BIG INTERVIEW: Social care needs scrutiny - Lord Laming, chairman of the Victoria Climbie Inquiry
Dan Williamson
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
After spending two years investigating Victoria's death, Lord Laming has produced 108 recommendations that push for wider accountability throughout all services involving children and young people.
The number of Lord Laming's recommendations that are taken on board will not be known until a green paper consultation document called Children At Risk is published.
"Society must value its young people, recognise they aren't simply the appendages of the adults in their lives and that they need to be respected," says Laming. "We need to break down any sense of alienation and separation.
We need to value them, be seen to value them and help them feel that society works for them and that they have a contribution to make."
To ensure these aims are reflected in government, the Laming report calls for a cross-departmental children's and families board, which would be headed by a cabinet minister to drive legislation for the wellbeing of young people.
"Almost all government departments make policy that affects the wellbeing of children, young people and families," says Laming. "It doesn't matter whether it's about housing, homelessness, asylum seeking, youth offending, or education."
Laming also proposes a children and families agency, which would ensure that legislation and standards are fully implemented, and would report to the children's and families board.
"We now have a situation where there are 30 health authorities, 43 police forces, 150 social services authorities and 300 primary care trusts," says Laming. "We need a system that will cut through all this and say to each service: 'This is the job you have to do and we're going to monitor how well you're going to do it'."
The agency would have powers to scrutinise documents, interview staff and have access to young people and families at a local level to investigate allegations of poor performance.
Laming doesn't see any problem with the Government's Children's and Young People's Unit potentially taking on the agency's responsibilities, but only if it has real powers. "At the end of the day, we just need the assurance that agencies are doing the job that Parliament has given them," says Laming.
The report also proposes local children and families' committees to ensure accountability within local health services, police and local authorities.
"During the inquiry, members of a local authority were saying they didn't know what was happening at their front door," says Laming. "If I were an elected member, I'd want to know about what communication we had with young people, our understanding of their needs and how we were meeting them. I want these senior managers to be required to demonstrate that they are in touch with the public they serve."
Local committees would also ensure that funding for young people and families was not squeezed out; a concern derived from the Climbie inquiry.
"We heard about an authority that was allocated 28 million to spend on children and young people's services, yet was only spending 14m," says Laming. "Was that money going elsewhere? Chiefs of these committees would need to account for that."
Both Brighton and Cardiff have recently appointed their own local children's commissioners. But despite obvious synergies, Laming is cautious about placing them in control of these local committees, as he "wouldn't want anything to diminish the accountability that must go with these chief officers".
In terms of a national children's commissioner role for England, Laming has suggested that elements of the role could be taken up by the chief executive of the national children's and families agency. But the more he talks about the role of children's commissioner, the more his reservations about the actual power such a role would have become clear.
He explains: "One of the dispiriting things in the inquiry was the amount of buck-passing that went on between the agencies, and the way leaders justified themselves through bureaucratic activity rather than through outcomes for young people.
"I want something more than a children's commissioner for England because I want something that will have wide powers to intervene and be responsible for ensuring things happen."
FYI
- Lord Laming was director of social services in Hertfordshire for 16 years, and chief inspector at the Social Services Inspectorate for seven years until 1998
- He has proposed the creation of a national children's agency, which reports annually to a cabinet minister and children and families' board. It would also ensure that legislation was implemented at local level
- Each local authority with social services responsibilities could establish a committee of members for children and families to ensure services were properly co-ordinated.
