STEPHEN Naysmith ("A worthy policy has caught out ministers", The Herald, February 13) and various other commentators in The Herald have dismissed concerns about the proposal to appoint a named person for every child in Scotland.

It is, they say, just a commonsense way of protecting children. Well, while the imposition of named persons may not bring about the end of family life, the proposal, and the Children and Young People Bill as a whole, does represent a complete denial of families, and of the impossibility of separating family welfare from child welfare.

The bill comes at a time when the poor are being increasingly blamed for their own poverty, and subjected to all sorts of goads and punishments to save them from themselves. Blaming parents for their own poverty and for their children's poor start in life is not confined to the Tories. It is now part of mainstream policy development in Scotland as well as in England. It comes from a misguided view that "we know what's best for you" and that "services" can substitute for social equality and solidarity. This has led to a failure to prioritise measures that would promote and safeguard family welfare as the absolute mainstay of children's welfare.

Hence the nonsense of a bill presented to Parliament, heralded as one to "get it right for every child" which does not mention families at all, and which has more mention of "named persons" and of "corporate parents" (an oxymoron if ever there was one) than of actual parents and carers.

The official line is that the proposal for a named person is merely a way of offering parents and others a single point of contact for their concerns about a child. That would have been relatively simple to frame in legislation. But that is not what is actually proposed. Instead the named person, who will be appointed by the "service provider" or their agents, will have authority "as they consider appropriate" "to inform, advise and support parents" in order to secure a child's welfare. Despite the Christie Commission pointing to the failure of prevention and the need to reform public services around prevention and not around the demands of failure, there is no mention of prevention in the bill either. So there is nothing to strengthen families, and nothing to strengthen prevention.

The proposal comes from Serviceland, a strange place of many large institutions each with responsibility for different bits of people's lives, and which children and families are invited to visit on Mondays to Fridays, 9-5. Most of the people who make the decisions about what happens in Serviceland rarely actually meet the children and families who come to visit, never mind take the time to ensure that services meet their needs. It is only the lowest-level staff who go out into homes and communities, but their reports of bare floorboards, no bedding, no electricity don't seem to trigger a change in the flow of spend.

If a child leaves a poor home in a poor area for a foster home in a better-off area, the cost is around £20,000 a year. Residential care can cost from six to 10 times that amount. That spend is described as spend on that area, as if the money were devoured by the poorest families, but in fact it is money deported to support other better-off families and areas. In fact, local preventive services are the hardest to get funding for, and the first to be cut, because they are not statutory.

We have the greatest levels of inequality ever, at the same time as actual hunger and cold becoming a daily reality for many children and their families. The Bill's biggest fault is that it is a diversion, a rearranging of the deckchairs while the ship heads for the icebergs.

Maggie Mellon,

3a Fettes Row,

Edinburgh.

STEPHEN Naysmith suggests that the Scottish Government's proposal for every child to have a named person has been misinterpreted by opponents.

The key issue is the right of parents to refuse to an investigation into their private and family life by the named person. In the rest of Britain, the state has to prove that a child is at risk of suffering signifi­cant harm before ordering an investigation. The Children & Young Persons (Scotland) Bill does not allow parents to prevent the named person from investigating the family and sharing the information when there is no evidence the child is at risk.

The Human Rights Act requires that there is a threshold, or line in the sand, where investigations can be halted by parents to protect family privacy. Without this necessary legal threshold investigations can be unlimited and, potentially, very damaging to the child and family.

Currently completing its passage in Wales is the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Bill. This legislation would appear to satisfy the Human Rights Act because clear provision is made for the parents to refuse an assessment of a child's needs but not to refuse an assessment where the child is at risk.

This fundamental point has been overlooked in Scotland. The elephant trap the Scottish Government has missed is real and is more commonly known as Article 8 of the Human Rights Act - the right to respect for private and family life. There is every possibility the bill will get held up by the courts - and rightly so.

Tristram C Llewellyn Jones,

The Cronk,

Church Road,

Ramsey,

Isle of Man.