CR spoke with the Christian Institute about Scotland's named person scheme

Simon Calvert

A campaign to challenge Scotland's controversial named person scheme officially launched in June. The named person plans which have been passed at Holyrood will not be fully implemented until August 2016 but many parents believe the scheme has already undermined their role in the family. The scheme looks to appoint a state guardian for every child from birth until they reach the age of 18, who would most likely be a social worker or head teacher and would have the legal right to ensure the child is raised in a Government-approved manner and report any issues about their upbringing to the authorities. To discuss this scheme and the campaign Heather Bellamy spoke with Simon Calvert, Deputy Director for Public Affairs for the Christian Institute.

Heather: Could we start with a quick overview of what this scheme is?

Simon: Yes. The Parliament in Scotland has passed this bill, the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act, and it establishes a state guardian for every child in Scotland. So these aren't people who are set aside to look out for vulnerable children, children who have come up in the system as being at risk: these are people whose job it is to be involved in the lives of all children. We're talking about more than one million children in Scotland. The idea is that a health visitor or a head teacher will be the 'named person' for a whole group of children: they will have the authority to get hold of medical records and other confidential documents about those children; they'll have the ability to talk with children without the parents' consent, perhaps to give them advice, whether or not the parents agree with it; to give them services, whether or not the parents are happy about it.

There has been a very strong reaction against it in Scotland. It went through the Parliament without too much difficulty, surprisingly, but once it was passed people started to realise the implications of this - and people are quite naturally reaching for language like this is Orwellian, a Big Brother kind of system, and a lot of people feel very anxious about what it will mean to give these people that much responsibility, that much authority, in the lives of every child. As I say, we are not talking here about targeting resources in an intelligent way at those children and families where children are known to be at risk: we're talking about a blanket system which applies to every child. A lot of people feel that this is making the state a kind of co-parent and a lot of parents think that it's not the job of the state to do that and a lot of parents are anxious about how these powers might be used and abused.

Heather: You raise an interesting point that it's all children and not just the ones at risk. So what is the reason being given by the Scottish Government of why they want to bring this scheme in? What's the need that they're trying to meet?

Simon: We're all concerned about children who are neglected or abused. We hear enough stories of children who are known to Social Services who then go on to suffer terrible abuse and even sometimes death. We all hear enough of those stories to know that there are problems with the way the system sometimes works and we all want to stop those kind of things from happening. I think everybody involved in this debate has to accept the good intentions of everybody else involved. We all want the best for all children and we particularly want to help children who are neglected or abused. It's not a debate about whether we should be trying to help and protect vulnerable children, it is a debate about how best to do that.

Those who've brought forward this scheme, presumably think that if you put every child on the grid then you're more likely to pick up cases where children are at risk. They talk about it as a single point of access, which is a kind of buzzword. In terms of picking up children who are most likely to be at risk though, the problem often with identifying at-risk children is its like looking for a needle in the haystack and, as others have said, by bringing in this law, the Scottish Government has made the haystack a whole lot bigger.

If you are the named person, for example if you're a headmaster and you're the named person for all the children in your school, say there are 1000 or 1500 pupils in your school, then you have a legal responsibility to those children. How are you expected to comb through all of the information that's been provided to you about the home life and the medical records of those children at the same time as you're running a school? It seems, frankly, crazy.

We've already had an example of how this might operate in practice. One of the NHS Trusts, the Forth Valley Trust, wrote to one family, a Christian family as it happens, and the family had just made a couple of medical appointments for two of their kids. The letter from the Trust said: By the way, a named person has now been appointed for your kids - it didn't say who that was - and it said in future, copies of all your children's medical reports will be sent to them - oh and by the way, if you miss a medical appointment then the named person will be told about that too. Now understandably, this Christian family - who take very good care of their kids, thank you very much - were rather surprised at this. You also have to think about the poor head teacher. Is the head teacher going to get the medical records of 1500 kids posted to him, the medical appointments of 1500 kids posted to him? The guy won't be able to open the door of his office in the morning, there'll be so many papers to go through. It's this kind of thing that the Scottish Government just does not seem to have thought through.

As for the claim that it's a single point of access, I think the argument is that it actually just introduces yet another person into the frame and a person who doesn't necessarily have the authority to get services that the family might necessarily want but they do have just enough authority to complicate the picture yet further and to get hold of confidential, personal, medical and other records about the children and their families. It's all quite a mess, really.

Heather: So what happens if the parents disagree with these state guardians or have concerns about the state guardian, because we have many stories of those in positions of authority who don't treat children well or abuse those positions of authority? Who's accountable to who here and where do parents go if they've got a concern about the state guardian?

Simon: One of the weird things about this named person system is that you don't necessarily know the name of the named person and that was what happened in Forth Valley. So this family happened to home-school their children, so they weren't at a school, so there wasn't a headmaster of their children's school who could be the named person for their children, so they weren't even given the information about who was going to be seeing their children's confidential medical records.

There's no opt-out; this is one of the things about the system that has caused the most concern. It doesn't have a built-in safeguard; it doesn't have an opt-out for the family. It just gives this responsibility, in a very vague and general way, to this named person and with that it implies a whole lot of authority to pry into family lives and to take children aside away from their parents and speak with them, without setting any limits or safeguards or monitoring systems. It seems, as I say, just very badly thought through. And yes, we all know that people can take advantage of positions of authority - and giving a person this kind of authority, it seems that it's bound to generate more problems than it solves.

Heather: It says that it's to make sure that children are brought up in a Government-approved manner. How do they define what a Government-approved manner is? What does that cover?