As a Named Person, I know this law is both rotten and dangerous

NEXT week, I will attend a training course to ‘bring me up to speed’ on my new role as a Named Person. I didn’t volunteer for this but as a senior youth work practitioner, I will soon be the Named Person responsible for young people who have left school but who are still under 18.

To date, my only interest in this flawed scheme was as the outraged parent of two young children. Now I will have to help administer it.

The scheme isn’t about ‘serious risk of harm’, the social work standard. That’s already covered, albeit by a somewhat threadbare service. Named Person is about the much lower threshold of ‘cause for concern’ at which the state can now intervene in people’s lives.

My children will soon have their own Named Persons, who will be able to access private medical and other sensitive files relating to them and, by extension, me. As much as the SNP likes to present itself as different, the party seems to suffer from the same meddling instinct as all the rest.

As a father, I consider myself trustworthy and proportionate. I recognise that children graze their knees, get upset when pets die and sometimes even feel that they hate their ‘unreasonable’ parents.

I also know there will be hundreds of other Named Persons, with completely different standards, equally as certain about what acceptable parenting is. Some will have very relaxed views about children, some will be very uptight – and all will bring those prejudices with them.

If it is left to individual professional judgment, I’ll be fine. It won’t mean any additional work for me. Having managed a children’s home in the past I know what to be worried – sorry, ‘concerned’ – about when it comes to children.

MINOR issues won’t worry me to the extent of triggering state intervention. If the issue being raised causes me concern, it will be a serious risk and will precipitate a social work response.

Of course, professionals are wanted for the scheme but not their professional judgment; we will receive training in the inevitable protocols which cover all those ‘what happens if ’ scenarios. Except, ‘what happens if’ is infinite. What happens if granddad comes to stay and he was convicted 50 years ago of armed robbery? It is a trapdoor to the absurd.

Combine this with a risk-averse culture and the minor concerns that Named Person is supposed to deal with will be transformed. Think how almost every call to NHS 24 results in the flow chart directing the call handler to tell the patient to attend A&E. The dragnet of safety is undiscerning.

The difficulty is that normal families very rarely live up to the ideal. That doesn’t mean they are problematic but any less than ideal behaviour could lead to intervention because it raises somebody’s cause for concern.

An ‘enthusiastic’ Named Person might well pursue behaviour that they just don’t like. There was a recent example in England of a family who allowed their children to cycle to primary school on their own. That was a cause for concern for a headteacher – exactly the sort of professional who will be asked to be a Named Person – so social work were involved because these children were deemed at risk and not supervised. I know social workers who think any parent who drinks just a glass of wine when in charge of children should be pulled up for problematic behaviour.

These days there are no such things as accidents. In retrospect, everything has a causal set of occurrences that ‘could have been avoided’. Named Persons will be tracking concerns forward and predicting future outcomes for every child – including your child.

Workloads will inevitably increase. I’m pretty busy most days without adding in Named Person duties for a few children with issues. My day job will suffer and it’s already an important one, as are those of other Named Persons.

And things will still go wrong. What happens to the single point of contact during holiday or sick leave? Because it is a legal obligation and because no one wants to get blamed, minor issues will be prioritised over other important work. Cases of serious harm will get lost in all the clutter.

I don’t know the ins and outs of the Liam Fee case but it must be fairly obvious when children are bruised and battered. Society seems to have lost its common sense. The major problem is that all professionals are now encouraged to intervene in family life and, when it is everyone’s business, it is in fact no one’s. We lose perspective of where interventions are necessary. We lose sight of the children who are at significant risk of harm.

ITHINK the Scottish Government is beginning to recognise the pandemonium that it is about to unleash and is looking for a way to water down the proposals. It was no accident that the First Minister used the term ‘entitlement’ instead of ‘obligation’. But the whole thing is rotten. Even if every practical problem were resolved, I’d still oppose it on principle because that new threshold of involvement in people’s lives is unacceptably low.

It is part of a corrosive suspicion of ordinary people led by politicians, who desperately want their votes but don’t trust them to bring up their own children. It would be farcical if it wasn’t so sad.

Dr Simon Knight is a senior youth work practitioner in Glasgow