Prime Minister's question asked in the House of Commons, by Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Conservative). It was answered on Wednesday, 20 January 2010 on behalf of the Prime Minister.

Engagements

Question: I am going to come on to the issue of whether we should publish the report in full, because I believe that we should, but if the Prime Minister wants to learn the lessons, clearly one of the most important lessons to learn is why so much went wrong for so long before we intervened. If we look at the catalogue of errors, we see that seven children died between 2004 and 2009. There were five serious case reviews––one did not appear for three years––and, of course, in every case only a summary was published. In 2007, more than two years ago, a report talked about serious failures in Doncaster social services, yet it took more than a year and the deaths of five more children, including three from abuse, before the Government took over in 2009. Does not that alone demonstrate that serious case reviews are not leading to the correct action being taken?

Answer: Lord Laming looked at this last year and made recommendations which are being adopted. He also recommended that child safeguarding boards had to have independent chairmen, and that is what has happened in Doncaster. As far as the serious case review itself is concerned, I think we have to wait until we see the findings of that review. I would not want to prejudge that. The reason why the whole review is not to be published is that we wish to protect the identity and names of the children as much as anything else. We have had this argument before. The executive summary is published, which allows us to draw conclusions. The problem in Doncaster, if I may say so, is that there were many actions taken, but they were the wrong actions. They were not actions designed to prove that we had children of violence who had to be separated from parents of violence at an early time. That, I believe, will come out in the serious case review summary, which will be published soon. I think the Conservatives should listen to some of the voluntary organisations on this matter, and to Lord Laming himself, and wait for the publication of the evidence. Then let us by all means have the debate that is necessary on what further measures we can take. We know that Doncaster had to be intervened upon, and we know also that a serious case review will reveal what happened.

Secondary information