4. What action has the Welsh Government taken to improve child safeguarding in Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire? OQ58036

I thank the Member for that question. The Welsh Government works closely with all regional safeguarding boards and local authorities to strengthen and improve safeguarding practice across Wales. New all-Wales safeguarding procedures have been developed with those boards, to ensure services better identify and implement learning.

First Minister, 20 years have now passed since the tragic murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié at the hands of her great aunt and partner in London. The case highlighted the failings of different Government agencies that failed to address the persistent abuse that she was suffering at the hands of her family. Whilst this murder did not take place in Wales, the report undertaken by Lord Laming in 2001 set out a number of recommendations as to how best reduce the chances of such horrific incidents happening again. Only last year, we saw the appalling murder of five-year-old Logan Mwangi at the hands of his mother and stepfather in Bridgend. Recently, I spoke to constituents who expressed their concerns that social services were not being transparent or accountable in the way that they were dealing with safeguarding matters. Indeed, Lord Laming's review highlighted that there was too much, and I quote, 

'organisational confusion and "buck passing"...to believe that the safety of a child can be achieved simply through issuing more guidance.'

First Minister, what measures are in place to ensure that these comments are listened to, and, a generation on, that cultures have changed? Diolch.

I thank Sam Kurtz for that important supplementary question. Victoria Climbié was just itself one more in a long line of significant child protection investigations. The foundational one in modern times was into the death of Maria Colwell back in 1974, and there's a very strong contrast between what the Colwell inquiry found and what the Climbié inquiry found. In the Colwell case, the inquiry found that that child's death was partly caused because every agency with whom she came into contact regarded itself as responsible for her welfare and didn't share information with other bodies; Climbié found almost exactly the opposite. In that case, any organisation onto whose desk the Victoria Climbié case arrived acted, Lord Laming said, as fast as it could to get that case off its desk and into the hands of another organisation. Our own Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 was very much designed to try to counteract that way of providing services for children, to make sure that children's services worked with others to help ensure the safety of children wherever they were in Wales.

The Member's original question asked me about Carmarthen West. When I visited Carmarthenshire social services some time ago, I was genuinely impressed by the way in which those services were organised to ensure that, for example, education and social services were part of a single directorate and worked together to make sure that children's interests were promoted and their safety promoted as well by those services working together. So, I think there are good examples of that happening across Wales. We need to make sure that that is consistently delivered. We have a series of reports that have helped us with that in more recent times, including the public law working group report. I was able to meet with the president of the family division only a couple of weeks ago, together with Judge Francis, the leading family court judge for Wales, to discuss a series of these matters. We will go on taking action at that Welsh Government level, but also working with our partners at the local authority level and at the regional partnership boards as well, all of whom have a part to play in making sure that the important points made by Mr Kurtz are addressed in the delivery of services in Wales.

Good afternoon, First Minister. Thank you to Sam for raising this issue. I'm very pleased to see the issues of social care for children being discussed here. I am very concerned, First Minister, about the situation in children's services in our local authorities. What support is the Government providing to local authorities, such as Pembrokeshire, to ensure that services are on a robust footing, and what is available to provide support for those people who work so hard on behalf of our children? Thank you very much.

Thank you very much to Jane Dodds. We provide support to local authorities in a number of ways. We have provided more funding to them during the pandemic to help them to cope with that situation. I referred in my original answer to Sam Kurtz to the new guidance we have drawn up to help people in front-line services with the hard work that they're undertaking. We're working currently with our universities to see if there's more that we can do to draw in more people to the training courses that we have here in Wales to create a workforce for the future. So, I agree with what Jane Dodds said. It is a difficult area, and people on the front line are working so hard to work with other people to provide support and help to them. There are a number of possibilities where we can work together to improve the situation that's facing them currently.