I welcome the Minister for Children and Young People, Aileen Campbell; Mr Raines; Ms Bruton; and Ms Happer. We will take evidence in our inquiry into child sexual exploitation. I invite the minister and Annette Bruton to make short opening statements. We will then proceed to questions.
Thank you, convener. I will provide an update on the three areas of work that Barnardo’s identified and on how we have been taking those forward with Barnardo’s and our other stakeholders.
Before we hear Annette Bruton’s opening statement, I welcome Dr Sarah Nelson, who is the adviser to the committee. I should have done that earlier.
The Care Inspectorate welcomes the opportunity to discuss this matter with the committee. In my opening statement, I will briefly set the context for the committee. Our interest in the issue relates to the duties that are placed on us to inspect and regulate care services across Scotland, which includes care services for children and young people. Key to that are the strategic inspections of services for children, to which the minister referred. The strategic inspections focus not only on the broad spectrum of children’s needs, but on vulnerable children, and they follow on from two rounds of child protection inspections, which have been in place since 2005.
Thank you. I reiterate that we should optimise this morning’s session with the minister. I therefore appeal for brevity in both questions and answers.
I will start and will leave Annette Bruton to talk about the work that she has commissioned from CELCIS. Of course, we are pleased that the committee is looking into this very important issue. Any work that we do must be complementary and must not duplicate the work that you are doing in raising awareness of the issue. The working group that I announced at the end of January was very much designed to be complementary and to look at areas and issues that the committee is not necessarily looking at.
I am sorry to interrupt, but can you give an example of an area in which you think that there is complementarity and no overlap?
We want to ensure that the research on child sexual exploitation is fully looked at and investigated. We want the working group to look into that—it is not something that the committee was as geared up to do—and we want to ensure that we liaise with other parts of the UK on best practice and other areas. The working group met for the first time last week, and there is an offer for you to engage with the clerks of the working group to ensure that the work is truly complementary and does not duplicate any of your findings. When we look at it as a whole, it is good that there are different groups—the committee within the Parliament and our working group, which is looking specifically at areas that we have set out in its terms of reference—ensuring that the issue is properly investigated and that we can move forward with clearly identified areas of best practice so that we can help children who may experience childhood sexual exploitation.
Ms Bruton, three months seems a very short time for a research project into such a major issue to come to any conclusions or recommendations.
Indeed, convener. The research project had a specific purpose, which was to inform our thinking about our future inspection methodology. The purpose was not to produce a report that would be the definitive, final research on the sexual exploitation of children. We particularly wanted to focus on what was known at this point about the sexual exploitation of children who are in care or vulnerable.
Forgive me, but could there have been more or better communication about what contribution that internal inquiry could make to the committee’s inquiry?
It was certainly never our intention to keep information from the committee, but we did the research as independent, first-hand regulators who need to establish how they will carry out their methodology and act independently to inform the public and the Parliament about their work.
Mr Raines, do you have anything to add?
My team was aware of the research that was commissioned. We liaise closely with the Care Inspectorate, not least in the development of the inspection cycle, and it seems to us entirely appropriate that the Care Inspectorate would commission whatever work it felt to be necessary to inform that inspection. Members of the committee will be aware that that inspection cycle has already kicked off, so there is an element of urgency about carrying forward whatever work is necessary to inform that.
Minister, you said in your speech at the child protection and child sexual exploitation conference that we had no reason to assume that the risks that were so visible in England were not also present in Scotland. The national action plan in England has highlighted a number of examples of good practice. Does the Scottish Government plan to use or pilot any of them in Scotland? If so, which ones?
The working group will consider the recommendations from the work that is being done elsewhere in the UK and check their applicability for the Scottish context. It might recommend that we use toolkits or some other things from that continuing work. The group will report to me at the end of this year, and we will be working throughout the year to ensure that it can consider everything that may be applicable to tackling child sexual exploitation in Scotland.
Good morning, minister. In your speech at the conference in January, you indicated that the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill, which was introduced in the Parliament a couple of weeks ago, will enshrine the GIRFEC approach. You touched on that in your introductory remarks. How will it address child sexual exploitation?
The bill will put the key elements of GIRFEC in statute. That is about placing the child at the centre of how services are designed and delivering services around them. It will ensure that the child’s wellbeing is paramount; ensuring that children are not sexually exploited will very much be part of that. The approach will enable services to work much more collaboratively around the child and will ensure much more coherence in how services are delivered for the child.
When I was a councillor, officers drummed it into us that we are all corporate parents. That certainly applies to elected members at all levels—in councils or Parliament. I am pleased to hear what the minister said about that. Joint working is always a plus.
We fund and support Who Cares? Scotland to reinforce the message that everyone has a responsibility as a corporate parent. Who Cares? delivers much of the training for that, including training that is delivered by young care leavers. That is an important part of our work.
We are concentrating on why child exploitation happens and on ensuring that children are protected from child exploitation. We need also to concentrate on who perpetrates it. Will you give me some idea about how you are working with the police to break these chains and get some successful prosecutions for child exploitation?
We inspect services to protect children using a joint inspection method that includes police officers. I will ask Helen Happer to give the committee some detail about how we do that. When we inspect, we essentially consider how effectively services are delivering on prevention, as well as dealing with the aftermath of sexual exploitation. We look at what data local authorities, the police and health services hold and how they use that data, particularly as part of a preventive strategy. Ms Happer can say a bit more about our new methodology.
When we are talking about the involvement of the police in dealing with the whole issue of child sexual exploitation and about sharing information on children who might be vulnerable, it is important to think about the information that the police might hold at a much earlier stage, before prosecution. In the six years of child protection inspections, a multi-agency approach has been adopted, and we have found that the police have an important role in early information sharing and intelligence gathering—in picking up information and sharing it with other partners to ensure that any concerns about children are fully explored at an early stage. That has improved over the past few years.
Do data protection rules not allow the police to, for example, inform a care home that it should be wary of certain individuals approaching the establishment or children in the establishment?
That is a good question. There should be no impediment to data sharing. Child protection issues always trump any other data sharing considerations so, when a child’s safety is at risk, we do not expect data to be held back for data protection reasons. That should pertain to teachers, social workers, the police and health workers. As Ms Happer says, the situation has improved during the past six to seven years, but there is still some way to go, and we are working in our policies and inspections on a common understanding among practitioners about the urgency of sharing data.
The committee might want to know that the Information Commissioner’s Office recently issued a statement about the sharing of data when a child’s wellbeing is at risk. That statement makes it absolutely clear that the Data Protection Act 1998 should not be a barrier to sharing concerns about anything that might put at risk a child’s wellbeing. We can certainly make a copy of that statement available to the committee if it will help with the question.
I alert the committee to the letter that was sent and how that was facilitated by the GIRFEC programme board. That might go back to Angus MacDonald’s question about the ways in which the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill will help us to consider the issue. The GIRFEC programme board is gearing up for GIRFEC becoming part of the legislation, and the programme board’s work led to the information commissioner issuing the letter. As Phil Raines said, Malcolm Graham is on the working group, so there are close working links with Police Scotland and we have opportunities to look properly at the issue and work collaboratively with the new police structures.
Are you working with, for example, the Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs on developing local protocols so that areas that have the problem have multi-agency working groups to break perpetrator networks?
Collaborative work is key to all this and there are no artificial silos in the Government for those who are tackling the issues. The Government is engaging and working with the police, local authorities and health colleagues to flag up the data as early as we can and to ensure that we look at the preventative angle and that people are alert to the signs, so that we can tackle the problem more effectively. There is always work to do on getting to the nitty-gritty of who is committing these atrocious crimes.
You mentioned how applicable the national plan in England is to the Scottish context. Could anything in the national plan in England tie into what my colleague Maureen Watt just asked about? Is there any practice that you hope to adapt to the Scottish context?
The working group will look at the action plan to ensure that, if good practice is flagged up, it can be adapted for a Scottish context. I mentioned the tools from the University of Bedfordshire, which we are piloting in some local authorities in Scotland. That is an example of us taking something that is good and, from the get-go, getting it out in a Scottish context to refine it and ensure that we can roll it out appropriately throughout the country.
I hear what you say about data sharing. It is good to hear that information will be shared with Police Scotland and that there will be a multi-agency approach. The committee is committed to shining a light into every dark corner, which requires thinking outside the box. Are there any new initiatives? For example, are we tracking abusive people who might be hanging around children’s homes, which is a very visible activity? I know that we must protect individuals and watch how we do that. Are we thinking about doing things in a totally different way?
I will start by giving some examples of the kind of practice that we are picking up in our inspections. In inspections, one thing that we look to see is that national policy is being implemented. We also look at whether people are coming up with solutions locally that are helping to tackle the problem. For example, in Aberdeen City Council—which I know well, because I worked there until last year—there is a daily meeting of the multi-agency group at a level that is close enough to know what is going on with individual children but senior enough to make decisions. Every day, individual children are discussed—it might be a child in a care home who has disappeared overnight or two girls at separate schools who are engaged in the same behaviour.
One thing that we are doing that is not being done anywhere else in the country and which is in the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill is ensuring that every child and young person up to the age of 18 has a named person whose job it is to pick up on all the clues and signs that different professionals might pick up on but have no way of putting together. In due course, that person will be in a position to pick up on the signs of child sexual exploitation and will—hopefully—be able to pull together the right support. The bill will ensure that every vulnerable child and young person has one document that brings together all the things that are needed to support that child. That is not happening elsewhere in the UK.
For clarification, are you saying that every child will have a document that will follow them, or will that apply only to children who are deemed to be at risk? You have just put it on the record that it will be every child.
Every child and young person will have a named person and every child for whom it is deemed necessary will have a child’s plan. Those are two separate things. All vulnerable children and young people will have a child’s plan.
How will children be aware that they have a named person? How will that named person be identified to the child?
That comes within the territory of the bill. It provides that, until the child is five, health boards will have a responsibility to provide a named person, who will presumably be a health visitor.
Who checks the named person?
What do you mean by “checks”?
Who checks whether the named person is qualified? Who nominates the named person?
As Phil Raines has said, when the child is in their earliest years, the universal service is the health service. That is why the health board is responsible for providing the named person in the most formative years of a child’s life. The next universal service is education, to which there will be a handover.
I am sorry, but I did not get an answer to my question about how the child will be able to identify who the named person is. There might be no problem while the health board has responsibility, which is until the child reaches the age of five, because health visitors and various others will liaise quite closely with the family.
Such issues will be part of the implementation of the bill. For children up to the age of five, the responsibility will lie with the health board to ensure that children and families are aware of who their named person is. For children from the age of five upwards, the responsibility will lie with the local authority, principally through education services. In the regulations and guidance that will accompany the bill, we will clearly set out what the expectations are on the relevant people on whom such duties are placed. The question is important, and it is important that those things are in place when the bill is implemented.
A core part of the methodology for our joint inspections of children’s services will be to explore the territory around the named person, to ensure that named people understand what their responsibilities are and to ensure that, at a strategic level, services are preparing and equipping named people to understand their responsibilities and are ensuring that people have the tools to take things forward.
Convener, I am sorry to extend this. Ms Happer indicated—rightly—that children will go to an individual in whom they have confidence. How will that individual be able to link to the named person? We need a joined-up approach to protecting children, no matter what age they are. A child might build up confidence in an adult or other individual and confide in that individual by talking about fears, concerns and experiences. Perhaps Mr Raines could elaborate on how, under the bill, the person in whom the child confides will be able to contact the named person. I see that some issues could arise with the future operation of the process.
In Scotland we have always had the position that children may speak to anybody about things that concern them. They may speak to parents, friends or professionals whom they are in touch with—youth workers and so on. We know that in Scotland services have a high level of alertness about how to protect children, and that has got better—we will say that in our forthcoming publication. It is not new that children may speak to somebody in any service, which then needs to take action to ensure that children get the help that they want.
I am conscious that we are somewhat constrained by time. However, the process is a particularly important aspect; it is certainly new. I ask Anne McTaggart to be brief.
It would be remiss of me to go further without asking the following question. You spoke about the new bill providing support until the age of 25. What funding will go along with that—or will something be dropped at the other end? Obviously, funding will be needed, because that is not how things currently operate.
The financial memorandum that accompanies the bill will alert members to the proposal’s financial implications. That has all been looked at. A lot of people responded to the consultation on whether the commitment on support until the age of 25 needed to be strengthened. There is more information in the consultation response analysis that we published a couple of months ago. We outlined the proposals when we published the bill a couple of weeks ago.
Minister, you said that every child and young person will have a named person. It would be highly remiss of me not to ask whether quotas have been set as to how many people that named person will oversee? In my last job in social work, some people dealt with up to 70 cases each, so the named person may well have up to 70 young people under their jurisdiction.
As Phil Raines said earlier, a process of guidance and regulation will accompany the bill. As we have said, the idea about the named person is to try to cut through a lot of the bureaucracy to ensure that the child truly is at the centre of the services that are delivered and that someone has oversight of a child who has a particular vulnerability. When the bill is presented to Parliament, there will be an opportunity to ensure that we get the guidance and regulation absolutely right. It is not a tick-box exercise; we want to ensure that the named person has a meaningful impact on a child’s life.
I appreciate that and look forward to seeing the financial memorandum that will accompany the bill. This is extremely important and the theory is all good and well, but I am not sure that it is happening in practice.
That is a good point.
Having listened to all of this, I hope that you will allow me to ask a question on this, as I have been quite taken with this part of the debate. We have latched on to the issue with a certain degree of attention, but it strikes me that we are raising, suddenly, something of an expectation, so I want to be clear. Every child in Scotland is going to have a named person, irrespective of any defined assessment of the risk contingent within the group of people that the named person will have in their portfolio. How many named persons do you anticipate that there will be? What will the turnover be in named persons and how in practice will they establish a bond of confidence on which people feel they can rely? That is not a concern about the principle, but to me the enterprise seems to be huge.
It is important to recognise that, although there will be a named person for every child, not every child will need interaction with that named person. However, there has to be a way in which we can ensure that someone has an overview of what is happening to the child to ensure that the early indicators of anything that would pose a threat or a risk to that child can be flagged up as soon as they can be, and that is why the particular part of GIRFEC will be put in statute. That is already happening in areas; it is not new. If the committee is interested in some of the more specific elements of the bill, which the Education and Culture Committee will look at, we are happy to ensure that the clerks or members get an adequate briefing on them, if that would be interesting and would cut through some of the committee’s questions.
That would be helpful.
In that case, I will now ask the question that I was going to ask, which is about missing people and children who abscond from care. Minister, you wrote to the committee around a year ago—on 19 April 2012—and said that, in 2012, you hoped to look with the Care Inspectorate at ways to improve the collation of information on children who have gone missing or absconded from care. What deficiencies did you identify in the collation of information that you looked to address through 2012? I want to understand what the baseline was before I understand what actions followed from that.
There has been the trafficking summit since we said that. A number of commitments that came from that relate to appropriate data collection. The Care Inspectorate will certainly want to input further into that issue.
Much of the work on that has been folded into the wider work on anti-trafficking that the Cabinet Secretary for Justice kicked off, which relates not just to children absconding, but to human trafficking more generally. Children who abscond are not the only part of that work, but they are a big part of it, and it made sense to bring together those two streams of work. We are taking forward work on that.
So the problem as you have defined it is that people can be missing or absconding from different streams or sources, and the deficiency has been that information has not been collated. Is that essentially the problem?
Yes, at that sort of level.
We ask and require regulated care services to provide us with information about young people who abscond from care establishments, but we do not have confidence that that is always followed in the way that it should be. That was part 1 of the streams of information that we wanted to look at as part of the work that Ms Bruton described at the beginning.
Ms Happer, sorry to interrupt, but I wonder whether you can help me on that. If young people go missing during the day or in the evening, they could be sexually exploited and then return home in the evening. However, you do not capture that information.
No. That is right.
I am conscious of the time. I want to bring this session to a close at 11 o’clock, so I appeal for brevity from members. We will have a final question each from Anne McTaggart, Maureen Watt and John Wilson.
My question is on the training of the professionals who are likely to come into contact with vulnerable young people. Those professionals include teachers, police, health professionals, youth workers and social workers. Does such training currently include spotting the signs of CSE? Do you plan to ensure that the training will include that in the future? Has the training been upgraded in that way?
Last year, we published the “National Framework for Child Protection learning & development in Scotland 2012” and we developed the “National Risk Framework to Support the Assessment of Children and Young People”, along with the first comprehensive toolkit. Both those frameworks encompass child sexual exploitation. In addition, the working group will look at areas of training that might be useful for education colleagues, for example. Therefore, a number of developments have recently been completed and work is on-going with the working group. I should point out that the pink book for health professionals was also refreshed.
Some of the training need is about improving our understanding of how children may be groomed and manipulated. That is a very important issue.
Perhaps the greatest training need relates to resourcing and the time that people need to spot such issues when they work with vulnerable young people. People could be trained for all the time in the world and have all the knowledge in the world, but if they have 70 children to deal with, realistically, it is just not feasible for them to spot such signs.
The frameworks and other things that I mentioned were produced following extensive consultation with the workforce, so they reflect what professionals and those on the ground feel is needed. The working group is also looking at that.
The frameworks may be great, but that is not what happens on the ground.
Sorry, we must move on.
Minister, you said in your speech to the conference that teenagers do not feature in child protection nearly as much as younger children do. Further to Jackson Carlaw’s point, how can we improve child protection for older children, who are mainly the group of people—although we hear that people are now involved at ever younger ages—who are subject to child sexual exploitation? How do we focus more on protecting them?
In the speech that I made at the end of January, I flagged up the anomalies between some of the figures and indicated that we wanted to ensure that we had a better handle on that and asked questions. The committee’s work will probably also highlight issues that we can explore. As the Minister for Children and Young People, I know that we cannot always concentrate on the very earliest years; rather, we need to ensure that a child’s whole life course and any vulnerabilities or risks that might be prevalent for them are properly dealt with. That is why we want to use the working group as a mechanism to look into that issue a wee bit further and ensure that we can get things right for children in their adolescence, that individuals and professionals have the proper protections and alertness, and that we capture information in a much more comprehensive way. We understand that there is a need to get underneath what is going on for those teenagers.
We have talked a lot about professionals and professional responsibility. We believe that there is some room yet to speak more directly to young people. As Ms Watt pointed out, young people of that age are a group that we know less about, and they are more likely to go to their peers for support. We can talk directly to young people and give them advice. Young people use each other as support in all sorts of circumstances in their lives. We can support them in helping each other to keep safe by being open and having open conversations with them. There is room for more work on that.
Good morning. It is clear that the issue is that we are getting more and more evidence almost on a daily basis from the rest of the UK and other parts of the world about how child sexual exploitation is taking place. Minister, you indicated that you will produce national child protection guidance and review it. You will be aware that the Welsh Assembly has produced supplementary guidance in relation to its sexual exploitation risk assessment framework. Do you intend to adapt guidance or introduce similar guidance for practitioners in Scotland before the end of this year? I am conscious that, as individual cases arise and we get more of them, there is clearly a need to update the guidance as quickly as possible to take account of some of the issues that we can identify from other parts of the UK or other parts of the world.
As you have correctly identified, I said in my opening remarks that there is a refresh of the national guidance on child protection. The Government has certainly had positive discussions with Barnardo’s, for instance, about how we will ensure that that properly reflects issues that surround child sexual exploitation. That guidance and those discussions will reflect the issues around child sexual exploitation, and that work will be on-going. That is a positive way to take the issue forward.
Due to the time, I will be brief.
We do not have figures for the 2009 act, but we can get back to you on that, if that is okay, convener. Certainly, the conviction statistics have recorded 24 persons convicted of an exploitation offence under the Protection of Children and Prevention of Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2005 since that act came into force. However, I do not think that that is the whole story, as there may have been other convictions for other reasons, and underneath that there are areas that relate to exploitation. I am happy to get back to you on the 2009 act figures. There is work going on to ensure that we get things right in terms of enforcement under the legislation. The opportunities with the new single police force and the fact that we have police representation on the working group show that we have close links to ensure that things are as strong as they can be.
I accept your point about the offences that have been taken to court under the 2009 act. When you are gathering the information, I would be interested in whether you could pull together information on other offences committed against children that are not covered by the 2009 act and consider particularly whether the 2009 act has not been used when cases of sexual offences against young people have gone through the court system.
Okay.
Thank you very much, minister, Ms Bruton, Ms Happer and Mr Raines for your evidence today. I suspect that we will probably want to revisit some of the issues that were raised today. I apologise for going somewhat over the planned time, but I think that some of the new information that was brought forth necessitated further questioning. I thank you for attending. We will suspend for a few minutes to allow the minister and witnesses to leave.
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