Sale of Puppies and Kittens

Debate between Meg Munn and Tim Loughton

Thursday 4th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

The hon. Lady has shown amazing ingenuity in bringing Iraq, Ukraine and the slave trade into a debate on puppy farming. I entirely support the thrust of her argument. Importantly, we have not yet mentioned rescue dogs and cats; the debate has been all about puppies. I was brought up in a household in which we almost always took on rescue dogs, and we need more people to look at that option rather than simply buying a nice fluffy puppy from a shop.

[Meg Munn]

The hon. Gentleman cannot have heard that point being raised by other hon. Members on both sides of the House, but they have indeed done so. Some of us have always been motivated to go to those organisations first. Indeed, those organisations also have puppies and kittens. I have visited the RSPCA centre in Sheffield, which is housed in a fabulous building and looks after its animals well. It also takes seriously its responsibility for proper aftercare by ensuring that people who take on animals as pets understand what is involved, and it is available to offer advice and support.

I entirely agree that that is a good way to find a pet, but of course not everyone goes down that route, so my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South has been right to secure this debate so that we can discuss the options when money and profit enter the equation. We must always be conscious that, when the profit motive is present, there will be unscrupulous people who work in a different way. As the legislation changes and tries to keep up with the trade, those people will find ever more clever ways of getting round it in order to make a profit.

We need to do a number of things. Raising awareness is enormously important, and this debate will put this story into people’s minds. It will appear in newspapers and on the internet, and people will learn what they might unwittingly be involved in when they buy an animal from a pet shop or even from a dealer. They will then be empowered to understand the questions they should ask, and be clearer about what they need to know before they take on the important role of looking after a pet. The Government also need to work harder in this area; I agree with hon. Members who have said that they need to do more. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South has set out how that can be done quickly, and I urge the Government to take this matter forward.

Child Protection

Debate between Meg Munn and Tim Loughton

Thursday 12th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and we could have taken up this entire debate with the history of some of these cases. And these are only the high-profile cases that we know about and read about. They are only a small sample of what has actually been going on; many more have not reached the headlines or even the courts.

Away from the high-profile stories that make the media headlines, the wider figures show that our various child protection agencies have never been busier. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports that referrals to ChildLine about sexual abuse were nearly twice as high in June and July of this year as in the same period last year, pre-Savile. There have been 2.4 million visits to the ChildLine website in the last year—an increase of some 28% on the previous year. The NSPCC estimates that more than 50,000 children in the UK are known to be at risk of abuse. It calculates that last year, a total of 2,900 rapes or attempted rapes of children under the age of 13 were recorded; that is eight per day. Indeed, 32%—almost a third—of all sexual crimes in this country are against children under the age of 16.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I know that the hon. Gentleman feels very deeply about this issue. Do these figures not show that we have to be more aware of the fact that paedophiles will target professions in which they can get access to children, and that the Government therefore need to do more? Instead of relaxing regulations relating to children and Ofsted child protection inspections, the Government need to be much more cognisant of the issue, target areas where such things are likely to happen, and make people aware that paedophiles will be in these professions. Action must be taken to stop them.

[Tim Loughton]

I agree with the hon. Lady, who knows a great deal about this issue, having been a practitioner in the field; indeed, she and I have worked together through the all-party group on child protection. We need to be wiser to the professions in which paedophiles and potential paedophiles will inveigle themselves. At the same time, however, training and awareness in some of these professions—an issue I shall return to—have improved enormously, although not enough, yet, and the inspection regime has improved. In too many cases, we were inspecting the wrong thing. I hope that joint agency inspections, which we were promised but which have been put on hold, will still happen, so that we have that cross-disciplinary eye: police looking at children’s services, children’s services looking at education, education looking at health services.

Too often, there was a silo approach to inspection, which took up a great deal of the time of professionals who would rather spend it looking after the families, and not enough dissemination of information. The best way to bring that about is better multi-agency training, which we have not been good at. That is beginning to happen, however. For example, we have multi-agency safeguarding hubs, through which different agencies are co-located—sitting next to each other in the same room, looking at the same intelligence, discussing cases and coming up with a much better informed and sharper action plan. All those things are improvements, but the point the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) makes is a valid one.

I know that many Members want to contribute to the debate, but there is a bit more I want to say. With the list I have given goes a looming public apprehension about whether we really have cracked child protection, buffeted by almost weekly revelations of the latest scandal involving abuse at the hands of a bishop, a music teacher, a taxi driver or a soap star. To some extent, it matters not whether the perpetrator is dead or alive, or how long ago his alleged misdemeanours took place. The higher profile given by the media to cases linked to celebrities has, however, been deeply unhelpful, as it detracts from the reality that the main perpetrators are common criminals in ordinary jobs.

Of course, the fact that so many cases are now coming to court, however belatedly, is a sign of some success, in that offenders are now being pursued better by police. Victims are being heeded more loudly and sympathetically, prosecutions are sticking and the perpetrators are being made to pay.

However, are our children safer now than they were 50 years ago, when Savile and others started to ply their trade? Have we just replaced celebrity abuse of star-struck teenagers while the establishment turned a blind eye with systematic abuse to order by organised gangs, be they Pakistani-British—high-profile cases of which we have seen—or of whatever culture? Are internet groomers and the recent Oxford and Rochdale abusers just a modern-day version of Savile, armed with mobile phone technology but without shell suits and the lure of the “green room”? In that sense, given the reach of technology as a key tool of the abusers, do they not pose a much more widespread threat now than ever before?

I think that those of us in the know here today can say that children are safer now than back in the 1960s, but that is a tough sell to the public at large. But if that is the case, when did things actually get better? When did child protection come of age and society at large recognise its significance? When did we equip our agencies sufficiently to question the “It’s just Jimmy” mentality and start turning over some rather grubby stones? Was the landmark Children Act 1989 the turning point? Was it the shocking revelations concerning the north Wales care homes, which have of course come full circle, as we now know that the whole story was not properly revealed? It is to answer these questions that I and others have been calling for some time for an overarching inquiry into the whole sordid history of child abuse in this country, going back to the 1960s and traversing the Children Act, into what I call the legitimate legislation tsunami post-Victoria Climbié. Such an inquiry must involve a commission, led by respected figures from the law, lawmakers, social services and children’s charities. It must set out to provide the holistic assurance that has been so sapped by the plethora of at one time weekly inquiries and reviews set up by the Home Office, the BBC, the Department of Health and numerous others, and it must go everywhere.

Such an inquiry must address four main issues. What exactly happened, and why, over all those years? When did things start getting better, and how? Have all practical steps been taken to give victims the confidence to come forward, and for the police to pursue vigorously any remaining offenders? Perhaps most important of all, have all our major institutions that have significant dealings with children and young people instituted child protection policies and practices that are fit for purpose in 2013 to deal with modern-day technology and savvy perpetrators?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Meg Munn and Tim Loughton

Monday 16th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend raises a very important point, which was covered slightly in my earlier answer. I am concerned about getting good pre-adoption support, peri-adoption support and post-adoption support, because the worst thing that can happen is a breakdown in adoption. There is scant evidence about breakdown in adoptions, but some of the highest-performing adoption agencies in the country, be they local authority or independent, are those that invest in adoption support, which means that adoptions do not break down. That results in not only a financial saving for that authority, but, more importantly, a social gain for the child, who gets a safe, stable and loving home—permanently.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I was recently contacted by some adoptive parents in my constituency who unfortunately are experiencing a breakdown with one of their adopted children, many years after the child was adopted. They felt that they were not given enough information before the adoption, particularly about attachment issues. In the push to increase the speed of adoption, what will the Minister do to ensure that the preparation for adoptive parents is not too fast and that the right information is given to enable them to deal with the issues when children are placed?

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady, too, is an expert on this subject. In trying to provide better timeliness, rather than leaving a child in limbo in care when there is no safe way back to their birth family, we will not sacrifice quality. We will beef up the assessment process so that prospective adopters are given a clear insight into what becoming an adoptive parent is all about. If they are up for it, they should be helped and supported through the process as quickly as possible. It is necessary to ensure that a suitable match is provided, which they are capable of taking on, along with all the support that needs to go with it. It is a false economy—financially and, more importantly for the child, socially—not to do that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Meg Munn and Tim Loughton

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

14. What progress has been made by the Munro review implementation working group.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

The Government’s response to the Munro review was informed by an implementation working group convened for that purpose. We continue to work with a range of partners to take forward these important reforms. We will consult early next year on the revision of statutory guidance. More flexible assessment processes are being trialled in eight local authorities. Ofsted has consulted on new inspection arrangements and we have published a work programme on safeguarding children in the NHS.

[Meg Munn]

The Minister started off well, publishing the minutes of the implementation working group on the website. Unless the working group has not met since, the last minutes are for May 2011. Will he give me an update on the report that he asked for on the funding implications of the Munro review?

[Tim Loughton]

I set up the implementation working group specifically to translate the Munro review recommendations into practical things that we could implement before we published the Government’s response, so they informed the Government’s response which we published before the summer. We have used members of that implementation group to inform the work that we are doing on all those aspects that I mentioned and others. My intention is to reconvene the implementation working group early in the new year to monitor the progress that we have made and see what more we need to do.

Munro Report

Debate between Meg Munn and Tim Loughton

Thursday 9th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Munro Report and its implications for child protection.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to lead the debate, as well as by the number of hon. Members who wish to speak in it. I would like to set out my stall, and although I am supposed to make a winding-up speech, I am keen that we hear from Back Benchers, so I shall keep that to a minimum.

Today is significant for two reasons. First, this is the only Government-led debate on child protection in Government time that I can recall in my 14 years in the House. The debate is therefore long overdue and it reflects the importance that I and my fellow Ministers attach to child protection. It is an enormous privilege to lead the debate and I look forward to what I am sure will be a constructive discussion, as I know that hon. Members on both sides of the House hold passionate and well-informed views about the subject.

The second significance is that this week is the first anniversary of the launch of the Munro review of child protection. Hon. Members will remember that this was the first review that was established by the Department for Education. It was launched on 10 June 2010, and that underlined the fact that getting child protection right is an enormous priority for the Government. I know we all share that as a priority, so let me pass on my thanks to all hon. Members, leading organisations in the sector, the child protection work force and the wider public, including children and young people themselves, who contributed in some way to Professor Munro’s report. Their experience, insights and expertise have helped make it a well-informed and widely welcomed report.

We should not forget that the vast majority of our children enjoy a safe and happy childhood, but even now too many still do not. Some of their names are sadly familiar—Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly and Khyra Ishaq—but many more are not. Whether we hear about a case in the media or it goes unnoticed by the public, there is always an individual tragedy at its centre. It is those individual tragedies that have so often been the triggers for different reviews and inquiries on child protection over many years. Every one of those reviews has resulted in calls for action, and in response legislation has been passed, rulebooks have been expanded, more procedures and processes have been introduced and structures have been restructured.

However, the fundamental problems have not gone away. Despite the very best of intentions, our hard-working, dedicated social workers, foster carers and other front-line professionals are too often still unable to make the difference that they want and need to make for vulnerable children and families. Day in, day out, they are up against a system that too often simply does not help them to do their best for children.

From the start we wanted the Munro review of child protection to be different. That is why, unlike its predecessors, it was commissioned not as a knee-jerk response to a specific tragedy that had hit the headlines; that is why it is recommending that regulation and prescription are reduced rather than increased—it is not just another case of adding a few hundred more pages to the “Working Together” guidance; and, most importantly, that is why the review has focused on the child rather than the system. Professor Munro’s final report, “A child centred-system”, is wide ranging. It looks not only at the problems, but at the underlying environment that allows, and sometimes inadvertently encourages, such problems to occur. The review takes an holistic approach to child protection and bases its proposals on evidence and experience.

The report has been widely welcomed, as I said. The College of Social Work welcomed it as a “huge step forward”. Nushra Mansuri of the British Association of Social Workers described it as

“Music to the profession’s ears”.

The Children’s Commissioner praised its emphasis on the child’s right to protection. I am delighted that it has been welcomed as a breath of fresh air for all those hard-working professionals involved in child protection.

For that success, I have first and foremost to thank Professor Eileen Munro for her expert insight and analysis and the open and collaborative approach she has taken to the review over the past 12 months. I also pay tribute to the reference group that supported her so closely: Melanie Adegbite, District Judge Nick Crichton, Marion Davis, Avril Head, Professor Corinne May-Chahal, Lucy Sofocleous, Dr Sheila Shribman, Daniel Defoe, Professor Sue White, Martin Narey and the great many officials from the Department for Education and beyond who worked tirelessly over the past 12 months. I know that Professor Munro has hugely valued the support, expertise and different perspectives of all members of the reference group.

The report builds on previous reforms and the work of eminent experts such as Lord Laming, and I pay tribute also to the enormous contribution he has made in this area over so many years. This really is not about criticising previous, well-intentioned efforts to improve the system, but about making the time and space to understand why those efforts did not always work as well as they were intended to and should have done, learning from that to bring about long-term, sustainable reform in the future.

Eleven years, three months and 17 days since the tragic death of Victoria Climbié I still find myself asking whether the ever more complex systems that were created have actually made children safer now than they were then. Has the enormous additional amount of legislation, regulation and guidance made that much of a difference where it really matters? I fear that the answer may be no. Has, in fact, the child protection system in this country become rather more about protecting the system than about protecting the children whom the professionals went into their professions to protect? That is why it is now of the utmost importance that we restore public confidence in child protection, and restore confidence in the social worker profession and others—not least through those professions themselves.

The Munro review report seeks to do exactly that. Its fundamental analysis is that the system has become too focused on compliance and procedures and has lost its focus on the needs and experience of children themselves. That interest has occurred not just since the election, however; we started the process when, in opposition, I chaired a commission on children’s social workers and we produced the “No More Blame Game” report back in 2007, with contributions from all parties, followed by our policy paper “Back to the Front Line”, produced before last year’s election.

Professor Munro makes 15 recommendations for reform. She makes it clear—and I agree—that they need to be looked at in the round, because they are interrelated and impact on the system as a whole. I shall go through them briefly, and in doing so I start by noting that this is an excellent report with which I find little to disagree.

The first recommendation is to revise the statutory guidance “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, and the framework for the assessment of children in need and their families to distinguish essential rules from guidance that informs professional judgment, because, although we need rules it is important that they are the right ones.

The second recommendation is that the inspection framework examines the effectiveness of the contributions of all local services—including health, education, police, probation and the justice system—to the protection of children.

The third recommendation is that the inspection framework examines the child’s journey from needing to receiving help, explores how the rights, wishes, feelings and experiences of children and young people inform and shape the provision of services, and looks at the effectiveness of the help provided to children, young people and their families. Too often, do we not hear that, actually, nobody really listened to the child at the centre of a case? We need inspection to look across all the relevant agencies and to focus on the things that really matter: outcomes for children and young people.

The fourth recommendation is that local authorities and their partners use a combination of nationally collected and locally published performance information to help benchmark performance, to facilitate improvement and to promote accountability. It is crucial that performance information is not treated as an unambiguous measure of good or bad performance, as performance indicators tend to be, because it is important that performance data are used intelligently to drive improvement in practice.

The fifth recommendation is that the existing statutory requirement for local safeguarding children boards to produce and publish an annual report for the local children’s trust board are amended to require its submission instead to the chief executive and the leader of the council.

The sixth recommendation is that “Working Together to Safeguard Children” is amended to state that, when monitoring and evaluating local arrangements, LSCBs should, taking account of local need, include an assessment of the effectiveness of the help being provided to children and families, and the effectiveness of multi-agency training to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and young people. Local safeguarding children boards play a vital role, and I see a much enhanced future for them as the linchpin of how we get this right.

The seventh recommendation is that local authorities give due consideration to protecting the discrete roles and responsibilities of a director of children’s services and a lead member for children’s services before allocating any additional functions to individuals occupying such roles. We know that that is an important concern, and it has come up in the House recently.

The eighth recommendation is that the Government work jointly with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of General Practitioners, local authorities and others to research the impact of health reorganisation on effective partnership arrangements and the ability to provide effective help for children who are suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm. I shall discuss that point further, but the implementation board, which will put forward these reforms, is heavily weighted—over-weighted in fact—towards health, and it is important that it should be.

The ninth recommendation is that LSCBs use systems methodology when undertaking serious case reviews with accredited, skilled and independent reviewers and have a stronger focus on disseminating learning nationally. Ofsted’s evaluation of SCRs should end, because serious case reviews need to be about learning rather than about processes or the story of a case; they need to be about supporting analysis, beyond identifying what happened, in order to explain why it happened. They should not be all about blaming people, because blaming individuals for errors and mistakes is unhelpful and counter-productive. Rather than having a blame culture where people try to conceal mistakes, surely it is better for people to work together to identify errors early so that they can be managed or minimised, often through the redesign of local systems. That is not to say that people should go without any repercussions when things have gone wrong, but simply wagging the finger of blame has clouded our judgment too much in the past. The name of the report that we produced in 2007—“No More Blame Game”—is as appropriate now as it was then.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I feel that I should apologise for interrupting the Minister, because he is giving a very good exposition of what is in the report. However, will he deal at this point with the issue of Ofsted not looking at serious case reviews in future? I find that slightly puzzling, and I do not understand the basis for it. In my view, Ofsted’s role is not allocating blame but assessing whether it is an adequate case review that properly describes what went on.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady makes a good point. I have had reservations for some time about the way in which serious case reviews are produced, read and inspected. This area was clearly highlighted in the report, and the implementation group will need to do a lot more work to see how we get to where we want to be. Ofsted itself will say that evaluating serious case reviews is not the best use of its time and resources.

In the past, we have seen questionable gradings of some serious case reviews. We should be using serious case reviews as serious learning tools. Before the baby Peter case, I did not realise that serious case reviews were not available in their full form to every other director of children’s services and other such relevant people around the country so that they could read what had happened in a certain case in a certain authority, say, “Gosh, hold on a minute—could that happen here?”, and be alert to the problems that had happened elsewhere to see whether they needed to do things locally to ensure that they did not happen there. However, serious case reviews in their full form are available only to a very small number of people.

There have been question marks over the consistency of the quality of serious case reviews, who is commissioned to carry them out, who is controlling the quality of the people producing them, and, above all, who is bringing together the learning expertise and learning points to see whether they have generic applications for people up and down the country. That is not happening as a result of the way in which Ofsted does it, with the very best of intentions. We need to get to a place where a serious case review is not about learning from things that went wrong in a particular case but learning from things that went wrong in the system and applying that to the system elsewhere. We also need to ensure that the people producing serious case reviews produce things of a sufficiently high quality. We have a lot of work to do because the current situation is not sustainable and serious case reviews are not producing what we need them to produce.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend, who has great expertise particularly in dealing with young children and in the whole area of attachment, knows how important it is that a child growing up is able from an early age to bond with, and develop an attachment to, parents or carers. We know from all the statistics that young children who are unable to grow up safely with their own parents benefit from adoption, where appropriate, at an early stage. If we can find them an appropriate adoptive placement, their chances of growing up as normally and conventionally as if they were with their own parents are greatly heightened, and they will have a better chance of catching up with their peers who are lucky enough to be able to grow up with their parents, so she is absolutely right.

[Meg Munn]

I welcome the tone that the Minister is taking in this debate. On adoption, may I ask him equally to adopt another approach—if that is not too many adoptions? It is enormously difficult to make the decision to place a child for adoption. It is a lifelong decision, and it is as important not to rush into it inappropriately as it is to make the decision to go for adoption. In reality, some of the biggest problems derive from other matters in the process, whether decision making in local authorities or decision making in the courts. I urge the Minister to consider those issues as well.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is right and will know that we have been doing a lot of work on adoption. I have set up a ministerial advisory group with all sorts of people, and we have issued new guidance, as I said earlier. We need to balance timeliness with appropriateness to ensure that where it is clear—it is not always so—that an adoptive placement is the best way forward and in the best interests of the child, we get on with it.

There are, I have to say, some people who, usually because of excessive addiction to drugs and alcohol and a complete failure to rehabilitate, will never be able safely to bring up children in their care. I have sat in family courts and seen parents—usually single mothers— have their ninth, 10th or 11th child taken into the care system. If that parent’s situation has not improved, can we be sure that it will ever improve? Need we take that risk, and wait years while a child is kept in an abusive situation? Again, those decisions require the judgment of Solomon, which is why I will shortly be holding a round-table meeting with a group of judges from the family court, directors of children services and chairmen of adoption panels to consider how we can make the adoption process better, more efficient, more robust and fairer; to ensure that we are making the right decisions for the too many children who are left in the system and could benefit from adoption; and to ensure that we are not taking into adoption children for whom it is not appropriate. I know that there are concerns there as well.

Finally, we need to remember in our policies the particular needs of vulnerable young people and the fact that they have the same right to enjoy the rich experiences of growing up, the transition to adulthood and becoming valuable members of society as those lucky enough to be part of safe, loving and stable birth families of their own. I recognise that it is vital for the sensible policy put forward by Professor Munro to be backed up by proper investment. As my hon. Friends will be aware, the Government have already announced some funding to support work force development, but the real cost is the cost of failure. The current system needs fixing. Because it needs fixing, huge amounts of resource are wasted. One local authority that has been working with Professor Munro and the review team as a “journey authority” calculated that around 50% of its children’s social care workers’ time is wasted in nugatory activity that does not add to the quality of service or outcomes, which is something that the authority is now starting to recoup—a resounding endorsement of the need to eliminate unnecessary red tape if ever there was one.

Few things are more important than helping and protecting vulnerable children and young people. In our first year in government, we have shown in the wide range of actions that we have taken—on child protection, children in care, adoption, fostering and dealing with the sexual exploitation of children—that we are deeply committed to tackling these issues, and I am determined to ensure that we make progress. Sadly, we need to recognise that despite Government reforms and the hard work of professionals, tragedies will still happen. There are individuals who will harm children. We cannot eliminate that risk, but we can all work to help to reduce and manage it—indeed, we all have a duty to do so. Society is right to expect professionals to take responsibility and make the best judgments that they can in the best interests of children. Those judgments will not always be the right ones, but they need to have been made for the right reasons and on the best possible evidence.

This Government believe that we need to move towards a child protection system with less central prescription and interference, and in which we place greater trust and responsibility in skilled professionals on the front line. Professor Munro has provided us with a thorough analysis of the issues. It is now for the Government, working with the sector, to help to bring about sustainable reform. That is why I have established an implementation working group, drawing in expertise from local authority children’s services, the social work profession, education, police and the health service, to work with the Government to develop a response to Professor Munro’s recommendations by the summer recess. We are today publishing on the Department for Education website the first account of the group’s deliberations, which started at the end of last month.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Meg Munn and Tim Loughton

Monday 15th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

13. What representations he has received on serious case reviews since the implementation of his Department’s requirement to publish them in full.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

We believe that publishing serious case review overview reports will help to restore public confidence and improve transparency in the child protection system, and ensure relevant lessons are learned and applied as widely as possible. I have received only a very small number of representations since the Government’s announcement on publishing serious case reviews on 10 June. I also considered comments received from relevant parties prior to publishing the SCR overview reports relating to Peter Connelly on 26 October.

[Meg Munn]

I know that the Minister is genuinely committed to improving child protection. In that spirit, will he give a commitment to examine the process of publishing serious case reviews in full so that in future we can, if necessary, amend the system better to protect families’ privacy and enable professionals properly to learn from mistakes?

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s comments. She has great experience in this area. What she asks has already happened, and we commissioned Professor Eileen Munro on 10 June to undertake a review of how child protection works in this country. That will include how to improve serious case reviews to ensure that they are the genuine learning tools that we all desperately need them to be.