I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for Amendment 103. This raises important issues, which I welcome the opportunity to discuss. My exchanges with my noble friend Lord Lang of Monkton and the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, at Second Reading, followed the helpful report of the Select Committee on the Constitution. This report cogently raised the question of how the panel will handle information subject to legal or medical privilege. I explained at that time that the Bill does not prevent those whom the panel asks for information from asserting legal or medical privilege, where applicable. The panel would need to consider any such assertion against the need for the information. This amendment would add a specific provision for the Secretary of State to include, in her arrangements for the panel, information about the panel’s powers to secure the submission of material, subject to legal or medical privilege. I agree that it will be important for the Secretary of State to specify clearly to the panel the considerations which it should bring to bear in respect of the information which it requests. I agree that this should include specific reference not only to the question of legal and medical privilege but also to the way in which it handles this information , once requested and received. This is particularly important in respect of the information which is included in final published reports. The panel will be expected to handle all the information it receives with due care.
Much of the information which it gathers will be highly sensitive, including information which is privileged in the way the noble Lord has set out.
As far as the issues arising from the very sad case of Ellie Butler are concerned, the independence of the judiciary is a constitutional matter and enforcement provisions will not apply, although there is scope to appeal judges’ decisions. I do not believe, however, that it is essential to say anything more on the face of the Bill. It will not add anything to the powers of the panel to request this information, which are clearly set out in Clause 14. In view of this, I hope the noble Lord will feel reassured enough to withdraw his amendment.
Clause 11 requires the Secretary of State to establish a Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and is central to this discussion. I will speak at a little length on this topic and in doing so, I hope to address some of the concerns expressed by noble Lords during the Second Reading of the Bill. The Government first announced their intention to decentralise the serious case review process in December last year. The background to the decision to seek to legislate to introduce the panel was set out in response to Alan Woods’s review of local safeguarding children boards. Alan Woods suggested that the body which supports the centralised review process should be one that is independent of government and the key agencies and operates in a transparent and objective fashion. The intention is to establish the panel as an expert committee, defined by the Cabinet Office as a committee of independent specialists who are politically and operationally independent. The panel is clearly set up to make its own decisions. We have just discussed arrangements for the appointment of panel members.
The Secretary of State will also be responsible for removing members, if satisfied they were no longer able to fulfil their duties—for example, due to ill-health, or if they were adjudged to have behaved in a way incompatible with their role. The clause also makes provision for the Secretary of State to provide whatever assistance is required to enable the panel to carry out its functions, including staff, facilities or other assistance. The Secretary of State may also pay remuneration of expenses to the chair and members of the panel. This will be commensurate with the level of time and commitment required. The clause further provides that the Secretary of State may make further arrangements to support the functioning of the panel, including, for example, the production of an annual report. This will serve to enhance the transparency of proceedings and in addition—although this is not specified in the Bill—I am able to say that the panel will be free to offer advice to the Secretary of State on such matters as it sees fit, and to make any such advice public.
The establishment of a strong, independently-operating national panel is an essential component, along with the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, in taking forward the Government’s plans to develop a better understanding of the factors which give rise to serious cases, in order to inform policy and practice nationally, and to support local agencies in improving the quality of the services that they provide to vulnerable children and families.
7.30 pm
Moving on to Clause 12, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, raised an important issue in his Amendment 104 concerning the time it takes for national reviews into serious safeguarding cases involving children to be produced and the reports to be made public. I recognise that the amendment seeks to speed up the process by formally setting a statutory time limit in which a report must be produced, and I welcome his thoughtful comments about the need for this. Statutory guidance states that local safeguarding children boards should aim for completion of serious case reviews within six months and currently the average time is 15 months to publication. In most cases this is far too long and recommendations made after the event tend to have little impact on practice improvement. It is important to note, however, that in some cases there might be potential prejudice to related court proceedings, so some delay may be unavoidable.
We think that six months to report would be adequate in many cases, but what is important is that the reviews are proportionate, timely and not driven by arbitrary timescales. Indeed, while some will tend to take less than six months to produce, others will necessarily take longer for reasons such as the one I have already stated. An important aspect of the panel’s work is to help to resolve long-term issues of quality, and importantly, timeliness of reviews and reports. As Clause 12 states:
“Where the Panel arrange for a case to be reviewed under their supervision,”
it will be the panel’s responsibility to ensure that the reviewer provides,
“a report on the outcome of the review”,
and makes “satisfactory progress”. The panel will be able to intervene if it believes that the reviewer is not making satisfactory progress.
The national panel should have autonomy to use its judgment about what constitutes a reasonable length of time for a review to be produced, although we intend to provide guidance that will aid it in making its decision in this regard. I have already made comments
about our thoughts on the time that it is taking currently. I can assure the noble Lord that we will take particular care to reflect on the points raised in this debate. However, as I have explained, there are risks in placing a specific limitation in the Bill, and in view of that I hope that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.