Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)

I wholeheartedly agree with the noble Lord on his final point. That is exactly the objective in what we are trying to do here. Whether or not the evaluation, after a relatively short period of time, will give us conclusive proof about that, I would be unsure, but that is absolutely the objective. Working backwards through the noble Lord’s points, I think he is right that the police play a very important role in multi-agency safeguarding hubs. But that, of course, is what happens at the point at which people or other agencies are thinking about referring into the system. Quite often, it helps to provide earlier support or more clarity about whether or not children should be being referred into the system. It is not specifically about child protection, which, as I was saying at the beginning, is probably the most difficult and the most crucial point in thinking about the point at which the child is in the system. I am surprised at the noble Lord, because I think he undersells what police officers do. He knows that the officers that he was responsible for would have known, when they were being called out to domestic abuse cases, what intelligence they had about the likelihood of children being exploited through gangs or in other ways. They would have known who in the local community were, frankly, getting into trouble and whose children were therefore likely to be in danger. They would have known the events that had happened that had brought disharmony or difficulties into communities. They would have known who was taking drugs and who was dealing them. All of that information, you could imagine, could you not, at the right point in the consideration of a child’s case, would be really, really important for getting that full story about the child. That is why I think it is right that police are involved in this. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, raised the point about funding, which is a fair point. That is why, as I have previously talked about and will talk about again, there is more investment for this initiative that the Government have put in place, but I would also, as I think I have been saying, be clear to policing that this is part of their responsibility. In very many police forces, they are recognising that the multi-agency child protection team enables that to be as effective as possible in the way in which it is put together. Turning to the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, and spoken to today by the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, which seek to include social workers with expertise in working with children with disabilities in the multi-agency teams, I absolutely agree that the teams should be equipped to identify, understand and respond effectively to all children and their families. I reassure the noble Baroness that there is, as I was describing earlier, already sufficient flexibility for safeguarding partners to determine which social work and health practitioners are most suited to work in these teams. I could imagine that there would be times when it would be appropriate to have a social worker or a health worker with expertise in disability involved. The point is that it is important to determine in the legislation, as this Bill does, who the key, compulsory members of the team are, then to have in regulations the other agencies that could be called on to support the multi-agency child protection team. It is just not appropriate to list in the legislation every single agency or worker who might potentially be involved, but that does not mean that they are not important.