Mary Reid

Some radical changes in how we deliver services to children are planned for the next couple of years.

The initial impetus for these was the Laming Report into the death of Victoria Climbie. In a speech in Jan 2003 Laming said:

"Victoria was known to no fewer than four social services departments, three housing departments, two specialist child protection teams of the metropolitan Police. Furthermore, she was admitted to two different hospitals because of concerns that she was being deliberately harmed and was referred to a specialist Children and families centre managed by the NSPCC." ... and she was also on the roll of a local school.

There were many shortcomings in the way she was managed by some of the professionals, but instead of simply dropping the blame on frontline staff, Laming called for integration of services to children, with information shared between agencies as a matter of course.

I applaud the government's action in response to this. The green paper "Every Child Matters" was followed rapidly (in Government terms) by the Children Act in 2004.

Each top-tier local authority has to appoint by 2006 a Director of Children's Services, who will have responsibility for both education and social services for children and families. A lead member must be appointed as well.

Each local authority must put in place systems for sharing information about the children they care for with their partner agencies in health. This poses a lot of problems. One is that hospitals, GPs and councils all use different IT systems. Another factor is that there is not a shared vocabulary; for example, the term "assessment" means very different things to different professionals. But these problems can, and must, be overcome.

The next stage will be setting up a local Children's Trust, to bring together local authority and health partners, although how this would work is still under consultation.

In Kingston we have responded to this programme by creating a Children's Services Development Board, chaired by our Chief Executive, bringing together the senior managers of all the agencies. We have an information sharing system in place for vulnerable children. I have already taken on the lead member role.

In Laming's words: "I hope that never again will any senior manager or member be able to say 'But I did not know. Nobody told me.' "