News

The pan-London child protection committee will enable staff to track children as they move within the capital, but how much standardisation is desirable, asks Lauren Revans.

The face of child protection in London was given a make-over last week, with the publication of draft all-London child protection procedures and the establishment of a pan-London child protection committee (News, page 8, 11 July).

The need for change, already highlighted by an audit of London’s existing 32 area child protection committees, was crystallised by evidence from professionals to the Victoria Climbié inquiry.

The clear message from the audit was one of inconsistency in child protection practice between boroughs. The clear message from the inquiry was one of procedures routinely not being followed, communication between agencies and between boroughs breaking down, different agencies’ roles not being understood, and ACPCs not working effectively.

The new London-wide approach to child protection is, then, an attempt by the various agencies involved to tackle these problems and inconsistencies head on.

Seen by most as a “big step forward”, in many ways the idea has been in the public arena for some time in the Department of Health guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children.

The guidance states: “Where boundaries between local authorities, the health service and the police are not coterminous, there can be problems for some member agencies in having to work to different procedures and protocols according to the area involved, or in having to participate in several ACPCs.

“It may be helpful in these circumstances for an ACPC to cover an area that includes more than one local authority area, or for adjoining ACPCs to collaborate as far as possible on establishing common procedures and protocols for inter-agency training.”

Although individual ACPCs will continue to exist at local level, the pan-London committee will provide a strategic overview and “ensure consistency” between ACPCs in terms of their roles and functions. It will also look at quality assurance and learning development (see panel).

The ACPCs’ locally negotiated procedures will be replaced by the new all-London procedures once they are published in final draft form in October, although these will not be officially finalised until Lord Laming publishes his report on the Victoria Climbié Inquiry at the end of the year. Practice guidance will continue to be produced locally until planned work on standardised guidance on some of the key issues has been completed.

Hannah Miller, director of social services at Croydon Council and children’s lead for the Greater London Association of Directors of Social Services, played a key role in the development of the London-wide procedures and was a member of the Metropolitan Police’s multi-agency child protection steering group that pre-dated the new committee.

Miller believes that as the draft procedures are based on accepted best practice and on information and material supplied by the very agencies who will use them, it is essential they are not tinkered with locally once they have been finalised.

“If you start doctoring them, you immediately start watering down the effect of having a standardised document,” she warns.

Miller cites the mobility of London’s population as a major factor behind this attempt to standardise child protection procedures across the capital. “The key thing is that London boroughs are static entities, but the families and children we work with are not,” Miller says. “They are constantly moving between boroughs, particularly asylum seeking families and homeless families in bed & breakfasts.

“We want the certainty that wherever a child turns up with child protection issues, everybody knows there is one clear set of procedures that we all work to.”

Mobility of staff, according to Miller, is another key factor behind the all-London procedures. This is particularly pertinent for social services departments given that many are suffering high turnover rates and are having to rely on agency staff who may be working in more than one borough at any one time.

It is also relevant for other professionals, such as health visitors and hospital staff, whose catchment areas may cut across borough boundaries. As director of Haringey social services department Anne Bristow says: “The North Middlesex Hospital serves us and Enfield, and although our basic procedures are the same, the detail is different. We are asking staff to read two sets of procedures.” This problem has been exacerbated by last year’s centralisation of the formerly borough-based police child protection units and the switch in April from a district-based to a London-wide probation service.

As a result, it is no longer feasible to expect staff working in these agencies to familiarise themselves with a set of child protection procedures that is broken down into 32  different child protection manuals.

“As some of the key partners are London-wide, we are a sensible grouping,” Bristow says.

“Working Together had always foreseen that we would develop a set of local procedures. All we are doing here is redefining what we mean by local. I can see it would work for other areas too, but whether it would work for all I don’t know.”

As far as detective chief inspector Mick Hopwood is concerned, regional ACPCs and procedures would certainly make sense in West Yorkshire, where he heads the police child protection unit and sits on the county’s five local ACPCs.

“I have got five sets of procedures and five business plans, and they are all very similar,” Hopwood says. “A county-wide basis is sufficiently tight to maintain the local focus, whereas a nationwide child protection committee would lack local focus and become even more bureaucratic than the current system.”

Izzy Atkinson, a senior practitioner for Peterborough Council’s intake and assessment team and a member of Peterborough ACPC’s sub-groups on communication and sexual exploitation, agrees it is vital that responses to local needs are not lost in any move to standard procedures.

“There are things happening in Peterborough that might not be happening in Chelsea,” Atkinson says. “We all need to have a hymn sheet, but we need to be able to write some of the music ourselves.”

But, for Norfolk’s director of social services, David Wright, the key is not so much whether procedures are local, regional, or national, but whether the agencies involved actually adhere to them and work together effectively.

“The critical issue is to ensure that all agencies who are signatories abide by the procedures and that their performance is measured by their own inspectorate,” he says.

To aid this compliance and improve joint-working, the Met has designed an interactive multi-agency training programme, known as Hydra, to be piloted in Tower Hamlets, Harrow and Croydon.

According to the Met’s child protection lead, deputy assistant commissioner Carole Howlett, the programme immerses managers from different agencies for a day and a half into a “Victoria Climbié-type scenario” where they have to make decisions. They are then brought together to discuss those decisions and their possible impact. The initiative, which has been welcomed, will then be rolled out to the rest of London.

It is without doubt, then, that the public spotlight on the collective failure of agencies to prevent the death of Victoria Climbié over two years ago has acted as a catalyst for change for the capital’s child protection system. And, as Bristow puts it: “The opportunity has been seized.”

Now it just remains to be seen whether the new procedures can achieve better practice on the ground and if the new high profile afforded to child protection in London can be sustained.

Committee’s tasks

The new all-London child protection committee is intended to secure consistency in the handling of child protection issues by all agencies, provide strategic leadership, disseminate and ensure adoption of best practice, and lead the development of protocols for the sharing of information. It will also lead the development of a training strategy and communication strategy, influence and inform the development of policy, and identify and promote changes to legislation.