Draft Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) (Revocation) Regulations 2012

The Committee consisted of the following Members:

Chair: † Mr Andrew Turner 

† Barclay, Stephen (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con) 

† Boles, Nick (Grantham and Stamford) (Con) 

† Burt, Lorely (Solihull) (LD) 

† Dunne, Mr Philip (Ludlow) (Con) 

† Esterson, Bill (Sefton Central) (Lab) 

† Glindon, Mrs Mary (North Tyneside) (Lab) 

† Hinds, Damian (East Hampshire) (Con) 

† Jones, Graham (Hyndburn) (Lab) 

Kaufman, Sir Gerald (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab) 

† Loughton, Tim (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education)  

† McKinnell, Catherine (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab) 

McDonnell, John (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) 

† Murray, Sheryll (South East Cornwall) (Con) 

† Nuttall, Mr David (Bury North) (Con) 

† Rudd, Amber (Hastings and Rye) (Con) 

Simpson, David (Upper Bann) (DUP) 

† Swinson, Jo (East Dunbartonshire) (LD) 

† Twigg, Derek (Halton) (Lab) 

Judith Boyce, Committee Clerk

† attended the Committee

Tenth Delegated Legislation Committee 

Thursday 19 April 2012  

[Mr Andrew Turner in the Chair] 

Draft Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) (Revocation) Regulations 2012

8.55 am 

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton):  I beg to move, 

That the Committee has considered the draft Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) (Revocation) Regulations 2012. 

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I will make my comments brief as this is largely uncontentious. It is also partly fairly historic, given that ContactPoint was closed down some time ago. These regulations will revoke the Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) Regulations 2007, which are commonly known as the ContactPoint regulations. The ContactPoint regulations place duties on all local authorities in England to participate in the operation of the former ContactPoint database. They specify what information can be held, who provides it, how long it can be retained and how its accuracy is to be maintained, as well as who can be granted access to it. 

In August 2010 the Government switched off access to ContactPoint. At that point the duties on local authorities imposed by the regulations ceased to apply. All data were subsequently destroyed and the database was fully decommissioned. The simple point is, therefore, that without ContactPoint there is nothing for the ContactPoint regulations to apply to. Although ContactPoint may have been well intentioned, it was, in the Government’s view, disproportionate and unjustifiable to hold information on every child in England and to make it accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. That is why we closed down ContactPoint as soon as possible after coming into office. 

However, we wanted to consider the practicality of a more proportionate approach. We did not seek to revoke the ContactPoint regulations at the time because it may have been possible to amend the regulations to support such an approach. We therefore asked Professor Eileen Munro, as part of her review of child protection, to consider the potential value of a national signposting service to help practitioners to find out whether another practitioner is working, or has previously worked, in another area with the same vulnerable child. She concluded in her final report last year that the arguments for and against a national system were finely balanced but that there was no compelling case to recommend one at that time. We accepted that conclusion and therefore do not see any reason to retain those regulations any longer. It is simply good housekeeping to remove them. 

That was, of course, just one of a number of conclusions reached by Professor Munro, and I should like to say a little more about her review and put the narrow issue

regarding these regulations into a slightly broader setting. Professor Munro’s review of child protection was the first review commissioned by the Department for Education after the election and it reflected the importance that we attach to child protection, and to trying to get it right for vulnerable children. In the light of her findings, we are committed to taking through a package of reforms to improve the child protection system across the country. 

The general message from Professor Munro was that we needed to move towards a child protection system with less central prescription and interference, where we place greater trust and responsibility in skilled professionals at the front line. Like her, we want a shift in mindset and relationships between central Government, local agencies and front-line professionals working in partnership. Effective and appropriate information sharing between agencies is essential if children are to receive the help they need. We know that information is not always shared between agencies and professionals when it is in the best interests of the child to do so. It is crucial that professionals should access the information they need when they need it to make the right decisions for children and young people. 

Decisions about what information to share and when to share it can require difficult and complex judgments. That is why, time and again, poor information sharing has been highlighted in serious case reviews of some of the tragedies. Getting it right is not easy, and we think that it was too simplistic to say that a national IT system in itself would address that and improve practice. We think that this is a good example of where local solutions are likely to be better than nationally imposed ones. We believe that it is for local areas to consider the most appropriate way to ensure that information is shared effectively across all agencies working on the front line. We are working with local authorities, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, health colleagues and the police to develop effective information-sharing policy and protocols in the context of delivering early help to vulnerable children and families. 

Professor Munro said that local authorities should look at improving their 24-hour access services, so that a practitioner concerned about a child could speak to a social worker at any time of day, and we are working with them on that. We are also encouraging local approaches and welcome initiatives such as MASH, the multi-agency safeguarding hub, which was established in Devon and is now being rolled out across many other local authorities. 

Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab):  I thank the Minister for explaining the rationale behind this. He rightly raised the need to share information. How can local authorities where information sharing is not as good as is needed be assisted, so that the lack of a national scheme does not create a dangerous gap that could lead to further serious case reviews? 

Tim Loughton:  The hon. Gentleman raises a fair point. Whatever we have done with ContactPoint and are now attempting to do, with the support of the Committee, with the ContactPoint regulations, does not diminish the need for better and more effective information sharing across all the agencies on the front line involved in child protection: the police, social services, education, health, housing and other agencies. Also it is not just a question of sharing information. Serious case

reviews after tragedies have happened have shown that a number of the agencies were in receipt of bits of information and were talking to other people but no one was picking up the ball, running with it and acting on that information. 

I mentioned the multi-agency safeguarding hubs, the MASH model. It was started in Devon and I visited the one that is working very effectively now in Haringey. I have sat in on some of these real-life cases. When a case comes in that needs to be investigated very quickly, all the different agencies, which are collocated—collocation is very important to this—will hold an action meeting and exchange information. It is information not just from within that local authority. There are very clear leads in Haringey to neighbouring authorities’ housing departments or social services departments to get any intelligence on the child or the family that has come on to the radar. Very quickly they devise a plan based on what further information they may need to glean or how they then intervene. That is really good information sharing and, more importantly, acting on information in practice. 

A large, expensive, all-singing, all-dancing database, as ContactPoint was—except it was not—is no substitute for those people at the sharp end going out and making an appropriate intervention and ensuring that they are in receipt of the information they need. An awful lot of the information that they act on was never going to be held on ContactPoint anyway. The point I am making is that it is down to practitioners to make sure that they are getting access to the right information. I will come on to a case in respect of health in a moment and I will obviously be happy to respond to questions at the end. 

That is not to say that we should not also look at capitalising on existing systems. In that context, we are working with the Department of Health, which is considering the feasibility of the system for practitioners in A and E departments and other urgent care settings so that they can have access to relevant information about a child, which could cover, for example, whether a child was the subject of a child protection plan or a statutory care order. That was in place well before ContactPoint but was not being utilised properly in practice. It is that sort of practical approach that we very much want to encourage. Health is a lynchpin in that. 

A key part of that work is the revision of the inter-agency guidance, “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, which Professor Munro called for. That will make clear the importance of inter-agency working, on which effective information sharing depends. We will be consulting on the revised version later this spring. At the same time, Professor Munro is due to submit her interim progress report. That will highlight examples of best practice to support areas in developing local approaches. Some of the questions that the hon. Gentleman raised will be addressed as we see the development of the new “Working Together” guidance. 

That is some of the broader context, but the issue before us today is, as I said, quite narrow. Without ContactPoint, we no longer need the ContactPoint regulations, and I therefore commend these revocation regulations to the Committee. The revocation regulations are necessary to remove the ContactPoint regulations, which, in the absence of the ContactPoint database, no longer apply. We are not convinced of the need to retain

those regulations and believe that they should be revoked, in keeping with our commitment to remove legislation that is no longer required or relevant. 

I accept that there are broader challenges ahead to bring about changes that will improve the child protection system, including offers of early help to prevent needs escalating to crisis point. We are all committed to trying to ensure that that happens. However, on the narrow point on the revocation, I hope that we can accept these regulations. I commend them to the Committee. 

9.5 am 

Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab):  I reiterate what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. The Opposition accept that ContactPoint was closed in August 2010 and that the regulations are being revoked today as part of that process. However, I should like to take this opportunity to make some points about the database. 

The Labour Government introduced ContactPoint in 2009 to help professionals to identify children vulnerable to abuse. It is well documented that a multi-agency approach is absolutely essential in child protection. Its creation stemmed from a recommendation made by Lord Laming in his inquiry into the tragic death of Victoria Climbié in 2001. The inquiry found that the professionals involved repeatedly failed to share information properly and those same findings have been made in inquiries extending back over 30 or 40 years. Clearly not enough has been learnt from them. I will come back to information sharing in a moment, but I would first like to address the concerns about ContactPoint which were mentioned by the Minister. 

ContactPoint was a directory intended to support better and quicker communication among practitioners across education, health, social care and youth offending in the statutory and voluntary sectors. It was a database of the professionals connected to a child, not a database of information about children. Practitioners needing more information about a child had to approach the professionals listed in the database directly. Its launch came after the death of Baby P. He had been seen some 60 times by social workers, doctors and welfare groups, who would probably have spotted the signs of abuse if better information sharing between them had been taking place. 

The Government shut ContactPoint down in August 2010 on the basis that it was “disproportionate and unjustifiable” to hold records on every child in the country. The Liberal Democrats called for the database to be scrapped on the basis that it was “intrusive”. However, access to ContactPoint was to be restricted to practitioners who required access to do their jobs. All practitioners had to have enhanced Criminal Records Bureau disclosure and required a username, PIN, security token and password to access the index. Child data could not be downloaded from the index on to a computer or memory stick. 

The Government felt it was risky that children’s details were accessible to large numbers of people, but it was never a database of information about children. It was a database of professionals, and those who accessed it were not just people: they were CRB-checked professionals. Any intrusion or risk of a child’s name leaking out, which, with all the in-built safeguards, was minimal,

was outweighed by the need to protect vulnerable children from neglect and, in the worse cases, death. Professionals sharing information is crucial to safeguarding. It is well documented that a multi-agency approach is needed in child protection. The Minister has made it clear today that the Government very much support that, too. That is what ContactPoint was intended to facilitate. 

Guidance is available to practitioners and managers on information sharing and it is clear about when and how to get the necessary consents. In a multi-agency service, explicit consent for information sharing is usually obtained at the start of the involvement and covers all the agencies within the service. So, from that point on, practitioners are free to share information between those agencies freely. Nevertheless, a national database was constructed because information sharing across local areas was and still is variable. Certain agencies, for example health, said that the law prevented them from information sharing, which is simply not the case. Some professionals mistakenly took that view as well, despite the guidance available. A cynical view that has been expressed is that misconceptions about data sharing are a pretext for doing nothing. After decades of trying to reverse that situation and failing, a centrally driven initiative was clearly needed to ensure consistent information sharing across the country. 

As the Minister has already explained, Professor Munro was asked to consider the feasibility of replacing ContactPoint with a new signposting service for professionals working with vulnerable children. The thrust of her review is that less central prescription in child protection and more trust in front-line professionals are required. The Government believe therefore that local areas should consider the most appropriate way to ensure information sharing across agencies. I understand that work is under way to develop information sharing protocols. The inter-agency guidance, “Working Together”, is being revised to that effect. 

I agree, as do colleagues on the Opposition Benches, that professionals should be empowered and enabled to use their judgment more effectively, but orchestrating a robust local approach poses significant challenges. Failure to achieve that places children’s lives at risk, as we have seen over the years. I am therefore keen to see what alternative the Government come up with for a watertight, centralised system. 

ContactPoint has been criticised for being too expensive, so I am also keen to see what alternative is proposed and any expense that might be involved in developing it. I submit that the value of ContactPoint for child protection practitioners and the potential that it had to save children’s lives was worth the cost. Meanwhile, the Government are further undermining agencies working together by making significant and vast cuts to local authority budgets. Agencies are pulling back from funding joint meetings, which are now seen as luxuries. 

I have received evidence and information from several authorities throughout the country that local authorities are picking up the slack and taking the strain as various public agencies withdraw support. How long before the cracks start to show and children suffer as a result? Following the NHS reforms, I am not confident that the health service will be in any state to share information.

However, I am pleased that the Government have said this morning that they are working with the Department of Health. As we increasingly see the localised and fractured NHS taking responsibility for such matters, we will see greater disparities between localities. 

I am sorry that ContactPoint, which had so much potential to be an important safeguarding tool, has been prematurely and recklessly abolished. 

9.13 am 

Tim Loughton:  I appreciate the comments the hon. Lady has made. She will agree that we all share the same purpose. Everything that we are trying to do is with the absolute intention of trying to safeguard as many vulnerable children as possible. We are never going to eliminate child abuse. We are never going to prevent absolutely some of the horrendous Baby P-type cases that we have seen in the past, which still weigh heavily in the public’s consciousness. What we can do, must do and will do is greatly reduce the opportunities for people who do evil things to children. The way to do that is to make sure that everybody is aware that we all have a duty to look out for vulnerable children. We must enable and empower the professionals at the sharp end whose job is to engage with families and protect vulnerable children, and we must ensure that they have all the tools at their disposal to do that. 

ContactPoint was a well intentioned device to try to bring that about. However, as the hon. Lady said, there was great confusion about what it actually did. Many people thought that it could be used for all sorts of things that it was never intended for. In some cases, it would not cover every single child in the country. There were certain children who would still fall under the radar. Health has been a particularly weak link for a variety of reasons in the past. That is why there is so much work going on between my Department and the Department of Health, and particularly between me and the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton)

. 

Health is absolutely key. More than any other professional, GPs will see some of these vulnerable children when they first present, as will doctors at A and E when it gets to crisis level. To give one example, soon after we gave the instruction to close down ContactPoint, I met a large group of GPs in my constituency and asked them what they thought about us switching off ContactPoint. With the exception of the head of the practice where we were meeting, whose daughter happened to go to an independent school—the Independent Schools Association had waged a fairly vigorous campaign against ContactPoint and requested that all their parents write to their MPs to say what a terrible thing it was—not a single GP in the room knew what ContactPoint was. They would have been key in inputting information and engaging in ContactPoint if it was to have worked as the previous Government anticipated that it should, so there were clear flaws in how it was set up. 

Catherine McKinnell:  The Minister is making the point that ContactPoint was prematurely disbanded. It was not given an opportunity to show its true potential and to bring in all the agencies that would have benefited greatly from it. 

Tim Loughton:  The hon. Lady might think that that was premature, but the Children Act 2004 established ContactPoint. It was many years in development and involved many thousands of people, yet key players were not remotely engaged in what it was supposed to do. By that stage, the previous Government had spent £243 million, and still there were flaws in the system that may well have involved substantial additional spending. I am afraid that we know the history of central Government, centrally imposed IT systems and their flaws and attached costs. It might have been premature, but it was by no means certain that the system was ever going to work anyway, let alone do what many people thought it might. 

Bill Esterson:  In fact, the database did not open until 2009, and a year is a very short period for it to work. 

I am concerned about the disparities between localities, which my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North mentioned. What is national Government’s role in making sure that local government and local health services ensure proper child protection and that information is shared and acted on, so that practice does not remain patchy, but the sort of good practice the Minister described earlier is rolled out across the country? 

Tim Loughton:  There are devices, which I described in my opening comments. The “Working Together” guidance, which will be published for consultation soon, will give further information as to how we expect the different agencies to work together. It is worth the Committee remembering that it is not IT systems, however elaborate, expensive and well intentioned, that save children, but what people do with information and whether the professionals at the sharp end are in a position to intervene appropriately and in a timely manner, where intervention is required. That is where the majority of work needs to go on. That is why “Working Together” will lay out very clearly—much more succinctly than the 650 or so pages now that no one has time to read—the expectations on all the different professionals. 

Local safeguarding children boards will be given a new remit to ensure that all the key professionals do not just turn up to meetings and sit round the table, but are absolutely engaged with the other agencies to ensure that safeguarding practices locally are followed. The new Ofsted inspection frameworks and the joint inspections between the different inspectorates, across health and education and the police and justice systems, will now focus not only on processes—how many meetings people turn up to—but on what action ensues and where examples of best practice, such as the MASHs, which are being rolled out enthusiastically, particularly across London, make a difference on the ground. Ultimately, the important thing is to ensure that that works, regardless of whether there is a large computer system behind it. That computer system has taken up an awful lot of the resource that could instead have been spent at the front line on, for example, ensuring that we have good multi-agency training. 

Multi-agency training is something that was lacking in the past. Some of the best practices I have seen emanate from having the GP, the health visitor, the teacher, the social worker and the police officer all

together in the same room, all trained in safeguarding measures from the same manuals, all speaking the same language and, therefore, able to act together to intervene much more effectively where such intervention is required. Collocation is an important part of that. 

Many local authorities are now innovating in collocated services. In places such as Doncaster, the child protection team sits next to police officers; in Haringey, the housing officers, education officers, social workers and police are collocated so the information exchange is instantaneous and they know with whom they are dealing. Ultimately, that is a more effective way of ensuring that we have professionals in whom we can place great trust to get on with their job. 

The thing that disturbed me most of all when I heard about the tragedies of Baby P and many others is that social workers were spending up to 80% of their time in front of a computer screen complying with processes to ensure that the system worked appropriately, rather than ensuring that the children were being safeguarded appropriately. That is the nonsense of too much well intentioned, but bureaucratic regulation, which has emanated since the tragic death of Victoria Climbié. That is what has been brought about. 

We are about ensuring that we have well resourced, well informed, well trained and well motivated professionals at the sharp end who have the confidence and capacity to make well informed value judgments about intervention and the other agencies that are required. We think that will make the most difference to the protection of vulnerable children. 

Catherine McKinnell:  Again, I feel the Minister is making the case for ContactPoint, or a similar system. I have visited children’s safeguarding services in a number of authorities, and they rely so heavily on their IT systems. They show with great pride the IT systems upon which they depend. The idea behind ContactPoint was to provide support and reduce the time that local authorities were spending trying to devise IT systems that bring agencies together. 

Another point that I must raise and put on record as a warning to the Government is that I have seen evidence of local authorities where there has previously been good multi-agency working and where, due to the cuts in budgets that all public authorities, particularly the police, are facing, some of that multi-agency working is being reduced, not increased, because they can no longer free up back-office workers, the number of which the Government have so keenly reduced. Local authorities can no longer free up the people who sit in those multi-agency teams, so I put that warning on record today. 

Tim Loughton:  I think the hon. Lady misrepresents the position. The Government have not keenly reduced the number of social workers anywhere— 

Catherine McKinnell:  Police. 

Tim Loughton:  Or police, or others involved in safeguarding across the board. If the hon. Lady looks at it in detail, she will see that safeguarding budgets are the most protected parts of local authority budgets because local authorities see the importance of safeguarding.

Information sharing is not some costly add-on luxury. It is essential, and, actually, it is financially prudent to do it, too. The most expensive thing is the cost of failure. When information is not shared, when an intervention is not made at an appropriate, early time, and when local authorities do not work to try to keep a family together, where possible—or, where that is not possible, to ensure that a child is taken to a place of safety—the cost of that failure is immense. 

I am seeing much more innovation in local authorities, and more of the MASH route. I spoke at a MASH pan-London conference recently and participants were keen to innovate and look at the experiences of places such as Haringey and Devon and Cornwall, from where the approach originated. They were keen to see how they might bring it to their local authorities by collocating and sharing information between real people who actually talk to each other, rather than relying on something that happens to have been put on a database. We do a disservice to professionals whose job is to go out there and make difficult decisions by suggesting that their job could be done better by investing £243 million in an elaborate computer system, which would never have done half the things that it was cracked up to do. 

Several hon. Members  rose —  

Tim Loughton:  I will take two more interventions, but we are rather getting off the track. The point is not to justify ContactPoint, because the decision on that has been made. We are here to decide whether some redundant regulations, which relate to a system that no longer exists, still need to be on the statute book. The argument about ContactPoint has been had, and that decision has been made. I understand why some Opposition Members may not agree with it, given that they innovated the computer system in the first place, but there is no place for regulations that concern a system that no longer exists. 

Bill Esterson:  I think that the issue is so important that it would be wrong of us not to explore it in such depth. The point is how we ensure, now that ContactPoint has gone, that adequate safeguarding is in place, and I still have not received an answer. The Minister is explaining good practice well, but the problem is how that is rolled out around the country to local authorities that are not in a position to ensure, or are not as enthusiastic about ensuring, that there is good information sharing and that action is taken on that information. That is the key of the debate. 

Tim Loughton:  It is not the key of the debate, and I repeat that effective child protection is not some add-on luxury. It is not a question of whether local authorities are keen on it or not. They have to be, because it is part of their statutory duties and part of their functions. One of the beefed-up roles of local safeguarding children boards will be to see whether effective information sharing is happening within that authority area and, if it is not, to name and shame unwilling participants and ensure that practice and information sharing improve. 

In the past, that did not happen. In the past, there was no networking between local safeguarding children boards, even though they are the one forum where all the relevant agencies come together in a local authority to ensure that they are doing a good job of protecting vulnerable children. Last year, I spoke at the LSCB chairs’ network conference. It was the first time such a conference had been held, and the delegates enthusiastically exchanged ideas and best practice. That should have happened ages ago, but it did not. It is going to happen in the future, so that LSCBs can see some of the good practice that goes on across the country. 

We now have the children’s improvement board, the job of which is to ensure that good practice is disseminated between local authorities and that underperforming local authorities get assistance, not simply the heavy-handed knock on the door from the Government or from Ofsted inspectors. The job of Ofsted inspectors, working with other inspectorates, ought to be to ensure that information sharing is taking place and that such information is acted on. Local authorities will be exposed if they are not doing so, and praised if they are. Child protection is improved by such methods, not by saying, “We have spent £243 million on an elaborate computer system.” The system had been worked on since 2004, regardless of whether it was switched on in 2009. Doctors and everybody else had had five years to start to prepare for it, and they were blissfully ignorant that it was there at the time. That was my concern, and that is why I did not think it was premature to close ContactPoint. 

At the end of the day, we are talking about how we can make sure that those who protect our children are best equipped to do so. We believe that the additional £29.1 million we have spent on the social work improvement fund, the extra £25.3 million for social work programmes and our current work with the College of Social Work on better training in such matters are the most effective ways of ensuring that we stand a better chance of protecting vulnerable children. I will, for the very last time, give way. 

Catherine McKinnell:  I thank the Minister for being generous with his time. I find his response to my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central reassuring. I agree that that is key to better multi-agency working and better safeguarding for children—it is very much through the local safeguarding children boards. 

As we are drawing to a close, I just want to put on record my response to the point the Minister made about the lack of buy-in from GPs. That reiterates the difficulties of multi-agency working and the lack of engagement that there can be from groups of professionals that simply do not participate. The Minister hit the nail on the head when he said that the costs of failure are great, but who bears those costs? Is it the health service? Does it have enough of a vested interest in making it work? Or is it the local authorities on whom that responsibility eventually falls, and ultimately on the children who suffer as a result? Those who have most to gain do not always have the most influence in making multi-agency work happen. 

Tim Loughton:  I appreciate the hon. Lady’s points. I have said for a long time—and I think she has agreed—that for a multitude of reasons, and I am not trying to point the finger, health has been a weak link in safeguarding.

That happened well before ContactPoint was on the scene, while ContactPoint was being developed and still is the case now. That needed to be addressed some time ago. 

With the changes now happening in the health service, it is even more important that we ensure that the new structures and procedures take on board the importance of safeguarding in health practices. I am acutely aware of that. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health is acutely aware of that, which is why our two Departments have been working so closely to ensure that safeguarding is not an add-on luxury but is factored in to be at the heart of practices. GPs are the early-warning system so often in some of these cases. They need to know what to look out for and, most importantly, what to do with their suspicions or information, and how that can be escalated to action, if appropriate. I am determined that through the revision of “Working Together”, which involves health agencies as key partners, there will be much clearer advice. With the inspection procedures, with the new roles and heightened responsibilities of local safeguarding boards, of which health agencies are again key partners, people will know what to look out for and ensure that everybody is pulling their weight. 

In addition, as I have said, the half dozen or so different inspectorates—I had them all in my office—which tend to work in silos, are for the first time now working on how we can have joint inspections around children’s services. People from health and social services backgrounds can work alongside each other and say, “Shouldn’t they be doing rather better?”, when that social worker talks to a GP or other health agency. That is a more effective

way of trying to reduce greatly the opportunities for people to perpetrate atrocities such as in the case of Baby P. I hope, and I am confident, that by placing more trust in those professionals who do the job of safeguarding, rather than in computers, we can reduce the likelihood of such atrocities happening in future, but I fear that we can never absolutely eliminate them. 

We have had an interesting debate about ContactPoint, although a slightly anachronistic one, because ContactPoint has gone. I remember having—in this room as well as in the Chamber—great debates about whether ContactPoint should have been put on the statute book in the first place. That decision has been taken and I hope that the hon. Lady and her colleagues appreciate the sincerity of what the Government are doing to try to achieve the most effective safeguarding possible for vulnerable children. In the absence of the ContactPoint database, however, the regulations are clearly redundant and no longer relevant. Whatever we think about the history of how we got here, I hope that all members of the Committee will see that we are better off without the regulations, rather than leaving them to clutter up the statute book. On that basis, I commend these revocation regulations to the Committee. 

Question put and agreed to.  

Resolved,  

That the Committee has considered the draft Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) (Revocation) Regulations 2012. 

9.35 am 

Committee rose.