My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. The Statement is as follows:

“In November last year, I commissioned an urgent inspection of children’s services in Haringey following the failure of agencies in that borough to intervene decisively to protect a little boy. Following the joint inspectors’ report, I took the immediate actions that I judged necessary to protect vulnerable children in Haringey. I also asked Lord Laming to provide us with an independent progress report on child protection across the country.

Lord Laming has today published his report, and I have laid a copy of it before the House together with my reply to him which sets out the Government’s immediate response. I can confirm that we will accept all of Lord Laming’s recommendations; that we are taking immediate action from today to implement them; and that we will also set out our detailed response to all 58 recommendations before the end of next month. I am sure that I speak for the whole House when I say that we are hugely grateful to Lord Laming and to all the experts, practitioners and members of the public who have contributed to his very thorough investigation.

As Lord Laming states at the start of his report, being safe is,

‘the very minimum upon which every child should be able to depend’.

His report finds that the Every Child Matters reforms introduced after the Victoria Climbié inquiry, provide,

‘a sound framework for professionals to protect children and promote their welfare’.

But he is also clear that:

‘There now needs to be a step change in the arrangements to protect children from harm’.

Lord Laming says that:

‘The new ContactPoint system will have particular advantages in reducing the possibility of children for whom there are concerns going unnoticed’,

but he challenges us to do more,

‘to ensure that leaders of local services accept their responsibility to translate policy, legislation and guidance into day to day practice on the frontline of every service’.

His report makes a series of detailed recommendations: to ensure that best practice is universally applied in every area of the country; to improve local accountability; and to provide more support for local leaders and for the front-line workforce. None of Lord Laming’s proposals alone could have prevented the death of Baby P, but all of them together add up to a step-change in front-line child protection. No barrier, no bureaucracy, no buck-passing should ever get in the way of keeping children safe.

As Lord Laming recommends, we will now establish a new cross-government National Safeguarding Delivery Unit to support and challenge every local authority and every children’s trust in the country, as they carry out their responsibilities to keep children safe; and to drive continuous improvement in front-line practice across all services. The new unit will be staffed by experts from across central government, local agencies and the voluntary sector. It will provide an annual report to Parliament, including reporting on the implementation of Lord Laming’s recommendations.

To guide this work, I am today appointing Sir Roger Singleton, former head of Barnardo’s and a leading expert on child protection, to be the Government’s first Chief Adviser on the Safety of Children. Sir Roger will advise us on how to update and strengthen our statutory guidance for front-line staff to make it absolutely clear to every agency and every practitioner what they need to do to keep children safe.

Lord Laming also recommends that full serious case reviews must remain confidential to protect vulnerable children and to ensure the full co-operation of all witnesses. We will now strengthen the independence and quality of serious case reviews, and the unit will monitor their implementation to ensure that lessons are learnt and that public executive summaries are full and comprehensive.

Effective child protection depends critically on strong local leadership and accountability so that everyone is clear about who must do what to keep children safe. We are already legislating to ensure that every local authority has a statutory children’s board to improve all the outcomes for children and young people. We will strengthen the role of the local safeguarding children boards to make them effective local watchdogs for the protection of children and to hold children’s trusts and local agencies to account.

We will set out in the revised statutory guidance our presumption that all local safeguarding children boards will have an independent chair, that the director of children’s services and the lead member for children’s services will always be members of both the children’s trust board and the LSCB, and that the chief executive and the leader of the council will be required to confirm annually that their local arrangements comply with the law. Because keeping children and young people safe is everyone’s responsibility, we will now open up the child protection system to greater public scrutiny by ensuring that two members of the general public are appointed to every local safeguarding children board in the country.

When children are at risk, it is the skills, confidence and judgment of front-line professionals that make the biggest difference. As Lord Laming says:

‘Every day, thousands of children are helped, supported and in some cases have their lives saved by these staff’.

However, he is also right to say that,

‘rather than feeling valued for their commitment and expertise, professionals across these services often feel undervalued, unsupported and at risk’.

This has to change. That is why the Health Secretary and I have set up the Social Work Task Force, which will now take forward Lord Laming’s recommendations on the training and professional development of social workers. I have already asked the task force to review the effectiveness, procurement and IT used in integrated children’s systems, and it will now report on this next month so that social workers can keep detailed records of their cases and spend more time with vulnerable children.

In addition to the longer-term reforms that the task force will propose, we will act now to ensure that all newly qualified social workers starting this year will receive a year of intensive induction training, supervision and support. From this year, we will introduce a new advanced social work professional status to ensure that the most highly skilled social work practitioners can stay close to the front line with better career progression. We will expand the graduate recruitment scheme and attract qualified social workers back to the profession, and ensure over time that all practitioners can study on the job for a masters-level qualification.

Because we must do more to support leaders across children’s services, I am today also accepting proposals from the chief executive of our leadership college to expand its remit, introduce a new leadership programme for directors of children’s services from September, and create a new accelerated programme for those with the greatest potential to become future leaders.

Lord Laming also identifies further specific recommendations for the health service, the police, the family courts and the inspectorates, so I can tell the House that: the Health Secretary is today announcing a new programme that will provide additional support and development for health visitors; the Home Secretary will take forward Lord Laming’s recommendations to improve skills and capacity in child protection in the police; the Justice Secretary is announcing that, in line with Lord Laming’s recommendations, Mr Francis Plowden will carry out a review of court fees in care proceedings; and if there is evidence that they are a barrier for local authorities when deciding whether to proceed with a care order for a vulnerable child, we will abolish them. And with Ofsted already strengthening its inspection process and introducing unannounced inspections every year for front-line social care practice in every area of the country, the inspectorates will also respond to Lord Laming’s recommendations by the end of April.

In its annual performance assessment, Ofsted rated safeguarding services in 101 out of 150 local authorities as good or outstanding. But where children are not being kept safe, we will act. In December, eight local authorities were judged inadequate in their safeguarding of children, and we immediately sent in our intervention experts to assess the situation in each of them. Haringey has now submitted an action plan to Ofsted for evaluation. Improvement notices and additional support are now in place in Surrey, Birmingham, West Sussex and Essex, and independent performance reviews are under way in Reading and Wokingham.

The Children’s Minister and I are particularly concerned with the serious weaknesses identified in Doncaster. In recent weeks, we have commissioned an independent performance review, and despite significant investment over the past year and some progress, the review has concluded that urgent improvement is still required. On Tuesday, the Children’s Minister met the leaders of Doncaster Council, and using powers in the Education Act 1996, the Children’s Minister has today written to the council giving it a formal direction to: appoint immediately Mr Tony Elson to chair an independent improvement board, which will report directly to Ministers; submit an improvement plan to be approved by the new board; and require the council to co-operate with my department to bring in a new senior management team to take over the leadership and management of Doncaster children’s services as soon as practicable.

It is our first duty in Government and as a society to do all we can to keep our children safe, and it is our responsibility to act decisively, as we have done in recent months, as we are doing today in Doncaster, and as we will do as we implement all of Lord Laming’s recommendations. I hope that all sides of the House will support our actions to keep children safe in every part of our country. That is our duty, something which, as Lord Laming says,

‘every child should be able to depend upon’.

I commend the Statement to the House”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

My Lords, first, I declare an interest as a provider of social care. I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement and for making it available to me at the earliest opportunity, which has allowed me more time to consider its contents. I must also express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for his work in producing the report. His analysis of the weaknesses in our child protection system has given us all much to digest. The report is powerful in its condemnation of the bureaucratic burden faced by social workers.

The noble Lord reports that,

“a tradition of deliberate, reflective social work practice is being put in danger because of an over-emphasis on process and targets, resulting in a loss of confidence amongst social workers”.

I think that all noble Lords would appreciate it if the Minister could clearly set out what the Government intend to do to reduce the burden of bureaucratic compliance and the number of targets faced by front-line professionals. The report of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, spells out in no uncertain terms the consequences of this bureaucratic burden. Vacancies in social work departments run at 9.5 per cent compared with just 0.7 per cent for teachers. Turnover rates are high, two-thirds of local authorities report difficulties engaging social workers and three-quarters of social workers report that case loads have increased worryingly since 2003. This is not surprising, given that he also observes that social workers experience,

“low staff morale, poor supervision … under-resourcing and inadequate training”.

They face high levels of stress and there are formidable recruitment and retention difficulties. Social work, he records, is seen as a Cinderella service and we now have, using his word, a “crisis” within social work. The consequences of this crisis will be felt by the most vulnerable in society, especially those children whose well-being depends on the indispensable services that a properly resourced social service can provide, but who are being failed, sometimes in the most appalling way, by the Government’s muddled and deficient policies.

The blame game is an unattractive game to play, but the Government have had almost 12 years to get their house in order. There can be no excuses for complacency on this most important of issues. What urgent, practical steps, beyond the creation of a new quango, will the Government take to raise morale, to ensure that resources reach the front line and to reduce red tape?

The noble Lord’s report makes clear his opinion that the central bureaucratic tool used to help children at risk—the comprehensive assessment form—is,

“in danger, like other tools, of becoming process-focused or, even worse, a barrier for services for children”

What will the Government do to simplify this area of bureaucracy?

The report also reveals the significant problems we have with the information technology systems that are supposed to help child protection. It points out that help for children is,

“being compromised by an over-complicated, lengthy and tick-box assessment and recording system”.

The IT system that the Government favour—the integrated children’s system—is reported to be “hampering progress” with the best local authorities having,

“to find ways to work around their systems”.

Conservative-run Kensington and Chelsea, one of the best local authorities for children’s services, has abandoned the Government’s bureaucratic approach to information technology and has set up its own much more flexible and professional-friendly system. Does the Minister agree that more councils are likely to follow suit unless the Government change their approach to this IT system?

I hope that the Minister will agree with my assessment of the report. We need a shift from the centre in the culture of child protection in order to put improving the workforce ahead of adding to the quangocracy or finding new boxes to tick. We must never lose sight of the fact that what is important is the welfare of children. Departmental organisation, reorganisation, targets and red tape should never be allowed to obscure that central and crucial purpose.

The noble Lord, Lord Laming, argues persuasively that the role of health visitors is crucial. He points out that an evaluation of 161 serious case reviews shows that nearly 50 per cent of children who suffered terrible harm were less than one year old, but that only 12 per cent were subject to a child protection plan. Many more children at risk might have been identified if we had had a universal health visitor service to support children from birth. Will the Minister offer her support for the proposals put forward by the leader of my party for an expansion of the health visitor service to make it truly universal?

As I have said, we are very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for his report, which contains a great deal of useful testimony and evidence. But it is stronger in analysis than in recommendation and better at explaining what has gone wrong than spelling out how to put it right. It exposes the problems with the current level of bureaucracy, but far too often falls back on recommending more bureaucracy as the answer. Crucially, the noble Lord, Lord Laming, recognises that serious case reviews—the policy inquests which follow the death of a vulnerable child—are valuable tools for learning lessons to enable us to avoid making similar mistakes in the future

He points out that the lessons from serious case reviews need to be better learnt and more widely disseminated, but he fails to recommend that they should now be published in full. I depart from the report in calling for just that. I believe that the Liberal Democrat spokesman in another place has added his support for our position. I hope that noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches here will join me in asking the Government to throw their weight behind us. The reasons used to defend the secrecy in this area, whatever they may be, must not hinder us from learning from past mistakes. Too much is at stake for us to disagree on that.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on his report and I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. I welcome the fact that the Government accept all of the noble Lord’s recommendations but what matters most is that they also will the means as well as the ends. Does the Minister know what full implementation will cost and whether the Government are committed to finding the money.

Turning to the detail, I welcome the establishment of a National Safeguarding Delivery Unit but it must not be only another layer of bureaucracy; it must have teeth and an adequate budget. It must also have as one of its founding principles that it listens to children and responds to what they want and need. I welcome the fact that it will report regularly to Parliament but warn that I will not only challenge it on what it has done but on what has not happened each year.

The Government promise updated statutory guidance so that every practitioner knows what to do. But it is not for Whitehall to do this in detail; it is for the Government to give the professionals the tools they need in the way of training, resources and a sensible workload so that they can spend sufficient time with clients and sufficient time to reflect on and discuss their practice and their decisions with other experienced professionals. Then they will be able to make the right decisions themselves.

I welcome moves to strengthen the independence and quality of serious case reviews, but I agree that it is vital that we learn the lessons from them by having them published, anonymised where appropriate.

Local safeguarding children boards are a vital element in protecting children and I welcome the fact that the chairs will be independent. We have been calling for that. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, has balanced opinions on both sides of the argument about this by saying that the director of children’s services and the lead member should be on the board and on the children’s trust. Although this may cause some difficulty as the one is accountable to the other, it will bring the necessary co-ordination and political accountability as well as the expertise the board needs. The idea that two members of the public should be on the board is interesting, but how will they be chosen, how will they be vetted and how will confidentiality issues be dealt with? Or will these decisions be made locally?

The state of the social work workforce has been a cause for concern for years and I and many noble Lords have often called attention to it, to be given a load of platitudes by a succession of Ministers. Can the Minister assure the House now that the Government will really grasp this nettle? We understand that there are many difficulties. For example, if newly-qualified social workers are to receive a year of intensive induction training, they must be given less than a full case load or they will not have the time to do it. In addition, where are the Government going to find the experienced people to do the monitoring and supervision? I heard recently that in some areas—I think it is London—75 per cent of social workers are in their first year of practice. The Government must succeed in their efforts to attract experienced people back into the profession.

Many useful parallels can be drawn from the teaching profession. The advanced social work professional status, like the advanced skills teacher, should keep highly-skilled people on the front line doing the job rather than their finding that promotion into management is the only way to make progress in their career. However, they will want proper remuneration for this and I do not blame them. Such initiatives have helped to recruit and retain good people in the teaching profession and I see no reason why it should not work for social workers as long as it is properly resourced.

In another parallel, the master’s qualification expectation is welcome, but it should always be remembered that experience counts most in social work.

The announcement about the new leadership role for the NCSL was made a few weeks ago. I welcomed it then but I am concerned about today’s announcement about an accelerated programme into leadership because it is experience that helps to produce good judgment and it takes time to develop that.

Finally, I welcome the statements about a greater role for other services, especially the health and police services. These have always been the weak link in multi-agency working. Does,

“additional support and development for health visitors”

mean more health visitors? Does it mean that more families will be entitled to their help for longer periods of time? If so, I welcome that. I have always said that it should go back to being a universal service without a stigma and thereby be absolutely invaluable in identifying problems early and ensuring appropriate intervention.

As I have often raised the issue of court fees, I welcome the announcement about the review of them and I suspect that the evidence will be found. I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, about the CAF and wonder whether that will be reviewed.

I am pleased that the spotlight is to be turned on Ofsted. The NSPCC claims that Ofsted has been asking the wrong questions of the wrong people at the wrong times. It is important that the quality of children’s services should no longer be covered up by councils that have a good score in everything else. In future, if they fail their children, they should be considered to have failed all of us.

My Lords, I thank both noble Baronesses for their questions. I remind the House that a key part of the analysis in the noble Lord’s report is that, having spoken to many people, having taken evidence from over 100 submissions and 200 letters from around the country and having spoken to voluntary agencies and a wide range of professionals, he is clear that the platform that we are working from—that is, Every Child Matters, the legislative framework—far from being the wrong one, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, suggests, is supported by a consensus among all those in the professions working with children that it is the right underpinning policy framework. We are talking about making a step change towards speedier delivery, which will make a significant change to the work that takes place on the front line.

As the House knows, following the Haringey review, my right honourable friend the Children’s Secretary set up the Social Work Task Force with the Health Secretary to undertake a root-and-branch review of how the social work profession should be developed. As I said, we are asking the task force to accelerate its work—for example, looking at the day-to-day work of social workers and at the amount of time that they spend on the computer or out working with families, and looking in detail at their use of the ICS and at how the procurement for that system can be improved and made more effective. We have asked for that work to be accelerated so that we can take action and ensure that social workers have the tools that they need to do their job to the best of their professional ability. That means that we have to ensure that the IT facilities are there for them to make those all-important records of their engagement with families and children. Record-keeping is key. We have to ensure, as both noble Baronesses suggested, that the IT system can step up to the plate. We know that some local authorities have made a success of the ICS, but others have found it less easy. There have been concerns about flexibility, as the noble Baroness was right to point out.

To pick up on the questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, about the practicality of the initiatives that we are proposing for social workers, if you are having an intensive induction year then of course you need to have protected time off for that induction, which will mean a lower case load. With regard to advanced social work professionals, we are learning from the success of the work that we have done in teaching. When we talk about creating a masters-level profession, that is something we have to do with great care and in consultation with the professionals, the GSCC and the Children’s Workforce Development Council. When we talk about graduate recruitment and getting returners back into the profession, it is vital that we do that properly and get results. We are convinced and concerned about the need to work hard.

I resent the idea that, in accepting the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, that we enhance national leadership of child protection and create a national child safety unit, we are in some way creating another quango. We are talking about making sure that there is cross-government leadership to deliver, that the recommendations of the serious case reviews, about which Members opposite are so concerned, are taken up and that the unit makes sure that those recommendations are acted on. Yes, there will be a report to Parliament, which will greatly enhance the transparency and the opportunity for those fresh eyes that noble Lords are concerned to see.

The Health Secretary has today announced that there will be a new health visitor programme which will look at the role of health visitors to ensure that it is properly defined. It will also look at numbers, career opportunities and how the Department of Health should be supporting health visitors in their vital work. The Chief Nursing Officer will lead the programme of action on health visiting. That is a very important announcement.

The noble Lord, Lord Laming, was very clear about the confidentiality of the comprehensive serious case review document. To ensure that the comprehensive serious case review is fully able to take account of the experience of all the professionals involved and that all the sensitive information is collected, it is important that the document remains confidential. However, the noble Lord also recommended that the executive summary should be a comprehensive and clear reflection of the serious case review. Sir Roger Singleton, in his new role, will be able to ensure that that is happening.

We have made it clear that we are accepting, in full, the noble Lord’s recommendations. We have had the right platform to go forward with Every Child Matters, but there is no complacency about the amount of work that yet needs to be done. That is very much focused on making sure that those at the front line have the support, training, backing and numbers to get the work done. We are right behind the development of the social work profession to make that happen.

My Lords, I congratulate the Government and my noble friend Lord Laming on an incisive report. However, I should like to ask the Minister about three areas of real concern that I have. My noble friend Lord Laming quite rightly describes—as I have on the Floor of this Chamber on a number of occasions—the stress and the strain experienced by social workers and the devaluation and the scapegoating that has happened over the years. We have lost experienced workers over many different Administrations and for many different reasons. I believe that the Every Child Matters framework provides a package in which social workers can regain their confidence, particularly regarding children, and see themselves once more as equal professionals with their colleagues in the police, teaching and the legal profession.

It is a real problem when the report talks about the balance between challenge and support. There is no doubt that we need to challenge; we need a zero tolerance approach to anything that does not protect a child. Zero tolerance is all that will do. The problem is that social workers and other professionals such as health visitors work in an extraordinarily complex matrix. How that working-together and the way in which we are able to develop it reflect the way in which government departments work together will be the key to their being able to move forward. That is the challenge. However, unless we also give support, social workers in particular will remain demoralised and continue to feel that all that matters is ticking the right boxes for Ofsted and meeting a particular target, when what they want to do is to work closely and dynamically with children and families.

I therefore have three questions for the Minister. How does she see this balance between challenge and support? How does she see social work practice moving forward in terms of reflective supervision when we have only a limited workforce, which was the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and who will carry the cases while we give people the space? How, when we are focusing on children, do we ensure that there is understanding of adults? I ask that because child development was not the only issue in the Baby P case; there was also the fact that the social workers had not necessarily been trained in understanding the dynamics of adults.

My Lords, the noble Baroness asks wise questions. We have to be clear that there needs to be a balance between support and challenge. Where does service improvement come from if it is not from challenge? It is important that professionals feel free to contribute to serious case reviews, so that their issues and experience can be fed back into service improvement and we have the right mechanism for it. However, support must come at every level in the system. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, has highlighted the need for social workers to have much better leadership in their local practice through better supervision and better management. That means a systematic improvement in the quality of social work training, whether it is initial training in the higher education sector or ongoing professional development. It is also about supporting social workers with experience and expertise to stay in practice, which we are very committed to doing.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement and the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for all the effort that has gone into the report. I am pleased that it is about not just an emphasis on new structures but those key people, the front-line professionals. Early intervention is the key to success in child protection. Health visitors have been reinforced, but not reinstated, in the system. We also have already in the system family nurse practitioners; we have the family intervention projects; and we have Sure Start. There are also people working in substance misuse—the report Hidden Harm has shown how serious the impact of that can be on families. How can we develop programmes whereby professionals are trained not just in silos but together in the same room and with the same trainer so that each gets a sense of what the other is about? I remember working years ago with school nurses and teachers together. It was brilliant. I am saying not that my training was brilliant but that the whole system was brilliant, in that each saw the other’s perspective. We should look towards all professionals in the early intervention systems being trained together so that they gain from the very beginning a sense of what each other is about.

My Lords, my noble friend makes an important point. This is something that Sir Roger Singleton will need to think carefully about, although I do not want to pre-empt his advice. It is clear from the report that the safety of children is the responsibility of us all; it is the responsibility of every professional who comes into contact with children. That means that there must be a shared understanding and high-quality working relationships between professionals with regard to information sharing, having a shared language so that people can communicate, and looking at commissioning. That is why the Every Child Matters agenda is so important, because it is through that agenda that the language and terrain for everyone can be set out in a way that can be understood. That is a foundation that we must build on.

My Lords, following on from that point, is it not now time to start thinking out of the box a bit and to take a leaf out of artists’ education? Artists start with a foundation year in which many of them have not decided what medium they will finish up in; many who have decided on their medium still dabble in others before they specialise. Is it not time that we started having a college for socially engaged professionals—although it would have to be called something a bit more glamorous than that—with policemen, social workers, possibly clergy but certainly teachers spending their first year together? I put that idea into the pot.

The second question is more specific. The organisation in most difficulty is the social work profession. It would be helpful to know the percentage of vacancies across the country and the length of service of the workforce in each authority. If you have an underrecruited authority, the workload of each individual will be too great and, if you have an inexperienced workforce across the country, the leadership and supervision will not be there. As we have learnt in education, the first year under close supervision and with great personal help is crucial to a successful and long career in the profession.

My Lords, I can be specific in answer to the second point that the noble Lord made. Vacancies for children and social workers stood at 9.5 per cent in 2006 and turnover rates were also high, at 9.6 per cent, in the same year. I do not think that we are looking at particularly better figures now. I have a figure for 2007, which puts vacancy rates for some local authorities in London as high as 20 per cent. Those are very worrying figures, which is why some time ago we set up the Social Work Task Force. We are expecting a lot of that body, which has already started work. One theme from that work is the importance of creating a confident profession that can work closely with other confident professions. The noble Lord talked about the teaching profession; we have a lot to learn from that. We want to ensure that social workers feel valued, which is why the Secretary of State for Health and the Children’s Secretary have today written to all social workers in the country to ensure that they understand how much the contribution that they make is valued.

My Lords, the Minister stressed the importance of record-keeping, but for many social workers the burden of record-keeping is regarded as considerable. Is there anything to be learnt from the police or teaching services about the use of lay people in such roles? There is the use of teaching assistants, for example, to take over some of the more mundane tasks. Could such support workers be used also within the social services to take some of the burden of record-keeping away from the front-line practitioners?

My Lords, I understand that some local authorities provide administrative support for social workers with their record-keeping. However, one of the core professional attributes of a successful social worker is the ability to analyse and record their interaction with the family. You cannot get away from that as a key part of understanding the dynamics.

My Lords, I draw attention to recommendation 26 in the Laming report, which states:

“The General Social Care Council … should … strengthen their curriculums to provide high quality practical skills in children’s social work”.

A social worker just completing her MA made this point:

“We are not being trained. We are being taught but we are not being trained to do the things we need to do”.

One of the social workers I most respect made exactly the same point; that they need to be trained to do the things. It is not just academic stuff; they need to be trained in the field.

The Minister may be aware of my second point, and I think it came up in the Statement. It is becoming clearer that many more children are being harmed than are being identified as being harmed. Is she thinking about how she will protect social workers from being overwhelmed by the demand, as we recognise more and more that children are being harmed?

My Lords, we are thinking very carefully about the point made earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, about how to get the balance right between support and challenge. We know that we need to ensure that local frontline social workers have a much stronger management engagement, and that that goes right to the DCS and to the chief executive of local authorities, so it is not the newest and least experienced social worker who is out there dealing with the most difficult and most challenging cases; that they feel supported. The noble Earl makes a very important point about training and how appropriate it is for social workers going out into the field. We know that one-third of newly qualified social workers thought that their social work course had prepared them fully. That is only one-third. That compares with 85 per cent of newly qualified teachers. Therefore, we know we can do it. We just have to get it right for social workers.

My Lords, I join those who so warmly congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on his report, and, indeed, the Government on the promptitude and enthusiasm with which they have accepted all 58 recommendations, and, perhaps even more than that, the speed with which they have commenced the implementation of those plans.

One wishes to see all the statutory duties of care authorities in relation to children in care and looked-after children carried out with the utmost competence and commitment. Nevertheless, one matter I would wish to touch upon, which is referred to in the report, is the fact that a vast number of children, completely unknown to social services and unknown, it seems, to any other governmental or local governmental agency, suffer the most dreadful abuse and neglect.

Will the Minister therefore see to it that the maximum exhortation is given from central government to all local government services to try to smell out as many of these cases as is humanly possible, ruthlessly using the agencies available, in particular those in health and education?

My Lords, I can absolutely reassure the noble Lord that that is exactly the Government’s intention. That is why in response to the very important recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on national leadership, we have introduced the new position that we are today appointing Sir Roger Singleton—the former head of Barnado’s, with many years’ experience—to advise us on the establishment of this cross-government national safeguarding delivery unit. It is not about creating more policy; it is about making sure that the change happens absolutely on the front line. That is cross-government, so all the different government departments are lined up and delivering. That will also be about providing the support and challenge to every local authority and children’s trust in the country, so that they can carry out their responsibilities and keep children safe.

My Lords, I welcome this report. I found my conversation with the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on this matter very helpful indeed. As part of this process, I ask the Minister whether the Government are going to look carefully at maximising the opportunities for collocating health and social care services in the same buildings as a first step towards creating a more integrated service and encouraging culture change.

Secondly, my experience across the country suggests that the present new investment in primary care buildings has far more potential, and that major opportunities for culture change are being missed because of how these new buildings are being commissioned. Are the Government going to look at this matter as part of the process?

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for those two observations, and I shall certainly think carefully about his suggestion. Of course, we are producing a White Paper on 21st-century schools. There will be a lot of interesting policy around those questions, but I will look into his point on the building of new health facilities.

My Lords, first, I am astonished by the churlishness of the Conservative Opposition in their response to the report. We in Wales remember that the worst case of serious assault on children was under the previous Conservative Government, as Bryn Estyn in Wrexham. That was of course before the education service was devolved to Wales.

Secondly, how is this excellent report to be accepted by the Administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland? What co-operation will there be to implement these proposals in our own nations?

My Lords, we have worked closely with the devolved Administrations, particularly, for example, on cross-border matters such as our work with the UK Council for Child Internet Safety. We work closely with the devolved Administrations on safeguarding. Of course, all those concerned with child protection, whether in England or Wales, will be looking at the Laming report to see where the learning can come.

My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that there is often a very dangerous man involved, who can be violent? Would it not be a good idea for the young social or health worker to have a minder to go in with them? They could be called a “monitor”.

My Lords, we are obviously concerned to ensure that social workers feel confident and safe in their job. That is why it is so important that social workers can work closely with the police and the health services, so that they do not work in isolation. This is why I come back, time and time again, to the importance of promoting confidence in the social work profession. We are doing everything we can. We are working with the social work taskforce that has been recently set up. We eagerly await the outcome of its deliberations so that we can act and ensure that we do the best that we can to protect children in our country.