#MRConsultation – Mandate Now

Home Office “MR” consultation #2. It’s not MR!

The Home Office has finally revealed its thinking in this low-profile month long consultation from the 4^th November until 30^th November 2023.

The consultation makes proposals that, even according to the Home Office’s own impact statement, will deliver no improvement to safeguarding and importantly for the Government it seems, no discernible increase in referrals to the statutory agencies. The Home Office claims its proposal is “mandatory reporting” when in fact it is nothing of the sort. The claim eases the Government’s ability to sell it to a subject naïve public and assert it has fulfilled one of the key recommendations of the IICSA public inquiry.

Our submission to the consultation, redacted of personal details, is available here in .pdf format.

Our submission to the consultation, redacted of personal details, is available here in .docx.

Here is an extract from our submission:

As a consequence, it appears that government is prepared to leave abused children to their fate rather than take action that would lead to more crimes of child sexual abuse coming to the attention of the authorities.

This Home Office approach to safeguarding children is strikingly similar to this recent allegation made in the Covid inquiry:

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Here is a highlighted note which shows the difference between IICSA’s lamentable recommendation 13, for what it asserted was mandatory reporting, and the dreadful proposal made by the Home Office.

November 23rd, 2023|

Ideology stops government introducing well-designed Mandatory Reporting

Occam’s razor leads us to reach this conclusion. For example, the questionnaire in the 2016 consultation “Reporting and Acting on Child Abuse and Neglect”, together with its accompanying commentary revealed the government’s mindset. Here is how on the last day of parliament, the Home Office media department used the press to strike fear into anyone working in institutions with responsibility for children.

Click on the image to view the article

Nick Ferrari, the LBC breakfast presenter, excitedly told his audience “a school secretary could be jailed for not reporting suspected abuse.” (more…)

March 27th, 2023|

Here are the 779 submissions made to the 2016 ‘Reporting and Acting on Child Abuse and Neglect’ consultation. Councils, Royal College’s healthcare, education, faith, NGO’s and similar

The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled in our favour against the Home Office requiring it to provide us with the submissions to the MR consultation.

The submissions provide useful information, but it’s a depressing picture of sparse safeguarding understanding in so many Regulated Activities. It is the Department for Education which is responsible for the disrepair and dysfunction within the safeguarding framework that fails staff, children and their parents. The framework’s design emerged from social work practice, dominated as it is by familial neglect and its consequences. The resulting thicket of confusion was then misapplied to strategically important and complex Regulated Activities in a thoughtless ‘one size fits’ all approach. As data reveals these settings require the legislative foundation of well-designed MR.

Like us you may find many of the responses from professional bodies quite inexplicable.

Surprisingly perhaps, no National Governing Bodies of sport made a submission to the consultation. Why not? Neither did the Catholic Church or the Church of England with the exception of the Diocese of Canterbury (see #556 and the answer to Q7), and it’s worth reading.

To use the data, we suggest you click on ‘Index of Consultation Responses’ and either scroll through or word search what you are looking for. Then open ‘consultation responses’ and go to the corresponding index number.

Index of Consultation Responses

Consultation Responses

January 31st, 2020|