Child Protection

Speech delivered on Thu 24th Sep 2009

I welcome the tone with which Claire Baker opened the debate and the minister followed. It is important that there should be a unified Parliament view on child protection matters, which are of great importance to the future of Scotland's children.

Few burdens rest more heavily on social workers, teachers, youth workers, police officers and, indeed, politicians than the protection of our children. We know that some children have simply appalling starts in life through neglect by those who have responsibility for caring for them. We also know that the consequences follow young people through their lives and can blight the lives of their children too.

Over the past 10 years, and before then, we have had many reports and inquiries. They have often been insightful and have often confirmed the same messages. All the reports had three basic points in common: the need for partnership working and information sharing between agencies; the need for individuals within the system to take personal responsibility for action; and the need to identify and target the children who are most at risk. Those children are often with parents and families who are alcohol or drug abusers-a growing problem, as Claire Baker rightly said.

If anything, there has sometimes been too great an emphasis on partnership working and information sharing and too little emphasis on individuals taking urgent action based on that information. Too many times, information has gone round the system rather than stopping and moving forward to action. Report after report has identified the presence in the system of enough information to put anyone on alert in cases in which action was not taken or not taken urgently enough.

Adam Ingram: The member will be aware of the getting it right for every child programme, which addresses the issue of referring on inside the system. Clearly, the member is familiar with the origins of that programme. I assure him that we are making significant progress.

Robert Brown: I am grateful for the minister's intervention in that regard.

The Labour motion is highly pertinent. Evaluation of local services has shown that there are far too many weaknesses. To be fair, there have not always been weaknesses in every area; nevertheless, a quarter of council areas have "weak" or "unsatisfactory" gradings. The processes for producing sustained improvements exist, with HMIE targeted inspections and follow-up work, but that approach needs a strong and sustained ministerial lead and priority to make it happen, as well as full commitment from the local authorities concerned. The minister rightly made the point that we need to have structured responses in child protection and to follow through on the lessons that we know about.

Ministers are properly accountable to Parliament for how they perform their duties, so the Liberal Democrat amendment proposes that there should be a full report to Parliament within three months-before Christmas-and then reports at regular intervals on progress on identifying and focusing on children who are at risk, on which information is still lamentably vague, on the follow-through on the "Hidden Harm" report and on HMIE's inspection and improvement work.

The clear focus of all that work must be the welfare and best interests of children. It is, no doubt, often best to support children in living with their own families or with grandparents or other relatives. However, the briefing that we had on that from the Association of Directors of Social Work was astonishingly complacent and lacking in any sense of hope for the future. Yes, we have to be realistic; yes, no system of child protection can guarantee a child's safety; and, yes, we have a shortage of adopters and fosterers. However, I increasingly feel that Barnardo's Scotland and others are right that more children need to be removed from chaotic and dangerous families-I use the word "dangerous" advisedly-and that that must be done much sooner, before their lives and health are irreparably damaged. I know from conversations with people in the field that others feel likewise.

Parliament and Government cannot set targets or make individual decisions on those matters, but there is a sense that decisions are driven by resource issues, such as the number of foster carers and the lack of alternative carers, and sometimes by inappropriately applied views about the natural family unit, rather than by consideration of children's welfare. Government can do many things to support the workers in the field, not least in bending its efforts to the effective recruitment of more foster carers, possibly through a high-profile national campaign akin to that used to recruit children's panel members.

Today's debate is too short to do the subject justice. However, these children are our children, and it is our job and everyone's job to ensure that they have the best start in life.

I move amendment S3M-4911.2.1, to insert at end:

"recognises the initiative taken by the previous administration in tackling this problem by bringing together a series of actions contained in the Hidden Harm report; calls on the Scottish Government to take effective action to identify and focus on those children who are at risk, particularly as a result of living with parents or carers who are alcohol or substance abusers; calls on the Scottish Government to report to the Parliament within three months and thereafter periodically on the progress made on this, in building on the recommendations of Hidden Harm and in the follow-up inspection work by HMIE, and looks for a child-centred approach to child protection that has the welfare and best interests of children at its heart."

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Child Protection.