Your District Councillor

COUNTY COUNCIL LETTER

MID APRIL and MAY 1999

COUNTY COUNCIL LETTER MID APRIL 1999

Two vital meetings either side of Easter need to be reported to you this month.

The first was the Government's inspection of Cambridgeshire's Child Protection Services carried out last November. You may remember the Dept. of Health first inspected our child protection services in 1997 following the death of Ricky Neave. There were forty recommendations and last November's follow-up visit was to check how far they had been achieved..

The recent report runs to 115 pages, so I will not go into too much detail. I can let anyone with a particular interest see my copy. What I can do is to summarise the latest conclusion simply by saying some progress has been made but much remains to be done.

As so often happens with a large department, it takes more time to make radical change than anyone expects. So many other bodies are involved in child protection, such as Education representatives, Police, Health Visitors and paediatric and G.P. services. Bringing them together in the newly reformed Area Child Protection Committee (ACPC) case conferences is in itself a time consuming job.Nevertheless, progress has been made in addressing problems associated with both Social Services Dept. and its associated ACP Committee.

All County members are hoping that the protection, vulnerable children in our County deserve will become increasingly effective. It is our role to keep up pressure on these entrusted with these duties. We aim at a swift response and effective action, so as to prevent, in so far as it is humanly possible, any future tragedies of the Neave type. We cannot guarantee no child will come to life threatening harm, but we will try our utmost to achieve this.

To put this subject into its context, there were 321 children on the County's Child Protection Register in September 1998. The rate of registration is slightly below the national average.

The other meeting of note since Easter was a long series of presentations by consultants of their favoured suggestions as to where new towns or large village extensions should be located over the next half century.