Ms Karen Kiernan:

I wish to respond and roll in a response to the last question, if that is okay. If we really want to improve child protection and services for children, first of all we need to make sure those children and their parents have a roof over their heads, enough income and all the basic, bottom-line things we need to survive. We also need to make sure that we live in a more equal society where people are not stigmatised because they are parenting on their own, because they are poor, because they are from a certain place or because they are an ethnic minority because that impacts their ability to do well.

The big answer is integrated services. The committee has heard today about how people's incomes are being affected this week simply because we have not got appropriate integration. The same is true from the point of view of service provision. It is completely patchy depending on whether you have a PHN at all, whether they are good and then whether you have a family resource centre - whatever is in your area.

As regards countries that do this well, Sweden certainly used to do it well. Everyone who is pregnant, whether with their first or fifth child, goes on a parenting course. The records for them, their family and their children travel from prenatal right through the schools and education. Talk about eyes-on. There is a completely holistic administrative system built around individuals and families. They are so supportive of parental leave. They have a very strong gender equality approach for fathers as well as mothers, whereas when we introduced the parental leave equality piece here, lone parents, unfortunately, got half the leave that two-parent families have. We have still not rectified that three or four years in. There are ways of doing this well but it requires investment and a reorientation to understand that poor children live in poor families and if you want to support children the single most impactful way is to support their parents to do their best.