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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 40-v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
Monday 24 January 2005 MS BRIDGET LINDLEY AND DR DEBORAH GHATE PROFESSOR HEDY CLEAVER, MR RICHARD THOMAS AND DR EILEEN MUNRO Evidence heard in Public Questions 272 - 377
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Memoranda submitted by Family Policy Alliance and Dr Deborah Ghate Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Bridget Lindley, Deputy Chief Executive, Family Rights Group, Family Welfare Association and Parentline Plus, representing the Family Policy Alliance, and Dr Deborah Ghate, Director, Policy Research Bureau, examined. Q272 Chairman: Can I welcome Bridget Lindley and Dr Deborah Ghate to our proceedings. I have already given an apology about our rather frenetic timetable this afternoon but we will win through despite it. The committee always gets slightly dangerous when it has got to this stage in an inquiry when we have had a reasonable amount of highly informed witnesses before us, and even more so today because we have just returned from British Columbia where we were looking at the working of their Children's Act. We are very keen to get as much as we can out of this session but we always give our witnesses an opportunity to say something in opening if they wish to, or we can go straight into questions. Ms Lindley: Can I say that I am here from the Family Rights Group but I am on behalf of the Family Policy Alliance and it is three organisations, one of which was not on the announcement. I am here from Family Rights Group, Family Welfare Association and Parentline Plus, and I am afraid FWA was missed off the list. I would just like to flag that up because everyone has contributed to all the thinking and anything that I will say. Q273 Chairman: It is good to get that on the record. Ms Lindley: Yes, thank you. Q274 Chairman: Do you want to go straight into questions? Ms Lindley: I have already prepared some notes which I think have been circulated. We prepared a longer submission and then we did yet more notes. We may end up repeating ourselves perhaps but I thought that would trigger some discussion. Q275 Chairman: Good. Dr Ghate? Dr Ghate: Perhaps I should quickly introduce myself. I am Deborah Ghate. I am Director of the Policy Research Bureau which is an independent research centre specialising in applying social policy research and shouldering young people and their families. I am here as a reader of the research literature and as a research practitioner. I guess the most relevant piece of work for your purposes that we have done recently is a major review of the international research literature on what works in parenting support, which we did for the Department for Education and Skills. You may or may not have seen that. That is a very useful major source of what the evidence base says about these issues. Q276 Chairman: As I said, we have got quite a lot of evidence already. Can I ask you, Dr Ghate, in terms of your research, although we have only dipped into the work of other countries, how you think the model we have adopted in the UK in terms of Every Child Matters and the Children Act compares? Is it a robust model? We were concerned in British Columbia to see a Children's Act that had been around rather longer where the Children's Commission and Commissioner had already been abandoned, where it seemed that they had reduced the focus of the act to child protection issues rather than a broader concept and where it was the least popular brief in the cabinet to become the Children and Family Minister. Is our model a robust model given your international knowledge? Dr Ghate: I find that a difficult question to answer. I do not think there is a great deal of evidence on the way that systems work together to produce good services for children and families There is a relatively good and growing body of evidence on how individual interventions work and in relation to individual interventions the way in which they may draw in various multiple agencies and work together to effective or ineffective ends, but I do not think that the model that is described in Every Child Matters has been in that form robustly evaluated, certainly in any of the countries that I can think of. The intention to integrate services and to have agencies working much more closely together is supported by the evidence in terms of what seems likely to be a promising approach. As to whether in practice it can be made to work effectively the jury is very definitely still out. Q277 Chairman: But it is a very large investment, is it not, and some of the predicted costs of this Act are quite astronomic, especially the cost flow in terms of a very expensive IT system for tracking every child in the country when some people have argued that that should flow into better quality services on the ground? Bridget Lindley, have you got any view on that? Ms Lindley: I would like to flag up the fact that I think there has been reluctance, all the way through Every Child Matters being published, the responses, the programme that is being rolled out as a result of that, to acknowledge the role of parents and family members. I know that concessions have been made and parents are part of the programme but I think there has been a philosophical reluctance to acknowledge that every child's family matters in order for every child to matter. Just on the basic statistics, almost all children who are in need live at home, 85 per cent of children who live on the child protection register live at home and 92 per cent of children who are not looked after eventually return home. One cannot have a policy that is looking to improve the wellbeing for children that does not really address how best to engage parents, and certainly research around child protection, and I am sure Deb will agree with this, has shown that partnership with parents has been the key to successful protection of children. What we would like to bring from our advice work - and we advise tens of thousands of families every year - is what it is really like to be involved with the system and to be looking for support but to be in fear once you enter the child protection arena and how best to engage with services in a true partnership. It is about respect and being able to be heard. There are various ways in which I would like to be able to elaborate on that but that is the base line, that parents do matter. There was extensive lobbying and debate in the Lords in order to get parents recognised on the face of the Bill at all. I just think it reflects an implicit reluctance to put families in the centre of the policy. Q278 Chairman: Deborah Ghate, in the whole debate about universal targeted services is it one or the other? Dr Ghate: It is definitely both. I think it is important to recognise that the same families may want to access both universal and targeted services at different points in the family life stage as different circumstances change around their family. They are not different groups of parents necessarily. They may well be the same groups of parents but all the research evidence suggests that good universal services are absolutely vital, not least to stop larger numbers of families needing to access the targeted services that then provide more intensive help to address greater needs. Perhaps ironically, despite the label that we give them, we call them universal services and they are intended to be available to all and to be available on an open access basis which does not necessarily take account of need, but in fact what little research we have suggests that universal services quite often fail to reach all parents in the community and all families in the community and they particularly tend to fail to reach the neediest. It is for those families that you need the targeted approach where you can reach out to them and address their particular needs in a sensitive way. I would say that you undoubtedly need both. It seems to me that the strategy spelled out in Every Child Matters is entirely supported by what we think will work to support children and families better, both integrated and universal. It is going to be absolutely critical that we improve the way that universal services identify different ranges of the needs that families may have and refer them on to other kinds of services which may be better suited to meet their particular needs. Q279 Jonathan Shaw: You have identified six criteria as crucial for success. If I read them out it might be helpful: reachable services, recognition of the families' need, responses to the need of the whole family, respect of family expertise, referral to services which meet their express need, and to check whether support that is provided is useful. You say that these are crucial to the success of Every Child Matters. You have said that you think the government has been dragged in in terms of parenting. Are you not being a little ungrateful in terms of the fact that we have got this very important piece of legislation and all we hear from you is just complaints that we are not supporting parents enough? You have not mentioned the Secretary of State's first speech which was littered with the word "parents", was it not? Ms Lindley: I think what I said was that there has been some reluctance and that it is an implicit movement towards acknowledging the role that parents play. When the Green Paper was first published parents were not seen as central to the solution. The purpose of this is not to complain and be difficult. I would like to emphasise that our role in the Alliance has been to try to find constructive ways forward. We have certainly been involved in many consultations with civil servants around the different papers that are being produced to try and improve things. Underpinning it all is how to make partnership work and how to make services available to families that families want and are going to be useful at a point when it has not reached crisis. There is a massive problem around investment in family support, or rather lack of it, such that the gatekeeping of family support is fairly strict until you get into child protection and once that happens then services follow, but the context in which services are provided when it is child protection is one much more around fear and distrust. It is much harder to work together in a true and equal partnership because there is the possibility all the time that if the parents get it wrong their child will be removed. We have many cases where families are crying out for support much earlier on. For all sorts of reasons they are not able to access it until it becomes critical. If we want to really look at prevention, and the government have said a lot about prevention and that is very welcome, the trouble is that there is quite a gulf between policy intention and what is delivered on the ground. Q280 Jonathan Shaw: We are seeing the development of children centres and the government is talking about wrap-around school provision. Is that the sort of policy development you want to see? Ms Lindley: The key to its success will be involving service users in the design and delivery of services and how those systems work. That is one factor. The second is to acknowledge that investment is key. Part of the gatekeeping at the moment happens by families not having a right to assessment when their children are in need and that legal flaw means that it is extremely difficult to challenge a refusal of services. Q281 Jonathan Shaw: How would you define when a family is in need? Ms Lindley: I would look to section 17(10) of the Children Act 1989. Unfortunately, in the 15 years that the Act has been in place there has been an ever-growing practice to redefine it in each local authority area, which then sets up a hierarchy of eligibility criteria. If you are in the top bracket you are in child protection and you get support. If you are in some of the next brackets you may get support, but if you are way down the line in need, and clearly the kind of children that the common assessment framework is seeking to support are way down the line, there seems to be a gulf between the policy intention, which is to bring it right down and provide support when need is first identified, and the investment which is not there to make it happen until it reaches a much more critical point. We all avoid talking about resources because clearly there are pressures on budgets and it is difficult in terms of the Treasury and what money is available to the DfES but I think that is the nub of it. Q282 Jonathan Shaw: You are advocating that there should be some minimum standards in terms of assessment or are you advocating a national assessment framework? Ms Lindley: There is a national assessment framework which is great, and it is issued under section 7 of the Local Authority and Social Services Act, which means that it should be complied with unless there are exceptional circumstances to justify departing from it, but the reality is for individual families that, short of threatening and taking a judicial review, they cannot access it until things become acute. In fact, in my notes I have referred to Michelle's case, which is a very good example - a mother of three, living on her own in deprived circumstances but parenting skills were not really an issue except for the fact that she had a son who had extremely challenging behaviour problems. She for years asked for support and only accessed it by leaving her child at school one day and just refusing to pick him up. Then, of course, it became child protection and then she got support and now he is finally getting what he needs, but that was an extremely desperate measure to get what could be provided and is intended to be provided under the new proposals for the common assessment framework. Dr Ghate: There have been lots of research studies which on a larger scale would bear that out, that families who are really in the most extreme need will say when they are finally given a service, "I have been screaming for services for years and years and is it not ironic that it has to get to this point of crisis before I receive any?". Parents who receive parenting support services as a result of having parenting orders during the reforms of the youth justice system particularly said that, "Why did I have to wait for my child to be identified as a young offender before I received some basic support?". I think you are right; that case is probably indicative of many cases. Q283 Jonathan Shaw: You are saying, Bridget, that we do not want to talk about resources, but the potential investment is enormous if you are going to meet every single need. Every single parent who has a child causing a particular difficulty or a young person who is exhibiting some level of antisocial behaviour is going to receive parenting classes. That is an enormous amount. Is it realistic? Do you think the government is being realistic to talk about this? You are saying universal and targeted, both, are what we want. Dr Ghate: Not all parents will want particularly intensive help. In fact, the majority probably will not, and their needs will be relatively short-lived and transitory and if they can get a bit of help and advice when they need it that may prevent problems escalating. The point about the argument on cost is yes, all these reforms will be very expensive if they do not work but if they do work they will be tremendously cost effective because the costs of poor outcomes for children in the long term, both social outcomes and cost to the Exchequer, are enormous, and we know from the relatively few cost effectiveness studies that have been done on some of the interventions to deal with children at greatest risk that when they work they save money. It is about taking the long view. Q284 Jonathan Shaw: They do not always save money in terms of the year's budget, do they? That is the problem. It is ten, 15 years in advance. Dr Ghate: It is a long view. Q285 Jonathan Shaw: Unfortunately we do not have ten years of one parliament. Dr Ghate: It is problematic when policies are disrupted when changes are made which are intended to run for a certain number of years and then in a much shorter framework everything changes again. It makes it very difficult to evaluate what is effective, even though it may be responding to very real needs. Q286 Jonathan Shaw: You said that it is not every family that wants an intervention but very often the families who perhaps need a level of intervention are perhaps reluctant to come forward in the first place, hence the argument about targeting not being the best way to hook in families who do have difficulties. There is this tension, this dilemma, that is bound to arise with seemingly a potential for unlimited services. What are local authorities going to do? Ms Lindley: Can I make two suggestions about it? One is that it is time to be completely up front and honest and say it is too expensive to do that, but therefore to set some minimum standards of where support services will be provided by the state. Maybe the definition of "in need" is too wide and needs to be qualified through guidance. I do not know if it would take primary legislation to do it but I think there could be mechanisms by which we could be more precise about categories or indicators of the need for support. The second thing is rather more bold but I think it would require a period of double funding. Q287 Jonathan Shaw: How much double funding? Ms Lindley: I have no idea. Q288 Jonathan Shaw: Double funding? We have got double counting. It has got in trouble before with that. Ms Lindley: The cost of family support is incredibly inexpensive compared to the cost of keeping a child in the looked-after system for a week or a month. Q289 Jonathan Shaw: We hear that all the time and it is an easy thing to say, is it not? Still local authorities have to have the money in case children do come into care. It is easy to say, "We can save this money over ten years, 15 years", whatever. It is not so easy to do though, is it? Ms Lindley: But Every Child Matters is about making changes. It is optimistic. It is about making things better for the future. I think that we are going to have the same discussion in five and ten years' time until we are bold enough to put money into family support and are respectful enough of families and clear enough about the criteria for when they can and cannot expect services. Q290 Jonathan Shaw: So the first step to address honestly and boldly this tension between "Have whatever you want" services as opposed to more realistic, "What happens now?", the targeted service for particular children and families in the greatest need, would be a redefinition of that section 17, ----- Ms Lindley: National standards. Q291 Jonathan Shaw: ----- national standards so that there are clear criteria, because it is quite open and wide now, is it not, in terms of its interpretation? We need a clearer definition as to what "universal" actually means. It is not everything to everyone. It is a specific thing. Ms Lindley: It is more what "targeted" means effectively, is it not? Q292 Jonathan Shaw: Wider targeting; new targeting. Ms Lindley: Do you want me to redefine it now? Q293 Jonathan Shaw: No, I do not. That is the challenge. Be realistic: we are not going to have double funding, we are not going to have a bottomless pit of money for these particular services. However much we might save in 15 or 20 years' time that is not going to happen, but what you are saying to the committee is that what we want are some clear definitions of what families can expect within the communities they live in. Ms Lindley: I can tell you very quickly about a project that we are currently developing, which is that families will be invited to self-assess in terms of their needs and it will be coupled with some work with several local authorities to be clear about eligibility criteria. If those two were to work in tandem it would combine the respectful approach to working with families with clarity about their entitlement to services. It will be interesting to see whether we can get that off the ground and really get something out of that. It is about being constructive in spite of the fact that we might not always appear like that. Jonathan Shaw: I am just being devil's advocate. Q294 Chairman: We know what a constructive group of organisations you represent. Does my colleague not have a point in the sense that if you start a policy - because we have just been to British Columbia and compared it - on the basis of one tragedy and you work back, you seem to develop a policy that is focused at stopping even more tragedies rather than what you seem to have been articulating, saying that there is a whole group of people who need support, a broader group, and perhaps in starting your creation of a group of services it is better to look at that focus rather than just panicking about, "Can we stop any more tragic child deaths?". We certainly picked up a bit of that in British Columbia. How do you feel about that? Ms Lindley: Clearly the extreme end of any child protection policy is stopping tragic child deaths. Nobody wants to see that, but many more children come into the child protection arena than end up in that extreme category. One needs to look at the broad picture of what is going on in child protection and then we need to look at the broad picture of what is going on before child protection. Can one reduce the numbers coming into the risk of harm category? That is our approach and we know that there are thousands and thousands of families who end up in child protection who have been crying out for support earlier. Q295 Valerie Davey: I did not go to British Columbia but in my Bristol constituency it is the voluntary sector which in my experience is doing a lot of this preventive, supportive work at an early stage. Do you see the voluntary sector as having an important part in delivering Every Child Matters? Ms Lindley: Yes. There could be terrible confusion because of the lack of clarity of thresholds of when different things happen, particularly the common assessment framework. The response has come out very recently about how that is going to be approached, and there is no definition of "threshold", of when a common assessment framework would be provided, so, although there are many voluntary organisations who may be in contact with families, there is going to be no clarity about when a professional should judge that they should or should not start an assessment. We could end up with the big postcode lottery coupled with huge variations in practice between professional groups. At the same time they are a key service, they are there, they are on the ground, they are in the community. People like going to community based services. I think it needs a lot of careful thinking. Dr Ghate: Yes, I think the voluntary sector is hugely important in the front-line delivery of an awful lot of our preventive services in particular. What the voluntary sector does less well is the strategic thinking and planning and I think the lead for that has to come from elsewhere. Q296 Chairman: If we use them who is going to support the voluntary sector and give them the training and the background which you have clearly articulated in order that they play whatever role is seen to be appropriate? Dr Ghate: There are a lot of differences in terms of practice amongst the various different providers of family support. I think it is probably true in the statutory sector as well but in the voluntary sector there are clearly degrees to which some agencies are providing a better quality of service than others and that certainly needs to be worked at. Oftentimes it is very obvious why: they are extremely under-resourced, they are trying to do too much. They are often picking up the cases that do not quite make it above the threshold for statutory help but whose needs are nevertheless quite far-reaching and difficult to address. The other point about these very heavy end cases, the extreme cases of a child death or whatever, is that these are the most difficult families to help and it does need a different approach for those families. We are increasingly seeing that their needs are so all-encompassing; they have needs in every possible dimension of their lives, and they really need a very seriously integrated, genuinely wrap-around, almost physically wrap-around, service in order to achieve change for them in the long term, but they are not typical of all the families who could use a bit of help and who might do better and whose children might do better if they got a bit of support. Q297 Valerie Davey: Were they different from day one or, if had there been a very valuable voluntary sector group, if they had got other friends, if other things had happened, they would not have been? Dr Ghate: The families? Ms Lindley: Yes. Is it from day one, from the birth of the first child, that that situation is crucial and different or do they become different as a result of not getting that integrated support? Dr Ghate: I suspect it is both, that they already face considerable disadvantages. If you look into the personal history and circumstances of those families very often you find a history of abuse in the parents' childhood and so on, but I think it is made worse by the fact that there are not services that can intervene early enough to stop problems escalating further. It is probably a bit of both, to be honest. Q298 Valerie Davey: Then, of course, we go back to Victoria and it was not her parents, so here we have got a different family set-up and we are doing an awful lot of work on the basis of that case where we are not talking about parenting at all. Dr Ghate: Yes, and that is a danger if we only react to cases that make it into the media, that we get the focus slightly wrong. Clearly there are very important lessons to learn from that case and some of them generalise to practice in other respects. That case is not necessarily representative of all sorts of families that we are talking about when we talk about families in need or children in need. Q299 Valerie Davey: Do you want to add anything, Ms Lindley? Ms Lindley: Yes, just a couple of things about the use of the terms "parent" and "parenting". I think we need to be very inclusive about what we mean. Parenting is caring for a child whether you are the direct biological parent or however you come to be in a situation of caring for that child. We need to be very careful to be inclusive. Also, I do think that in the case of Victoria Climbié it is evident that there was not a proper thorough assessment of need at the very early stage, and that is partly what I am talking about. I am not making any more judgement about that but it flags up the need for assessment and identification of need and then a proper plan for services at whatever level of the spectrum we are on. Q300 Valerie Davey: Coming back specifically if I may to the nature and the need of the parent, does this set of proposals support the parent or regulate the parent? Which side is it on as far as the parent is concerned and which side should it be on? Ms Lindley: The reality is that it was going to vary according to when it was provided. If one has already reached a point where there is reasonable suspicion that the child is likely to suffer harm we are into section 47 inquiries, child protection. The context in which support is provided once there is a section 47 is basically, "This is what you are being offered and we expect you to take it, and if it does not really do the trick or you do not meet expectations more will flow and your child may end up being removed". If it is offered one stage back from that, as is intended with the common assessment framework, then the context is completely different. I think I outlined attending a parenting class which had two completely different flavours to them. One is very supportive and the other one is coercive and undermining to partnership and partnership is necessary to protect children who are living at home on the register. Q301 Valerie Davey: You have done some research on some of this work, I think, and also, how does the parent perceive this? Is the parent going to know that there is a different gradation or are they just going to feel threatened by it? Dr Ghate: In respect of child protection services? Q302 Valerie Davey: No, in respect of the recognised need of help at some stage. Dr Ghate: I think there is not a culture of expecting help with parenting as a right in this country and as a result there is still in the minds of many parents a slight sense of stigma. We have a culture which still tends to say that you should know how to be a parent naturally; it just comes with the birth of your first child, whereas most parents know very well that that is not necessarily true. There is still a sense, I think, for many parents that asking for help may be revealing that you do not feel you are coping or that you are inadequate or deficient in some way and we still need to work on that perception and to keep saying that it is normal to need help. Most parents need help at some point with some issue. To follow that up we ought to have some access to services where people know that if they have a need they know where to go and they can guarantee that they will get some input. Often it is very low level; it is just a need for a particular piece of information about a particular issue at a particular point in the child's life. Transition points for children's lives often seem to trigger that, for instance, when children move between starting school or going to secondary school and so forth. Q303 Valerie Davey: We had what we called, I am glad to say, an Oxfam coffee morning and in meeting with other parents what we learned from each other was brilliant. No-one told us but we were a parent support mechanism in that informal way, voluntary in the broadest sense. Should we be encouraging that or do mums not have the time these days? Dr Ghate: There have been some projects recently developing fairly low level parent support and guidance and information sessions which are attached to schools and which are hosted by schools and facilitated by schools, and the evidence from the evaluation of the pilot was very positive. Schools seem to be a very appropriate place from which to access parents but they will not reach all parents. They do not reach dads as effectively as they reach mothers and they will not reach the families whose children are not attending school or who have very extreme needs. Other approaches will be necessary for those groups but they seem to have been extremely well received and in the parents' own report effective at helping them feel more confident and know where to go for help in their local area should they have need of it. That was a very promising intervention. Q304 Helen Jones: Bridget, I understand that the organisations that you represent have some concerns about the DfES proposals for information recording and sharing. Would you first of all like to tell us what those concerns are and what changes you would like to see? Ms Lindley: The starting point is that anything that will facilitate sharing of relevant information where appropriate permissions have been given is to be welcomed, obviously, because it leads to greater efficiency, but (I am afraid there are some "buts") we are aware that it is not likely to be a national database and I think probably the most vulnerable families are in that transient population that may move quite frequently, in which case a local based database is not going to be any help at all in terms of sharing information. Unless somebody has been able to track exactly which authorities that family has been in that is not going to be very helpful, so I think it is national or nothing. Q305 Jonathan Shaw: They are not likely to leave a message, are they, at social services? Ms Lindley: The second point is that there is a huge danger that the information that it contains will not be kept up to date. We have concerns about who is going to keep it up to date and it could become very misleading very quickly unless information is kept up to date. The third thing is around the Data Protection Act. If partnership, going back to the earlier discussion, is really going to be a core part of the policy in order to really engage parents because they are the main carers for children, there has to be a strong presumption that parents' consent will be asked for unless the section 47 threshold has been met, which raises the question of what happens with the lobbying, flagging, whatever one calls it, for cause for concern. As you know, it is not defined, nor is it linked to any duty in the Children Act to provide any services, so there is a danger that it is going to be free-floating, not necessarily a trigger to anything but will nevertheless create a sort of professionals' comfort zone that they have done something but nobody else has necessarily picked it up, at the same time as undermining the family's trust in the system because things are going on behind their back and things are logged and they are not quite sure why and what is going to happen. There are huge dangers and, being a lawyer by training, you put it all in the scales and see which way it tips and I am afraid it seems to tip against the massive investment that is involved to set it up in favour of other things. I am afraid therefore that the message, not just from our three organisations but at least 30 others who came to a seminar that we had last week to discuss this, all said very definitely that they would not support it and if it did go ahead then the cause for concern bit must be defined and must be linked into existing child care legislation because otherwise it is just operating on its own and it does not necessarily lead to service provision in any way at all. Q306 Helen Jones: That is very helpful, but there is a tension in all of this, is there not, between getting permission, getting things sent from parents, and the problems of families where there is cause for concern about the children who are the least likely to give consent to that information and share it. How are you going to resolve that because all of us, everyone who has worked in any social policy or legal area, is well aware of a small minority of families who hide things? That is the area where the most damage is likely to result to children, so how are we going to resolve that tension? Ms Lindley: Whenever we have tried to think about this in our discussions we have tried to find cases where there is cause for concern that addresses that issue where things may be hidden or there is a worry about asking for consent to disclosure that does not meet the section 47 threshold of suspicion of harm. We cannot find any where you will be saying, "No, we have not hit section 47. We do not suspect harm but we are too worried to ask for consent". This is a question to you. Can you describe the kind of case to me that would not have hit section 47? If you cannot then I think it is fair enough to say that there is a presumption that you ask for consent unless you suspect harm, in which case it is taken out of their hands anyway. Helen Jones: Generally we do not answer the questions from this side of the table. Chairman: But it was a good question. Q307 Helen Jones: Let me describe one to you. We have already objects set up to try to divert young people who may be at risk of getting involved with the criminal justice system, for example. It may well be, and we are theorising here, that some of those young people come from a home background which leads them into trouble. It is not harm but it could lead to harm in the future. Do either of you have suggestions for how we would deal with something like that which clearly would be a cause for concern if you were looking at those young people? Dr Ghate: This is not particularly my area and I think there are colleagues coming later who know relatively more about this. My sense is that it is already happening in any case from the work that we do on youth justice issues; we are researching on young offenders and young people at risk of offending. My sense is that the worst possible thing that can happen is that yet another system will be introduced half-heartedly and it will become then yet another way of assessing, recording, tracking and so forth alongside the various other things which areas and agencies are using. My experience as a researcher for many years now is that record keeping is appalling in most agencies. It is worse in some than in others. Even in agencies where they have had for quite a long time computerised record keeping and clear instructions about what they should be doing, when you actually go through the information that should be recorded it is not there or it is out of date or it is missing. This strategy stem is only going to work if it is really given a lot of support and a push from behind. To introduce it half-heartedly and see how it goes I think is a recipe for disaster. Helen Jones: I think I would agree. Speaking as somebody who once wrote to the health visitors to tell them I was moving and they took absolutely no notice until they turned up on my doorstep a couple of years later and said, "We have got no record of this child", I can quite see that. What happened in the trailblazer areas? Did we learn any lessons from those about how valuable the databases were, whether they could be used properly and whether they led to improvements in services, because that is the key, is it not? Are they going to lead to improvements in the delivery of services where they are needed for all children and particularly for the most vulnerable children? Q308 Chairman: I think we have got the evaluator of the trailblazers coming in the next session. Deborah Ghate, do not hold back if you want to answer that. Dr Ghate: I was going to say it is probably worth looking at what happened in the youth justice system with the introduction of things like Asset, which I think did improve record keeping to some extent. I do not think they completely solved all the problems but it has been relatively easier to find out what is happening to particular children in the system as a result of those having been introduced, but again it is very patchy. Q309 Helen Jones: What would you say to us as a committee? Would you want to get rid of the information sharing arrangements altogether, would you argue that resources would be best used elsewhere or would you simply want to modify them? Dr Ghate: As a researcher I have to say that I think it is critical that we have a good system and there is a lot of evidence that children do fall through the cracks if we do not have it, and it is exactly the children who most need help who somehow do not appear on anybody's system. I think the problem is that ideas are introduced and then watered down and watered down in response to a whole set of concerns and then we get some hybrid that really does not fulfil any need. Q310 Chairman: I get the feeling from the evidence we have taken so far that on the one hand out of the Victoria Climbié inquiry there is the view that you have got to have a totally new, all-encompassing system that replaces what we have got rather than very good discrete services across the patch. It does seem to me that there is a bit of Laming, when we interviewed him, that wanted this big new system that every child was on, whereas, as I have heard you giving answers, there are lots of policies that support children that are new. In some areas it is Sure Start, in others it is the new right to nursery education. There are an awful lot of services that are being provided for children that are discrete services and we want all of those to be of high quality and value. Is it some sort of looking for something too ambitious to have an all-embracing system or service? Dr Ghate: At this point in time it may be very ambitious considering that we are still working at getting agencies to work together across more basic functions. If the proposals in Every Child Matters are implemented and carried forward and in a few years' time we see much more effective integrated working through children's trusts, for example, then I would say the ground may be more fertile for developing shared information systems, for example, but I think probably we are trying to do everything simultaneously and my hunch would be that that is relatively more difficult. Q311 Helen Jones: My last question is about this business of correcting information in one sense when the children are very young, but what happens with older children if parents and children disagree about the nature of the information that is held on them? We understand what you are telling us, Bridget, about the need to involve families but there are occasions when there are disputes within families about what is correct and what is not. How would you deal with situations like that? Ms Lindley: It is the age-old problem of almost Gillick-competent children and Gillick-competent children, and I think probably once Gillick competence is clear then the child is going to be the main informant. Nevertheless, the parents do have parental responsibility and if there are big issues I think perhaps it is something that needs to be assessed as to why the parents and the child are disagreeing and it is an issue that should not just be swept under the carpet. What is a bit less clear is when children are not quite Gillick-competent but are giving other messages and that can happen really quite young. It is another tricky problem if professionals are going to spend hours trying to resolve who is the main informant for the information that goes on the database and time is not spent assessing the need of the family. Q312 Helen Jones: But it is one they have to resolve in many other areas, is it not? In mental health, for instance, there is quite often a tension between what the client, who in this case is the person with the mental health problem, and what their carers and family want. It has to be resolved by deciding who the main client is. It is much more difficult in the situation you are talking about but surely it is a key to getting this right. Ms Lindley: Are you talking about the database? I am sorry; I am a bit unclear. Q313 Helen Jones: For example, general decisions in mental health are quite common on how someone should be dealt with, whether they should be in hospital, whether they should be in the community and quite frequently you find different points of view. That is true within families too, is it not? You are talking about how to resolve this but it is quite difficult to decide in this case who the client is. Is that the child or the family? Ms Lindley: I think we are moving away from the discussion around the database to assessment generally and how one identifies a child's needs. Q314 Helen Jones: No. It comes back to the database. If parents and the children are giving different information or have different views on the information which is on the database how would you resolve that tension? Ms Lindley: As I understand the database it is a directory of information about agencies that are involved with the family and basic details about people who have parental responsibility and it is flagging up a cause for concern but not holding any case data. Those are the latest proposals that I think are coming out of DfES. I may be wrong but I think that is right, so I think the issues you are talking about are much more around assessment and it begs the need for a really thorough assessment according to the assessment framework which already exists. Q315 Chairman: Just to push you a little bit further down the road of information sharing, coming out of this tragedy and the Laming inquiry was there not a strong recommendation that ran right through that, that it is not a better information; it is a high quality group of people working across departments, talking to each other, particularly social work departments and people in the health sector? We have talked informally, although he has not given formal evidence to this committee to the Children's Health Commissioner. He is still very worried and concerned about how much quality of information will be shared under the new arrangements between the health sector and other sectors. Do you share that concern? Dr Ghate: Worried in what sense? Q316 Chairman: Concerned that there is every sign that there is a deep reluctance of professionals in the health sector to share the information that they have. Dr Ghate: Yes. I think one comes across that in many different ways and there is a reluctance on their side. On the other side social services staff are often very poor at keeping records at all. One does not even get to the question of whether they should share the information with anybody. Q317 Jonathan Shaw: That is a sweeping statement, is it not - social services are very poor at keeping records at all? Dr Ghate: I think they can be. Q318 Jonathan Shaw: Some social service departments in some cases have poor record-keeping. That is a bit more accurate, is it not, rather than condemning the whole lot? Dr Ghate: That is not what I am saying. Jonathan Shaw: You did. Chairman: Jonathan is a former social worker. Q319 Jonathan Shaw: You would not want to make sweeping statements as a highly regarded researcher who looks at information and detail, would you? Dr Ghate: Absolutely not. Jonathan Shaw: I thought not. Q320 Chairman: Bridget, do you want to come in? Ms Lindley: Just to say around the issue of health professionals being worried about how much information will be shared, I think it goes back to the point about the consent of the person whose information it is. If that issue is not such a hot potato in the sense that consent has been asked for then there will not be the fear, and if the consent has not been asked for then it must be a section 47. Then it is clear because the threshold is there. I do not see it as such a problem if there was a presumption of getting parental consent, or the child's consent if they are Gillick-competent, as part and parcel of the information sharing process if it does go ahead. I also understand that the database index, or whatever the latest term for it is, does not hold case information, so there is perhaps an excessive worry about what they might have to share about the database which does not really exist. What it means is that this professional is willing to be rung; that is the latest that we have heard. It does not record the case information on the database. What they then divulge will depend on whether or not we are into child protection because those are the basic medical codes of practice. Chairman: Okay; I think you have put our minds at rest. Can I thank Bridget and Deborah very much for the information you have given orally and in writing but will you stay in touch with the committee because as we are continuing this inquiry and writing it up we are going to need your help and assistance? Thank you very much. Memoranda submitted by Information Commissioner, London School of Economics
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Hedy Cleaver, Professorial Research Fellow, Royal Holloway University of London, Mr Richard Thomas, Information Commissioner, and Dr Eileen Munro, Reader in Social Policy, London School of Economics, examined. Q321 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming to meet the Committee. Richard Thomas, you have a reputation for being a tough commissioner. Everyone says, "that's a pretty tough guy, pretty robust; he does not mince his words". Would this be a good description of your attitude to the information aspects of the Children Act? Mr Thomas: I have a reputation for supporting plain English if nothing else! As Commissioner, I am responsible for the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act. In this area, as Commissioner, my main concern focuses on the databases that are being proposed to contain information on every child and young person in this country. I want to start by making absolutely clear that I yield to nobody in my concern about children at risk from harm. I would welcome any attempt, whether legislation, guidance, or practical arrangements, to improve the sharing of information amongst professionals about their involvement with a child whose health and safety needs protection. That has to be my starting point. I do have some concerns to share with the Committee about the proposal for a network of databases. I put in a fairly lengthy written submission to the Committee, and in the last week or so we have shared with the Committee our response to the DfES consultation paper on this subject of October 2004. I think the proposed databases raise what I see as four key but interrelated issues, all of which have data protection implications. First, which children are we talking about; secondly, how much information about each child; thirdly, who should have access to that information; and fourthly, what are the operational aspects? How will the information be kept accurate and up to date, and how securely will the information be held? I would be very happy to elaborate to the Committee, both in relation to the overall scheme of the 2004 Act, as enacted, the more detailed proposals recently put forward by the DfES, which are welcome as a step in addressing the issues, but I continue to have very serious concerns about the latest proposals coming from the DfES, and I have some alternate ideas to share with the Committee this afternoon. Q322 Chairman: Hedy Cleaver, you have been looking at the Pathfinders and evaluating them. These are the authorities that have had £1 million to spend on the pathfinder. You have also looked at some of the others, the 100,000. Professor Cleaver: You are quite right that I was responsible for the Trailblazers, as they are called. That is the research that I have just completed and which is now published. I would like to start by saying that I thought it was a very interesting way of the Government exploring how information-sharing could be supported and improved, because normally the research that we do is on policies or new procedures, where often Government people, academics and some practitioners get together and work something out and it is then trialled. This notion of trailblazing was very interesting and innovative because it allowed local authorities - and it was well funded - to try things out. Having said that, and thinking of summing up the key issues about databases that came from the research on the trailblazers, they did have concerns about databases. The key concerns was whether the system was going to be secure; how they could get practitioners to use them; and how they would monitor them. Six of the ten trailblazers went the route of having very minimal information on these databases. The more complicated they get, and the more information put on, i.e., flags of concern, or even the names of the agencies working with the child, you will have difficulties because agencies like CAMS or the Brook Clinic signal more information than you need, and those are the agencies that do not want themselves to be put on. If you go that route you will get into all sorts of complications. The research would suggest the simpler the better, and that you would have a lead professional whose name should be on there, and they would encourage information-sharing by passing on information and keeping the chronology. If you have a very complicated system, not only will you have problems with making sure that everybody can use it - it is Criminal Bureau checked and all sorts of difficulties like that - but you may also have the exact opposite of what the Government wants, which is not an increase of information-sharing but a decrease in agencies talking to each other, simply because you put on some information, you read some information, and you do not bother to talk, communicate or meet with those people. Dr Munro: I have given in evidence my concerns. The two main points are that in endeavouring to build up preventive services, which I wholeheartedly support, if we do not provide adequate funding, then local authorities will have to take it away from dealing with child abuse cases because they have a finite budget. I am also concerned at the way that problems with children's services get discussed; it is as if child abuse were just another need like any other, and I do not think it is. For the worker in dealing with the family, it requires a complete change of mindset towards a more suspicious, challenging attitude. The good worker needs to be able to move from both that narrow, suspicious focus on abuse to the broader mindset of discovering the child's needs and the broader social setting. They are different processes and different types of assessment, and they should not be merge because then we would be losing the lessons that we have developed so painfully over the 1970s and 1980s of how to deal with child abuse. My second major concern is that in talking about information-sharing as being a crucial aspect in good work, people are misunderstanding the mistakes that have been made in the child protection cases. In the case of Victoria Climbié there was no shortage of information but there was a shortage of wisdom of how to understand that information. Giving those workers even more information would make them less competent than they were. It is not the answer; it is about improving the workforce. Chairman: We are learning some lessons about that in the evidence we have taken already. We were quite astounded in one area that we looked at, at the number of children taken into care, which had shot up after the Climbié case out of all proportion, so there can be a total over-reaction to that sort of investigation as well. Q323 Paul Holmes: Professor Cleaver, obviously it is very early days with the information-sharing assessment systems that have been introduced so far, but you have done an initial study of the process of setting those up. Are there any indications from what you have seen so far that these systems will improve, or are improving the links between different practitioners? Professor Cleaver: Definitely the setting-up of systems is improving the link - whether the outcome would in terms of the database - but the trailblazers have worked enormously on trying to improve inter-agency collaboration, understanding each other's roles and responsibilities and getting people together. It has to be a continuous, ongoing process; but the process itself has been very valuable. Q324 Paul Holmes: Relating to what Dr Munro has said about the Climbié inquiry, that it was not a lack of information but a lack of wisdom about how to use the information, the whole point of the information-sharing system is to get practitioners working in different areas - police, health and social services - to know that there are concerns that other people have. Do you think it will work in that sense? Professor Cleaver: I think there is an awful lot of training, both within and between agencies. On another piece of research that I was doing, which is based in social services, looking at the integrated children's system, one of the biggest issues that is coming out there is the difficulty practitioners have in being able to analyse the information they are given - so supporting Eileen, there is an awful lot of information, but understanding what it means is a very difficult task. In social services particularly social workers struggle, partly because the training needs to be addressed from the universities, but partly because they are under-staffed and over-worked, and they do not have sufficient support, because again there are difficulties in line management because they are under-staffed. That is where the crux of that might be. Q325 Paul Holmes: In the Climbié inquiry and in the Matthew Vaudreuil case that we have been looking at in British Columbia, exactly the same thing was found, in two children's cases in two different countries. There had been dozens of different people involved from health and the police and social services, but they did not realise, or did not know, that there had been lots of other visits to hospitals and lots of other people who had been alarmed. The whole point about the information-sharing system is that you would have a simple flag of concern from the hospital or from the health services, so that a new social worker looking at it would be alerted. Professor Cleaver: My feeling from the trailblazers study is that it would be better if you had a lead professional who would co-ordinate all that and keep a chronology of events, rather than try and get a system to do it, because you have to make judgments and you have to make sure that people talk together, rather than just putting up the flag and not doing anything about it. My preference would be to have that done by a human-being rather than a computer. Q326 Paul Holmes: You are indicating that from your initial studies you do not think it will make a big difference in outcomes, although it might help in communication. Professor Cleaver: If you have a database where you have a lead professional, and you the playgroup leader have a concern and access the database, having talked first with the family and asked their permission to access the database; you access it and find out that there is a lead professional there and you would then talk to the lead professional to find out who else is involved. The lead professional would know that for example the GP has had a concern, and the health visitor has had a concern, and they would then be responsible for making sure something happened, i.e., the person who had rung in with the consent could not then decide that they had done their job and flagged the concern up, which is always my worry about these things, but people have to then carry on their responsibility and maybe a meeting would be called with the parents to work out how best to respond, to get more information and on you go. Dr Munro: In Victoria Climbié's case it was not a question of them not knowing how many other people had been involved, but not seeing the significance of it. There was no secret about her hospital visits. The Haringey social worker knew about the Brent involvement. It was that the brain cells did not operate. Q327 Paul Holmes: You both seem to be indicating that all the effort, money and time that has been put into setting up this common system, which raises all the concerns from an information and confidentiality point of view, is perhaps misplaced because it is trying to tackle a problem that is not really the main problem. Dr Munro: Yes. Professor Cleaver: I do not think it will stop a Climbié death, but I think it might be helpful to support vulnerable children to make sure that agencies talk more at an earlier stage, but child deaths have remained pretty constant, and we have a problem of knee-jerk reactions and completely revolutionising everything because another child dies. We could have done things better; there are no two ways about it; but I think there will always be children who die, and there will always be children who slip through the net. The most vulnerable are likely to slip through a database net. Q328 Chairman: We certainly found that in British Columbia. It was an exact parallel to Victoria Climbié with the Children's Commissioner and the new Act. There were half a dozen tragedies, so it is not a quick fix here. In terms of Richard Thomas's view, it would matter to you if there were a system that cost £1 billion to set up this database, and £1 billion that could have been spent on other things. Richard Thomas and his organisation have very great doubts about having this sort of information on a database. Are we going a long way down the wrong track here if it costs that sort of money? Dr Munro: I am not sure how it will help very vulnerable children. Q329 Chairman: But that is why it all started. Dr Munro: I know! Mr Thomas: Many of these issues are beyond my competence, but I will answer in more general terms. Q330 Chairman: A lot of them are beyond the competence of members of this Committee. For many years we have been stuck in the rut of education and skills and this is all new territory for us. Mr Thomas: I acknowledge that many people do clearly believe that databases are necessary and desirable in this area, but I have to raise questions about what we are trying to achieve in this area. What are the stated objectives? One senses a shifting of goalposts in this area, starting with the original clause 8 of the Children's Bill over a year or so again, which in term followed from the Every Child Matters green paper. There were vague statements as to what the databases were intended to do. That was amended as the Bill went through Parliament. We had the Joint Committee on Human Rights commenting on the proposals at that time, and some fairly difficult questions were raised by that Joint Committee. The Bill was amended and we now have what is effectively section 12 of the Act. Since then we have had the consultation paper of October 2004, which I mentioned in my opening statement. That signals to us something of a shift inside DfES, away from what I might call the universal approach. Originally it seemed to be talking in terms of all children, 11 million children, all contacts from professionals where there is, in rather vague language, a cause for concern, and access for all professionals. The consultation paper does mark a very clear shift away from that. It recognises that such an approach may deter access to vital services in some cases. It recognises that it may run the risk of omitting the most vulnerable children. By implication, not explicitly, the DfES paper recognises that the universal approach would indeed involve excessive intrusion into privacy, and ultimately undermine both the confidence of professionals, of the public, and ultimately undermine effectiveness. It goes right back to asking very precisely what we are trying to do here. Are we concerned with protecting vulnerable children who are at risk of abuse of some sort - and we can elaborate what is meant by that - or are we talking more about - picking up the jargon this afternoon - more about family support and the wider needs of children as articulated in the second part of section 12. The words in section 12 are more concerned with the well-being of the child and the ability of the child to reach their full potential. I have concerns, as the Information Commissioner, responsible for data protection. I went so far in the summer as to echo some of the concerns expressed by the Home Affairs Select Committee, looking at identity cards, when they picked up on the proliferation of databases, where the state in its various guises is collecting more and more information about citizens, and children in this case. I used quite graphic language, which was: "Are we in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society?" I come back to my opening point: we must be absolutely clear what we are trying to achieve. We can justify those objectives, but let us get a system that does just that. Let us not collect information for its own sake, with all the risks of intrusion into privacy and the more serious risks where mistakes are made, where information is not kept up to date. I can share with the Committee examples that my office has seen in recent years in the childcare area, where some quite disturbing situations that have come to our attention, where mistakes have been made or where information has not been kept up to date. Q331 Helen Jones: I was struck by what you said about the Victoria Climbié case, that there was not a lack of information but there was a lack of what we call from where I come from "nowse". How would you improve social work training? Let us face it, that this is a terribly difficult job, sometimes done by young men and women with little practical experience to draw on when they first start their work. If we really wanted to protect vulnerable children, and move of the database, how would you improve the training? Dr Munro: One area that I would look at is whether the recent efforts to improve it have been inadvertently harmful. I am thinking of the proliferation of paperwork. I am wholeheartedly in favour of encouraging a more structured approach of encouraging recording, and a form of paperwork is essential and it is the right path to go down. However, we have got very clumsy tools at the moment, and one of the very big dangers I can see is that with things like the assessment of need frameworks and the common assessment frameworks, if you give them to an inexperienced worker and you do not give them the kind of reflective supervision that encourages learning, they will use them in a very mechanical way and they will never go beyond using them in a very mechanical way, because they only learn to develop the skills to get the feel of a pattern of family interaction and get the overall intricate picture by having the kind of supervision that makes you stop and reflect on what happened, what you missed, what you could have interpreted differently. You learn by deliberately trying to learn; it does not happen by chance. We are underplaying the role of that kind of professional development in the day-to-day work of social workers, and turning it much more into a clerical - "have you done the form?" kind of job. Q332 Jonathan Shaw: Professor Cleaver, following on from Richard Thomas's question about what we want to achieve from this database, in your review of the trailblazer areas, what were staff telling you about how effective or not the database was, and whether it was useful at all? Professor Cleaver: Very few of them had started using databases, so the information is rather poor. They had only just started their trialling of the whole system, and some had not started at all by the time I had finished it. One of the interesting things that came from, not the database itself, but as a pro, was that not only did they learn much more about each other, and there was all this stress on understanding what each other did, but also that the referrals to social services were more appropriate once they used the common assessment. Most used the common assessment, and the common assessment reflected in all but one case the assessment framework. It is crucial that if we are going to have a common assessment it does reflect it, because if we want electronic transfer of data we cannot start re-inventing. The use of the common assessment was well understood across the agencies, so they did not have to start explaining all the terms. That work had already been done to some extent, so they took advantage of it. Q333 Jonathan Shaw: You said there was a problem for social services understanding all the information that they received, due to under-funding and staff shortages. Do you think that is the case right across the board? Professor Cleaver: You mean other agencies, or across the board in social services? Q334 Jonathan Shaw: You said that social workers do not understand the information because they are under-staffed. Professor Cleaver: It is not so much that they do not understand the information ----- Q335 Jonathan Shaw: I am picking up these sweeping statements this afternoon. Professor Cleaver: The biggest problem is analysing the data that they get and understanding what it means. Q336 Jonathan Shaw: So that is about competency, not just about staff shortages. Professor Cleaver: No, it is linked to staff shortages because ----- Q337 Jonathan Shaw: Well, not every area. I agree in London there are particular problems, but it is not every area in the country that has staff shortages. Professor Cleaver: It is fairly universal. It is average 30 per cent running ----- Q338 Jonathan Shaw: Well ----- Professor Cleaver: Well, yes, I will not argue. Some of them - I have not met one yet - may be fully staffed. Q339 Jonathan Shaw: What I am keen to understand is whether it is just about shortages, or is it about a general competency that has an impact upon training? Professor Cleaver: It is a combination. I think there is a difficulty from the social work training that is done in universities; that needs to be addressed, in terms of understanding child development and how you do analyse information and how you use research data in analysing your information and making plans. There is an issue there, and what one would have hoped then, if you had had social workers who were coming out with these difficulties, is that they could be overcome if you had very good supervision in terms of allowing the time for reflective practice, to think through it with your line manager. That is where the difficulty comes in terms of staffing issues, because you are often carrying too large a case load and so is your manager, so you do not have that time. Q340 Paul Holmes: Professor Cleaver has already done some research on the setting up of the databases. Is there a need for further research to evaluate whether it has made any difference? Professor Cleaver: Yes. Q341 Paul Holmes: Are there any plans for ----- Professor Cleaver: Not that I know of, but I do not know whether the Government has decided to fund that piece of research, or whether they have it in planning or not. It needs to be looked at. Q342 Paul Holmes: As far as you know there are no plans. In so far as you think it will work better at all, how far will the national database system improve things for those children who currently fall between the cracks, the children who are looked after by adults, but do not get social services, or refugee children? Professor Cleaver: If you are going to smuggle a child in, you will smuggle them in quite well, and you will not go and register them on a database. If you are an extremely young girl giving birth in a field, you are not going to have them registered on the database, so extremely vulnerable children will fall through those cracks anyway. It might encourage agencies to work together better, if there is a lead professional who you know you can come to and who will help organise and support agencies in talking to each other more. Q343 Paul Holmes: If one of the purposes of the national database was that it would be commonly accessible across the whole of the UK, would that not make it easier to pick up on some of the children who sometimes get lost because the parent moves from one end of the country to the other? Professor Cleaver: If it is national ----- Q344 Paul Holmes: Is that not the intention? If it is local databases, they should be accessible nationally, or it should be a national database - or not? Professor Cleaver: I think I agree with you. The idea is that if they are local they will be somehow linked in to each other. I am not quite sure how it will work if you move and take the child out of school. You may get lost anyway and I am not quite sure how that would work. I do not see how it would work. Q345 Paul Holmes: Would there be any point unless it was a workable national database? Bridget Lindley talked earlier about the danger of postcode lotteries, of local databases not talking to each other. Is there any point at all unless you have a proper national system? Professor Cleaver: You have to have a national system or one - I am not an IT guru but they tell me that there are ways of somehow magically speaking to each other. It has to be in reality a national database. How it works, I do not understand, but it must be national; there is no point at all otherwise. Q346 Paul Holmes: You talked about the need for there to be a lead professional who would take particular responsibility for deciding when there was cause for concern and when to put flags up on the database. Who would that be? Where would the lead professional come from? Professor Cleaver: I would not be putting flags of concern on the database at all. Q347 Paul Holmes: But is that not the whole point stated in the Children Act of the database? Professor Cleaver: I do not think it is a good route to go. It is dangerous and I think you have real problems of access, and you have levels of access then. If you have levels of access because you only want some people to see what the flags are and whatever - you have professionals having different levels of access depending on what case they are working with, and it is a hugely complicated system. I would not have flags of concern on. The research from the trailblazers suggests that the majority would not have flags of concern on either. Q348 Paul Holmes: Who would be the lead professional? Professor Cleaver: The lead professional, in my small view - I am not going to be making these decisions, but it could work if you had the lead professional starting off being from universal services. It would be the health visitor if they were under 5, and it would need to be flexible so that once the child went to school it would then become the school teacher. If the child went into social services it would be for the period of time they were getting social services support, the social worker who would take over. It would have to be flexible. Q349 Paul Holmes: The Children Act says clearly that it is the intention that an electronic flag would be placed on the record if a practitioner had a cause for concern about the child. The Information Commissioner and the NSPCC have criticised that because they ask, what is the definition of "cause for concern"? Everybody would have different definitions. There is a clear intention that there should be these electronic flags. How would you decide on what "cause for concern" meant, which would have the same meaning to all the different people involved? Professor Cleaver: It is extremely difficult. We have no definition of what concern for me is, and what concern for me is one day or another day, and which child; and whether my level of concern differs from yours or yours. It is a really, really difficult can of worms that we are opening. If we have got real concerns, we should be thinking in terms of child protection as against a mild worry. It is a terrible problem. Dr Munro: If you have a cause for concern that the child may be abused or neglected, then we have a very large set of working-together documents that set out very clear what you should do. It is well-established and the result of a lot of good experience, so we do not need to duplicate that. I do not quite understand what the scenario is where you think that you might need to check things out without the family's knowledge, but you are not talking about abuse. I just do not know what scenario crops up of that nature. Q350 Chairman: If you do not have these flags on the system, what is the point in having the system? Professor Cleaver: I do not want the system. Q351 Chairman: This is a wonderful session, where I am getting more evidence from the back row. The nods will never go down in Hansard - it is all very good quality! Mr Thomas: Can I raise the issue of whether we need to extend this to all 11 million children? Clearly, when the Act talks about such matters as education, training, recreation, the contribution to society and social and economic well-being - those are the words I was searching for earlier from section 10 of the Act - that does embrace all children. The fundamental issue is, are we trying to enhance the well-being of all children in this country with this system, or are we trying to target child abuse for the problems that have been well-rehearsed. It may be possible with a narrower database, as it were, automatically for there to be a cause for concern, because they would not be on the database in the first place unless there was a cause for concern in the sort of language that Dr Munro referred to earlier. The consultation paper I mentioned earlier illustrates some of the tangles that we get into here. As you collect so much information on so many children you run the risk of losing the important cases amongst the mass of other cases. It becomes very, very complicated, and I echo the words about simplicity being important in this area. It is very expensive. That is not my immediate concern, but the resources must be phenomenally high. I really worry about whether some of these arrangements will be workable in practice. The latest proposals rely very heavily upon the consent of the parent, up to age 12, and of the child beyond 12 up to 18. It is very difficult with these very huge databases to explain what is involved in giving consent, to get multiple consent across a wide range of organisations - the health area, the social services area, education and so on. Keeping the consents up to date will be very challenging. It is not a once-and-for-all consent; it has to be something that is ongoing. What somebody may consent when a child is four years old, may be very different when the child is 14 years old. There are problems where there are conflicts between parent and child. There are problems where we have different names for children. Children often have different names and addresses. We have a divorce rate in this country of something like 40 per cent now and people move address on a very, very regular basis - the London turnover is about 40 per cent every year or so. The problems of keeping this database accurate and up to date, from my perspective as the custodian of data protection concerns, are very challenging. You only have to struggle with the concept of what is a cause for concern if you have this very wide approach to all children. If you narrow it down to a database just of those who are at some sort of risk and have been identified as being at risk of threat to their mental or physical health or well-being, then you do not have to worry about an indicator of concern. You do not have to have flags. Three flags will be complicated enough in itself. You do not have to worry about these sorts of details and you do not have to get the consent of the parents in the first place. A lot of people think that everything, because of data protection, has to be done with consent. There is a lot of misconception out there: consent is not required for so much sharing and processing of information. If a statutory body is exercising a statutory function, that is one example of where consent is not required at all. The concerns we have raised consistently focus around the scale of the ambition of these databases, being for all children. If it was for very well and closely-defined objectives with a narrower population, many of the problems we have been talking about may disappear altogether. Q352 Chairman: As the Information Commissioner, do you think it is rather odd, whether you want a bigger or a smaller system, that we do not have any identification for children from birth? The earliest we get is at five, when going to school and then a national insurance number at 16. We do not have any data on a child with registration at birth, for example. Is that not an anomaly, or are you not concerned about it? Mr Thomas: I am concerned. You are raising major issues here, Chairman. There are various sorts of numbers. The National Health number is not used to any great extent. For what purpose does one need to have the registration? For what purpose does one need to have such a number? If a compelling case can be made out, then maybe one should go down that road. So far the tradition in this country and other English-speaking countries is not to go down the system of the state registering and keeping tracks of every person from cradle to grave. Q353 Chairman: Are trailblazers put into practice with an up-and-running system? I have heard it is only Lewisham. Professor Cleaver: I do not know how many are because I have come off the study now. It is now five months old. I went to a meeting on Thursday with them, just by chance, and I think they are probably more than Lewisham, but I do not know. I think it does need to be looked at. Chairman: If you know who has that information, would you pass it on to us? Now we move to coverage of databases and child indexes. Q354 Jeff Ennis: This is supplementary to the point you made about information and the intelligence gained from the trailblazers, Professor Cleaver. It appears to me that by and large a trailblazer or pathfinder, or whatever model the Government is looking at, is so that we can learn from best practice and make sure that we put the system in when it comes in on the big bang that it is working effectively. It appears to me that the trailblazers have not really delivered value for money to a large extent in achieving that objective. I would have thought that when we are looking at databases the main objective is to separate the wheat from the chaff, to be able to identify information within the whole amount of data available, which can act as a signpost. It seems to me that currently we are looking at a system that is adding to the chaff, rather than sorting the wheat from the chaff. Do you agree with that, Professor Cleaver? Professor Cleaver: When they were established as IRT projects, they were not directed to set up databases. Q355 Jeff Ennis: Or information systems? Professor Cleaver: Or information systems particularly. They were to explore ways for improving information-sharing. There was a steer away at the very beginning from computerised systems, and except for one of the local authorities most of them spent much of their time trying to improve the inter-agency collaboration and trying to get that embedded in day-to-day practice. As we know, it is very difficult to change the way people work. A lot of effort went into that, and I think a lot of learning came from that, and a lot of understanding of how difficult the job is and how long a task it is to get it done. I would question your very negative view of them; I think quite a lot has been learnt. One of the other difficulties is that they were given so little time, and the Government moved so fast. The learning from it really has not been incorporated in as well as it could be because things were changing so fast. Q356 Jeff Ennis: Effectively, it looks as though the eye has been taken off the ball, and we have moved away from trying to make sure we share this information sensitively and effectively; and now we are more concerned about the structure of the data system or the information system. Is that what you are telling me? Professor Cleaver: I think that is true. There is now suddenly a great desire for a computer-based system, and I fear there is an assumption that this is going to solve the problem, whereas I do not think that any of the trailblazers were setting off thinking that a computerised system which would hold all information about everybody was going to be the way forward. Dr Munro: Saying that it would help you take your eye off the ball is exactly the fear I have. If children's services are told to develop this very expensive and difficult database, and put their attention on developing technology, they take their eye away from the need to improve the skills and knowledge of the person who goes into the family home to talk to the parents. Mr Thomas: You talked about separating the wheat from the chaff. If I can extend the metaphor, if you are looking for a needle in a haystack I am not sure it is wise to make the haystack even bigger. That is one of the points I was trying to make earlier. I have not been directly involved with the trailblazers, but my staff had conversations with half a dozen of them, and my impression is that what they really valued was the face-to-face or telephone contact they had with their fellow professionals, which the trailblazing schemes have stimulated. It is not so much what the technology turns out, but it is what it has prompted them to do by way of dialogue with each other, which I am sure is a sensible and welcome thing. That is no more than the impression we have, but I hope that is an answer to your questions. Q357 Chairman: The trailblazers were very much about better communication, and it was set on this IT mission at the beginning, and so there is very good stuff that will be available on that communication between human-beings phoning each other and meeting each other in a more systematic way. Professor Cleaver: A lot of the report is about how they improved collaborative working, because that is what they focused on primarily. Some of them did not focus at all on getting a database; they just did not do it. Q358 Chairman: How quickly can that information be shared as good practice, and who is responsible? Professor Cleaver: I do not know who would be responsible for it. It is there in the public domain. Q359 Chairman: Presumably it is the Minister for Children, is it? Professor Cleaver: Is it? Q360 Chairman: I have to tell you that we are in totally new territory - and I am very glad that the witnesses today have been very gentle with us because we are very used to education and skills, but we are finding our way in this new territory. It is a whole new set of acronyms for us, and this is our first inquiry. We do know that we are the scrutiny committee, and this is why we are conducting this inquiry, so we are very interested that is good practice coming out of several million pounds spent on trailblazers, that it be shared amongst all the local authorities and all localities in order to improve what we have. All three of you are saying that rather than having some complex IT system, what you need is better-trained professionals and better interface between those professionals. That is what you are saying, is it not? Professor Cleaver: Yes. Richard is, I think. Mr Thomas: From a different perspective, Chairman. My concern is to make sure we do not have excessive or inaccurate or unnecessary processing of personal information, so I come at these issues from a different angle. We are meeting somewhere in the middle. Q361 Chairman: You have reminded me of a very early LSE lecture I had about information and needles in haystacks. Apparently the Intelligence Service in the United States knew exactly that Pearl Harbour was going to be bombed, yet there was so much information that it got lost in the information flow. We are talking about the same thing, are we not? Mr Thomas: There is a far more serious and more recent example, the Soham murders. Data protection was quite wrongly blamed for what went wrong there. The Bichard Inquiry entirely vindicated data protection. The truth was that the Humberside Police had a lot of information but did not always know where to best find it. Q362 Jeff Ennis: In your written evidence, Dr Munro, you had four main concerns, one of which encapsulates the problem we have, which is your concern no.3: "The proposed policy includes the power to breach confidentiality about low-level concerns and concerns unrelated to abusive parenting; and this will be detrimental to relationships with families." This is the problem we have. How can we ensure that children are protected at the same time as enhancing family support? It seems that we are struggling with two extremes in the parameters, as it were. Dr Munro: I think you have to be clear that supporting families includes treating them with respect, and taking it that on the whole they have their child's best interests at heart far more powerfully than any politician or professional. We also need within children's services, which are basically within a supportive attitude, a more suspicious and coercive element at certain times. The more that we can spell it out, both for professionals and for families, where the threshold is that we will stop treating them with respect and start to challenge them, the better it is. The idea that there is a hazy scenario of dodgy families that would not co-operate but which are not abusive, needs to be spent out, because if they exist I would like to know more about the nature of the problems that they are creating. Unless everybody concerned is clear about what point we criticise a parent, then having a major observation of what they are doing will feel frightening to parents, and it will be threatening. Q363 Helen Jones: As I understood Professor Cleaver's evidence, there had not been much emphasis on IT in the trailblazer areas, but there was a lot of information- sharing and then perhaps setting up of IT. Do you have any information to give us on how parents reacted to the new systems? What affected their responses? Professor Cleaver: There was quite a lot of consultation and information putting-out to parents and children and young people, and most of them did it innovatively, because they had to tell families that this was all going to be happening. They spent a lot of time putting stuff through in all sorts of different ways. They did quite a lot of consultation with the children, again exciting consultation - they had play-acting and what it would be like, et cetera. The children, on the whole, thought information should be shared about them if it was going to improve the services they had, but they wanted to be consulted and informed. They did not want the information shared with bad people, and they were very worried about databases because they felt that they could be hacked into, and unlike Neolithic people like myself ----- Q364 Helen Jones: By them? Professor Cleaver: They were saying things like they could get into the Pentagon database so you could definitely get into East Sussex. They just did not believe all those wise words of the Government, saying it would be secure. They just did not believe it and they wanted very little information kept on those databases because they were frightened that paedophiles would find out, particularly if there was a flag of concern. You can identify vulnerable children, because there was the name, the age of the child and the school they went to, so that you could go and visit, and there was a concern; so you knew immediately that this was a vulnerable child - "goody, goody". They were very concerned about that. They wanted agencies to talk to each other, if they asked them first. Q365 Helen Jones: That is very interesting, particularly the children's view on it, because in my experience they know far more about IT systems than the likes of us. Mr Thomas, you mentioned earlier your concerns about the accuracy of information held, and following on from what Professor Cleaver has told us, about the security of the system. Can you tell the Committee your thoughts on how any such system can be kept accurate and secure? Mr Thomas: There are a lot of questions there, but on security there are standards in the IS/IT industry, and one of the data protection principles is that personal information must be kept secure; so one can have appropriate levels of security. The point I want to make here is that it is fundamental to get it right in this area. We have had complaints in this area of social services, where it seemed that everybody in a local authority department knew that a complaint had been made that a parent was abusing the child, and that was an example of the gossip spreading too far. In terms of accuracy and keeping up to date, I have given some examples of some of the logistical problems when you have these massive numbers and just keeping track of people. Let me give you a graphic example of where circumstances changed and yet the records were not kept up to date. A case was brought to our attention when a child was overheard in the school playground to say - and please forgive the language - "my Dad bonked me last night". The social services through the school quite rightly investigated that. They carried out a full investigation and discovered that a fair had been held in the town; the father had won an inflatable hammer and had said to his children, "bonk, bonk, bonk". As far as social services were concerned, that was the end of the matter. They were quite clear that there was no concern at all, but the records of that incident relating to the child, the sibling, the parents and to the grandparents were kept on another system and were never amended or deleted until it came to light some time later. That is an example of the harm that can happen where records are not scrupulously kept up to date. Another example came to our office some time ago where a father was alleged to have been abusing his child. Another person was then prosecuted for that matter and the father was entirely innocent, and yet the records were not updated, and that was still there against that particular parent's name. It is fundamental not just to keep track of the names and addresses, but to keep track of the changes of circumstances as the various processes move forward. Q366 Chairman: While we have you in front of us, Richard - and we would not like you to have to face us twice, we are also looking at prison education. One of the matters that comes up all the time is whether prisoners can use the Internet for educational purposes. One group of witnesses told us absolutely that there are secure systems where there is no danger of prisoners accessing pornography or getting in touch with victims and so on. There is another group that said there is no system that is foolproof. Which camp would you fall into? Mr Thomas: I am not going to answer the question fully, Chairman. I have notice of that question! I would say no more than that it is my role as Commissioner to be somewhat sceptical, somewhat concerned, and to make sure the systems do what they are intended to do. If one has clarity about the purposes and security arrangements, one then has to make sure that they are actually delivered in practice. Q367 Chairman: What is your interpretation of the 2004 Act, section 12? One interpretation is that there will be a database, and we are on this road to ruin - we have got to have it because it is in the Act. There is another interpretation that there is a power to develop a database. Which is it? Mr Thomas: I read section 12 as a lawyer, Chairman - forgive me - but I think it is talking about the Secretary of State "may" do this, that or the other. There is no duty on the Secretary of State. There is nothing which says that this has to happen. Indeed, there was very considerable scope and flexibility to decide what, if anything, is going to happen in this area. I have welcomed the fact that the primary legislation has become a little more precise than in the original clause 8 of the Bill; we have more elaboration now on the face of the Act. As always in these sorts of situations, what comes out will be the content of the regulations. They have yet to be made. I hope that we will see some draft regulations in due course. I have had the same debate vis-à-vis identity cards. I am bound to say that the safeguards and arrangements on the Identity Cards Bill that is currently going through Parliament are a great deal more elaborate and discussed, and more fully articulated than what we have seen on the face of the Children Act. I do have some concerns, frankly, that as this Bill went through Parliament all the attention was on smacking, and these provisions got almost no attention at all. I do think there are some issues and debates to be had amongst the population and within society at large about these proposals, about which there is still not very much detail on the face of the Act. Chairman: I do get the feelings sometimes in these hearings that we are conducting a rather late pre-legislative inquiry. There is now one last section on the resource implications of the ISA programmes. Q368 Paul Holmes: Professor Cleaver, from your study of the initial trailblazers, is there any evidence about the cost of setting up a proper system in any given area? Professor Cleaver: One of the concerns they have is that the funding would have to continue. I do not think they are expecting it at the very generous rate that it was, but you would have to fund first of all somebody to keep the databases up to date. That is absolutely essential, otherwise you have rubbish information on them, as we have just heard, which can be very dangerous. You need to have some funding for the lead professional, if you are going to have a lead professional. There are huge funding issues, and you need funding to continue the training, because a lot of them have invested a great deal but know it will have to continue, even in the trailblazers; but for the non- trailblazers they have not started. They have done some work towards it, but it has got major cost implications. Having said that, if you removed the database and said you would not go for databases, it has still thrown up the fact that if we want greater inter-agency collaboration, we will have to fund it. Q369 Paul Holmes: What were the generous amounts initially for the trailblazers? Professor Cleaver: They had £1 million for local authorities or groupings of local authorities over a year to do it. Q370 Paul Holmes: If you multiplied that up to cover the whole country, instead of trailblazers, what ----- Professor Cleaver: It would be a lot of money! It is 135 non- trailblazers. Q371 Paul Holmes: You said in some cases it would be groupings. Professor Cleaver: Yes, there were pairs. I do not have a calculator and would have to work it out. Q372 Chairman: There has been an estimate of £1 billion. Professor Cleaver: Okay. Q373 Jeff Ennis: Do you think that ISA systems will represent a good investment, or would money be better spent elsewhere within children's services? Dr Munro: I think I have answered that very clearly already, have I not? This is the wrong place to be looking for improving the quality of services. Q374 Chairman: I want this on the record: I have in my notes that you said in an article published in Clinical Quarterly where you said the real problem is with limited funding of services for early intervention. "Adequate funding would do far more to improve outcomes for children than creating an intrusive, expensive tracking system to reveal what parents and professionals already know, that there are more children needing help than services available." Dr Munro: Yes, I put it quite well, did I not? Mr Thomas: Frankly, I do not think I can personally answer that question. Can I just use the opportunity to make one final point, if you are winding up now? I am conscious that we have all been somewhat negative this afternoon. These are desperately serious issues and we must be as positive as possible. I am aware that within those concerned with the welfare of children, there is a lot of misunderstanding, misconception and anxiety about so-called legal and other constraints, including data protection, on the sharing of information. I want to make it very clear - and I have talked already to such bodies as the Association of Social Service Directors - that the more guidance we can give to people about the legal framework, about what can be done within the data protection environment, the better. I am very, very committed to making data protection as simple as possible, and to clarify the guidance in this very, very important area. If nothing else, I want to end on that very positive note. We are going to do what we can to explain to all the childcare professionals what they can do in this area, a lot more than many would perhaps think. Q375 Chairman: Your use of plain English helps a great deal in that. Mr Thomas: Thank you, Chairman. Professor Cleaver: The enthusiasm in the trailblazers for greater inter-agency collaboration was across the board; they all thought that this was the way forward. An awful lot of work had been done that was very good, and I think that will and should help improve the outcomes for all children, not only the very vulnerable who were on child protection registers but also children who are children in need as defined by the Act and children who are not even at that level of concern - children within schools, if there is greater sharing of information. As I say, there is a great enthusiasm for greater sharing of information when they are working together with the co-operation of parents. You have to have parents and children in there. Q376 Chairman: Is there anything you think we have missed in terms of our questions? Dr Munro: I have a concern about the social work workforce, because I am a social worker. You do need to remember that until the mid 1990s children and families social work was the elite branch, which was highly competitive. If you went to any children and families team in London you would have found people there who had been in post for ten or twenty years, and you had these really experienced, competent teams. They have all been driven out. Unless you can understand why you drove them out, and get them back in, I do not think we are going to capture the skills that we need to make the system function properly. Q377 Chairman: This has been an excellent session. All of us who are experienced Members of Parliament do know what has been happening in social work over the years. I am always amazed when I talk to my health visitors and social workers particularly, professions very much at the sharp end and dealing with human misery and challenging circumstances, that we do not have better human resources bases where people can be moved to different duties and then back. Large numbers of social workers at the front line have such a job that they do need a very careful human resource approach to developing their profession. Dr Munro: They do. Chairman: It has been a very good session for us. Thank you for us being gentle with us, being newcomers on the block! I am grateful to all the witnesses today, and the nodders and the shakers in the gallery! Will you please keep in contact and allow us to contact you again because we want to make this a good report? Thank you. |