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Child Protection

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and ICS, well used, and ContactPoint are both valuable ways of keeping children safe. Strangely, ContactPoint was omitted from the Opposition's motion. They omitted any mention of their intention to abolish it. It was developed in response to a key recommendation of Lord Laming and the Climbié inquiry. We all know that no information-sharing system can, in and of itself, keep children safe, but we believe that ContactPoint will make a real difference. It will allow those who work with children to intervene earlier to prevent problems from escalating and ensure that no child slips through the net of support, and it will free up social workers to spend more time with vulnerable children. The idea of having a database that has only the vulnerable children on it shows a complete lack of understanding of the reality of child protection in our country. The Opposition disagree with what I have just said. They say that ContactPoint will increase the risk of vulnerable children being abused. The Leader of the Opposition regularly says that it is a waste of taxpayers' money and that they would scrap it, on top of the £300 million of cuts to children's services that they have promised to make in the coming year. The Opposition are out of step not only with Lord Laming's recommendation, but with the NSPCC, Action for Children, the British Association of Social Workers, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, the Local Government Association, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Children's Inter-Agency Group, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Youth Justice Board, the disabled children's charity KIDS, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, the Royal College of Nursing, and the Royal College of General Practitioners—yes, the GPs, too. All those experts support ContactPoint and are working with us to ensure its successful roll-out in the summer because they know that it is important for keeping children safe. Again, I urge Opposition Front Benchers to reconsider and tell the Leader of the Opposition that he proposes a spending cut too far. Mr. Martin Narey, the chief executive of Barnardo's, stated:"““Michael Gove has said that a Conservative government would scrap ContactPoint, the Government's children's database… But I would ask Mr. Gove to think long and hard about whether or not Barnardo's, which works with more than 100,000 of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children in Britain, would support ContactPoint if we thought it would, as Mr. Gove suggests, increase the risk of children being abused. We believe the contrary to be true.””" The Opposition are out on a limb and it is time they stopped digging.