Children, Schools and Families Bill

That, of course, is exactly right, and it is why we need much fuller accounts of what goes wrong in tragedies like the Edlington and baby Peter cases than can be provided in brief serious case reviews, however comprehensive their title calls them. We definitely need a radical overhaul of how serious case reviews are commissioned, compiled and published, as well as of how they are subsequently learned from and acted on. We need that to restore public confidence in child protection, and morale in the social worker profession. We also need it to ensure that all the agencies involved in safeguarding children can see clearly where mistakes have been made and can work to ensure that they will not be repeated, on their watch and in their patch, in the future. In the past 18 months, I have travelled widely around children's services departments. I visit local authorities most weeks to speak to the people in the front line and the ones who manage those departments. Some children's organisations claim that they do not agree that serious case reviews should be published in full, and I am sure that, as usual, the Minister will give us a litany of them before long. However, despite those claims, the overwhelming view among the child protection social workers at the sharp end whom I meet is that they would be in favour of the full publication of serious case reviews. Full publication of the reviews would be in their interests. More importantly, it would be in the interests of vulnerable children and families, so I was pleased to see the stance taken by the British Association of Social Workers, which was confirmed in The Times just last week. The association is the professional body for social workers, and it is headed—very skilfully, I might say—by a former colleague of the Minister in this House. He has committed BASW to campaigning for full publication of serious case reviews. The association represents the professionals who have to deal with these problems every day of the week at the sharp end. They now see the merits of exposing the weaknesses in serious case reviews, as opposed to suppressing them and keeping them secret, as has happened for too long. In The Times of 18 February, Hilton Dawson said:""It's vital that these reviews are transparent and can be seen in full, subject only to the need to preserve individual anonymity. These reviews are vital learning tools and it is imperative that they are made widely available."" There speaks the head of the professional body for social workers in this country. A former social worker himself, he incidentally had experience for a short time as a Labour Member of Parliament in this House. In addition, Community Care magazine, the bible of social workers—[Interruption.] That name causes some tittering from the Secretary of State, but the magazine is used very widely by the social worker work force. The magazine has also committed itself to the publication of serious case reviews, and has been waging a very forceful campaign to that end. I quote from a recent copy of Community Care:""Serious case reviews are usually published only in summary. This limits learning. Community Care recommends that reviews be published in full so that practitioners can use specific details to inform their practice according to their experiences and roles. There is some resistance but it is possible to publish without harming anonymity . . . Names can be removed and reviews could be collated and distributed centrally, thereby disassociating them from specific local authorities, teams and known cases. It would help if reviews focused on learning not recrimination."" I fully agree with that. The purpose is not a witch hunt or a blame game. It is to find out what went wrong, to learn from it and to make sure that it is less likely to happen in the future. We will never abolish cruelty to children outright. There are evil individuals in society who will always seek to do evil to vulnerable people, including children—incredibly. What we can do is to make it as difficult as possible for those people to be able to perpetrate their crimes, and to make sure that everybody is working together to ensure that those opportunities are as limited as possible for the perpetrators of such crimes.