Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th November 2016 Lords Chamber

As Tom Watson rightly points out, domestic violence victims suffer enough. No GP should charge a victim of domestic abuse for a letter they need to access legal aid. It is unfair and immoral. I hope the Minister will agree that this has to stop. I beg to move.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, briefly, I support the noble Baroness. I know that the Government are committed to both safeguarding and equality, and this is a safeguarding and equality issue. It has always amazed me, after my years in Cafcass—I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, would agree with this—that women who suffer domestic violence, whose children are often likely to face that violence, must prove that they are in that situation before they can get legal aid to go to court. That is an injustice and I hope that the Government will look at this carefully. It is one example of the very broad issue of legal aid, but a very pertinent one in relation to children.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Thornton clearly outlined the issues involved in this amendment. Domestic violence victims suffer enough. GPs should not be able to charge them to access justice because in many cases that will, in effect, deny them justice. The fee that can be charged for a letter is, as my noble friend said, discretionary—but where GPs charge it can range anywhere from £20 to £180. All too often, that would be impossible for the victim to pay. We have no knowledge of how many GPs charge because the Government do not hold that information. There is a clear need to collect it because this is a loophole in the legal aid regulations that needs to be closed.

Calls for change are not restricted to domestic violence support groups. Many MPs and Peers also support the need for change, as do both the medical and legal professions. The British Medical Association was dismayed not to be consulted prior to the regulations being introduced and made it clear that it would have opposed the inclusion of medical evidence, if only on the basis that such requests can compromise the doctor’s relationship with their patient.

As my noble friend Lady Thornton said, the Law Society agrees that these changes should be scrapped. Indeed, its former president said:

“Without legal aid, women are unable to access family law remedies, which are vital in order to help them escape from violent relationships and protect their children. They are being forced to face their perpetrators in court without legal representation”.

The Government should listen to the medical and legal experts. Above all, they should listen to women who suffer at the hands of the men who perpetrate this appalling abuse.

In a debate in another place on 15 September the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice, Dr Phillip Lee, said:

“Where arrangements have been found wanting, we have taken action. For example, when the Court of Appeal ruled earlier this year that elements of the evidence requirements for making legal aid available to victims of domestic abuse in private family cases were invalid, we changed the regulations as an interim measure ”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/9/16; col. 1117.]

I ask the Minister now: if an interim change can be made in one instance, why not in this one?

The Government acknowledge that there are issues with the current system because they consulted specifically on evidence requirements for accessing legal aid in private family cases; that consultation closed in July. If this is an unintended consequence of poorly drafted legislation, it needs to be changed. I look to the Minister to show what I hope will be leadership on this issue and say that he will take this forward and discuss with ministerial colleagues how to bring about the required change, rather than say simply that the Government will report in due course with potential changes. Victims of domestic violence are losing out now, so change is urgent. It is a question first and foremost of supporting women who suffer domestic violence; it is also a question of natural justice.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I do not have a prepared speech. I came today to listen to the arguments, because this issue is difficult and finely balanced. I think that the Government have come a long way and listened extraordinarily carefully over the summer. I was able to come in during my holiday, to be seen and listened to by officials and to have my hopes and fears for social work heard. I think that a lot of that was taken on board.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord True. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Low, that this is a way to dismantle the whole legal system for children. Having been a director of social services who was involved in not one or two but three child abuse inquiries and who has experienced some of the most difficult areas of social work down the years, I am concerned—I have talked to colleagues about this—that we have such a mass of guidance and procedures to follow through the present legislation that, without some intervention, social workers and their managers will be overwhelmed. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, would agree with that. I say to the noble Lord, Lord True, that it is likely to be social work managers and not social workers who are looking for innovation, but let us hope that they will be informed by the social workers, who in turn will be informed by those whom they listen to and try to help—in this case, children.

I say to the Minister, for whom I have huge respect, that he has simply not won the hearts and minds of the vast number of people out there in the community. We have letters from mothers who are totally confused and seem to think that this has something to do with being able to cut across the whole of law so that their children may be taken away—I have sent the letters to the Minister so that he might see them. I do not think that it has anything to do with that, but it shows the breadth of confusion.

I have talked to people who want to innovate. I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children and have listened to directors of children’s services—good directors—who are in difficulty and who would like to make changes. There are difficulties. For example, if you are caught in the common assessment framework, you can spend your life assessing situations and never getting into the position of providing a service—and there are legal requirements about assessment. I give just that one example; as a practitioner, I could give a number of examples of cases where easing the regulation would make it much better in terms of providing and delivering services.

The question that I am still stuck with today in not knowing which way I would want to vote is whether the Government have done enough to reassure us that the structures are strong enough to ensure the safeguarding of children’s services, the development of social services and the long-term protection of children. The Government have not convinced most stakeholders in the community. Whether there is more that the Government could do to reach those hearts and minds, whether the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will press his amendment at this point and we will therefore find ourselves unable to move forward on innovation—which would be a pity, because there are things that need to be done and changes to be made—and whether this was the best way to do it or whether an inquiry into and review of guidance and the law would have been better I do not know. We are where we are. Many of us do not want to see the stifling of innovation; we just want to make sure that it is safe.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I follow my noble friends Lady Eaton and Lord True in supporting Clauses 29 to 31. My noble friends made many of the points that I thought were important to this debate, so I shall limit myself to the single issue of testing and reiterate the commendation of the Government for their reforming courage, not just in what they are seeking to achieve but in how they are seeking to achieve it.

Few can doubt that reform is needed in national social work practice. The number of children coming into care is soaring. My noble friend Lady Eaton has already mentioned how the complexity of their lives, especially when they are late entrants into the care system, cannot be adequately catered for in the current legislative framework.

Every sheet of Pugin wallpaper on the walls of this Palace could be replaced by policy reports brimming with ideas and care studies about social work and children’s services reform. Many of these ideas have been learned from good practice here and in other countries; they emerged not from a clear blue sky but from grass-roots practice. However, if they are ever to be implemented, they need the leeway referred to by my noble friend. On the subject of learning, modern government increasingly has to draw inspiration from the way corporations innovate but avoid going bust in a highly complex world—without, of course, handing over the core business of protecting the vulnerable to profit-making companies. I welcome the Government’s amendments to Clause 29 that bar local authorities from doing precisely that.

To explain what I mean with a recent example, the Institute for Government published Nicholas Timmins’s highly instructive report on the rollout of universal credit, at the heart of which was a change in approach from the traditional way of managing big projects. Previously, managers operated a “waterfall” approach, where government would legislate on a programme and set the rules, suppliers would then design in detail how these would operate, do some testing and then cascade a finished system out to the regions, either in phases or even on one day. One of the major drawbacks was that any errors, misjudgments or even rigidities factored in early or midway through the design process tended to be, as Timmins said, “baked in”, and end users could find that the project did not meet their needs because requirements were wrongly specified or simply not anticipated early on.

The opposite—which the private sector has increasingly adopted over the last 15 years or so—was known as the “agile” approach. Again to quote Timmins, this is,

“a mindset of humility around how little you should expect to understand about how real people use your service. So you optimise your whole approach by working with them and learning to iterate quickly based on learning in the real world”.

The mantra of test and learn that emerged from the adoption of an agile approach became a welcome hallmark of wider welfare reform, as well as of universal credit. It is a far more realistic and sensitive way to carry out reforms in areas such as welfare benefits and social care, which have such profound implications for people’s quality of life, well-being and even survival.

Obviously, there are many differences between the rollout of an IT-controlled benefits system and an iterative improvement in the responsiveness of children’s services, but the key similarities lie in the words “iterative” and “responsive”. We heard from my noble friend Lord True about the Royal Borough of Kingston and the London Borough of Richmond—Partners in Practice local authorities. They have said that the clauses will enable them to safely test new approaches that their front-line workers come up with and remove barriers to effective work. Leeds City Council is seeking to become an exemplar of a new and more sustainable safeguarding system where children do better, families are supported to do better and the state has to intervene less. One local authority after another is aspiring to become a learning organisation that can be instructed by and instruct others—all within an enabling framework of intense scrutiny from government and those charged to put children at the forefront of all they do.

We are all here with the aim of ensuring that children thrive. But, as anyone who has lived in a family with several children knows, parenting must be nimble if each unique child is to flourish. I suggest that we also need to be agile in how we approach these clauses. We should no longer fetter well-trained professionals but enable them to develop strategies for their patch within the protective envelope of the Bill.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, we are fiddling while Rome burns. I have spoken this week to a social worker, a director of children’s services, an academic and a head of a voluntary organisation, all of whom are in total despair about the state of social care. I know it is the Government’s wish to improve that. I am sure that that is where the heart of the Minister in the other place and the heart of the Minister here are. However, I am not sure that they have found the right route forward.

Certainly, the Local Government Association—I declare an interest as a vice-president—feels that there needs to be a balance between greater regulation and encouraging experienced social workers to remain in or return to the profession. I have not yet seen the report from the other place about the movement of social workers but I have read the press report, as I am sure everyone here has. That shows a huge movement. I know that there are vast vacancies and that inexperienced agency workers are taking on these roles with dire consequences.

We know that good social work can transform people’s lives and protect children, and I know that that is the aim of the Government. My concern about what the Government are trying to do at the moment is that this will divert resources and energy. We have got to focus both of those directly on the front line of social work so that we do not leave social workers in local authorities, and sometimes in voluntary organisations, taking the responsibility for the failure of the Government and their authorities to get regulation and professional development right.

We have all been concerned because of Ofsted reports. I have been looking closely at the way that Ofsted works, and I support it in many ways. However, it never takes into consideration the amount of resource that an organisation has. We have occasionally had examples of local authorities that are able to produce more on less resources. However, it is only a handful of authorities. A vast number of authorities are struggling and therefore worrying about what they are going to do. This is about making sure that we have a really good regulator who can assess whether the social worker or the structure in which they are working is at fault.

I have looked closely at how those resources are used. The director of social services to whom I spoke this week simply said, “All I am going to do, because I care about my services, is raise the bar on Section 17”. So we will have more children with greater difficulties going to a higher level of need, and more children below that bar—but again with a higher level of need —who will not get a service.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not feel that I have the answer. We all care desperately about social work as a means of helping families in need and we have to find the right answer. However, it is clear that many people feel that we have not reached that point yet.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I add my support to the amendments in this group, and I wish to make two points.

First, I endorse the sentiments of the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, about whether it should be a priority at the moment to put so much time and energy into setting up a new regulator when the profession, and the front line in particular, is so stretched. I was taken with the report that I saw on the BBC this morning about the Commons Education Committee which said that urgent action is needed regarding social workers’ case loads. It drew attention to high drop-out rates leading to increased workloads. It said that these problems must be tackled, particularly the endemic retention problems in the profession. These are the issues that are crying out for urgent attention, and that is my first concern about diverting our attention from them.

However, when it comes to the proposals that the Government have set out to bring social worker regulation under government control, I very much share the concerns that have already been voiced about the lack of independence in these proposals, which is extremely problematic. As I said, I support the broad concept of a bespoke registration body for social work and of social work having its own regulator, but a regulator needs to do a delicate balancing act and being government controlled makes that very difficult. It needs to balance the need of the public for accountability, the requirements set, quite legitimately, by government, the interests of the profession and the organisational requirements of employers, and any regulator needs to be independent in carrying out that balancing act.

Therefore, my concerns are the ones that have already been voiced. This proposal has come without any prior consultation or dialogue with the social work sector so far. It has not had an opportunity to feed in. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, it would leave social workers in a very different position—unique indeed—among health and social care professionals when we should be doing all we can to enhance the status of the social work profession and put it on an equal footing with other health professions.

I also share my noble friend’s view that this proposal will further weaken trust between the profession and Whitehall. In addition, it could well have a negative impact on the extent to which social workers feel real ownership of the very necessary and important improvement initiatives that are around. Indeed, it could also stifle innovation—something that we have discussed very thoroughly. It is very important that we have innovation. Finally, it could well lead to further demoralisation of social workers when, as I said at the beginning, there are currently well-documented problems with recruitment and retention in parts of the workforce. This is simply not the time to go about these reforms.

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[Lord Nash]

As we have not done it, I cannot produce any evidence. However, given that the profession very recently failed to do it—and it seems to follow that it is unlikely suddenly to be able to get its act together quickly—and given the sense of urgency that we have about improving the quality of social work, we believe that if we put the forces of government behind this, we will be able to do it quickly.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

I am sorry; I do not understand. Perhaps the Minister can help me. What does that mean? Who will be doing this? Who will ensure that the profession is improving? Who in government will do that? I am sure that it will not be the Secretary of State, so will it be officials—and how much experience do they have—or will there be people in the executive agency who will have experience? It is a serious question because I think it is crucial to know which personnel are going to be responsible for this terribly important task.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pinnock]

I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has tabled the amendment and again raised the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and I referred to at Second Reading. At that time I referred to the investigation by the EU Sub-Committee on Home Affairs into unaccompanied migrant children. It raises some important issues that reflect on what the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has tabled in his amendment. One or two examples from the report expand on the issues raised. Evidence from Kent social services states:

“There have been issues in respect of the apparently competing demands of the immigration legislation and the childcare legislation in respect of over-18’s”.

That was the fundamental issue that I raised at Second Reading. We are in danger of creating a two-tier approach to care leavers. We quite rightly say that care leavers who are born in this country will receive support until the age of 21 or 25, but unaccompanied minors who have been through the most awful and traumatic experiences are suddenly deemed at 18 to be able to act as adults. Further evidence summarises the problem facing unaccompanied migrant children approaching 18. The report states:

“Those children who are given temporary leave on the basis that they are children are suffering terribly in their protection needs and, as has been identified for many years, their leaving care provisions. We recognise how much children need help in that transition to adulthood. For most of us in this country, we do not suddenly feel and behave like adults when we turn 18”.

We had evidence of the potential consequences of unaccompanied minors, as they approach 18, not given leave to remain but not wishing to return to the troubled area of the world from which they came. One of the consequences is:

“The severe delays experienced by some unaccompanied migrant children in their asylum claims and in accessing services may compound their lack of trust of state authorities. In such circumstances, smugglers and traffickers may come to be regarded by children in some cases as a preferable source of support—‘by choice, through desperation, or through exploitation and abuse’”.

That is the evidence that I have referred to. I do not think anyone in the Committee, which has now spent 20 hours or more considering how we can improve care for the most vulnerable children in our society, would want this particular group of young people to be affected in this way. As we approach Report, I hope that the Government can bring forward their own amendments to help to address the issues of unaccompanied minors as they approach care-leaving at 18, to provide them with the support they desperately need and confidence that they are not going to continue to be returned to the war-troubled areas of the world whence they came.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being here sooner, but I was the last person standing to chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children this afternoon. That is where I have been, and it is always revealing. I support the amendment because I have raised this issue on a number of occasions. I hope the Minister will look at this, though he knows well that I do not like long amendments; lists in Bills are not helpful.

I cannot understand why, from the moment when the child is identified as an unaccompanied minor in a school, we do not start not only to stabilise the child’s status but to look at their mental health issues. We know of the trauma they have been through. I know that mental health services are poor across the country—we have heard that repeatedly—but these children have very particular needs. I am appalled when I learn that often schools do not even know the status of these children. I have met a number of youngsters who realise their immigration status only when they are about to go to university and discover that they cannot. Instead, they spend a year on appeal, appealing being deported to countries about which they know nothing. One young man I met had been here from the age of six. He had been in a foster home and suddenly discovered that this was his status.

I am sure that that is not the way this Government wish to treat children. These children happen to be in this situation only by chance. There might be another child next door who happened to have come in to the country, or be part of a family, on a very different basis. We must treat these children equally.

I am not against returning children home when that is the appropriate answer. We know that there have been very successful programmes of returning children to their country of origin with the right support and understanding; but we have to start sooner than we are starting now, get the position of the child right, make continuous assessment and not leave it until their 18th birthday, when it becomes a crisis.

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend. His experience and commitment in this sphere are well known in this House. I wish his talks with the Minister more success tomorrow. It seems essential that the Government take what my noble friend proposes very seriously. Others have stressed, and I underline it, that the trauma through which these youngsters have been is almost indescribable. It is more than distressing; it is deplorable. They need to be helped to build future lives. An action plan of this kind will help, and it is very important. Yet no action plan will be better than the culture of those who are operating it. From that standpoint, all of us in politics have a responsibility to set the tone for what is expected. We have a duty of care and responsibility to these children. We say that in our post-EU future we want to be prominent members of the international community. There is no better way that we could establish a reputation to help us in that future than by becoming leaders in answering this challenge, and the commitment with which it is answered.

In our vocabulary, in the speeches of Ministers and opposition spokesmen and all the rest, it is therefore terribly important to bring home that if we mean anything at all when we talk about our civilisation, our values and so on, this responsibility to children must be there. For those who are to operate any scheme, it is terribly important that what the children need is stability of relationships and a feeling that there are genuine, reliable friends looking after them—not just a system but real friends on whose shoulders they can lean and cry from time to time, and from whom they can get reliable counselling and advice on the way forward. What they need is human relationships in their future. This framework will therefore have to be filled by the culture which we and all others are generating about responsibility.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I add my support to this group of amendments, which are all extremely important, and I want to make two points. I support what has already been said about adoption. For some children, it works very well indeed, and it is absolutely right that we are supporting prospective adopters and giving all the support and help that children who are being adopted need, but it is not right for everyone. In particular, it is not easy for children over the age of five. We need to understand how it becomes progressively a lot more difficult to adopt children as they become older.

Secondly, I want to add to the wise remarks of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, about local authorities being required to take children’s wishes and feelings into account. I say that as the chair of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, as in my declared interests. Our role, as noble Lords may be aware, is to assist the courts and provide reports to the family courts so that judges know what children’s wishes and feelings are and can make their decisions accordingly. The work that we do there is very important, but it is absolutely vital that all parts of the family justice system—and I include local authorities as a key part of that system—have that first and foremost in their minds, so that children’s wishes and feelings really are what drives the whole process.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, want wishes and feelings to be included in the Bill. As noble Lords know, I am not really very keen on having additions to the Bill. I have taken part in a series of legislative debates that involved discussion of the inclusion of wishes and feelings, but I cannot remember exactly where they are and are not omitted. I have been chair of CAFCASS, and I know that judges have to take wishes and feelings into account. If local authorities had to do that before the report stage, it would save time because, often, judges have to send reports back because local authorities have not carried out the proper work on wishes and feelings. The present chair of CAFCASS, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is nodding. If such a provision were in the Bill, that work would be more likely to be undertaken.

My other point is about adoption and fostering. At the moment, there is a groundswell among a group of women who feel that they have had their children prised from them into adoption—I hope that officials have picked that up—and a campaign to look more closely at preventive work, with children being kept in their own homes. However, I have to say that, often, these children should be removed from home. Whether they should then be adopted is the question. I raise that issue because good work with the parents might mean the child could return home. However, they are often very difficult children whose parents are on drugs or have alcohol problems, and who are seeking help for themselves but not making it, and the children are in real difficulties. These are the children whom fostering would help. Fostering would maintain the situation until there is more stability. These are the children who in some situations have been placed for adoption, when we have not given the kind of support the Government previously discussed—ongoing care for adopters, adoption allowances and adoption support through the local authority, to ensure no further breakdown. Where is such a programme? There had been very positive thinking about adoption.

The Government have for a long time resisted proper research on adoption breakdown in order to understand why these children are sometimes being placed several times over. Sometimes adoption does not break down just once; it may break down more than once, and that is a total disaster. I have met young people who have been in that situation. The sooner we gain a greater understanding, either through government research or through gathering the research of others, the sooner we can intervene better by preventing breakdown or not placing these children in such situations in the first instance.

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[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, I also support very strongly the amendments tabled by my noble friends and other noble Baronesses and noble Lords in this group. I will speak briefly but very particularly in relation to the points about siblings and grandparents. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, have spoken very movingly about the importance to children of contact with their siblings. The new and rising role of grandparents also means that we have to look at that in terms of policy, as well.

I want to reflect on something that I find quite depressing. Most people in this room now were also participants when we debated the Children and Families Bill, not too long ago. We had extensive debates then about the importance of contact with siblings and the importance of considering kinship care before alternatives were gone towards too quickly, yet it seems to be the default position of the Department for Education not to recognise this in primary legislation. When he replies, I hope the Minister will speak to that, because I thought we had convinced him and his officials then, when we debated that Bill—but here we are again, with other legislation presented to us, that completely disregards siblings and other important family members. As the evidence my noble friend cited from the Family Rights Group and others shows, there is still very poor practice. Unless we put these issues in legislation to demonstrate their importance when the decisions about individual children and families are being made, we will still keep going around in circles. We will come back with another Bill and they will still not be there, and we will still have children separated from their brothers and sisters. Now is the time really to put this right.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My lords, I believe that the latest Ofsted findings show that siblings are being kept together and placed without undue delay in most circumstances, which is extremely good news. I wonder if the Minister could verify that. Certainly, it was what was said at the presentation of the latest Ofsted report and I greeted the news with some joy. However, it does not mean that I do not support this amendment, because the very fact that Ofsted has to report on this and say how much better it is getting shows that we have had to reach a point of changing practice to make sure that children are able to talk to their brothers and sisters. I am delighted that it seems to be getting better, if that is so, but it does emphasise the need for this proposal. I am the very unlikely founder of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Grandparents—they could not find anybody else—but, as people know, I have brought up children and still find myself with my great-nieces and great-nephews for care, and for all the things that grandparents do.

What I have learned from working in the north of England, where all my family are, is that grandparents up there are mostly caring informally for their grandchildren. It is only when things go seriously wrong that they suddenly find that they are not adequate to care for those grandchildren, because the assessment says that they have to be moved somewhere else. That is where the two parts of this Bill meet, because we are looking for good assessment by a social worker. Of course, the child’s needs must be paramount; you do not leave a child with a grandparent who does not have the ability to care for that child—but surely it is better, if they have made that relationship and the grandparent is fit to care, that they continue. The recent death of Ellie Butler is an example of that.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I welcome this group of amendments, and particularly welcome what the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said. It is so important to the young people who come to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children, young people in care, care leavers, and their foster carers and social workers, that they are heard by parliamentarians. They often express their regret that not more MPs and parliamentarians are there. I am so very grateful to the noble Baroness for taking such great pains to listen, record and share with the Grand Committee her experience of visiting that meeting. I agree of course with everything that she said.

I flag up one more time the important role that Delma Hughes has played over the past 10 or 15 years in terms of advocacy for sibling contact. As I mentioned before to your Lordships, she entered care and lost contact with her five siblings; she went on to become an art therapist and practised for many years. On recognising about 10 years ago the lack of facilities for facilitating sibling contact, she set up her own charity, Siblings Together, and has organised workshops over many summers and Easters where groups of siblings who would otherwise be separated have come together to enjoy performing in plays and camping together. She has made a big mark in this area. She met with Ed Balls, the former Secretary of State, to advocate on their behalf, and has been a member of the SCIE consultation group on this area. She has really made a big difference, and I pay tribute to her.

It is encouraging to hear what my noble friend Lady Howarth said about the recent Ofsted findings. To enable siblings to stay together, one obviously has to have foster carers with the capacity to offer the larger placements—so congratulations are due all round that some progress is being made.

I can summarise the last two or three amendments by saying that they are about better supporting special guardians, kinship carers and others. The problem is that local authorities are very stretched for resources. If they have no legal obligation to support such families, who are standing in, those families may get very little if any support. Yet those families save the Exchequer huge sums of money each year by caring for many thousands of children. They often do so at their own expense, not being able to do the job that they might otherwise be able to do. They may have to live in a very cramped housing environment because of the extra child they take in. Anything that the Bill can do to make central government more aware of the duty that we owe those families and of the support, or lack of it, is very welcome.

We recently discussed a housing Bill and a welfare reform Bill in which concerns about the helpful role that these special guardians and kinship carers offer was raised. To some degree, their concerns were answered, but we need always to keep our minds on those people. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, argued in earlier amendments for making Secretaries of State bear much more in mind of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, so that we can look, across all departments, at the impact of Bills on children, whether they are welfare or housing Bills. So often those Bills have other priorities, and there is a risk that different departments will not work together to improve the outcomes of children but work against such outcomes. I welcome this group of amendments and look forward to the Minister’s response.

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[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, clearly there are other organisations that undertake work on behalf of the local authority in some of these areas. They are usually not-for-profit organisations, such as Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society and others. They will wish to continue to work with local authorities in these areas. However, it is interesting that Article 39, an organisation which looks at the legal position of children, stated:

“Research on the first five social work practice pilots (one of which was run for profit) … found mixed views on whether looked after children and care leavers received a better service”.

But the telling point was that:

“Three of the five local authorities involved said the practices had cost more than equivalent in-house services and evaluators noted, ‘Interviews held with local authority commissioners in 2011 made it clear that SWPs were not judged to have been financially advantageous’”.

So if the Government are looking for a way of delivering services that offers value for money, clearly “for profit” services are not necessarily the best way forward.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I think it is fair to say that this is the most contentious issue to have arisen in our consideration of the Bill so far. We will discuss Clause 15 next week. In passing, I have to say that I am not quite sure why this measure is being discussed at this point. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has stated his views on that, but I wondered why the Clerks did not direct it elsewhere. However, as I say, we will discuss Clause 15 next week. That clause will allow local authorities to opt out of providing some children’s social services. Many people fear that that could pave the way for the privatisation of those and—perhaps, later—other services, in ways outlined by noble Lords in this group of amendments.

The Bill refers to “different ways of working”, which I think most of us understand is code for exempting local authorities from requirements hitherto imposed by children’s social care legislation. Certainly, Labour holds strongly to the view that child protection and wider social care should not be run by an organisation seeking to make a profit. That is why we have joined with Lib Dem and Cross-Bench Peers, as well as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, demonstrating the breadth of support for that requirement to appear on the face of the Bill.

We do not object per se to outside organisations working with, or for, local authorities in delivering children’s social services functions, but do so where a company or organisation designed to make a profit, as opposed to a surplus, takes on such functions that would expose the local authority—and, by definition, the children under its care—to the danger that the company might for whatever reason fail, and fall into receivership. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of examples of such occurrences since local authorities began to outsource various services.

Equally, if profit were the motive, the company or organisation may conclude after a period of time that the margins were insufficient in delivering those services and other avenues offered better prospects, and as a result end the contract. In either case, the local authority, which would have handed over the role of providing those services, would be faced with having to find another partner to deliver them or to bring them back in-house. Meanwhile, the quality of services provided for social care or child protection would be, at best, jeopardised. That is not a situation that any of us would wish to see. It is, therefore, a situation that should be ruled out.

At Second Reading, the Minister relied on the fact that in 2014 the Government had introduced legislation that prevented profit-making where local authorities delegate child protection functions. However, there remains the possibility of profit-making companies setting up their own non-profit subsidiaries to take over the critical and sensitive function of deciding how best to protect vulnerable children There is a serious risk that the likes of Serco and G4S could create these subsidiaries as part of their wider businesses and, in that manner, these companies could indeed profit from the care of vulnerable children and their families, even if only indirectly.

There will be an obvious conflict of interest because some of these companies will also run children’s homes. That will make it difficult to know how funds might flow between the profit-making and non-profit-making arms. That is why the changes outlined in Clause 15 have caused such concern in the sector, and they could undermine public confidence in the services provided to children and young people. It cannot be stressed too much that effective child protection relies on public trust. The public need to be able to trust local child protection teams so that they feel sufficiently confident to report concerns they may have about a child and to have faith that if they raise a concern the service will act in the best interests of that child.

I invite the Minister to provide answers on two aspects of this crucial matter. First, the provisions of the 2014 legislation notwithstanding, can he guarantee that funds will not be transferred between profit and non-profit arms of a company where the latter is delivering services? Secondly, will the purpose and culture of companies or organisations bidding for the right to deliver child protection and social care services be taken into consideration when decisions are made about delivery partners? When an organisation’s primary aim and main business has nothing to do with children, would it be considered a suitable partner for a local authority?

Nothing can be more important than the safeguarding and protection of children, especially those who are at greatest risk or are the most vulnerable. Organisations prominent in the social care and child protection sectors have registered their anxiety over the exemption proposals in the Bill. At Second Reading, I asked the Minister whether the Government had made any assessment of the risk to children in allowing local authorities exemption from some key duties for keeping children safe. I hope he will now be in a position to let me have his response.

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[Baroness King of Bow]

My Lords, this amendment seeks to prevent the introduction of financial disincentives for adoptive parents. I strongly commend the Government’s stated desire to increase adoption rates where adoption is an appropriate outcome for the child concerned. However, recently passed legislation will have the opposite effect, which is why I have tabled this amendment. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, first brought this to my attention, and the Committee reminded itself this afternoon that if she thinks something is a problem, it is a problem.

At present, if you have one child and you adopt a sibling group of two or more children, you will receive child benefit for all three children, despite the Government’s new legislation that restricts child benefit to two children in all other cases. However, if you adopt your two children separately—that is, they are not in a sibling group, like my three adopted children who are not siblings—the exemption does not apply, so lower-income families which would get child benefit and who already have a child will get child benefit for the first adopted child but not for any subsequent adopted children who take them over the two-child limit, unless the adopted child is adopted with a sibling. This simply makes no sense. The exemption the Government have introduced is linked to genetics, not adoption, yet the whole point of adoption is to circumvent genetics. As my children are mine through both adoption and genetics, I feel very strongly that there should not be a difference, and certainly not one that is put into law.

I will raise one other very important issue relevant to this debate. It is also based on my experience of adopting three children in three separate adoption processes. I now have three amazing foster families who gave my kids a home before they came to me. I am linked into all their foster carer networks, through which I have met dozens of foster families. Added to those foster families, I have many others through the work I do with adoption agencies, so in total I have met upwards of 100 foster families. In the vast majority of cases, these amazing families are moved entirely by their desire to help the children they love and foster, so much so that when, inevitably, children with complex needs are not adopted, foster families often step in to adopt. In the case of my daughter’s foster family, the next child placed with them was attacked by her parents while a baby and left deaf, blind and severely brain-damaged. She requires 24-hour care. No family came forward to adopt her. She was going to spend her life being shunted around the care system. Her amazing foster carers therefore said that they would adopt her, even though they had no intention of doing that when they first fostered her. By adopting her, they dramatically restricted their quality of life. They did it because they are truly amazing.

What is amazing is that they had so little to start with. That is when I realised a strange thing: despite meeting so many foster families, I have never met, not even once, a middle-class foster family because on the whole, more well-off families do not foster children, they adopt children. Do professional women like me give up their careers to bring society’s most needy children under their own roof? The harsh but honest truth, which I wish was not true, but it is, is that on the whole, we do not. I would love to see more data on the economic background of foster families which adopt, but from my experience, and I have quite a bit of it, Britain relies on low-income families to bring up our most vulnerable kids, those with complex needs who too often are unfortunately—we do not do it on purpose—left to rot in the care system. It is quite shocking when you think about it, but what is even more shocking is that we are going to make it harder for low-income families to adopt. Taking away child benefit from low-income families who adopt children is literally shameful.

I grant that the Government have not done this on purpose—well, they have done it on purpose but I do not think they set out to do it. I hope the Minister will tell me I am right when I say that I am sure they did not set out to do something so diametrically opposed to their objective of increasing adoption. It is all about that law which we always seem to pass around here without meaning to: the law of unintended consequences.

A failure to exempt all adopted children from the child benefit two-child limit will be particularly perverse for this reason: it will not stop babies without complex needs being adopted by better-off families like mine. If I was going to lose £60 a month for my adopted daughter, it would not actually stop me adopting her. But for kids with complex needs who cannot easily be adopted and who often fall back on low-income foster families, that £60 absolutely will make the difference between whether they are adopted or not, particularly when set against the experience on the ground of the failure of post-adoption support, notwithstanding the Minister’s earlier comments.

It is always the exception that proves the rule. I know of one foster family that is not on a low income. Happily, that family belongs to the Minister of State for Children and Families at the Department for Education, Edward Timpson, whose family has fostered more than 80 children. I therefore have one question for the Minister. I think very highly of him, which is unfortunate because I will be devastated if he cannot help me out with this fairly simple request. I know that he must have enough power to do what I am asking—no pressure—which is this. Please will he meet with his colleague, the Minister for Children and Families, and work out a plan to bring into force this simple exemption in child benefit for all adopted children? I cannot believe that the Government want to increase disincentives for adoptive parents, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I support the amendment because I argued for it during the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill. When the Minister turned it down then, he did agree to a whole range of other benefits such as kinship carers’ allowance and so on. Frankly, I think he reached the point where he could give no more. The illogicality of saying that benefits could be paid for two sibling children but not for two children who have been adopted separately must have been for the noble Lord, Lord Freud, who is an intelligent man, something to do with the politics of it all. I say that because it was clear at the time that this exception would make sense.

We trying to increase the rate of adoption. We know that the children who are now being placed for adoption are not easy. There are very few if any white middle-class babies being placed for adoption. Most of these children have special needs or they are older and therefore it is much more difficult to find a placement.

I recognise that the Minister here may not have the power to agree to the amendment, but he can go back and talk to his colleagues. We have discussed silos in government at length and how people need to talk across government departments. This is an area in which we could make a real difference to a group of people who wish to look after children and, more importantly, it would offer a better standard of living to the children being adopted. It would be easy and I am sure that it would not be vastly expensive, although I have not yet done the maths.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, there are moments in Committee when we can listen to people with a lifetime of experience in law and the military, but we ignore at our peril someone with experience of adoption who speaks from the heart and makes such an emotional plea. Certainly our side thinks that this is an important issue.

It is not just an emotional issue, of course; it is also fulfils that awful phrase we use constantly—it would be value for money. This obviously makes sense. I had not appreciated how many low-income families adopt children. We should support them and thereby, we hope, increase the number of children who are adopted.

The last time I heard such an emotional plea was when my noble friend Lady Benjamin made a similar presentation and, I believe, stalked the Minister on a few occasions outside his office. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady King, could do the same, but I hope the Minister will take note of this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, this is an important amendment that is worthy of serious consideration. There must be something worryingly and seriously wrong when mothers constantly have their babies removed from them. We have seen social services almost having to get care orders in place as the child is born, and it can happen three, four, five or six times. Obviously in all circumstances the interests of the child must be put first, but there also must be a realisation that something must be done to support the mother. Are there mental health or emotional issues at play? This constant removal of children safeguards those children, but it does not safeguard the mother. We need to try where possible to look at why this is happening.

This is an issue of which I do not have any experience and, indeed, I have not considered it. The amendment asks in a sensible and supportive way for us to look at therapeutic support and so on. There is also the cost aspect. If a child is taken away from its natural family and we as a society have not considered effective treatments that could reasonably be made available to keep the parent and child together, then surely as a society we are failing.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I simply want to mention the organisation Pause, which has found a way of intervening with these families. I know that the Government hope to set up a unit looking at what works and that there are programmes that work in this field. I do not think this is a legislative issue. I think it is again an issue of spreading good practice through all local authorities. Sometimes the voluntary sector develops the best ways forward, and I hope the Government will do all they can to promulgate these programmes. I have removed children at birth from their mothers. It is a traumatic and appalling process to have to be involved in when working in social services. The follow up has always been poor for the mothers. We now have an opportunity to do something about it. We know how to do it.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I very much support this amendment. We have already heard in previous debates about the danger of the repeat performance—women who have been in care becoming mothers and having a problem with children being taken away. It is a vitally important matter. My noble friend Lady Howarth mentioned Pause as one of the organisations offering practical help in this respect. It certainly could be called on. I hope that in this instance we will be able to get support from the Minister so that this can be looked at rather more seriously than, perhaps, in the past.

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[Baroness Pinnock]

My Lords, I will respond to what the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has said. I totally agree with him that the proposals in the Bill are so important that they ought to be subject to the statutory instrument procedure that he defined. In particular, the chair of this safeguarding review panel should be appointed after a public hearing with the Education Select Committee has taken place. The noble Lord has our support.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, which is particularly concerned that the national panel is too closely controlled by the Secretary of State. The association believes that that risks politicising the serious case review process. If reviewers are to identify the root cause of safeguarding failings, the association believes that they must be fully independent of government control to ensure that they are able to consider without undue influence whether changes are required at both the national and the local level. The association also believes that to ensure that reviews of national significance are able to pass comment on the impact of national policies without undue influence, they must be able to identify these root causes, again without undue political interference. I therefore support Amendments 101 and 102.

It is important to recognise that the Local Government Association, which wants to work with this process and take some of it forward, has these concerns. We are in this position as a result of having so little time to look at these amendments. The basic principles are probably ones with which we would all agree but there are some fundamental flaws in the way the process is being put together.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Hunt, for their amendments relating to the arrangements for the new child safeguarding practice review panel set out in Clause 11, and for the observations of the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Howarth.

Amendment 101 raises an important issue, which is that both Houses should have an opportunity to scrutinise regulations in secondary legislation where it is appropriate to do so. Noble Lords will be aware that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has issued its report on the clauses within the Bill. I hope that noble Lords can be reassured that while the DPRRC commented on other clauses, it raised no concerns about this one. The arrangements that will be made in respect of the establishment of the panel set out high-level matters that relate to the processes, arrangements and administration of the panel rather than matters of substance that the Houses would need to debate. This clause covers processes and arrangements. I will turn to the question of regulations in a later discussion on the functions of the panel. This clause provides for the making of arrangements that are necessary to enable the functioning of the panel which may include clarity around such matters as reporting and its day-to-day operation.

Amendment 102 seeks to involve the Education Select Committee in the appointment of the chair. I would expect the appointment of the chair to be subject to a full and open Cabinet Office public appointments process involving advertisements for the position, applications and formal interviewing. Panel members could also be subject to this process if that were deemed necessary. I would expect the number of panel members to be sufficient to enable the effective operation of the panel and for the chair to be able to draw on the expertise that he or she considers necessary for the right decisions to be made about individual cases. We would of course welcome any views that the Education Select Committee may have, but we do not believe that we should prescribe a pre-appointment hearing. In view of this, I hope that the noble Lord will feel sufficiently reassured to withdraw the amendment.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

I support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, proposes in this amendment. Before I make the next remarks, I draw Members’ attention to my interests in the register as a member of Kirklees Council. My concern with the amendment, and others we will discuss in the course of this Committee, is the number of proposals that add to the responsibilities of local authorities. As anybody who is associated with local government will be aware, additional responsibilities nearly always require additional spending. I just wanted to draw the attention of Members of this Committee to what is happening to the budget for children’s services in Kirklees Council, which is no doubt repeated across local government. Kirklees Council is a large metropolitan borough serving 420,000 residents, which puts the figures I shall now cite in context. The budget that the council intends to spend on children’s services, which excludes what it spends on schools, was £71.6 million for last year and is £70 million for this year. For next year, the proposed budget is £53.4 million. Despite every effort by members of the council and officers in Kirklees—we have done all we can to protect spending on children’s services—the reduction over the next couple of years will be £18.2 million. As Members of the Committee will quickly calculate, that is a reduction of 25%. Within that reduction, there is a reduction of 10%—more than £3 million—in services specifically for looked-after children.

Will the Minister take into account the dire consequences of the Bill adding to local authorities’ responsibilities? Of course, it is not that local authorities have no wish to have better services for care leavers and looked-after children, but there is a big reduction in the amount that can be spent on them. Consequently, any additional responsibilities will be very difficult to fund.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I have great sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said. We all work with local authorities that have extraordinary constraints on finances. However, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, because it can make things easier rather than more difficult. I need to support it as it relates to what I said both at Second Reading and previously in Committee about the two things that are important.

First, any amendments must be tightly drawn. I am really concerned about the next batch of amendments because they could add considerably to local authorities’ responsibilities. Many people agreed that if you are a director of children’s services, you do not want to have to wade through yet more legislation. We are looking for less legislation but legislation that is clearer and more tightly drawn, to be freed up to get on with the job of looking after children.

The other important item is that we make clear that this is the responsibility of wider services. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, acknowledged that his was not a comprehensive list of those people who could do more to benefit these young people. I know that some of the amendments may be out of the frame. Some of the issues I raised last time in relation to financial services need more refinement. However, if we had these two things—tightly drawn legislation and a wider range of services with the responsibility—it would not add to the responsibilities of local authorities but streamline their work and ensure that others took their part. I declare an interest as a vice-president of the LGA.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I also support this amendment. I apologise for not being here for day one but at Second Reading I explained that I would not be able to be present last week. At Second Reading, there were a number of clauses—this is one of them—where I was concerned that the work of independent fostering agencies, adoption agencies and the voluntary sector as a whole, which provides increasing support to children in care and leaving care, was hardly noticed. We need to keep on top of that. We should not restrict its growth but we should ensure that it is joined up with what is required of statutory authorities and that quality remains high. In supporting the amendment, I hope consideration will be given to that area of work as well in any future redrafting.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I briefly support Amendments 52, 53 and 54. These have echoes of the debate we had on my Amendment 29, in which I argued—with support from other Members of the Committee—that the onus should be on the local authority to take the initiative in offering help. I ask the Minister to think about the circumstances in which many of us are placed as parents, where the Government are trying to get the principles of corporate parenting as close as they can to the responsibilities of parents looking after children who are not part of the responsibility of a local authority. We as parents—I can speak from personal experience—do not watch our children walking over a cliff and wait for them to request us to do something. If we see that they do not understand something or they are going to take some ill-advised action, we do not wait for them to ask us: we intervene. We try to intervene in a sensitive manner but we do try to intervene to give them the information they require to make better decisions. Why are the Government asking a group of people who, on their own acknowledgement, are vulnerable, who often find it difficult to interact with public bureaucracies, to make a well-informed request for help? Indeed, if they are capable of making that well-informed request for help, there is a large chance that they do not need it in the first place. What the Minster has set up looks like a gesture, but the “on request” totally minimises the effectiveness of that gesture. I ask the Minister to reconsider the Government’s position on this, in the light of the moderate way that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and others have argued for the amendments.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I add one sentence because I clearly heard the Minister say that there would be young people who would not need personal advisers or would not wish to have this sort of help. I understand that absolutely, but all the amendments are suggesting is that we move out “on request” so that the local authority has to take responsibility to ensure that information is given so that a refusal could be made. If we do not ensure that the young people have the knowledge of what is available, they can walk into difficulties.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I obviously support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has said, although I am not going to go through the long list of experiences that I have experienced as a director of social services, as an assistant director and a social worker, and even more so, working with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which dealt with predatory grooming adults and how they got in touch with children.

I am concerned about how we work through two parts of this. One is how we make absolutely sure that the vetting is solid and absolutely reliable for all the reasons the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has said—and how we set performance standards—but also, at the same time, as having some flexibility in who the young person might see as the person who is going to be their personal adviser. I think this is more complex than it looks on the surface. I think we could set standards of training—we have all done that in our time; we could have a vetting system and place it on a register, although I would say 130 days to get a vetting back from the Met police at the moment seems to me a scandal, and is interfering with the recruitment of appropriate social workers right across the piece. But we have to look at how we have both of those things together, with the young person having some choice about who they want to be their mentor. There may be people in their lives, such as a teacher who stuck with them right through their school or a foster parent who struck right with them. Are they seen as different from personal advisers, who are a sort of profession apart? I have not yet conceptualised who those people are in relation to all the other people who are supporting the young person, and where the standard is set. The one thing that is absolutely clear is that whoever they are, they must be vetted. In my day, we had people called children’s homes visitors, and we learned the hard way what happened if you did not vet appropriately those visitors, when young people disappeared on to the street. I would underline that—it is quite a complex question.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, this is an important probing amendment. I now understand why it is in this grouping and not in the other groupings, and I apologise to whoever is responsible for that. As the British Association of Social Workers rightly said, it will be important to clarify what qualifications and capabilities will be required for the new personal advisers. Throughout our Committee discussions, we have shown how important personal advisers are and will be, in terms of speech and language and literacy, financial matters, and in putting the pathways plan together. It also is important that these are the right people for that and currently, there is no prescribed professional or occupational qualification determining which person should carry out the personal adviser’s function for any individual care leaver. There are suggestions of what a PA should normally possess. They should,

“be working towards a professional qualification … good practice …for the young person to maintain the same PA from the age of 16”,

et cetera. Presumably, the current personal advisers are DBS-compliant. If they are not, why not? I would have thought that was something that happened straightaway. They are working in a very intimate situation with young and vulnerable children, so if that is not the case, we need to know that straightaway. If it is the case, we need to look at the other suggestions that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has made. We also need to ensure that the line management of personal advisers is not something that is just put on paper and does not happen but that somebody line-manages those personal advisers and sees them on a regular basis. There is another issue—that if we are not careful, sometimes young people who are emotionally vulnerable can make allegations against personal advisers, and that personal adviser is in a very difficult situation. If an allegation is made against a teacher, at least the teacher is in a setting where there are people around who can support and advise, whereas a personal adviser is acting entirely on their own. As well as any register and making sure that correct procedures have been gone through, there also has to be proper and effective line management of personal advisers.

Care Leavers: Life Chances

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful for my noble friend’s support. I agree entirely that we want the principles to be embraced by a wide group of organisations—charities, the private sector, businesses and public sector agencies—and that is what the care leaver covenant is all about. It will be a promise from the nation to care leavers that anyone who leaves care will be treated fairly and given the support they need to make the best of their opportunity to make a successful transition to adulthood. It will be a commitment to support care leavers through the way in which we deliver services, the opportunities provided, promoting the covenant and getting others to sign up.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, we have only just started, so we are not at a point where anyone can shout, “This side”. The House seemed to be indicating to the noble Baroness on the Cross Benches.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

I apologise; I did not see the noble Baroness. The Minister will know that the children who do worst at school and in life are those on child protection plans, rather than those coming into care. How will the Government ensure that such children have good parenting, either by being maintained in their own homes or being in permanent placements that will give them that life chance?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right and she knows that the Minister, Mr Timpson, is very focused on this. We will shortly bring forward more proposals.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

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.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, as the only person in this Room who will have applied the Children Act from the day it became law until I retired as a judge in 2005, perhaps I may say first that I agree strongly with what the noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Ramsbotham, said, and particularly with the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, who said that we must not make corporate parenting—which I entirely support—too complicated. There is just a danger that we may be putting too much in. Everything that is set out in the amendments is right, but I am not absolutely certain whether it all has to be in primary legislation.

I should like to pick up the phrase “have regard to”. I can see the Minister being advised by his team that it is a phrase which is used in the Children Act, particularly in Section 1, which states that,

“the court shall have regard to”.

In my view, there is a great difference between the court having regard and others doing so. Judges in family cases are trained to know what is meant by the phrase, which means that they have to take the issues into account and then they have a checklist to decide what in fact they should actually be doing. But it is interesting to note that Section 17 of the Act does not say that a local authority should “have regard to”; it talks about the “general duty” of every local authority. It seems to me that there is a very real distinction between having regard if you are a judge or a magistrate trying cases and having regard if you are a social worker with very considerable financial constrictions.

I cannot understand, I have to say, why we need the phrase “have regard to” when those who drafted the Bill took the trouble to say “must”. The phrase “must act in the best interests” is a very simple way of looking at it. But the phrase,

“must, in carrying out functions … have regard to the need”,

is, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, pointed out, a let-out.

So having started listening to this argument on the basis that “have regard” is a perfectly good phrase that I applied day in and day out for many years, I think that there is a real distinction between the judiciary and the magistracy having regard and the way in which local authorities should be told rather than being left to exercise their discretion, which is rather different.

--- Later in debate ---

We have seen what has happened where local authorities have had their budgets cut for adult social care. They have reduced their eligibility criteria. We will see some of the same patterns of behaviour in these other authorities if we do not take the opportunity in this legislation to require the other agencies—and I suggest to the Minister that we should name them in the Bill—to have a duty to co-operate with the responsible local authority in discharging their obligations.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I have some difficulty in the way that this clause and the next clauses are drafted. There are some overlaps, and I think that that is what is causing some of the debate.

In my Second Reading speech, I emphasised the importance of relevant partners, including government departments and wider. Whether we can specify them, I do not know. But where we can specify them is in the local offer, which is what comes next. That is why it is difficult to debate one part of this Bill without debating the other.

In the local offer, the local authority and its partners should be able to provide young people with the assurance that they can be exempt from council tax, which we will debate again later; that they can get proper accommodation; that they will not have another agency or department evict them if they run into arrears; and that they will get proper help, if they need it, with any benefit system. Those things need to be available to them in the local offer through the partners. I am not much good at drafting, but I hope that the Government will take back what I have said and look at how those two things knit together.

As I said earlier, “leaving care” is a very unfortunate phrase. It implies that you are leaving the services that you need. These youngsters are “moving on” from one stage of their care life into, we hope, another one, if we manage to see them through to the age of 21 and possibly 25. That is the time when the government partners will be most important. Earlier on, the local authority will need to work closely with different partners such as the police and health—that needs to be clear. I hope that the drafting can be looked at again so that the partners can be specified crisply and clearly—like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, I think that that is the only way to get good legislation—and somehow be included.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said. The spirit of these amendments strikes me as very appropriate. What we need is a duty that is appropriate to people who are not corporate parents but have a duty and a responsibility to do what they can within their sphere of responsibility to help the corporate parent to carry out the corporate parent’s responsibility. Of course there is another area where in a sense this happens: in ordinary families. These authorities may well have a duty as well to try to help the ordinary parent, not just the corporate parent, to fulfil their responsibilities. That is not so easy these days for many. So while I entirely agree that this is a proper course to take, and I suggest, along with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that it should be drafted along the lines of the Care Act, we ought also to have at the back of our minds the fact that there are other children who sometimes need special care, too.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I speak as a corporate parent. I am a corporate parent for the nearly 400 young people in the care of Wiltshire Council. I have concerns about the amendment. I believe that I am responsible as the corporate parent for such a child’s life chances—so I am responsible for the plans for the child’s health and for challenging the local commissioning group and the local GP who is responsible for looked-after children in our county to give that child the right services. I believe that that is my responsibility, as it would be my responsibility as a parent.

I am concerned that if we move some of the responsibility to another body, it will not do it as well as it would if we were pushing it to do it. So I welcome the strengthening in the Bill of the responsibility of the corporate parent, but that corporate parent is responsible for not just health but life chances, including apprenticeships, traineeships and jobs into the future. That is my responsibility as a corporate parent, just as it is to give support to my own children as they move on through their life chances—not, I have to say, just up until 18.

I very much look forward to debating looking after a looked-after child for many years into their future. I am still looking after mine; a couple of them are in their 40s and they still come home for advice and support. In Wiltshire we are looking at how we might use volunteers, the voluntary sector, mentors in the communities and people who are special in those young people’s and young adults’ lives to help us to do that. So please strengthen our role and allow us to be the ones to strongly challenge other departments to deliver the services that our children require.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, perhaps I may say that those of us who also have been corporate parents do not disagree at all that somebody clearly has to be a corporate parent. What we would like to see in the Bill is for other departments—particularly government departments, which are nowhere in other legislation—to have a responsibility to work with that corporate parent in legislation, and to give that support. That is what I think everyone who has spoken means.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

To add to that, the danger is that government policy will undermine what local authorities are trying to do. That is why we need government policies that will work with and support local authorities in their corporate parenting, rather than working against them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, first, I very much support the amendments that wish to provide legal assistance to children who are in need. It is extremely important that they should have such help. I suggest for consideration setting up an advice centre because the problems that unaccompanied minors who come from abroad face include the intricate law in relation to immigration. If you go to a high street solicitor, it is difficult to get the kind of advice that you might wish for in that situation. It would be important to have a small team of specialists set up by the Government, or by anyone whom the Government could persuade to set it up, which would be available to provide that kind of help to children in that situation. That would be children who are in care or unaccompanied minors who come into our system otherwise than by the ordinary ways of care. It may be a good idea to bolster this type of amendment with a suggestion as to how it might be carried out efficiently and at reasonable cost.

My second point is in relation to Amendment 9. I understand the problem broadly in terms of the report of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and other reports—for example, the chief officers’ consideration of it. To ask people to do this is a great aim, in a sense, but I feel that if we are to do this we should offer them some assistance on how they go about it. Is the main way of approaching it to try to prevent the children in care committing criminal offences, small or large, or is it saying that if the children commit small offences we should persuade the police to do nothing about it? In other words, we should not commit these people to the organisation that deals with complaints generally. As has been said, ordinary children may find themselves in a disciplinary situation in their own families which does not involve the police and it may be that something of that kind is required. I am not at all certain how this problem can be dealt with but I am very much aware of it, and of the point of view that it should be dealt with. I would like to give more help to the people who we are asking to deal with it in how they go about it.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I want to make two small points, the first of which was introduced quite well by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. The one report not mentioned was that of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children, which reported on an inquiry jointly with the police about children and the police. One thing that came clearly out of that inquiry was that when children kick off—to use a phrase that children would use—and create a disturbance because of difficulties in a children’s home, if the police are called to help deal with that disturbance they have to record it as an offence. But if it happens at home in a domestic situation and the police help out, it is not recorded as an offence because the people concerned cannot be pressed to press charges. We must look at the spectrum of these things because once a child has a criminal record we know that they are likely to feel fewer inhibitions about starting on that road.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I visited my GP last week and she expressed her concerns about the number of care leavers coming to her surgery with mental health issues—anxiety, depression, self-harming, suicidal emotions and erratic behaviour. She said: “Floella, if only we could do something about this when the child is entering care. If only we could identify that they are suffering from mental problems it would save the NHS resources and save them suffering and long-term unhappiness.” That is what many Peers have said this evening, while charities such as the NSPCC have said it for a long time. I, like others, strongly believe that we need to adequately identify the issue and that children should receive assessment for their mental and emotional well-being by professionals with specialist training in the mental health of looked-after children. This is necessary because the children are suffering long-term. We spoke earlier about corporate parenting. I believe that the principles should include the responsibility to ensure that children are offered the support they need to recover from psychological harm caused prior to their entry to the care system. That should be paramount when we have to look after those children.

There must be provisions made to guarantee that the children in care will never be denied access to, or disadvantaged when trying to access, mental health services. They are finding that this is a problem. They must never be told that they cannot get professional help because they are not in a stable placement, or disadvantaged because they have moved out of an authority placement. We know that a high percentage of children in care end up in prison or are homeless, and that many suffer from mental problems while in prison. During my prison visits, I often speak to young people who say. “If only things had been different for me when I was a child”—a phrase repeated over and over again. Children who have been abused or neglected could face serious long-term mental problems throughout adulthood because of the lack of support, so it is essential that we are able to deal with difficulties early and offer the right support to children.

Children need that support but the NSPCC has found that there are not enough therapeutic services for those who have been abused or neglected. This has to stop. There is cause for concern because more and more children are reporting sexual abuse, which is occurring every hour of the day, and because we have almost 70,000 children living in care in England. This has to stop and we have to help these children. We must not let them down. That is why I am supporting and have put my name to Amendment 87.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, nothing has been said during this debate that one could reasonably disagree with. My only question is: would it help if we had it all in the Bill? I would draw attention to the Local Government Association’s concern, which is that if all these things are in a Bill they restrict the capacity to think through the targeting of where there is greatest need. In some communities, the greatest need may not be for the in-care community.

We know, as I said this afternoon during Questions, although I was rather interrupted, that the children who are on the list of those in greatest need are likely to have a greater need for intervention than some of the children in care. We should not do anything that inhibits local authorities and their partners from making proper assessments and being able to direct those services. I know, having talked at length to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and to other people who have been in poor authorities, that there is some despair about whether some local authorities will ever reach that point of being able to make good assessments. I also know from work that I am doing with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children that some remarkable work and turnaround is happening in other local authorities. We should try to work with the best towards the best and enable a local authority to do that.

I am interested that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, is so sanguine about the suggestion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. I can see a million difficulties in having his suggestion on the statute book. Again, much as the bit of me that was a director of social services would have liked to have had that, the other bit would know how impossible it is to get one person. What is the role now of the independent reviewing officer, for example? We know that IROs have not been particularly successful, yet those are the people who we have identified as the ones to focus on the children. There must be alternative ways.

This is where the two parts of the Bill come together. If we are able to get the social work bit of it right and develop really good social work, it seems that the other issues will not be so pressing—apart from the ones raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. The mental health issues of children in care are of particular concern and I would support her. This is because CAMHS is in such disarray, probably in greater disarray than some other areas in local authorities, and although I think that the Government have good intentions to put money into the service, we know how hard it is to get that funding properly directed. However, we could make a real difference to young people’s progress if we ensure that their therapeutic needs are met early on, not when they are developing serious mental disorders and personality conditions. We know that behavioural work with children at an early stage works very well. While I am finding it difficult to support a wide range of the amendments, again because I want to keep the Bill as simple and implementable as possible, we should look seriously at these mental health issues.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, undoubtedly many telling points have been made on these wide-ranging amendments. I cannot offer my support for all of them, but I certainly can in respect of those tabled by my noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, concerning mental health. My noble friend urged the promotion of mental health, something that we might imagine was not necessary but unfortunately it is. Current statutory guidance requires that children entering care should receive a physical health assessment by a trained clinician, yet mental health and emotional well-being are assessed only through a strengths and difficulties questionnaire. That is not an alternative to a full assessment conducted by someone with the appropriate qualifications in mental health, which should be instituted as a matter of urgency. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, sets it out clearly in her Amendment 87. This is not a new demand. I can recall asking for it on several occasions during our consideration last year of the Education and Adoption Bill, and I was not alone. Noble Lords from all sides of the House expressed the same call.

It is now well past the point when Ministers should get it, by which I mean the fact that 45% of children entering care have a diagnosable mental health condition. Their needs should be identified early and clearly. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, referred to the plans that form part of the implementation of Future in Mind, and I hope that I am quoting her accurately when she said that only 14% of children entering care receive proper mental health assessments despite the proposals in the document. I would suggest that the time for that situation to change dramatically is now long overdue. We missed the opportunity in last year’s legislation, so I hope that will not be allowed to happen again.

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[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 48 tabled in my name and to Amendments 49 and 50 in this grouping. Amendment 48 would provide a national offer for young people leaving care and would help to address the concerns that have just been raised about them entering poverty and social exclusion. It would build on what we were discussing earlier; that is, placing duties on departments in very specific ways to work to promote good outcomes for these young people. The national offer would include a council tax exemption, for which the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth of Breckland, will make the case shortly, as well as an entitlement to income support to reduce the risk of sanctions and help to support care leavers into work. There should be an extension of working tax credit to care leavers under the age of 25 to ensure that work always pays for them, along with an extension of the shared accommodation rate of local housing allowance, again until the age of 25.

I recognise that this is a very difficult time financially, and of course some of these proposals would have financial implications. While I am reluctant to burden the public purse still further, as the Minister and noble Lords will know, the cost of failing to intervene effectively on these young people is huge, including criminalisation and many becoming pregnant early in life. They will have young families and be struggling as it is, and yet they will have additional financial burdens and so on, although I understand that a couple of the provisions would be unnecessary for the mothers of young children. There are the knock-on costs, and of course there is the absolute misery for young people who are struggling in life and then perhaps having their own children taken away from them. I hope that noble Lords will bear that in mind.

On income support, which is covered in the first amendment, research undertaken by the Children’s Society has found that care leavers are three times more likely to have sanctions applied to them than other adults of working age, with 4,000 sanctions applied to care leavers between 2013 and 2015. Where these sanctions were challenged, although care leavers are less likely to challenge them, some 60% were overturned. This implies that the sanctions are being misapplied. Fewer than 16% of care leavers challenge benefits sanctions as opposed to 23% of the general population. Care leavers are particularly vulnerable to the effects of benefits sanctions, which currently can last for between four and 13 weeks for a low-level infraction such as being late for an appointment at a jobcentre. One young person told the Children’s Society that she was sanctioned in the lead-up to Christmas. She said:

“Don’t know why … it caused a lot of issues … I wasn’t able to sustain myself”.

Allowing care leavers to claim income support would ease their burden. Income support is still a sanctioned benefit, for groups who should be preparing for work. Currently care leavers are not eligible to receive income support by virtue of their status of having been in care. Extending the entitlement to be on income support to care leavers would be a recognition by central government of the need to be more supportive to this particularly vulnerable group during their search for gainful employment. This amendment is very much focused on reducing the impact of sanctions on care leavers, rather than providing them with a higher level of income.

The second part of the amendment applies to working tax credit. Care leavers currently cannot claim working tax credit under the age of 25 unless they have a child or disability. This amendment seeks to extend eligibility to claim working tax credit to all care leavers in full-time work of more than 30 hours a week in recognition of their risk of falling into debt as a result of being liable for household expenses such as rent, energy bills and basics, where many young people would not cover these costs in full if living with family members. It would also recognise the particular need to provide clear incentives to this group to move into, and stay in, work.

I understand that there may be some rationale behind restricting access to working tax credits until a person reaches 25. Younger workers on low wages are likely to be living with their families and not have the full financial liability of running a household. Those over 25 may be less able to fall back on their families for support. However, care leavers take on the full financial burden of adult life as soon as they begin independent living, yet are not able to claim the national living wage. Regulations by the Children’s Society show that they are £42 a week worse off than an equivalent older non-care leaver. Extending working tax credits to care leavers under 25 would be a significant step forward in ensuring that work paid for care leavers, and would secure the surest financial footing for them at the beginning of their adult lives.

The final part of the amendment is on the shared accommodation rate. That rate sets maximum local housing allowance entitlements for most single people under the age of 35 in line with the reasonable rent in their local area for a room in shared accommodation. Currently care leavers are exempt from this until the age of 22. The amendment seeks to extend this exemption up to the age of 25. Until the age of 22, care leavers receive the single bedroom rate, providing them with sufficient support to rent a single-bedroom flat rather than a room in shared accommodation. This should be extended until the age of 25.

With the current situation, care leavers receive a significant cut in their local housing allowance at the age of 23 as they transition from single-bedroom rates to the shared-accommodation rate. At this point, leavers may find that they fall into rent arrears, leaving their home to live in shared accommodation, which may put them at risk. Those in foster care leaving care under staying put arrangements of the age of 22 may find themselves transitioning immediately into shared accommodation. These are serious problems that the amendments would address, so I hope the Minister will consider a favourable response.

I turn to the next two amendments. I have spoken for far too long so I will not say anything more, but I strongly support them and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

I thank the noble Earl. I thought briefly that he was going to make my speech for me, and I was having a doubtful moment.

These are probing amendments, looking at how other agencies could benefit the long-term care of young people. These are crucial areas. It is difficult to see this from the way in which the groupings list is put together, but these amendments are linked to Amendment 38, which I know we will come to but I need to make a comment about it before moving on because it is all about financial knowledge and education. The Government can be given credit for the general progress that has been made in financial education, but it is not enough, certainly not for children in the care system.

Schools have a mandate to include financial education lessons as part of mathematics and citizenship at key stages 3 and 4. Academies, free schools and independent schools have no obligation to teach it, although many do, but many schools do not have it high on the curriculum so children could miss out on this essential life skill. At a time of taking on more financial responsibility and having to make long-term financial decisions, only 28% of 17 to 18 year-olds received lessons on money management before joining university or the world of work. How much more difficult is it for the population of young people who are moving on from care who have very little backing from their own families for this? I am really probing this amendment because currently a paradox exists between a local authority’s duty of care to care leavers and its enforcement methods on council tax arrears. This paradox does not level with the corporate parenting principles set out in Clause 1 as it exposes care leavers to the risk of debt and potential court summons, does not promote their well-being, act in their best interests or seek to find the best outcomes for them.

Links between debt and poor emotional well-being are becoming increasingly clear and links between poor mental health and emotional well-being and future life chances have been well established. We are very grateful to the Children’s Society which has done a great deal of work on this and has shown that debt can influence a young person’s willingness to start university education due to the worry about the debt they may further accrue. One care leaver living independently told the Children’s Society that council tax arrears severely impacted on her well-being. She said:

“I was late making a payment and they sent me a reminder letter and they said if they had to send me any more reminder letters then I have to go to court and they stopped my instalments. I got really worried and really panicky because I didn’t understand, I didn’t want to go to court”.

Another speaking with reference to the reactive chasing debts and emergency support as opposed to proactive financial education and council tax exemption focus of local authorities said:

“They’re setting you up to fail”.

This is not the approach that any parent should take, especially a corporate parent. There are good areas of practice and I think the Minister knows about Cheshire East Council which has set the precedent in recognising its role as a corporate parent by introducing a full exemption from council tax for care leavers until the age of 25. This will cost about £17,000 per year, including out-of-area care leavers. Cheshire East anticipates this will reduce the number of emergency payments it will be required to pay to care leavers who are in financial crisis, as well as further reducing the dependency of these young people on other services. This is to be welcomed. However, we must take the opportunity presented to us with this amendment to make sure that all care leavers receive the full exemption from council tax until they are 25; otherwise we are back with a postcode lottery again, with some children getting it and others not.

It would be good if the Government could show leadership on this issue and make sure that as a corporate parent central government departments work with local authorities to extend the best practice as seen in Cheshire East across the country. The Minister may see this as an issue for local areas but the precedent is a national government one as the authority applies blanket exemptions to certain groups such as students through tax legislation. Does the Minister agree that as a corporate parent the Government have a duty to support care leavers in their transition into adulthood, and that council tax exemption is a tangible and meaningful way of doing this?

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, at this point, there is only one person I feel more sorry for than myself, and that is the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, because, like mine, his carefully crafted speech is in shreds as everyone else has made the points. I will say one or two things that are different from those I have on my bit of paper, so if I am not as coherent as I usually am, that is why.

I want to make some points because this is an important Bill—but possibly not because of the way it appears on the surface. I think its value is under its skin. It is because the three things it represents—social workers, the regulation of the social work profession and social work itself and the people who are being helped, particularly children in care—are interrelated. A little earlier, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, asked why the number of children in care was going up. I can indicate why it is going up: it is because good preventive work keeps children out of care. If you are working with families, you can maintain many of them in communities. I say this because I have been a social worker for about 50 years—I am not really that old, but I trained in 1963—and I still maintain work with various groups, so I have a hand on what is happening in social work now. I know how crucial it is that we take a really good overview.

That is why I said at the briefing that in some ways this important Bill lacks vision. The vision it could have had was for all children in difficulties. There are children in chaotic families—the troubled families programme touches only some of them—and children living in anxiety-provoking debt or experiencing a culture of violence. We know that there are some very good social work programmes that work, and that we have some tools to help families—but the one way to get service is to get into care or to have even more difficulties. That is because we have abandoned very good preventive service.

We have heard a lot about the closure of centres that have made a huge difference in the past, so I want to start there rather than where I had intended to start. Most of the valuable work that we undertake starts too late, even when children come into care. We do not have a vision of continuity when a child is in difficulties at home and may have to come into care.

My other point is that thousands of children every year go in and out of care again and again. That is when we need really good rehabilitative work in the home with those children who return home but need the services building around them. Time and again I see children returned, and that is it—until they have a crisis and they are back in care. Then they get a bit more social work, but their family situation remains chaotic. At the end of the day, it really is a matter of chance as to whether you are in care at 18 or 19 so that all the services that are on offer for children leaving care kick in. You might be unlucky and not be in care at that moment, at which point you are on your family’s resources and you just do not get any of these additional benefits.

The Minister knows I recognise that the Government’s strategy of giving care leavers more time in foster homes, known as Staying Put, has worked well in councils that have embraced it. Leeds was mentioned earlier today as an exceptional council, although I am a little worried that we do not have more than one or two of those. At the moment the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children is looking at the state of social care, but we have found only a handful of really good local authorities that are embracing a different way of working.

I do know that Leeds may well find it very difficult to sustain the policy. It receives £200,000-plus in income but it is paying out over £1 million. The council thinks that the programme works, and the children who are on the Staying Put programme are doing well. The programme deals with some very difficult youngsters. I met some of them recently and they talked about their experiences and their behaviour and how their foster parents had seen them through and they were now in employment or education. We really have to try to make that work because the savings are in other departments. My noble friend Lord McNally talked about the juvenile justice system, but these children are not even getting into that system because they have a family to give them sustenance.

I want to say one sentence about young people whose immigration status stops everything at 18, even if they are in a foster home. Some children arrive here without proper legal status. Their schools never find that out—it is a mystery to me why it does not come up during the education process—and it is only when they are going to go to college that they find that they cannot go until they have fought removal from this country. That is something on which we will bring forward amendments, and I wanted to mention it to the Minister because we need to return to it. Often these are children who have been brought up in this country: again, the Children’s Society has introduced me to some of them.

We have heard a great deal today about the Children’s Society looking at the impact on young people of financial planning and the need for them to have a really good education in how to manage their money. Moving into permanent accommodation, struggling with apprenticeships that do not pay enough and being unable to meet their council tax leaves them destitute. If you talk to homeless groups, you will find that many young people who have become homeless have done so because they have not had the sustained help that I hope the new programme will develop. Cheshire expects that a policy of not imposing council tax until young people reach 25 will result in a decrease in emergency payments made to care leavers in crisis, as well as reducing the dependency of these young people on other services.

While we are talking about financial issues, I know that this issue was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, but I cannot believe that while we have spent a great deal of time enabling many other young people not to be on benefits, we actually train our young care leavers to claim benefits in order to pay for their costs. That is a very easy programme to rectify between departments.

I turn to what I think a corporate parent should be doing and who a corporate parent should be. Having been a director of social services, I took my local authority responsibility as a corporate parent extremely seriously—and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, said, the local authority is the corporate parent. But it has a lot of corporate parent partners, many of which are in the local authority; again, Leeds has pulled that together. But, like many other speakers this afternoon, I want to see central government and other departments taken on board. I wonder whether the care leaver covenant will do this. Can the Minister say whether it will extend to all these other departments? After all, it is interesting that Alan Wood, in his report on the role of LSCBs, which I do not have time to address here this afternoon, points out that,

“national government departments do not do enough to model effective partnership working between themselves”.

The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, made that point.

I will say something briefly about the local offer: again, I find this a very strange phrase. Can the Minister tell me whether there has been any assessment of the local offers made under the previous legislation that we saw through this House, and whether a local offer programme ensures that young people get the services and that they are not just on a list? Have we any assessment of what happened under the previous legislation?

Like everyone else, I welcome personal advisers. Again, many of the issues I have just raised would be dealt with if we had personal advisers, but they have to be consistent people. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, said, it is no use having someone who happens to pop into your life now and again—they need to be a mentor who understands your life and who will stand by you. But it could be a number of different people, and I do not see why a foster parent who has done very well by a child should not remain the mentor if the young person wants that. It is extremely important to take the young person’s view into consideration—but not altogether. Sometimes what they want might not be in their best interests, and we will still have to take the parental role.

I am interested to know whether we will get the regulations on the training and standards of advisers and the baseline before we get through the Bill.

I will say very briefly that I welcome the high ambition for social work. I will not talk about regulation, because the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, has done it far better than I could, but I will say just one thing. Nicky Morgan wants to see an extra 755 qualified social workers coming from fast-track programmes in the next year alone and has promised £100 million to the Frontline and Step Up training programmes. I subscribe to her vision of a confident social work profession, constantly pushing boundaries and redefining what works by rigorous and evidence-based practice. The only problem is, will the local authorities have the resources or framework to employ them, and do the Government see the resource issue as a real one or think that we can squeeze out still more from local authorities that are trying to provide these services?

I commend my noble friend Lady Meacher for what she said about inquiries. I have been subject to three child abuse inquiries in my life; they have left scars. Can the Minister ensure that these inquiries do not turn out to be simply fodder for the media but that we will learn lessons, and that all the lessons from previous inquiries, as well as these, are properly integrated into social work practice?

Schools: Academies

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I will give the noble Baroness an independent view from the chief inspector, who believes that every school should be an academy. As for local authorities, of course there are a lot of high-performing local authorities and we very much hope that people there will continue to be involved, by spinning out and setting up academy trusts. As I said in an Answer last week, no strong schools will close as a result of the policies in the White Paper. Indeed, we think that many rural schools will be much stronger working together in multi-academy trusts. There are very strict rules about the closure of small and rural schools, and I expect that all such considerations will continue in the future in relation to all rural schools.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I have a slightly different angle on this Question. Where there is a playgroup that wishes to join a primary school that is an academy, because it wants to get that continuous stream of education through the playgroup, the primary school and into the secondary schools, what kind of help do the Government give to that playgroup?

[Lord Nash]

We are now seeing quite a lot of primary academies opening nurseries. The issue of playgroups and children’s centres is one we are considering and I would be happy to discuss it further with the noble Baroness outside the House.

Children: Drugs

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Monday 11th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My understanding is that this programme of study is very comprehensive, but I will write specifically to the noble Baroness on this.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister will be well aware of the importance of work with families, and that there has been a substantial increase in respect of Section 47—child protection—and Section 17, which concerns children in need. I quote the sections to underline the statutory nature of the work for local authorities. We understand that, because of this increase, Section 17 work—the preventive work—is being reduced by local authorities. Is that not just the work that is needed for children living with families where drug abuse is high?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Baroness’s sentiments. I will look at what she says about Section 17 and talk to her further about it.