Baby P: please, no hasty legislation

It is quite natural that policy makers, practitioners and media are clamouring for changes that will ensure Baby P's horrific death was not entirely in vain.

We should be careful not to draw the wrong lessons however. Baby P was on the radar and still he was killed by abusive carers. Lord Laming has said that abusers "become very clever at diverting attention away from what has happened to the child. Therefore people who work in this field - whether health visitors, police officers, social workers, whatever – have to recognise this in their evidence gathering. They have to be sceptical; they have to be streetwise; they have to be courageous."

Two things to note: children will fall through the net if the abusers are good enough at concealing the abuse. There can be no way of eliminating all cases, however sceptical practitioners may be. Secondly, this scepticism, in attempting to eliminate the worst, may harm functional family units by removing children unnecessarily - the one thing we know rarely results in positive outcomes. Certainly, if practitioners are concerned that they will be in serious trouble if they make a call that is insufficiently sceptical, there could be a great deal of unnecessary damage caused to children and their families.

So much of our legislation today is designed to prevent the worse - from school targets to health and safety regulations - and so much of it serves to restrict the best. I hope the Government is cautious, even in the face of the Sun's screaming rage.