Baroness Barran (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 36. I am also delighted to support my noble friend Lady O’Neill on her amendments, as well as those of my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, who was so ably represented by my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton today. All these amendments seek to clarify some of the operational issues with the proposed multi-agency child protection teams. I do not want to steal from the Minister’s remarks, but she might remind the Committee that the context for introducing these teams came from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which the previous Government commissioned and was led by the honourable Member for Whitehaven and Workington. Following a key recommendation from his review, we established 10 pathfinder sites to pilot and test out these teams, alongside a number of wider reforms to early help, targeted family help and support for children in need, as defined under the Children Act. We support the spirit and direction in which this draft legislation is going, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, pointed out, we have concerns about how it will be operationalised in practice. Noble Lords may be aware that, in a former life before joining your Lordships’ House, I was involved in the establishment of multi-agency teams all around the country to address high-risk cases of domestic abuse, which were known as multi-agency risk assessment conferences—MARACs. We did that in every local authority in the country. At the end, those teams were managing about 60,000 adult cases a year and over 100,000 children. They involved statutory and non-statutory agencies. For better or worse, I am very familiar with the issues that are important when operationalising this kind of work. The detail is important. Who attends these teams? Is it the same person? How senior are they? Is it the caseworker or a representative covering all cases? As my noble friend Lady O’Neill and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, asked, who is accountable for the work? How can we share information legally? How does information sharing translate into action planning? How do you involve the family? These and many other issues are so important to get right, and we will explore them in more detail in the debates on the other amendments to Clause 3. My Amendment 36 simply seeks to understand how the Government expect the new statutory multi-agency child protection teams will interact with existing multi-agency work, particularly the multi-agency safeguarding hubs—the MASH teams. There are so many acronyms in this world; I saw that the department has even snuck in a new one: MASA. Who knew what MASA was? Nevertheless, it is in the documentation. The MASH teams, which are now pretty much universal around the country, are not statutory. Some are great, but some are less so. How does this team interact with the multi-agency risk assessment conferences for high-risk domestic abuse or the multi-agency public protection arrangements for high-risk perpetrators? In a world where resources are tight, we need to avoid duplication. Equally, however, we know that non-statutory agencies—the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, who is in her place, knows this extremely well from her work outside the House—at the very least bring different information to multi-agency work. Frequently, they are really trusted and can build relationships with families that can be harder for statutory agencies, with the powers that they hold. I would be grateful if the Minister could set out how she expects the multi-agency child protection teams to work in practice with the MASHs, the MARACs, the MAPPAs and any other organisation that has an acronym beginning with an “M”. I will pick up on the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady O’Neill. My key question about Amendments 29 and 31 is: can the Minister say how she expects that the involvement of partners, both statutory and non-statutory, will be funded? What we hear from the pathfinders is that it is very difficult to get other agencies outside the local authorities to participate in the teams, and that some of the extra funding the pathfinders have been given has gone to funding police officers to attend a multi-agency child protection team, which in my world feels like a very odd thing for the local authority to do. I assume that the Minister does not believe that that is a sustainable model, let alone for non-statutory agencies, where, all too often, we rely on their good will and do not acknowledge the pressures on their budgets. I am also very interested to hear the Minister’s reply in relation to Amendments 39 and 40, which deal with cases across local authority borders. She will know that, for vulnerable families, that happens all too often—one parent lives in one local authority and the other parent lives in another; the family are moved from temporary housing in one local authority to temporary housing in another; or a child lives in one local authority but is being groomed by a gang in another. I think I am right in saying that a contributing factor in the tragic case of Sara Sharif was that she moved local authorities but the understanding of the degree of harm she faced did not move with her.