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Health and Education

The right hon. Gentleman makes a different point. I am not asking dentists to tell parents that they should be private patients. The point that I am making is that dentists who offer NHS services should not take NHS access away from children if they are already registered with them. That is what will happen. If he is suggesting that we should see the number of children accessing NHS dentistry falling, with all the potential consequences for poor oral health, I would be surprised. That seems contrary to many of the things that I have heard him say in the past. A central and joint responsibility for both Secretaries of State—and also at the centre of our concerns—is children's health. The Department for Children, Schools and Families is pushing for a child health strategy to be published, but the Department of Health is letting that drift. That will not do. I hope that the Secretary of State for Health will now tell us when he will publish that child health strategy. Drift will not do either when it comes to the protection of vulnerable children. The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has responded to the latest tragic events in Haringey by announcing a review by Herbert Laming and the establishment of a task force. The Select Committee was told yesterday by Ofsted that three children a week die from abuse or neglect, which is a compelling case for urgent action. The joint area review of children's services in Haringey illustrated one of the important points with painful clarity:"““the reliance on national and local performance indicators is too great and does not enable understanding of the quality and effectiveness of service provision on the ground.””" When we respond, as we must, to the tragic baby P case, I hope that Ministers recognise—and perhaps use this afternoon to say—that constant structural change and a tick-box, top-down attitude will not do for protecting children. We have to move on from that. Like other hon. Members present this afternoon, I remember when the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), responded in the House to Lord Laming's report on the Victoria Climbié inquiry. He announced the creation of children's trusts, even though Lord Laming had not recommended them. That is an example of the Government offering a structural solution in a way that Lord Laming had not asked for. It did a disservice to Lord Laming's report from six years ago to offer a structural response to the problem that he identified. In his report, Lord Laming stated:"““I am convinced that it is not just structures that are the problem but the skills of the staff that work in them…The single most important change in the future must be the drawing of a clear line of accountability from top to bottom without doubt or ambiguity about who is responsible at every level for the welfare of vulnerable children””." How can it be that, six years later, it took weeks of public pressure in the same borough of Haringey for such accountability to be brought to bear, for the facts to be exposed and for those at the most senior levels to accept responsibility? We must all take responsibility for the fact that things that Lord Laming asked for, and which were understood early in 2003, were clearly not being put into effect culturally in the social work profession and in those services with responsibility for children. It is important that we make sure that that accountability is in place now, and that we recognise the need for improvements in skills. In 2006, in the absence of Government action in that respect, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), set up the Opposition's own commission to look into how to improve the training, recruitment, status and perception of social workers. Its report was published in 2007, and I urge the Government to look at some of the examples that are available, including work done on this side of the House. Instead of starting again from year zero, with another task force and another report that will take a great deal of time to prepare, they should think about how we can do things. I shall take one example from our report. It suggests that we should recognise that experienced social workers far too often go into hierarchies of management and are not retained on the front line. The report proposes that we should recognise the need for them to be retained in front-line care and that, to make that happen, we should create a structure of consultant social workers. I urge the Government not to push every issue off to a new review or task force. We need to think—by all means on a cross-party basis—about the things that need to be done now that we know can make a difference in the short term.