My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 37, 38, 41, 46 and 47.
These relatively minor refinements, through Amendments 38 and 47, to the terminology used provide greater specificity and focus to the clauses. The Government believe that this will more precisely clarify the overall purpose of the new local and national reviews. Clauses 12 and 20 refine and strengthen the description of the purpose of local and national reviews,
to be conducted by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and the safeguarding partners respectively. Amendments 38 and 47 provide more specific detail around what should be published following those reviews, where it might be inappropriate to publish the full review. The amended wording states that the purpose of a review should be to identify,
“improvements that should be made”,
rather than,
“to ascertain what lessons … can be learned”.
Amendment 37 relates to the national child safeguarding practice reviews, and requires the identification of improvements that the safeguarding partners should make to improve safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, following the review. Amendment 46 relates to the local child safeguarding practice reviews, and requires the identification of improvements that persons in the local area should make to improve safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, following the review.
We have listened to noble Lords’ comments in Committee, and heard consistently that reviews of incidents of serious harm to, or death of, children should focus on what can be done to reduce the chances that such incidents will be repeated. We therefore feel that it is necessary to step away from the broad language of “lessons learned”, which all too often has focused on what went wrong and who is to blame, rather than focusing on why things went wrong, and what can be improved to reduce these incidents in the future. Amendments 38 and 47 are linked to this.
In the unlikely event that it is deemed not to be appropriate to publish the full child safeguarding practice review following an incident, Clauses 12 and 16 require the panel and safeguarding partners for national and local reviews respectively to publish certain information about the case. Amendments 38 and 47 specify that the information published, in the absence of the full report, should relate to the,
“improvements that should be made”,
rather than the “lessons to be learned”.
Amendment 41 adds to new Section 16B(9), inserted by Clause 12, a definition of who the safeguarding partners are. This is necessary as Amendment 37 introduces the safeguarding partners into new Section 16B(2). I beg to move.