Effective government structures for children.

This article highlights the need for a Minister for Children, sited within the Cabinet Office and responsible for a small Children's Unit in Great Britain. The Minister and Children's Unit would be charged with four main tasks. First to develop and oversee a government strategy for children which would establish a framework of overall objectives for children. Second, to ensure that government has an accurate and comprehensive picture of the real lives of children disaggregation of budgets and so forth. Third, to coordinate government departments. The idea is for the Minister and Unit to act as a broker, rather than having direct responsibility for children's matters. Lastly, the Minister and Unit would seek to consult children and promote their role as active and responsible participants in society. The justification for special government measures for children is not just that attempts to coordinate across the functional departments are not working well enough. There are both moral and self-interested grounds for giving children priority in government. The moral grounds are that children are totally dependent on adults for their successful evolution from helplessness to competent autonomy and are also more affected by the activities of government. From a purely self-interested point of view voters can see that there would be less waste and more effective services if government departments have coordinated and integrated policies