Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360 - 376)

MONDAY 24 JANUARY 2005

PROFESSOR HEDY CLEAVER, MR RICHARD THOMAS AND DR EILEEN MUNRO

  Q360  Chairman: You have reminded me of a very early LSE lecture I had about information and needles in haystacks. Apparently the Intelligence Service in the United States knew exactly that Pearl Harbour was going to be bombed, yet there was so much information that it got lost in the information flow. We are talking about the same thing, are we not?

  Mr Thomas: There is a far more recent example, the Soham murders. Data protection was quite wrongly blamed for what went wrong there. The Bichard Inquiry entirely vindicated data protection. The truth was that the Humberside Police had a lot of information but did not always know where to best find it.

  Q361  Jeff Ennis: In your written evidence, Dr Munro, you had four main concerns, one of which encapsulates the problem we have, which is your concern no.3: "The proposed policy includes the power to breach confidentiality about low-level concerns and concerns unrelated to abusive parenting; and this will be detrimental to relationships with families." This is the problem we have. How can we ensure that children are protected at the same time as enhancing family support? It seems that we are struggling with two extremes in the parameters, as it were.

  Dr Munro: I think you have to be clear that supporting families includes treating them with respect, and taking it that on the whole they have their child's best interests at heart far more powerfully than any politician or professional. We also need within children's services, which are basically within a supportive attitude, a more suspicious and coercive element at certain times. The more that we can spell it out, both for professionals and for families, where the threshold is that we will stop treating them with respect and start to challenge them, the better it is. The idea that there is a hazy scenario of dodgy families that would not co-operate but which are not abusive, needs to be spelt out, because if they exist I would like to know more about the nature of the problems that they are creating. Unless everybody concerned is clear about what point we criticise a parent, then having a major observation of what they are doing will feel frightening to parents, and it will be threatening.

  Q362  Helen Jones: As I understood Professor Cleaver's evidence, there had not been much emphasis on IT in the trailblazer areas, but there was a lot of information-sharing and then perhaps setting up of IT. Do you have any information to give us on how parents reacted to the new systems? What affected their responses?

  Professor Cleaver: There was quite a lot of consultation and information putting-out to parents and children and young people, and most of them did it innovatively, because they had to tell families that this was all going to be happening. They spent a lot of time putting stuff through in all sorts of different ways. They did quite a lot of consultation with the children, again exciting consultation—they had play-acting and what it would be like, et cetera. The children, on the whole, thought information should be shared about them if it was going to improve the services they had, but they wanted to be consulted and informed. They did not want the information shared with bad people, and they were very worried about databases because they felt that they could be hacked into, and unlike Neolithic people like myself—

  Q363  Helen Jones: By them?

  Professor Cleaver: They were saying things like they could get into the Pentagon database so you could definitely get into East Sussex. They just did not believe all those wise words of the Government, saying it would be secure. They just did not believe it and they wanted very little information kept on those databases because they were frightened that paedophiles would find out, particularly if there was a flag of concern. You can identify vulnerable children, because there was the name, the age of the child and the school they went to, so that you could go and visit, and there was a concern; so you knew immediately that this was a vulnerable child—"goody, goody". They were very concerned about that. They wanted agencies to talk to each other, if they asked them first.

  Q364  Helen Jones: That is very interesting, particularly the children's view on it, because in my experience they know far more about IT systems than the likes of us. Mr Thomas, you mentioned earlier your concerns about the accuracy of information held, and following on from what Professor Cleaver has told us, about the security of the system. Can you tell the Committee your thoughts on how any such system can be kept accurate and secure?

  Mr Thomas: There are a lot of questions there, but on security there are standards in the IS/IT industry, and one of the data protection principles is that personal information must be kept secure; so one can have appropriate levels of security. The point I want to make here is that it is fundamental to get it right in this area. We have had complaints in this area of social services, where it seemed that everybody in a local authority department knew that a complaint had been made that a parent was abusing the child, and that was an example of the gossip spreading too far. In terms of accuracy and keeping up to date, I have given some examples of some of the logistical problems when you have these massive numbers and just keeping track of people. Let me give you a graphic example of where circumstances changed and yet the records were not kept up to date. A case was brought to our attention when a child was overheard in the school playground to say—and please forgive the language—"my Dad bonked me last night". The social services through the school quite rightly investigated that. They carried out a full investigation and discovered that a fair had been held in the town; the father had won an inflatable hammer and had said to his children, "bonk, bonk, bonk". As far as social services were concerned, that was the end of the matter. They were quite clear that there was no concern at all, but the records of that incident relating to the child, the sibling, the parents and to the grandparents were kept on another system and were never amended or deleted until it came to light some time later. That is an example of the harm that can happen where records are not scrupulously kept up to date. Another example came to our office some time ago where a father was alleged to have been abusing his child. Another person was then prosecuted for that matter and the father was entirely innocent, and yet the records were not updated, and that was still there against that particular parent's name. It is fundamental not just to keep track of the names and addresses, but to keep track of the changes of circumstances as the various processes move forward.

  Q365  Chairman: While we have you in front of us, Richard—and we would not like you to have to face us twice, we are also looking at prison education. One of the matters that comes up all the time is whether prisoners can use the Internet for educational purposes. One group of witnesses told us absolutely that there are secure systems where there is no danger of prisoners accessing pornography or getting in touch with victims and so on. There is another group that said there is no system that is foolproof. Which camp would you fall into?

  Mr Thomas: I am not going to answer the question fully, Chairman. I need to have notice of that question! I would say no more than that it is my role as Commissioner to be somewhat sceptical, somewhat concerned, and to make sure the systems do what they are intended to do. If one has clarity about the purposes and security arrangements, one then has to make sure that they are actually delivered in practice.

  Q366  Chairman: What is your interpretation of the 2004 Act, section 12? One interpretation is that there will be a database, and we are on this road to ruin—we have got to have it because it is in the Act. There is another interpretation that there is a power to develop a database. Which is it?

  Mr Thomas: I read section 12 as a lawyer, Chairman—forgive me—but I think it is talking about the Secretary of State "may" do this, that or the other. There is no duty on the Secretary of State. There is nothing which says that this has to happen. Indeed, there was very considerable scope and flexibility to decide what, if anything, is going to happen in this area. I have welcomed the fact that the primary legislation has become a little more precise than in the original clause 8 of the Bill; we have more elaboration now on the face of the Act. As always in these sorts of situations, what comes out will be the content of the regulations. They have yet to be made. I hope that we will see some draft regulations in due course. I have had the same debate vis-a"-vis identity cards. I am bound to say that the safeguards and arrangements on the Identity Cards Bill that is currently going through Parliament are a great deal more elaborate and discussed, and more fully articulated, than what we have seen on the face of the Children Act. I do have some concerns, frankly, that as this Bill went through Parliament all the attention was on smacking, and these provisions got almost no attention at all. I do think there are some issues and debates to be had amongst the population and within society at large about these proposals, about which there is still not very much detail on the face of the Act.

  Chairman: I do get the feelings sometimes in these hearings that we are conducting a rather late pre-legislative inquiry. There is now one last section on the resource implications of the ISA programmes.

  Q367  Paul Holmes: Professor Cleaver, from your study of the initial trailblazers, is there any evidence about the cost of setting up a proper system in any given area?

  Professor Cleaver: One of the concerns they have is that the funding would have to continue. I do not think they are expecting it at the very generous rate that it was, but you would have to fund first of all somebody to keep the databases up to date. That is absolutely essential, otherwise you have rubbish information on them, as we have just heard, which can be very dangerous. You need to have some funding for the lead professional, if you are going to have a lead professional. There are huge funding issues, and you need funding to continue the training, because a lot of them have invested a great deal but know it will have to continue, even in the trailblazers; but for the non- trailblazers they have not started. They have done some work towards it, but it has got major cost implications. Having said that, if you removed the database and said you would not go for databases, it has still thrown up the fact that if we want greater inter-agency collaboration, we will have to fund it.

  Q368  Paul Holmes: What were the generous amounts initially for the trailblazers?

  Professor Cleaver: They had £1 million for local authorities or groupings of local authorities over a year to do it.

  Q369  Paul Holmes: If you multiplied that up to cover the whole country, instead of trailblazers, what—

  Professor Cleaver: It would be a lot of money! It is 135 non- trailblazers.

  Q370  Paul Holmes: You said in some cases it would be groupings.

  Professor Cleaver: Yes, there were pairs. I do not have a calculator and would have to work it out.

  Q371  Chairman: There has been an estimate of £1 billion.

  Professor Cleaver: Okay.

  Q372  Jeff Ennis: Do you think that ISA systems will represent a good investment, or would money be better spent elsewhere within children's services?

  Dr Munro: I think I have answered that very clearly already, have I not? This is the wrong place to be looking for improving the quality of services.

  Q373  Chairman: I want this on the record: I have in my notes that you said in an article published in Political Quarterly where you said the real problem is with limited funding of services for early intervention. "Adequate funding would do far more to improve outcomes for children than creating an intrusive, expensive tracking system to reveal what parents and professionals already know, that there are more children needing help than services available."

  Dr Munro: Yes, I put it quite well, did I not?

  Mr Thomas: Frankly, I do not think I can personally answer Mr Ennis's question. Can I just use the opportunity to make one final point, if you are winding up now? I am conscious that we have all been somewhat negative this afternoon. These are desperately serious issues and we must be as positive as possible. I am aware that within those concerned with the welfare of children, there is a lot of misunderstanding, misconception and anxiety about so-called legal and other constraints, including data protection, on the sharing of information. I want to make it very clear—and I have talked already to such bodies as the Association of Social Service Directors—that the more guidance we can give to people about the legal framework, about what can be done within the data protection environment, the better. I am very, very committed to making data protection as simple as possible, and to clarify the guidance in this very, very important area. If nothing else, I want to end on that very positive note. We are going to do what we can to explain to all the childcare professionals what they can do in this area, a lot more than many would perhaps think.

  Q374  Chairman: Your use of plain English helps a great deal in that.

  Mr Thomas: Thank you, Chairman.

  Professor Cleaver: The enthusiasm in the trailblazers for greater inter-agency collaboration was across the board; they all thought that this was the way forward. An awful lot of work had been done that was very good, and I think that will and should help improve the outcomes for all children, not only the very vulnerable who were on child protection registers but also children who are children in need as defined by the Act and children who are not even at that level of concern—children within schools, if there is greater sharing of information. As I say, there is a great enthusiasm for greater sharing of information when they are working together with the co-operation of parents. You have to have parents and children in there.

  Q375  Chairman: Is there anything you think we have missed in terms of our questions?

  Dr Munro: I have a concern about the social work workforce, because I am a social worker. You do need to remember that until the mid 1990s children and families social work was the elite branch, which was highly competitive. If you went to any children and families team in London you would have found people there who had been in post for 10 or 20 years, and you had these really experienced, competent teams. They have all been driven out. Unless you can understand why you drove them out, and get them back in, I do not think we are going to capture the skills that we need to make the system function properly.

  Q376  Chairman: This has been an excellent session. All of us who are experienced Members of Parliament do know what has been happening in social work over the years. I am always amazed when I talk to my health visitors and social workers particularly, professions very much at the sharp end and dealing with human misery and challenging circumstances, that we do not have better human resources bases where people can be moved to different duties and then back. Large numbers of social workers at the front line have such a job that they do need a very careful human resource approach to developing their profession.

  Dr Munro: They do.

  Chairman: It has been a very good session for us. Thank you for us being gentle with us, being newcomers on the block! I am grateful to all the witnesses today, and the nodders and the shakers in the gallery! Will you please keep in contact and allow us to contact you again because we want to make this a good report? Thank you.





 
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