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There will inevitably be an element of déjà vu about today's report by Lord Laming into child protection services in England.
It was, of course, Lord Laming who originally carried out the inquiry into those services four years ago following the killing of Victoria Climbié in 2001.
The death of Baby P as a result of sustained abuse while he was on the at-risk register happened, moreover, in the same borough, Haringey, where Victoria died.
The positive aspect of the inquiry is precisely that Lord Laming, whom Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, asked to review services after Baby P's death, is the best person to monitor the extent to which his own report's recommendations have been fulfilled.
The dispiriting aspect is that it seems likely to find that, now as then, many children are being exposed to unnecessary risk and maltreatment by the poor quality of children's services.
Already change is under way. Mr Balls has announced that mid-ranking managers of children's services departments are to be returned to the front line to work alongside child-protection workers.
That is a positive step, both to give the people who deal with problem families support from those with experience, and to focus attention on the real priority of these departments, which is child protection, not bureaucracy.
Indeed, those right at the top, too, should have to spend some time with at-risk children.
Another change is that Ofsted will have the power to make unannounced inspections of children's services.
The inspectors themselves came under scrutiny after it was found they had praised Haringey children's services even while Baby P had been enduring months of abuse under the noses of its case workers. That cannot happen again.
Lord Laming has identified the great challenge in child protection, which is to raise the status of the profession in order to attract talented individuals to this demanding work.
One good way would be to diminish as far as possible the paperwork and bureaucracy recruits have to engage in, and instead liberate them for the work they joined the profession to do: caring for vulnerable children.
In the family way
Our report today about the number of ministers who employ their husbands or wives or children - five members of the Cabinet and nine other ministers - will do little to raise public esteem for members of parliament.
In the wake of the affair of Derek Conway, the Tory MP who was obliged to pay back some of the sums he paid his own son as researcher, it might have been thought that ministers would be careful about employing members of their own families.
It may be that their spouses or children are better qualified for the job than any other candidate; another possibility is that they are reluctant to let these lucrative allowances go out of the family The problem is cross-party; an inquiry by David Cameron suggested more than half of Tory MEPs employed spouses or relatives.
This is quite legal. There has always been another reason why MPs employ their spouses, which is that it means errant parliamentarians are less likely to end up leaving their wives for their secretaries. But there is no very obvious rationale to employ children. Voters will draw their own conclusions.
Harry can help
Prince William attends the launch of a Mother's Day campaign by the Child Bereavement Charity today to promote its work with schools, helping children understand and come to terms with losing a member of their family, especially a mother.
Given Prince William's own experience of his mother's tragic death, he can do genuinely good work in promoting a little-understood problem which affects many children, as well as teachers and fellow pupils who struggle to deal with the subject.
Princess Diana attended the launch of the charity in 1994; this is one case where it is heartening to see history repeating itself.
