Government outlines new plans for local safeguarding arrangements

The government has published plans for moving to a new system of local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

The plans - contained in a consultation document published by the Department for Education last month - bring forward recommendations made in a review of local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs) last year by government adviser Alan Wood.

The review's key recommendations, made law when the Children and Social Work Act received Royal Assent in April 2017, have yet to be formally enacted.

Once the legislation is triggered, the requirement for councils to have LSCBs will be replaced with a requirement on three partners - local authorities, the police and the health service - to make arrangements for working together on child protection in a local area.

In addition, serious case reviews will be replaced with a new system of local and national reviews (see box).

The consultation and related documents - including a separate consultation on revisions to Working Together to Safeguard Children statutory guidance - outline how the new arrangements will be delivered in practice.

This includes proposals to allow safeguarding partners to organise themselves in the most efficient way for their area - for example, by merging two or more local authority boundaries, or multiple partners within the same area, such as clinical commissioning groups (CCGs).

The DfE says safeguarding partners will be free to make bespoke arrangements for themselves and the relevant agencies who have a key role to play in their area.

The Act places a duty on those partners and relevant agencies to work together for the purpose of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in their area.

There is currently a draft list of 40 relevant agencies - which includes young offender institutions, adoption support agencies, childminders, charities, and district councils, among others.

Time frame

Councils and their safeguarding partners will be given a maximum of 15 months to decide on the arrangements - up to 12 months to agree arrangements for themselves and relevant agencies to work together, and then up to three months to implement the changes.

Once the arrangements have been published and implemented, the LSCB for the local area will cease to exist.

LSCBs must continue to carry out all of their statutory functions, until the point at which safeguarding partner arrangements begin to operatein a local area.

In Milton Keynes, safeguarding systems have already been revised to comply with the forthcoming regulations.

Jane Held, independent chair of Milton Keynes Safeguarding Board, describes the new model as "LSCB-plus", because it builds on the former arrangements.

Held says a decision was taken to base the new arrangements on the existing geographical area of Milton Keynes, rather than joining forces with other areas, because most of the safeguarding partners in the city have co-terminus borders.

Revised safeguarding partnership arrangements - called MK Together - have been in operation since 1 April 2017.

The new structure includes separate "programme boards" for children and adults, which meet every two months and report to the safeguarding board, made up of health, police and the local authority, which also meets every two months and fulfills the requirements of the forthcoming regulatory changes.

The Children's Programme Board - which is responsible for delivering the current statutory functions of the LSCB until the changes are enacted - has representatives of, among others, school, community health and mental health services, a local secure training centre, probation, fire and ambulance services.

Better use of capacity

"Working as a whole system [across children and adults] is in many ways harder, but getting rid of duplication and a whole range of meetings where the same people sit in a room with a different hat on, makes better use of increasingly scarce capacity, increases creativity and helps us use our Milton Keynes taxpayers' money more flexibly on improving the lives of our citizens rather than on systems and processes," Held says.

David Ashcroft, chair of the Association of Independent LSCB Chairs (AILC), says that while the new flexibility will offer "important opportunities", there is a danger that partners may not share the same views on geographical boundaries for the new arrangements, the functions it has, or the way it is funded.

He also fears that valuable oversight of the system, which the best LSCBs and individual chairs provide, is lost. There is also a risk that the new arrangements are based on what agencies can afford, rather than what is best for children.

Positive plans

"I have seen details of the proposals in Milton Keynes and it looks positive - it fits Milton Keynes in terms of the locality," says Ashcroft.

"There is already a good commitment from the existing LSCB chair and the director of children's services.

"If areas don't have that commitment and interest, there's a real danger you end up with a patchwork of different arrangements in different places which makes it difficult to communicate and provide a consistent service right across the country, particularly if levels of investment change.

"The other key thing, which is borne out by Ofsted reviews of LSCBs, is how you resolve a situation where the three partners don't agree. In the best of all possible worlds, police, public health, and local authorities will have different priorities.

"At the moment, the independent board chair is able to arbitrate an agreed solution in the interests of children.

"We are concerned that there is a lack of detail about how that might happen in the future - there is nothing in the guidance about how disputes get resolved."

According to AILC figures, the average LSCB annual budget is around £250,000, and range from £64,000 to £682,000 across England.

Ashcroft says: "Police and health have not traditionally been co-equal partners in funding, but the DfE is now blithely saying that funding should be equitable between all three partners.

"That, in practice, means that police and health have to find a larger share, but realistically, that's a very difficult ask."

A date for when the legislation is to be triggered is yet to be set. The consultation closes on 31 December.

New safeguarding plans

The Children and Social Work Act 2017 sets out provisions that will:

• Replace local safeguarding children boards with new flexible local safeguarding arrangements led by three safeguarding partners - local authorities, chief officers of police and clinical commissioning groups
• Place a duty on those partners to make arrangements to work together and with any relevant agencies for the purpose of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in their area
• Require safeguarding partners to identify and arrange for the review of serious child safeguarding cases which they think raise issues of importance in relation to their area
• Provide for the establishment of a national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. The Panel will commission and publish reviews of serious child safeguarding cases it thinks raise issues that are complex or of national importance
• Give clinical commissioning groups and councils joint responsibility for child death reviews.

Expert view: Time is right for new arrangements to protect children and review serious cases

By Alan Wood, government adviser and author of the Wood review of LSCBs

Despite some excellent work, the models of local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs) and serious case reviews were not sufficiently effective. Both were laden with processes and guidelines, yet the problems they were designed to remedy carried on. My argument was to move from a prescriptive approach to a model giving local areas more freedom to design systems that work for them.

The draft guidance makes clear that safeguarding partners have the flexibility to identify regional or sub-regional multi-agency arrangements (MAAs) as two or more areas can combine. This remedies the confusing situation where one local authority covers several police and clinical commissioning group (CCG) boundaries, each characterised by different policies and procedures.

Here is a real opportunity for some of the emerging metro areas to make a sensible case for one overarching safeguarding and review model for their area. This does not conflict with the importance of local delivery. There are a small number of key MAA strategic issues the safeguarding partners need to agree on, meaning the focus of chief officers is on creating the necessary conditions with which practice leaders can further develop operational multi-agency service delivery and improvement free from the bureaucracy of a LSCB.

Local authority leaders, the police and CCGs should not wait for their local LSCB to design a new model, they should take action now and commission chief executives, police commanders and CCG chief officers to put their heads together and propose new multi-agency arrangements for protecting children and reviewing serious cases.

Effective MAA will:

• make a lead chief officer in health, the police and local government equally responsible for effective MAA
• ensure better co-ordinated and deployed services creating a safer, more consistent system
• promote innovation, and deliver efficiency in the design of local MAA
• establish a national learning framework overseen by a new independent body to promote higher quality inquiries
• create a more effective model of learning from the deaths of children.

Focus should be on promoting innovation and releasing resources to the frontline. This will develop more highly skilled practice leaders and practitioners using professional skills and judgment in casework as opposed to form-filling and data collection.

If we want to achieve a safer system to protect children, leaders must create the environment in which better skilled practitioners can practice and get on with the work of protecting children.