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Safeguarding Children

My Lords, I speak as a Haringey parent and without the expertise shown by others in our debate. From what I have been hearing, in Haringey there is a tremendous amount of concern about what people want to feed into an inquiry in this area, which obviously this more limited inquiry cannot embrace. Indeed, we have heard about the restrictions on it. My noble friend Lady Sharp asked the Minister about a full public inquiry, but I do not think that the Minister answered the point. Could she elaborate on it, because it seems that there are questions not only about this specific case—one in which a number of issues that people are talking about locally need to be explored—but also about several other instances that were brought to the attention of the leader of the council but on which no action was taken? For those reasons if for no others, I think that there is a tremendous loss of confidence in Haringey in this area of social services provision, which would definitely benefit from a full public inquiry.