Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Baroness Hughes of Stretford

Monday 14th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to intervene briefly. We know that many children want to maintain contact with their natural family, even if they know that that family is chaotic. I absolutely support the amendments but my concern is that they do not push hard enough for support when the child initially goes into care. This builds on something that I was trying to say last week. Our responsibility ought to be to ensure that, while the child is in care, work none the less goes on with the natural parents so that an assessment can be made of whether they are capable of change and willing for change to take place. Our problem is that too often children who themselves have improved are then sent back home and no work is done with the parents before that happens. That is often why the placement breaks down again, and that is expensive—not just in monetary terms in trying to deal with that when the child comes back into care, but precisely because it adds to the damage that has already been done.

I chair an organisation in the north-east which does quite a lot of work with people who have addictions. We have a programme where we take mothers who are addicted into residential accommodation with their children. It is largely paid for by the National Health Service but we put a bit of our own money into it and we try to get some money from local authorities too. During the residential period, intensive parenting takes place and what happens to the children in that situation is also monitored extremely carefully. In that way, you really can make an assessment as to whether it is going to be feasible for the mother and her children to make it outside the care system.

One problem that was re-emphasised to us while we were on the adoption Select Committee is that very often parents who are encouraged or are made to put their children up for adoption because they are not capable of looking after them simply go and have other children. Our intervention with the Cyrenians in Newcastle is really trying to stop that by saying, “If you’re going to have another child then you’ve got to take the steps necessary to make sure that that child actually stands a chance”, so that there is not a wheel continually going round where they are saying, “If I can’t have that child then I’m going to have another child”, without any exit.

The Government really need to look at how we work with natural parents once the child has gone into care. If we can get better at that work, we may indeed be able to return children much more successfully and the support package being talked about in the amendments will then really bear fruit.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, briefly, I particularly support the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, in relation to Amendments 26 and 27. These amendments are important because, as she said, the statistics show us that the system is not working well for children who return home. While going home is the most common outcome for children in care, around half of them have to go back into care—sometimes more than once in this revolving-door pattern that can emerge—simply because there is not the good social work practice in relation to children returning home that we associate with other forms of childcare.

As the amendments address, there is not good assessment, good identification of need or provision of the necessary support services. There is also, very often, no continued monitoring of how that child is faring when they go home. That is the first point which the Government need to address: the statistics show us that it is not working when half the children who go home have to come back into care. That obviously not only damages them; as the research has shown, the costs of the consequence of coming back into care escalate because as children return from successive attempted reunifications, they are more damaged. The cost of caring for them in other placements then becomes that much greater. As the University of Loughborough has shown, as well as the social and moral imperative to try to reduce these failed reunifications there is, potentially, a financial benefit. If you can prevent the escalating cost of failed reunification, it makes financial sense as well and may in fact reduce costs to the local authority.

These amendments are about preventing further breakdown and damage to children. They are really about the good social work practice that should be going on but which we actually know is not, because reunification practice varies so widely across local authorities. The amendments would at least set a standard as to what should be required.