Daniel Pelka

Debate between Tim Loughton and Geoffrey Robinson

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robinson]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, it might have been plagiarism—I hope that is not an inappropriate word—but that was another idea I was going to take from her. We should have not one huge centre but various centres in which creative means of communicating with difficult children are imaginatively developed and explored. The day before Daniel Pelka died, a teacher was found in another school in Coventry—there are loads of them—to talk to him. She happened to be Polish and was able to speak the language, but that is not good enough. It is pathetic that things got to that stage.

I agree with my hon. Friend, so let us make that our No.1 point: children must be talked to and we should develop a whole area of useful specialisations, as opposed to a load of paper that gets churned out continually. Children could tell us what their parents look like by using diagrams. We might start to learn something and it could tell quite a story.

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

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the need to talk to the child. The situation was even worse in this case, because I gather that they relied on another child in the family to communicate with him, which obviously is not appropriate.

There is a big issue of social workers being fobbed off at the door. When social workers are dealing with communities that are not naturally fluent in English, we need to make sure that they have people alongside them who can communicate in the relevant language so that they are not fobbed off by communication difficulties, let alone by all the problems involved in crossing the threshold and finding out exactly what is going on. This is a real problem for some of the incoming communities, particularly those from eastern Europe.

[Mr Robinson]

Yes, that is a problem. Let us think creatively and commonsensically about how we can deal with it. It will not be enough to train a whole load of interpreters to become experts in Polish, arts and crafts and other languages and grammars. We need the same sort of practical thinking as inventive mothers who work part time and know how to do things with their kids.

I do not want to be unkind to the Minister, because he inherited the situation and was gracious and courteous enough to agree to meet me on the afternoon the case review was published, but at that meeting he said, “I think we’re going to make a big difference now,” and produced a 74-page document full of all sorts of jargon. The Minister should not worry, because I will say something else to qualify my comments in a moment. The document was statutory guidance, which is an oxymoron—it is either statutory or it is guidance; it cannot be both. The Minister said, “Well, Geoffrey, if you think that’s feeble, it was 700 pages when I got it.” Think of all the time, effort, pen-pushing and talking that is going on, and yet we cannot find a means of getting through to a young kid because he speaks a different language. It does not make any sense at all.

Secondly—I owe a good deal to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport for this point, too—the lines of responsibility have to be much clearer. Who is responsible? I thank the well meaning and extremely professional National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and half a dozen other agencies, as well as probably a dozen people from other constituencies who have been, or fear they will be, affected by this issue, for their response to tonight’s debate. The first recommendation in the NSPCC’s briefing paper is:

“Front-line agencies must see and listen to the child”.

That is sensible and we all agree with it, but it then states in a green box:

“All notifications of domestic abuse should be sent to a Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH)”.

What sort of line of communication is that? What it amounts to is a mishmash. We see that more and more.

It is not that the agencies are not talking to each other. They probably are not as good at communicating with each other as they should be and improvement is necessary, but the problem is that we do not know who is responsible. The NSPCC says that a lead is needed. It is not a lead that is needed, but somebody who is responsible for the case and who knows that he is responsible for it. I am sorry, I should have said “he or she”, because the only person who had the guts to put a foot in the door and leave it there was a female youth community officer, who did a fantastic job and found out that the abuse was going on.

MASH just about sums up what is wrong. What we need is clearer lines of communication.

[Tim Loughton]

I am loth to intervene again in case the hon. Gentleman does not get on to his other points, but I must say that the MASH is the way to go. It allows all the different agencies to communicate with each other better because they sit next to each other in the same room. In a relatively short period of time, all the relevant people can come together and swap information. Importantly, somebody then picks up the ball and acts on what has been said. That is the responsible person to whom the hon. Gentleman rightly refers. It is happening more effectively in MASHs than it has done before. That is why most London authorities and most other authorities in the country are going that way. It is the way to go.

[Mr Robinson]

I am delighted to hear that and I wish the hon. Gentleman well with it. I hope that it works. However, a MASH can work only if at the end of all the talking—I accept that that has to happen, because there is no other way of getting everybody to know what they need to know—there is a clear line of responsibility. Somebody has to write the minutes, somebody has to say what will be done and there must be a clearly identifiable responsible person or group of people who are charged with carrying it through. Otherwise, it will not happen.

The MASH is a committee and committees do not do anything. It serves the useful purpose of bringing people together so that they can talk and exchange the information that they need to know about. What is missing from the system is a clear way of saying at the end of the meeting what the conclusions and recommendations are. Those must be very short. A person or group of people—a lead, or whatever you want to call them—must then be responsible for carrying out those recommendations.

That was certainly what was missing in Coventry. There was meeting after meeting. Everybody was grouped together and the information was being exchanged. However, when the dreadful news broke, I asked who was actually responsible. The reply was that we were all responsible. If we are all responsible, no one is. We must not be afraid of allocating responsibilities and ensuring that they are carried out. If they are not, retraining is always a good option. People do not have to be sacked. We are not like that on this side of the House. However, people in the country cannot accept that the head of the department, Colin Green, resigned a few days or weeks before the report came out and was appointed to exactly the same position elsewhere. That was wrong. What sort of confidence does that provide?

That point reminds me of another Adjournment debate that I secured about a distinguished surgeon at Walsgrave who was almost sacked because he had reported somebody else. It turned out that the chief executive of the hospital was not up to the job—there were a whole series of these cases—and all six neighbouring MPs served by that hospital called for his resignation. He was sacked—well, that was what it was called, but within six months he was back in charge at Birmingham Heartlands hospital. It is unbelievable what such a network of controls can do.

My next point will, I am sure, again be contentious for the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and others who are a bit on the side of the establishment, because it concerns the compositions of serious case reviews. Each area has its own chairman—that is all it has, actually—and lay members. When it comes to the inquiry, the chairman or chairwoman brings in a rapporteur, a writer of the report, and both she and he know each other—I am not suggesting that is wrong; it could sometimes be very helpful—and have written many of these reports in the past, either together or separately. Already in my book that does not seem quite right. It is not independent, and the essence of the serious case review is that it must be seen to be independent.

My last point—I have left plenty of time for the Minister—concerns Ann Lucas, whom I begged to carry out an independent report. “Why should I be the only one to put Coventry through that when nobody else has ever done it?”—she did not say that, but that was what I felt she felt. That would have meant a completely new board, fresh blood, with people who did not know the situation in Coventry or the chair of the Coventry group, and who had a completely dispassionate view.

I do not think anybody would agree any longer with the police investigating the police. Why should the civil servants who had administered the case in question be those who were the team supporting the independent chair—she was independent—and the so-called appointed independent rapporteur, or reporter? He wrote the report and one could see he is a professional. Every perfect piece of civil service-ese was in it; it could not be faulted. However, out of that comes nothing so far, and so Ann Lucas wrote to me and asked whether I would relay this message to the House tonight. She is an outstanding council leader who has been in the job about six months. She was distraught to find that she had inherited this case, and she went along with a traditional conventional review. She said that

“we need a national debate around safeguarding issues—

that is obvious—

“with the setting up of a Commons Select Committee to take evidence from all concerned. From politicians, from front-line workers, from all agencies, social workers, the police, health agencies—including GPs, hospitals, health visitors and schools. And very importantly, from experts working with Domestic Violence”,

in which she is an expert.

I do not know whether that is a runner, but I am clear that I do not see it ever working—I have not left the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham time to add his comprehensive view. We need a more forensic direct attack. For example, there were four or five points at which Daniel Pelka could have been saved. That is clear. We need a mechanism so that when such a point is reached—I guess the people doing it did not know—or anything like that, the man at the top should be informed. We need a mechanism to intervene and bring things to a head, and in a way it is about management. I hope those points will have helped the Minister in his reply.