The Partnership is responsible for ensuring services are delivered, in the right way, at the right time, so that children are safe and we make a positive difference to the lives of them and their family.
In December 2023, the updated Working Together to Safeguard Children: A guide to multi-agency working to help, protect and promote the welfare of children, was published. This strengthens the safeguarding duties placed on the three local safeguarding statutory partners (the local police force, integrated care boards (ICBs) and the local authority). Alongside providing a framework for them to make arrangements to work together, and with other partners, to safeguard and promote the welfare of local children, including identifying and responding to their needs.
Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is defined for the purposes of this guidance as:
- providing help and support to meet the needs of children as soon as problems emerge
- protecting children from maltreatment, whether that is within or outside the home, including online
- preventing impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development
- ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care
- promoting the upbringing of children with their birth parents, or otherwise their family network through a kinship care arrangement, whenever possible and where this is in the best interests of the children
- taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes in line with the outcomes set out in the Children’s Social Care National Framework.
Within Leeds, the three statutory safeguarding partners combined with the wider safeguarding partners, will continue to be known as the Leeds Safeguarding Children Partnership (LSCP), and have agreed Multi-Agency Safeguarding Arrangements (MASA), which sets out how the requirements of Working Together to Safeguard Children (2023) will be achieved.
The LSCP is not a public body under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and therefore is not obliged to respond to FOI requests.
