Select committees: I am starting to realise their value

By Lisa Nandy / @lisanandy

When I was first elected a number of MPs advised me not to try for select committee membership. One shadow cabinet member said to me, ‘whatever you do, avoid select committees like the plague’ . Time consuming, early morning starts, sometimes dull and with mountains of reading, they can be difficult and daunting. But I am starting to realise their value: they are the one place I have found where you have the time and space to delve beneath the sound bites and try to work out what is really going on in government.

Tim Loughton, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children, appeared before the Education Select Committee this week to tell us what he had done to keep children safe since taking office in May. Child safeguarding is always an emotive subject, and with the horror of the Baby Peter case still fresh in the public memory, the room was packed with interested journalists. They were primarily interested in Sharon Shoesmith, who gave evidence before him. But the media circus around her appearance was, I think, just a distraction from the importance of this: the first public test of the new government’s commitment to keeping children safe.

So it was interesting that the DfE chose Mr Loughton to appear in front of us. He is the most junior member of the department, but perhaps the one who has had the longest involvement in this area. He is also intensely ideological. Unlike some of my colleagues, I think ideology is important and valuable. My father is a communist, my grandfather was a liberal. We differ on many things, but I think it is useful to have a set of principles that guide you, a moral compass based on underlying values. Provided you are open to questioning your own values, it makes for better debate.

But where the danger lies is when blind ideology refuses to accommodate the real world. When Tim Loughton announced to the committee in his opening remarks that his greatest contribution to keeping children safe was scrapping the Contact Point database I became concerned. We had just heard a concrete example where Contact Point had helped Maggie Atkinson, the new Children’s Commissioner, find a child at significant risk of harm. It was, she said, the only reason they had succeeded. Mr Loughton however, was of the unequivocal opinion that Contact Point is an unacceptable breach of civil liberties.

He did not argue (though it is possible to) that such a large database can put children at risk. Instead, he explained that his commitment to scrapping Contact Point was based on his view that the state had intruded too far into people’s lives. It’s an important debate – it is possible to simultaneously believe that Contact Point keeps children safe and is an unacceptable intrusion into privacy – but on the question of whether Contact Point keeps children safe he did not engage.

Similarly, when we pressed him on the work he was doing with other departments, the response was vague. Since the Laming Review into the tragic death of Victoria Climbie it has been understood that keeping children safe is a joint effort – everybody must play their part. Why had he abolished the cross departmental safeguarding body? It didn’t add anything, he said. Had he thought about the impact of extra pressures on GPs as a result of reform led by the Department for Health? No, but it was an important point. Why had he still not ended the practice of detaining migrant children? Because it wasn’t his brief – talk to the Home Office.

Of course it’s impossible to draw conclusions about an entire government from one Minister’s appearance before a select committee, but Tim Loughton’s evidence was telling. With the speed and radical nature of the policy announcements and legislation it was beginning to look like the coalition were so ideologically driven they were paying little heed to how their policies would work out in the real world. On this, most important of issues, Mr Loughton has simply confirmed what I was beginning to suspect. If it is true, it could not be more reckless.