Welcome to another week.

The government has issued draft guidance which tells practitioners that getting consent to pass on information about children and their families is unnecessary in the majority of child protection investigations.

It said that consent should “not be seen as the default lawful basis” for sharing personal information in a child safeguarding context, as it is “unlikely to be appropriate in most cases”.

The draft is part of a consultation the government launched on 21 June which is looking for feedback on the proposal.

The proposed guidance represents something of a u-turn. The current guidelines, which were last updated in 2018, state that practitioners should, “where possible, share information with consent”.

However,  Working Together to Safeguard Children, a key social work ‘manual’ which is underpinned by law, was amended in 2020 and now states that consent is not necessary to share information for safeguarding purposes, as long as there is another lawful basis to do so.

There are three exceptions, all rooted in the UK’s General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR) which Community Care says allow for consent to be dispensed with:

• ‘Public task’ – sharing information is in line with the lawful exercise of a public function.
• ‘Legal obligation’ – it is necessary to share information to comply with the law.
• ‘Legitimate interests’ – the sharing is necessary for the organisation’s legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, unless there is a good reason to protect the individual’s personal data which overrides those interests.

Researching Reform is concerned by this development.

While information sharing is important, it does not need to happen without consent as a routine practice.

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel has said that consent has created a dangerous barrier to information sharing which has led to the deaths of children, but this site is not convinced that this is an underlying issue.

The panel has also argued that practitioners are ‘information sharing averse’ and that this lack of sharing is partly responsible for child deaths. To us, at least, the core issue is a failure to act on information, as seen in the tragic cases of Victoria, Peter, Daniel, Arthur, Logan, Kyrell, Hakeem, and Star.

Removing the need for consent is also likely to create mistrust between practitioners and families, and place more barriers in the way of children genuinely in need of protection.

We’ll be watching this development closely.