Children’s Social Care

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes an important point, taking us even further back in the process to the situations that families find themselves in that put them under the sort of pressure that sometimes—not always—brings potential harm to their children. Of course it is important that we think about child poverty in a holistic manner, which is what the task force with my right honourable friends the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is working on now. It is also important that we support local government in providing some of those broader services. At the moment, we are seeing enormous increases in spending on children’s social care but relatively small increases in benefits for children. That is why we need to reform the system, alongside ensuring that the money is there.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I first declare an interest: I grew up in a children’s home, so I have a bit of knowledge about it. The system is broken. Not by the last Government: it has gradually been broken over 50 years since we got rid of children’s departments. My one criticism of this document, which is a very good step forward, is that it mentions virtually everything except talking to the children about what they want.

Secondly, as I have said before, you cannot devolve compassion. You have to get the private sector out of this business. There is no other way forward. When we had children’s departments, we had university departments backing them up; we had a profession devoted to children, not profit. Will the Minister go back to the department to see how she can get this service back into the public, municipal care that it thrived quite well under from the Curtis report of the 1940s to the Seebohm Rowntree changes in the early 1970s, which undid it because the Treasury got greedy?

Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for initiating this debate which, of course, was tabled before the election. We are now catching up. I agree with noble Lords who said that this was in the manifesto, but it is still a very vindictive policy and the way in which it is being introduced worsens things. Top schools will still be okay. Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the like will not go under. They will stay there. The only schools that will go under are those that are on the margin anyway.

There are good schools in places such as Woking, Guildford and Kent, in areas where there are grammar schools. We already have a lot of schools in the state sector which are as good as public schools.

Two of my children went to public school. I observed the huge struggle that parents had in paying fees. It was quite common for there not to be a summer holiday. They went to a very average public school in Ely. We used to know it in slang terms as “Farmers’ Comprehensive” because it catered for the rural community of the north part of East Anglia. However, many of the parents there struggled very much. Not only that, when two parents sent their children to the school, for one of those parents nearly all their income was spent on those school fees.

I was lucky because my wife earned more than me for a good period of our early marriage. Most of that money went on childcare, first on nannies, then on schooling. It was very beneficial because I was working in Brussels, and we felt that my son would benefit from having male teachers around and not being in a totally female environment. However, we also felt that my daughter, who had mild dyslexia, would benefit from the dyslexia programme of the King’s School in Ely, which she did. She went on to university, got a 2.1 and now holds down a very good job.

There are a thousand stories behind all this. Look at the family reasons. I am the president of BALPA, the pilots’ union. Pilots are often away for a week at a time. Sending their children to weekly boarding helps to round them and to give them a start in life.

The same was true for my wife, who is the daughter of a Foreign Office diplomat. She went to public school at 10 and did not see her parents, apart from during the holidays, until she was at university. This is the sacrifice that many people make for their country and the schooling system helps with that.

Finally, I have one question for the Minister. King’s Ely has a burgeoning group of Asian children. It is likely that, if their numbers go down, the school will pull it up by bringing in more migrants. Have the Government made any assessment of this? How many migrants are we to expect? Will there be visas for parents, noting that health service workers can no longer have family visas? Will the children be able to bring their parents in to help look after them, or is this yet another bit of the puzzle that has not been thought out?

Children’s Care Homes: Reform

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I have already talked about the change to the financial oversight that we want to bring in the children’s social care market. The noble Baroness will also be aware that we are introducing a regional model for providing homes for children and we are working with partners both within the sector and in health and justice to co-design this. We will be piloting two regional care co-operatives, which we hope will rebalance that power dynamic between the providers and the local authorities.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

For those who were fortunate enough to grow up in a Sheffield City Council children’s home at a time when councils had children’s departments, the input of private equity into this sector is totally wrong. It sends all the wrong messages, and it also prevents integrated care between a local authority and the homes that are provided. All of this about loving care is, frankly, nonsense. What are needed are decent homes, and the realisation that some children actually like living in a children’s home, as I did, because it provided security and a good environment. Can we look at chasing private equity out of the system?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank my noble friend and have great respect for him sharing his own experience from Sheffield. The reality of our situation today is that just over 80% of children’s home places are provided by the private sector, so we need to make sure that the sector is resilient. We are working on this in a number of ways, including increasing funding and provision, and reform, before we chase people out in a way that could destabilise provision.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, this is an excellent report. One of the more interesting things in it is the set of examples that it gives. It confirms what I have seen all my life, which is how complex families in crisis can be. There is no “this is a family in crisis” model. They are all different.

I am here to give your Lordships a bit of what was mentioned earlier: lived experience rather than professional knowledge. I declare that I am not a vice-president of the LGA; there are not many of us in this House who are not vice-presidents of the LGA, but I am one of them. However, I began a part of my life at the London School of Economics, looking at children’s services among other things. Children’s services as a distinct subsection of social policy really ran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, from the Curtis report to the Seebohm report. The Curtis report grew out of the abuse of children who were sent to foster homes during the war, where they were often abused and in one or two cases died.

That led to the setting up of a committee and to the Children Act 1948, which positioned children’s services not in education or health but in the Home Office. One of the great advantages was that a children’s service grew up that was devoted to children. That may sound a bit odd, but at that time social services was very much welfare services. It was still the old workhouse. The children’s service was the one beacon. I remember early in my life meeting a remarkable woman, Baroness Lucy Faithfull, and her sidekick the children’s officer for Oxford, Barbara Kahan, who did a lot of pioneering work concerning children. I was struck by how all the problems were different and how local authority children’s services were, above everything else, conditioned by being flexible. The best of them could respond to the individual demands, which meant that the social workers and the heads of social services departments had to have a certain autonomy, while the local authorities had children’s departments and children’s committees.

I speak with some knowledge. I was a child “in care”, as they said. I was extraordinarily well looked after by Sheffield City Council. My first point for the Minister is that privatisation does not work. Children’s services and social services must be public services. You cannot put a profit motive in there and expect a humanitarian concern. There must be a very careful look, because many of the decisions that you are called on to take are not taken against a strict financial backdrop.

My second lesson is that you need devolution. Having been David Cameron’s envoy to the trade unions, I read very closely what the Labour Party is up to. I see that it is up to a bit of devolution at the moment. Devolution to local government is a jolly good thing, but it must be accompanied by financial devolution. It is no good saying to local authorities, “Get on and do the job”, unless you give them the money to do it. My lifetime in local government leads me to believe that there is no finer structure for local government than the old county borough arrangement, where you had the services under one authority without the conflicting authorities, and they were able to get on with the job. I say to the party opposite that you cannot just devolve power. You must devolve financial power, and local government has to be trusted. If you live in a democracy, you must trust people to raise the rates from the people and get themselves either elected or thrown out. This is quite crucial.

If we are to make children’s services work, they have to work—and be seen to work—at a local level. The fact of the matter is that when you build up a local service, you are actually building up dozens of individual services. I would not have been as well looked after in a for-profit organisation; I do not think the children of Sheffield would have been as well looked after in one. We were well looked after because we were professionally looked after and there were professional people looking after what we had.

I must say, I remember all the “loving relationship” stuff. It falls on stony ground a bit when you are 13 years old with, as someone just said, a bin bag in the children’s services department. You need the kindness of strangers but let us not delude ourselves that, somewhere out there, there are lots of people with their hearts brimming over. I saw evidence of some people seeing having a foster child as a way of supplementing their income, which was often not very high. It was a legitimate way but it needed a business-type relationship. It was not that they were overwhelming in their love and gratitude. They were in many ways overwhelming with wishing to help, but it was also a business relationship. We have to remember that.

The job of the professional in this sort of area was to hold the ring between kindness, compassion, obedience to the law and the best interests of the child. It is a very difficult ring to hold. I say this to the Minister: go back to the department and look at devolution. Look at letting people get on with the job and setting up what I would call a loose field of rules and regulations. Above everything else, look to the official guidance of strangers.

Education System

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware of the details of the timing of the post-legislative review but I point the noble Lord to the special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision Green Paper, which the Government published and have consulted on, in which we really strive to address many of the issues that the noble Lord has raised; namely, that we should have a trusted, non-antagonistic system that is fair and transparent that parents feel confidence in and children can flourish in.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (Non-Afl)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, we have run out of time but the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, has been waiting for some time.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I commend my noble friend Lord Cormack for his courage. I probably would not have got up first but I now get up to support him. We really are in a terrible mess. We have a Prime Minister who has the confidence of virtually no one. I have been trying now for three or four days to get either a Private Notice Question or a Question to the Government because I understand that the Prime Minister, before he leaves office, intends to create a number of Peers. That is totally wrong. The Prime Minister is now a caretaker. When he leaves office, he will have a Resignation Honours List and that is quite appropriate.

It has proved impossible to get anything on to the Order Paper of this House. It really shows us up as being a rather ineffectual House if we cannot even get a Question to ask the Government to make a Statement as to whether they consider it appropriate that a caretaker Prime Minister should now be about to appoint another group of Conservative Peers. This is the time to make this speech, not when there are names on the table and it appears that we are attacking individuals. I have no knowledge whatever of who may be on that list but I believe that it would be completely improper for an acting Prime Minister to issue a list of Conservative Peers when he can issue his own Resignation Honours List.

I have a solution; the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has one. We have a Deputy Prime Minister who is not a candidate, as I understand it, and my answer is quite simple. The Deputy Prime Minister should take over and we should run the Government how it is run during a general election: in other words, no new policies, a caretaker, and we look after problems as they emerge but do not seek to shape legislation or anything else.

I fully support my noble friend Lord Cormack and ask the Opposition to consider their position because frankly, if they went on strike I would join their picket line—I have been on lots of picket lines—because now, and in this way, is not the time for us to be passing legislation. We are turning ourselves into something that we will soon come to regret.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend Lord Cormack said about this Bill. We are in the most extraordinary situation where, in the course of the day, we are going to gut the Bill by removing the first 18 clauses and removing its real intention. The rest are really issues that can be brought up in another Bill.

We are going to be asked to pass this Bill to Third Reading but this House has never been asked in the past to pass a Bill the guts of which have taken out. We have no idea what is going to be placed into the Bill later in the House of Commons. This has simply not happened in our history and it is not the right way to behave.

I believe therefore that we should consider not giving this Bill a Third Reading when it comes to it, because it is a gutless Bill. I am not critical at all of the Minister; in fact, I have the highest praise for her because she did not resign and is now the best Minister in the whole department. She knows about it. The other cronies appointed by the Prime Minister have no idea about what happens in education; he just wanted to give them extra pay for five months and the possibility of a consolation retirement. This is how cronies work and they will have no influence on this Bill whatever. The new Government will have to decide how this Bill should continue, or whether it should continue and in what form.

The issues that they will have to decide are very serious. We are told that the regulation of schools is the bit that is going to come back to us, and that concerns us very seriously indeed. If the Government are going to change the rules on regulating schools, there must be a consultation period; it cannot just be foisted on us at the end of a parliamentary Session.

I invite the major parties of this House, the Liberals and the Labour Party, to consider whether it would be sensible to give this Bill a Third Reading. I do not think it would be. It should be left to the new Government to decide, and it is highly unlikely that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will return to being the Education Secretary; we will have a new Education Secretary on 5 September. That person, with a new team of Ministers—I hope he gets rid of them all, apart from my noble friend—will have to consider very carefully the steps forward in the regulation of schools and MATs. I hope that the idea of not giving this a Third Reading now takes aflame in this House and that we agree not to do it.

Vulnerable Children

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to those of others to the noble Baroness, Lady Dean. She said she was indebted to us all for speaking in the debate and I hope she will still feel indebted to me when I sit down. I thank also the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield. Although the statistics in her report have been cited many times, I see something much deeper underneath it.

I must declare a couple of interests. First, I grew up in care, so I have some knowledge of the system—although that was 60 years ago, so it is totally out of date. Secondly, I was the research officer for the Committee on One Parent Families, where for the first time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we tried to get to grips with the definitions of disadvantage. Believe it or not, until then nobody really knew what the concept was, apart from a word to look up in a thesaurus to try to get some similes. Thirdly, I am a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, so I hope I will be forgiven if I talk more about statistics than the human nature side.

To me, one thing that comes through in this report is that the commissioner is grappling with definitions and with size. At one point, she says that 4 million children live in families with less than half the average household income. There, she is talking about the largest definition of vulnerability, but that is a quarter of all children; it has to be a bit more precise than that. If you read the report carefully, you will see that under the definition of children with alcoholic parental problems, the number ranges from just over 15,000 to around 900,000. There is clearly a need to refine this much more. In the section on the lack of clarity on definitions, the commissioner mentions,

“children whose parents may have limited parenting capacity”.

She states also that the number of children who have physical health issues ranges from 206,000, but that the Council for Disabled Children has,

“700,000 children … who have a limiting, longstanding illness”,

going up to,

“1,478,487 children who have a longstanding illness”.

The point I am making—I make it also to the Minister—is that the Government need to try to refine the definitions of poverty and disadvantage to get closer to the real figures.

To go back to my experience on the one-parent family committee, we found that, as defined, “difficulty” and “poverty” were readily solvable. The committee was known as the Finer committee, because in those days committees tended to be christened after their chairman. I well recall Morris Finer, who sadly died rather young, saying, “I think we could solve half the problems by issuing each one-parent family with a £5 note”. When we looked at it, we saw that poverty was the root cause of a huge number of problems, but it was not then a social work issue but a redistribution and benefits issue. The fact was, and probably still is, that one-parent families tended, by definition, to have one earner and to be much poorer and therefore able to give much less support to their children. This is probably still an issue. It was quite different from the problems we had with alcoholic parents or parents who just could not cope.

One of the two biggest challenges facing the Minister is getting adequate definitions of problems. He will then have to deal with defining a hierarchy of those problems, because they cannot be defined and cured all at once.

The final point for the Minister to grapple with, which all Ministers must, is resources. There is not an unlimited level of resources. Too often in this House I come to debates about the demandeur not the payer: we demand the money but have no idea where it will come from. There is a limit to state expenditure and one of the biggest difficulties for the Minister and his colleagues is coming to terms with where the money will come from and the hierarchy of needs to be addressed. I wish the Minister well—I do not envy him in the task ahead.

There is no difference between the parties in this Chamber on this. We all want to do our best. The debate is about how to do it, not whether to do it. Therefore, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, for introducing this report and giving us an opportunity to air these views.