Contribution
My Lords, Amendment 69 would make provision for a common open data standard for those with responsibilities for individual children. I will start with a couple of wider comments. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, as chief inspector at Ofsted, I reported each year, for many years, on the concerning shift of local authority spend into acute services and away from early help and targeted support. The reasons why that was happening seemed fairly simple: resources were constrained and these were the statutory services, so it was logical for local authorities to prioritise their spend on those.
I was therefore surprised when the Minister cited this concerning shift as a reason for the changes proposed in the care review and in the Bill. There are potentially much simpler solutions, such as rebalancing the obligations or providing funding. Yet this Bill creates a lot of additional structures, duties and complexity, which could unintentionally take more resources and time away from front-line work, which I know everybody would like to prioritise. I would like to get more sense of the thinking as to how the Bill can enable all the players in an extremely complex system, rather than simply direct and control from the ministerial office.
A particular missed opportunity is data and the value of a common open data standard to help facilitate sharing at individual level, but also to make it easier to aggregate and analyse. Every service working with vulnerable children has its own data system. Typically, a number of proprietary systems are available in each sector; each of those is set up and works in different ways. There are no common data standards for the bodies involved. This makes it genuinely hard. There have been obligations to share data between the different parties for very many years, yet every serious case review points out failures in data sharing, almost without exception.
It is right that we have privacy by default, so it is a hard decision each time you decide it is important to share information and override privacy. The process of sharing is itself time-consuming and expensive, because these systems do not work to any common standard. There would be potential improvement in the management of individual cases if we can reach the kind of common open data standard that is being developed and used in other sectors.
In the care review, everybody realised quite how hard it often is to put together a national picture with data about social care. The understandable protection around individual children, and the kinds of disconnect that have already been referred to, mean that information about those who are causing harm, or the children or others who are collateral damage in the same situation, is not necessarily neatly joined up. It is genuinely hard to find out about types of abuse and all its different aspects, and who is implicated. This is a real problem; it should not be down only to journalists armed with FOIs to go hunting for things that we should already know about and be acting on.
As chief inspector, I served until the end of 2023 on the national implementation board for the care review. I was sitting alongside the eminent professor, Sir Anthony Finkelstein, who is a data systems expert and gave me valuable input into the framing of this amendment.
Data was an important strand of the initial care review and the report, and an important part of the initial plan for its implementation, but it seems to have got largely lost. So, I have put forward this amendment to bring this strand to the fore. The Minister should make sure that this opportunity is not lost to enable all the players in this complex system. By making this provision now, she will have the flexibility to set a sensible, reasonable and proportionate timescale for all these proprietary providers to start creating the kinds of alignment that can help us going into the future to do the best for all children.