Draft Child Safeguarding Practice Review and Relevant Agency (England) Regulations 2018

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 8th May 2018 General Committees

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful, Mr Robertson.

I hope that my speech will give the hon. Lady a little more comfort on how we intend to carry out monitoring. Part of the safeguarding partners’ duty to work together to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in their area will, as I have said, be to determine the agencies with which they intend to work. They must also consider serious child safeguarding cases that raise issues of importance in relation to the relevant area and, where they consider it appropriate, commission reviews of those cases.

The regulations cover important details that will enable the legislation on reviews and joint working to operate. They set out the broad criteria that the new independent Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel must take into account when deciding whether to commission a review. The panel may also take other criteria into account as it sees fit. The regulations also give the panel a duty to set up a pool of potential reviewers, which must be made publicly available. The panel will determine how to set that up, and who will be in the pool.

Having a pool of potential reviewers will mean that when the panel decides that a national review should be commissioned, it will be able to select a reviewer quickly. However, it will have the flexibility to select from outside it, if no one in the pool is available or suitably experienced. The panel may remove a potential reviewer from the pool at any time, either because they wanted to be removed, or because the panel considered that a potential reviewer had shown evidence of general unsuitability. As the panel cannot let its own contracts, the Secretary of State will hold the contracts with reviewers. Therefore, the regulations require the Secretary of State to appoint them to or remove them from reviews, based on the panel’s recommendations.

The regulations also specify the panel’s supervisory powers during a review, and set out details about final reports, including regarding publication. The panel must ensure that reports are available for at least three years. The reports are expected to be significant, and to involve national-level learning. It is only right that there should be a requirement for them to be made public for a substantial period.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I am interested, pursuant to the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan, in how we make sure that all the agencies play their part in ensuring the correct resources to take the action in question. The Minister referred to significant reports, which would mean a tremendous amount of work. That will need resources. We need a reassurance from the Minister that all the agencies will play their part financially and that the Government will ensure they have the money to share out among themselves.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I will address the issue of money directly. It is important that local areas should have the flexibility to fund the arrangements that they design. The safeguarding partners should agree the level of funding secured from each partner, which should be equitable and proportionate, with, of course, contributions from each relevant agency to support the local safeguarding arrangements. The funding should be sufficient to cover all elements of the arrangements.

We do not expect the new arrangements to cost more than existing structures. Indeed, they may help to reduce duplication of resources and effort across agencies and areas, making greater efficiency and effectiveness possible.

[Alex Cunningham]

I was the lead member for children’s services when we set up the children’s trust in Stockton-on-Tees. Much as the various compartment agencies wanted to contribute financially to resourcing—both people and cash—it did not happen in all cases, and the local authority was left holding the baby. We have already heard about local authorities’ considerable financial suffering. How can the Minister ensure that the cash is there and, again, that he lays down the law to ensure that everybody plays their part in resourcing this legislation?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

If the hon. Gentleman will let me make some more headway, I hope I shall be able to convince him by the end of the debate.

The local review requirements in the regulations have some similarities with the national reviews. That section of the regulations also covers criteria, appointment and removal of reviewers, reports and the publication of reports. Like the panel, the safeguarding partners must make decisions about when it is appropriate to commission a review, taking the local review criteria into account. If the panel considers that a local review may be more appropriate, the safeguarding partners must also take that into account.

The safeguarding partners must consider the timeliness and quality of a review, and may seek information from the reviewer during the review to enable them to make that judgment. The regulations make it clear that the safeguarding partners may remove a reviewer who they have appointed at any time prior to the report being published to support the principles, which the new arrangements seek to establish, that the report should be high quality and produced on a timely basis. There is an expectation that improvements will be clearly identified, and there are clear requirements for publication.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

It is important to remember that the panel is independent of Government. Of course, if the Education Committee chooses to call a witness for evidence, the chairman or any member of the panel will be compelled to go before it. To return to the funding issue, the Government will fully fund the national reviewers.

[Alex Cunningham]

Safeguarding boards up and down the country struggle to find experts to chair them, yet we are talking about people with similar skills and understanding forming the new pool. Never mind the panel’s independence, which is extremely important; how will the Minister ensure that we have a pool of suitably qualified people to carry out what are, as he has said, significant reports?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman mentions local government. The Local Government Association responding by saying that it welcomes the

“introduction of shared responsibility between health, the police and the local authority,”

which has the potential to give the new arrangements more authority over those core agencies. Ofsted, which obviously inspects local government, says that it is pleased to see a stronger emphasis on the involvement of schools and local partnership arrangements. I am confident that what we are putting in place will deliver the engagement, including of local candidates, to carry out those local reviews.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

I had not intended to speak, and I will keep the Committee only a short time. The Minister spoke of receiving a positive response from the consultees, and that is fine. I do not have a problem with what is envisaged, but I worry about the implementation. The Minister said that he hoped during his speech to reassure us on the issues we raised in our interventions, but I am afraid that he has not reassured me—I do not know about my hon. Friends.

Where will the pool of expertise come from? I am not convinced that the people are out there who would be committed to doing the work. I gave the illustration earlier of trying to find chairs for local safeguarding boards. The people fishing in this pool, if I can put it like that, will face the same problems, so I ask the Minister again to address that. If he cannot do that today, I ask him at least to write to members of the Committee to tell us exactly where those people will come from.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan raised the issue of independent scrutiny of the pool, and that point was not adequately responded to either. Where is the provision to direct people to participate, and where is the resource commitment from the Minister? No dedicated new funding is being introduced for the delivery of what the Minister described as substantial reports. There is no detail on people being held to account for not participating. A letter from the Department, or even from the scary Secretary of State, is just not good enough. What will the Minister do to ensure that we do not need to send any such letters because people will know that they have a responsibility under the law to participate in the reviews?

[Lisa Nandy]

One of the concerns that my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields and I have raised is about the blame culture and the damage it does, particularly to frontline social workers who are trying to deal with very difficult issues, often with incomplete information, under pressure and in an era in which cuts have become the norm. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that one of the unintended consequences could be that the blame culture is exacerbated, because the pressure and the spotlight will be very much on the Minister?

It is not hard to envisage that something terrible happens, a review is commissioned, and the Minister is under pressure and seeks to apportion blame before the review has been completed, firing off letters to the local area to show that he or she is taking the matter seriously. Would my hon. Friend welcome as much as I would a commitment from the Minister that that is not what is intended and, explicitly, that the Department intends to take a different approach from now on? That is not a party political point; we have seen instances of that under different parties over the years. It does huge damage and it should stop.

[Alex Cunningham]

I certainly would welcome a commitment from the Minister to ensure that we do not end up in a blame culture. Last week I was given the honour of starting to chair the all-party parliamentary group on social work, and the first presentation was about the stresses that social services departments are already under in delivering children’s services. In my own local authority, we spend 57% of our entire council budget on social care issues—on children’s services and adult services. They are feeling the strain, and people are looking elsewhere to see how on earth they can get out of some of the corners they are in, particularly when things go wrong.

Warm words are great, and I know that the Minister is a sincere man, but we need guarantees. We need to that people will participate, that the reviews will be done, that we will learn from them and, most importantly of all, that they can happen in the first place by being properly resourced.