Baroness Brinton (LD)

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for his Amendment 28, which I have signed. I agree with everything that he said. My Amendment 5 in an earlier group followed the same principles, as did some of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, in that group, focusing on not just the police but other bodies that need to keep records. However, police records have repeatedly been a problem, so it is important that they are highlighted. Amendment 109, tabled by my noble friend Lord Marks, which I have signed, sets out the monitoring of compliance with the duties under this Act. All afternoon and evening, amendments have tried to improve the Bill to ensure that it will work. However, this amendment and some of the others in this group set out how we can judge whether it has worked—including Amendment 105, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and Amendments 33 and 107, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wills. Amendment 109 says that the Secretary of State must commission and publish annually an independent report which monitors compliance—including the record-keeping by public authorities, disclosures and responses—and look at the effectiveness of sanctions and enforcement to help public authorities and their officials carry out their roles. Why is this important? Rather than looking at disasters that have happened in this country, two examples from elsewhere will give us the answer. We will not know how culture change has happened, because you cannot judge that easily. How on earth can you monitor that? When mandatory reporting of child sex abuse was introduced into a number of states in Australia, there was alarm when, initially, case numbers rocketed. However, data also showed that the comprehensive staff training had enabled staff to feel that they could report concerns about possible incidents to the person to whom they should in their organisations. That was a real culture shift. It was a combination of soft work and mandatory reporting. We are beginning to introduce that in this country—not quite as I would like, but this way you have both. You can judge that, but you have to look at some of the softer data as well as the hard data. The other example I have mentioned before. When a major incident occurs in this country, things move horribly slowly. In France, it became clear in the early 1980s that some hospitals were giving people, mainly children with haemophilia, infected blood. Immediately, the French judicial system intervened and three Ministers and two doctors were prosecuted. One Minister and one doctor were found guilty; the others were not. More importantly, at the same time the Government immediately stopped buying blood from the USA, setting up their own systems to become self-reliant and ensure the purity of blood. There was no need for any review because the system had worked. I am not suggesting that we move to the French judicial system, but the point is that there was no attempt to hide anything, because the culture in France is that, if there is a problem, you need to sort it. That has happened, though not entirely without problems. But it took us another 15 years to get our own blood system set up. It has taken two full public inquiries and we are still not there, 50 years on. Our amendment asks how we will know that it has worked. I hope that we have set that out. I hope that in the short term it will give us the good news that it is working—the Australia example—and that in the longer term we will wonder why on earth it was needed because our system will resolve the issues before we even need an inquiry.