I thank the Minister for his very detailed explanation of these amendments, which are aimed at putting in place new arrangements for local safeguarding children boards. I have a number of questions and would be grateful if the Minister could respond to them so that I can fully understand and appreciate the implications of what is being proposed.
First, I thank him for his assurance about local accountability. However, one element is not specifically referred to in the detail that he gave about the composition of the new panels, and that is whether the panel could include local elected representatives. I referred to this in a previous discussion and raise it again because the safeguarding boards currently consist of professionals—for example, social workers, the police, health service workers and members of the probation service—but no non-professional, on the basis of local knowledge, can challenge what goes on. Such a challenge from a non-professional standing up for local people is very important in terms of safeguarding, even more so as local elected representatives have a duty as corporate parents and they are judged on how they fulfil that role. I think that the addition of non-professionals would enhance the status of the panel. It would be not just a collection of professionals taking responsibility but a collection of professionals plus some local representation saying, “This is not good enough. What are you going to do?”. They could do that if they were effective local representatives, and I would like to hear what the Minister has to say on that.
I turn to my second query. I totally understand the proposals for greater flexibility in composition and geographic areas, and so on. In principle I do not have a problem with that because the Wood report says, and my own experience tells me, that the current arrangements can become a bit bureaucratic—a case of going through the motions, rather than dealing with the issues. For me that is not an issue but, from what I heard the Minister say, under the new arrangements there will be three statutory representatives—from the police, the health service and local authorities—and they will consult on what other representation there should be, which is welcome. My query concerns whether any additional members from those organisations would be required to attend or whether they would just be asked to attend.
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I gave the example, from my local experience, of where even on existing boards the probation service is supposed to attend but fails to do so on 80% of occasions. That leads me to be concerned about flexibility over membership. However, as I said earlier, I respect the reasoning and understand the proposals for greater flexibility.
There is a third area that I am interested in understanding a bit better. In speaking to Amendment 115, the Minister said that the proposal to publish an annual report of the workings of the new panel would enable scrutiny of safeguarding. I have never regarded publishing a report as enabling scrutiny; it just enables the publishing of a report. Scrutiny is about questioning and challenging. Local authorities currently have local scrutiny arrangements, and I wonder whether they could be charged with scrutinising the annual report and responding to it in an open and robust way. There would then be what I would regard as scrutiny.
I have a fourth point. I am sorry that there are so many but several changes are being proposed. The proposal for different geographical areas to work together is not itself a problem. However, I am not sure whether these arrangements are designed to support the
institutions—that is what I thought I heard. There is overlapping of CCGs and police across local authority boundaries, and so there is no coterminosity. It sounded as though we might be making these changes to aid the institutions rather than improve safeguarding. I can understand how changing geographical areas so that senior police officers have to attend only one meeting instead of two will be better from their point of view, but will it improve safeguarding? Unless the local authority area is taken as the fundamental area, a lot of cracks will be created into which serious issues may fall.
I turn to my last point. Again, I apologise for there being so many but this concerns a big change. Can the Minister point me to where there will be learning from the reviews that these new panels undertake? I understand how they will come up with recommendations but I am not clear about how we will be sure that they are effectively implemented. Unless we do that, we are not going to improve the protection and safeguarding of children, which I know is at the heart of what the Minister and the Committee are trying to achieve with the Bill.