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Safeguarding Children

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former social worker, a previous director of social services and the deputy chair of CAFCASS, an organisation that employs around 2,000 social workers. I should like to ask several questions that are inter-related to what previous speakers have asked. First, how will we gather through the new review being undertaken by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, a different understanding of the matrix in which social workers function? They have to be responsive to local communities and to expectations of communities, which often press for children to remain at home, and they are continually criticised for removing children inappropriately—as against the pressure when something goes wrong and the media immediately hound social workers for not removing children. How is the social worker doing her job to marry that matrix of expectation with the complex demands of bureaucracy—there has to be some bureaucracy; records must be kept and information gathered so that we know how many children are of concern and where they are in order to make a comprehensive assessment? This is a workforce that for some time has been bowed by poor pay, the undermining of its professional standing in terms of decision-making, and the sheer horror of worrying about what happens to clients. That is because the person who will suffer emotionally and has to face the press as a result of this case is the social worker responsible for the child. Faced with an extraordinarily complicated problem, how is my noble friend Lord Laming going to put aside the issues surrounding structures and get to the questions I have been asking recently? These include how to improve practice, the standing of the worker within the family so that advice is acted upon, and ensuring that the nation can be confident about the band of workers in whose hands the welfare of these vulnerable children is placed?