Children and Families Bill

Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Timpson]

One of the reasons we want to encourage local authorities, through this additional funding, to move into a more consortia-type arrangement is that that reduces overheads. At the moment, more than 180 adoption agencies are recruiting, on average, 17 adopters each year. That is not a good economy of scale. There is huge scope within the system to make savings and to get the money to where we want it to help to get children adopted.

[Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Minister on the way in which he is commanding the House in presenting this Bill. He is talking about speeding up the process. Is there any link in the data that he has between the speed of the process and the success of the placement?

[Mr Timpson]

We know from research done by Julie Selwyn at Bristol university that for every year a child is not adopted there is a 20% reduction in their prospect of being adopted. By ensuring that adoption is timely and that the matching process has been done in conjunction with the prospective adopters rather than as an adjunct to that process, we will get children into the right placements in a quicker and more quality-assured way than has happened in the past. The longer children wait to be adopted, the less prospect there is of their being adopted. Adoptive placements are some of the most secure and stable arrangements outside the family. Clearly, adoption breakdowns still take place. We are looking at every stage of the process to make sure that the support that is made available and the information that is given to prospective adopters about the child they are adopting is as transparent as possible so that the prospects of any breakdown are reduced to a bare minimum. The right hon. Gentleman makes a key point that we consistently bear in mind as we make these reforms and push them forward.

Not all children in the care system will or should be adopted. But for all children, the difference it makes when someone cares whether they do well at school is crucial. When someone has high aspirations for them, they are more likely to have high aspirations for themselves. Yet in 2012 only 15% of children who had been looked after continuously for 12 months achieved five or more GCSE grades at A* to C, including English and maths. There have been slight improvements in recent years, but these results are simply not good enough. We have a duty to these children as corporate parents—a duty to care for them as we would our own children.

Of course, we should not forget that, thanks in large part to the fantastic foster carers we have across the country, the large majority of looked-after children benefit from their time in care. However, we want to drive up the focus, commitment and effort within our schools, councils and, yes, foster and residential care homes to make sure that the education of children in care is a real priority. The Bill introduces a duty on every local authority to have an officer—the “virtual school head”—to promote the educational achievement of its looked-after children, because these children are our children and they deserve the very best chance in life.

I want to turn to family justice reform. There is no debate about the need for reform of the family justice system. It is simply not acceptable that children wait, on average, over 47 weeks—until recently, over 56 weeks—for their care or supervision case to be resolved. In 2011-12, 21,553 children were involved in care proceedings and subject to this delay.

David Norgrove’s widely welcomed family justice review made the case for setting a clear time limit for the length of care cases, ensuring that decisions are child-focused and aimed at reducing duplication in the system. We know how important family courts are in making sure that vulnerable children end up in appropriate placements safely, but we need to do more to speed up the process to make sure that children can find stability as quickly as possible. To this end, the Bill includes measures to tackle delay through the introduction of a maximum 26-week time limit for completing care and supervision proceedings.

We also want to see a reduction in the number of additional expert reports commissioned, by ensuring that expert evidence is used in children’s cases only when it is necessary and not as a matter of routine. We will make it explicit that when the court considers a care plan, it should focus primarily on those issues that are essential to its decision about whether to make a care order. We will also help to reduce bureaucracy in the system by removing the need for frequent renewals of interim care and supervision orders.

Our private law reforms are also based on the family justice review’s detailed analysis and recommendations. Simply too many children are involved in private proceedings. Just over 56,000 children were subject to new contact and residence cases in 2011-12. For many families involved, the process can be drawn out and emotionally draining. As someone who spent the best part of 10 years practising as a family law barrister, I can testify that this is rarely the best way to resolve family disputes. Taken together, the Bill’s private law provisions keep the needs of children firmly at the centre of the system, while explicitly acknowledging the important role that both parents should play in a child’s life post-separation.

Our starting principle is that separated parents should resolve their disputes out of court whenever possible. The Bill makes attendance at a mediation, information and assessment meeting—known as MIAM—a prerequisite for applying to court for certain types of family proceedings. This support to help parents reach their own agreements will be underpinned by better online support, access to information programmes and encouragement to develop parenting agreements. The material will also emphasise the importance to children of relationships with wider family members, particularly grandparents.

The principle that most children benefit from the involvement of both parents in their lives after family separation is also pivotal to our private law reforms. Too many children lose contact with a parent following family breakdown. One survey suggests that between a quarter and a third of children who do not live with both parents rarely, if ever, see their non-resident parent. We will emphasise in the out-of-court support we offer to parents the importance to the child of both parents playing a role, but we also believe it must be explicit in the court environment.