We all have a role to play in keeping children safe

Various agencies seem to have engaged in a somewhat futile exercise in buck-passing — futile because the public could not care less about inter-agency squabbles. All they care about is keeping their children safe, except when things go wrong, and then they expect someone to take responsibility.

It has long been a point of principle for me that safeguarding is everybody's business and that no-one can absolve themselves of responsibility by assuming that someone else will take action. That seems to me a starting point for everyone in children's services. Ministers and officials, rightly, want to ensure that systems and processes are designed to minimise risk. But this can so easily lead to regulation overlaid on regulation, with complex and bureaucratic systems. The Integrated Children's System was designed with the very best of intentions. And serious case reviews were in turn invented, strengthened, improved, strengthened again, inspected, and published. And children still die.