Victoria Climbie Inquiry

28 Jan 2003
Ms Diane Abbott: The Secretary of State will be aware that the Laming report explicitly directs most criticism, and places most of the responsibility for what happened to Victoria, not on the front-line staff but on senior managers and councillors in the local authorities. Time after time, events such as this happen, senior managers get themselves a media adviser and we hear the same old interviews about lack of resources. In many cases, those people go on to even better and more highly paid jobs. I believe that one way to stop such events happening again is to make sure that senior people take the responsibility that they are paid to take.

The practice of private unlicensed fostering, largely by west Africans, has gone on for a long time. At best, it causes all sorts of trauma. At worst, children are open to all sorts of abuse. It is time that the Government moved to close this practice down.

Mr. Milburn: To make managers accountable there has to be a proper system of accountability from top to bottom. That is what Lord Laming addresses in his recommendations. We will consider those recommendations seriously because that form of accountability is not present in the current system.

On private fostering, we will take extremely seriously the representations that have been made to us not just by Lord Laming but by others. However, let me strike one note of caution about reviewing the law on private fostering and the Victoria ClimbiƩ case. It is true that, legally, Victoria was being privately fostered. No one knew that, for one simple reason. Her great-aunt Kouao lied about who she was. She called Victoria "Anna" and said that she was her mother. Even if we had had changes in the private fostering legislation on the statute book, it would not have stopped the person responsible for caring for Victoria lying. She would have continued to lie.



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