Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 219)
MONDAY 10 JANUARY 2005
MR PETER
NEWELL AND
MS MARY
MARSH
Q200 Chairman: Peter, we had Lord
Laming give the opening evidence for this inquiry and he seemed
to be pretty enthusiastic about and happy with not only the proposals
but also the Act. I would have thought that if anyone was going
to be a reasonable judge of the success of what the Government
has put forward it would be Lord Laming. Why do you differ so
strongly from him?
Mr Newell: I have looked at what
exists in terms of the sorts of champions for children across
the UK and across Europe. In fact, the Laming report's recommendation
for a commissioner I thought showed some degree of misunderstanding
of the role. It implied it was to some extent a governmental rather
than a completely independent post if you look at the actual wording
of his recommendation. That confusion has persisted into the way
the Minister defended the right to direct the commissioner to
undertake inquiries and she did not seem to be able to see that
the concept of independence is not really compatible with Ministers
being able to direct a huge proportion potentially of the commissioner's
time and energy onto a particular formal inquiry, and we know
that formal inquiries are huge affairs that take an awful lot
of time. There seemed to be a different conception of what a commissioner
is and yet the original promise to children was for an independent
champion. I have looked at the legislation establishing these
offices, most recently in Malta, Mauritius and Croatia, and in
each case there is a completely explicit general function of promoting
and safeguarding the rights of children and there is no mention
of any power of Ministers to direct. In fact, there is a very
strong statement that no-one can interfere with the role of the
ombudsman or commissioner.
Q201 Mr Pollard: I took part in the
debate on the Children Act, particularly on the "no smacking"
bit, and supported David Hinchliffe's amendment. I was lucky enough
to be able to get an intervention, no more than that, but I stood
up and said that as a father of seven children I believed smacking
was outdated and should be stopped immediately. What sort of message
are we sending out to children and to the world at large that
we can still allow "reasonable chastisement", that is,
smacking children? After all, we have moved on from poking boys
up chimneys and other things like that. It is now considered totally
illegal to chastise your wife or servants, as we could do some
years ago, quite rightly too, and yet we still leave children
as the ones who we can chastise.
Ms Marsh: Clearly the NSPCC's
position on this as part of the "Children are unbeatable!"
Alliance from the very beginning of the Alliance has been very
clearly that children should have equal protection in law from
assault. That is not to say that we are interested in having a
punitive framework where parents are criminalised or anything
of that sort, which is indeed exactly the case that happens between
adults, in relation to this particular offence anyway. It has
to be a pretty serious assault before criminal consequences follow.
It is entirely wrong for children and young people to have in
this one peculiar example a case where the rules that govern adult
behaviour, and indeed the way adults behave, is entirely contradictory
to the way in which we expect children themselves to behave. In
every other aspect of the upbringing and education of children
we talk about them learning from adult example. It is extreme
and extraordinary that in this particular case there is such a
robust defence of the right to allow adults to behave in an entirely
different way from that which we would want and expect children
to do. In any case, the most important thing of all is that the
evidence is overwhelming that using physical force in this way
to discipline children simply does not work. It is not the best
way to establish a firm disciplinary relationship with a child
which is effective and lasting into adolescence so that you have
a framework of dialogue with them that allows discipline, which
is clearly very important, and boundaries and consequences and
all of that but where the use of physical force, striking a child,
is wrong. That does not mean that physical restraint is wrong
and what I would say about the legislation is that we now have
something which is very confusing to parents about where the boundaries
really are and not the protection to parents about the use of
physical restraint which is what the amendment we proposed would
have provided.
Chairman: I think we all have a pretty
strong opinion on that one. Can we move on from that? We have
only got an hour and we need to rattle through.
Mr Pollard: I would like Peter Newell
to comment.
Chairman: This is a question that could
take the whole committee all afternoon.
Mr Pollard: Chairman, I feel very strongly
about this, as I have tried to maintain, and I feel most put out.
Chairman: Perhaps you would ask a quick
question to Peter Newell and then we will move on.
Q202 Mr Pollard: I want him to comment
on what I said before.
Mr Newell: It is absolutely about
children's status in our society. It is about how we regard children,
in that if we do not give them this absolutely fundamental protection
of their human dignity and physical integrity it is suggesting
that they do not have the same status and rights as us. I think
it is totally in line with this government's objectives for children.
It is an absolute anomaly to stick with this idea that we can
with children exceptionally define acceptable violence. I think
it is completely absurd and it clearly conflicts also with our
human rights obligations, as a number of human rights treaty bodies
have told the UK.
Q203 Mr Pollard: Some organisations
have raised concerns about whether the new proposals will adequately
protect children in the most vulnerable groups, such as refugees.
Do you share these concerns?
Ms Marsh: Certainly we have concerns
about that. The particular arrangements for refugee children to
be detained are of concern to us and to many other children's
organisations. We have sought to assist with that by providing
child protection advice to the Home Office on the arrangements
for such places but that does not protect them in law at all.
Q204 Mr Pollard: What was the nature
of that advice?
Ms Marsh: It was about the way
in which they should manage the centres where children were being
detained to try and ensure that the proper procedures were put
in place to protect children but they are out of the normal system
of protection of children while they are in such places.
Q205 Mr Pollard: Do you think that
the Every Child Matters programme of reforms strikes the
right balance between universal and targeted services? In other
words, are we trying to do too much?
Ms Marsh: What the NSPCC is particularly
concerned about is that while we strongly support the move towards
preventative services, early intervention and early identification,
ensuring that we pick problems up at an early stage, and that
being done through universal services being a right and proper
thing to do, there is a danger that in the period while we are
establishing this different way of operating the amount of resource
that is available may mean that there is a problem in that the
position for the hard end of child protection may get a bit lost
in the diversion of energies towards prevention. It is a bit like
one of those things where you need to invest at the beginning
in order in the long term to balance things so that you are dealing
with them early so you will not get so much of the problems at
the hard end, but in the interim period clearly you are going
to have both. It is being absolutely sure that we do not lose
sight of the serious part of child protection while we are developing
the new intervention that is important. It is a very difficult
balance. The principle is right but I think implementing it is
going to be very challenging and needs very clear monitoring locally.
That is why having some clear local standards with all the regulation
that is going to emerge around the local Safeguarding Children
Boards and the way they are going to operate and how local safeguarding
policy and practice is going to be put into place and monitored
is going to be really important. It will not work unless all the
organisations working with children do themselves actively safeguard
their own practice. Nobody can depend on anybody else.
Q206 Mr Pollard: Does that include
voluntary organisations?
Ms Marsh: Absolutely, which is,
with our training and consultancy, what NSPCC does a lot of work
to assist many people with at the moment. That is an absolute
fundamental. We are concerned that that is consistent and that
kind of safeguarding regulation needs to be something which is
not open to too much local flexibility. We need to know that across
the whole framework there are some very consistent standards and
regulations which apply.
Mr Newell: I feel that none of
us will ever know how successful the child protection system is
unless we have baseline detailed interview research with parents
and children about all forms of violent victimisation of children.
That is really how one should measure the success of a child protection
system, not through conviction rates or reporting rates. It has
to be about what is really happening to children. There has been
research early in the 1990s but there has been no detailed interview
research since then. I think they are very important things that
government should start to do in order that they can measure whether
they are protecting children effectively or not.
Q207 Chairman: So it is the Government
that has to carry that out?
Mr Newell: I think the Government
have the obligation so they should at least commission it. I am
not saying they have to carry it out but they should be paying
for it.
Q208 Jonathan Shaw: I would like
to ask Mary Marsh if I may what lessons the NSPCC have drawn from
the Climbié inquiry. There are two sections to your organisation.
You are a campaigning organisation; you alert parents to the dangers
that children encounter, but also you are a service provider;
you have contacts with the local authorities.
Ms Marsh: Clearly, like all social
care organisations we have been through the whole of the recommendations
framework of the inquiry and done a rigorous audit across everything
that we do. It has been an absolutely right and proper and robust
way of being absolutely sure about the safeguarding of our own
practice yet again. It is something we have done previously. For
us the particular and direct area of challenge was around the
way in which records were kept and managed and secured. That has
been something that we have paid particular attention to but that
has been the case for many other people in social care because
it is clearly very evident that not only having the relevant information
available in the way but also the oversight and the management
and the supervision of the way in which cases are handled is absolutely
crucial and was at the heart of what went wrong repeatedly in
this particular tragic case.
Q209 Jonathan Shaw: I think it was
the summer before last when you had a campaign about "stranger
danger". Is that correct?
Ms Marsh: I think it is a while
since we have done one which has been entirely about that.
Q210 Jonathan Shaw: It was about
three years ago. There have been people who have questioned that
type of campaign. Looking at child protection overall, Peter was
talking about some research base being clear about what dangers
there are for children within our society. Obviously, an organisation
such as yours is a very powerful organisation. Parents listen
to you. Do you base those sorts of campaigns on research on the
number of children getting abducted? I do not think it has changed
really, has it?
Ms Marsh: We certainly do use
research. We conducted the only prevalence study that there is
in 1999 to look at the levels of abuse and the only way we were
able to get at that was to do one with 18-24 year olds looking
back on their childhood. It was a very large study. That prevalence
of child maltreatment and abuse has been incredibly important
to us and many other people in understanding, at least to some
extent, what the reality is of the nature of abuse and where the
abuse is happening, albeit that that is probably missing a lot
of the early childhood abuse where we know also that there is
a lot going on. If you look at the overall area of our campaigning
the bulk of the emphasis is on the abuse of children at home.
That is what our concern about physical punishment relates to.
Child deaths at home have been something we have campaigned about
for some considerable time and we repeatedly and endlessly will
say that the children are far more at risk of abuse—and
it is a minority of children, of course, but a significant minority—at
home than anywhere else. That is what the statistics make very
clear, that that is predominantly where it happens. Whether it
is physical abuse, emotional maltreatment or sexual abuse, usually
it is somebody known to a child. A lot of our advice to people
about the issue of strangers has been to help parents get that
sort of thing into proportion because it is giving advice about
the sorts of things you need to do to reassure yourselves. Parents
get very over-anxious when these things become high profile and
it is helping people understand the sorts of things to look out
for without people becoming so paranoid that they do not allow
their children to do anything. It is managing the potential for
risk appropriately.
Q211 Chairman: To conclude on that
particular answer, we are conducting an inquiry into out of school
education. We have been given similar evidence that a much more
dangerous place for a child to be is at home in the family rather
than on a school trip or something out of school organised by
the school. You would concur with that, would you?
Ms Marsh: I am strongly in support
of such activity but I understand the difficulty for people organising
it nowadays, not least the whole problem about arranging appropriate
insurance for a whole range of risks, not just from potential
issues of abuse. We are in a situation where people's understanding
about the reality of risk in this area is distorted from the truth,
as it is in some other areas, and that is why I think it is very
important to encourage people to understand how you can take all
reasonable steps to make activity safe. That is exactly what the
consultancy service at NSPCC sets out to do. It helps organisations
audit their practice, put the proper processes in place, understand
how you recruit people safely and monitor them when they are working
for you, things to look out for and all that sort of thing. That
then gives parents more confidence that those safeguards are in
place. The fundamental issue is that you can never make life totally
risk-free. Sometimes we mislead people by suggesting that that
is what we are all trying to do. One of the things which I think
is very good for children and young people is outdoor experience.
The other thing we do is educate children and young people to
manage their own risk and be exposed to situations which are potentially
risky but understand how you handle risk in such circumstances.
Otherwise, as young adults we are going to have a lot of people
who are not capable of looking after themselves or anyone they
are responsible for.
Q212 Chairman: Can I push Peter on
this first bit? Here we have the Victoria Climbié tragedy,
then the inquiry, then the recommendations. Do you think that
everything that has been created is going to prevent future Victoria
Climbié tragedies happening in our society?
Mr Newell: No, I do not think
it will. There is a sense, obviously, in which nothing will prevent
occasional awful things happening in any society, but I think
there are a number of deficiencies in the legislation. To me the
first thing we need to change is the way children are regarded
and thought about in our society. There one of the most symbolic
issues is the physical punishment one. Giving children a powerful,
independent commissioner is about redressing the lack of power,
political and other power, that children have in our society.
I think government has made some quite substantial moves towards
listening to children more and taking them more seriously but
the actual machinery of government has moved a bit backwards.
In 2000 there was a great fanfare when they announced a Minister
for Children and Young People, the Children and Young People's
Unit, a Cabinet Committee on Children's Services. The Children
and Young People's Unit was going to develop an overarching strategy
for children which would be rooted in the framework of the Convention
on the Rights of the Child. Then a year or two ago the Children
and Young People's Unit disappeared, the promise of an overarching
strategy also disappeared and was replaced in a way by the Green
Paper and what has followed. We do have a Minister for Children
but she is also the Minister for Families and children have been
subsumed into families. In terms of trying to get this specific
focus on children in government it is a move backwards. I think
to have a Directorate of Children and Families is again blurring
the focus on children. Of course, families are of total importance
to children and cannot be separated from children, but if you
are looking at how to protect children effectively, how to listen
to them, how to take them seriously, you do have to have this
specific focus and putting them into families means almost everyone
in society, so that worries me. Also, but I know less about it,
frankly, I am not sure that we have established clear accountability
for when things do go wrong in local authorities, which again
seems to me to be of vital importance in child safety.
Q213 Chairman: Reading between the
lines of that reply, are you saying that what we had, the status
quo of two years ago, plus a very robust Children's Commissioner,
would have been the right sort of balance?
Mr Newell: I think we need a Cabinet
Minister for children. I think we need to have a children and
young people's unit which could be still within one of the big
departments but would have the power and authority to bring together
different departments to try and solve the difficult issues which
cannot possibly be solved by one department. It is like juvenile
justice, which remains firmly in the Home Office where in many
ways it seems to be getting worse rather than better. You cannot
solve that just in the Home Office and so you need some way of
forcing departments to come together and get inter-sectoral solutions
to these difficult issues.
Q214 Chairman: Mary, do you agree
with most of that?
Ms Marsh: Yes. The lack of strong
focus at the right level right across government is something
which is not necessarily going to come through this The mantra
"Every Child Matters" has the potential to become a
government-wide strategy and I am sure Ministers would argue very
strongly that that is what they are trying to do, but it is still
very much in pieces in the way in which the youth justice response
at the time of the whole original Green Paper was kept entirely
separate and had a different tone and pitch to it. That has continued.
I am very pleased to see that the National Service Framework
for Children, published through the Department of Health,
obviously, has very much had "Every Child Matters" as
a by-line on the way in which that comes through. I would not
say that there is no intent to have a strategy for children but
I do not think it is clear or explicit enough yet. With regard
to whether this prevents another tragedy like Victoria Climbié—and,
sadly, I have to say we can never give that absolute guarantee—what
we can all do, and this is everybody with any responsibility of
working with and for children, is everything that is within our
reasonable power to protect children better, and quite clearly
that is what we have not been doing. It makes some of the instances
that arose in that particular case far less likely but it never
deems it impossible. Of course, there are children who will suffer
in that way at the hands of the people who look after them who
may well not be known to any of the statutory agencies at all.
They ought to be known in school, which is why the support we
give to teachers and other adults working in schools in terms
of their capacity to identify the potential in the early intervention
area is really important and we should not underestimate the investment
we need to support them properly in order to be able to do that
because it is not what they have been accustomed to doing. I am
not saying they would be the ones who would follow it through
but they would need to know how to follow it through and get the
right support if they did make that early intervention. As I was
saying earlier, there are a lot of the elements there with the
potential to come together and make a real difference, but it
is what actually happens in terms of how they become operational
on the ground. While there is a wish to allow a lot of local flexibility
in the way in which some of these policies are implemented, I
just have a caution about the flexibility being such that we end
up with there not being sufficient consistency in these really
core critical areas around child protection.
Q215 Chairman: What about sharing
of information? We all thought, did we not, that sharing of information
was absolutely critical to the investigation in the report that
Lord Laming produced? Yet, as we have taken evidence, it seems
that there are certain key players in children's services who
are still unwilling to share information or are only willing to
share it on a very restricted basis. Surely that is going right
against the grain both of the legislation's intent and whole notion
of the full protection of children?
Ms Marsh: I agree with you that
the sharing of information is absolutely crucial in order to make
the system integrate. It is the way in which that information
is shared which is critical. The NSPCC has never supported a complex
information-sharing system that is technologically driven because
I do not think that will work. I think that the difficulties of
appropriate information being shared among the right people in
such a system would such that it would be a completely wrong distortion
of resources to even begin to create such a system. Our view has
always been that what you need to have is a way of identifying
children, where they are, who is responsible for them and who
the key professionals are who are involved with them, so that
if anyone else gets involved with the child they can easily establish
who they are, and then they can have an opportunity to share information
in the usual, proper, professional way but much more effectively
than was sometimes done in the past. I know there are big concerns
around some of the tight confidentiality boundaries in health,
which continue to be of concern to us too, and the lack of a duty
to co-operate with GPs in the legislation was another dimension
of our concern on that matter. We have done an awful lot of investment
in these trailblazing authorities at the moment. Some of them
are not yet working as they should and those are only within authorities.
In the Victoria Climbié case the problem was the sharing
of information between authorities and that to me is the most
crucial bit, that we get to work so that the information hubs
can pass information between each other as children move. That
whole issue of mobility is at the heart of this.
Q216 Valerie Davey: I would like
to return to the role and responsibilities of the Children's Commissioner
for England which you both raised in your initial comments. Which
responsibilities do you think you would want to add to or subtract
from those now given to the English Commissioner?
Mr Newell: In terms of the general
function I think the England Commissioner should have the same
general function as the other three UK Commissioners and pretty
well all of those across Europe: to promote and safeguard the
rights and interests of children. What the Act says is that the
commissioner "will promote awareness of the views and interests
of children", which is a perfectly respectable role but it
is not a very strong one. It is a duty of government under the
UN Convention to promote awareness of the rights of children amongst
adults and children. It is one of the obligations the UK took
on when it ratified the convention, and it is quite right in my
view that commissioners should review how governments are fulfilling
that task, but I do not see it as the central role for the commissioner.
With regard to the complete bar on the commissioner investigating
individual cases, there is a peculiarity here because the commissioner
is now allowed to initiate or hold an inquiry into an individual
child but is not allowed under section 2 which sets out the general
function to look at the case of an individual child. That again
seems to me to be an unreasonable restriction because clearly
what comes to the commissioner's office is going to be a lot of
experience from individual children. None of us wants the commissioner
to get bogged down completely in dealing with individual cases
but we do think that the commissioner should be able within his
or her discretion to look at the case of a child and think about
whether that is something on which they should base a report or
a comment to a Minister or whatever. Again, it shows a basic misconception:
with this sort of independent watchdog government should not be
directing their activities at all. Government should give them
a general function and let them get on with it and that is what
"independent watchdog" means.
Q217 Valerie Davey: In the recommendations
which the NSPCC make, the four key areas, it did not include the
investigation of individual cases. Would you like to comment on
that aspect of it? Should that be a responsibility for the English
Commissioner or not?
Ms Marsh: I think there is a really
serious issue in comparing the different commissioners because
of the scale and responsibility of the English Commissioner and
the number of children for whom the English Commissioner is responsible
compared to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I think the
most important thing throughout the legislation, and the NSPCC's
position was in this direction, was that the commissioner should
be there to ensure that other people are dealing with complaints
appropriately and properly. As Peter has just said, none of us
wants the commissioner to be overwhelmed by spending lots of time
and resource on individual complaints. If you set up the English
Commissioner to have a full expectation that they were going to
investigate lots and lots of individual complaints you would have
regional offices immediately and that is not necessary, but the
principle of them being able to go into an individual case so
that they can establish whether an individual case has some matters
that require inquiry, which then means that this individual case
has wider application, is important. It does seem rather odd that
there is a hole between finding out about the individual case
and being able to get to it. What really matters is that the commissioner
is there to drive change in the whole system. Everybody has got
to take children seriously; everybody has to have an approach
where they can follow through where things are wrong for children.
If you fully have a strategy for children, the impact of what
government is doing in all sorts of areas, where people stop and
think what the impact is of making this legislative change on
children, could be very powerful. You have environmental impact
statements. A pause for thought with any legislation, "What
is the impact of this legislation on children?", could be
relevant. We made the point about the involvement of the commissioner
in scrutinising what happens in these areas about child protection,
and I said earlier that we are concerned about how robust and
consistent they are going to be, but we have a particular concern
about safeguarding in the secure estate and the degree to which
the approach and policies and procedures and scrutiny can happen
there as robustly as should be the case.
Q218 Valerie Davey: Thank you very
much. We will thank the Commissioners for Wales, Northern Ireland
and Scotland in a moment personally for their contributions already
in written form. For the record, you indicate that it is a matter
of degree, and certainly the figures we have been given are that
for the under-18s in Wales we are talking in round terms about
660,000; in Northern Ireland we are talking about 500,000; in
Scotland we are talking about 1.2 million, and in England we are
talking about 10.5 million.
Ms Marsh: Exactly.
Q219 Valerie Davey: The disparity
in numbers is enormous and that does have to be, as you readily
acknowledged, put into context for what we are asking. The other
aspect of it though that you have brought out very clearly is
the independence from government and it is that area I would like
to explore. We went to Norway and we investigated there how a
commissioner has been in post for longer and is independent and
yet our fellow MPs were saying that that has caused some difficulty
because the argument goes on then between government and commissioner.
MPs who have cases brought to them are not quite sure which way
they ought to take that case and perhaps we ought to have looked
at Norway's experience, as some of our Ministers I think have,
and reflected on 20 years of work in Norway. I do not see why
you should take our responsibilities too seriously, but how has
it worked in terms of that independence and what does it do for
children as opposed to being for organisations and academics a
better principled position?
Mr Newell: Norway is one of only
two countries where the office has been evaluated. The development
of these sort of institutions has now been going on for long enough
to need more evaluation in different countries. The evaluation
in Norway happened after the second commissioner and was wholly
positive in that members of the Government, the public and children
all felt that this had become an extremely valuable part of the
scenery and had achieved specific outcomes (to use the favourite
word) for children over the period since 1981 when it was set
up. The evaluation also recommended that the office's law should
be changed to connect it directly with the Convention, which then
happened, which was useful. The only problem perhaps in Norway
has been the conflict between handling individual cases and promoting
the overall issues that affect groups of children. Certainly the
children's ombidsman there has felt at times a bit overwhelmed
by the numbers of individual queries and inquiries coming from
children. That was why the evaluation recommended that the office
should focus on being a voice for all children on bigger issues
rather than on individual cases and that has happened more and
more.
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