I just want to register something with the Minister. I am grateful for what he had to say, but the whole issue of trying to make progress in this area is littered with attempts at reviewing the information that is available on making the world a better place. As the noble Lord opposite has reminded us, we have to go back 40 years for the first really serious child abuse scandal, involving Maria Colwell, which came to light. Since then it has been 40 years of agencies, in case after bad case, failing to share information that would have saved a child’s life. As I said, 12 years ago the noble Lord, Lord Laming, said his piece on one of those cases and made it very clear that a common database was required, with a linked identifier.
It is no good the Department for Education crawling all over the ground again and finding 27 reasons why we should not do anything. We need some action.
There is plenty of evidence about why a common identifier would make things a lot safer for children. They are pretty much the same arguments that you would use in relation to adults; they are not fundamentally different. The Government and the Opposition Front Bench need to understand what is going on around the country—it is happening in Birmingham—where the agencies are coming together in multiagency safeguarding hubs. But when they come together, they find that their data systems cannot talk to each other, even if they are in the same room, because there is no easy linkage between the different databases.
If we wish to make kids safe, we have to progress this issue quickly. Frankly, I am not wildly reassured by a DfE review by the end of this year in an area that is littered with information about the need to make progress. It is not just me; I think that many of those hard-working professionals I have talked about cannot see why the government bureaucracy—whoever is in government—cannot make some progress in this area. Having got that off my chest, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.