Lame reaction to protection worries
Ravi Chandiramani
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Children's Secretary has talked a tough game throughout the Baby Peter child protection storm, taking swift action at the outset in commissioning Lord Laming to review child protection arrangements in England.
But for all his bravado during this difficult period, Ed Balls' eagerly anticipated response to Lord Laming's report last week came not as a bang but as a whimper. The government's new action plan promises many things: a revision of statutory guidance on safeguarding children; two members of the public to sit on local safeguarding children boards; and new performance indicators on safeguarding. It also promises research briefings on how best to intervene when there are concerns a child is being harmed; a families and relationships green paper; and a new strategic framework to ensure the police have the right arrangements and resources in place to protect children. And plenty more.
These proposals, which have variable levels of merit, pave the way for imposing yet more procedures and processes on a set of professionals already feeling overwhelmed by the burdens of bureaucracy. They are well-meaning proposals, but they are not costed.
What's more, the government response offers not a penny more to support frontline services. Laming's call for local authorities' child protection budgets to be ringfenced is sidestepped by the government and deferred to another day, probably the next public spending round in 2011. The failure to rise appropriately to this recommendation is particularly worrying in the present economic climate as councils strive to cut back spending.
The entire focus of the government's response is misjudged. As we all know, it was not a lack of multi-agency working or box-ticking that failed Baby Peter, since he was visited 60 times by different agencies.
The focus should not, therefore, have been on introducing more procedures, but on putting money into the frontline so that all safeguarding practitioners have the expertise and the confidence to make sound judgments to keep children safe.
The extra money that has been pledged - £58m to improve the training and development of social workers - is a fraction of what is needed to genuinely transform children's social work.
While the government has been gung-ho about ushering in a "step change" in child protection services, what we have been handed, in fact, is no more than small change.
