Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Child Protection

Once again it is in the news that massive court delays, which will get worse, are placing abused children at risk and vulnerable families at risk from a wrong decision. When interviewed, representatives from the legal profession, social workers and Cafcas blame each other for then chaos. Now they have a common enemy, government cuts.

I have been advocating change since the beginning of 2009. I even received a very nice letter from Gordon Brown inviting me to submit evidence to one of Labour’s many Task Forces. Whatever little has happened does not include any of my proposals. It is clear that soon I will have to have another go.

Every report of failure and delay confirms my conviction that the working relationship between social workers, adversarial courts, lawyers and Cafcas is systemically dysfunctional and cannot ever work. I propose an end to the responsibility of social workers as the engine of inquiry into cases where potential risk is flagged up, an end to the adversarial family courts, an end to battling lawyers and closing down of Cafcas.

All this to be replaced with a Child Welfare Commission, with a Commissioner in every district with the power of a judge presiding over an inquisitorial court employing its own investigating officers, fully trained to deal with the diversity of challenge in identifying children at risk and families in need of support. Robust with the dodgy but family friendly with the frail and the frightened this logical new system would be up to date and fitted to a civilised country in the twenty first century. It would also save a good deal of money.

The present shambles is an expensive failure and an affront to the values we declare to hold dear.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 10:43 am and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.