To : The Editor (30/03/10)
Dear Sir
Isle of Man Children Bill
I recently attended a debate on this controversial subject put on by the Positive Action Group. Before attending I felt fairly neutral about the proposals but I now realise their implications are far reaching and there will be an ongoing and substantial cost to the Isle of Man and this is not just financial.

It all sounds fairly innocuous. “Every child matters”: who could argue with that. We all want children protected but look at the English version, which incidentally has not been adopted in the Channel Isles, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, and it becomes obvious that this is an attempt by government to take over parental responsibility. It gives government powers to intervene even if they think something might go wrong, not if something has already gone wrong. We all know that children growing up can go through rebellious stages but most, and I emphasise the word most because it’s a very few actually who go on, particularly in the Isle of Man, to cause real concern. The same applies to parents. We are very fortunate that we do not suffer, as they do in England, with large areas of deprivation and the immigration problems that can lead to poor outcomes.

The Bill as published will give the Government the power to set up an information database about all parents and children resident in the Isle of Man. This will inevitably lead to information overload and perhaps a sledgehammer to crack a nut would be the correct analogy. In our present litigious culture this means pressure to report anything and everything about a child. There are around 16,000 children in the Isle of Man with approximately 700 being born every year. This is going to be a very complex database with a lot of people having access to information that could be hearsay and in our small communities any false allegation or information could be seriously damaging.

It displays a complete lack of trust in our parents and addresses a perceived rather than a real problem. There are around 40 children on our At Risk register and just over 100 in full time care. The only deaths that I recall were two children who were actually in the care of the DHSS.

I do hope that Tynwald will either dramatically revise the Bill or reject it completely then do the proper thing and review our present legislation in a Manx context. We already have the tools to tackle the problem. The system is not broke, it may require review but not the big brother government knows better approach proposed at present.

Regards
Geoffrey Boot
Ballagarraghyn

St Johns