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Lord Laming's report on safeguarding children, published this week, makes depressing reading.

We do not need to rehearse the headlines, the high-profile horror stories of cruelty and neglect or the statistics that give the lie to our claim to live in a civilised society.

However energetically we set about tackling the other causes of harm to children – accident, alcohol, disease, deprivation, diet, drugs – wilful abuse by adults is a source of shame that is deepened by our inability to do anything about it.

There are two kinds of impotence and it's hard to say which is hardest to live with: our powerlessness to prevent the unavoidable, the sudden act of rage or depravity that causes suffering or death, or our abject failure to deal with preventable abuse.

The Laming report makes all the usual sensible proposals about better training for social workers, better management, better co-ordination of agencies and better systems for reporting and assessing risk. It also establishes the underlying causes, many of which are also all too familiar.

For example, the report blames inadequate IT systems for hindering progress. Good IT should enable risk analysis, case-load management and information sharing and communication between agencies. But the report finds that IT is making work where it should be saving it. Social workers are busy in front of screens filling forms necessitated by an unwieldy assessment system. Every hour they spend on their computer is an hour wasted in making contact with children at risk and their families. Tick-box technology has another, more insidious effect, which is to create a culture in which procedure is more important than judgement.

The failure to share information is not only an IT problem. The law or rather ignorance of the law is also getting in the way. Agencies are nervous of sharing information apparently because they are unclear about whether they will be in breach of the Data Protection Act.

Lord Laming gives unequivocal advice on this point: "The safety and welfare of children is of paramount importance, and agencies may lawfully share confidential information about the child or the parent, without consent, if doing so is in the public interest."

The only thing hard to understand about that is why agencies don't already know it.

The last cause of failure is what the report calls the wariness of health service staff to engage in child protection work. Is this our legendary British diffidence, our reluctance to interfere, our belief in the virtue of minding one's own business? Or is Lord Laming simply too polite to use the word "gutless"?

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