When it's the one in England.
In the Children Bill's committee stage in the Commons last week children's minister Margaret Hodge drove through five amendments removing references to children's rights that had been inserted by the House of Lords. The function of the children's commissioner in England will be to promote the views and interests of children, not their rights.
Hodge has argued all along that she does not want a commissioner who becomes bogged down in casework. But there are more than practical considerations behind her refusal. It can't be that hard to frame a remit that allows the commissioner to only take on cases of significance to children generally, and that are beyond the remit or experience of local government, the health service ombudsmen and the like.
The truth is that a commissioner with a remit to champion the rights of children and with real powers of investigation, reporting directly to Parliament rather than to the Secretary of State for Education, would expose many of the contradictions that underlie the Children Bill.
The line that the Government is drawing over the powers and remit of the commissioner marks clearly the extent of what it is prepared to give to children.
The Bill does contain reforms to children's services that will make millions of children better off and better protected. But ultimately, it is a set of technical and managerial solutions to a specific problem: how to prevent another tragedy like that of Victoria Climbie.
It does not change the status of children and young people in our society or in relation to government. The treatment of refugee children, the preventable deaths of children in the care of the criminal justice system, and the Government's snivelling position on physical punishment because it does not want to offend parents who see it as their right to hurt children: these are just three examples of State-inflicted or State-condoned abuse that a children's commissioner should rightly be concerned with.
But if the Children Bill goes through as it currently stands then the commissioner can say what they like, he or she will not have the power to change a thing.
