Closure and decommissioning of ContactPoint
The Government has announced that on 6 August it will
switch off the ContactPoint Database and will subsequently
decommission it, safely removing and destroying the existing data.
The Government’s view is that it is disproportionate and
unjustifiable to hold records on every child in the country, making
them accessible to large numbers of people.
Instead of a database containing millions of children’s details,
accessed by hundreds of thousands of practitioners, the Government
are exploring the practicality of a new national signposting
service which would focus on helping practitioners find out whether
another practitioner is working, or has previously worked, in
another authority area with the same vulnerable child. Social
workers in particular, and potentially other key services like the
police or accident and emergency departments, may need this
information very quickly. Such a service must aim to ensure that
these children are not ‘lost’ to social care services when they
move.
The Government recognises that frontline practitioners need to
be able to provide support for our most vulnerable children when
they move across local authority boundaries or access services in
more than one area.
Critical to the success of any service must be that it provides
a modern, effective tool that supports the frontline and that it
supports the broader aims of Eileen Munro’s Review to improve child
protection and social work practice. An update from the Government
is expected in the Autumn.