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One of the key proposals of Lord Laming's report into the death of Victoria Climbi' was the need for a national database of all children under the age of 16.

The aim of the proposal is to overcome the often antiquated and inadequate record keeping and the problems in sharing information between different agencies.

Most of the agencies criticised by Lord Laming have embarked on programmes to improve their collection, use and sharing of information. Initiatives under way include the Integrated Children's System (ICS) and e-social care records within social services; and the Integrated Care Record Service (ICRS) within the NHS. There is also the Connexions Customer Information System (CCIS); Identification, Referral and Tracking (IRT) system for local authorities; and the Police Information Technology Organisation (Pito) plus whatever the government decides to call its drive to re-engage children missing from education.

All have a simple common objective - to enable the different professionals who deal with vulnerable young children to gather data and share it in a manner that can be understood. But they make a bewildering array of protocols, IT systems and initiatives.

As the government finally issues its long-awaited guidance to local authorities on IRT of vulnerable children, concern is growing over the fragmented way in which data-sharing systems are being set up in the various agencies.

It is feared that a lack of communication between agencies, together with a wide disparity in the resources available to each, could create several different systems that at best simply duplicate each other's data and at worst create even greater barriers to inter-agency co-operation.

"It sounds barmy and confused and it is barmy and confused," says director of social services at Devon Council David Johnstone. "When you look at the data that will be contained within the ICRS and that within the e-social care record there must be at least an 80 per cent overlap."

Yet both systems are being set up virtually independently with very little cross-fertilisation between the two, he says.

An additional concern is whether the big multinational IT companies, currently eyeing up the money on offer to set up ICRS, can deliver software systems that are up to the task.

Recent high-profile failures within the public sector, such as the collapse of the Inland Revenue's administrative system and the fiasco over criminal record checks, have hardly engendered confidence.

"When you look at the record of these companies it is one of absolute failure," says Johnstone.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson Simon Hughes has also criticised the government's reliance on unproven IT for its information-sharing strategies.

"To rely on a combination of expensive IT, some of which is still on the drawing board, is to multiply the risks both to children and the exchequer," he said.

Such criticisms will be particularly galling for the government as they could seriously undermine its response to the Laming inquiry.

In an annex to the forthcoming children's green paper, leaked to Community Care, the government makes it clear that a cross-agency system for sharing information is essential to its drive to improve the protection of children at risk of social exclusion, neglect and abuse. In particular, it states that, once IRT and ICS are up and running, the child protection register will become superfluous and will gradually be phased out. None of this will be possible if the information-sharing systems are not in place or the computer software is not up to scratch.

This may be part of the reason why the government Children and Young People's Unit has released the local authority guidance on IRT in advance of the green paper. Originally scheduled for March, the guidance was postponed to allow the green paper to be published first. But with the green paper now delayed until September, the unit has decided to go ahead and publish anyway.

The guidance is based on the experiences of 10 trailblazing local authorities and lays out a detailed timetable of what is expected of each local authority as it progresses towards the March 2004 implementation date for IRT.

By the end of September, for instance, each local authority should have audited its current practice, including the identification of information-sharing protocols, assessment processes, strategies for securing the engagement of stakeholders and mechanisms for ensuring that children in need of support receive appropriate services at the earliest opportunity.


By next March, local authorities should have put in place protocols for information-sharing covering health and education services and social care. They should also have budgeted for extra IT and agreed standards for data collection, storage, retrieval and transfer.

The development of IRT is concurrent with a drive within the NHS to deliver ICRS. The difference is that while IRT is to be launched at the end of March 2004 on a budget of just £100,000 per council, ICRS has a total budget of £2.3bn and will not be in place until at least 2008.

This disparity, according to Johnstone, is "blighting" the data-sharing initiatives currently taking place within social care.

"Social care has a budget of around £25m. The NHS has £2.3bn. So which do you think is going to develop the more powerful IT system? And how am I going to convince my suppliers to invest in systems to be up and running by 2004 when ICRS could come along in 2008 and swallow everything up?"

Nor is there any guarantee that the NHS's record system will be any better than those already being used within social services departments, says Johnstone. Indeed, he believes that the NHS would do well to learn from the work that has already been done within social care.

"We have to get the different parties talking together now and we have to be treated as equal partners. The NHS is not taking sufficient regard of the level of development in integrated systems that has taken place in social care. We are at least a decade in advance of the NHS. The NHS has only just started talking about people-based information systems whereas we have had those systems in place since the beginning of the 1990s," he says.

There is a risk that the biggest drive ever seen to improve communication between the services involved in child protection could result in a different "integrated" system created by each agency and produced in splendid isolation.

- IRT: Information Sharing to Improve Services for Children from www.cypu.gov.uk

Alphabet soup of protection systems

• IRT - Identification, Referral and Tracking. A system to identify children at risk of social exclusion and flag up concerns to workers in all relevant agencies. To be up and running in every local authority by end of March 2004. Guidance has already been circulated.
• ICS - Integrated Children's System. A "conceptual framework" for the assessment, planning, intervention and review of children using social services. It is currently being piloted. Due for national introduction in 2005.
• ICRS - Integrated Care Records Service. Part of the NHS's national IT programme. Aims to integrate care records across all health and social care settings. To be implemented in three phases by the end of 2008.
• CCIS - Connexions Customer Information System. Brings together information about young people aged 13-19. By April 2004, all Connexions partnerships must provide a database of all 13- to 19-year-olds; details of their progress through learning; Connexions interventions, including joint working and referrals to other agencies; and contact with other agencies.
• Pito - Police Information Technology Organisation. Provides ITsystems for the criminal justice and court service. Currently, analysing child protection IT systems used by police forces. A decision is due in September on whether there should be a national system that takes into account the needs of social services.