My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 103 and 104. Amendment 103 seeks clarification from the Minister on the powers of the new Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel to require information in relation to its functions. In Clause 14 a,
“person or body to whom a request … is made must comply with the request”,
without, apparently, any exemption.
The report of this House’s Constitution Committee published on 13 June pointed out that:
“This is a broad obligation … and could possibly include information of an incriminatory nature”.
As far as I can see, there is no explicit exemption for material that would ordinarily be the subject of either legal or medical privilege. I can see that a broad exemption of that kind could hamstring the panel in its difficult work. and I will say a bit more about that in relation to a particular case. However, I do not think that we should wait until a case of this kind arises and then find that we are not sure what the rules really are. That is why I support the Constitution Committee’s request for greater clarification.
To illustrate my concerns, let me cite a recent case that could be said to raise this issue if the new review panel was in existence. We have already mentioned today the recent case where Mrs Justice Hogg was criticised by a case review for her decision to take Ellie Butler away from her grandparents and return her to her parents where her father beat her to death 11 months later. My understanding—the Minister may be able to correct me if I have this wrong—is that the judiciary does not consider that the judge can be required to explain her actions to a review panel. In particular, this would make it difficult to consider the system implications of whether a judge should have been able to set aside the judgment of the local authority social workers who had been protecting Ellie and appoint new private social workers to make a different assessment of the protection she required, which sadly resulted in her being returned to her parents with catastrophic results.
This is a systems issue about how the judiciary works. I can see that that could involve incriminatory evidence. Let me reassure the Minister that I am not
trying to discuss this case but I am using it to indicate that there may be confusion in the wording regarding the panel’s ability to request information when people may or may not conform for reasons of incrimination. I hope that the Minister can help us with this because we need greater clarity about whether there are any exemptions to a request for information by the panel and the nature of those exemptions.
Amendment 104 is an attempt to introduce time limits into the production of review panel reports. This panel will be considering serious systems matters which are referred to it. It is important that we complete these reviews quickly so that people can learn from mistakes. We do not want very long and drawn-out reviews that hold up learning. We need some kind of time limit here. I am not particularly wedded to the six-month time limit that I put in just to probe the issue, but it would be worth the department and the Minister considering the insertion of time limits for the work of these review panels. I beg to move.