Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
MONDAY 24 JANUARY 2005
PROFESSOR HEDY
CLEAVER, MR
RICHARD THOMAS
AND DR
EILEEN MUNRO
Q340 Paul Holmes: Are there any plans
for—
Professor Cleaver: Not that I
know of, but I do not know whether the Government has decided
to fund that piece of research, or whether they have it in planning
or not. It needs to be looked at.
Q341 Paul Holmes: As far as you know
there are no plans. In so far as you think it will work better
at all, how far will the national database system improve things
for those children who currently fall between the cracks, the
children who are looked after by adults, but do not get social
services, or refugee children?
Professor Cleaver: If you are
going to smuggle a child in, you will smuggle them in quite well,
and you will not go and register them on a database. If you are
an extremely young girl giving birth in a field, you are not going
to have the baby registered on the database, so extremely vulnerable
children will fall through those cracks anyway. It might encourage
agencies to work together better, if there is a lead professional
who you know you can come to and who will help organise and support
agencies in talking to each other more.
Q342 Paul Holmes: If one of the purposes
of the national database was that it would be commonly accessible
across the whole of the UK, would that not make it easier to pick
up on some of the children who sometimes get lost because the
parent moves from one end of the country to the other?
Professor Cleaver: If it is national—
Q343 Paul Holmes: Is that not the
intention? If it is local databases, they should be accessible
nationally, or it should be a national database—or not?
Professor Cleaver: I think I agree
with you. The idea is that if they are local they will be somehow
linked in to each other. I am not quite sure how it will work
if you move and take the child out of school. You may get lost
anyway and I am not quite sure how that would work. I do not see
how it would work.
Q344 Paul Holmes: Would there be
any point unless it was a workable national database? Bridget
Lindley talked earlier about the danger of postcode lotteries,
of local databases not talking to each other. Is there any point
at all unless you have a proper national system?
Professor Cleaver: You have to
have a national system or one—I am not an IT guru but they
tell me that there are ways of somehow magically speaking to each
other. It has to be in reality a national database. How it works,
I do not understand, but it must be national; there is no point
at all otherwise.
Q345 Paul Holmes: You talked about
the need for there to be a lead professional who would take particular
responsibility for deciding when there was cause for concern and
when to put flags up on the database. Who would that be? Where
would the lead professional come from?
Professor Cleaver: I would not
be putting flags of concern on the database at all.
Q346 Paul Holmes: But is that not
the whole point stated in the Children Act of the database?
Professor Cleaver: I do not think
it is a good route to go. It is dangerous and I think you have
real problems of access, and you have levels of access then. If
you have levels of access because you only want some people to
see what the flags are and whatever—you have professionals
having different levels of access depending on what case they
are working with, and it is a hugely complicated system. I would
not have flags of concern on. The research from the trailblazers
suggests that the majority would not have flags of concern on
either.
Q347 Paul Holmes: Who would be the
lead professional?
Professor Cleaver: The lead professional,
in my small view—I am not going to be making these decisions,
but it could work if you had the lead professional starting off
being from universal services. It would be the health visitor
if they were under 5, and it would need to be flexible so that
once the child went to school it would then become the school
teacher. If the child went into social services it would be for
the period of time they were getting social services support,
the social worker who would take over. It would have to be flexible.
Q348 Paul Holmes: The Children Act
says clearly that it is the intention that an electronic flag
would be placed on the record if a practitioner had a cause for
concern about the child. The Information Commissioner and the
NSPCC have criticised that because they ask, what is the definition
of "cause for concern"? Everybody would have different
definitions. There is a clear intention that there should be these
electronic flags. How would you decide on what "cause for
concern" meant, which would have the same meaning to all
the different people involved?
Professor Cleaver: It is extremely
difficult. There is no definition of what concern is, and what
concern for me may differ from one day to another, and which child;
and whether my level of concern differs from yours or yours. It
is a really, really difficult can of worms that we are opening.
If we have got real concerns, we should be thinking in terms of
child protection as against a mild worry. It is a terrible problem.
Dr Munro: If you have a cause
for concern that the child may be abused or neglected, then we
have a very large set of working-together documents that set out
very clearly what you should do. It is well-established and the
result of a lot of good experience, so we do not need to duplicate
that. I do not quite understand what the scenario is where you
think that you might need to check things out without the family's
knowledge, but you are not talking about abuse. I just do not
know what scenario crops up of that nature.
Q349 Chairman: If you do not have
these flags on the system, what is the point in having the system?
Professor Cleaver: I do not want
the system.
Q350 Chairman: This is a wonderful
session, where I am getting more evidence from the back row. The
nods will never go down in Hansard—it is all very
good quality!
Mr Thomas: Can I raise the issue
of whether we need to extend this to all 11 million children?
Clearly, when the Act talks about such matters as education, training,
recreation, the contribution to society and social and economic
well-being—those are the words I was searching for earlier
from section 10 of the Act—that does embrace all children.
The fundamental issue is, are we trying to enhance the well-being
of all children in this country with this system, or are we trying
to target child abuse for the problems that have been well-rehearsed.
It may be possible with a narrower database, as it were, automatically
for there to be a cause for concern, because they would not be
on the database in the first place unless there was a cause for
concern in the sort of language that Dr Munro referred to earlier.
The consultation paper I mentioned earlier illustrates some of
the tangles that we get into here. As you collect so much information
on so many children you run the risk of losing the important cases
amongst the mass of other cases. It becomes very, very complicated,
and I echo the words about simplicity being important in this
area. It is very expensive. That is not my immediate concern,
but the resources must be phenomenally high. I really worry about
whether some of these arrangements will be workable in practice.
The latest proposals rely very heavily upon the consent of the
parent, up to age 12, and of the child beyond 12 up to 18. It
is very difficult with these very huge databases to explain what
is involved in giving consent to get multiple consent across a
wide range of organisations—the health area, the social
services area, education and so on. Keeping the consents up to
date will be very challenging. It is not a once-and-for-all consent;
it has to be something that is ongoing. What somebody may consent
when a child is four years old, may be very different when the
child is 14 years old. There are problems where there are conflicts
between parent and child. There are problems where we have different
names for children. Children often have different names and addresses.
We have a divorce rate in this country of something like 40% now
and people move address on a very, very regular basis—the
London turnover is about 40% every year or so. The problems of
keeping this database accurate and up to date, from my perspective
as the custodian of data protection concerns, are very challenging.
You only have to struggle with the concept of what is a cause
for concern if you have this very wide approach to all children.
If you narrow it down to a database just of those who are at some
sort of risk and have been identified as being at risk of threat
to their mental or physical health or well-being, then you do
not have to worry about an indicator of concern. You do not have
to have flags. Three flags will be complicated enough in itself.
You do not have to worry about these sorts of details and you
do not have to get the consent of the parents in the first place.
A lot of people think that everything, because of data protection,
has to be done with consent. There is a lot of misconception out
there: consent is not required for much sharing and processing
of information. If a statutory body is exercising a statutory
function, that is one example of where consent is not required
at all. The concerns we have raised consistently focus around
the scale of the ambition of these databases, being for all children.
If it was for very well and closely-defined objectives with a
narrower population, many of the problems we have been talking
about may disappear altogether.
Q351 Chairman: As the Information
Commissioner, do you think it is rather odd, whether you want
a bigger or a smaller system, that we do not have any identification
for children from birth? The earliest we get is at five, when
going to school and then a national insurance number at 16. We
do not have any data on a child with registration at birth, for
example. Is that not an anomaly, or are you not concerned about
it?
Mr Thomas: I am concerned. You
are raising major issues here, Chairman. There are various sorts
of numbers. The National Health number is not used to any great
extent. For what purpose does one need to have the registration?
For what purpose does one need to have such a number? If a compelling
case can be made out, then maybe one should go down that road.
So far the tradition in this country and other English-speaking
countries is not to go down the system of the state registering
and keeping tracks of every person from cradle to grave.
Q352 Chairman: Are trailblazers put
into practice with an up-and-running system? I have heard it is
only Lewisham.
Professor Cleaver: I do not know
how many are because I have come off the study now. It is now
five months old. I went to a meeting on Thursday with them, just
by chance, and I think they are probably more than Lewisham, but
I do not know. I think it does need to be looked at.
Chairman: If you know who has that information,
would you pass it on to us? Now we move to coverage of databases
and child indexes.
Q353 Jeff Ennis: This is supplementary
to the point you made about information and the intelligence gained
from the trailblazers, Professor Cleaver. It appears to me that
by and large a trailblazer or pathfinder, or whatever model the
Government is looking at, is so that we can learn from best practice
and make sure that we put the system in when it comes in on the
big bang that it is working effectively. It appears to me that
the trailblazers have not really delivered value for money to
a large extent in achieving that objective. I would have thought
that when we are looking at databases the main objective is to
separate the wheat from the chaff, to be able to identify information
within the whole amount of data available, which can act as a
signpost. It seems to me that currently we are looking at a system
that is adding to the chaff, rather than sorting the wheat from
the chaff. Do you agree with that, Professor Cleaver?
Professor Cleaver: When they were
established as IRT projects, they were not directed to set up
databases.
Q354 Jeff Ennis: Or information systems?
Professor Cleaver: Or information
systems particularly. They were to explore ways for improving
information-sharing. There was a steer away at the very beginning
from computerised systems, and except for one of the local authorities
most of them spent much of their time trying to improve the inter-agency
collaboration and trying to get that embedded in day-to-day practice.
As we know, it is very difficult to change the way people work.
A lot of effort went into that, and I think a lot of learning
came from that, and a lot of understanding of how difficult the
job is and how long a task it is to get it done. I would question
your very negative view of them; I think quite a lot has been
learnt. One of the other difficulties is that they were given
so little time, and the Government moved so fast. The learning
from it really has not been incorporated in as well as it could
be because things were changing so fast.
Q355 Jeff Ennis: Effectively, it
looks as though the eye has been taken off the ball, and we have
moved away from trying to make sure we share this information
sensitively and effectively; and now we are more concerned about
the structure of the data system or the information system. Is
that what you are telling me?
Professor Cleaver: I think that
is true. There is now suddenly a great desire for a computer-based
system, and I fear there is an assumption that this is going to
solve the problem, whereas I do not think that any of the trailblazers
were setting off thinking that a computerised system which would
hold all information about everybody was going to be the way forward.
Dr Munro: Saying that it would
help you take your eye off the ball is exactly the fear I have.
If children's services are told to develop this very expensive
and difficult database, and put their attention on developing
technology, they take their eye away from the need to improve
the skills and knowledge of the person who goes into the family
home to talk to the parents.
Mr Thomas: You talked about separating
the wheat from the chaff. If I can extend the metaphor, if you
are looking for a needle in a haystack I am not sure it is wise
to make the haystack even bigger. That is one of the points I
was trying to make earlier. I have not been directly involved
with the trailblazers, but my staff had conversations with half
a dozen of them, and my impression is that what they really valued
was the face-to-face or telephone contact they had with their
fellow professionals, which the trailblazing schemes have stimulated.
It is not so much what the technology turns out, but it is what
it has prompted them to do by way of dialogue with each other,
which I am sure is a sensible and welcome thing. That is no more
than the impression we have, but I hope that is an answer to your
questions.
Q356 Chairman: The trailblazers were
very much about better communication, and it was set on this IT
mission at the beginning, and so there is very good stuff that
will be available on that communication between human-beings phoning
each other and meeting each other in a more systematic way.
Professor Cleaver: A lot of the
report is about how they improved collaborative working, because
that is what they focused on primarily. Some of them did not focus
at all on getting a database; they just did not do it.
Q357 Chairman: How quickly can that
information be shared as good practice, and who is responsible?
Professor Cleaver: I do not know
who would be responsible for it. It is there in the public domain.
Q358 Chairman: Presumably it is the
Minister for Children, is it?
Professor Cleaver: Is it?
Q359 Chairman: I have to tell you
that we are in totally new territory—and I am very glad
that the witnesses today have been very gentle with us because
we are very used to education and skills, but we are finding our
way in this new territory. It is a whole new set of acronyms for
us, and this is our first inquiry. We do know that we are the
scrutiny committee, and this is why we are conducting this inquiry,
so we are very interested that is good practice coming out of
several million pounds spent on trailblazers, that it be shared
amongst all the local authorities and all localities in order
to improve what we have. All three of you are saying that rather
than having some complex IT system, what you need is better-trained
professionals and better interface between those professionals.
That is what you are saying, is it not?
Professor Cleaver: Yes. Richard
is, I think.
Mr Thomas: From a different perspective,
Chairman. My concern is to make sure we do not have excessive
or inaccurate or unnecessary processing of personal information,
so I come at these issues from a different angle. We are meeting
somewhere in the middle.
| 
