Member

There has been a lot of talk about Sara Sharif, and the need to put in emergency brakes to prevent something like that ever happening again. It is very clear from the report and the evidence that the bad egg was the father and that safeguarding protocols and systems were deficient. We have talked about the one-third of care services that are basically broken and not working. Is not the real solution to sort out our child services system? The reality is that as we add more regulations, as we are proposing to do tonight, parents and those working in child services have one more rule to follow. The evidence is that they have had so many rules to follow and so many cases to investigate that the few who are there—relative to the scale of the problem we face—are struggling to cope. Adding more work for them, more false alarms and meetings, is not necessarily going to fix it. In the Sara Sharif case, there were very clear signals missed that could have been followed up on. What will happen if we add more signals and more noise, but the poor social worker is so inundated that they cannot pick up on those signals?