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Child Protection

I do not think I can allow another intervention. We must also learn from experience and from all these dreadful cases. I urge us to listen to the outside experts; we are not the experts here. I want to secure a consensus, and we might be able to get it from the people who know about this stuff. Politicians do not really know about it; we have to be judged by the professionals. When they say that serious case reviews should be published, I will then be convinced, but I am not convinced at the moment. We also need the systematic collection of records and data. It is so easy to say that it is all red tape and to cite the figure of 80 per cent. Social work and monitoring children and families is a highly complex task. It needs to be done with a human touch, with good management and with the data, which must be scrupulously kept and scrupulously checked. In every serious case review that I have looked at, I have found that so often things go wrong when management decisions are made on the basis of data that do not exist.