Children in Care

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, most children in the care system live with foster parents, to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude for their dedication, but many foster parents report that they are not given sufficient information about the background of these children, many of whom have had traumatic experiences, as the noble Lord, Lord Laming, pointed out. Confidentiality is often given as the reason for this, but does the Minister agree that, if foster parents are going to deal adequately with the behavioural problems that may arise, they need to be as fully informed as possible about the background of these children?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point. If it would help to meet some foster parents to understand those issues better, I would be delighted to do so.

Family-strengthening Policies

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

One of the biggest lines in the budget for family hubs—£50 million of the £300 million in that package—is for parenting programmes specifically, and an even bigger line, about £100 million, is for infant and parental mental health. Both those things address the group which the noble Baroness refers to.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

Does the Minister remember that many thousands of children take on caring responsibilities, far more than we would perhaps like to imagine? They do so often because services to support disabled parents are quite inadequate. Will her department remember the connection between those children’s health and the provision of social care services?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point, and that is where our joint working with the Department for Health and Social Care, for example, is particularly important.

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.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

Amendment 35A withdrawn.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

I remind noble Lords that if Amendment 35B is agreed to, I cannot call Amendment 36 for reason of pre-emption.

Amendment 35B

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

Finally, perhaps the Minister could reflect on the interplay between master agreements and individual academy agreements, which feels quite muddled as I read through this set of clauses. As a MAT, a single problem in one of your academies, if people do not like the cut of your jib, could end up with you having the master agreement taken away and losing the whole thing. All of this feels disproportionate; none of it feels well thought out. It all feels very rushed, as ever with this Bill, and yet again, my plea to the Government is to take some time, do the regulatory review, publish the outcome of the consultation on the review and come back on Report with something informed by the sector and by proper consultation. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I now invite her to speak.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I start by apologising to noble Lords who have their names against amendments and clause stand part notices in this group. The rules for remote contributions mean that I am always called after the mover of the first amendment in the group; I would have wanted to hear other expert contributions before speaking.

Amendments 39A and 39B in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, make it absolutely plain that the Secretary of State’s powers should be used only when an Ofsted inspection has made it clear that there are issues. Amendment 39C in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, asks for further qualification to inform a Secretary of State’s intervention decision on the replacement of directors or trustees, which include those who pose

“a risk to the duty of the institution”.

I hope that this would also include those who do not respond to safeguarding concerns. The detail of this comes to the nub of the issue that we have faced in our day and a half of Committee so far: exactly how the Bill will work in practice.

Turning to the 14 clause stand part notices in this group for Clauses 5 to 18, I hope that, after our debates so far in Committee, the Minister is in no doubt about the concern right across the House, including from all the former Education Ministers present, about the first part of the Bill on academies. The noble Lords, Lord Baker, Lord Nash and Lord Agnew, have made it absolutely plain in our debates today and last week that this Bill, especially this part of it, is not fit for purpose and that it would be sensible to delay until more detail can be provided to Parliament, the education sector and parents.

Normally, when a major change in the structure of our entire education system occurs, there has been broad consultation with the public, schools and the bodies that deliver educational services to education directly. That just has not happened here. It is evident that your Lordships’ House remains concerned that this part has not been thought through in the detail needed. All schools that are funded through the public purse becoming academies, bringing virtually all schools under the direction of the Secretary of State, is one such major change.

That brings us to the other conflicting issue to which noble Lords have referred in almost every debate on each grouping: the Henry VIII powers that the Secretary of State will take on in the Bill; again, without wider consultation or understanding of the implications. I want to focus on the latter point for a second. Page 55 of the White Paper, Opportunity for All: Strong Schools with Great Teachers for Your Child, sets out the standards, regulation and intervention from the department’s perspective. Given the debates we have had, the White Paper is remarkably coy about the powers of the Secretary of State. In fact, according to the schedule on page 55 of the White Paper, the Secretary of State’s only role is to sign new funding agreements and amend them “for material changes”. Intervening in schools is listed as happening by the regions group, on sufficiency, admissions, safeguarding, attendance and ensuring quality; whereas the Bill appears to give decisions over these powers directly to the Secretary of State. So, what is on the face of the Bill sets out neither a strategic framework nor the detail of how it will work in practice; it also contradicts the White Paper.

This reflects the difficult debate that we are having at the moment. My noble friend Lady Garden of Frognal said during our debate on the first group of amendments that there should be delays in the progress of the Bill until some of these matters are clarified and put out for consultation. Other noble Lords have said the same; they are right. As more and more issues and concerns emerge, grouping by grouping, it is not right to proceed until they are discussed and then consulted on with the wider public.

As the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, made clear in our debate last Wednesday, the Academies Minister has already had to take a large number of decisions in relation to schools that are not maintained. Some of us argue that this results in a closed and untransparent system that is particularly opaque for parents, their children and their communities when key and serious decisions need to be made about their local school. It now appears that these powers, given to the Secretary of State but with a recommendation presumably to be made by the relevant Academies Minister, will apply to all 20,000 publicly funded schools once the Bill has gone through. How on earth will this work in practice? Also, how will it be publicly accountable to the parents and communities that these academies will serve? Can a junior Minister manage this workload or will the practicalities of it mean that it will be made by invisible and unaccountable civil servants?

In the Clause 3 stand part debate earlier, the Minister said that the Government will always consult the sector, but I did not hear anything about consulting parents and communities on changes to their local schools. I hope that the Minister can provide some answers or a timetable for your Lordships’ House as to when our many questions can be answered in detail and then debated properly; otherwise, we must delay the next stage of the Bill until we know and understand more about what the Government are trying to achieve through it.

Vulnerable Children

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on securing this debate and on way she has introduced this important topic. I want to concentrate on a particular issue very close to my own heart, which she has highlighted, as has the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin—young carers.

I am glad to see that young carers are included in the definition of a wider group of children with family-related issues. Looking at the definitions, which include being disadvantaged with education, in your economic, social and behavioural situations and in your physical and mental health, it is clear that being a young carer can have an effect on your life in many different ways. Before I mention some of them, with inevitably negative connotations, I emphasise that most young carers are caring with love for a family member who needs them and that without the young carer other care would have to be found. We should celebrate and cherish such family relationships, which give the lie to those people who say young people are not responsible and that families do not care any more. That is not true.

When the contribution of young carers was first identified as far back as the late 1980s, I remember the disbelief with which it was greeted. People simply did not realise or believe that children as young as four or five were acting as the main carers for their disabled or frail parents. I remember the then Minister of Health saying very strongly to me that the figures I was using simply could not be true, and I was accused of scaremongering. I could see why anyone would say that because there was a conspiracy of silence about young carers in those days.

The typical situation then, as is still often the case now, was that one parent would be diagnosed with some kind of disability or condition. All would be well for a while but then the marriage or partnership would break up, leaving the child with the remaining parent, with neither of them wanting to bring their situation to the attention of anyone, not even their GP, for fear of what would happen: that it would be seen to be unacceptable and the child would be taken into care. Indeed, this often happened, so they were right to be fearful. It happened because no one knew quite how to deal with the situation.

I am glad to say that we have moved on a good deal. We have young carers workers and young carers groups, there is attention on the issue and charities running specific services for young carers have proliferated, although I am afraid we cannot ignore the fact that many such projects have been cut as a result of funding constraints on local government. The situation of young carers is much better recognised by health and care professionals, and in education, but they still report being stressed by too much responsibility, being physically tired, missing school, being embarrassed about their situation, being bullied, and having low self-esteem, anxiety, anger or guilt. YoungMinds states that young carers miss an average 48 days of school because of their role, and 68% report having been bullied at some point directly because of having to care for somebody. Research from the Carers Trust shows that young carers doing more than 50 hours’ care a week are five times more likely than normal adolescents to report that their health is “not good”.

As we have heard, there are an estimated 700,000 young carers in the UK, who frequently report that their caring role can cause distress and can impact very badly on their mental health. There are gaps in support and there are barriers that prevent them accessing the support that they need. Many research respondents talked also about worrying about family finances, and the realities of living in a poor household were highlighted by many. Some described shortages of basic necessities and often described how limited resources jeopardised their physical health or participation and achievement at school.

However, this goes beyond school and into the employment market. These difficulties can continue for those who have been carers in their childhood and adolescence, because carers suffer the loss of certain skills, knowledge and confidence as a result of the time spent out of the workforce, which poses considerable barriers to entering the workforce when their caring role has ceased or they have got adequate services. Caring is not understood or respected by employers as a reason to be out of the workforce, especially if it has resulted in long-term breaks. Employers often fail to see the skills that an individual may have gained while caring. Those seeking work may also lack the ability to accurately explain the skills that they have developed, meaning that the value of their caring experience is not fully understood.

I have a couple of suggestions for the Minister to help young carers. The Government should put in place a duty on education providers to identify and support carers, and review the 21-hour study rule on access to benefits. The Department for Education and the Department of Health should work with local government to review waiting times and the quality of young carers’ assessments, including the quality of outcomes, and targeted careers advice should be available to young adult carers. Those are relatively small steps but they could make a huge difference to the lives of young carers.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

My Lords, before we continue, I have a special request. Because the loop is not working, could noble Lords speak up when they are contributing? Thank you.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I had got as far as noting that the university technical college in Cambridge had encountered major difficulties with recruitment. The jury is still out on this, but the technical college has joined the Parkside multi-academy trust, and we believe that because the multi-academy trust has financial responsibility for all four secondary schools in our charge, it is probably going to be a little easier to envisage recruiting children from one of our schools over into the academy trust, if they would be better suited there. But it seems to me a possible route to help the UTCs, because the money does not go away from the multi-academy trust—it stays in. We hope this will be a little better.

On careers advice generally, I support the amendments. However, I have been wondering, particularly in view of the provisions that make the Institute for Apprenticeships responsible for producing careers advice, whether one ought to take it away from schools. It is very difficult for a school to keep up with its expertise, but then I was horribly reminded by my noble friend Lady Morris that individual teachers at a school are very influential in what their students choose to go on and do. So I wonder whether we could group schools’ careers advice. We could probably do that inside a multi-academy trust, and I will take home from this debate the suggestion that we try. For example, the University of Cambridge provides a perfectly effective careers service, with professional, HR-trained people, who will never have met the people whose careers they are advising on but seem to be doing it perfectly satisfactorily. Providing experts in careers, rather than forcing teachers to become experts, might have legs as an idea. Indeed, I know there are parents paying for professional careers advice because it works better than what they are being offered by the school. I do not want to propose it as a formal amendment, but I would be interested to know the Government’s thinking on that.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I have also added my name to this amendment, and to Amendment 135C in the next group, which we will come to in a moment.

I really think the Government have some questions to answer. Why is this new regulator needed? The Minister might answer by saying that having its own regulator would add to the status of social work. That is a perfectly decent answer, but not one that is totally under the thumb of the Secretary of State. Perhaps the Minister could tell us what the cost of creating this new regulator would be. The NSPCC is concerned about the danger of it creating a two-tier system of statutory and non-statutory social workers. I wonder if the noble Lord can answer that. What is the justification for putting regulation and improvement together? That question was very ably outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. Why does this health and care profession have to be under the skirts of the Secretary of State? While I am about it, which Secretary of State are we talking about? The Bill does not say. Perhaps I should ask which woman it will be.

Many of us feel that if social workers were to become directly regulated by the Government, that would further weaken the trust—which is already fragile—between them and Whitehall. As the BASW said in the briefings we have all received, the Bill does nothing to address some of the real problems that affect social workers.

There is a real issue here because we have a significant shift of significant powers. It is a matter of principle. Why should social workers be the only profession in the health and care sector to be regulated by government? Nursing and medicine are not. They are public service professionals using their professional skills and judgment to make vital decisions about vulnerable members of the public. Bringing regulation under government control risks sending a demoralising set of signals to the sector. Loss of independence is likely to be seen as evidence that social work is really not up to it and needs a very close eye kept on it. That seems odd because it is at odds with what Ministers have been saying recently. They have been saying that social workers have been disempowered by command-and-control-type initiatives from central government and should be trusted to exercise their professional judgment and respected as professionals who undertake very complex work. Hear, hear! I agree with that. Why seek this government stranglehold now?

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee that I have form in this area as the person who chaired the committee that set up the General Social Care Council, as the first chair of the General Social Care Council and as the chair of the Professional Standards Authority which oversaw the demise of the GSCC and the transfer of regulation to the HCPC. There are, as we know, terrible problems facing social work and social workers at the moment, so to be discussing these structural changes now is rather like rearranging the deckchairs on the “Titanic”. That said, I support the idea of getting very much more independence for the regulator of social work. The separation between regulation and improving standards is important. That is a very well-established principle. The Department of Health is promoting that principle as we speak, building on the Professional Standards Authority’s paper Rethinking Regulation. All this applies to other health regulators, as Ministers well know.

Independence is extremely important. The oversight of the current regulator, the HCPC, by the Professional Standards Authority—I am no longer its chair, but I still declare an interest—is a vital part of assuring not only its independence but its performance by scrutinising its fitness-to-practise cases and referring them to the High Court where it has failed to protect the public. I remind the Committee that the purpose of regulation is to protect the public.

I wonder whether the Minister has considered the disruption element of the Government’s proposals. The HCPC has only just finished, this month, dealing with the legacy fitness-to-practise cases it inherited from the General Social Care Council. If a new regulator is set up, it will have to deal with the legacy cases of the HCPC, which will mean two different systems with two different sets of staff and consequent expense. Cost is another area that we all have to be very concerned about with these issues, and I raised it at Second Reading.

--- Later in debate ---

That is why Amendment 135C, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is clear about what the mandate for the new improvement agency would be. That is very important because the confusion to which I have referred had a great impact on the work and sustainability of the College of Social Work. The new professional body must have a clear and explicit mandate and set of functions, and have a sustainable business plan. Noble Lords on this side of the Committee feel that that package would be very helpful to the Government in achieving their objective, which we all agree with, of improving the quality of social work, and doing so fairly quickly if we are to build on what has gone before.

[Baroness Pitkeathley]

My Lords, one could scarcely fail to notice that when the Minister talked about the very welcome aspects of the things that this new regulator is going to do, they were, as others have said, mostly focused on the improvement of social work. There is no disagreement about this. Everybody wants to improve and support social work. However, the actual functions of a regulator always come very far down the Minister’s list when we talk about registration and the fitness to practise of social workers. Fitness to practise involves not being fit to practise and social workers being struck off a register, which is a very important part of what a regulator does.

Any regulatory system for social workers should ensure parity of esteem for the social work profession with that accorded to other public service professions entrusted to undertake high-risk professional tasks. For me, that is an argument for keeping the system within the Department of Health, which regulates many of those other professions. Any regulatory system should also provide stability for social workers. One thing that we have not given social workers in recent years is any form of stability. Some of us here are old enough to remember CCETSW before we had the GSCC, and all the controversy surrounding that. Then we went to the HCPC. That lack of stability has added to the problems of the workforce and the severe current retention problems with which we should all be concerned.

Any regulatory system must also be cost-effective to both central and local government and not be provided for at the expense of resources needed for service delivery, about which my noble friend Lady Howarth—I call her my noble friend—has already talked so eloquently. It must not result in the deterrent of unacceptably high registration fees falling on very poorly paid social workers. I am still not convinced about that. It seems to me that the HCPC already does parity, stability and being cost-effective. We could leave regulation there, along with consulting the HCPC to undertake some improvements, which I am sure it would be willing to do, and with the existing oversight of the Professional Standards Authority and a responsibility to the Privy Council, which is also where the HCPC sits. If we did that, and had a separate improvement agency, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, could be set up very quickly, and given the great amount of agreement from everybody in your Lordships’ House and across the piece, why does not the Minister at least give that serious consideration over the summer?

[Baroness Pinnock]

My Lords, the Minister referred earlier to the regulator having a role in fitness to practise. He is absolutely right; that is what a regulator has a duty to do. However, I refer again to the policy statement produced last month by the Department for Education and the Department of Health. It refers to professional standards which will cover four elements: on proficiency, performance, conduct and ethics and, it says:

“Continuing professional training and development”.

If I were looking through the eyes of a social worker at what was being set up here, I wonder how happy I would be to have a regulator that was going to establish the standards and have the right to strike me off if my proficiency was not up to scratch in any way, yet was also going to set out my continuous professional development. When we had the meeting with the chief social worker, she said that social workers have a range of ambitions when they go into social work, at one end of which is their role in challenging society and how the Government see society. That is one of the complex and noble reasons why people become interested in and go into social work.

Paragraph 119 of the policy statement relates to CPD. It states:

“The new regulator will set new standards for CPD”,

and refers to,

“options on how to ensure compliance … This will include appropriate sanctions for non-compliance”.

Here we have a regulator concerned with fitness to practise, as regulators are, while it may impose sanctions for non-compliance with what it has set up for professional development. That is at the heart of what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said earlier when he referred to the medical profession. He spoke about the importance of separating the state and government from what is at the heart of social work, as opposed to regulation.

So what is at the heart of development? Which route should we go down when we train social workers for mental health practice, for instance? Should it be the route that the Government may want, ensuring that more people are taken into secure units, or should the approach be more one of community care? If the regulator has responsibility for both fitness to practise and compliance with its own list of what CPD should include, we are down a very dangerous route, and I am sure the Minister would not want that to happen. CPD needs to be separate. If we have a profession, as we do, continuous professional development must be separated from the regulator. That is at the heart of this amendment, which I support.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, when I first read Part 2 of the Bill, to which I shall confine my remarks, my first reaction was, “You couldn’t make this up”. There are many good things in this Bill, as others have said, but on Part 2 I really have to say to the Government, “You cannot be serious”.

I must declare my interests, as I have a very personal involvement in this subject. It goes beyond being a social worker, with a great deal of interest, therefore, in how social workers are supported and recognised; I have form in the area of regulation of social work. In the late 1990s, I chaired the commission that recommended the setting up of the General Social Care Council, the GSCC. This had been wanted and called for by the social work profession and allied colleagues for many years, and the Government accepted the recommendation of my committee wholeheartedly. There was a great deal of rejoicing across my profession. In 2001, I served for six months as the interim first chair of the GSCC. By 2012, I was chair of the Professional Standards Authority, which reviewed the functioning of the GSCC, which was found wanting; subsequently, as chair of the PSA, I oversaw the transfer of regulatory responsibilities to the Health and Care Professions Council. I also helped to launch the College of Social Work, which was designated as the body that would oversee the professional functions, leaving the regulatory functions with HCPC. Noble Lords will see that I do not have a very good track record in this regard. The HCPC is now assessed by everybody who knows this field as doing an excellent job, and doing it most efficiently and cost effectively. So while I bow to no one in my desire to see the profession of social work properly recognised and supported, I have to ask the Minister why he is doing this, and what he expects to gain from it.

I have three main objections to the new regulator, and if the Minister can set my mind at rest about them, I shall be delighted and relieved. My first concern is one that was highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, about the conflict between different government departments. The primary purpose of a regulator is public protection. Does the Minister agree with that? There is no reference in the Bill to the public protection purpose of statutory regulation. The health and social care Act of 2015 introduced consistent public protection objectives across the nine independent regulators of health and care professionals, overseen by the aforesaid Professional Standards Authority. In that authority’s paper, Rethinking Regulation, which followed on the work of the Law Commission, which reviewed the existing regulatory framework, radical reform proposals had been made, which included reducing the number and cost of regulators. The Government have expressed support for those ideas and the Department of Health will shortly consult on reforms to professional regulation along those lines. The proposals from the Department for Education in this Bill therefore run entirely contrary to the principles of better regulation and to the approach of the Department of Health to the reform of regulation of health and care.

The regulatory landscape is incoherent and confusing, with a proliferation of regulatory organisations created piecemeal at different times, for different reasons, and in response to different problems. The regulatory proposals in this Bill perpetuate this error. Surely, the Government should have taken what the PSA calls a “right touch approach”, by clearly identifying the problem to be addressed and considering how the problem could best be resolved by making better use of, or reforming, the current arrangements. This could include ensuring that social work falls within the remit of the proposed reform of health and care professional regulation. I also have concerns that the Government have not thought properly about the scope and remit of the proposed new social work body within the wider context of health and care regulation.

I repeat: the primary purpose of a regulator is public protection. That is quite distinct from quality improvement functions, which are commonly carried out by a professional body or college, whose primary functions are to improve education, training and continuing professional development. It is also different from the representative role fulfilled by a membership organisation, such as the British Association of Social Workers, whose primary role is to represent the interests and views of its members and provide advice and support to them. A new body of the kind proposed, combining representative, improvement and regulatory roles, will create an organisation with competing, confused and conflicting responsibilities. The GSCC, previously responsible for regulating social workers, was itself criticised for having an unclear remit covering both regulatory and improvement functions—and that was wound up by the last Government, as I have already said.

Ahead of the transfer of regulation of social workers to the HCPC, the Government commented that they saw potentially significant benefits from,

“putting the regulation of social workers on a similar footing to the regulation of health professions”.

At a time when the need for a closer relationship between the health and social care services remains a very live issue—and how many times in this House do we talk about the need for closer co-operation?—this seems a very unwise thing to do. There is no evidence at all that the HCPC is not doing an effective and efficient job of regulating, so why confuse the situation?

My second concern is about the independence of the new regulatory body—or, I should say, the lack of independence. There is well-established principle in statutory professional regulation that regulation should be independent of government but with direct accountability to Parliament. The Bill proposes a potentially different model, giving broad powers that would allow the Secretary of State or another person—it is not clear who, or in what circumstances—to exercise regulatory powers, or a new regulator to be established.

There is no reference in the Bill to oversight of any new regulator by the Professional Standards Authority. The HCPC is currently overseen by the PSA. The PSA fulfils its role by scrutinising the fitness-to-practise decisions of the regulators and referring cases to the High Court where it considers that a decision may have failed to protect the public. Again, we come back to the essential importance of protecting the public. While the idea of a separate regulator for social work may seem attractive, it should not be brought about by the loss of the independence which the current system—overseen, I remind your Lordships, by the Privy Council—provides. There should also be a role for a voice for professional social work. I remind the right reverend Prelate that the College of Social Work was set up and abolished by the Government, although it was making good progress until the withdrawal of government funding led to its closure.

My final concern is about cost. The up-front cost of setting up such a body will have to be borne by government, unless it is going to be borne by social workers. Each year, social workers pay £90 to remain on the HCPC’s register. Therefore, the proposed policy will entail either a significant increase in fees for social workers or substantial ongoing costs to the taxpayer if it cannot operate on those fees. The annual report for 2010-11 highlights that the GSCC’s expenditure on regulatory activities for 2009-10 was just under £19 million. Roughly £2.5 million of that was funded by social worker registration fees and the rest—around £16 million —was funded by government. According to a recent Written Answer from the Department of Health, the closure of the GSCC in 2012 and the transfer of its regulatory responsibilities cost £17.9 million but has led to an annual saving to the Government of £13.5 million. Have the Government done a thorough review of the cost of their proposals? At the time of the GSCC’s abolition, the Government estimated that the increase in fees paid by social workers would have to be at least £235 a year if it were to be self-financing. I cannot believe that the Government want badly paid social workers to pay this, so we must ask where the money is coming from and whether it is a proper use of public money when social work services and training are under severe strain. I would like the Minister to answer very specifically on cost review and how it will be funded. I do not question the Government’s intention to try to be supportive of social workers, but I have to ask: is this the way to do it?

I hope the Government will listen to the wise words of your Lordships’ House.

Children: Drugs

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Monday 11th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. In view of the fact that this point has been made by a number of people, I will look at it in detail and write to him about it.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that children who live in households where there is much drug use are at risk not only from the drugs but of becoming young carers for their parents, who are addicted? What is the Government’s policy on helping those young carers?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness makes an extremely good point. Certainly, this is something I have seen on a number of occasions. Last month we launched a new campaign—“Together, we can tackle child abuse”—to encourage members of the public to report child abuse and neglect and just this kind of situation. I hope this has some effect on the point the noble Baroness makes.

Childcare: Early-years Funding

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Pitkeathley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how their proposed plans to increase free early-years childcare will be funded.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, our current estimate is that this will cost around £350 million, to be delivered from reducing the tax relief on pensions for those earning more than £150,000 a year. We want to make sure that funding is sufficient to providers and fair to taxpayers. That is why we have committed to increasing the average funding rate, and to get this right we will hold a funding review. Details of this will be announced before Second Reading on 16 June.

[Baroness Pitkeathley]

That is very good news to the House, but is the Minister familiar with the remarks made recently by the chief executive of the Pre-School Learning Alliance? He said:

“Just about everybody that you talk to who has an ounce of knowledge about delivering childcare will tell you it is underfunded”.

He went on to say that,

“the Government … has no idea how much it costs to deliver childcare”.

In the light of those comments, can the Minister assure the House that the Government do know how much it costs and that essential childcare services will be properly funded?

[Lord Nash]

I assure the noble Baroness that we will be taking this extremely seriously—that is why we are funding the review—and we will protect essential services.