Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, could I ask a number of questions, particularly in relation to Amendment 116, on information? Before doing so, I will leave the noble Lord with a thought about my experience of local safeguarding boards in Birmingham, when I was the Children’s Commissioner there. A common feature of that board, which covers a very big area—I suspect it is a common feature of many other of those boards—was that often there was no consistency in who turned up for the meetings between the different agencies. There is a moving cast of characters turning up at these boards on behalf of particular agencies. Unless we can ensure greater consistency, we will not make those boards more effective.

On Amendment 116, I am not sure whether the Minister knows that some of us have been involved for a very long time—it seems as though it is since Adam and Eve—in trying to get the public agencies to accept a common identifier for children. If we want information to flow smoothly and quickly between agencies for children, particularly those who are at risk and in the child protection system, we need to listen to some of the people who have been working on this, such as Sir Cyril Chantler, an eminent paediatrician often used by the Government to undertake inquiries, to progress that. If you talk to paediatricians who have been involved in this area, the common villain of the piece—I use the term loosely—is the Department for Education, which simply will not accept that the NHS identifier is the best one to use because all children have one. Will the Minister take this back to his department and have another go? If he wants information to flow smoothly in child protection cases between the agencies, let us move towards using the NHS number as a common identifier. I assure him that that will get the information moving much faster through all the agencies concerned.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

I shall add one more question to those posed by this very important set of amendments about how to improve local arrangements and have more effective multiagency safeguarding. I can think of nothing more important than that this works.

When I looked again at Alan Wood’s very interesting report, I saw two sentences that so far have not been picked up in this debate. They read:

“I would also add that national government departments do not do enough to model effective partnership working between themselves for local agencies. The join up demanded of local partners is not particularly evident at national level”.

For the new arrangements to work, and it is critical that they do, it is vital that government departments are modelling more effective collaboration in the area of safeguarding. I would be grateful to the Minister if, when he responds, he could tell us what steps government departments are taking nationally to model this behaviour.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I am grateful for this debate. On the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, local arrangements may include elected representatives but this is a matter for local determination. On her second point, Amendment 113 gives the safeguarding partners flexibility to determine who the other relevant agencies are but, having determined that, those relevant agencies have to co-operate.

On the publication of annual reports, my answer says that this enables public scrutiny as it is transparent. As for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about how local areas organise themselves—the noble Baroness also asked about flexibility on the areas to align operational reach—I can confirm that the local authority area will be the key area and accountability will be to the local authority. It is designed to ensure flexibility within that structure but, to answer the noble Lord’s point, there is no hidden agenda. We are concerned here purely with the matter of improving child safeguarding.

The noble Baroness asked about monitoring progress and reviews. I already covered some of that in my answers about the What Works centre for children’s social care. The duty remains for local arrangements to report on their practice and action taken in response. The second question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was who the safeguarding partner will designate as a relevant agency so that it can keep track of what is going on. I will certainly look at that. His third question was about Amendment 119 and whether the guidance will be statutory. It will.

The noble Lord, Lord Warner, made a point about Amendment 116 and a common identifier and whether we could not use the NHS identifier. Obviously, we want this to work well. That is an entirely new point to me; I will take it back and look at it in some detail.