Chaos and chicanery behind the law that has shamed Holyrood
How a well-intentioned Act designed to protect the vulnerable and ensure the welfare of Scottish children became a gross intrusion into family life ... and caught MSPs asleep at the wheel
IN the earliest days of devolution, there were many promises of a revolutionary new parliament. Holyrood would be a ‘family-friendly’ legislature, refusing to sit long into the nights and breaking for school holidays.
Donald Dewar, the first First Minister, said it would be ‘based on the assumption that we share power with the people’.
Nearly a generation later, it is a profound irony that MSPs have been responsible for the least ‘family-friendly’ policy imaginable, the SNP’s Named Person scheme.
It aims to appoint a state guardian for all under-18s, ensuring their development meets officially approved criteria.
Mr Dewar’s idealistic vision of a parliament that could ‘share power with the people’ lies in ruins, as MSPs forge ahead with what must rank as one of the least popular – and most intrusive – policies ever produced by a Western democracy.
Nor would his grand vision have included the shabby manoeuvring witnessed in parliament this week, when a last-ditch Tory bid to halt the scheme’s nationwide expansion was rejected – a casualty of petty point-scoring and party tribalism.
Instead, MSPs conspired to rescue the policy from the political equivalent of life support despite a broadening consensus against it – not only among parents but also the childcare professionals tasked with its enactment.
In a further irony, as former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars has suggested, the ‘family-friendly’ parliament, with its civilised hours and long breaks, may have helped to ensure that the legislation was under-scrutinised and shoddily drafted.
Yet there is no doubt the law in its early stages was entirely well-intentioned and, indeed, had its beginnings before the SNP began its long spell in office in 2007.
Its seeds lay in the Getting It Right For Every Child strategy – leading to the ominous, Soviet-style GIRFEC acronym.
THE phrase was, in fact, the title of a 2004 Scottish Executive review of the Children’s Hearing system, which highlighted a ‘dramatic increase in identified children with multiple needs’. The central GIRFEC belief that developed from this benign starting point was that official agencies must guard against parental failures by monitoring children’s development from their earliest stages.
This philosophy holds surprising sway over ministers and their officials in the Scottish Government, the same administration which has launched a major public inquiry into institutional child abuse and a wholesale review of the child protection system.
The reputation of the state as ‘corporate parent’ is tarnished, yet the GIRFEC assertion that the state knows best is the driving force behind Named Persons.
The resulting legislation sought to formalise the duties of existing health visitors and senior teachers as the professionals officially tasked with ‘safeguarding’ children’s interests.
It would turn them into ‘points of contact for other services’ if concerns arose about a child’s ‘wellbeing’.
This would create a universal early warning system, helping to ensure continuity in care and to prevent cases where youngsters fall off the radar.
That single ‘point of contact’ would be available for parental backup and, indeed, to counsel the child over any problems in their lives.
Crucially the service would apply to every child, not just to the most vulnerable.
Despite the rampant revisionism of recent days, when supporters of the scheme denied that it was ever aimed at curbing child abuse, this was indeed its essential purpose.
In May 2013, Children’s Minister Aileen Campbell was clear that state guardians would be ‘early indicators of anything that would pose a threat or risk’ to children.
Alarm bells first began ringing when parents and families were barely mentioned in 2012 proposals for the Children and Young People’s Bill, which contained the Named Person legislation. Tellingly, lengthy official guidance for the state guardians later excluded any mention of ‘fathers’.
The entire project was gradually hijacked by the zealotry of childcare experts whose ambitions for the legislation were far more sweeping in their scope than the initial proposals.
Under the plans as they were ultimately presented to MSPs, the Named Person would be duty-bound to ‘promote, support and safeguard’ the ‘wellbeing’ of every child.
This meant there had to be some attempt at defining ‘wellbeing’ – no easy task.
The Named Person would have to be able to monitor the child’s development, ensuring that it met official, stateapproved yardsticks, with all failures logged, possibly leading to social work intervention.
Soon enough, there was a welter of New Age rhetoric, with one senior civil servant warning that parents who do not show enough ‘love, hope and spirituality’ to their children should be targeted by state guardians.
Last year, a handbook for Named Persons revealed they would be expected to grill families on topics such as money worries, sun cream and TVwatching habits. Other guidance stipulated children must be consulted about the choice of wallpaper in their bedrooms.
Health visitors would be expected to spend up to 90 minutes going through a checklist of ‘well-being indicators’– many of which did not actually relate to the child’s health.
Training also included a working knowledge of the 221 ‘risk indicators’ and the 308-item list of ‘wellbeing indicators’.
These include questions about whether or not a child ‘smiles a lot’. Teachers will be ordered to tell the Named Person if a pupil confides in them about having an abortion, rather than passing the information to the parents.
More recently, in a series of workshops, children as young as five have been encouraged to think of themselves as ‘plants’ with the Named Person as ‘head gardeners’, in an echo of the kind of brainwashing found in totalitarian states.
Named Persons, in their pursuit of compliance with ‘wellbeing indicators’, will be able to request access to confidential and sensitive medical records.
Chillingly, children will be allocated their Named Person while still in the womb.
More than 600 taxi drivers in the Borders who take young people to school have been instructed to pass on information about their welfare.
Senior teachers – often working in crumbling schools in the grip of a literacy and numeracy crisis – have been left in no doubt their role will change.
As Andrew Sutherland, former
director of education at Falkirk Council, has said, teachers who fear they are being forced to take on a social work function must recognise that their profession ‘has evolved’.
This is in stark contrast to Nationalist MSP Jenny Gilruth’s assertion this week that the introduction of Named Persons would lead to no ‘serious changes’ to teachers’ jobs.
Stuart Waiton, an academic at Abertay University in Dundee and a prominent critic of the scheme, summed up the chief objection to the philosophy that forms its foundation – that parental authority on its own is not to be trusted.
He said: ‘To cope alone, to be independent, to take full responsibility for your family is [regarded by the state as] a mistake, a fantasy, and, as such, to refuse this support is problematic and must necessarily be treated with some suspicion’.
Alarm bells have sounded throughout the evolution of the policy, which was approved by MSPs in February 2014 but is now subject to an ongoing legal challenge raised by family values campaigners at the Supreme Court in London.
Some of those MSPs, including Nationalists, later regretted their decision to back the scheme as the true scale of its scope and possible repercussions became clear.
It is another indictment of the parliament that it remained so resistant to those warnings – a product largely of SNP hegemony and the party’s domination of the anaemic committee structure.
EVEN the Faculty of Advocates condemned the ‘indiscriminate provision for possible interference in the lives of all children’. The Law Society of Scotland and the Scottish Parent Teacher Council are also critics, together with the Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland.
Police Scotland has said that the scheme could make it harder to identify children at risk.
Most damningly of all, many childcare professionals fear that its universality will place extra pressure on already scarce resources, making it likelier that the cases of vulnerable children will be lost in the system.
Senior youth work practitioner Dr Simon Knight warned this week that ‘workloads will inevitably increase’ and asked: ‘What happens to the single point of contact during holiday or sick leave?’
The Educational Institute of Scotland teaching union has said teachers will not work as Named Persons during holidays, with the buck passed to council officials.
As we reported yesterday, as few as eight council workers in Moray, where the scheme is already in place, had to cover for 80 Named Persons during school holidays, who faced up to 25 referrals a day from police over problem children.
Fearing organisational chaos, Glasgow-based Dr Knight believes that the Scottish Government is beginning to ‘recognise the pandemonium that it is about to unleash’ and may be ‘looking for a way to water down the proposals’.
This might well explain Nicola Sturgeon’s disingenuous attempts to portray Named Persons as an ‘entitlement’ and not an ‘obligation’.
Indeed, some key concessions were wrought from the SNP during this week’s Holyrood debate.
Education Secretary John Swinney agreed to ‘refresh the guidance provided to professionals and the communication of the policy to the public’ – but remains wedded to the scheme’s basic ideology.
During his parliamentary appearances, Mr Swinney normally has the demeanour of a mild-mannered chartered accountant.
But he was full of righteous indignation on Wednesday, savaging the Tories for ‘utterly misrepresenting the policy’ and attacking one of its most principled critics – new Tory MSP and legal expert Adam Tomkins – for stoking the row and ‘fuelling absurdities’.
There was no mention of the ‘absurdities’ of senior Nationalist minister Humza Yousaf, who claimed that opponents of Named Persons are putting children’s lives at risk; or MSP John Mason, who suggested that some of its critics may be child abusers.
No wonder Mr Swinney was furious: after all, he is new to the job and was passed this hand grenade by his hapless predecessor Angela Constance.
A Mail poll showed earlier this week that nearly two-thirds of Scots believe that appointing a state guardian to every child is an ‘unacceptable intrusion’ into family life.
More than half of those who voted SNP last month have concerns about the legislation. Were even these SNP voters swayed by Tory ‘scaremongering’, as Mr Swinney suggests?
Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale had called for a ‘pause’ in the implementation of the scheme during the Holyrood election campaign.
But the party could not bring itself to back the Tory motion calling for just that – with the exception of MSP Jenny Marra.
Shetland Lib Dem MSP Tavish Scott hailed the success of the scheme in the Highlands, where the local authority was an early pioneer of Named Persons.
But he failed to mention Inverness two-year-old Clyde Campbell, a victim of cot death, who was repeatedly neglected by his barmaid mother Amanda Hardie.
Clyde had a Named Person – so too did Mikaeel Kular, the threeyear-old boy who lived in Fife and Edinburgh and was murdered by his own mother; as did Madison Horn, the two-year-old girl killed following an orgy of abuse by her mother’s partner in Fife.
Nor was there any mention of Dayna Dickson-Boath, one of Scotland’s first Named Persons, who taught in Elgin, Moray but was struck off the teaching register for sharing fantasies about abusing youngsters.
Clearly, these concerns were too trifling for our parliamentarians.
AT Holyrood this week, party tribalism meant the legitimate fears of thousands of ordinary parents were cast aside of narrow political in favour interests.
The debate came in the wake of the case of Liam Fee, the Fife twoyear-old murdered by his mother and her partner. Liam had a Named Person under an early version of the scheme.
But a series of tell-tale signs of horrific abuse and neglect he had suffered were missed by health visitors, social workers and medics.
Weasel words were hastily deployed by Mr Swinney after Liam’s mother Rachel Trelfa and her civil partner Nyomi Fee were convicted last month of the toddler’s neglect and murder.
He and other Nationalist MSPs tried to deny that Liam had a Named Person.
But this claim was quickly rubbished by official documents showing that the so-called success of the Fife pilot scheme was repeatedly hailed as proof that the initiative should be extended nationwide.
It was ‘insensitive’, ‘point-scoring’ and ‘atrocious’, the Nationalists alleged, to connect the Fife scheme to Liam’s death.
Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh (formerly a staunch critic of Named Persons when he was a Scottish Labour leadership contender) even informed MSPs earlier this month that they could not discuss the case fully because of legal restrictions.
This was despite the fact that Liam’s killers had been convicted and all that remained was their sentencing by a judge – who cannot be prejudiced.
Commenting on Liam’s murder and the role of the Named Person in his case, Mid Fife and Glenrothes MSP Miss Gilruth said during this week’s debate that it was wrong to try to ‘score political points over a wee boy’s death’.
Yet, however well-intentioned it was in its early form, support for the most intrusive and illiberal law Holyrood has produced is haemorrhaging on a daily basis.
As Mr Swinney has demonstrated, even the Government that conceived it no longer unequivocally supports the initiative.
The debate this week was an opportunity to ‘share power with the people’ – as Mr Dewar had once envisaged.
But instead. our blinkered MSPs ignored the concerns of the thousands of parents they represent, to foist upon them a scheme that utterly betrays the parliament’s founding principles