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Children: Laming Report

Statement

4.15 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Children, Schools and Families (Baroness Morgan of Drefelin): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. The Statement is as follows:

“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 protect vulnerable children in Haringey. 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, and I have laid a copy of it before the House together with my reply to him which sets out the Government’s immediate response. I can confirm that we will accept all of Lord Laming’s recommendations; that we are taking immediate action from today to implement them; and that we will also set out our detailed response to all 58 recommendations before the end of next

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month. I am sure that I speak for the whole House when I say that we are hugely grateful to Lord Laming and to all the experts, practitioners and members of the public who have contributed to his very thorough investigation.

As Lord Laming states 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 introduced after the Victoria Climbié inquiry, provide,

‘a sound framework for professionals to protect children and promote their welfare’.

But he is also clear that:

‘There now needs to be a step change in the arrangements to protect children from harm’.

Lord Laming says that:

‘The new ContactPoint system will have particular advantages in reducing the possibility of children for whom there are concerns going unnoticed’,

but 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’.

His 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 workforce. None of Lord Laming’s proposals alone could have prevented the death of Baby P, but all of them together add up to a step-change in front-line child protection. No barrier, no bureaucracy, 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 to support and challenge every local authority and every children’s trust in the country, as they carry out 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. It will provide an annual report to Parliament, including reporting on the implementation of Lord Laming’s recommendations.

To guide this work, I am today appointing Sir Roger Singleton, former head of Barnardo’s and a leading expert on child protection, to be the Government’s first 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 tomake 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 to ensure the full co-operation of all witnesses. We will now strengthen the independence and quality of serious case reviews, and the unit will monitor their implementation to ensure that lessons are learnt 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 to ensure that every local

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authority has a statutory children’s board to improve all the outcomes for children and young people. We will strengthen the role of the local safeguarding children boards to make them effective local watchdogs for the protection of children and to hold children’s trusts 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, 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 the 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 now open up the child protection system 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’.

However, 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’.

This has to change. That is why the Health Secretary and I have set up the Social Work Task Force, which will now take forward Lord Laming’s recommendations on the training and professional development of social workers. I have already asked the task force to review the effectiveness, procurement and IT used in integrated children’s systems, and it will now report on this 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 task force 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. From this year, we will introduce a new advanced social work professional status to ensure that the most highly skilled social work practitioners can stay close to the front line with better career progression. We will 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 masters-level qualification.

Because we must do more to support leaders across children’s services, I am today also accepting proposals from the chief executive of our leadership college to expand its remit, introduce a new leadership programme for directors of children’s services from September, and create a new accelerated programme for those with the greatest potential to become future leaders.

Lord Laming also identifies further specific recommendations for the health service, the police, the family courts and the inspectorates, so 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

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will take forward Lord Laming’s recommendations to improve skills and capacity in child protection in the police; the Justice Secretary is announcing that, in line with Lord Laming’s recommendations, Mr Francis Plowden will carry out a review of court fees in care proceedings; and 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 also 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, and we immediately sent in our intervention experts to assess the situation in each of them. Haringey has now submitted an action plan to Ofsted for evaluation. Improvement notices and additional support are now in place in Surrey, Birmingham, West Sussex and Essex, and independent performance reviews are under way in Reading and Wokingham.

The Children’s Minister and I are particularly concerned with the serious weaknesses identified in Doncaster. In recent weeks, we have commissioned an independent performance review, and despite significant investment over the past year and some progress, the review has concluded that urgent improvement is still required. On Tuesday, the Children’s Minister met the leaders of Doncaster Council, and using powers in the Education Act 1996, the Children’s Minister has today written to the council giving it a formal direction to: appoint immediately Mr Tony Elson to chair an independent improvement board, which will report directly to Ministers; submit an improvement plan to be approved by the new board; and require the council 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 we can to keep our children safe, and it is our responsibility to act decisively, as we have done in recent months, as we are doing today in Doncaster, and as we will do as we implement all of Lord Laming’s recommendations. I hope that all sides of the House will support our actions to keep children safe in every part of our country. That is our duty, something which, as Lord Laming says,

‘every child should be able to depend upon’.

I commend the Statement to the House”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

4.27 pm

Baroness Verma: My Lords, first, I declare an interest as a provider of social care. I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement and for making it available to me at the earliest opportunity, which has allowed me more time to consider its contents. I must also express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for his

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work in producing the report. His analysis of the weaknesses in our child protection system has given us all much to digest. The report is powerful in its condemnation of the bureaucratic burden faced by social workers.

The noble Lord 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”.

I think that all noble Lords would appreciate it if the Minister could clearly set out what the Government intend to do to reduce the burden of bureaucratic compliance and the number of targets faced by front-line professionals. The report of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, spells out in no uncertain terms the consequences of this bureaucratic burden. Vacancies in social work departments run at 9.5 per cent compared with just 0.7 per cent for teachers. Turnover rates are high, two-thirds of local authorities report difficulties engaging social workers and three-quarters of social workers report that case loads have increased worryingly since 2003. This is not surprising, given that he also observes that 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 seen as a Cinderella service and we now have, using his word, a “crisis” within social work. The consequences of this crisis will be felt by the most vulnerable in society, especially those children whose well-being depends on the indispensable services that a properly resourced social service can provide, but who are being failed, sometimes in the most appalling way, by the Government’s muddled and deficient policies.

The blame game is an unattractive game to play, but the Government have had almost 12 years to get their house in order. There can be no excuses for complacency on this most important of issues. What urgent, practical steps, beyond the creation of a new quango, will the Government take to raise morale, to ensure that resources reach the front line and to reduce red tape?

The noble Lord’s report makes clear his opinion 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, even worse, a barrier for services for children”

What will the Government do to simplify this area of bureaucracy?

The report also reveals the significant problems we have with the information technology systems that are supposed to help child protection. It points out 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 to be “hampering progress” with the best local authorities having,

“to find ways to work around their systems”.

Conservative-run Kensington and Chelsea, one of the best local authorities for children’s services, has abandoned the Government’s bureaucratic approach to information

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technology and has set up its own much more flexible and professional-friendly system. Does the Minister agree that more councils are likely to follow suit unless the Government change their approach to this IT system?

I hope that the Minister will agree with my assessment of the report. We need a shift from the centre in the culture of child protection in order to put improving the workforce ahead of adding to the quangocracy or finding new boxes to tick. We must never lose sight of the fact that what is important is the welfare of children. Departmental organisation, reorganisation, targets and red tape should never be allowed to obscure that central and crucial purpose.

The noble Lord, Lord Laming, argues persuasively that the role of health visitors is crucial. He points out that an evaluation of 161 serious case reviews shows that nearly 50 per cent of children who suffered terrible harm were less than one year old, but that only 12 per cent were subject to a child protection plan. Many more children at risk might have been identified if we had had a universal health visitor service to support children from birth. Will the Minister offer her 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?

As I have said, we are very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for his report, which 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. Crucially, the noble Lord, Lord Laming, recognises that serious case reviews—the policy inquests which follow the death of a vulnerable child—are valuable tools for learning lessons to enable us to avoid making similar mistakes in the future

He points out that the lessons from serious case reviews need to be better learnt and more widely disseminated, but he fails to recommend that they should now be published in full. I depart from the report in calling for just that. I believe that the Liberal Democrat spokesman in another place has added his support for our position. I hope that noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches here will join me in asking the Government to throw their weight behind us. The reasons used to defend the secrecy in this area, whatever they may be, must not hinder us from learning from past mistakes. Too much is at stake for us to disagree on that.

4.35 pm

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on his report and I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. I welcome the fact that the Government accept all of the noble Lord’s recommendations but what matters most is that they also will the means as well as the ends. Does the Minister know what full implementation will cost and whether the Government are committed to finding the money.

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Turning to the detail, I welcome the establishment of a National Safeguarding Delivery Unit but it must not be only another layer of bureaucracy; it must have teeth and an adequate budget. It must also have as one of its founding principles that it listens to children and responds to what they want and need. I welcome the fact that it will report regularly to Parliament but warn that I will not only challenge it on what it has done but on what has not happened each year.

The Government promise updated statutory guidance so that every practitioner knows what to do. But it is not for Whitehall to do this in detail; it is for the Government to give the professionals the tools they need in the way of training, resources and a sensible workload so that they can spend sufficient time with clients and sufficient time to reflect on and discuss their practice and their decisions with other experienced professionals. Then they will be able to make the right decisions themselves.

I welcome moves to strengthen the independence and quality of serious case reviews, but I agree that it is vital that we learn the lessons from them by having them published, anonymised where appropriate.

Local safeguarding children boards are a vital element in protecting children and I welcome the fact that the chairs will be independent. We have been calling for that. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, has balanced opinions on both sides of the argument about this by saying that the director of children’s services and the lead member should be on the board and on the children’s trust. Although this may cause some difficulty as the one is accountable to the other, it will bring the necessary co-ordination and political accountability as well as the expertise the board needs. The idea that two members of the public should be on the board is interesting, but how will they be chosen, how will they be vetted and how will confidentiality issues be dealt with? Or will these decisions be made locally?

The state of the social work workforce has been a cause for concern for years and I and many noble Lords have often called attention to it, to be given a load of platitudes by a succession of Ministers. Can the Minister assure the House now that the Government will really grasp this nettle? We understand that there are many difficulties. For example, if newly-qualified social workers are to receive a year of intensive induction training, they must be given less than a full case load or they will not have the time to do it. In addition, where are the Government going to find the experienced people to do the monitoring and supervision? I heard recently that in some areas—I think it is London—75 per cent of social workers are in their first year of practice. The Government must succeed in their efforts to attract experienced people back into the profession.

Many useful parallels can be drawn from the teaching profession. The advanced social work professional status, like the advanced skills teacher, should keep highly-skilled people on the front line doing the job rather than their finding that promotion into management is the only way to make progress in their career. However, they will want proper remuneration for this and I do not blame them. Such initiatives have helped to recruit and retain good people in the teaching profession and I see no reason why it should not work for social workers as long as it is properly resourced.

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In another parallel, the master’s qualification expectation is welcome, but it should always be remembered that experience counts most in social work.

The announcement about the new leadership role for the NCSL was made a few weeks ago. I welcomed it then but I am concerned about today’s announcement about an accelerated programme into leadership because it is experience that helps to produce good judgment and it takes time to develop that.

Finally, I welcome the statements about a greater role for other services, especially the health and police services. These have always been the weak link in multi-agency working. Does,

“additional support and development for health visitors”

mean more health visitors? Does it mean that more families will be entitled to their help for longer periods of time? If so, I welcome that. I have always said that it should go back to being a universal service without a stigma and thereby be absolutely invaluable in identifying problems early and ensuring appropriate intervention.

As I have often raised the issue of court fees, I welcome the announcement about the review of them and I suspect that the evidence will be found. I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, about the CAF and wonder whether that will be reviewed.

I am pleased that the spotlight is to be turned on Ofsted. The NSPCC claims that Ofsted has been asking the wrong questions of the wrong people at the wrong times. It is important that the quality of children’s services should no longer be covered up by councils that have a good score in everything else. In future, if they fail their children, they should be considered to have failed all of us.

4.40 pm

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin: My Lords, I thank both noble Baronesses for their questions. I remind the House that a key part of the analysis in the noble Lord’s report is that, having spoken to many people, having taken evidence from over 100 submissions and 200 letters from around the country and having spoken to voluntary agencies and a wide range of professionals, he is clear that the platform that we are working from—that is, Every Child Matters, the legislative framework—far from being the wrong one, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, suggests, is supported by a consensus among all those in the professions working with children that it is the right underpinning policy framework. We are talking about making a step change towards speedier delivery, which will make a significant change to the work that takes place on the front line.

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