Gove: Absurd red tape that puts children at risk

The Education Secretary, visiting Yorkshire today, said red tape surrounding children’s homes prevented police being given basic information about youngsters, leaving them at risk of “gangs intent on exploiting these vulnerable children”.

The Cabinet minister’s comments came as an in-depth report into England’s children homes revealed councils spent an average of £4,000 a week to place a child in accommodation, with many sent far away from their local area - a practice Mr Gove said was “indefensible”.

The dossier of information was compiled in the wake of the Rochdale grooming scandal and found that 30% of homes fell below the Government’s preferred minimum standard, and is due to be published in full today.

The Daily Telegraph reported that councils spent more than £1 billion a year to care for fewer than 4,900 children, with Bexley Council spending more than £3 million a child on specialist privately-run homes last year.

Writing in the newspaper, Mr Gove said he had been met with a “wall of silence” when he tried to find out information about children’s homes, with his department lacking basic information about their locations and who was responsible for them.

The regulator Ofsted was barred from giving information to the police by data protection rules and other “bewildering regulations”, he said.

But he added: “There was one group of people, however, who did seem to possess all the information: the gangs intent on exploiting these vulnerable children.

“They knew where the homes were; they knew how to contact the children: at the fish and chip shop, the amusement arcade, in the local park, or just by hanging around outside the houses.

“In the name of ‘protecting children’ by officially ‘protecting’ their information we had ended up helping the very people we were supposed to be protecting them from.

“We shielded the children from the authorities who needed to be looking out for them.”

Mr Gove said almost half of the children were placed in homes outside their local authority area, with a third more than 20 miles away.

“That is indefensible,” he said. “So, too, is the fact that more than half of children’s homes are in areas with above-average crime levels.”

David Simmonds, the chairman of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board, said that councils are “not necessarily routinely notified” if a children’s home opens in their area.

Mr Simmonds told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The local authority running children’s homes will clearly know where they are and who is placed at them.

“But one of our frustrations and one of the things we’ve been working with Government on is making sure we know when children are placed in our local area and when new children’s homes open, because we need to be sure that the council is geared up to support them if an emergency occurs.

“If you are aware that there are issues in a local area with gangs, sexual exploitation and grooming going on, and a vulnerable child is being placed in that area, you may well be saying to the council from which that child has come `Actually this is not really a safe place for that child to come at the moment and you’d be better off looking for an alternative place’.”

He added: “Many of these homes are in the private sector. If somebody thinks `I’d like to open a new children’s home - they have a family home, they open it up as a place that can perhaps take a couple of children - they wouldn’t necessarily routinely notify the local authority, so we may not be aware that those children are placed there.”

Mr Simmonds said that the problem had arisen partly as a result of perceptions that council-run homes had become “a focus for abuse” in cases like that involving Jimmy Savile.

“The market was created whereby there were lots of small secret children’s home that people didn’t know about, the idea being that abusers wouldn’t be able to identify them and target them,” he said. “That’s created a new set of risks that weren’t there in the past.”

He added: “Councils have been campaigning on this issue for quite some time, and I think it’s marvellous that we now have a minister who says `I’m going to listen to this’.”

Mr Simmonds said: “It is indefensible if councils are placing children (away from their home area) simply because they are not making local arrangements. But often it’s being done to break a cycle of abuse and to get a child away from someone.

“I would say that in the vast majority of cases I’ve experienced in my own authority... we are doing it to break a cycle of abuse.

“There definitely is an issue that there are a number of towns in the West Midlands and North West where there is a high density of children’s homes.”

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham is writing to Mr Gove to “set straight any misunderstandings” about data protection law.

His office said there was nothing in the legislation to prevent the protection of vulnerable children.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Ensuring that vulnerable young people are properly protected in care homes is essential.

“There is nothing in data protection legislation that is a barrier to this happening.

“This law covers information about people so it has no bearing on the disclosure of non-personal information like the location of care homes.

“If anyone has serious concerns about an individual either as a potential victim or perpetrator then this can be passed on to the police without breaching data protection law.

“The Information Commissioner published a data sharing code of practice in May 2012 which helps ensure that more routine information sharing takes place where necessary and any myths around data protection preventing proper sharing are dispelled.

“The commissioner’s advice has not been sought on any perceived difficulties about sharing care home information so we are writing to both Michael Gove and Sir Michael Wilshaw at Ofsted today to clarify the concerns and set straight any misunderstandings.”