How has the Welsh Government progressed on the recommendations from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

Rachel Thomas, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the Children’s Commissioner for Wales

The six recommendations for the Welsh Government following The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, led by Prof. Alexis Jay, were fundamentally about improving the data, establishing a Child Protection Authority, raising Public Awareness and about ensuring specialist therapeutic support for child victims of sexual abuse.

The Welsh Government accepted all recommendations, at least in principle, but progress towards their implementation has been slow.

We know that the National Independent Safeguarding Board has a role in monitoring this progress; looking at the extent to which the actions agreed by the Welsh Government are effectively progressing.

We have written to the government asking for a full update on progress.

The six recommendations are set out in this document.

A single core data set – this includes data regarding the characteristics of victims and perpetrators, and contextual safeguarding matters.

We understand that work is ongoing on this at Wales and UK level, and that this would form part of the WG Child Sexual exploitation/abuse national action plan – but this is still awaiting a consultation before being finalised.

The previous national action plan ran for 2019-2022, so this did not take into account any of the IICSA recommendations. One of our 2022-3 annual report recommendations was as follows:

“Welsh Government should ensure that the renewed National Action Plan on Preventing Child Sexual Abuse effectively responds to the recommendations of the IICSA enquiry and sensitively incorporates the views of children and young people”.

No new plan has come forward since then, so there are opportunities remaining for ministers to address these recommendations, but action is needed to bring a new plan into force.

Establish a Child Protection Authority for Wales

There are three elements to this role.  Each Authority’s purpose should be to:

improve practice in child protection;

provide advice and make recommendations to government in relation to child protection policy and reform to improve child protection; and

inspect institutions and settings as it considers necessary and proportionate.

In their response to the inquiry, the Welsh Government refers to the National Independent Safeguarding Board (NISB) as discharging the first two elements, and inspectorates like CIW for the monitoring and inspection aspect.

Whilst the NISB does have oversight over the sector through the Regional Safeguarding Boards, and they can make recommendations to the government on safeguarding matters, they cover all ages, so they are not a specific child protection authority.

Their resources are extremely limited as they are not a full-time body – each member has around a day a month allocated to what is already a busy area of work.

There is no governance that requires the WG to respond formally to any NISB recommendations so there is no accountability mechanism that could then drive those improvements to practice, and new policies.

There are areas of safeguarding and child protection that do not fall within their (or anyone’s) remit for oversight, including religious institutions, minority sports (without a federation or national governing body), and uniformed groups.

For example, the 2024 report into Caldey Island historic sexual abuse found that previous recommendations had been accepted by the Abbey but there had been little action to address key points such as training.

Nobody had oversight to ensure action was taken, as it does not sit within any body or organisation’s role currently.

The remit of the Children’s Commissioner relates to named statutory bodies such as local authorities, health boards and schools, and does not extend to any of these categories.

Whilst NISB and CIW will meet regularly to discuss matters of relevance to them both, this isn’t the same as having all elements and actions vested in the one organisation.  The inquiry clearly envisaged a new body being set up, to encompass all of these elements.

The Welsh Government approach to this recommendation means that they are not exploring the opportunity to introduce a more comprehensive oversight mechanism for child protection matters across Wales.  It could be argued that they haven’t taken the recommendation from IICSA seriously enough to recognise the need to take new/additional action, as both NISB and CIW were already in place when the IICSA inquiry took place.

A Cabinet Minister for Children

It is welcome that the First Minister has appointed Dawn Bowden as the Minister for Children and Social Care.  Although she has ‘children’ in her portfolio title, her portfolio does not include all matters relating to children, and she does not have officials reporting to her on all matters relating to children.

She does have safeguarding in her direct responsibilities.

The post is not a cabinet level post so it could be argued this isn’t as senior an appointment as that envisaged by IICSA.

It is notable that this portfolio change was not done in response to the IICSA recommendations; the 2023 response from WG to IICSA noted that there were then four Ministers who had responsibility for children’s matters, two of whom attended Cabinet, and they considered that this discharged the recommendation despite not having made any specific changes as a result of IICSA.

Raising public awareness

This is a key issue for us and something that we picked up on our evidence to the Health and Social Care Bill currently before the Senedd.

It came up in the context of the next recommendation, on mandatory reporting, and was discussed in our written evidence submission, as well as in a follow up letter to the Committee.

The government says that they don’t need to expand the mandatory reporting duty further, and instead it is about raising awareness of the existing duty to report on key professionals.

As noted in our letter, the government has set out their position, but they haven’t set out the actions they are now taking on awareness raising.

In order to accept their reasoning, we would like to see more detail on the awareness raising plans and actions, to be assured that this is sufficient to ensure children across Wales are being kept safe.

Mandatory reporting

As above, the Welsh Government refers to the duty in S.130 Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act, which was in place prior to the IICSA recommendations.

We highlighted in our written evidence on the Bill (above) concerns about professionals who may not be aware of this duty, noting an example from north Wales that remains in the news, where it appears that education professionals may have had concerns that were not sufficiently passed on by way of formal referrals.

Inquiries are ongoing in respect of that matter, which should tell us more about what did or did not happen, but on the face of it, it does appear that opportunities may have been missed to safeguard the affected children, and this may be linked to lack of awareness or understanding of this duty, which would have applied to education professionals in 2019.

National guarantee of specialist therapeutic support for child victims of sexual abuse

The government accepted this recommendation in principle, noting the need to work with partners on the options for commissioning and delivering this support.

We have visited the Lighthouse model in London with the other UK Children’s Commissioners, in 2019 and again in 2024.

The Lighthouse is the UK’s first Child House and is based on the international Barnahus model. It is run by University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) in partnership with the Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC.

The model is about making sure children can recover from sexual abuse, with a focus on getting children and young people the right help at the right time, by putting all the services needed to respond to sexual abuse under one roof. Medical, advocacy, social care, police, and therapeutic support can be delivered from the one place, in a safe and comfortable environment for the child.

We raised this approach with the Welsh Government back in 2019 through our national Child Sexual exploitation/abuse roundtable meetings and in correspondence.  At that time, they were waiting for an evaluation of the Lighthouse model before deciding how to proceed.

The Government’s 2019-22 national action plan refers to consideration of a range of child-centred practice models that will inform incremental service development, including the adoption of the Barnahus or Child House approach at the first UK pilot, The Lighthouse service in London and other established models of good practice such as that at St Mary’s Centre SARC, Manchester.

This was intended to inform a national Service Specification of SARC services for children in Wales.

The specification has not been produced to our knowledge and no such provision exists in Wales.  Whilst there are Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARC) across Wales, these may be at hospitals or other unfamiliar settings and have not been designed specifically for children.