on. One area that concerns
us greatly in terms of integrated service is obviously the position
of schools, where we seem to be arguing for services to come together
with health and social services and the police, but where there
are also other local authority services like housing, leisure,
youth and childcare. There is widespread concern about the position
of schools where there is no duty to co-operate laid down in legislation.
I can not speak for everyone here, but there is concern about
what that might mean in practice, particularly on the back of
the rhetoric laid down even in the Children Act of schools becoming
more autonomous and becoming masters of their own affairs. Whilst
I think no-one has a problem with school autonomy as it stands
at the moment, there is a concern about relying on the goodwill
and spirit of individuals to see that the duty to collaborate
is a kind of moral imperative as opposed to a legalistic duty
that is being placed on everybody else.
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