UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 40-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Education and Skills Committee

 

 

Every Child Matters

 

 

Monday 29 November 2004

LORD LAMING OF TEWIN

MR PHILIP COLLINS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-76

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Monday 29 November 2004

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr Nick Gibb

Paul Holmes

Mr Kerry Pollard

Jonathan Shaw

________________

Witness: Lord Laming of Tewin, a Member of the House of Lords, Chairman, Victoria Climbié Inquiry, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Lord Laming, welcome. I understand that apart from the Royal Family, the House of Lords is the one category of people that the Select Committee cannot ask to come and you cannot refuse; so it is a privilege when a member of the Upper House comes to give evidence. We have had several members of the House of Lords give evidence to the Committee, and we are always grateful.

Lord Laming: Had I known that nugget of information at an earlier stage, my decision might have been different, but I am really very glad to be here! I should like to say how much I appreciate the work that you and your Committee are doing on this subject, because it is vitally important that as a society we try and get this right, to protect the well-being of children. I think that the journey from Victoria Climbié to the full implementation of the Children Act is a very long journey, and it will need a lot of effort by a number of people. The work of your Committee is likely to make a very useful contribution to maintaining the momentum, so I am very grateful that your Committee has decided to do this work.

Q2 Chairman: Thank you very much for that. I should like to ask you some general questions about where we are today in terms of the Children Act. When you undertook your nearly year-long inquiry Victoria Climbié tragedy, did you have any notion that as you produced your report, simultaneously - synchronised - would be the introduction of Every Child Matters?

Lord Laming: No, Chairman, not at all. When I did the inquiry I was determined that the inquiry would be independent of government and indeed every other organisation with an interest in the subject; that it would be transparent and fair, but also that it would be robust, because I did not want to spend time looking at a tragedy of this kind without the hope that something good would come out of it. It was only after the report was published that the Government told me that they had in mind producing a Green Paper Every Child Matters and they very kindly asked me if I would be willing to assist them in some parts of that report, and I was very happy to do so. I think it is a very helpful contribution to what we hope will be a more effective service for children and families in the future.

Q3 Chairman: You were more concerned obviously with child protection matters.

Lord Laming: Yes.

Q4 Chairman: The Government wanted to spread their Green Paper to a much broader area of children's issues. Were you fully engaged in that? Did you know that it was going to be more broadly conceived?

Lord Laming: First of all, let me give you my perspective of the situation, which is that I was not preoccupied with child protection; the services that I looked at were preoccupied with child protection at the expense of the well-being of children generally. I hope that the report that I produced was a report which encouraged all of the services and the Government to look at the well-being of children generally and not to be in the vice-like grip of child protection. Therefore, in my discussions with Government Ministers about the Green Paper, my modest contribution to that, if it was of any value, was to encourage Ministers to look at the well-being of children generally, of which child protection is a very small part. If we do not start by identifying children who have needs of one kind or another, and only wait to act if there is blood on the carpet or terrible bruising, then we get it all wrong. We have to start at the earlier stage. Victoria was referred to social services under the Children Act on the second day she was in this country, and if they had responded to her as a child, new to this country, who did not speak any English, in a homeless situation - if they had responded to her as a child in need rather than waiting for the label of "child protection" to be put round her neck, then maybe all the other departments and agencies that were involved, would not have needed to be involved, and maybe Victoria would be alive today. I was therefore concerned that we get away from a narrow preoccupation with child protection and actually get into what I believe the 1989 Children Act is all about, which is promoting the welfare and well-being of children.

Q5 Chairman: Lord Laming, time has moved on; the Green Paper has come through into legislation and you can see various developments; you have heard what Ministers have said at the dispatch boxes, and you have heard the debates in both Houses: what is your perspective on your starting point and where the Government have got to now in terms of implementation?

Lord Laming: Chairman, the Victoria Climbié inquiry was a thoroughly dispiriting experience, and I cannot emphasise that enough. I thought that in respect of all of the agencies that were involved with this little girl - as I say from the second day she was in this country - despite their knowledge of her and their involvement with her, she suffered appallingly, and a dreadful death. I am very pleased that a number of actions have been taken by the Government, which I think they deserve great credit for. First, the Government accepted in principle every one of the 108 recommendations, and they made a very constructive response. There is a document that is published about their response to the 108 recommendations. Secondly, the Home Secretary accepted all of the recommendations affecting the police, and that is reflected in police guidance; but, more particularly, the well-being of children appears for the first time in the Home Secretary's priority list for the police. Thirdly, the Prime Minister, as you know, for the first time appointed a Minister for Children and Families. Fourthly, services that had hitherto been located elsewhere in Whitehall departments were substantially re-located into one department, the Department for Education and Skills, thereby trying to produce a more co-ordinated response to children. It also gave an example to local authorities and others. Then the Government produced this consultation paper, Every Child Matters, which I think is a very ambitious document when read in its full meaning. Unfortunately, people do tend to get hooked up on narrow organisational matters rather than looking at the big picture. They then produced the Children Act, which became an act last week, which has again a number of profound changes within it. Finally, there will be a new system of inspection, where all of the Government inspectorates will be looking at the way in which these services are operating on the ground. I think that by any standards, and certainly in my experience of inquiries and inquiry reports over the years, that is a very constructive and very ambitious response to the Victoria Climbié Inquiry report. I think that the Government deserves great credit for that, and I am very happy to pay them credit for it.

Chairman: Lord Laming, thank you very much for those introductory remarks. I now want to move to some more specific questions. We will keep coming back to the broader picture.

Q6 Mr Pollard: Lord Laming, you have just said that the Government accepted all of the recommendations, and you have rightly praised them for that. What about implementation; how is that going? Are you satisfied with progress so far, and are there any immediate areas of concern that you still have?

Lord Laming: I have large concerns about implementation because one of the matters that concerned me most in the Victoria Climbié Inquiry was the failure of the services to implement the 1989 Act. When you think that an act of Parliament had been in operation for a decade, in my view the will of Parliament, to which I attach a lot of importance, had not been achieved. As I say in the report, the gap between the legislation and the practice guidance issued from Whitehall, and the service delivery at the front door across the country, was far too wide and needs to be narrowed. I see the steps that the Government has taken, which are very, very important steps and a solid foundation on which to build the beginning of the next phase; however, the test is: what is the quality of services delivered at the front door by any one of these agencies across the whole of England, whether on a housing estate in Preston or a rural community in Cornwall? It seems to me that we need a greater certainty that the child will be at the centre of the process, that the well-being of the child will be paramount. That is something that we have not got, and we cannot rely that we have it everywhere. Implementation will be the test, and what the Government now puts in place gives us encouragement, but there is a long way to go.

Q7 Mr Pollard: Is the rate of change fast enough for what you envisaged originally?

Lord Laming: On the second day that Victoria was alive in this country, she was referred to social services as a child in need, and that authority was Ealing. Last week or the week before, I noticed that the Commission for Social Care Inspection published a list of local authorities across the country with stars attached to them, and I could not help but notice that Ealing was singled out as an authority that had no stars at all for its service to children; but, worse than that, it was moving down, getting worse. I regard this as pretty drastic. Do I think the speed of change is good enough? The answer is that I do not. I think that there is a long way to go. I began, Chairman, by saying that I appreciate the work of your Committee in maintaining the momentum, and I really do think this is very important because, frankly, we can all sit here and have a shared concern about children, but the issue is whether or not there is another Victoria being referred this minute to an agency, getting the same lack of response that Victoria got. There is urgency about it and there is a need to be absolutely determined. From my contact, I am sure that the Minister of Children has this in mind, but she needs all the encouragement that she can get.

Q8 Mr Pollard: Are you confident that there is a reduced risk now for all children as a result of what has gone on, or is Ealing an example that you feel is reflected nationwide?

Lord Laming: I have to say that I am not confident. There is just a long way to go, and that is why there is a great deal of urgency and why there needs to be a great deal of determination in these matters. In my discussions with local authorities, health authorities and police forces up and down the country I pick up a very mixed picture. There are some authorities that I think are doing very much better, which is reflected in this document from the Commission for Inspection. Some authorities have yet to get the message, frankly, and that message needs to be got to them pretty quickly.

Q9 Mr Pollard: Social workers' caseloads generally are enormous, and in some cases their work is seen as being fire-fighting rather than being proactive, being reactive rather than proactive. Is there a cause for concern in recruitment and retention for example?

Lord Laming: Yes, there is a cause for concern about recruitment and retention. I actually have a huge regard for front-line social workers - I was one myself, and I have a huge regard for what they do. I think that we under-estimate the skills that they have to employ day by day, but we under-estimate the emotional tone that goes with the work that they have to do because they have to meet people in very distressing circumstances. It would be inhuman for them not to be disturbed by the quality of life that some people have and the distress that people experience. That is why I believe that these social workers need not only great support in what they do, but also high-calibre leadership that provides them with the right kind of direction. One of the difficulties in the Victoria Climbié Inquiry was that it was the front-line social workers that were identifying ways in which they could defend themselves, and I think the duty is placed on the authority, not on the individual social worker. It is for the authority to make sure that every front-line social worker has good supervision and proper support, and that managers know what is happening at the front door. That, in my view, is what managers are paid for. Until we are sure that the performance of managers will be evaluated by the quality of service at the front door rather than by glossy brochures and all the fine words spoken from headquarters, then we cannot be satisfied that social workers are being properly helped to do the job they have to do.

Q10 Mr Pollard: Is parenting an issue that we need to pay some attention to, as part of this partnership?

Lord Laming: It is extraordinary, Chairman, is it not, that we have the lowest birth rate that we have ever had, and in relation to the rest of the demographic changes in society the per centage of children in our society gets smaller and smaller? In those circumstances, you would think there is no excuse for us not to value every child and make sure that every child feels valued. For the vast majority of children, proper care is best delivered through their parents, and I note that the Government has in mind developing a range of services that are aimed at supporting patients and enabling them to fulfil their responsibilities to their children. I welcome all of those initiatives. We have clearly got to get the message across that becoming a parent is probably the most responsible thing that any humanbeing can do; and, secondly, that it is a life-long commitment. We do not now have the extended family that was so prevalent in my parents' and grandparents' age, where people were born and lived most of their lives in a network of family relationships. It is most important that society - and this is not nanny-ing but society being responsive to the needs of the community - ensures that parents are supported and that children have the best possible start to life. It seems a truism, but we must not forget that children are our future. Therefore, if we want to live in a healthy, positive society, we must ensure that children are given the best possible means to fulfil their potential and become useful and constructive members of the community and good parents.

Q11 Mr Pollard: Risk is part of everyday life.

Lord Laming: Yes.

Q12 Mr Pollard: Are we getting the balance right between what risk is acceptable and what risk we think we can protect children against?

Lord Laming: Not one of us can be expected to foresee or to prevent a sudden explosion of anger that leads to a child being injured. That kind of unexpected, explosive behaviour can happen even in situations where it is least expected. However, what we can get right and what we must get right is that when a child is identified as possibly having needs, a proper assessment is made by gathering the information contained in each of the departments around the place so that we get the best possible picture. We should not only assess need but we should assess risk. I think that this can to be done. To be blunt, although I admire what social workers, doctors and police officers do - and I hope that I have conveyed that - I do not think that this is rocket science. What is necessary is a process. The process of social work has a beginning, then a step which is about gathering information, a step about assessment, a step about action to be taken, and a step about review and monitoring. That is a logical process, and it is the job of managers to see that in every case that is properly attended to. We had huge difficulty in the Victoria Climbié Inquiry in getting files, reports and documentation. If you tried to read the documentation, you would struggle to see any kind of logical process in it. It is inexcusable, in this day and age of computerisation, that information is not properly managed and handled. Until we do that and are sure we are doing it, we will not have dealt with risk adequately.

Q13 Chairman: Lord Laming, the authority you mentioned within which this child tragically died does not seem to be responding to the challenge of improving the kind of services it provides to children.

Lord Laming: Not from their evidence, I have to say, to the inquiry, because if you go back and review that you would think that great changes had taken place; but if you look at the evidence of this document, of social care inspection, you will see that they are not only one of ten authorities that has no stars, but one of two that is moving downwards. Victoria died in February 2000: it is nearly five years since Victoria died. It leads me to suspect, to put it at its minimum, that they either do not have the will or they do not have the capacity to change, and I do not know how long society should give authorities that cannot demonstrate they are looking to the well-being of children in this way.

Q14 Chairman: As you know, it is new territory for us, getting into the social services area; we are usually in our comfort zone of education, and this is a whole new world for us. Certainly in terms of education under-performance, one would have expected the inspector of both the local education authority and the specific school - that there would be some real improvement over five years, and this Committee would want to know something about it. You are saying that for nearly five years the authority involved in this tragic death has not improved.

Lord Laming: According to this report, which I accept.

Chairman: Certainly, as Chairman of this Committee I find that quite astounding.

Q15 Jonathan Shaw: Lord Laming, you have mentioned your career in social work, and we know that you were the Chief Social Services Inspector for a number of years. You told the Committee that when you were undertaking the inquiry it was a thoroughly dispiriting experience. When you were undertaking your inquiry, did you ever reflect upon your previous role as the Chief Inspector, and think, "we did not do enough here"?

Lord Laming: Absolutely.

Q16 Jonathan Shaw: When you respond to that, can you also do so in the context of private fostering?

Lord Laming: Let me deal with your first question, which I take to be a very important question. I had been a director of social services for 20 years before I became Chief Inspector. I did not think that the department that I was director of social services for was a particularly outstanding authority. I was more aware of our shortcomings than our achievements, and that was the spur to make me go on and keep trying to do better. However, when I became Chief Inspector I of course had the opportunity to look at 149 other authorities, and it made me realise that certain things I had taken for granted as being givens in an organisation, I was not entitled to take for granted in some organisations. There were some that I thought were outstandingly good, and this report reflects that there are some authorities that are well run and have three stars; they know what they are doing and support their staff and deserve great credit. There were not enough of those authorities, however, and what is more there were some that caused me great concern. While I was Chief Inspector we had a number of authorities on what we called special measures, where they were being scrutinised on a regular basis. When I did the Victoria Climbié Inquiry I did find it a very dispiriting experience, and of course if you have been in the position of being Chief Inspector, I think it would be unreasonable not to think why these authorities have behaved in this way. All that has made me even more determined to try to persuade others to take more robust action with authorities that are not fulfilling their responsibilities to children in the way that they should. I hope very much that others that come after me - and I believe there is evidence that they are doing much better than I did - will do well, and I wish them great success. Private fostering is a feature in our society. It is a difficult area because most parents at some time in their lives make arrangements for their children to be looked after by another family from time to time. That is altogether different from what might be called a permanent or semi-permanent arrangement. As I understand it, the Government is doing its best to strike a balance between not wanting to intrude in normal family arrangements, but at the same time making sure that the regulations relating to private fostering are brought up to date. It is not an easy area.

Q17 Jonathan Shaw: The most comprehensive inquiry into children staying away from home was your predecessor, Sir William Utting. It said that this group of children were amongst the most vulnerable in our society.

Lord Laming: Yes.

Q18 Jonathan Shaw: Particularly those children coming from West Africa such as Victoria Climbié; and it recommended a registration scheme. You endorsed that. You said in the report that you had nothing further to add to what Sir William said. However, the Government has been criticised in some quarters for not going far enough and implementing a full registration scheme, particularly when they do not know how many children are privately fostered because they have not collected the figures, and have not done since you were Chief Inspector; they stopped collating because it was an impossible task. Is that correct?

Lord Laming: All of that is right. I have to say that private fostering did not feature very strongly in the Victoria Climbié Inquiry because there was never a formal private fostering arrangement made as far as Victoria was concerned; it was all rather different. You could not describe it as private fostering. Therefore, on the basis of the evidence that came to the inquiry, I did not feel that I could say more than I did say, which is that I thought Sir William Utting did a very good job, and that there was nothing more that I could add. However - and this is not me wanting in any way to belittle the seriousness of the situation, but more to say that I do think private fostering is a more difficult area to regulate than most others. With child-minding, it is easier; but the child is not as exposed in child-minding because he goes home to his parents in the evening. In private fostering they can be there for months, as you know. I think that Sir William Utting did a really good job; the issues are still there; and the Government should address them.

Q19 Mr Gibb: You talk about poor practice by professionals, and you have emphasised time and again in your evidence this afternoon that you are concerned about the quality of leadership in the local authority concerned, and you cite the number of stars and decline in quality. Is that not the fundamental issue here; that it is about the quality of management in our local authorities? I wonder, therefore, how the measures that have been proposed by the Government and in the Children Act can address that fundamental problem that we have in a lot of our local authorities - management that is not really up to scratch.

Lord Laming: Can I say that as far as Victoria Climbié was concerned, it was not just local authorities; there were four local authorities, but she was twice in hospitals - and to give one minor example of what was wrong there, the second hospital that admitted Victoria could not access any information from when she was in the first hospital, even though it was only a few miles up the road. She was referred to two specialist child-protection teams of the police; she was referred to a centre run by the NSPCC. This is not about local authority bashing or social work bashing; in my view it is about, more generally, the quality of leadership and management in the public services. I think that public service has become much more complicated in recent years: we expect much more of them; the tasks are more complicated, and I think that in the Health Service and other services - not all by any means - the quality of management has not kept pace with the demands of the job. If you just take information-gathering, information-recording and information-exchange, you can see how some of the authorities have not kept pace with modern technology and the way in which, as society, we can handle information so much better. It is the quality of leadership, but we ought to make plain that we expect of leaders not only a clear sense of direction but also a clear line of accountability, and that we expect them to be judged on the services delivered at the front door.

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 are 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 ten 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 ten 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 of 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 Climbie 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.

Q40 Chairman: Lord Laming, there are some problems in terms of the ability to remove information from a database, are there not? In terms of an allegation; if someone is arrested for something but the case is not proceeded with, that is a difficult area, is it not?

Lord Laming of Tewin: It is a difficult area. When I employed staff to work with children I had to have a police check on all of them. Of course information came from the police about individuals. I am familiar with the difficulties. On the other hand, it does seem to me that for the most part these matters can be handled if, as a society, we follow practices that are open and defensible. What I do not think is defensible is to hold information in secret and to pass information undercover and pretend that we are not passing that information. I do not want to be part of a society that operates in that way. If at the end of the day that means that some information is not passed because it was information that should not have been kept, it should have been removed from the database, and something happens, I suppose that is the price that we pay. The greater good of society, in my view, is served by being open and being transparent. These are difficult situations, but I would like to have certain principles established as to how they are handled.

Q41 Chairman: Something I want to touch on before we lose the opportunity, I have a particular interest in the whole notion of a Minister for Children and a Children's Commissioner representing Huddersfield. Brian Jackson who was from Huddersfield - you may know Brian Jackson's work - he campaigned most of his life for a Minister for Children. What I want to ask you now is: how do you view the Children's Commissioner and his present incarnation? How is the role developing in terms of how you see it?

Lord Laming of Tewin: If there is to be a Children's Commissioner - and there is now to be a Children's Commissioner - I think it is very important that the Children's Commissioner is seen to have a distinctive role which is separate from everybody else's role. It needs to be different. I do not think that we want a Children's Commissioner who is there to second guess the decisions of social workers or police officers or health workers. I think that we want a Children's Commissioner who is a genuine advocate for children who is seen as looking at the proper development of all children, making sure that, as a society, we value children - which sometimes I have to say I have had doubts about - but that we value children and that we recognise that in a changing world children have a voice which needs to be listened to and children have a perspective which we should take seriously. I would like to see a Children's Commissioner as not somebody who is spending their time questioning how individual cases have been handled because there are appeal mechanisms in all of these services. There are review mechanisms. There are opportunities for reconsideration. Of course people get things wrong, but there are methods that Parliament has put in place to look at those again. There are complaints procedures, there is the ombudsman, there is the Court of Appeal, there are all manner of things, rightly so. I would like to see a Children's Commissioner as being somebody who has that distinctive role of being a real advocate for children. Whether it is about playing fields or whether it is about obesity or whether it is about drugs or bullying or whatever it may be, anything that interferes with the good development of children ought to be something for the Children's Commissioner. The Children's Commissioner ought to be a voice for children. Therefore, the Children's Commissioner will, in my view, need to be somebody who is credible with children and young people, who has the machinery in place to know about children and young people, to listen to children and young people and then to involve children and young people.

Q42 Chairman: Norway or Finland picked out a Children's Commissioner who was a disc jockey. Do you envisage someone with a profile pushing up the role of children, perhaps Terry Wogan taking over the role? What sort of person do you think would be the right person to run this Children's Commissioner? Is it a pop idol?

Lord Laming of Tewin: I think, Chairman, I have not studied the Children's Commissioner process in other countries and I could not comment on that. What I would say is that the Children's Commissioner should not be somebody like me: old, grey and a long distance behind them.

Q43 Chairman: You mean with a distinguished record in services? What I am posing is a serious question. A high profile person, getting into newspapers regularly, getting in all the media. Profiling people ‑ Terry Wogan was something of a joke, but you know exactly what I mean - somebody who has not a lot of fear, a high profile sort of person, a media person rather than a distinguished public servant.

Lord Laming of Tewin: It is not the media bit that interests me terribly. What interests me is their credibility with children and young people. What interests me is their ability to have a genuine and easy relationship with children and young people, to speak their language, to understand what it is like to be a young person in society, to be somebody who children and young people will want to communicate with.

Q44 Paul Holmes: In the discussion about establishing the database it is easy to lose sight perhaps of the fact that the database is simply a tool to allow the sharing of information. How do we get down to the practicalities of getting that integrated information used properly? For example, with the move to create extended schools and children's centres who is in charge? Who is in the driving seat there? Is it the director of Social Services or is it the local education authority, although given the Queen's Speech it seems they are going to become a dead duck anyway?

Lord Laming of Tewin: I think that that is a hugely difficult question. I am sorry to come back to this, but you realise that new technology and computerisation is not one of my fortes. That is why I was extremely careful in the Victoria Climbié Report to say that there should be pilots because I think that these are really difficult issues. I am persuaded by the people who know about databases that you can design a database to do almost anything in the management, the gathering and the management and the analysis and the transmission of information. It is not the technology that is the problem. The problem is defining exactly what we want this database to do, who can input to it and who can access it: they are the real issues. It seems to me that if we make this a local authority wide database we miss out on a very important feature of our society which is geographical mobility. Geographical mobility is a factor in our society, more prevalent in some parts of the country than in others, but if you look at some of the Ofsted reports they have highlighted how many children today are not on any school roll. If a child leaves a school because the family is moving, unless the parents tell the school which school the child is going to next, or when they contact a new school tell them where they have come from, that information is lost. If they choose not to tell the school where they are going to, not to register the child in the new home, their new address, then that child is lost to the education system. This cannot be right. 10,000 children not on the school roll: it is unacceptable. It seems to me that what we have to recognise is that in a society in which geographical mobility is not only a reality but is likely to be a bigger reality in future, we have to have databases that can track children as they move through society. Children have rights as well as adults. We need to make sure that children are valued as essential members of our community among adults.

Q45 Paul Holmes: Moving away from the database, which you said if done right can allow all that to happen, but we are still back to the question of management and how we shift. At the moment we have these very segregated departments, different managements. We saw in Finland the example of the campus where you had a health centre, social services and school all on the same site within a few yards of each other. If we do that in England where we are coming from the totally opposite side? How do we get the management of the hospital trust, the director of Social Services and the director of Education, who is in the driving seat according to the Children's Bill in making this happen?

Lord Laming of Tewin: That is certainly a key question. What it means is it is no use having 150 different databases that do not talk to each other. What struck me - I am sorry to give this example but it is one that struck me - I was recently in China doing something for some services for children in China and I needed some money. I went to a bank and I put my card into the hole in the wall and out came the money in Chinese currency from my bank account. If we can do that, we can manage the movement of children across our society in this country.

Q46 Chairman: Last question: do you want an integrated service for children? How are we going to really bind it in? How is it going to be managed properly? There is a large emphasis on good management; I absolutely agree with you. How are we going to have good management in a new organisation mainly based, but not entirely, on local authority areas where, in a sense, you do not have fully compliant partners? Certainly, GPs I think are excluded from the recommendations, the hospital trusts and even the primary healthcare trusts are not fully integrated into the process. How are we going to overcome that?

Lord Laming of Tewin: I think that it is a huge disadvantage that we do not have coterminosity of boundaries in many parts of the country. I think that is a huge complication, but what I am hoping is that the local safeguarding board, which will require on a statutory basis the key services to be represented at the board, will be the beginning. It is a long journey. We need to renew progress as we go along. We will be at the beginning of ensuring that there is much better cooperation about information, about children, exchanging information and much more collaborative working, so that it is not just passing the parcel over from one service to another. It is actually genuinely people working together at a local level. It can be done. Recently I visited a Social Services department referral and intake team where there was a health visitor in the team who did not operate as a social worker but who formed an essential liaison between the social work team, accident and emergency, the child paediatric services, the GP services, the local health visitor services, that worked absolutely splendidly I thought. These models need to be developed and they need to be spread across the country. I am sure it can be done.

Q47 Chairman: Lord Laming, it has been a privilege for us to have you as a witness to this Committee. Thank you very much.

Lord Laming of Tewin: Chairman, thank you very much for the invitation and perhaps you would allow me to repeat something that I said at the beginning which is: I think this is a hugely important study that you are engaged on. I do wish you every success in what you are doing because I think that it is not only important in respect of the importance of child protection. It is much wider than that. It is important in respect of ensuring that in our society we learn to value children more and to ensure that they have the best possible start in life. I wish you well.

 

 

Witness: Mr Philip Collins, Director, Social Market Foundation, examined.

Q48 Chairman: Phil Collins. You are not grey?

Mr Collins: I am not.

Q49 Chairman: Are you looking for a job as a Children's Commissioner?

Mr Collins: I am not really, no, not after the exposition of the problems we have just heard. It is a tough job.

Q50 Chairman: We have seen you pop up in many different guises in the education world. It is very good of you to take time to be with us today. We particularly want to probe with you some questions around this whole new shift in the approach to children's issues. From your wide experience in this area we hope you can give us a unique look at these issues and wonder if you want to say something to get things started?

Mr Collins: I agree with an awful lot of what Lord Laming said so I will not recapitulate any of that so we can go through quicker. There are two arguments that collide here which show where we are, one of which is the aftermath of the Victoria Climbié process. We should remember that the green paper had a life prior to that. It was not originally the Victoria Climbié response. We went through a number of iterations and it has collided with this view which is now very prevalent and in fact becomes a bit of a cliché that the early years of life are more important in policy than any other moment in a welfare state. Generally speaking, the welfare state has never been from cradle to grave. Once the health visitor has been and the immunisation programme is over the welfare state has left you alone for a few years until the door to the primary school opens and the old Jesuitical insight that that is the most important moment. There is a lot of evidence built up, mostly from America and of course Scandinavia, that £1 spent in that era has a significantly better return than £1 spent in remedial activity in the teenage years. I think that argument, which has now really taken hold, has come together with the attempts to respond to the failings which sometimes has fatal consequences like the Victoria Climbié case. That is where we are now. In a way, the first big question is: who is the green paper for? Who is it about? Is it simply about the mercifully small number of cases where systemic failure leads to fatal consequences? Is it about that ten per cent of least well off children or is it universal? I think there are all sorts of tensions in answering the questions. An interesting thought is: who in fact is this green paper, this bill really for?

Q51 Chairman: To follow those thoughts through, who do you think it is about? Do you think it is the very vulnerable minority? Is it the poorest ten per cent? The Bill purports to be for children right through to 18. You do not hear much discussion of the older age groups in terms of that, do you?

Mr Collins: No. That is where the gap starts. To give an example of where this becomes quite depressing is we know that if you can attach a named person to people in public services their satisfaction with the service goes up. Also, the actual experience they have is improved, but their report of their experience is that it is much better. The usual response in public service is a post facto joining up. You have lots of disciplines doing their own thing and you join them up in a multi‑disciplinary team. The approach in the green paper was to try to get a named person to follow all the way through. One point where I think I probably do disagree with Lord Laming on specialisation, or at least it is worth posing the question: specialisation may exacerbate the tensions. One of our big problems, which is common to all of the fatal examples and is common to much less not non‑fatal but important instances of mediocrity in service, is that the system does not talk to each other. The levels of coordination are very poor. It is partly a technical problem that we do not have the systems that work, but it is principally more than that; it is principally cultural. One of the reasons professions within the system do not talk to each other is that they are very, very busy and have other things to do. It is not the first thing on their radar. I have said this repeatedly at conferences to the various professionals, and understandably they do not like it, the professional rivalry that exists between them, that expertise and professional prestige involves pulling the ladder after you and erecting barriers around yourself. This is going to be a very significant problem when we try and integrate this profession. For example, the tensions between people who see themselves as educators, people who see themselves as carers are already looming. I do not think at the moment there is a very clear way through that problem. Those professional demarcations I think are going to prove to be extremely hard to negotiate.

Q52 Chairman: Do you think health is going to be a particular problem?

Philip Collins: Health. Yes, I do. Health is a good example because the original vision of the Bill in the Act, in the Green Paper, I think was to envisage moving from a social care workforce and health workforce to a children's workforce. It is now unclear to me whether that is still where we are going. The position of health visitors and midwives, for example, is made much more complicated by this process because their hope and aim is simply to carry on in their neatly defined professional package and be part of a multi‑disciplinary team. If instead we head towards something like a children's practitioner, everybody is in some way a children's practitioner with their specialisms underneath and that alters the nature of those professionals quite markedly in ways which as yet we have not thought through seriously. Trying to think through what the integration of service means for people's jobs is very, very important. That leads to another important point about entry routes into these professions because I agree with what was said before about recruitment and retention being absolutely pivotal and difficult. I think pay is something to do with that. It is no coincidence that as a nursery assistant on £5.60 an hour they struggle to recruit. I just think it is dishonest to pretend that pay is not part of this; it absolutely is, but it is not the whole thing. The particular managerial problem that I would pick out is that it is very hard to promote people who are really good and it is very hard to get rid of people who are really bad. You have the status within the professions, the labour market rigidity in these professions is not organised with the citizen principally in mind. It is like most public services organised principally with the providers in mind. So you have serious problems there.

Q53 Chairman: You said the integration of people's jobs is one of the true aspects to success. Have you made any observation where departments are merging to provide children's services? Very often it is the education directors that are becoming the dominant people getting those posts. That is perhaps not surprising given education is the most dominant public service at a local level.

Mr Collins: I think that is right. That is what has happened. I think if any of the sectors has to dominate it is probably the right one. The reason I say that is because it consorts with the evidence. If we think of Every Child Matters as more than just a response to the Climbie Report, but it is also about doing the best of all for least well off children, then there is a lot of evidence now that the right kind of education in the early years can make a very significant difference. The right kind of education is a begging phrase. It is absolutely critical. There is a lot of evidence that says if you simply cover across universally, if the quality of what you offer is not very good then it may have a negative impact. In order to do something which is useful which improves the life chances of children it is very expensive. It does mean that we are going from a situation of simply caring or looking after or keeping control of children during working hours to one where we are educating children. That shift will inevitably mean that the educational aspects of the professions are paramount and it will cause problems - it already is doing - where services are being integrated between the different rivalrous groups.

Q54 Jonathan Shaw: What do you think we need to keep an eye on when we are looking at speaking to the minister and plotting the progress from what is, I think, universally agreed to be an ambitious programme?

Mr Collins: I think the workforce issues are principal. They are absolutely crucial because the profession will rarely candidly confess that it is going to have trouble integrating, but it will. It is a major reason they do not talk to one another. There are serious gaps in the market for provision at the moment. It is not at all clear how we are going to fill those in. There is no particular ideological problem here. Nobody has a real ideological problem in its provision in healthcare. In fact, the Chancellor at a seminar at the Treasury recently on this, where he contrasted this market with the healthcare system where he said he does have an ideological problem with a major extension of private provision, but that is not the case here. That market provision is extremely patchy. One of the reasons, to my mind, is the funding mechanism. I think another thing which is worth considering as we go through this process is whether the childcare tax credit, which is the main channel for funding, is fit for purpose for a large expansion of supply, especially in areas which are not very well off. The main reason you do not get sustainable provision is the money just is not there. As the funding is on the demand side it is just not worth it for lots of providers to offer a durable service. There is a consensus pretty much I think in the field that funding it through a component of the childcare tax credit is deeply problematic, so I think that is something to probe. One other thing: I think relations with schools, the role of local education authorities will prove to be, again, interesting and problematic. It is not at all clear yet what the role of LEAs will be in this as in lots of other areas. It may be that LEAs that are imaginative become deal brokers essentially, assembling packages of education, taking money from different sources, but we have not aligned what is expected of them in this Bill with the PSA targets, for example. There are all sorts of peculiarities in what we are asking LEAs to do. I do not think they have yet responded particularly well to a change of role.

Q55 Jonathan Shaw: What about research? What priority would you attach to research? Which particular aspects do you think the Committee should be looking at or ensuring the Government are carrying out on their behalf, in seeing that this ambitious programme is fit for purpose?

Mr Collins: As I am sure you know the Government has its own evaluations running on some aspects of its Early Years programme. One thing which has come out of the research which I think will be worth following up, is the next question of whether these things ought to be organised nationally or locally. That came out in the early evaluation of SureStart where it showed that a mere 26 per cent of SureStart initiatives had demonstrably positive outcomes on children. What the accompanying literature showed was that SureStart did not exist as a single thing. There had been enormous local discretion on what people did with SureStart money. People followed a hunch locally and they had done what they thought was needed in their area, which generally speaking I applaud as an approach to things. It turns out that the bulk of them did things that made no difference at all. It was at best a placebo effect in most cases. In 26 per cent of cases there was a very good effect which is a remarkably successful venture when you talk about the most difficult to reach, but one conclusion that could be drawn from that is what you need is a bit more centralisation. You need somebody to come in and say: these things seem to work, what you need to do is that. What it points out is that our mechanisms for sharing best practice in the public sector generally and in this area particularly are very poor. It is not just we do not share information well; it is that when things work in one place it takes forever.

Q56 Jonathan Shaw: That is also culture, that people would not go out and look for things that are working well. They plod on and think what I am doing here is fine because to do that would be to somehow admit that you are not providing a very good service. This comes back to your provider service.

Mr Collins: There is precious little incentive to go out and seek.

Q57 Jonathan Shaw: They do if they are forced to. That is the way we work. You are forced to or you plod on?

Mr Collins: There is a very interesting study at the Mackenzie US Retail Centre in which they pointed out that a novelty becomes standard practice within 14 months. If you do something interesting I will be doing it in 14 months even if I am the most unimaginative provider in the sector. I wonder what a comparable period in the public sector is.

Q58 Chairman: Is not the fact that in terms of SureStart there was a vague departmental remit and the problem we had when we were looking at this was there was a queue of people wanting to get a SureStart programme going and a commitment with the Government rolling them out. The problem was they were analysing what they were going to do, comparing it with what other people were going to do and getting that right. So the department's fingerprints were all over these SureStart programmes. How did they all go off at tangents and not deliver?

Mr Collins: To a large extent than is normal the variations in what people did within their SureStart programmes was really quite marked. In a sense, it is an inadvertent exercise in localism and not all of it worked. I do not want to sound like I am too harsh on that because part of the way of getting things to work is through trying things and they do not work. I am not saying that that was, therefore, a terrible failure, as long as there is some mechanism which by the good spreads through. That is what worries me, if the 26 per cent will be mimicked and copied by the rest all to the good.

Q59 Chairman: Phil, is this a social market foundation line that you are giving? You sound very pessimistic. First of all you were very pessimistic when you were answering questions to Jonathan and I about multi‑discipline approaches, that people could get rid of that tradition and work together as multi‑disciplinary teams, co‑located, all the excitement of the Children's Act, if you like. You seem to poor cold water on it thinking it is never going to happen because these people are traditional human beings working in silos and they are never going to get out of them.

Mr Collins: I do not quite think that, but I do think if you are thinking about where might it go wrong, where will the problems be, I think there will be intractable difficulties. I am not really pessimistic actually. In fact I think the progress in this area over the last ten years has been remarkable. We have to remember we do not have to go back very far to look at the Early Years terrain and then there was nothing. There was nothing there at all, so the folk memory of policy is pretty short. It is a pretty remarkable transformation. The commitment to the next phase of policy I think is sincere and will follow. It is going to be extremely costly, but the big problem - the problem which in a sense insofar as this is a question about pulling levers in government I will be optimistic about - is not mostly a question about pulling levers in government, it is trying to get a profession to alter its way of behaving and that is really difficult. If I am pessimistic it is simply a refection of how difficult it is to get cultures to shift. I think that point needs to be stressed. Very often, I did it before, people make an easy translation from something that happens in a private market, something that happens in a public sector. I am sure we ought to recognise that they are not the same things in the end because the incentives are different. The problems that we encounter in some of these communities are really extremely difficult. It would be like saying to a business: go and take the most difficult customers who have the least money and then sell them a very high quality good. They will say: I am not going to do that. I will go over there and sell to it somebody who has more money. We have to remember that we are trying to do something here which is extremely hard. Therefore, if I sound pessimistic about our capacity for success it is not because I am just being gloomy, it is just recognition that this is a really tough thing to achieve.

Q60 Chairman: How do you compare the SureStart success or lack of success with the work that has been mentioned only in the last few days, work in Oxford showing even a short time in pre‑school, in a nursery? The evidence there is showing that is a very good investment because even a short time in pre‑school raises the educational achievement of a child.

Mr Collins: That is right. The evidence to my mind is overwhelming. We are starting to gather a body of evidence in the UK that confirms the evidence that we have from Denmark, Sweden and the United States where there are a number of projects, the Head Start project, but plenty of others too, which show that a year of good pre‑school is immensely valuable to children and has a disproportionate effect on children of lower socio‑economic status. That evidence is really suggestive and telling. I just emphasise something I said before ‑ and this is true of Kathy Silvers' work too ‑ you have to stress the quality of that provision is absolutely crucial. It is not enough. There are two separate objectives here. One will be to ease access of women into the labour market. The second will be to improve the cognitive development of children. They are complimentary up to a point but they are not the same. You could get more women into work if you had a thin coverage, just had somewhere for children to go that would meet your labour market objective. If you want to really get to the cognitive development of children then you have to attend to the quality of the provision. Crucially what that means is the quality of your staff. It brings us back to the point about people. You have to have a workforce which is properly trained and qualified, that means properly remunerated and we are miles away from that now, absolutely miles away.

Q61 Chairman: We are not talking about that so much in the other provision for social workers, people working with children in hospitals. There are reasonably well‑remunerated people working with children in some of these silos. Is that not the case?

Philip Collins: In some. My own view is that they are not well remunerated enough and that the vacancy rates are evidence of that. We are struggling to recruit in most of these areas and we are certainly struggling to retain people. As I said before, that is partly to do with levels of pay. I do not think we can duck this, but we are not talking simply about plugging the gaps which currently exist. The sort of thing that we are working on implies quite a major extension of the workforce and improvement in its skills. For example, in New Zealand there is a very good example of a country that has made a major transformation in its early years services. The Government set itself a target by 2012 having a fully graduate level workforce, not necessarily graduates, that is an important thing to come back to, but graduate level workforce. It recognised that until you have that standard of provider then you are not going to get the benefits to your pound invested earlier on than you would otherwise.

Chairman: Could we hold that for a moment. Paul.

Q62 Paul Holmes: Just on that, talking about resources and the roll out of the programme everywhere, if Every Child Matters then it should be of benefit to every child. SureStart is very much lauded for its success and quite rightly but it is targeted on the poorest per centage of children who most need it. Even with that targeting, 40 per cent of the children who would qualify do not get it because they live in areas where there is a more thinly scattered population. If we are going to extend under Every Child Matters these benefits out to everybody what are the resource implications? Is the Government committing itself in reality to extending it to everybody or is it still a very, very rationed process?

Philip Collins: It is a very incremental process and it has to be. I think it would be fairly fantastic to demand of Government that they do this in one big step. It is inconceivable because the short answer to your question is: if you were to extend what I think you need to every child you are talking about something in the order of £15 billion. It is a colossal amount of money. You need to think about the steps to get there. It is something like a ten or 20 year answer. In order to provide the standard of provision that I am talking about that is consistent with the data on good returns, to provide 12 months' paid parental leave, which is again crucial because prior to that age all the evidence tells us is that if a parent can spend the first year with their child this has enormous benefits to the child. Of course, that is not available to most people who cannot afford six months unpaid. Then that second year between one and two, in Finland you probably saw they have a home care allowance which essentially allows the parent, if they wish, to extend that contact with the child.

Q63 Chairman: It is controversial.

Mr Collins: It is. My own view is that that would be a good idea. To do that package of things you are looking at a shift in GDP spent on this area from currently about 0.8% to something like 2.7%. It is very large. It is worth then asking what would we stop doing? We modelled all these questions and it depends crucially on what you perceive to be the benefits. The benefits follow five, ten years hence. PWC did some work for us when we modelled that scenario and we asked them what they thought would be the balance of costs and benefits. They came through, not to our surprise but to our delight, to say the benefits would outweigh the costs to the tune of something like 2 per cent of GDP over time, 700,000 jobs created, and so on. We have all the details. You have to take a leap of faith, in a sense, that in due course those benefits would outweigh the cost.

Q64 Chairman: This is your graduate profession?

Philip Collins: Not alone. That is not the only thing. In the work we did we modelled a number of different scenarios, but one to which the figures I just quoted refer included an all graduate profession, a home care allowance between one and two, and paid parental leave for 12 months. We added the costs of those together and then we computed benefit and even on a relatively cautious set of assumptions there are returns on it which you can imagine is plausible. Indeed, the returns on that earlier expenditure are good. It must feed through in some sense to reduce welfare bills and reduce crime bills.

Q65 Paul Holmes: You say the benefits are very great so it is worth doing, but you are also saying therefore we need to decide what we stop doing. Do you rule out the idea of a greater tax break, since we are in the bottom third of Europe whereas Finland is way above the top of the league.

Philip Collins: No, I was not ruling that out, but in order as a think tank if you come out and say, "Let us have £20 billion more money", in a way it is a really easy thing to do and not very helpful for ministers. What we try to do is set ourselves a much tougher question which is to say: let us try and work out how public expenditure will be organised if it is consistent with the data on the return on every pound. We set ourselves that question artificially. Of course, another way of doing it would be to argue for tax increases. What we tried to do was essentially we took two graphs, one of which was the work with James Heckman, the nobel economist, who showed that the return on a pound spent at age nought significantly outweighs that at age 15. If we look at the current pattern of public expenditure according to the life cycle, we discover, you will not be surprised, that it is organised in exactly the opposite way, it really bulges from about 13 onwards when we spend very little early on. We thought one interesting thing would be to see what we would have to do to make those two graphs run together, so that just purely on efficiency grounds that would make sense. That was just the artificial task we set ourselves in a way, but it does pose interesting questions. It does get you thinking about second chance training schemes, for example. There is precious little evidence that Government training schemes have any great return. Subsidised employment does, if you subsidise employers to take people on. This is confirmed in the New Deal evaluation. The subsidised employment part of New Deal has a very good return and is successful, whereas those people who took up training options it seems to have had zero impact on their employability return, that sort of thing, where we might start to look at what we do not do as well as what we do more of.

Q66 Paul Holmes: Did you model at all how far with an increasing ageing population and a decline in the number of children how far you could meet the gap by keeping spending at current levels over the years and, therefore, having more available per child?

Mr Collins: We did not specifically, no, but it is a very good question. The one person who has done a lot of work on that is a Swedish man who has essentially pioneered the view that the burden and risk in a welfare society is shifting from men to women. The crucial people will be women. He points out that across all societies across time women have said they wanted 2.2 children, actually over most of Europe they are having significantly fewer than that now. The pressures on them are really quite intense. The one exception to this is in Denmark where they are having just about the number of children they say they would like to have. He attributes that to their universal childcare provision which over 30 years has filled in the gap. The presence of women in the Danish labour market is better than other places. It also gives them the flexibility through childcare to have the children they want. It is a crucially interesting question. It is not something we have included specifically in our work.

Q67 Mr Pollard: If you look at the commitment in ECM policy involving children in the decision making, how do you best do that?

Philip Collins: It is very difficult I think.

Q68 Jonathan Shaw: Go on. Be positive for a change.

Mr Collins: I think what is quite useful to do as this goes by is to think what the difficult questions would be. Involving children: when you say certain children want to be involved for a start, the best involvement of children is to provide really good quality services to them. The model of involvement we always work with is one where we have some form of committee or consultation process which people have to sit on. In defiance of all the evidence people do not want to do that. One of the reasons I think is that the welfare state generally has produced more benefits to the middle classes. The working class is precisely this model of involvement because the consumer voice has been monopolised by the articulate middle class. It depends what you want. If you think the trickle down theory of people's voices and the articulate people will make the service better for everyone by making their voice heard, that might be fine. What I would want would be extensive involvement with as many people as possible so that the service can be responsive to them. Then you really want everyone else to be involved. Across all public services it has proved to be quite easy to get some social groups involved in public services and much more difficult for the lower socio‑economic groups. I will be positive though. One of the big successes of SureStart was that it managed this. People said prior to that it could not be done, we have given up, we cannot reach these groups. SureStart did it and they did it by going out and knocking on doors essentially. Outreach work was the answer. They got people involved which all the evidence and all the doom sayers said you could not do. The positive answer is that it can be done, but it is expensive because you cannot sit and wait for the people to come. You have to go to them. It is very labour intensive. I do not think at the moment that hard pressed workers in the system have the capacity to do it. Again, most of my answers require extra money, which I think inevitably is a requirement in this area.

Q69 Chairman: Can it not be done on the cheap through the voluntary sector?

Mr Collins: No, not entirely. Of course, the voluntary sector has a big role to play in it, but I do not think it can be done on the cheap with them, no. Again, I do not think there is capacity to do what needs to be done. You can make it better than it currently is by just using the voluntary sector, but if we are looking at real serious advance it is going to need some serious resources.

Q70 Chairman: Some of us who remember the miners strike know that families and especially the wives of miners suddenly became articulate and very active in the community which had not been the same way as before. Research that has been done on that showed what a transformational experience it was.

Mr Collins: Yes, but go through all the public services and just jot down everything that the Government wants you to do, to be involved in and you have no time for any work or anything like that. You are doing nothing other than being an active citizen. It is inconceivable that people can do all this stuff. It is the old Oscar Wilde line: "Socialism will never happen", and so on. The Government is asking us to do so much. The idea of co-production will require even more of us. What we know about this is that people do get involved when it is deeply important to them and where they know they can have a genuine impact. I think there is loads of scope for citizen involvement in the provision of local services.

Q71 Chairman: How does that square with declining numbers of people participating in the electoral process or indeed local parties or action?

Mr Collins: I am more optimistic on this because I think that if you try and put up a phone mast near someone's house and see whether they are politically apathetic or not ---

Chairman: --- or build an incinerator.

Mr Collins: Yes, quite. --- I do not think that politically activity has disappeared; it has just moved. People have moved into areas where they know they can make a genuine impact. Therefore, what we need to do is provide a genuine voice to them where they have some sort of impact on the service. That is going to require some sort of partnership with them and the professionals, which again the professionals will not yield very easily.

Q72 Chairman: Phillip, you can get parents involved in broader action outside their narrow confines of earning a living and keeping lots of things going to support the family. The one time you could get an outlet is when the children are in education, particularly early education. This is the opportunity of the Children's Act, is it not, that that kind of relationship between the professionals, if they can come out of it, be teased out of their silos, and parents and other members of the community could be quite transformational?

Mr Collins: Yes, it can. There is an opportunity. Again, SureStart gives us some little evidence on this because the effect on mothers is as stark in some cases as the effect on their children. The confidence generated by involvement in the process and employability rates, for example, of mothers after involvement in SureStart is really quite interesting. So there are clear benefits here.

Q73 Paul Holmes: Just backtracking slightly to one of the earlier comments on this particular bit: are you being slightly cynical or realistic about all the talk on getting young people involved in taking decisions on this sort of thing is paying lip service? You seem to be implying it was not really very effective.

Mr Collins: I think it is paying lip service. It could be effective. I am not saying it is inconceivable to design it so that it is effective, but in order to be effective people have to have a genuine authority. Their voice has to have some sanction attached to it. One way to attach sanctions to someone is to give them the right to exit a service if they do not like it, if it does not do what they want and give them the right to go somewhere else, normally known as choice. The other way is you give them some voice. If all you give them is a talking shop and in the end then their voice is not heard, it is not made effective, then that leads them to become cynical. I do not see at the moment that we have the mechanisms by which people's views feed through into the way the service is provided. It is perfectly possible to do it, but it involves a new relationship between citizen and professional as well.

Q74 Chairman: Voice not choice: a nice slogan. Sorry to tease you out on this particular area of inquiry, but are you modelling the impact, say, of a deprived community where 11 to 16 education is struggling in the light of the impact of specialist schools? Are we talking about a lot of money?

Mr Collins: Yes, we are. That is the next stage of the work because there is a danger we think that there is great promise in the Early Years work. I am a bit of an evangelist for it. I think it can make an enormous difference, but there is a danger that if we think we get the Early Years provision right, then that is somehow done. People are kind of inoculated against failure later on, and that is not true. The academic community knows a bit about the way in which those gains start to fade - not very much - but it is starting to become a major topic of study about once you have had a boost from an extra year of education, when does it start to fade and what can you do later in life to try and ensure those gains are retained? That is where we are moving on to now. I do not know the answer to my own question. I do not think anybody has quite asked the question as precisely as that which is how would you organise comprehensive product services from 11 onwards which are specifically designed to try and retain the gains you had earlier? It is a return to the question of what would you stop doing. I do not know the answer, but it is something which we are actively thinking about.

Q75 Chairman: Just to take you back to SureStart. This is fascinating to us because it is a joined‑up service and there is some inspiration at the moment here. Perhaps it is in SureStart; you said some reasonably positive things there. How much of the analysis of what does work has been written up and now is available to other SureStart programmes or other Government departments?

Mr Collins: It is written up and it is in principle available to them if they go to the website where the FE work is written up. How many of them do in fact do that? I rather suspect it is a small number. There is no mechanism, as far as I know, for spreading that around, but the first evaluation has been written up and published and so that is there and available. There is a very important question how we get really good ideas spread through. The number of people employed in local authorities, for example, just to be spies on other local authorities is very small. Keeping an eye on what the others are doing is a very crucial part of any provision of any good.

Q76 Chairman: It happened with football teams.

Mr Collins: Absolutely: scouting. Why do we not have scouts in a local authority or just keeping an eye on it?

Q77 Chairman: Phil, we are running out of time in this committee room. We have three minutes. Is there anything you wanted to tell the Committee in three precious minutes that it is right at the beginning of totally new territory for us in terms of looking at this area? What else? What words of guidance and navigational drives?

 

Mr Collins: I think that to counteract the sense in which I have been deeply pessimistic, it is worth keeping in mind all the while that this is not just about scandal‑led policy. This is not just an area which is an attempt to avoid terrible things happening. The promise of this is really quite serious. For a long time, particularly the political Left has thought that social mobility and life chances could really be altered by policy from 11 onwards. The main hope is in comprehensive schooling. I think that it has shifted really to the thought that actually, no, it is not there because most of the formative influences are then settled and it is much earlier. I am really quite optimistic that this could be very serious, but it has to be done right because we do not know a lot about this. The political pressures will always be for the resources to be reduced because it is incredibly hard to find them and for different interests to be traded off. I always plead for clarity. There are many reasons why you might do an Early Years policy. One of them might be that you want lots more women into the labour market; a very laudable aim in itself but it is not the same aim as improving the cognitive development of children. Different outcomes lead to different policies. I just ask people to be clear about what it is they are looking for. Our objective has been to try and find what is the benefit for children, that leads you to a series of conclusions which would be alarming to the Exchequer and also involve relationships between citizens and providers and between different professions which are really quite revolutionary which they will find very difficult. Whenever any profession comes in and minimises the difficulties they think they will face in integrating themselves into the new world then I get extremely sceptical.

Q78 Chairman: Thank you then. The Sutton Trust gave evidence to this Committee about social mobility commissioned by the London School of Economics. What is your view on that? Has social mobility declined in recent years compared to the 1950s and 1960s or is that suspect research?

Philip Collins: No, it is true, but the thing that has happened in the 20th century is that absolute social mobility has increased, i.e. there are more lawyers, there are more accountants, and there are more middle class people. There are much more ex‑working class lawyers than there were in 1900. However, your chances of going from social class five to social class one: the odds ratio is exactly the same. Absolutely, yes, it has increased. Relatively it has not increased at all. The principal driver of that social mobility is in changes to the labour market. Insofar as you can separate them it has not been Government policy in the labour market changing. The big question that comes out of the LSE work is: is that growth in the service sector of the labour market itself slowing down? If it is, then you would expect that growth to slow. That is the big question. It connects with this argument because I think the work from Scandinavia, which is by the way the most socially mobile country in the world, Sweden, would suggest that universal childcare is, of all government policies, probably the most important if that is your objective.

Q79 Chairman: Phillip, thank you very much for your time and we have had a great deal of stimulation from your evidence. We hope to see you again.