Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) (Revocation) Regulations 2012

Lord Hill of Oareford Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) (Revocation) Regulations 2012

Relevant Document: 41st Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, these regulations will revoke the Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) Regulations 2007, which are commonly known, fortunately, as the ContactPoint regulations—and I shall henceforth refer to them as such in the interests of brevity. The ContactPoint regulations place duties on all local authorities in England to participate in the operation of the former ContactPoint database. They specify what information can be held, who provides it, how long it can be retained and how its accuracy is to be maintained, as well as who can be granted access to it.

As noble Lords will know, ContactPoint was decommissioned back in August 2010. Although I know and am very clear that the purpose behind ContactPoint was a good one—to address the issue that was rightly flagged, whereby professionals need to share information about vulnerable children—we felt that the way it was executed was disproportionate, and that it was unjustifiable to hold information on every child in England and make it accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. It was a commitment in both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos to close it. The simple point is, therefore, that without ContactPoint there is nothing for the ContactPoint regulations to apply to.

It is true that we could have revoked the ContactPoint regulations at the time, but we decided not to because it might have been possible to amend them to support a more proportionate approach to information sharing. We wanted to explore the practicality of a new national signposting service to help practitioners find out whether another practitioner is working, or has previously worked, in another area with the same vulnerable child. That was why we asked Professor Eileen Munro to consider the potential value of such a service.

In May 2011, Professor Munro issued the final report of her review. She concluded that the arguments for and against a national system were finely balanced and that there was no compelling case to recommend one at that time. We accepted that conclusion and therefore do not see any reason to retain these regulations. It is simply good housekeeping to remove them.

That was, of course, just one of a number of conclusions reached by Professor Munro, and I should like to say a little more about her review and put the narrow issue regarding these regulations into a slightly broader setting. Professor Munro’s review of child protection was the very first review commissioned by the Department for Education and reflected the importance that we attach to child protection, and to trying to get it right. In light of her findings, we are now committed to taking through a package of reforms to improve the child protection system in this country.

The general message from Professor Munro was that we needed to move towards a child protection system with less central prescription and interference, where we placed greater trust and responsibility in skilled professionals at the front line. Like her, we want a shift in mindset and relationship between central Government, local agencies and front-line professionals working in partnership.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

Briefly, my Lords, as the Minister said, this is a very limited set of regulations in its intent. Given that ContactPoint has gone, I will not say anything about those regulations. I just put a couple of points on record in respect of the wider context that the Minister outlined.

First, as someone involved in the implementation of ContactPoint—sweating blood over it would not be too excessive a statement—it was never intended that it of itself could protect children. However, the recommendations from equally august people as Eileen Munro that we ought to try it came about because every inquiry, from Maria Colwell through to Jasmine Beckford, Victoria Climbié and even, to some extent, Baby Peter, identified to a lesser or greater extent the repeated failure, despite all those inquiries over 30 or 40 years, of professionals to share information properly.

One reason for that is that the local solutions that the Government are now asking local areas to put in place were always variable at best and, in many instances, were totally inadequate. They ran into the buffers of particular agencies—health is an example in many places—which felt that the law did not allow them to share information. It needs decisive government action to make it clear, as we tried to do, that those barriers do not exist. I do not mean this unkindly, but many professionals in local areas take a default position of, “We cannot share information”. That is what has happened and many children have lost their lives because of it.

There is a second, more practical reason, which ContactPoint, cumbersome though it might have been, was designed to address. For example, as a social worker, a referral from a school expressing concern about a child might land on your desk. If it is completely cold, your only contacts at that point are the school and the address of the child and their parents. You do not know, and it is often very difficult to find out, who else has been involved with or might have had concerns about that child in the recent past. It is very hard to get that information and put it together. You cannot call a case conference because you do not know who to call to it.

I must put on record that ContactPoint was never a database of information about children, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, maintained; it was a database of professionals. It was simply a list of the people who were connected to a child, such as their school, their GP and any other professional who had provided a service. If you, as a professional, got a referral about a concern, you could look on the database not for the details of the child—their background, history or circumstances—but for a list of professionals who had been involved in one way or another. That does not transgress that child’s human rights or reveal any information about that child. You would have to go to the professionals and ask for the information in order to get it. The database would never have given it to you.

Therefore, I do not think that local solutions will cut it. We have tried them over decades and they have not worked. Facilitation from government is needed. While I am very much in favour of building up professionals’ capacity to use their judgment more effectively, I disagree profoundly with Eileen Munro’s belief that that will simply happen without central government drive, commitment and clarification—not necessarily prescription. I simply say to the Minister: be very wary. I am not at all sure that what is being put in place instead of ContactPoint will prevent the death of another child through the failure of professionals to share information. We need a stronger system to ensure that that does not happen. Much has been tried over the years and nothing has yet worked. I am sorry that ContactPoint did not have a chance to prove whether it could have been better.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, talked about sweating blood, and I can completely believe that she did. One starts with the simple thought that it must be possible with the use of technology in the modern age to share information more successfully than has been possible before, and there must be a rational way of delivering that through a national system. My own limited experience is that you say something in the department that sounds quite simple and before you blink you have procurement frameworks, complicated systems and national everything, and something that you thought was quite modest and rational turns into a huge thing with a life all of its own. Therefore, I understand how trying to implement it must have felt.

I also know, and it was clear from the noble Baroness’s remarks, how strongly she feels about the subject and how much she knows about it. She says, rightly, that our challenge is to try to make a more local approach work. With regard to her specific point, which I think was one of the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Laming, originally raised, the misconceptions about data protection, either genuine or used as a pretext for a default position of doing nothing, have been a problem. In the revised guidance that we will be issuing later this year, as I mentioned, we will need to make that clear and respond to the point that misconceptions about data protection cannot be used as an excuse not to share information. Therefore, that is one way of dealing with the matter.

There are also other ways. One would not want to rule out the intelligent use of IT in certain settings in order to share information at an appropriate level. The example that I referred to—the work that we are doing with the Department of Health on sharing information regarding children who might be moved around from one A&E to another by their parents or carers—may be another way in which we can deal with that.

On the point raised by my noble friend Lady Walmsley regarding the money that we are saving, we have spent about £244 million on ContactPoint. We are committed to funding high-quality training—for example, with our programme of social work reform, building on the work of the social work task force that the previous Government introduced.

I accept the challenge that the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, set out. We are all committed to trying to ensure that it works. With that, on the narrow point on the revocation, I hope that we are able to accept these regulations.

Motion agreed.