Children: Child Protection

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I am grateful for the opportunity to make it absolutely clear that the report published yesterday by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner is very important. The Government will consider it carefully and seriously, and will respond later this year. As to the point made by my noble friend about inspections, as the House may or may not be aware, Ofsted carries out inspections of local authorities as regards their provision for child protection. The noble Baroness makes an important point; namely, that inspections have to be rigorous. Certainly, in recent times, the criteria and the way in which Ofsted has carried out these inspections has been tightened. We no longer accept a level of standard that clearly was not adequate to tackle this issue.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

I should like to pick up on the point made by my noble friend Lady Howe. What are the Government going to do about what appears to be the culture of the police, certainly in Rotherham and Rochdale, where girls under the age of 16 were treated as bad girls, rather than appreciating that criminal offences were being committed by these men? The girls, being under 16, were victims and were not just acting as prostitutes. It is a very serious matter that the police were not recognising criminal offences.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

That is absolutely right. Forgive me if I did not respond in a way that properly acknowledged that point. If there was any ambiguity in my response, it was because, as I was trying to make clear in my response to another question, there is both child abuse and child sexual exploitation. Child sexual exploitation, to which the noble and learned Baroness referred, until fairly recently has not been properly tackled for all the reasons that she gave. In light of the review and the action plan that the Government produced just over a year ago, much more is going on in the police services to make sure that the police are properly aware and take the action that they must to tackle this serious crime.