Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I can say to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, that the voluntary agencies are right behind us in their support of this amendment. I thank the Minister, but I have no illusions about the fact that having this on the statute book will ensure that no child is killed by its parent or carer ever again. However, we have to ask ourselves why it sometimes happens that children are not seen alone. We have to do all we possibly can to make sure that social workers have everything they need in place. I give the Government credit for the fact that they are recruiting more social workers, there is better training, and that only recently the noble Lord, Lord Laming, launched a new programme to provide specialist training in this field for newly qualified social workers in order to give them more confidence to deal with these issues. There must also be better supervision, and I know that the Government are doing something about that. However, they cannot say that they have done absolutely everything if they do not give social workers this particular tool. It will enable them to explain to parents why they must see children alone. The Minister talked about making a record of whether the child had been seen, and if not, why not. That will simply not do. In such a case, emergency powers must be sought to ensure that the child is seen. The noble Baroness used the phrase "as far as is reasonably practicable". Again, that is not enough when a child’s life is in danger. She also told us about Ofsted and the comprehensive area assessments that will find out whether local authorities have been ensuring that their social workers are seeing children alone, but again that is all after the event. It is all very well, but it only highlights when things have gone wrong. That is too late because by then we have a dead child. I take this issue very seriously and your Lordships might have detected how passionately I feel about it. I shall read carefully what the noble Baroness has said and decide whether to find a way of returning to this matter at the Report stage. We have to do every single thing it is possible to do. I repeat: I have no illusions that this is a magic bullet, but if we have not done all we can, we will blame ourselves. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 279 withdrawn.