Children and Vulnerable Adults: Abuse

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the House for my earlier attempt to speak. It was purely because of my interest in the subject and my wish to engage in the debate that we have been having. The debate has been a very good one, and our thanks are due to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and other speakers for making it so. I should declare an interest as a deputy chair of a special school, the Chiltern Way school, and have had some responsibility for child protection matters in that.

The noble Baroness asked whether we knew enough and whether we were doing enough prevention work. Those are important issues which I want to position next to that raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, who also posed the question of whether the Government have willed the ends of policy but not yet the means. Although it is a very old and hoary saw which is often used in matters affecting government policy and action, it seems particularly relevant today.

This debate is timely as it comes on the day of the first tranche of reports on the predatory actions of Jimmy Savile, which will, as the Secretary of State said in another place, shake our country to its very core. The debate comes also during the week when a major new report from the Centre for Social Justice, entitled Enough is Enough, reminds us once again of how we are failing so many vulnerable young people. Some of the case studies are shocking and distressing, and they have been reinforced by many other examples which have been raised today. They include the seven year-old boy feeling forced by his mother to steal milk from his baby sibling and then abandoned by social care following his arrest, and a young girl who was severely neglected and physically abused by her mother and repeatedly seen with her siblings searching for food in rubbish bins. As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said, these are things that we should not be seeing in a civilised society.

The report is a wake-up call to those, including me, who thought that these crucial child protection issues, identified in the Munro report of 2011—to which I want to return at the end of my remarks—were finally being understood and addressed by the Government. Sadly, we have heard recurrent themes emerge from the comments made today: countless examples of abused, neglected and traumatised children being failed by statutory services; social workers being overwhelmed by the scale of the task and a lack of resources to intervene; a failure to grasp the necessity of early intervention; professionals lacking the skills, training or experience to deal with complex cases; the lessons that were clearly set out in Every Child Matters being lost in short-term expediency and sticking-plaster solutions; an ability of statutory bodies to share information and collaborate effectively being lost; and a disconnect between the valuable work carried out by voluntary agencies and their interfaces with statutory services.

The result is that we are confronted by too many shocking cases hitting the headlines, but also with the knowledge—graphically illustrated by the Savile reports today—that these cases are just a tiny fraction of the abuse and neglect taking place day by day. Arguably, the role of Ofsted in inspecting children’s services is a significant part of the problem. Unlike with schools, the inspections are not routine and rigorous, but rather crisis-driven. Similar arguments can be made for the inspection of adult care services. In 2010, the Government announced the cessation of annual performance assessments, which has resulted in the Care Quality Commission no longer inspecting the commissioning practices of local authorities. Parallel to this move to lighter-touch regulation, we have seen an increasing number of care home scandals.

We should surely all agree that it is essential to have a strong and effective regulator to protect vulnerable adults. This should be a precondition to enable patients to have confidence in the services they receive, and to allow them to exercise informed choice when choosing services. This is why we think it is essential for the CQC to be allowed to proactively inspect and review the commissioning of adult social care services in local authorities.

One issue which has been picked up during this debate, and highlighted by numerous reports, is that reports are not investigated or charges are not brought because victims are often thought to be “not credible”. It is surely the job of all of us, across government, to try to tackle a culture which consistently fails to give victims—especially child victims—of abuse the status they deserve in the criminal justice system. One way this could be, in some senses, remedied is to improve sex and relationship education in schools. This week the Prime Minister announced that he would allow the guidance given to schools to be updated to reflect the new pressures resulting from the internet, but this still fails to acknowledge that too few schools are teaching proper sex and relationship education.

Sex and relationship education is not just about challenging the attitudes among victims. It is also about changing attitudes among perpetrators. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, reminded us, we need to remember that most child sexual exploitation is done either by a child’s peer or by a young adult. The NSPCC study already mentioned found that 65% of sexual abuse was conducted by the under-18s, while a Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre sample of 1,200 known perpetrators found that, where the age was known, over half were under 24. Sex education can also be particularly useful in combating new forms of abuse, such as sexting.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said, the key to protecting children is accurate data sharing between agencies. However, there is concern about the Disclosure and Barring Service, whose job is to stop people who pose a danger to children from working with children. The operation of the DBS has been dramatically changed by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, which means that the DBS is barring fewer people. The number of people placed on the barred list in 2009 was over 17,000, and so far this year it is 1,400. Like the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, when the Minister comes to respond I would like to hear from her what the explanation is for this. Perhaps more importantly, the Act dramatically reduced the number of agencies with which the DBS is able to share information. Indeed, in many cases the DBS will be forbidden from sharing intelligence with a school or youth club, even after a DBS check has been requested.

Child protection is an incredibly broad subject, as reflected in today’s contributions. A number of inquiries have taken place, and there are many ongoing. There is an inquiry into Jimmy Savile’s conduct and why action had not been taken by various institutions with which he had a relationship. There is also the Waterhouse inquiry into the North Wales abuse scandal, and the Deputy Children’s Commissioner is in the process of holding an inquiry into the culture of grooming. The NSPCC has conducted a number of excellent pieces of research, as have Barnardo’s and the Children’s Society.

There are so many reports, but all seem to be brought forward in a way which allows those who have commissioned them, or those who have received them, just to leave them and move on to the next one. What we need from these reports is an action plan. As mentioned by other noble Lords, we need either a serious case review which brings together the various inquiries and brings forward clearer recommendations or, as suggested, the sort of qualitative and very narrow investigation prompted by accidents. This type of investigation was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, in relation to civil aviation. Whatever the type, there is enough information and evidence around to require us to ensure that we have action plans and for them to be implemented.

At the beginning of my remarks, I mentioned the Munro report. The Munro recommendations were, by general accord, an excellent blueprint for action. When the Government responded, the then Children’s Minister, Tim Loughton, wrote:

“There is now a significant opportunity to build a child-centred system that: values professional expertise; shares responsibility for the provision of early help; develops social work expertise and supports effective social work practice; and strengthens accountabilities and promotes learning”.

What happened to those aspirations? All the evidence seems to be that the situation has got worse, not better, under this Government’s watch, and very few operating in the sector have seen a positive drive for change.

We do not need Jimmy Savile and the reports that have come out today and will be coming out over the next few months to remind us that we need to do more, discover more and work harder at prevention. I hope that we can use this useful debate to make progress on all those points.