Child Protection

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on assigning time to it, and I am pleased to follow two such powerful speeches. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) on securing the debate.

Over the summer we saw more tragic evidence, if it were needed, of how important it is that the child protection system works swiftly and effectively. Last November the Education Committee published a report “Children first: the child protection system in England.” We agreed that we should focus our attention on three separate but linked themes that were emerging strongly from all that we had heard and read—neglect, older children, and the thresholds for interventions. What drew them together was the recognition that in each case the child should be the priority.

I will start with neglect. No one should underestimate the scale of this problem. A major study by the NSPCC last year found that severe neglect was experienced by 3.7% of children under 11 and 9.8% of 11 to 17-year-olds at some time in their childhood; and 43% of child protection plans are in place as a result of neglect. During our inquiry we learnt that it can be difficult to pin down what is meant by the term “neglect”. It can mean different things for different age groups and in different situations, which can make it difficult for professionals and the public to recognise.

We were particularly concerned by the variation in rates of neglect between local authorities. We recommended that the Government commission research to see whether similar situations and behaviours were classified as neglect in different local authorities in different ways. We concluded from the evidence that the needs of children and the importance of acting quickly to secure early intervention for children experiencing neglect are all too often not given sufficient priority. I hope that the Government will be prepared to intervene if the responsiveness of local authorities to neglect does not improve.

We also learned from witnesses that older children are often reluctant to disclose information about abuse or neglect. Potential causes of this include mistrust of the authorities, embarrassment and fear of what is going to happen, including the fear of not being believed. That leads on to another of the three main areas that the Education Committee examined—namely, the support given to older children. Ofsted figures reveal that 24% of the serious case reviews conducted between April 2007 and March 2011 involved children aged 14 or older. That means that children in that group are second only to babies under one in terms of risk of serious harm.

[Andrew Griffiths (Burton) (Con)]

On the point about older children, does my hon. Friend share my concern that we do not yet seem to be responding adequately and quickly enough to the growing issue of grooming by gangs? We see it in many of our towns and cities across the country, yet we do not seem to have an adequate response.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is right. However, it is being taken seriously. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham talked about the use of modern technology and how those who are predatory towards children can use it to co-ordinate and be more effective. As in every area of crime, it is essential that those on the side of law and order, particularly those involved in the protection of children, should keep up and be ahead of the curve in relation to the abusers.

ChildLine told us that provision for 16 to 18-year-olds, in particular, represents a massive gap in the system. We concluded that the position was so serious that the Government should undertake a complete review of the support offered to older children by the child protection system, with proposals to reshape services to meet their needs. In their response to our report, Ministers said:

“We expect local leaders to consider whether their child and family social work services are appropriately configured to meet the needs of all vulnerable children and families.”

I appreciate the key role played by local authorities in delivering children’s services and the need to respect a certain amount of local discretion as to how they discharge this responsibility, but I hope the Government will act if evidence continues to show that older children are still being overlooked by our child protection system.

One element of the support on offer to older children has shown a marked improvement in recent months. I was delighted by the package of support for young people leaving care that was unveiled by the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), earlier this year. I am pleased to see him in his seat. This includes new rules to ensure that more 16 and 17-year-olds remain in care unless signed off by a director of children’s services. For too long, young care leavers for whom the state is, in effect, the parent have been cast off at 16 or 17 with no support network in place. The new arrangements mark a real step forward, but there is still much more to be done.

The third aspect of my Committee’s work involved the thresholds for intervention and whether they are set at the right level and applied consistently. We found variation between local authorities in how these thresholds are applied. We recommended that the Government commission research to understand the impact of varying thresholds in different areas, and whether they are too high or rising in some places. Undoubtedly part of the solution is having a common understanding of thresholds as between different agencies and ensuring that information is shared. We found particular concerns about the health sector, as one always does in relation to information sharing.

We commended, as did my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, the example set by authorities that have brought different agencies together into multi-agency hubs to ensure better co-ordination and information sharing between all the professionals involved in child protection. During the inquiry we went to York, where there was the principle that there should be a response to every need. Rather than having a threshold, the aim was to co-ordinate and to ensure that where a need was expressed people could, at the very least, signpost someone to where they could get help and support.

The American social reformer Frederick Douglass said:

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

He was exactly right. As a political class, we must take the hard lessons of recent years to heart as Britain is confronted by a very 21st-century picture of abuse. As well as the themes that I have mentioned, my Committee heard about threats to the welfare of children from new forms of abuse resulting from technology, as well as older forms of abuse newly present in this country such as the evils of human trafficking and female genital mutilation. The challenge of protecting children is constantly changing, and our response needs to be sure-footed and robust.

There are clear signs that Ministers have turned their attention to where the child protection system is failing children, but in our inquiry we were concerned about where the responsibility lies. I hope to hear from Ministers whether there has been a change in responsibility as between the Department for Education and the Home Office. Who exactly is in charge? If there has been a change, how could it have occurred without the Education Committee being informed about it? Do we have clarity as to who is responsible, and without that clarity can our children really be safe?

Speaking for myself, not for the Committee, I think that my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham made a strong case for a public inquiry. Such is the level of public disquiet, such are the complexities and challenges of these issues, and such is the need not only to reassure the public but to allow for a public examination of the issues, that nothing short of a public inquiry is required, and it would carry cross-party support. My Committee will undertake follow-up work in connection with our inquiry to assess where we are and what else needs to be done.

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[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

I refer the House to my chairmanship of the Justice for Families campaign and of Care Leavers Voice, which is a group of care leavers who are concerned that the voice of care leavers is excluded from the system.

On 14 August Jana Tokolyova, who is the press officer of the Slovak Republic’s equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service, the General Prokuratura, reported that their equivalent of the Director of Public Prosecutions had agreed with the deputy director of their national police to appoint a special agent to investigate a criminal complaint by Silivie Maher that relates to care proceedings in the UK.

This is an interesting process, because it is an extra-jurisdictional process. I believe it relates to the Rome statute and, as such, could lead to the end result of members of the Government facing questions about why they have tolerated the amount of malpractice that goes on in care proceedings in England and Wales.

On 5 December 2012 Leicester city council fired a very experienced social worker because she wanted to send a baby home to their mum and dad. Her assessment was that the parents were competent, but Sir Martin Narey and Education Ministers want a rapid movement to adoption—hence, the baby remained in care. This pressure by local authority managers on a social worker to lie to the court is, of course, a criminal offence. However, I think the Slovak Republic is more willing than the police in England to investigate criminality in our courts. Happily, however, on 5 September 2013 the case was set down for a full hearing by an employment tribunal next year.

I have for some time been worried about what I was told by a social worker some years ago, which is that at times the legal aid-funded solicitors for parents conspire with local authority staff in order to ensure that the parents lose. One example where that appears to have happened is that of Jaqcue and John Courtnage, whose two sons were taken into care because one had a lump on his head. The doctors were not sure whether it was because of a fracture or a fissure. The child was neurologically sound, which implies a fissure, but the parents did not see the evidence that it could have been a fissure until after the court had decided in 2010 that it was a fracture, and the question was never considered in any court judgment.

A court order on 30 October 2008 had said that all evidence should be provided to the parents. That did not happen. The hospital provided Derbyshire county council with the information in December 2008, but this did not get to the parents until after the finding of fact hearing of 2010, when they made a subject access request.

The question is whether the council colluded with the parents’ solicitors. Chris Sedgewick of Miles and Cash has been asked about the issue by his client and me. Although he denies the allegation, he has refused to give a detailed response, which confirms to me that Miles and Cash colluded with Derbyshire county council to keep this evidence from the parents.

Additionally, there was a single metaphyseal fracture, but Thomas, Rosenfield, Leventhal and Markowitz found as long ago as 1990 that

“femur fractures often are accidental and that the femur can be fractured when the running child trips and falls.”

Their article can be found on pages 471 to 476 of volume 88, No. 3 of the journal Paediatrics, published on 1 September 1991. Again, here we have an essentially criminal allegation that escapes investigation and prosecution in England, but which could be prosecuted by the Slovak Republic.

Article 3 of the European convention on human rights was almost certainly engaged with regard to the removal by the police of the newborn baby that appeared in the video that Staffordshire county council failed to injunct last Friday. Interestingly, Mrs Courtnage assisted the father in resisting imprisonment at an earlier stage. Was the action of removing the newborn baby inevitable, and therefore permissible under article 3, or even necessary, under article 8? The risk is future emotional abuse. The authority accepts that the parents are no immediate risk to their child. Why, then, take this action? The Government are moving towards removing such babies and immediately placing them with adoptive families. This does not appear to me to fit with traditional English family law or the European convention on human rights.

I have mentioned Toni McLeod before. She featured in the Sunday Express because Durham wanted to take her unborn baby into care because she went on an English Defence League demonstration. She went to Ireland. Sadly, the Health Service Executive in Ireland is now trying to force back to England all the family court refugees. More recently she returned to England and was refused permission to appeal. The case reference is [2013] EWCA Civ 1007. In paragraph 10, the court said

“Happily, on one basis, this case is not about a mother who is incompetent or unable to provide ordinary, good enough or even good physical and practical care for her children. Unhappily, and frustratingly for all involved, I dare say, particularly the mother and the children, the concern about the mother's ability to parent is more subtle and harder to pinpoint, but it arises from her personality and the potential for the children to be upset by unpredictable actions or words that she may from time to time exhibit.”

There are still parents leaving the UK to escape the system. I know of two pregnant mothers who have done so: one has gone to France and the other to live with a Belgian social worker, who is appalled at what is being done in England and is therefore willing to look after a mother and child at home.

I welcome the work of Sir James Munby. He is a good appointment to the challenging task of president and his initial practice directions have been good. However, the Government remain complacent and Parliament should really look at the individual cases. The care system continues not to be accountable. The independent reviewing officer will never be independent while they are on the payroll of the local authority.

The case of Jimmy Savile have been raised by various people. What is not widely known, although it is in the public domain, is that a journalist, Leah McGrath Goodman, aimed to go to Jersey to investigate what had happened in 2011 before it became public. However, she was banned by the UK Border Agency. With some effort from me, the ban was removed and she received a visa earlier this year. She has now been to Jersey, but the issues are already in the public domain. The CCTV that might explain the basis on which somebody was prevented from investigating a serious case of child abuse that came out at a later stage has still not been provided. The Government need to provide some answers on that issue.

I wrote to all the embassies this year asking whether somebody would like to come to a meeting in the House of Commons to discuss problems with child protection. Fifty-nine people came, representing 30 countries. Although not all those countries have complained formally, we should recognise that there are serious concerns about how the system operates.

Child protection is a complex process that covers a wide range of circumstances. There are some very good practitioners and lawyers who work in the area. As I said, Sir James Munby is a very good judge. However, there is also bad practice. If we tolerate the bad practice, we undermine the more competent people. It is therefore important to look at the wider issues.

In a sense, there is a constitutional problem. When hon. Members receive complaints from their constituents and write to the Minister, the Minister says, “We don’t comment on individual cases.” Unless we are able to look at the details of individual cases and see whether there are collective problems, we cannot be certain what is going on. I know that the system does a very good job at times, but it also does a very bad job at times. We are not looking at the process systematically.

Ministers say, “We want more children to be adopted.” That message goes to council leaders who talk to their cabinet member for children’s services. The cabinet member talks to the senior managers and they talk to the more junior managers. The social worker who wants to send a child home then gets fired. I have also heard of a council that, because the expert witness recommended that a child be reunited with their parents, would not pay for the expert witness’s report. That pressure on people to go in a particular direction is driven unintentionally by the Government. I am not saying that the Government intend to achieve that, but that is what is happening on the ground.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am working hard to follow my hon. Friend’s argument. There will undoubtedly be injustice in the system, as there is in any system. However, the case that he talked about in which a social worker in Leicester was fired for wanting to send a child home seems incredible. Will he say more about it?

[John Hemming]

I have the defence that Leicester city council made to the employment tribunal. I can give the hon. Gentleman a copy of it. The defence was, “We told her not to send the child home, but she wanted to do that, so we fired her.” That went to appeal and the councillors in the authority endorsed the process.

This is a question of the balance in the civil procedure rules for expert witnesses. Social workers are expert witnesses and they provide assessments. If their assessments are driven by management priorities, they are not following their duty to the court. In fact, they are driven by management priorities a lot of the time. Another error that the Government are making is to reduce the use of independent social workers. Although the repeat player prejudice can be a problem, an independent social worker is not necessarily managerially driven to come to certain conclusions, whereas employees of the council often are. Civil servants make the error of assuming that an assessment is the same, whatever the managerial pressure on the person who made it. The Lashin v. Russia case considered the question of expert evidence and concluded clearly that such evidence has to be produced by somebody who has no interest in the outcome or the conclusion of the case, otherwise they are untrustworthy.

I am coming up to my 10 minutes, so I will draw my remarks to a close. The fundamental issue is the quality of expert evidence. Much of the expert evidence is driven by the management priorities of the local authority. That is why there are many very bad cases. The Education Committee could look at individual cases, as could the Justice Committee. I have made my point, so I shall sit down.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) for consistently pushing hard to ensure that the House does not forget these important issues and that we make progress on them.

I echo the concern of the hon. Members for East Worthing and Shoreham and for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) that the Department for Education is not responding to this debate. However, I am pleased to see that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), has arrived on the Front Bench and is listening to the debate.

Since the tragic death of Victoria Climbié nearly a decade ago, it has been widely accepted that child protection is everybody’s responsibility and that, necessarily, all central and local government departments have a role in keeping children safe. Child protection policy is fragmented across different Departments including the Department for Education, the Department of Health, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is important that there is a strong lead Department so that a drive comes from somewhere in Government to ensure that the voices, needs and views of children are never forgotten.

I agree with the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, who said that child protection is primarily about education, awareness, early intervention and prevention, and that it should therefore sit with the Minister with responsibility for child protection in the Department that is responsible for children. Will the Minister confirm that the Department for Education is still responsible for such children or whether it has abandoned its child protection responsibilities altogether? The confusion is deeply concerning. Is the Home Office now the lead Department or not?

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Under the heading, “Who is responsible for child protection?” the Education Committee report stated:

“It is everyone’s responsibility…In Government terms, child protection in England is the overall responsibility of the Department for Education, which issues both statutory and non-statutory guidance”.

Would the hon. Lady, like me, welcome an intervention from a Minister to confirm that that is still the case or whether the situation has changed?

[Lisa Nandy]

I would welcome that.

It is my view that we must start with the child if we are to tackle child protection. I have a huge amount of respect for the work that the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice has done on children in the immigration detention system over several years. He will know from that experience that some children are at higher risk of harm, including migrant and trafficked children, children with disabilities, child offenders and children in care, to name just a few of the groups that I have worked with over the years. It is important that there is a focus on those children from a Department whose primary focus is the protection and welfare of children. Many of the Departments that come into contact with those children have responsibilities that conflict with children’s welfare and safety. It is therefore essential that the Department for Education takes the lead on child protection. I would be grateful for that assurance from the Ministers who are present.

I endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport said so compellingly about the importance of communicating with children, listening to them and believing them. I spoke recently to a group of brave, articulate and inspiring teenage girls in Bradford who had been through the court process. The stories that they told me about what had happened to them and how they had been treated by some, although not all, front-line professionals will stay with me for the rest of my life. It had scarred them deeply.

I endorse what my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) said about support for parents. One young girl told me, in heartbreaking terms, about how she still cannot talk to her mum, who is a single mum, about what happened to her because her mum cannot believe that it happened to her child without her knowledge. We need to do much more to support parents if we are to support children.

I also endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport said about the courts. I recently met a group of young boys and girls in Nottingham who had been through the court process. One of them had repeatedly been called a liar on the witness stand. When I asked her what she had said to the barrister who was calling her a liar, she said, “You weren’t there. You can shut up.” I endorse those words. I am proud that she had the courage to say that to him. I could not have put it better myself.

The court process had put those children through hell. They had seen the collapse of their cases. They had been called to court several times not knowing what to expect and had then found that the case would not be heard. They had also been told that they would be able to use separate entrances and exits, only to find that they were next to the entrances and exits the people who had abused them were using, and that they were coming face to face with them and their families on the way in and out of court. We should, and must, do better.

I want to mention briefly the explosion of victim blaming we saw over the summer. A 13-year-old girl was labelled

“predatory in all her actions…sexually experienced”

by the lawyer Robert Colover after she was sexually abused by a 41-year-old man, and the judge took into account that she looked older than her age. A former newspaper owner said that under-age girls were throwing themselves at adult men, and newspaper columnists dismissed a 31-year-old teacher’s sexual abuse of a child in his care because she was just a few months away from turning 16. We have to start challenging these attitudes in public.

There are many things we can do. First, we need to support the social work profession better. In a recent survey of 3,000 social workers, a stark picture was painted of intolerable work loads, unqualified staff assessing children, social workers unable to spend time with the children they were tasked with protecting, and thresholds being revised upwards so that, as one social worker said, “Amber is the new green: children who need and ask for our help are being taken away.” We have to take this issue seriously.

I was disappointed that the Government did not take on board our call for sex and relationship education to be made available in every school. We need to equip young people with the knowledge, skills and resilience to withstand pressure, and to understand what constitutes acceptable behaviour, including online. We have to get better at preventing, rather than tackling, child abuse. Only 6% of funding in this area is spent on prevention. That is not a smart use of money—it is also an absolute waste of children’s lives and we need to sort it out.

The role of hotels and bed-and-breakfast establishments in the abuse of children has recently come to public attention. Many Members will know this from their own constituency experience. When police and local councils strongly suspect that abuse is happening, they do not always have the tools they need to tackle it. There have been a number of reports of on-street grooming across the country, including in Oxfordshire and Rochdale, in which young people’s accounts of sexual abuse contain repeated references to hotels and B&Bs. In one case, the police came across reports from other guests at a hotel on the website TripAdvisor of young girls being abused by older men. That abuse had not been reported to the police by the hotel or anyone else.

Hotels and B&Bs were also the location for child sexual exploitation in up to one third of sites visited by the deputy Children’s Commissioner, in her inquiry into sexual exploitation which reported last November. I checked with the Library and it seems that hotels have no specific legal responsibility to register guests under the age of 16—only guests over the age of 16. All they have to do is ask for their name and nationality, so it is hard to track who is using them and when. They do not require a licence to operate unless they sell alcohol, and are under no specific obligation to report child abuse, although they do have general health and safety obligations. That is not good enough.

Tackling this issue is essential, but not straightforward. It would make no sense to tie up the hotel industry in a complex system of regulation that may not protect children. We know that those who do not recognise their responsibilities will often find ways to avoid them. However, we cannot continue with a situation where some businesses are turning a blind eye to child abuse without any redress whatever. I would like the Minister to make a commitment today for the Department for Education to establish a cross-departmental working group alongside those who work in the industry—hotels, child protection experts, the police, local councils and others—to explore how the legal regulatory framework can sensibly be strengthened to protect children. We know that we have to do more to protect children, and this is one area where we can and should do more.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am unaware of the point that the hon. Lady makes about the Department for Communities and Local Government failing to provide properly for local safeguarding boards. Will she expand a little on that?

[Diana Johnson]

I will say something about the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which has produced a report in which it says that local safeguarding boards are not fully able to perform the duties they have been given. Part of the problem with that is around funding. Perhaps the Minister will respond to that point.

I pay tribute to the excellent contributions made by hon. Members this afternoon. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham spoke with enormous knowledge and expertise as a former children’s Minister, and gave a long, grim list of what has happened over the past 12 months. He called for an overarching inquiry into child protection to pull together the recommendations in the plethora of reports and inquiries that have taken or are taking place. He also referred to a model in Australia that is well worth looking at.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport—such a doughty advocate for children—raised the importance of communicating properly and effectively with children, especially in relation to issues affecting child witnesses. She gave very good examples of how that can be done.

The Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), spoke about some of his Committee’s findings, including on the issue of neglect and the challenges it presents to local authorities, the issues facing older children and young people, and the thresholds for intervention—all important issues.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) spoke incredibly powerfully about Operation Bullfinch and the horrific crimes in Oxford against children and young people, and the need for progress to be delivered for real change in child protection. He called on all Members of the House to find out what is going on in our constituencies.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) spoke about his long-standing interest in care proceedings. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) spoke with great knowledge and made a passionate case for a clear lead in Government for child protection, as well as raising the important issue of the use of hotels and bed and breakfasts in cases of sexual exploitation.

The hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) spoke about the need for early years intervention, and gave a memorable, graphic description of a child’s brain—a lovely cauliflower if the child was nurtured, and a shrivelled prune if the child was being abused. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson) spoke about the appalling case of Daniel Pelka and made a plea for clear lines of responsibility to be identified.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn), who has great experience of child protection issues, spoke about abuse within churches and religious faiths and the need for such organisations to face up to what they need to do to put their houses in order.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about the need to provide awareness training, and my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) spoke knowledgably about issues in her constituency and the need to share good practice. My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) talked about the role of social workers with a great deal of experience and knowledge, and raised important questions about probation and how public protection from sex offenders could be compromised by some of the Government’s probation proposals. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who has vast experience at local authority and ministerial level, raised the important issue of witchcraft and what our response to it should be.

I want to go through a few of the other issues that are pertinent to this debate, and to start with the question of an overarching inquiry, which the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham raised at the beginning of the debate. There are the investigations into Jimmy Savile’s conduct and why no action was taken by various institutions. There has been an inquiry into the Waterhouse abuse scandal; the deputy Children’s Commissioner is conducting an inquiry into the culture of grooming; the NSPCC, Barnardo’s and the Children’s Society have all produced important reports. There have been a number of serious case reviews, and the Munro and Kennedy reviews. The House has benefited from the excellent reports compiled by Members. The Home Affairs Committee has produced a report on localised grooming, and the Education Committee has completed an inquiry into child protection. In addition, there have been excellent reports from a number of all-party parliamentary groups.

All these reports have given rise to many recommendations, and each makes recommendations to different bodies and at different levels. We all want to see these recommendations translated into action. Like many other Members, I think it would be ideal if one report was complied—similar to a serious case review—that brings together the various inquiries mentioned in the debate and makes clear recommendations, to be implemented at a local and national level, with clear lines of accountability.

The operation of the Disclosure and Barring Service, whose job it is to prevent people who pose a danger to children from getting work with children, has been dramatically changed by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. The changes mean that the DBS seems to be barring fewer people. More than 17,000 people were placed on the barred list in 2009, but so far this year, the figure is 1,400. Perhaps most importantly, the Act dramatically reduced the number of agencies that the DBS can share information with. Indeed, in many cases sharing intelligence with a school or youth club is forbidden, even after a Criminal Records Bureau check is requested. Would the Minister like to comment on those figures?

The role of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre is vital. It has the expertise to profile offenders and to understand the processes of abuse. We need to monitor carefully how it gets on as part of the National Crime Agency. At present, the police are aware of 60,000 cases of peer-to-peer shares of child abuse images a year, but as figures obtained by my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) show, there were only 1,570 convictions last year. Of course, that may also reflect staffing shortages in regional police forces, who support CEOP’s work but unfortunately are losing thousands of front-line officers.

I raised in a previous debate the issue of confusion in the NHS as to where responsibility for child protection actually lies. I was told that a Minister would write to me, but I have not had that response. It is disappointing to learn that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is reporting widespread confusion, lack of proper training and a lack of understanding of child protection responsibilities within the NHS.

It is important that we maintain pressure on the Government to bring in sex and relationship education, because we know that it is an important way to enable children to understand what a proper and loving relationship is. Finally, can the Minister explain what additional resources are being made available to keep children safe when they use the internet?