Children: Vulnerable Children

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the question and pay tribute to the work that she does in this area, and has done for a very long time. On protecting children at greatest risk from abuse, I hope that the independent review announced by my department today, to be led by Professor Eileen Munro, whom many noble Lords and noble Baronesses will know well from their work, will help us to put better systems in place. Most importantly, I was told this morning that apparently social workers spend up to 80 per cent of their time in front of a computer screen rather than working with the children, as they would like to be doing. If we can reduce some of those burdens and support social workers to do the job they want to do—and we all want them to do—we will be making some progress.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that this Question is related to the previous Question that we discussed, about children who have come before the criminal courts? Is it not the case that there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of children coming before the family court in relation to both private and public legislation? However, while local authorities are working on safeguarding in that statutory area, they are certainly not working in prevention. As the noble Lord, Lord McNally, pointed out, unless we work in the area of prevention, more children will become before both sets of courts. What will the Government do to ensure that social workers in local authorities have the time to do both their statutory work and to work with vulnerable families in their own homes?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

To pick up on the first point, I echo what my noble friend Lord McNally said about the work particularly of the family intervention projects, which the previous Government introduced. Some of the early results from that were extremely encouraging in helping the most disadvantaged families and children early on. There were some very big reductions in problem behaviour. On the broader point about what we can do to help social workers have more time to do their job, that comes back to my earlier remarks. One benefit that we hope will come from the Munro review is that we will free social workers from what we might call the more pointless box-ticking activity to have more time to do the job that they want to do, which would encompass the kind of concern that the noble Baroness has.