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Health and Education

The answer we got yesterday was that the volume of material would have been too great. I can understand that in terms of school inspections as there are thousands of schools, but I find it more difficult to accept in respect of 150 local authorities and children's departments. Our role in this House must be to get the answers right, and we await with great interest the findings of the Laming inquiry, which is being carried out at the request of the Secretary of State. I want Members to bear in mind that the social workers in this country do a wonderful job. They are underpaid, and in many ways they are under-trained. Before the baby P case, a chief executive of a London authority gave evidence to the Committee and said that he no longer trusts the training of social workers in our country and would prefer, as far as possible, only to hire social workers from Australia, South Africa and Canada. That was a remarkable comment, but the Secretary of State intends to look at the training of social workers, and also how they are used and managed. Earlier, a Member talked about accountability, and I agree that accountability is important, but so is good management. The management of a large children's department is a very challenging job, and all of us know that merging social services with education has been difficult. There is a great tension in that. Some of us represent constituencies whose local authorities have an expert director of children's services who came from social services; others have someone who came from education. We must look at these matters very carefully. Although there have been criticisms of the director of Haringey social services, we should look a little more carefully at, and a little more kindly on, the stress of that job. We should sometimes be a little more objective and thoughtful about the comments we make about people before we know the full facts.