Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I join other Members in paying tribute to Lord Laming and his enormous interest and dedication to child protection. Only recently, he gave evidence to the Children, Schools and Families Committee, on which I sit. Even though he said that this would be his last report, it was clear that he remains committed to child protection. Only yesterday, he was commenting on the future of that issue when he said that social services still needed to act quicker and more decisively to protect youngsters on the at-risk register. He also said that""Drift is the enemy of good practice"." That tells us that Lord Laming, as he also made plain in his report, remains exasperated with the lack of progress since the Victoria Climbié case. Although that case ushered in a number of major reforms such as the child protection system, it failed to deal with the problem on the front line of child protection. Since that report, far too much time has been spent on organisational changes and not enough has been spent on the social work force, on whom we rely so heavily for the protection of vulnerable children. The service has remained underfunded, under-resourced and, unfortunately, unable to cope with the demands placed on it. Although it is important that we try to find ways to improve the structure of our child protection system, I have concerns about new clause 22 and how we are going about those changes. The Secretary of State has put his weight behind the statutory targets as a way forward, but I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). The Secretary of State supports the statutory targets, which he believes to be right to protect children, but unless we have some idea of what they may be, it is difficult, particularly for Conservative Members, to fall in step with the new clause. Although my instinct is that targets will not necessarily solve the problem, we can see that some would be beneficial to the child protection system—for instance, on the quality and consistency of social work care, the timeliness of protective measures for vulnerable children and, most importantly, the outcomes for children who have some contact with the child protection system. If we are to have targets, those are the sort that I would have expected the Secretary of State to mention in response to my hon. Friend. Another difficulty is to do with the training, recruitment and retention of social workers. In some local authorities, almost 50 per cent. of front-line child protection staff have less than two years' experience in their job. I have seen that for myself in the work that I have done in the family courts representing local authorities, children and their parents. On far too regular a basis, a social worker, or even a team manager, working for the local authority has made the application to take a child into care but their experience is woefully short for the extreme complexity of the case that is facing them. That is not their fault: it is the fault of all of us in failing to ensure that measures to improve the status of social workers, to invest in the social work profession and to better train social workers have come to fruition.