Childcare Bill

We could create even more of an imbalance between the Front Bench and the Back Benches by drafting in some of our hon. Friends from the shadow Wales team, who take child protection seriously. We have discussed the matter with them and our colleagues in the Welsh Assembly, because the issue of child protection extends beyond Offa’s dyke. Government new clause 5 amends schedule 9A to the Children Act 1989. It is frustrating when Acts are amended by subsequent legislation and when we are provided only with the original legislation. My copy of the Children Act 1989 provided by the Table Office does not included schedule 9A, which was added later. As a general point, it would be useful if the Table Office were to keep supplies of updated legislation, because I have been unable to obtain the exact wording of schedule 9A. Perhaps the Minister will be kind enough to provide hon. Members with the original wording. On amendments Nos. 19 and 20, we are waiting for the final details on the arrangements for safeguarding children, and it would be interesting to know when they will be published. In the past few days, the Government have published the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, and a lot of detail is required on barring, vetting and appeal mechanisms, so we are being asked to accept the amendments on trust. Government amendment No. 22 states that someone can be disqualified from registration"““on grounds relating to his health””." The Minister has provided a couple of examples—of people suffering from alcohol or substance misuse. If people have ongoing medical conditions that mean that they may not be up to the job, they will be disqualified, presumably on a temporary basis, until they are—hopefully—treated successfully. What about other conditions? What about people who have HIV? What about people who are suffering from minor mental health conditions? Can the legislation be used to exclude or disqualify people from working in child care if they are suffering from one of those two conditions, which may not be deemed by many people as sufficiently serious or germane to the subject to merit their being disqualified completely from working with children? That is particularly true of people who have minor mental health problems or who have their HIV condition under control and who take all precautions on contamination. I fear that those conditions could be used to discriminate against people who are already stigmatised because they are suffering from a mental illness or have an HIV condition. I would be grateful if the Minister can confirm that the clause could not be used for the purposes for which I am sure she does not intend it to be used. Government amendment No. 24 says that disqualification can happen if"““he has been given a caution in respect of an offence of a prescribed kind””." Government amendment No. 25 refers to section 65 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. That part of the Act, which gives the definitions of cautions and reprimands, can catch a lot of people. The definitions of when it is appropriate to give reprimands or warnings include when"““an offence is not so serious as to require a charge to be brought.””" Will the Minister indicate the sorts of warnings or reprimands that she thinks were not sufficiently serious to merit a full charge under that Act, but are deemed sufficiently serious that those people should not then come into child care contact with children? In effect, it is possible that a teenager who in a moment of high spirits did something that was not serious enough for them to be charged and given a criminal record, but to which they admitted guilt by accepting a reprimand or a warning, could find when they tried to embark on a career in child care or some other form of contact with children, that they are exempted. It seems draconian to exempt a whole group of people who are not on the face of it a danger to children as most of us might term it. There is another issue that I hope that the Minister will deal with when we come to discuss the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, if she is handling it. We need to be able to distinguish between the severity of offences. If a 17-year-old boy or girl has sexual relations with a 15-year-old boy or girl minor, that is against the law. When set against a convicted paedophile who downloads child pornographic images on the internet and engages in molestation of children, I think that most of us would agree that those two offences are on an altogether different scale. There should be some balance in the Bill. Otherwise, people who end up accepting a reprimand or a warning under that wide-ranging section of the Crime and Disorder Act, on the basis that that was the most sensible thing for them to do at the time so that they could move on, may find that it has undermined their entire potential career in the child care work force. I heard about an example of that recently. A mother had intervened to stop her son being beaten up by a school colleague who was something of a bully. Without going into the detail of the whole episode, it ended up with her being taken to the police station and being advised to accept a caution for her supposed aggression in separating those children. Given her telling of the story, with other witnesses corroborating it, I have no doubt that what she did was anything more than trying to drag a bully off her son. She thought nothing of it and took the caution. A few years later she applied for a job to work with children in the local youth service. The caution came up and, lo and behold, counted against her so that she could not get the job. That is a high price to pay for somebody who was protecting her son. It is right to seek to disqualify people who are a serious threat to children from working with children, because that needs to be tightened up. Conservative Members have been critical of the loopholes and laxness in the system that have allowed serious sex offenders to carry on teaching, in particular, and working in the health service. That is why we will, at the appropriate time, welcome many of the measures in the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill. However, we are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I ask the Minister to give us some assurances on the subject. Government amendment No. 28 is a technical amendment on which we have no comment. Government amendment No. 29 amends the long title of the Bill. It is usually my job to try to change the long titles of Bills that are to do with children. I applaud the Minister for following my example, as many of them are a disaster. I turn to amendment No. 49, which stands in my name and those of my hon. Friends. Our amendment gives a slightly different angle on the whole subject of protecting children. It would add the words, ““child protection arrangements””, to clause 12, which deals with the duty to provide information, advice and assistance. It would be appropriate, particularly given the furore in recent months over sex offenders working in environments where they will be involved with children, to do everything that we can to reassure parents that local authorities and child care providers have gone that extra mile to ensure that their children can go to the nursery with every reasonable measure having been taken to ensure that the people with whom they will come into contact have been properly vetted. It would enhance the thrust of clause 12 if an additional piece of information were provided to parents and prospective parents to give an indication of what child protection arrangements have been established by the local authority and are demanded of child care providers, and whether they are being put in place, adhered to, maintained and updated where appropriate by those child care providers. That would be a sensible enhancement of the Bill to give parents a degree of assurance that they are giving their children into the charge of people in whom they can have the greatest confidence, so that they can be sure that such people are there in the interests of the children, not because they harbour some other, less desirable intentions towards those children. I hope that the amendment is constructive. If the Minister is unable to incorporate it into the Bill now, I hope that it might be considered later, or at least put into regulations for local authorities to follow so that this important issue is taken into account.