The Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB) is the key statutory mechanism for agreeing how the relevant organisations in each local area will cooperate to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and for ensuring the effectiveness of what they do.

The requirements for the Safeguarding Boards in the Children Act 2004 came into force on 1st April 2006, when Bury's Area Child Protection Committee (ACPC) was replaced by the Bury Safeguarding Children Board (BSCB). It is an inter-agency forum which brings together the Local Authority, police, education, probation, health workers and others in the community responsible for child protection to help them work more effectively to safeguard children from abuse and neglect.

The responsibilities of the Local Safeguarding Children Board are: -

• To develop and agree local policies and procedures for inter-agency work to protect children, within the national framework to audit and evaluate how well local services work together to protect children.
• To put in place objectives and performance indicators.
• To encourage effective working relationships between services and professional groups, based on trust and mutual understanding.
• To ensure agreement across agencies about operational definitions and thresholds.
• To improve local ways of working based on knowledge from national and local experience and research, and to ensure lessons learned are acted upon.
• To undertake case reviews where a child has died or in certain circumstances has been seriously harmed.
• To help improve the quality of Child Protection work through inter agency training and development.
• To raise awareness within the wider community of the need to safeguard children and promote their welfare.