Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Farmer and Baroness Howarth of Breckland

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

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I do not have a prepared speech. I came today to listen to the arguments, because this issue is difficult and finely balanced. I think that the Government have come a long way and listened extraordinarily carefully over the summer. I was able to come in during my holiday, to be seen and listened to by officials and to have my hopes and fears for social work heard. I think that a lot of that was taken on board.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord True. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Low, that this is a way to dismantle the whole legal system for children. Having been a director of social services who was involved in not one or two but three child abuse inquiries and who has experienced some of the most difficult areas of social work down the years, I am concerned—I have talked to colleagues about this—that we have such a mass of guidance and procedures to follow through the present legislation that, without some intervention, social workers and their managers will be overwhelmed. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, would agree with that. I say to the noble Lord, Lord True, that it is likely to be social work managers and not social workers who are looking for innovation, but let us hope that they will be informed by the social workers, who in turn will be informed by those whom they listen to and try to help—in this case, children.

I say to the Minister, for whom I have huge respect, that he has simply not won the hearts and minds of the vast number of people out there in the community. We have letters from mothers who are totally confused and seem to think that this has something to do with being able to cut across the whole of law so that their children may be taken away—I have sent the letters to the Minister so that he might see them. I do not think that it has anything to do with that, but it shows the breadth of confusion.

I have talked to people who want to innovate. I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children and have listened to directors of children’s services—good directors—who are in difficulty and who would like to make changes. There are difficulties. For example, if you are caught in the common assessment framework, you can spend your life assessing situations and never getting into the position of providing a service—and there are legal requirements about assessment. I give just that one example; as a practitioner, I could give a number of examples of cases where easing the regulation would make it much better in terms of providing and delivering services.

The question that I am still stuck with today in not knowing which way I would want to vote is whether the Government have done enough to reassure us that the structures are strong enough to ensure the safeguarding of children’s services, the development of social services and the long-term protection of children. The Government have not convinced most stakeholders in the community. Whether there is more that the Government could do to reach those hearts and minds, whether the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will press his amendment at this point and we will therefore find ourselves unable to move forward on innovation—which would be a pity, because there are things that need to be done and changes to be made—and whether this was the best way to do it or whether an inquiry into and review of guidance and the law would have been better I do not know. We are where we are. Many of us do not want to see the stifling of innovation; we just want to make sure that it is safe.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I follow my noble friends Lady Eaton and Lord True in supporting Clauses 29 to 31. My noble friends made many of the points that I thought were important to this debate, so I shall limit myself to the single issue of testing and reiterate the commendation of the Government for their reforming courage, not just in what they are seeking to achieve but in how they are seeking to achieve it.

Few can doubt that reform is needed in national social work practice. The number of children coming into care is soaring. My noble friend Lady Eaton has already mentioned how the complexity of their lives, especially when they are late entrants into the care system, cannot be adequately catered for in the current legislative framework.

Every sheet of Pugin wallpaper on the walls of this Palace could be replaced by policy reports brimming with ideas and care studies about social work and children’s services reform. Many of these ideas have been learned from good practice here and in other countries; they emerged not from a clear blue sky but from grass-roots practice. However, if they are ever to be implemented, they need the leeway referred to by my noble friend. On the subject of learning, modern government increasingly has to draw inspiration from the way corporations innovate but avoid going bust in a highly complex world—without, of course, handing over the core business of protecting the vulnerable to profit-making companies. I welcome the Government’s amendments to Clause 29 that bar local authorities from doing precisely that.

To explain what I mean with a recent example, the Institute for Government published Nicholas Timmins’s highly instructive report on the rollout of universal credit, at the heart of which was a change in approach from the traditional way of managing big projects. Previously, managers operated a “waterfall” approach, where government would legislate on a programme and set the rules, suppliers would then design in detail how these would operate, do some testing and then cascade a finished system out to the regions, either in phases or even on one day. One of the major drawbacks was that any errors, misjudgments or even rigidities factored in early or midway through the design process tended to be, as Timmins said, “baked in”, and end users could find that the project did not meet their needs because requirements were wrongly specified or simply not anticipated early on.

The opposite—which the private sector has increasingly adopted over the last 15 years or so—was known as the “agile” approach. Again to quote Timmins, this is,

“a mindset of humility around how little you should expect to understand about how real people use your service. So you optimise your whole approach by working with them and learning to iterate quickly based on learning in the real world”.

The mantra of test and learn that emerged from the adoption of an agile approach became a welcome hallmark of wider welfare reform, as well as of universal credit. It is a far more realistic and sensitive way to carry out reforms in areas such as welfare benefits and social care, which have such profound implications for people’s quality of life, well-being and even survival.

Obviously, there are many differences between the rollout of an IT-controlled benefits system and an iterative improvement in the responsiveness of children’s services, but the key similarities lie in the words “iterative” and “responsive”. We heard from my noble friend Lord True about the Royal Borough of Kingston and the London Borough of Richmond—Partners in Practice local authorities. They have said that the clauses will enable them to safely test new approaches that their front-line workers come up with and remove barriers to effective work. Leeds City Council is seeking to become an exemplar of a new and more sustainable safeguarding system where children do better, families are supported to do better and the state has to intervene less. One local authority after another is aspiring to become a learning organisation that can be instructed by and instruct others—all within an enabling framework of intense scrutiny from government and those charged to put children at the forefront of all they do.

We are all here with the aim of ensuring that children thrive. But, as anyone who has lived in a family with several children knows, parenting must be nimble if each unique child is to flourish. I suggest that we also need to be agile in how we approach these clauses. We should no longer fetter well-trained professionals but enable them to develop strategies for their patch within the protective envelope of the Bill.