A Failure of Implementation (Children and Families Act 2014 Committee Report)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, on securing this important debate on the Children and Families Act 2014. I also thank all your Lordships who carried out post-legislative scrutiny of the Act last year and all who contributed to the debate today. I join others in paying tribute to the noble Baroness and her work over many years to improve the outcomes for children who access children’s social care and the family courts. I also very much thank my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy, who has reflected his commitment to this issue by being here in person to listen to your Lordships. To those noble Lords who are disappointed to get a Minister from the Department for Education, I say: you have two for the price of one.
As your Lordships have set out today, the Act took forward a range of commitments to improve services for vulnerable children and families. As we have heard in this afternoon’s short debate, it sought to support: children in the adoption and care systems; those affected by decisions of the family courts; those with special educational needs and disabilities; and families with their home and work life. Although those sound like solid policy objectives, all your Lordships brought to the debate the human issues and the absolute imperative to try to improve our response for children who do not have the benefits of stability and love as they start their lives.
With that in mind, I want to touch on the Government’s plans to reform children’s social care, which many of your Lordships raised. As the Committee is aware, earlier this year, in response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and two other key reviews, the Government published an implementation strategy titled Stable Homes, Built on Love, which sets out how we plan to reform children’s social care. It sets out how we will help families overcome some of the challenges they face, keep our children safe, and make sure that children in care also have stable and loving homes and opportunities to fulfil their potential in their lives. I am glad that my noble friend Lady Wyld was brave enough to leave the section in her speech where she talked about the importance of understanding our responsibility in relation to our children and the importance of our supporting families to stay together within their limitations that she rightly raised.
Before I turn to the recommendations and the points your Lordships raised, there were a number of questions about whether we are confident that the approach we are taking to the reform of children’s social care will really deliver, in particular the test and review approach, which the right reverend Prelate raised and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, questioned. She raised the issue of funding for our reforms. Members of the post-legislative scrutiny committee understand better than most just how complicated it is to get this right on the ground. We believe that getting a balance between testing robustly and going as fast as we can—without going too fast—is the right approach. I would be happy to meet the noble Baroness again to talk about the unique child identifier; we met earlier but I am more than happy to meet with her again.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked about what progress we have made on the special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision improvement plan—less simply named than the elegant Children and Families Act—since March 2023. We have secured funding since then to design and test the proposals set out in the improvement plan and have identified local authorities in every region that will test many of the measures. They will start their work this autumn.
This ties into some of the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, in particular on the national frameworks being ready by the end of the year. We are still confident about that. We will respond this month to the consultation she referred to. I hope she will acknowledge the progress the Government have made on local authorities judged inadequate in relation to children’s social care. I share her deep unease at the thought of what that looks like on the ground and feels like for vulnerable children in receipt of services, but I hope she acknowledges that our strategy to date is already working. We very much believe that this new approach will also build on it. Finally, we will publish on kinship care by year end. If I have not covered any of her points, I am happy to follow up in writing.
I will update on progress against the committee’s recommendations. I heard disappointment from a number of your Lordships that there was no earlier post-legislative scrutiny of the Act. The Government found the recommendations made by the committee and the depth of the work it carried out extremely helpful, but I will move on to some of the practical issues for the future that noble Lords raised.
We published our adoption strategy in July 2021 and in March 2022 we announced that we would invest £160 million over the next three years to deliver it, including £5 million to improve the way in which we match children with families.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, quite rightly raised the issue of improving the response for children from ethnic-minority backgrounds and asked how we are addressing racial disparities in the adoption system. I am pleased to inform the Committee that the number of minority-ethnic adopters has risen from 400 in 2020 to 698 in 2023 as part of our recruitment campaign, You Can Adopt.
We are also working with regional adoption agency leaders, who have made a commitment to develop an overarching strategy to address equality and diversity issues. Statistics on ethnic-minority children waiting for adoption are published quarterly, and the latest figures show an average of 10 months from the court granting a placement order. The noble Baroness is right to raise the issue until we can bring that delay down substantially.
Alongside that, since 2015 we have made £300 million available through the adoption support fund for therapeutic services for over 44,000 children, young people and their families. My noble friend Lady Wyld stressed quite rightly the importance of that mental health support and the unpredictability about how long one might need it for.
On the family courts and family justice, it is a real priority for the Government to address the delays in the family courts, which many of your Lordships mentioned. My department has recently invested an additional £10 million to test new initiatives to try to speed up the process. I know that colleagues in the Ministry of Justice are convening a conference with local family justice boards so that they can look together at how we tackle delays in the family courts.
The committee was very clear about the importance of data sharing and data collection—the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, very much stressed that point. My department has invested more than £2.2 million to improve family justice pre-proceedings practice and data collection. I know that the Ministry of Justice is also investing in improved data collection so that we can give local family justice boards not just their own data but data from others so that they can compare, understand and improve their performance relative to others.
The noble Lord, Lord Bach, was very eloquent on the issue of private family law disputes and some of the problems that we and, more importantly, families and children are facing in that area. In March, the Ministry of Justice published a consultation so that we could support the earlier resolution of private law family disputes. The word “early” came up in many of your Lordships’ remarks. As the right reverend Prelate touched on, we are considering our response, particularly in relation to mediation, and the whole question of early legal advice is also under consideration.
I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for his work on family hubs, his insights into the need for early legal advice and his explanation of the Norwegian and Australian approaches. He also raised the important issue of joint work between the family courts and family hubs and between my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy and me. I will make sure that we can follow up that conversation, if that would be helpful to my noble friend.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Tyler and Lady Wilcox, raised the critical issues around presumption of parental involvement. We will review that before the end of the year.
My noble friend Lady Wyld raised the issues of strengthening and enhancing the voice of children during proceedings. This is a core aim of a new approach to applications for child arrangement orders and other private family law proceedings. Your Lordships already referred to the pilots running in Dorset and north Wales and we really want to draw on this experience more widely. Of course, although the pilot will not be reviewed until January 2025, we want to learn as we go along and emphasise a non-adversarial approach.
We absolutely agree that better information for parents is needed and that we need better connectivity between all parts of the family justice system.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, raised the important issue of kinship care. As I said earlier, we will be publishing our kinship care strategy by the end of 2023. We have already made progress, working with the charity Kinship to deliver high-quality support across England. Like the noble Baroness opposite, we absolutely recognise—and I express our gratitude to—those in families who support other family members. We want kinship carers to get the financial help that they are entitled to. That is why we have extended the adoption support fund to cover children under special guardianship and child arrangement orders. As the noble Baroness mentioned, the Ministry of Justice extended legal aid entitlements to prospective guardians making applications for special guardianship orders in private family law proceedings. We are also committed to establishing a training and support offer for all kinship carers and have committed £45 million to deliver the Families First for Children pathfinder and family network pilots, which will promote the use of family group decision-making, as well as test the impact of family network support packages.
My noble friends Lady Wyld and Lord Farmer raised important issues, as did other noble Lords, in relation to mental health support for children, particularly the join-up between different government departments. The Department for Education is working with health partners across government, including, obviously, the Department for Health and Social Care, but also NHS England, to consider how we can better work together to deliver social care and health services for children with the most complex needs. In Stable Homes, Built on Love, one of our six key missions for care leavers in particular was that, by 2027, we would reduce the disparities in the long-term mental and physical outcomes of care-experienced people and the activity to support that. I will happily write to my noble friend Lady Wyld to set out the pathway.
I always feel that something happens with the clock whenever I stand up to speak. If I may, on some of the comments in relation to employment rights, I will, with my noble friend’s permission, set out some of the points in writing rather than overrun even more than I already have.
There are clearly areas where we are taking forward recommendations from the committee. There are others where we absolutely share the committee’s aspirations in relation to vulnerable children, the family justice system and support for families, including those with children who have special education needs, but where our strategy and approach are slightly different from what the committee recommended. Our aspiration is very much the same.
I thank the noble Baroness and all noble Lords for contributing to this important debate and for the valuable scrutiny that they brought to the Bill. As my noble friend Lady Wyld said, our commitment to vulnerable children happily transcends party-political interests. I know that I can speak both for myself and my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy in saying that we look forward to working across the House on these important issues.