Within the tight world of Whitehall and the much wider world of child welfare, the senior civil servant Rupert Hughes, who has died aged 80, was a heroic figure. In the 1980s he was given unprecedented freedom within the Department of Health and Social Security to work on improving the wellbeing of the nation’s children, and the result was the 1989 Children Act. A radical piece of legislation, the act helped to unravel what had previously been a tangle of public and private laws causing confusion across a wide spectrum of crucial children’s issues: protection, care, family support, adoption and fostering.
In a decade in which the government of Margaret Thatcher was seeking to curb state activities, Hughes managed to steer through the act with cross-party support, and set a threshold for compulsory state intervention in family life that was both more precise and wider than existing law.
Continue reading...