Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be a member of the Public Services Committee, so ably chaired by my noble friend Lady Armstrong, and to speak in this debate, along with other colleagues and, indeed, former colleagues from the committee. Our inquiry was both illuminating and distressing, all the more so because many of us have worked in child protection for many years and found the same old problems of lack of recognition, lack of co-ordination, lack of a comprehensive strategy and lack of collaboration between agencies with which we have unfortunately been familiar for too many years. It was, to say the least, dispiriting.

To all these old problems was added the pandemic, with 1 million children growing up with reduced life chances, as my noble friend said, public services offering too little, too late, and local services undermined not only through lack of funding but through a lack of the information that would enable them to protect children, such as how many young people took up caring roles as support services were withdrawn as the pandemic progressed. We have no accurate figures about that.

In my brief remarks, I will concentrate on two areas where we found failings but which could, if addressed, provide some early wins and huge steps forward to protecting vulnerable children. The first is a lack of proper engagement with users—children and families—when services are designed. The evidence we received from users of services was the most powerful of all. Six focus groups and seven evidence sessions with parents and children really brought home to the committee the problems faced by families and shaped our recommendations. In short, services must be responsive to individual needs and must be co-produced.

I quote Emma in our report:

“I feel [that public services] just ignore children’s voices. When my mum was going through issues with her mental health, they asked her if she needed any services and she said we were fine. I felt like I needed help, but nobody listened to me. No one wanted to hear my voice.”


Emma had been a young carer for her mother for a very long time.

In our first inquiry, we argued that involving disadvantaged groups in the design of services makes public services more responsive to marginalised communities’ needs. But, like Emma, many of the children and families reported to us that statutory agencies too often deliver support without ever listening to the people who use their services. We heard that services for vulnerable children and their families need to be responsive to individual needs to be successful. Therefore, they must be co-produced—that is the word we heard very often.

We saw some interesting co-production and the Cabinet Office certainly issues quite strong guidance about how good it is to engage in co-production, but I am afraid that the experience of one of our witnesses was that the use of co-production in children’s social care is limited. She said that children in the care system regularly requested “kinship care”—when a child lives with a relative or family friend rather than with a foster family or in a care home—but they were often ignored. She called for children suffering from the consequences of family breakdown to have a greater say in their future. She said:

“The best way of doing that … is through coproduction and having young people, kinship carers and families working with the local authority to coproduce a kinship, family and friends care policy. Unfortunately, this does not happen.”


We heard too many depressing examples of where co-production does not happen, but we heard about some local authorities, such as Cheshire East Council, that envisioned an organisation to codesign the service with young people, their families and the community. They designed the programme and, lo and behold, they had some very good outcomes. They halved the rereferral rate into social care services from 23% to 12%, reduced the average social worker’s caseload by 30%, reduced reliance on agency staff, who, as we know, cost too much, and achieved 95% engagement from families.

I have often said in your Lordships’ House that if people work with the users they get some very pleasant surprises. When you really engage with users, they often ask for far less than you think they will want if you really address their needs, rather than have their needs addressed by somebody who does not really understand their situation.

That brings me to the second issue on which I want to concentrate: the inadequate engagement and collaboration with local voluntary and charitable agencies. Engaging users is nearly always best done through a local voluntary organisation; this was pointed out to us in our evidence sessions. I will never forget Maria from Birmingham, who said to us:

“The police dismissed what happened to us … They said, ‘It is just [your husband’s] behaviour’, and I was told to manage my fear and my children through counselling … but I needed [more] support with my daughter … she was easily triggered by the violence she had witnessed and would hurt herself. I couldn’t cope.”


Maria was fortunate to be referred to a small charity in Birmingham, WE:ARE, which forms long-term and meaningful relationships. She received group therapy from it, enabling her better to support her children. Now she says that her strength has been passed on to her children and that they are doing much better in school as a result.

Our report says:

“A common theme that emerged from our focus groups and evidence sessions with parents and children was that voluntary sector organisations were often better placed than statutory services to identify and respond to needs, and to co-design services more effectively. We heard that the voluntary sector was able to engage vulnerable families whom statutory services could not reach.”


I always remember that when I was working with young carers, a lot of them and their families were terrified of being referred to social services for fear that they would take the child into care instead of trying to resolve the situation in which the family found itself. It is hardly surprising that marginalised families are reluctant to request state support, because they fear that that involvement in family life will mean that kind of intervention, which is not what they want.

For example:

“Leah told us that her mother ‘did not want any help’ from statutory agencies with her addiction: ‘it was mainly because she was scared of social services taking me and my sister away.’ Fortunately, the family was supported by … an addiction charity.”


Leah said that the charity deals

“with those things more often, they have a better understanding … They know how to help and they have been doing it for a long time. They have seen loads of families come in with all sorts of problems. I feel like they could help on so many levels”.

We had some good examples such as those I have quoted, but there were too many where the ability of the voluntary sector to create and deliver innovative services was ignored because of a lack of trust and it being called in too late, once decisions had been made, not being treated as a proper partner and, of course, being deprived of funding.

Funding underlies so many of the problems we have identified, so it is very important that public services do not ignore but make the very best possible use of two of the most important resources available to them: the users themselves and the voluntary sector. If these are both treated as equal partners—co-producers—public services would do a better job of supporting vulnerable children than was evidenced to the committee in this inquiry.