Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Baroness Walmsley

Monday 14th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I make the point that if you want to know what a child needs, you should ask the child. If you want to know what the child’s parents need, it is also often quite a good idea to ask the child. People who are addicted are not always totally candid with the social workers, but if a child goes home for visits or is sent home—apparently permanently but that turns not to be permanently—he or she knows exactly what is going on in that home and can help the services in assisting the parents so as to ensure that the child can eventually go home if the parent is genuinely rehabilitated.

I also add my support to what the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said about special guardians. They perform an invaluable public service at very little cost. Some of them break down because of lack of support and help, and we ought to do something about that.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, this is Committee: I was rather carried away by reading the notes and I meant to ask the noble Earl a question on his drafting in Amendment 26. In proposed new subsection (1)(a), he provides for,

“any person who has contacted the authority to request information”.

I suspect that he does not quite mean “any person”. I can imagine circumstances where it would be entirely wrong for information to be given out. Perhaps he can give the Committee some assurances about that, particularly if he is going to come back with this at a later stage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, Clause 8 is also about contact: contact post-adoption. Subsection (5) sets out the points which a court must consider when there is an application for an order for contact by any person who has obtained the court’s leave to make that application. The court must consider: any risk of the application disrupting the child’s life to the extent that he or she would be harmed; the applicant’s connection with the child; and representations made to the court by the child or any person who has applied for, or been granted, an adoption order. I am quite prepared to be told I have misread this, because the amendment comes out of my own head: it has not been raised by anyone else with me. If I have got it completely wrong, I apologise to my noble friend who has put her name to it.

There must be a place for considering the welfare of the child. Section 1 of the 1989 Act states that when the court determines any question with respect to a child’s upbringing, the child’s welfare is the paramount consideration. Is that the answer in the sense that it would apply in any event? If so, why do we have the new subsection (5)(a) about the risk of disruption to the child’s life, because welfare of the child would clearly cover that? It seems to me that the balance of the clause as drafted, the presumption, is that if the risk of disruption to the child’s life is slim, you should not take account of it. I am curious—to use a term used earlier in a different context—about what has and what has not gone into the clause. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I am happy to support my noble friend Lady Hamwee’s amendment, because it is never a bad thing to draw attention to the paramountcy principle in the 1989 Act and the fact that the welfare of the child must be pre-eminent. What she is suggesting is really nice, because it is positive. What we have in Clause 8(5)(a) is negative: that you should not do it if there is any risk. My noble friend is saying that you should do it if it is to the benefit of the child. I am a very positive person and I should like it that way round.

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, I hope that I can reassure my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lady Walmsley on this point. We are very concerned to ensure that when the child has contact, it benefits the child. There is both the positive side, when contact benefits the child; and the negative side, to protect the child where such contact is not regarded as being in their interest. It is striking that research has shown that the proportion of children suffering negative consequences from contact after adoption is twice the proportion for those for whom contact had a positive effect. In the light of that, this must obviously be weighed up extremely carefully.

My noble friends are clearly well aware that the paramount consideration of the court must be the welfare of the child throughout his or her life. Section 1(2) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 states that the paramount consideration of the court when coming to a decision relating to the adoption of a child must be the welfare of the child throughout his life. I hope that that gives the reassurance that my noble friend is looking for. If it does not, I am more than happy to write to clarify, but I hope that she can be reassured that the balance is right and that the protections that she wants are indeed here in both directions, as it were.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, the meeting arranged by the noble Earl brought a number of comments about Staying Put. It was clear that there is a shortage of accessible information—particularly because not all authorities are operating the system—and that there are real complications when there are cross-boundary considerations. That follows on from the point made by the noble and learned Baroness.

Some things were mentioned which really took me aback. When a young person becomes 18, if he or she does stay with the foster parents a tenancy agreement has to be signed. As a couple of the young people we met said, “This does not reflect our relationship. They are our foster parents; they are not our landlords”. It is necessary, I understand, to have a tenancy agreement in order to qualify for housing benefit and income support. I asked how the total income compared to fostering allowances and I was told by the foster carer we met that the total income had reduced by about 50%. He was very enthusiastic about his foster daughter remaining with him. That foster daughter also said—she was part of a sibling group—that she had to be CRB checked in order to stay with her sisters. Something has gone wrong with the system.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, have my name on the amendment and support it wholeheartedly. The noble Earl, in his introduction, used the word “normalising”. We are trying to normalise the relationship between the young people and their foster carers because, as my noble friend Lord Storey pointed out, most young people who grow up in their birth family do not leave home at 18. They stay on.

I was interested in what the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said about the pilots. It did not have an adverse effect on the recruitment of foster carers; indeed, it had a beneficial effect. It occurs to me that the Government might be a little concerned that if we make it a right for young people, if they and their foster carers wish it, to stay on until 21, it will take away foster parenting places for other children coming into the system. Frankly, I think that we should be putting more effort into turning the tap off and giving more support to families so that children can safely stay with their birth parents, but that is an argument for another day. That might be the case, but I have a suggestion that might fulfil some of the need without the problem of taking away a foster-caring place for some other child. I have promoted this idea to successive Children’s Ministers over the past few years, who all say, “That sounds like a good idea”, but nothing ever gets done.

Many children go off to university or college, or to work somewhere else when they are 18, but they maintain a close and supportive relationship with their birth families. Why not allow foster parents, if they so wish, and the young person wishes, to have a sort of little stipend or retainer to act as a supporter and adviser to the care leaver for the next few years when they have left the bedroom in the house? That bedroom would then be freed up. A lot of young people who get on very well with their foster parents go back and visit them and ask for advice anyway. But many of them, knowing that the parents may have taken on another foster child and will be busy, would be hesitant to go back to the foster parent and ask for help and advice when things go pear-shaped, such as their accommodation or education plans going wrong, or they have trouble with their employment. Whatever it is, they would have somebody officially who was being paid a little bit by the state to help them and stop new arrangements breaking down. It is when they break down that the state has a great deal more cost liability to try to put things right. There is an existing relationship of trust, understanding, knowledge and emotion. If the Government cannot accept the noble Earl’s amendment—I very much hope that they will—perhaps the Minister will consider my suggestion of a sort of halfway house. The parent could retain that relationship formally and, one hopes, the care leaver would have no hesitation in going back to that person for advice if things went wrong.

Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Baroness Walmsley

Wednesday 9th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, we have two amendments in this group. As we are starting in Committee, I begin by declaring an interest as a patron of PAC, which deals with both pre and post-adoption support and care and the Intercountry Adoption Centre. I am joint president of London Councils—of course, local authorities have adoption responsibilities—and I have other interests that are well in the past. I have been informed by the directorship of an adoption agency, membership of a local authority adoption panel and membership of the legal group of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering.

I enjoyed both the subject and the process of serving on the Select Committee on Adoption Legislation under the chairmanship of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. Fostering for adoption is a concept much supported by members of that committee, although we all recognised that it may be of quite limited application. The Select Committee urged the Government to widen the scope of the duty to include it in options for all children for whom adoption is the permanent plan. I appreciate that that is why the Government made an alteration to the original draft clauses, although not the alterations that the Select Committee suggested.

I appreciate that my Amendments 5 and 7 would be pre-empted if the Committee accepts government Amendment 1. However—and I say this for clarity and not too aggressively—if we are not persuaded by the response to the other points raised in this debate, I for one will want to return to the matter on Report to deal with the equivalent issues in the clause that, if we accept the government amendment, will then have been amended.

My first amendment is to probe both the meaning and the weight of the term “consider”. It is not a technical term. When I first saw it, thinking very much as a non-professional, I wondered where on a spectrum of thinking about something—from something casually crossing one’s conscience all the way to making a decision—“consider” comes in terms of considering adoption. I then discovered that many professionals were also concerned. BAAF and the Family Rights Group, endorsed by other organisations, say that there is a wide spectrum between adoption considered as one possibility when all options are open and a formal decision that a child should be placed for adoption. Things follow automatically, step-by-step, when one is in the formal process. This suggestion is made that unless we link this provision to the statutory review process, we are not centring it properly as part of that step-by-step sequence. In defining a more precise trigger point, they suggest it when the local authority considers that adoption is the likely permanence plan. I accept that I have failed to bite the bullet by not offering an alternative.

I wondered whether I was fussing unnecessarily because if one looks at new subsection (9A)(a) of Section 22C, all that will be required is for the local authority to consider placing the child with a foster parent approved as an adopter. However, and this is very central to my point, I worry that a lack of clarity or agreement across the sector as to what is meant by “considering for adoption” may lead to inconsistencies in practice between agencies. That cannot be a good thing.

Given that the Government’s amendment proposes new subsection (9ZA)(b), I am even more unclear now about the local authority being satisfied that the child should be placed for adoption. Why is paragraph (b) required if being satisfied, in the terms set out there, is different from “considering adoption” in paragraph (a)? I hope that in reply the Minister can explain the distinction between the two paragraphs in the first part of his Amendment 1.

Amendment 7 would require the matching process to have been carried out; the noble Baroness referred to this and to issues coming to light which are not necessarily initially obvious. It is a very careful process which should be reflected in the legislation. I was not reassured by what the Minister said in the Commons about this. He said that fostering for adoption should,

“be used where the local authority has not … decided”,

on a “permanence option” and that it is,

“not … appropriate … formally to match the child and carers”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children and Families Bill Committee, 12/3/13; cols. 183-195.]

He also said it would be “premature” because a fostering for adoption placement was generally before adoption was the definitive plan. If permanence is the objective, I do not follow the logic of that.

There is of course an important place for guidance in all this. I thank the Minister for distributing the indicative guidance but it does not seem to deal with this. Surely it should at least be included as an issue, even if one does not go as far as the amendments that I have tabled. What a lot of this comes down to is taking all reasonable steps to avoid placing a child in a situation where disruption or a breakdown of the placement has not been considered adequately.

I know that my noble friend Lady Walmsley will say a word about Amendment 10. I absolutely take the point about work with families being difficult. On the drafting—this is a detail—I was not sure that it was necessary for an emergency to preclude the steps which are spelt out. I also wonder how this would relate to Section 47(5)(a) of the 1989 Act, which requires the ascertainment of a child’s wishes and feelings. I suspect that everything else in that section is subject to that anyway but perhaps the noble Baroness might say a word about that.

I finish by putting on record my huge admiration—and not just mine—for both foster parents and adopters. Above all, to be prepared to foster with a view to adoption, and therefore necessarily with a view also to not adopting, is particularly admirable. In the somewhat technical approach that we may have to take to some of this, it is appropriate that we should not lose sight of the enormous contribution that these families, which are sometimes a family of one, will make.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I want to add a couple of comments to those of my noble friend Lady Hamwee, with whose words I totally concur. I have a great deal of sympathy with Amendment 10, and I urge the Minister to consider it and perhaps come back to us at a later stage with some further thoughts about it.

When we are considering all this, we need to bear in mind that adoption is not the only form of permanence, and we must not lose sight of that fact. It is not appropriate for many children. When it comes to considering placement with family and friends, on whatever basis, in my view you cannot do that early enough. A briefing that I received from the College of Social Work pointed out to me—I had not realised this before—that there is currently no duty on a local authority to consider family and friends before the child is taken into care. Given the 26-week limit that we are about to bring in, it would be very wise for the Minister to consider this amendment. It would mean that family and friends were considered even before the child was taken into care, and the concern that people have raised, that 26 weeks may not give family and friends time to come forward, would be averted if family and friends were being considered even before the child went into care. This amendment has merit, and I hope that the Minister will consider it.