Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I would be delighted to defer to the hon. Gentleman to allow him to comment on our single amendment. New clause 29, tabled by the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends, requests that a""Children's Services Authority… must ensure that the Local Safeguarding Board… has"" an independent chairman. Actually, those boards already can, and in many cases do, so I am slightly at a loss as to why primary legislation is required to bring that about. Indeed, when the issue of baby P and serious case review handling by local safeguarding children boards came up back in the autumn, Conservative-run authorities were advised to ensure that they had chairmen or chairwomen of those boards who were independent and that the boards were no longer chaired by the director of children's services, as had been the case in many authorities. All Conservative-run authorities had either made moves to bring that about or were in the process of making such moves. They have led the way and pre-empted a recommendation that it became inevitable Lord Laming would make. It will be interesting to hear from the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) how many Liberal Democrat-run local authorities have followed that advice—not that there are many, but we can at least have a good stab at finding out how much they have done already to put their principles into practice. The Government's main proposals are new clauses 22, 23 and 24, which are important. I think that the Secretary of State would acknowledge that we have been proactive and positive in supporting child protection legislation post-Victoria Climbié, and have been constructively critical in many examples, but we have always supported those measures that we think will lead to greater protection of children. Alas, too many of those measures have not had the desired effect—for a host of reasons that it is not appropriate to go into now. We had a debate on child protection a month or two ago. I am keen to learn from the Secretary of State greater detail as to why he thinks that these particular measures will improve the quality of the outcomes, by which I mean that more children will be better protected and fewer will end up meeting the horrific end of baby Peter and other children who have died at the hands of parents or carers in recent years. I am not interested in the quantity of legislation. I think we have concentrated too much on quantity in the nine years since the death of Victoria Climbié. We must focus much more on the quality of the legislation, particularly the quality of the outcomes that it achieves. I have enormous respect for Herbert Laming, who was one of the patrons of the Conservative commission on social worker practices, but part of the criticism has been that the 108 recommendations made in relation to Victoria Climbié have added to the bureaucracy, which can be said to have made the job of social workers rather more difficult. My problem, therefore, is how many of the 58 further recommendations being made in Laming 2 will add yet further to the bureaucracy, with Herbert Laming having himself acknowledged how too much bureaucracy has grown up around the field of child protection and is becoming, in some cases, self-defeating.