Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 25 August 2020
The Scottish Government does not support many amendments in group 5.
Amendment 40, in the name of Liam MacArthur, would allow only social workers who were registered with the Scottish Social Services Council to be child welfare reporters. My officials have spoken to a number of key organisations that have expressed concern about the amendment.
Around 90 per cent of child welfare reporters are lawyers and I remain unconvinced that there is a justification for limiting that role to social workers. In my view, the most important factor for any child welfare reporter is that they meet the required standards in training and qualifications, regardless of their professional background.
Amendment 40 would also exclude child psychologists, child psychiatrists and other family support workers—who may have the necessary qualifications and experience to be a child welfare reporter—unless they were also social workers.
It would also exclude retired social workers, who may also have the required skills to act as a child welfare reporter. It is also not clear whether the social work sector has the capacity to take the role on. Capacity issues could lead to delays in producing child welfare reports, which could, in turn, delay the case overall. That would not be in the best interests of the child concerned.
I am, however, keen to encourage more non-lawyers to become child welfare reporters, as diversity of experience in the role of child welfare reporter would be beneficial to the process. I give the member my assurance that those considerations will be taken into account as the regulations on child welfare reporters are developed.
As regards amendment 1, in the name of Neil Findlay, an identical amendment was not supported by the Justice Committee at stage 2 and it remains unclear to me what the amendment is intended to do. If a person has the requisite skills and experience to be included on the register of child welfare reporters, then they can be included on that register. I am not clear how the person’s professional knowledge of a particular child can be relevant to the question whether a person could be registered as a child welfare reporter generally.
I take the member’s point that a professional who has already worked with a child may be well placed to write a child welfare report in relation to that child, although it should not be overlooked that there might also be cases in which the child or other members of the family might have a strong preference that somebody new is brought in to do that. The issue that the legislation is dealing with is not who will write a report in relation to a specific child but who can be registered to be a child welfare reporter. It would obviously be unworkable to have a system under which, in effect, there would be a separate register of child welfare reporters for every child in relation to whom a child welfare report might ever need to be produced.
For the reasons outlined, I remain unable to support amendment 1 and urge members to reject it.
Regarding amendment 2, however, I see the point that Neil Findlay is making. When consulting on draft regulations, any Government will of course need to ensure that people with lived experience of court-ordered contact and domestic abuse give us their valuable insights. I am therefore happy to support amendment 2.