Deregulation Bill

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Meacher]

32A: Clause 75, page 64, line 14, at end insert—
“(3) This section comes into force on such day as the Secretary of State may by order made by statutory instrument appoint.
(4) A statutory instrument under subsection (3) shall not be made unless a draft has been laid before and approved by both Houses of Parliament.
(5) The Secretary of State may not lay a draft statutory instrument under subsection (4) until he has published a report of a risk assessment of the delegation by local authorities of their child protection functions and services.
(6) The Secretary of State must publish the report specified in subsection (5) within 18 months of the passing of this Act.”

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[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, the Minister, for finding time for two meetings to discuss our concerns about this issue and the removal of a safeguard from the child protection system. We thought carefully about bringing this issue back to the House at this point but there is a high level of risk associated with the child protection functions, and the fact that the regulations were tabled and passed only last year suggests that the arrangements are still very much at an early stage and that it is really premature to remove the requirement for these delegated services to be registered.

We note that local authorities will remain accountable to the regulators for the quality of the services provided, but the fact is that the regulated services will not sit directly within the purview of local authorities and we know that commissioning, contract compliance and adhering to rules around commercial secrecy are still in their infancy and untried with respect to child protection decision-making functions. Indeed, in our meetings the Minister himself referred to the poor commissioning and contracting skills of local authorities that he had identified, and we agree with his concern. These new functions will take time to bed down. Staff need to be trained. They need some experience and you cannot achieve that overnight. For local authorities, quality assurance in external organisations may prove very difficult to achieve. An experienced principal social worker describes numerous occasions of near-misses in contracted-out services affecting children and adults in community settings, and the incredible frustration of trying to get contractors and agency suppliers to take remedial action to improve the quality of care provided.

With the extension of delegated functions to include child protection functions, among others, the risks will increase sharply. There is the potential for the emergence of much larger market providers with subcontractors—of firms establishing a string of not-for-profit subsidiaries with supply lines that are difficult to hold to account. These are the concerns of the College of Social Work that we are reflecting today. We understand that local authorities will be inspected to check whether they have commissioned the functions and services appropriately and whether they are ensuring contract compliance. There are concerns about the quality of that inspection and the training of the staff within the inspectorate. There are matters there that need to be dealt with.

The Minister kindly sent us some key extracts from the Ofsted documentation which make it clear that inspection of local authorities will take place about every three years. Yes, a local authority will be reinspected within 12 weeks following the delegation of functions if the local authority had previously been judged inadequate. But local authority services may be perfectly adequate even if their commissioning and contract compliance skills are yet to be developed, so there is no reason to believe that there will be an inspection within 12 weeks. In that case, we are talking about three years. An awful lot of children may be damaged in that time. In this context we should be strengthening rather than scrapping the registration requirement. This should at least ensure that any organisation taking on this work has the basic structures, supervision arrangements and risk management procedures in place. The Minister argued, very reasonably, that Ofsted does not have the resources to undertake this registration function effectively. If that is the case, the delegation of these services should not go ahead until the ways and means are found to provide that assurance.

We know that in this very difficult field disasters will occasionally happen. Social services staff may not be proficient in commissioning and contracting, as I have already said, but they have considerable experience in child protection. Every day, children are protected by social workers from sick, disturbed or dangerous parents. As in the terrorist field, the perpetrators have to succeed only once, whereas the staff in these agencies have to fail only once and all hell is let loose, as we know.

These are extraordinarily difficult and stressful areas of work. We should not increase the risks involved. We understand that a number of local authorities are being instructed to delegate these functions. There will be the possibility therefore of a pilot, which could be risk-assessed. Our amendment requires the undertaking of a risk assessment of the delegation by local authorities of their child protection functions and services before the registration of those services can be abolished. That is the whole point: it is early days and it is premature to be taking this step.

We also propose that the report on the risk assessment be published within 18 months of the passing of the Act. We assume that the Government of the day would take appropriate action if the assessment showed that the risks of delegating those functions were unacceptably high. I look forward to the Minister’s reply and beg to move.

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, this amendment is about child protection and ensuring appropriate government responsibility for the regulation and quality of care offered by outsourced social work providers. Although most local authorities do their best to uphold standards, this important area cannot be left entirely to them, with very occasional inspections from Ofsted—as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has just said.

Local authorities have stated that it is,

“important to ensure there is a proper, external to the local authority, registration process to enable a local authority to be confident in using the services provided by the SWP”—

that is, the social work provider. The government proposal is that the external providers of social work services will not be inspected in their own right by Ofsted, nor will they be registered as providers in the way that children’s homes and adoption societies are, so there is already an anomaly here. There will be no overview of their activities across local authorities where they hold contracts and no visible assurances for the public about their financial viability, quality or working practices.

In June 2013, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee criticised the Government’s proposals to remove regulation of social work providers. It stated:

“Registration … would allow the imposition of national minimum standards and requirements as to the fitness of providers, and would also provide a mechanism for removing providers who were failing to meet standards”.

The Government subsequently retained separate registration, but not inspection, for external providers through the Providers of Social Work Services (England) Regulations 2013, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has already referred. The discussions are less than 14 months old, and now the Government seek to remove even that provision of registration. This is in the context of there having been no empirical review of the 2013 regulations to see how they are working. Our amendment asks for a pause for the review to be conducted to satisfy ourselves that the most vulnerable children in our society have some protection.

Finally, social workers, whether working for the public or private sector, have a difficult if not impossible task with a heavy if not impossible workload. They take decisions every day which could mean life or death. Yet the only time that they receive publicity is when things go wrong. I believe that it is the duty of Government to ensure that standards across the profession are of good quality and that local authorities are not left high and dry on this issue. I hope that noble Lords will see fit to support this amendment.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I suppose that I should declare an interest: my son has lived and worked in the United States for seven years and his American wife is a qualified children’s social worker. She has worked in Boston and is currently working in Chicago, so I have learnt a certain amount about the Massachusetts and Illinois systems of privatised provision of child protection. I am not completely unaware of some of the delicacies in this area. I am of course also acutely aware of the sensitivity of the issue of child protection in British political debate at present.

I thank the noble Baronesses for raising this issue and for coming in to discuss further with my noble friend and officials some of the underlying issues at stake. I am well aware that the College of Social Work has strong views on this, although as I understand it the area of social work is not entirely of one mind in how far one needs registration as well as inspection. The questions of registration and inspection are related but not identical. The system of delegation is purely permissive. Local authorities may continue to provide their own services or, as the noble Baroness suggested, delegate to third sector providers or commercial providers in the field. Some do so; many others continue to provide their own direct services. The removal of registration does not mean the removal of inspection.

[Baroness Meacher]

I thank the Minister for giving way. I understand that a number of local authorities are being instructed to delegate out these services. Is that correct or not? It is what I have been told.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am informed that it is not correct. I certainly have no knowledge of it, but my noble friend Lord Nash assures me that it is not the case, so we are not in that area.

We have an active system of inspection. It is local authorities which are accountable for ensuring that when contracts are signed in this form, the provider is a credible and qualified provider. Having said that, Ofsted is the inspector of such arrangements and it keeps a very active role in watching what happens, receiving reports and then coming in to inspect when reports are provided of inadequate care or the accidents which sadly, as we all know, eventually and occasionally happen. Ofsted shares the Government’s view that registration adds little value and that, in many ways, it risks confusion in the system as to where accountability lies.

It is the Government’s view that accountability lies with local authorities and that Ofsted, for the Government, provides the continuing process of inspection. There are of course issues about the level of risk and the level of burdens in the system.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government will naturally review the relatively recent arrangements that have been put in place. That of course will be for our successors, whoever they may be in a matter of months’ time, but I assure the noble Baroness that all Governments and Secretaries of State are well aware of the risk factor involved in all this; it is an area that any Government have to pay active attention to.

[Baroness Meacher]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. I thank my colleagues, my noble friends Lady Donaghy, Lady Howarth and Lady Jones, for their persuasive and powerful contributions—and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Reid.

The fact is, as we have made clear, that there are major risks in pushing ahead with these delegated services without a proper risk assessment. I am grateful that the Minister assures us that there will be a review of these delegated services; it would be good to have in writing some information about when such a review will occur and the nature and detail of it, because that is fundamentally important. The reality is that we do not feel assured that local authorities will be able adequately to quality-assure all the organisations out there undertaking these sorts of child protection and other related functions; it is just unsafe. Therefore, a review—frankly, I would call it a risk assessment—is fundamental and, hopefully, any Government in power after May will be able to respond appropriately to that. Even at this very late hour, I have to say that I want to test the opinion of the House on this matter because of its gravity.