Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Warner

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 4th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I too welcome much of what the Minister has said, as well as the work undertaken by the Government and the Members of the other House, particularly their acceptance of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady King, on adopted children, as promised. The Minister’s last words highlighting the continued financial support for higher education institutions to train social workers are also very important and very welcome.

I share my noble friend’s concern about proposed new Clause 9 regarding secure accommodation in Scotland. I recognise that there is a crisis in the care of looked-after children. Since the death of baby Peter the number of children taken into care has risen year on year, and we anticipate that the number will increase even more steeply. There is pressure on foster placements and pressure on children’s homes in England and Wales. I recognise that it is sometimes better to send a child a long way from home if there is excellent and specialist provision to meet their needs. However, as a patron of a children’s advocacy charity, I know very well from young people themselves that what they wish for above all is continuity of positive relationships, so sending more children further away from home is always a matter of concern. I know that the Government are apprised of that principle. The thought that we are making it easier through this legislation to place more children out of England and Wales, far from their local authority—in Scotland—therefore causes me concern. The President of the Family Division of the High Court, Lord Justice Munby, said that this was something that needed to be considered, but he also said that there should be a joint Law Commission report into it. My concern is that it needs to be thoroughly considered. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister that, before this amendment is implemented, there will be thorough consultation to consider its implications.

On Amendment 14, on the improvement of standards for social workers, I agree that standards need to be improved. There has been a long-standing concern about the quality of education of social workers. I recognise that they have often not been fully equipped to practise when they have completed their courses. However, it is right to insist that the Secretary of State should consult with the social work profession and higher education institutions in developing these standards. The Minister was fairly reassuring on that point although he did not explicitly mention the higher education institutions. My concern is that there is a risk that ideology and strongly held personal prejudice can lead judgment in the development of social work. The role of the social worker is highly emotionally charged, and it always has been. These people step into the lives of families and children for understandable reasons. The widest possible consultation with academics and practitioners would avoid the risk that the prejudices of one individual or one group could shape the standards too sharply.

I recognise the benefits of the innovative training models such as Frontline, which the Government introduced. The Minister has been fairly reassuring on this last point so I will not go further on that. I do not intend to speak again this afternoon but I warmly welcome the next set of amendments and the introduction of statutory personal, social health and economic education. A long-standing concern is that teachers in schools are just not equipped to teach the difficult subject of sex and relationship education. I hope that by putting this on a statutory basis many more teachers will be properly equipped and children will get the education they need.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I too welcome what the Government have done in responding to some of the concerns that have been expressed about the Bill. They have shown their willingness to listen and to make amendments and I commend them for that.

I just want to raise an issue around secure accommodation. My warning lights always start flashing on the subject of children’s secure accommodation. It is very difficult to regulate this area and to ensure that good care is provided, because the unit costs tend to be extremely high. If we have now got to the point where we have to take children over the border—where they have to cross the Tweed to get their secure accommodation—we should start to be concerned. This sector has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk in England. This was starting when I was chairman of the Youth Justice Board, up to 2003, and it is very difficult to get people to work in it, to set the systems up and to ensure that they continue to be safe.

There is something to be said, not just for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, but for taking an independent look at this sector and its economic viability. This is an area where, in effect, you almost have to pay for spare places to be available because you do not know when a child is going to require that accommodation. The Government now need to have a long, hard look at this. The sector has been shrinking for some time; it has proved difficult to get the finances right and to secure good staff. People are doing their best, but things can often go wrong in this sector. It is very difficult to ensure that these places are regulated properly. The Minister might want to write later, rather than responding today, but will he and his department consider whether a review of the sector is long overdue?

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Warner

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

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness’s amendment and what she has said. After witnessing this weekend, at a gathering of child and adolescent psychotherapists, the superb work that a therapist can do in supporting mothers and their infants to make good, strong relationships, I know that what she asks for is absolutely crucial. It was wonderful to see, for instance, the case of a mother who had grown up with a violent father, been taken into care and then gone on from care to become a teenage mother and have several of her children removed. Then she found the help of a child psychotherapist who helped her to understand her relationship with her child and to build a strong attachment with that child, so that eventually she was able to get back her other children. So I agree absolutely with what the noble Baroness is calling for. It is particularly important in the light of the recent view expressed by the President of the Family Division, highlighting the year-on-year increase in the number of children being taken into care, expressing the concern that that may well accelerate. It is much more difficult to give a high quality of care in the care system if the numbers of children arriving increase year on year.

I was grateful to the Minister for offering to meet me yesterday to discuss whether more can be done by central government to minimise the flow of children coming into care. I look forward to that meeting. I am particularly concerned about the new lower benefit cap and how it might impact on families. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, highlighted the background of poverty for most families whose children are taken into care. I am concerned that this may increase that poverty and force more of these families into homelessness. It raises the risk of more children being taken into care—but we will debate that this evening in the dinner break.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. I remind the Minister that there have been many initiatives by far-sighted people, including judges such as Nicholas Crichton, who have looked at the issue of repeat pregnancies when a child is taken away from a birth mother.

There is a growing body of evidence, but what have the Government done to look at it in terms of cost-effectiveness? One’s instincts are that this is a good investment. Certainly, sober judges have thought that this was a good investment and have raised the money to put some of these projects in place. Is it not about time the Government looked at the evidence on whether it is cost-effective to go to a scale on this kind of initiative?

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Warner

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 18th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I want to flag up an issue around the wishes and feelings of children, as raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. At a recent conference I was listening to a researcher who was herself a birth family sibling—so she had many foster carers move through her family. One of the fostered children in the family just disappeared one day without any notice to her. She emphasised the importance of listening not only to the voices, wishes and feelings of the child in care, but also to those of the children in the adoptive family or in the foster family. We must make efforts to understand the wishes and feelings of those children, partly out of respect for them but also, very often, because a foster placement or an adoptive placement might break down if the wishes and feelings of those siblings are not respected. If they do not welcome the child, if they feel that the stranger is an intruder into their home, coming between them and their parents, they can very easily undermine the ability of that placement to work. I just wanted to flag up that point.

I welcome the fostering care stocktake that is going on in the Department for Education, which I hope will answer some of the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about parity of esteem for adoption, fostering and residential care. All these are important options. We want to find continuity of care for young people, wherever they are in the care system. I just wanted to flag up that point and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 30, 31 and 34. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady King of Bow, that there have been Ministers in this House who have made concessions on the basis of the evidence before them; the noble Lord, Lord Nash, is not unique in this, although I am very grateful for the concessions he has made.

Let me start with Amendment 30. Going back in time to when I first became a director of social services in the mid-1980s, and having never, I have to confess, even been in a social services department in my life before, the very first briefing I was given by these luckless social workers who suddenly found that this strange man had been placed in charge of their department was on the importance of permanence and that if I did nothing else in my time as a director, I must promote planning for permanence. That has stuck with me as a big issue. The second briefing said: “You cannot rely on adoption to deliver permanence. Everybody likes to adopt babies and young children but you will find, oh dear director, that there are going to be a lot of children, from the age of 10 and moving into the teenage years, for whom you will have to plan for permanence, and adoption is not the issue”.

Any social worker starting out in their career over the last two or three years could be forgiven for thinking that the real answer to permanence is adoption. The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, are critical: if we believe in permanence as the aim of what we are trying to do—as we all do—we must not give any signals that longer-term fostering is not a perfectly valid option in planning for permanence. We must not delude ourselves, or allow ourselves to look as though we are deluding ourselves to the social work profession, that adoption is the only answer and that, somehow, longer-term fostering is an inferior option for permanence planning. So I hope that the Minister will think about that and what the impact of all this is on the profession, working day in, day out, on the front line trying to deal with and provide a more permanent solution for many of these children. We need an amendment of the kind that has been framed in Amendment 30 to restore the balance.

We discussed the issue in Amendment 31 pretty extensively in Committee. In those discussions I recall that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, with all her experience in the family courts, said that all too often the voice of the child was absent from our legislation and court processes. She made much of that then, and there is an opportunity now, with Amendment 31—which, if I may say so to the Minister, is just five little words—to put clearly, fairly and squarely in the legislation an amendment that gives the voice of the child some recognition in the legislation. It will not cost the Government anything, so the easiest thing for the Minister to do shortly would be to stand up and say, “I accept Amendment 31”. He will then go out of this Chamber at the dinner break even more flushed with success and encouragement from the Members of your Lordships’ House. As the noble Baroness said on Amendment 34, this is a straightforward way of removing a disincentive to taking siblings into adoption. I am glad that the Minister is going to make a concession on that, but if he is in for one, why not go for a couple of others as well?

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Warner

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I will not offer flattery, as the Minister probably knows, but I take him back to the post-legislative scrutiny report of the Select Committee on Adoption Legislation. It is a shame that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is not in her place, but some of us met a lot of adoptive parents, some of whom were on quite low incomes. They made two points to us very strongly. One was the issue we have already discussed, about the levels of support for adoptive parents, but the second came from people who had been foster parents. They pointed out brutally—but in an amiable sort of way—that the financial disincentive in moving from being a foster parent to an adoptive parent was very high. This seemed to me and other members of that Select Committee pretty bizarre, given that the Government were at that point going hell for leather to promote adoption as the gold standard for permanence.

There is something not quite right here about what we might call the intragovernmental strategy—this applies not just in the Minister’s department—on how we align the financial incentives with the policy objectives. Therefore, the Minister should start to raise some of those issues not just within his own department but across Whitehall.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. The noble Baroness speaks so eloquently from her experience and makes a strong case. She takes me back to research that was discussed at the Thomas Coram Research Unit about eight years ago. That unit has carried out comparative research into residential care and foster care in France, Denmark and Germany. It is a long time ago but what stood out for me was that in those continental countries, many more teachers and social workers were recruited into foster care.

Professor Jackson, one of the leading academics on the educational attainment of looked-after children, has raised concerns that many foster carers have themselves had difficult experiences at school. That is another reason why we need to support them very well. The issue of professionalisation comes into this debate. Do we want professional foster carers? My recollection suggests that they are better paid on the continent. That may be why one can recruit from the middle classes there. There is an argument on the other side that we should not pay foster carers a lot of money, as they should be doing this out of love. I have sympathy with that argument as well. However, the very least we can do is to pay them child benefit. I hope that helps the noble Baroness’s argument. I look forward to the Minister’s response, which I am sure will be sympathetic. I hope that we will see some action.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Warner

Monday 4th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Warner (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I want to put Amendment 29 in context. I see it as part of a package relating to Clause 1. In our previous debate on Clause 1, there was a large measure of agreement that the corporate parenting principles needed to be kept tightly drawn and manageable in length. There was also a sense, however, that some important aspects, such as mental health, needed to be specifically incorporated into those principles. We also discussed at some length the importance of requiring the co-operation of other key partners in supporting the corporate parent in living up to those principles. I am sure that on this latter issue we will come back with amendments on Report to place a clear duty on key partner agencies and services to co-operate with the responsible local authority corporate parent.

I wish to raise a point on this, on which the Minister left me, and possibly other Members of the Committee, rather confused. Let me seek clarification from the Minister on what he said about other agencies co-operating with local authorities on the delivery of services linked to the corporate parenting principles. At one point he suggested that this was covered in Clause 10. As I said then, it is not. Then there was some suggestion that what was meant was Section 10 of the Children Act 1989. With a great deal of help from the Library, to which I give thanks, I have checked: it is not there in the 1989 Act. Then I asked the Library to show me the current version of the 1989 Act, as amended subsequently. It is not in the amended version of Section 10. I am struggling to find it elsewhere in any of the legislation. My request to the Minister, therefore, is that he write to me and other Members of the Committee as soon as possible—certainly well before Report—citing the text of the legislation that requires other agencies, and which of those agencies, to co-operate with the responsible local authority in delivering corporate parenting principles. Without that legislative clarity, I am sure many of us will want to press an appropriate amendment on this issue on Report.

I now return to my Amendment 29, which is linked to this issue. Alongside the corporate parenting principles and the co-operation and involvement of other relevant agencies, a third important element is, I suggest, required to make it all work in practice for the young people concerned. That is an obligation to help those young people get the services they need, which is where Amendment 29 comes in.

The amendment does two things. First, it requires the local authority corporate parent to ensure that all the relevant services are aware of the needs of children and young people in care or leaving care. We know that many of these services, some of which were cited in our previous discussion, are not aware of the special needs of those in care or leaving care. History suggests that we should strengthen the obligation on local authorities to bring home to the other agencies the special needs of those for whom they are corporate parents. Because of the unfortunate timetabling of the Bill, I had little time to prepare the amendment. I know that some services have been omitted from it, but this can easily be rectified.

The second part of the amendment places an obligation on the corporate parent to make sure the children and young people for whom it is responsible know about the services available to help them make their way in the world. It also obliges the corporate parent to help these young people secure those services. I regard this second aspect as very important indeed. Public services can be very complex; they can be very siloed—as was said in our last discussion—and pretty inaccessible. Many of us, as experienced and knowledgeable adults, often struggle to penetrate public sector bureaucracies, so why should we expect these young people to do it without help? It is not good enough to await young people coming forward and asking for help, which they often do not even know about. I recognise that I may not have got the wording quite right and this amendment would need to be aligned with the other amendments to Clause 1 that I have mentioned. However, I hope the Minister will see merit in this amendment and will be willing to make an amendment of this kind to the Bill and possibly discuss it with some of us beforehand. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support this amendment. I do so because it reminds me of my experience of being acquainted with a young woman who left care some time ago. She did get access to mental health support and saw a therapist over a quite considerable period. She is thriving; she is doing well and supporting young people leaving care. When she spoke to me about her experience, she highlighted how important it was for her to have that access to a counsellor. So if this amendment helps her with that, I would definitely like to support it. We will hear from the Minister about the Children Act duties and I hope that will comfort the noble Lord, Lord Warner.

This woman has a younger brother in care and she is concerned about the access that he is getting to therapy. This is a real issue for many young people in care and care leavers, so I am looking for as much reassurance from the Minister as possible in his response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I listened very carefully to the Minister. Before responding, perhaps I may say that he offered to write to me. When I did not receive a letter, I went to the Library.

With this approach of simply asking local authorities to find different obligations in different bits of legislation, the Minister is undermining the strengths of Clause 1 and the corporate parenting principles. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham has given me some interesting information about the Children Act, so technology is giving us instant access to some of these bits of information. However, they do not cover some of the issues that were raised in the debate about the corporate parenting principles; they are narrower in scope where the partners are asked to intervene. We have been having a debate about the full range of services and agencies that need to co-operate with the local authority to enable the corporate parenting principles to be delivered to children. The Minister did not really deal with the issue in the second part of my amendment, which is about the local authority taking the initiative and showing children and young people what services are available.

I looked very carefully at Clause 1(1)(d). It is a pretty general proposition about helping young people, and it does not define who the “relevant partners”—the wording in the legislation—are. If the Minister wants to get the best out of this well-intended set of corporate parenting principles, we have to beef up the Bill in terms of the duty to co-operate placed on the full range of services, and we may need to specify them in the Bill with something along the lines of my Amendment 29. I will certainly come back to this, as I suspect will other Members, on Report. In the meantime—

[The Earl of Listowel]

Before the noble Lord withdraws his amendment, casting back to the Children Act 2004, one agency that was excluded was the Immigration Service. On the duty for all agencies to work together to secure the welfare of children, I am not sure that the Act was successful by excluding that service. In his letter to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, perhaps the Minister can make clear whether that is the case.

[Lord Warner]

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Warner

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Warner]

I am sorry but I want to pursue this. The clause is clearly—

[The Earl of Listowel]

I think that the Minister was referring to Section 10 of the Children Act 1989, not to a clause in this Bill. I hope that that is helpful.

[Lord Warner]

That certainly was not what he said.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, the report In Care, Out of Trouble: How the life chances of children in care can be transformed by protecting them from unnecessary involvement in the criminal justice system, an independent review chaired by my noble friend Lord Laming and sponsored by the Prison Reform Trust, was published about a month ago. Can the Minister tell us how the report has been received and when it is likely that a response to the recommendations made in it will be forthcoming?

I too share the concerns about the status of young people in the immigration system as they leave care. I would like to emphasise the point that has been made on all sides, most recently by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, that these young people need advice early on when they enter care about their immigration status so that they can make early applications in order that when they leave care, it has been sorted out. Often they do not get that support and everything is up in the air for them. This is such an important point.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I too support Amendments 14 and 28A, but I want to speak mainly in support of Amendment 9 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I do so from the background of having been the architect of youth offending teams and as a former chairman of the Youth Justice Board. One of the most depressing things about the report of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, is that we continue to find that the same number of children, if not more, who have been looked after and have left care are in the criminal justice system. My responsibilities as chairman of the Youth Justice Board related to the under-18s. If noble Lords go to Feltham, as I did recently, or look at young offender institutions for 18 to 21 year-olds, they will still see very disproportionately represented young people who have been in care. It is worth giving this special consideration, without distorting and overcomplicating Clause 1 too much; the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in Amendment 9.

These children are a special case. Many of us have tried to ensure that they get a better deal so that they do not go into the criminal justice system. Progress has been made among the under-18s in diverting them away from it, but there is still a long way to go. That is particularly the case among young people who have been in care and then are taken into custody. It is the case that when they leave custody, a depressing number of these young people quickly get on to the escalator of reoffending and they are back where they started. Many of the sentences are short. I should say that I am not advocating longer sentences for people in these circumstances, but they are usually not long enough to enable those running the custodial institution to change the behaviour of these young people and provide them with support. Typically, when they come out of custody, whether they are under 18 years of age or aged 18 to 21, for many there is no one in their lives to support them, they have accommodation problems and they do not have any employment. They then go back into the kind of environment which led them to get into the criminal justice system in the first place. Many of them offend outside the area where they were in care, so we have some problems about whether those local authorities always pick up the background of these children.

It is very difficult in today’s world for a youth offending team working with a young offender in one area to get the host local authority, if I might put it that way, to take responsibility for that young person who had been in their care. We have to look very seriously at Amendment 9 from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. It gives focus to the importance of trying to do our best to stop these young people who have been in care, or who have left care, going through the revolving door of the criminal justice system—particularly those who end up in custody and then fail again when they leave custody.