Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

My Lords, I am happy to have added my name to Amendments 121A and 131A by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I am grateful to officials from the Department for Education who had a meeting with us to discuss these amendments and the reasoning behind them. The reasoning behind those amendments is really simple. The Sara Sharif incident happened despite multiple reviews looking into not dissimilar cases, in some cases over previous decades. In this case, I do feel that almost an extreme preventive approach is required to make sure that we do not have a repetition. The point was made by the officials that there have been significant improvements in the quality of children’s services in most of the country and about two-thirds are now in a reasonable shape, but that raises the question: what about the other third? If there is another case, God forbid, like Sara Sharif —and history, for I am a historian by background, teaches us that that probably will happen—the opprobrium that will be heaped upon whichever unfortunate Ministers and officials happen to be in office at the time will be considerable and, in our view, is avoidable. We should mitigate that risk by assuming that we have to legislate for the one-third of children’s services that are not in good shape, because that is almost certainly where the accidents will happen. One of the key findings of the Sara Sharif review was that there have been systemic weaknesses again and again, despite all the inquiries and the well-intentioned actions that followed them. This is important enough that we feel we have to prepare and assume that the worst might happen and do everything in our power to prevent it.