Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Massey of Darwen Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, first, I apologise for Amendment 28A. That is my fault because, having been asked to table the amendment in something of a hurry—I endorse very much what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said about this all coming rather quickly—I am afraid I did not read through the list of amendments sufficiently carefully. Nor, I have to say, did the Public Bill Office, which happily tabled it. I have apologised to the Minister’s Bill team for the fact that two identical amendments have been tabled. However, I would like to speak briefly to it.

Various groups of children, such as those under the age of 18 or children who are leavers from care, may need legal advice. One such group are English children caught up in their parents’ unhappy divorce or separation proceedings, where they, or one parent—usually the mother—may be the victim of very serious domestic abuse. Currently, there is absolutely no legal aid in private law family proceedings. The judge or magistrates have to try to find out what is going on. A report, the name of which escapes me, talks about this great concern in relation to the private and public law sectors. On the nub of those two areas, some children who are the victims of what is going on in the family are not discovered, so their problems come up in the private law sector where their parents are not entitled to legal aid and there may or may not be good CAFCASS support because CAFCASS may or may not be asked to become involved until a very late stage. The welfare of such children is paramount under the Children Act, yet at the moment they are unlikely to get proper representation in proceedings where their parents have no representation and where their manifest needs may be overlooked because the judge or the magistrates do not have the information that is needed. That is one group who need this legal representation for children and young people.

As many Members of this House know, I spend a lot of my time involved in combating child trafficking. The children involved in this are a very special group. Generally, they come from overseas and many lack much, if not all, English. They may or may not go through the national referral mechanism. Some of them emerge on the streets of London and other places. They very much need all the help they can get. One of the things they need is legal representation to fight their way through the absolute maze of the various aspects that may hit them. Immigration is the most important but is by no means the only one. They need someone to help them. They need an independent trafficking advocate, who we have talked about. The Minister in the Commons has said that that issue is being looked at again with further pilots. However, these children also need legal representation.

I remind the Minister that the Government have now said that they will look after some at least of the 26,000 or 28,000 unaccompanied children who are stuck somewhere in Europe, although they do not seem to have begun to implement this policy. There has now been a promise to have some of them in this country. They perhaps more than almost anyone else will need the help of lawyers. This is therefore a very important amendment. I commend it to the Committee.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, these are extremely important amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and, by default, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I too want to talk about child migrants and children who are trafficked. I am not a lawyer but I know that there are lawyers in the Room, so I hope that they will be able to reinforce these issues if I am right about them. It seems to me that child victims of trafficking from abroad are often left entirely on their own to navigate the immigration system, the criminal and family justice systems and the national referral mechanism mentioned by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, without the support of anyone with parental responsibility for them. There seems to be no further announcement on the second pilot for independent child trafficking advocates, so I would like to know what is happening there.

UNICEF has pointed out that for children who have been trafficked there are apparently no monitoring systems to track outcomes for them once they leave care. Therefore, it is difficult to review cases and analyse long-term outcomes. Recent evidence presented to the Refugee Children’s Consortium suggests that there is not enough access to legal advice in a child’s care plan. There should be an active duty to promote this access for these children, who are extremely vulnerable.

Currently, the guidance on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children sets out that social workers should understand how to access specialist immigration legal advice. However, this advice is often sought too late for children. Further, it is important that children in local authority care are able to access legal advice on other areas of law. Children can require a broad spectrum of legal intervention to ensure that their best interests are represented: for example, to stay in education, to access support for their special educational needs or to gain compensation from a perpetrator.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s concluding observations on the UK Government’s fifth report noted that some children in care do not feel listened to and that unaccompanied migrant and asylum-seeking children may not receive independent legal advice. Figures gathered by the Children’s Society show that almost all unaccompanied children’s immigration cases would be out of the scope for legal aid. This is not a satisfactory picture, and I would like reassurance from the Minister that it will be looked at. We may well need to bring it back at a later stage of the Bill.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for raising concerns about the legal aspects of children and care leavers, and in particular for extending that to children who have come here as refugees, and perhaps as unaccompanied minors. There has been a commitment from the Government that 20,000 such children will be accepted into this country by 2020. I know that my local authority in West Yorkshire has already been asked to accept 70 such children.

The difficulty that has been raised is one that we all ought to be aware of: we are in danger of creating two tiers of care leavers. On the one hand, there are those who are rightly included in this Bill, and we all praise the direction of travel. We are rightly saying that local authorities and corporate parents generally ought to take greater responsibility for those care leavers up to the age of 25. Therefore, in this Bill we are saying that young people aged 18 are not yet fully prepared and need help in the transition to adulthood. On the other hand, however, in the Immigration Act, which was debated in the last Session, the decision was made that, unless their asylum application is successful, young people aged 18, who have had some of the most harrowing experiences that any of us can imagine, not only will not receive any further care and support but will be sent back to their country of origin.

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Moved by

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

10: Clause 1, page 1, line 10, after “health” insert “(including mental health)”

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, in the last hour or so we have heard a lot of talk about prevention, and the Minister latterly talked about life chances. My amendments today cover both prevention and life chances, and I wish to speak to Amendments 10, 16, 22 and 80A in this group.

Amendment 10 calls for mental health to be included in the definition of health. Amendment 16 comes in the part of the Bill on the best interests of children and supports the development of high aspirations in promoting “social and emotional” outcomes. Amendment 22 comes within the guidance for staff members for looked-after pupils and would reinstate issues for child welfare that were in the Children Act 1989. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, about this; I do not know where that Act has gone but it had such a lot of good things in it and was complete. I shall talk later on about the importance of taking into account certain things in that Act, such as age, gender, vulnerability and so on. Amendment 80A would add the category of,

“returning home to the care of a parent”,

to those looked-after children who have ceased to be looked after by the local authority.

Amendments in this group tabled by other noble Lords come in between my amendments and are to do with respecting the background of children and promoting well-being, prevention and life chances. I leave it to the capable hands of other noble Lords to talk about those issues.

Amendment 10 is about mental health. I remember that at Second Reading the issue of mental health came up over and over again. I want to emphasise the importance of attending to mental health here. The Royal College of Nursing, together with other notable organisations, has pointed out that the mental health needs are higher in looked-after children—I think one would expect that. Mental health must be addressed in the early years by carers, social workers and schools so that it does not deteriorate as children age.

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[The Earl of Listowel]

Before the noble Baroness withdraws her amendment, I want to say how very pleased I was to hear that Dr Peter Fonagy, director of the Anna Freud Centre, an institution with such an illustrious history in the treatment of abused children, is being appointed to run a working group looking at how mental health professionals can better work with children in care. The Minister might consider taking to Dr Fonagy, at the beginning of his research, the concern about children’s homes. In his report in the 1990s, Choosing with Care, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, highlighted the fact that best and widespread practice on the continent had psychiatrists or relevant mental health professionals working in partnership with staff in children’s homes, as much to support staff as in meeting the mental health needs of these children. Only about half of our children’s homes have a connection with mental health professionals in that way.

This issue is so important. Although there has been progress in terms of the qualifications of staff in children’s homes, still we have a long way to go. They need the best mental health professionals supporting them. I would be most grateful if the Minister could flag that up to Dr Fonagy.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very complete response. This has been a varied group of amendments and the debate has raised issues that I know the Government will take on board.

The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, raised a very interesting issue about what goes into the Bill. I agree with her, of course. It seems to me that some of the issues raised today would be very easy to slot into the Bill. However, we need more discourse, perhaps with outside agencies, as the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, suggested, to condense other issues that might be reinforced in the Bill.

I am very glad to hear that there will be a review of mental health and looked-after children. The three issues that came out very strongly for me were mental health, prevention and assessment, the last of which was brought up by the noble Baronesses, Lady Tyler, Lady Walmsley and Lady Benjamin.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, for his support. We have talked about this before. To respond very quickly to him, I think character education does link with personal, social and health education. I do not care what you call it but it is important, although I will not accept the name “grit” education, because it is very American and it sounds like a film. As far as I am concerned, that is out, but we can talk about that some other time. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, and others mentioned CAMHS. CAMHS has borne the brunt of funding cuts since 2010 and cannot be relied on to do all the work that we expect of it.

I return to the very interesting remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, on kinship care. I suggest to the Minister that this may be an area where we would benefit from a discussion with the Kinship Care Alliance because those of us who are old enough to have been here for a while—there are one or two familiar faces present—will remember that over the last 10 years, or possibly longer, the issue of kinship care has come up in three or four Bills but we have never resolved it. We have never resolved what kinship carers need or how they should be recompensed for the service they provide. They save the state millions of pounds but they still often live in poverty with no support. I hope we can crack this issue with this Bill and achieve some sensible way forward on this.

I hope the Minister accepts that this is an important issue. My comments are linked with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, said because we tried with one such Bill to have a person appointed in every local authority who would support kinship carers and the relevant children. Sometimes children cannot be happy and healthy unless their carers are happy and healthy. Many kinship carers are not happy and healthy but are struggling under tremendous financial, physical and mental burdens. That is another issue to which we may well come back, but in the meantime I thank noble Lords for their contributions and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 10 withdrawn.