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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol, East) (Lab): As someone who spent nearly the first 40 years of my life in Luton and knows the Muslim community well, I think that I can say with some authority that the actions of those who took part in the protests the other day are not representative of the wider Muslim community there. I ask my right hon. and learned Friend to bear that in mind when she considers whether it is worth stoking up matters by holding a debate.
Next Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of our pledge to abolish child poverty. May we have a topical debate on the subject?
Ms Harman: Abolishing child poverty can be raised in the full-day debate on the economy on 31 March. I think that the House will want to associate itself with my hon. Friend’s remarks about homecoming parades. We do not need to hold a debate about the matter, because everybody agrees about it.
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): May I tell the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), who queried the decision of my county council, Leicestershire, to put satnav on roadside mowers, that its activities often verge on the ridiculous?
May I add my support to the comments of the hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Christopher Fraser) about prostate cancer? It is prostate cancer awareness month and the Prostate Cancer Charity has launched the “Prostate cancer—it matters!” campaign, which draws attention to the fact that 100 men a day are diagnosed with prostate cancer and that one man an hour dies of it. Of all the common cancers, it is the worst in terms of patient experience of the NHS. We urgently need a better, new generation test to differentiate between aggressive cancers and more slow-growing ones. May we have a debate on the matter, which is important for many people in every constituency throughout the nation?
Ms Harman: I will bring the matter to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health. I think that it possibly should be the subject of a debate in Westminster Hall.
On satnav on lawn mowers, as a former Back Bencher of the year, my hon. Friend has often mown down his parliamentary opponents.
Lord Laming’s Progress Report
12.36 pm
The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (Ed Balls): In November last year, I commissioned an urgent inspection of children’s services in Haringey following the failure of agencies in that borough to intervene decisively to protect a little boy.
Following the joint inspectors’ report, I took the immediate actions that I judged necessary to ensure the protection of vulnerable children in that borough. I also asked Lord Laming to provide us with an independent progress report on child protection across the country.
Lord Laming has today published his report. I have laid a copy of it before the House, with my reply to him, which sets out the Government’s immediate response. I can confirm that: we will accept all Lord Laming’s recommendations in full; we are taking immediate action from today to implement them; and we will set out our detailed response to all 58 recommendations before the end of next month.
I am sure that I speak for the House when I say that we are hugely grateful to Lord Laming and all the experts, practitioners and members of the public who have contributed to his thorough investigation.
As Lord Laming says at the start of his report, being safe is,
“the very minimum upon which every child should be able to depend”.
His report finds that the Every Child Matters reforms, which were introduced after the Victoria Climbié inquiry, provide
“a sound framework for professionals to protect children and promote their welfare”.
However, he is also clear that
“There now needs to be a step change in the arrangements to protect children from harm.”
“The new ContactPoint system will have particular advantages in reducing the possibility of children for whom there are concerns going unnoticed.”
However, he challenges us to do more
“to ensure that leaders of local services accept their responsibility to translate policy, legislation and guidance into day to day practice on the frontline of every service.”
The report makes a series of detailed recommendations to ensure that best practice is universally applied in every area of the country, to improve local accountability and to provide more support for local leaders and for the front-line work force. None of Lord Laming’s proposals alone could have prevented the death of baby P, but together they add up to a step change in front-line child protection, because no barrier, no bureaucracy and no buck-passing should ever get in the way of keeping children safe.
As Lord Laming recommends, we will now establish a new cross-Government national safeguarding delivery unit both to support and challenge every local authority and every children’s trust in the country as they fulfil their responsibilities to keep children safe and to drive continuous improvement in front-line practice across all services. The new unit will be staffed by experts from across central Government, local agencies and the voluntary
sector and will provide an annual report to Parliament, including on the implementation of Lord Laming’s recommendations.
To guide the unit’s work I am today appointing Sir Roger Singleton, the former head of Barnardo’s and a leading expert on child protection, to be the Government’s first ever chief adviser on the safety of children. Sir Roger will advise us on how to update and strengthen our statutory guidance for front-line staff to make it absolutely clear to every agency and every practitioner what they need to do to keep children safe.
Lord Laming also recommends that full serious case reviews must remain confidential to protect vulnerable children and ensure the full co-operation of all witnesses. We will strengthen the independence and quality of serious case reviews. The unit will monitor their implementation to ensure both that lessons are learned and that public executive summaries are full and comprehensive.
Effective child protection depends critically on strong local leadership and accountability, so that everyone is clear about who must do what to keep children safe. We are already legislating in the House to ensure that every local authority has a statutory children’s trust board to improve all the outcomes for children and young people. We will strengthen the role of the local safeguarding children board both to make it, in effect, the local watchdog for the protection of children and to hold the children’s trust and local agencies to account.
We will set out in the revised statutory guidance our presumption that all local safeguarding children boards will have an independent chair. We will also set out that the director of children’s services and the lead member for children’s services will always be members of both the children’s trust board and the LSCB, and that the chief executive and leader of the council will be required to confirm annually that their local arrangements comply with the law. Because keeping children and young people safe is everyone’s responsibility, we will open the child protection system up to greater public scrutiny by ensuring that two members of the general public are appointed to every local safeguarding children board in the country.
When children are at risk, it is the skills, confidence and judgment of front-line professionals that make the biggest difference. As Lord Laming says:
“Every day, thousands of children are helped, supported and in some cases have their lives saved by these staff”.
But he is also right to say that
“rather than feeling valued for their commitment and expertise, professionals across these services often feel undervalued, unsupported and at risk.”
That has to change. That is why the Health Secretary and I have set up the social work taskforce, which will now take forward Lord Laming’s recommendations on the training and professional development of social workers. I have already asked the taskforce to review the effectiveness, the procurement and the IT used in integrated children’s systems, which it will report on next month, so that social workers can keep detailed records of their cases and spend more time with vulnerable children.
In addition to the longer-term reforms that the taskforce will propose, we will act now to ensure that all newly qualified social workers starting this year will receive a year of intensive induction training, supervision and support. We will introduce from this year a new advanced
social work professional status to ensure that the most highly skilled social work practitioners can stay close to the front line and have better career progression. We will also expand the graduate recruitment scheme and attract qualified social workers back to the profession and ensure over time that all practitioners can study on the job for a master’s level qualification.
Because we must do more to support leaders across children’s services, I am also today accepting proposals from the chief executive of our leadership college to expand its remit, to introduce a new leadership programme for directors of children’s services from September and to create a new and accelerated programme for those with the greatest potential to become future children’s service leaders.
Lord Laming also identifies further recommendations for the health service, the police, the family courts and the inspectorates. I can tell the House that the Health Secretary is today announcing a new programme that will provide additional support and development for health visitors. The Home Secretary will now take forward Lord Laming’s recommendations further to improve the skills and capacity in child protection in the police. In line with Lord Laming’s recommendations, the Justice Secretary is announcing that Mr. Francis Plowden will carry out a review of court fees in care proceedings. If there is evidence that they are a barrier for local authorities when deciding whether to proceed with a care order for a vulnerable child, we will abolish them. And, with Ofsted already strengthening its inspection process and introducing unannounced inspections every year for front-line social care practice in every area of the country, the inspectorates will respond to Lord Laming’s recommendations by the end of April.
In its annual performance assessment, Ofsted rated safeguarding services in 101 out of 150 local authorities as good or outstanding. But where children are not being kept safe, we will act. In December, eight local authorities were judged inadequate in their safeguarding of children. We immediately sent in our intervention experts to assess the situation in each of them. As the House knows, Haringey has already submitted its action plan to Ofsted for evaluation. Improvement notices and additional support are now in place in Surrey, Birmingham, Essex and West Sussex, and independent performance reviews are under way in Reading and Wokingham.
The Minister for Children, Young People and Families and I are particularly concerned about the serious weaknesses identified in Doncaster. In recent weeks, we have commissioned an independent performance review, which has concluded that, despite significant investment over the past year and some progress, urgent improvement is still required. On Tuesday, the Children’s Minister met the leaders of Doncaster council. Using powers in the Education Act 1996, the Children’s Minister has today written to the council giving it a formal direction immediately to appoint Mr. Tony Elson to chair an independent improvement board that will report directly to Ministers, to submit an improvement plan to be approved by the new board and to co-operate with my Department to bring in a new senior management team to take over the leadership and management of Doncaster children’s services as soon as practicable.
It is our first duty in government and as a society to do all that we can to keep our children safe. It is also our responsibility to act decisively, as we have done in recent months, as we are doing today in Doncaster and as we will do in the coming weeks to implement all Lord Laming’s recommendations. I hope that all parts of the House will support our actions to keep children safe in every part of our country. That is our duty and, as Lord Laming says, it is something that every child should be able to depend on. I commend this statement to the House.
Michael Gove (Surrey Heath) (Con): The events that we are reflecting on today were horrific and they still haunt the nation’s conscience. Protecting vulnerable children is a duty that I know the Secretary of State takes seriously and none of the questions that I ask today are intended as criticism of him personally. May I thank him for allowing me to read Lord Laming’s report earlier this morning and for early sight of his statement?
May I also thank the Secretary of State for the speedy manner in which he has taken steps to rectify problems in both Doncaster and Haringey? We all know that the director of children’s services in Haringey was dismissed some time ago. Will he update the House on what has happened to the other officials who were suspended in Haringey at that time?
I also welcome the steps taken today to review the impact of court fees on care proceedings. The Secretary of State has said that he was sure that the high level of court fees was not a barrier to taking children into care who needed that step. We welcome the fact that he will now look again at that decision.
I also thank Lord Laming for his diligent work in the report. He has done a great deal of useful analysis of the weaknesses in our child protection system and his report is powerful in its condemnation of the bureaucratic burden faced by social workers. He reports that
“a tradition of deliberate reflective social work practice is being put in danger because of an over-emphasis on process and targets, resulting in a loss of confidence amongst social workers”.
Will the Secretary of State tell us what he will do to reduce the burden of bureaucratic compliance and the number of targets faced by front-line professionals?
Lord Laming spells out in great detail the consequences of the bureaucratic burden. Vacancies in social work departments are running at more than 12 per cent., compared with just 0.7 per cent. for teachers. Turnover rates are high, with two thirds of local authorities reporting difficulties in engaging social workers and three quarters of social workers reporting that case loads have increased worryingly since 2003. Lord Laming reports that front-line social workers experience
“low staff morale, poor supervision, under-resourcing and inadequate training”.
They face high levels of stress and there are formidable recruitment and retention difficulties. Social work, he records, is a Cinderella service and we now have, in his words, a “crisis” in social work. Does not the Secretary of State agree that that is a remarkable indictment of the state of child protection in this country? Where does the responsibility for that failure lie?
Will the Secretary of State also tell us what urgent practical steps he is taking, beyond the creation of a new quango, to raise morale, to ensure that resources reach the front line and to reduce red tape? Lord
Laming’s report is again scathing about the unwieldy and overly bureaucratic nature of the regime currently in place. He reports that the central bureaucratic tool used to help children at risk—the comprehensive assessment form—is
“in danger, like other tools, of becoming process-focused, or... a barrier to services for children”.
Will the Secretary of State tell us what plans he has to simplify this area of bureaucracy?
Lord Laming’s report also reveals the significant problem with the information technology systems that are supposed to help child protection. He reports that help for children is being
“compromised by an over-complicated, lengthy and tick-box assessment and recording system”.
The IT system that the Government favour—the integrated children’s system—is reported by Lord Laming as “hampering progress”, with the best local authorities having to
“find ways to work around the system”.
One of the best local authorities for children’s services, Kensington and Chelsea, has abandoned the Government’s overly bureaucratic approach to IT and set up its own much more flexible and professional-friendly system. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to ensure that the IT system that he favours will no longer hamper progress? What steps has he taken to learn from those local authorities, such as Kensington and Chelsea, with first-class child protection records?
Is it not clear overall that we need a shift, led from the centre, in the culture of child protection to put improving the work force ahead of adding to the quangocracy or finding new boxes to tick? Should not that shift in culture mean a significant extra investment in a universal health visitor service? Lord Laming argues persuasively that the role of health visitors is crucially important. He points out that an evaluation of 161 serious case reviews showed that nearly half the children who suffered terrible harm were under one year of age but only 12 per cent. of them were subject to a child protection plan. Many more of those children at risk might have been identified, if we had a truly universal health visitor service supporting children from birth. Will the Secretary of State now offer his support for the proposals put forward by the leader of my party for an expansion of the health visitor service to make it truly universal?
We are, as I have said, very grateful to Lord Laming for his report. It contains a great deal of useful testimony and evidence, but it is stronger in analysis than in recommendation and better at explaining what has gone wrong than spelling out how to put it right. It exposes the problems with the current level of bureaucracy, but far too often falls back on recommending more bureaucracy as the answer.
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