Tim Loughton
Main Page: Tim Loughton (Conservative - East Worthing and Shoreham)Department Debates - View all Tim Loughton's debates with the Department for Education
Safeguarding Children
Tim Loughton Excerpts(12 years, 6 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
Let me first say what a contrast to the previous debate this has been—calm and measured, and about important things that are affecting our constituents and vulnerable children around the country but do not get the airing that they should.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) on using an opportunity such as this, as I always did in opposition, to try to flag up these really important issues, which are not terribly fashionable in the press or among some of our colleagues but are absolutely crucial to many of our most vulnerable citizens. It is absolutely right that we should do that. The hon. Gentleman raised, in a very measured way, a lot of important matters, most of which I covered in my two-hour grilling in front of the Education Select Committee yesterday, and many of which I will cover in my comments today. Let me pick up just a few of his points. I do not want to speak at length, because other people want to contribute to the debate and that is very important.
I very much appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s comments about Eileen Monro’s report, which was excellent. She had the time and space to come up with some very well-considered proposals instead of giving a knee-jerk reaction to the latest tragedy that had happened. Her report was universally well received. It is a great joy to me to be able to put into practice everything that she recommended. Some of the recommendations are a bit more problematic than others, and with some, just as she took time to consider them, we will take time to come up with the precise nature of the solutions.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the chief social worker. Before this debate, the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), and I interviewed the four short-listed candidates; in fact, I gather that they interviewed us. There have been some very high-calibre candidates and we hope to be able to appoint that person shortly. I want them working alongside me and the Health Department as soon as possible. That key recommendation from Monro will make a big difference.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the family drug and alcohol court, which Nick Crichton runs. I have sat in it on many occasions. It is fantastic and a really smart way of dealing with very problematic cases. I want to see more of that rolled out. My own authority is looking at a joint venture with Brighton in east Sussex to see whether we can bring it to our part of the country, and there are other examples.
The hon. Gentleman hit the nail on the head when he praised Munro for wanting a child-centred system. The review was entitled, “The Child’s Journey”. We are all here not to make sure that the system works better or that processes are followed more efficiently, but to make sure that the qualitative outcomes—the impact that the system is having on children who need to be helped, safeguarded and put in a safe place—are improved. We often forgot that in the past, which has been one of the weaknesses.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned training. One of my continuous pushes is on continuous professional development, which he mentioned as well. It is crucial, which is why we put £80 million into social work reform in 2011-12, and why we have some good new social workers coming forward from other walks of life, as well as through training in our universities. We put £23 million into the local social work improvement fund in 2010-11 to support improvement on the front line. We have 3,700 newly qualified or first or second-year social workers who have joined the professional development programme. There are 400 extremely high-calibre people. I have met many of them. I am handing out awards to many of them from the Step Up to Social Work programme.
There is a great deal going on. Safeguarding children is not a partisan issue, but something that we all want to achieve, so I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s acknowledgement that a real momentum is building in efforts to make our children safer—although never completely safe. It is unrealistic, as Professor Munro pointed out, to suggest that we can remove risk and make every child absolutely safe. It would be complacent to think so. Our job in government and the job of those in opposition working with all the professionals around the country is to make children as safe as we possibly can.
Mr Sheerman
The Minister knows of my interest in the subject and I do not want to upset the apple cart or the bipartisan nature of the debate, but this is not the first such debate that the Secretary of State has not attended. There is a crisis facing children. All the evidence that we have received over the past months suggests that many vulnerable children are in a dreadful situation in our country. We need the leadership of the Secretary of State, to show that he is interested in children’s issues as well as in broader schools and education issues.
Tim Loughton
The Secretary of State is hugely engaged in the issue. I have been around the block a little longer than he has. Having been shadow Minister with responsibility for children, having dealt with safeguarding since 2003 and having been appointed to this position, I perhaps have a little more experience of the subject. When the current Secretary of State took up his position as shadow Secretary of State, his interest and his knowledge of serious case reviews on some safeguarding issues was extraordinary. He has driven the programme and enabled me and others to carry forward the proposals from Munro and others in the way we have. I remind the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) that the very first review that was established in the Department for Education under the new Secretary of State was the Munro review on child safeguarding. It was nothing to do with schools or education; it was on child safeguarding. That speaks volumes.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
That is good to hear, but when both the Minister and his hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) said that this debate was much more important than the previous one, is it not fair to point out that the Secretary of State chose to attend the beginning of the previous debate, but not to attend this debate?
Tim Loughton
I am sorry that we seem to be descending into the village frippery of the last debate. This debate was announced yesterday. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State had to shift various engagements to attend the House earlier and is not able to attend this debate. He trusts me and my ministerial colleagues to speak about this issue from the Dispatch Box. He follows these issues very closely. The fact that he has put the resources of the Department into ensuring that we have safeguarding improvements that are working is the test of the commitment of this Government, this Secretary of State and this ministerial team to the subject in hand.
Let us get back to the important business of saying what we have done and responding to the points that have been made. I welcome this opportunity to debate safeguarding children. It is appropriate that we should have this debate now because, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby mentioned, only yesterday we launched a consultation on revised statutory guidance, as part of our wider proposals to reform radically the child protection system in England. It is radical reform, and it is also about changing mindsets.
Before I remind hon. Members of the action that the Government have taken to keep vulnerable children safe, I want to pay tribute, as I am sure we all do, to the many thousands of professionals, social workers and others around the country who work hard to do just that, for which they receive little recognition and praise in the media or among our constituents. I often refer to social workers as the fourth emergency service. That is not an overestimation. Our reforms are designed to help those professionals to get on with their jobs better and to keep vulnerable children safer.
Although it is essential to tackle poor practice, I believe that we can and should do a great deal more to celebrate successes and to support those on the front line when they use their professional judgment to take tough decisions. I have met many hundreds of social workers over the past few years and spent a whole week in Stockport as a social worker a little while ago. They have to exercise the judgment of Solomon, often on a daily basis. It is not an exact science. They have to make difficult judgment calls, and we expect them to do so as part of their daily job.
As many hon. Members will know, the widely welcomed review completed by Eileen Munro last year laid the groundwork for a new approach to child protection. As I have said, it was the first review that we established. We are rapidly turning its recommendations into practice. Professor Munro found that the system had become overwhelmed by prescriptive bureaucracy and box-ticking, and that social workers were spending too much time on form-filling and not enough with families and vulnerable children. Endless procedures had been imposed on professionals to minimise risk, even though it is fanciful to believe that we can wish danger and insecurity away simply by ticking the right boxes. As a result, the professionalism and judgment of frontline staff had been undermined. The most important thing—the central focus on the needs of children—had been largely lost.
The answer that Professor Munro proposed was simple: we need to get back to basics of best practice. We need to allow social workers to spend more time with children and families, getting to know and understand them and responding to their particular circumstances and needs. As she put it, we need to focus
“not only on whether we are doing things right but whether we are doing the right thing.”
We accepted Eileen Munro’s findings and have been acting on them. We are beginning to see the fruits of the change of emphasis. We are seeing greater flexibility, with eight local authorities, including Knowsley and Islington, testing new approaches to the assessment of children’s needs over the past year. We have given them the freedom, through a special dispensation, to set their own local frameworks and to replace rigid time scales with professional judgments based on the needs of each child.
The feedback from the trials has been encouraging. Social workers are telling us that greater flexibility leads to more quality time with children and families, and better assessments, particularly for families with the most complex needs. Many also feel an enhanced sense of ownership over their work. We are, I hope, restoring confidence to the social work profession, which had taken such a knock.
Local authorities are telling us that with greater freedom comes greater responsibility. They have been reporting back to us about the need to monitor cases robustly to prevent drift. We are seeing a greater practical emphasis on multi-agency working and a drive towards transparency, which is essential in improving services and strengthening public confidence in the work that they do. We are seeing a stronger focus on supervision, with social workers having more time with their managers to discuss complex cases.
I am also encouraged to see an emerging greater emphasis on learning, another key point that was mentioned by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby. Increasingly, the sector is taking the lead in sharing lessons from good practice and from when things go wrong. We can learn from mistakes only if we understand how and why they happened, hence our policy on publishing serious case reviews, which I am delighted to hear the Opposition have now come around to. We are also considering how we can improve serious case reviews to make them more effective tools for learning lessons that are widely shared and that lead to action and sustainable improvements. That could not happen while only very limited executive summaries were in the public domain.
Yesterday, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, we announced a further important step in our overhaul of the child protection system in England. It is a measure at the heart of the Munro recommendations: the revised “working together” strategy. That new statutory guidance for safeguarding children will help create a new culture of trust among health professionals, teachers, early years professionals, youth workers, police and social workers.
We have published three draft documents for consultation—and it will indeed be a consultation. Some of the points made by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, as well as others that the hon. Gentleman raised, absolutely need to be fed into that consultation. That was why we did not just plough ahead, much though Eileen Munro was urging us to do so. We want to get things right, just as she got her recommendations right. We want to ensure that we put them into practice in the right way so that they work properly.
Our three draft documents will replace more 700 pages of detailed instructions with 68 pages of short, precise guidance and checklists. They will be punchy but clear and give professionals space in which to exercise their professional judgment. The revised guidance proposes giving local areas more freedom to organise their services in a way that suits local needs. It will allow more face-to-face time with children and families, which is crucial, and provide a clear framework within which professionals must operate.
The first document, “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, clearly states the law so that all organisations know what they and others must do to protect children. It does not tell GPs and other health professionals, teachers, police and social workers exactly how to do their job, but it provides a checklist setting out their duties and what is expected of them. It also sets out how the role and impact of local safeguarding children boards can be strengthened. As the hon. Gentleman said, they are crucial to the reforms, and they play an absolutely vital role in holding local agencies to account and getting all the key players around the same table and talking the same language.
The second document is new guidance on undertaking assessments of children in need. Informed by evidence from the eight trial local authorities, it proposes replacing nationally prescribed timetables with a more flexible approach. That approach will be focused, as it should be, on the needs of each child. It will absolutely do what the motion asks for—it will put the child’s needs, rather than compliance with inflexible time scales and recording processes, at the centre of assessment.
The third document is new guidance on learning and improvement, to help all services learn the lessons from serious case reviews. It comes from our strong belief that serious case reviews need to be much more strongly focused on learning, rather than process, and that the reports must be published so that lessons can be shared nationally and locally. In those reviews, we need to get to the heart of what went wrong and what action at what point by which individual led to a decision being made that might have contributed to a tragedy.
The approach behind those three new documents has rightly been welcomed. Professor Munro has said:
“We are finally moving away from the defensive rule-bound culture that has been so problematic. I believe an urgent culture change in our child protection system is now underway.”
Anne Marie Carrie, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, has said:
“We support changing the emphasis within the system to enable professionals to take responsibility for safeguarding the welfare of the most vulnerable children.”
Ian Mearns
At the same time as doing the work that he is undertaking to do, has the Minister given any additional thought to updating the legal definition of neglect? I believe that next year is the 80th anniversary of that definition as it is currently enshrined in law.
Tim Loughton
We had this conversation yesterday in the Select Committee on Education, of course, and I said that in response to the Action for Children report we had examined closely whether there needed to be an update to the law, which goes back to the 1933 definition. We were strongly advised that we did not need to change the law, which the courts and children’s services are interpreting in a contemporary way. As I was speaking yesterday, we were putting on the website a neglect toolkit, designed with Action for Children and the university of Stirling. It includes some practical tools for detecting, intervening and dealing with cases of neglect. That is a much more practical way to achieve real results now.
Revising statutory guidance is clearly not the only thing we need to do—far from it. The consultation forms part of a much wider programme of reforms that includes Ofsted’s new inspection framework, which began in May 2012 and has a stronger focus on the quality of practice and the effectiveness of help provided to children. It is much more children-centred. From June 2013, the planned new joint inspections will make a further important difference by looking at the contribution of all local agencies to keeping children safe. We are reforming inspection so that it makes judgments about the things that really matter, and so that it looks at how agencies work together to safeguard children more from the perspective of the qualitative outcomes for the child.
Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that moving looked-after children from one local authority to another creates greater difficulty, namely ensuring that case notes are transferred and that the conversation between the different agencies is sustained? When children are moved, their longer-term safety is eroded because of the distance and lack of contact between the source local authority and the receiving one.
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend knows exactly what I think about that—we have discussed it at length. She has become something of expert in this matter because it is an issue in her constituency, as it is in mine. As a result of her approaches and events in Rochdale and other alarming cases, we will announce shortly, as I told the Committee yesterday, the results of the additional work done by the Deputy Children’s Commissioner on how we ensure that children are placed out of area only when appropriate, and when they can be safely and appropriately looked after. That should happen at the moment, but it does not in practice. The sufficiency principle, which we have overhauled once, needs more work. I will be happy to make those announcements in detail within the next few weeks, because this is a serious matter.
I want to get to the end of this speech so that other hon. Members can contribute, so I am going to talk fast, as I often do. The motion calls for early intervention programmes
“to be promoted on the best available evidence”.
We know that the earlier help is given to vulnerable children and families, the more chance there is of turning lives around and protecting children from harm. We are therefore continuing to work with children’s services, police and the NHS to shift the focus on to earlier intervention and early help.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Tim Loughton
I was trying to get on, but I will be delighted to give way to my hon. Friend in a moment.
We know that continuing such work will help to tackle childhood neglect, which is the most common category of abuse under which children become the subject of child protection plans.
Andrea Leadsom
I am so grateful to my hon. Friend. I just want to be helpful. Does he agree that having more early prevention programmes—including, for example, psychotherapists to whom social workers could on-refer—would help to back-solve the problem of the overloading of social workers and health visitors? If we had such programmes, social workers and health visitors would have somebody who could deal with the problems, support them and enable them to release some of the burden of their case load.
Tim Loughton
I have known my hon. Friend for more than 30 years and she has never been anything but helpful. Her work on early prevention, which is germane to the Government’s work on neglect and early help, absolutely confirms that the sooner we can detect problems, such as detachment, deficiency and others—the work with troubled families is important in this respect—the more likely we are to step in at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner to avoid such problems leading to greater harm to a child. She is absolutely right, as she knows, and as she knows I know.
Understanding families and the experiences of children within them can be complex and signs of what appears to be low-level neglect can be misleading. Yesterday, as I have said, we published materials commissioned from Action for Children and the University of Stirling to help on that.
We are already seeing some notable successes from earlier intervention. I again pay tribute to the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), who is no longer in the Chamber, for his work on that. For example, the integrated access team in Suffolk is taking and handling quickly cases that would previously have been dealt with by children’s social care, with a £7 million saving on top of better social outcomes for those children. Tower Hamlets is operating a multi-agency integrated pathway and support team to deliver early help, reducing by 50% the number of referrals to children’s social care. That is happening in practice, and we now want more of it around the country.
As the motion indicates, it is important that professionals know what early intervention works best. To support them in that, the Government have recently invited bids for the establishment of an early intervention foundation and we expect the foundation to operate independently of central Government to support the needs of local commissioners and to build a solid evidence base.
I referred at the start of my speech to the importance of a high quality social work work force. Building on the work of the social work taskforce established by the previous Administration, we have focused heavily on improving the capacity and capability of the social work profession. In 2011-12 we invested £80 million in a national programme of social work reform to improve skills for social workers and tackle high vacancy rates in child protection. Together, all those reforms will shift the child protection system from a culture of compliance to a culture in which children and families are at the centre and social workers and other key professionals spend less time in front of their computer screens and more time face to face with vulnerable families and children, which is what we all want to see.
The motion rightly refers to the importance of young people understanding the risks of abuse and sexual exploitation. Tackling child sexual exploitation is a major priority for the Government and it has been at the top of our agenda over the past 12 months. Back in May last year, I made a speech at a Barnardo’s event in which I highlighted the importance of its “Puppet on a string” report. I said then that sexual exploitation of children
“is happening here and it is happening now”
and I went on to say that
“I think it’s a much bigger problem than it may appear now on our radar.”
I fear I was only too right and that we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
For far too long, the issue was something of a taboo in this country. It was little spoken about, little appreciated and little acknowledged or dealt with. Few local authorities had much idea about how prevalent child sexual exploitation was in their areas and, as a result, there was a real and tragic failure to grasp the scale of the problem. The high profile verdicts in the recent Rochdale case and others show that the situation is changing. The country is at last waking up to the fact that child sexual exploitation is a real problem in this country, but although the issue has been extensively discussed and debated in the media, there is still a good deal of misunderstanding about it.
Much of the coverage of the case in Rochdale focused on the fact that the perpetrators were British Asian men and the victims white teenage girls. We must not shy away from difficult issues about culture—I have said that on many occasions—and the Rochdale case does raise very troubling questions about the attitude of the perpetrators, all but one of whom were from Pakistani backgrounds, towards white girls, but it would be mistaken, and dangerous, to assume that that is the form that child sexual exploitation generally takes. We know that perpetrators of that appalling crime and their victims can be found in all backgrounds, in all parts of the country and in all social and ethnic sets. As Sue Berelowitz, the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, told the Select Committee on Home Affairs yesterday, this is not just a crime that takes place in northern metropolitan boroughs. She quoted a police officer from a
“lovely, leafy, rural part of the country”
who told her that
“there isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”.
We owe a debt of gratitude to several organisations and individuals for putting the issue on the map, such as Safe and Sound Derby and, in particular, Sheila Taylor, to whom I pay tribute. Barnardo’s also did an enormous amount to raise awareness through its excellent report and its continuing “Cut them free” campaign. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre carried out a major assessment last year and reported practitioners telling it
“if you lift the stone, you’ll find it”.
There are many others, including many local projects and voluntary organisations, with whom my Department continues to work closely. We acted, I brought together all the major players and in November of last year we produced the tackling child sexual exploitation action plan. That is one of the pieces of work in my Department of which I am most proud, and it is beginning to have an effect. It is intended to lift the lid on the true nature and extent of this crime and to set out practical responses to it, and as a result many practical measures are already coming into force, although we need many more to take effect.
We identified four key stages where we needed better intervention. We need better awareness among children and their parents. We need better multi-agency action to intervene so that we can help children and families who are caught up in sexual exploitation. Once they have been rescued from it, we need to help them get their lives back on track. Finally, we must secure robust prosecutions and improve court processes to ensure support for victims and their families, including ensuring that we do not retraumatise teenage girls and other victims, who have to go through the whole episode in court in front of a phalanx of defence barristers. That is why the Attorney-General’s influence and involvement are really important. We must and can do better and shortly we will publish a progress report on how a range of Government Departments and national and local organisations are implementing the action plan.
Hon. Members will also be aware that last month the Secretary of State asked the Deputy Children’s Commissioner to provide him with an accelerated report from her office’s inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups. Although it is clear that most children who are sexually exploited are not in care, we know that children who are in care are disproportionately represented in the numbers of victims of this crime. The Secretary of State asked particularly for recommendations on how to keep children in care homes safe from this abuse. We have just received that accelerated report, and we will publish it within a matter of weeks alongside the updated progress report, into which some of the findings from Sue Berelowitz’s report will be factored and, as a result, some urgent streams of work will emerge.
We are already taking action on children missing from care, and it is clear that the figures the police and my Department publish are not consistent. That is simply not acceptable. We are now working with the police and local authorities to bring a more consistent approach to figures collected nationally and locally. We need to know the extent of the problem so we can challenge poorly performing local authorities and come up with the right solutions.
I am particularly grateful for the work the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) is carrying out through the all-party parliamentary group inquiry into children missing from care. I look forward to receiving its report next week and will consider its recommendations very closely. I have promised that it will inform the new guidance we are looking to publish in that area.
Of course, safeguarding children in care is only one aspect of our wider reform programme to transform the care system and improve outcomes for the most vulnerable children. Key is ensuring placement stability and good parenting—as we have heard from hon. Members today—whether through adoption, foster care or children’s homes. We also want to improve the support given to care leavers, another group vulnerable to sexual exploitation. We must ensure that children who leave care live in good accommodation and are well supported.
The reference in the motion to multi-agency working has a particular relevance in relation to tackling child sexual exploitation. Local safeguarding children boards have an absolutely central role in overseeing much of the work set out in our action plan. There is growing evidence that LSCBs and local authorities are getting a better picture of child sexual exploitation in their areas and taking steps to address it. But it is clear that some are still not giving this issue the priority it requires. They need to do so without further delay.
There is one final area that I want to mention in particular. Improving the safety of children who use the internet is an urgent priority, including reducing the risk of harm through contact with strangers and the viewing of harmful content. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby mentioned a particularly horrific site that was raised yesterday. The Government are working, through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety or UKCCIS, which I chair jointly with a Home Office Minister, to help to keep children and young people safer online. The council is focused on practical action, both by individual members, and collectively.
We have made real progress across a number of areas. The four major internet service providers have signed a code of practice that will see by October 2012 all new broadband customers presented with an unavoidable choice of whether to activate parental controls. Major retailers and manufacturers of internet-enabled devices such as mobile phones, laptops and internet-enabled TVs are developing solutions to increase the availability and awareness of parental controls at point of sale. UKCCIS has also published advice and guidance for internet companies to use so that parents get consistent information about keeping their children safe on the internet.
In conclusion—
Mrs Chapman
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I hesitated to intervene, given the speed at which he was going, but I did not want to miss the chance to raise with him a very real concern for people in Darlington about registered sex offenders. At the moment, offenders are not required to register their online identities as a matter of course. Sexual offences prevention orders are used to do this job, but it is not a requirement as a matter of course. When people have a known history of child abuse and deliberate grooming, it is very important that they are required to register their online identities as a matter of course.
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady makes a very important point. Rather than go into detail now and take more time from Back Benchers, I would be happy to look into it if she would like to have a conversation with me and send me some details.
This is a huge, complex but deeply important subject and one that must remain a key priority for the Government and the Department in particular. The documents we published yesterday are intended to help create the new culture that we are determined to see. It is a culture that is not overly focused on compliance and dependency on central prescription and guidance; in which front-line professionals who work to keep children safe from harm no longer have their judgment stifled by what has all too often been pointless—albeit well intentioned—bureaucracy, made up of unnecessary rules and targets; and which has the needs and well-being of the child at its centre. It is apparent from the motion that the Government and the Opposition share the same goals in relation to the safeguarding of children, and I believe that the important reforms I have outlined will be welcomed by hon. Members on both sides of the House. I congratulate again the shadow Secretary of State on bringing this important subject before a slightly reduced audience in the Chamber today, because it is really important to a much bigger audience outside the House.