Baroness Barran (Con)

My Lords, I am delighted to support my noble friend Lord Agnew of Oulton’s amendment. The example that he gave of teachers and teaching assistants, as cited in his Amendment 34, could obviously be replicated for many other agencies, with a valuable contribution to make to multi-agency child protection teams and wider safeguarding activities, including local drug and alcohol services, mental health services, domestic abuse services, housing associations and more. The key point here is that practitioners need to feel confident about how to engage in the process and how any information they share will be used, confident that it will not put anyone at risk and, as my noble friend so ably put it, confident that they have the time in their working day to be able to participate responsibly. From my own experience, I know we make assumptions at our peril about how confident even statutory agencies are in some of these areas, so any programme that promotes safe and effective partnership work is to be commended. My Amendment 38 seeks to understand what capacity the Government think will be needed on the ground and what guidance they plan to give for this. The Bill says in Clause 3, page 3, lines 16 to 21: “Arrangements … must include the establishment of one or more multi-agency child protection teams … for the purpose of providing support to the local authority in connection with the discharge of its duties under section 47 of the Children Act 1989”. In Clause 3, page 3, lines 27 to 31, it says: “A multi-agency child protection team is to consist of … at least one of each of the persons mentioned in subsection (4), and … such other persons as the local authority considers appropriate after consulting the other safeguarding partners”. My cracked-record question is this: what does this mean in real life? I am sure that the answer to this is no, but, as written, it could mean that Birmingham has one team and Rutland has one team. I am sure the Minister will reassure me that that is not the plan. Even smaller local authorities, particularly rural local authorities, have multiple child protection teams already, so adding one more will not be that useful to them if they have multiple existing teams that need that multi-agency engagement. When I led the charity SafeLives and we did the rollout of multi-agency risk assessment conferences around the country, we gave estimates to every area based on evidence of realistic case loads, resource requirements and so forth—and we had rather less influence than the Government do. My challenge to the Minister is: if a small charity can do that, surely the Government can do something similar or work with the ADCS or the LGA to develop appropriate clarity and guidance. I would be very grateful if the Minister could explain the Government’s plans.