Child Safeguarding

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 17 May 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:02, 17 May 2022

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.