Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Baroness Howarth of Breckland

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I will introduce a totally different note into the debate. I want assurances from the Government that corporate parenting will not be used as an excuse for not working with the natural parents while the child is in care. One of the major failures in this country is that while the child is in care, we do not do any work with the natural parents. We send children back from care to their natural parents more than they do in most other European countries. I went to look at this in Denmark and Germany when I was Minister for Social Exclusion. I was looking at why we in this country did so badly with children in care. They cost us more and the outcomes are poorer, which means that we should learn from what goes on elsewhere.

What the social workers in Berlin said to me was, “We don’t pretend that we can be substitute parents. We know that we have to be the bridge between what has gone wrong and where they might go”. That means that they were prepared to take them in earlier, but when I went to breakfast in one children’s home, three mothers were there. I have to say that they were clearly fairly dysfunctional, but as soon as the children went out to school, the key workers did some work with those mothers. They said that the children might never go back home, but anyone in this Room who has worked with children in care—which was my first job in Newcastle—knows that it did not matter how long they had been away from home or how bad things were there: the children wanted to know about their families. I am concerned that we sometimes say, “Right, they are in our care now and we can look after them. We’re not going to spend any time with that dysfunctional natural family”. I believe having that in our system is one of the reasons why we fail.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly. I welcome the corporate parenting principles in the Bill, but I hope that we do not end up making them so complex that local authorities find them difficult to implement by adding things that should perhaps belong in other places such as the national offer or in other parts of the Bill. We should keep the principles simple. However, I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and in particular with his Amendment 29. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, referred to it in terms of the other people who should be incorporated into taking responsibility for these young people. We will come to that, but I would rather we dealt with it in another part of the Bill rather than here.

I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Warner—as one of the other people in this Room who has been a corporate parent—that the phrase “have regard to” would become a major discussion around the table of a local authority in difficulty that had to make savings. It will not be true in places such as Leeds or Kensington and Chelsea, which really have a grip on this.

I will also say that, as the Minister knows perfectly well, the Ofsted report published yesterday showed that many of our care systems are doing much better. Eight out of 10 children’s homes are now rated as being good or doing well. They can improve, so we are not at the bottom. Certainly a lot of local authorities need to improve, but we are on the way up. I hope that anything we do here and anything the Government do in future will encourage the direction of travel that we appear to be on at the moment. But it will certainly not be helped by the phrase, “have regard to”. “Must” is a much better word.