Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

I support Amendment 50, as well as the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who gives his apologies to your Lordships’ Committee, as he is unable to be here to speak to his own amendments. I do so in the spirit of my noble friend Lady Cash, because these are probing amendments by and large, from a position of broad support for the objectives that the Government have laid down in this part of the Bill. Nevertheless, they are amendments that seek clarity in respect of the proposals that the Government are putting forward. We need more information about the Government’s intention in adding new Section 16LB to the Children Act 2004. Such scrutiny is essential given that it would enable the Government to set in train a process that will be achieved through regulations—secondary legislation —but nevertheless is very far reaching and potentially re-establishes a regime that, as we have heard previously, was abolished in 2010 by the coalition Government for reasons that I will come on to. It is hard to disagree with the logic that a single unique identifier would prevent children getting lost in systems that are meant to keep them safe, for example, if they are known by different names or their names are not spelled correctly, as happened in the tragic case of Victoria Climbié. I absolutely concur with my noble friend: the name Maria Colwell and other tragic cases hang over someone like me, who served on a social services committee, and many social workers and other professionals over many years. Ensuring that children do not slip through the net or disappear without services knowing where they have gone is paramount, as so many appalling national scandals involving dead or desperately abused children have shown. It is appropriate that we look at the history and genesis of ContactPoint. It is important to be mindful of the need for qualitative data, not just quantitative data collection; there is a difference. Hence in 2003, in his report about the death of Victoria Climbié, the noble Lord, Lord Laming, recommended the establishment of a new national children’s database for all children under the age of 16. While scrutinising this report six months later, the Health Select Committee in the other place expressed reservations, saying: “We believe that establishing a national database for children along the lines envisaged by the Laming Report would represent a major practical and technical challenge that should not be underestimated”. The committee was instinctively open to the concept, likely for the same reasons that many are advocating for it today: if good data can save children’s lives, it of course needs further exploration. The committee went on to say that the implementation difficulties should not be a deterrent and endorsed the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for a feasibility study to explore the value and practicality of setting up a national database for children. In 2004, as we heard, trailblazer pilots were conducted to assess the feasibility of implementing a children’s information index. Nine local authorities piloted a range of IT applications and a government study of the indexes concluded that implementation was operationally and technically feasible. By 2009, the Children’s Information Sharing Index had been renamed ContactPoint, with the aim of all local authority ContactPoint management teams having access to the database by autumn 2009. In old money, the estimated development and set-up cost of ContactPoint was £224 million and the estimated maintenance cost in 2009-10 was just under £44 million; most of this latter sum was for local staff to operate, maintain and ensure the security of ContactPoint. Some giving evidence to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee in the Commons—and arguing strenuously for the SUI—were among those running ContactPoint back then and benefiting from those sizeable contracts. In their defence, they saw this as part of a bigger package and emphasised the need for early intervention in communities and strong relationships with families. The Children’s Charities Coalition said that, “to really shift the dial we need further investment in early intervention and early help across our communities, and much greater focus on embedding that consistently and universally”. It also called for further clarification on how the single unique identifier will be effectively applied. Returning to the ContactPoint database, which was, as I said, abolished by the incoming Government in 2010, it was designed to contain names, ages, addresses and information of all children aged under 18, as well as information about their parents, schools and medical records. Respected organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust quantified the scale and financial cost of data collection, the methods used to maintain and secure the data, and the treatment of critical issues such as consent, as part of a wider study. Its researchers found that children are among “the most at risk” from what they called Britain’s “database state”, with three of the largest databases set up to support and protect children failing to achieve their aims.