Contribution
My Lords, as we start on these amendments relating to the operational delivery of multi-agency child protection teams, I will just respond to a few general points before I go into the details of the points that have been made and the amendments.
First, on the point the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, made both today and on Tuesday, it is not true that there is no support for these arrangements among local authority children’s services and organisations concerned about child protection and keeping children safe. There is plenty of support. Nor has this idea somehow or other fallen out of the sky. In fact, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, gave us a good explanation of the history of this. Of course, last autumn this Government published Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, which included the provisions that are in this legislation. So there has been plenty of time, and in fact the department has taken the opportunity to talk to a broad range of professionals and others about how we will ensure that all the provisions in the Bill work properly.
The provisions in Clause 3 particularly relate to the duty to protect children with respect to the legislative arrangements on child protection. The experience of child protection is that too often, this most difficult and crucial area of children’s social work has been carried out by social workers who are perhaps less experienced and not necessarily experts in child protection. They have had to do it without the full story of the children they are trying to protect, because of the lack of the strongest possible input from a range of different agencies to create that full story about the child and their needs, in order to ensure that they are protected properly.
On one of the concerns expressed by Professor Munro, as I emphasised on Tuesday, these provisions do not downgrade the quality or nature of social workers who will be working on child protection. They will increase the likelihood that the most experienced social workers will be working in the most difficult area. We are clear that a fully qualified social worker will be responsible within the multi-agency child protection team. Equally, in family help, where the worker is dealing with a child about which there are child protection concerns, that will also be a fully qualified social worker.
On the detail of this and how we got here in the first place, as many noble Lords have said, both today and in other debates on the Bill, nothing is more important than keeping children safe. Ineffective multi-agency working is a key factor where child protection activity fails, and, despite existing legislation, day-to-day operations can be inconsistent and ineffective. In its review, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel found that inexperienced practitioners, ineffective multi-agency working and poor information-sharing within and between agencies results in missed opportunities to protect children. As I said, this is a situation I am sure all of us are keen to improve.
Often, several practitioners have information about a child and their family but the lack of joint working means that vital opportunities are missed to protect children from serious harm—for example, the GP treating a parent for their substance misuse, the school that notices a child arriving unwashed and unfed, and the police involved in call-outs for domestic abuse. But no one has the whole picture of the day-to-day life of the child. Early results from the 10 local area pathfinders for Families First—a programme that, as we discussed on Tuesday, is embedding family help, multi-agency child protection and family group decision-making in a single integrated system—demonstrate better management of complex issues, reducing crisis points and enabling quicker, effective interventions where children need protection.
I hear again the calls for publishing the first part of the pathfinders evaluation, which I wholly understand. I hope, even if it is slightly later than spring, that it will be available—I know it will be available for the development of these teams. But we are not even waiting for that. We are using already the experiences of those who are going through the pathfinders to help support practice in other local authority areas, through webinars and through the opportunity to share not just good practice but the challenges they are finding. The fact that some pathfinders are finding some things difficult is precisely the point of having a pathfinder: so that you can work out what works, where you might need to change things, how you are going to operationalise it and what additional support might be needed.