Adoption and Children Act Register (Search and Inspection) (Pilot) Regulations 2014

Lord Nash Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2014 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Nash]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Adoption and Children Act Register (Search and Inspection) (Pilot) Regulations 2014.

Relevant document: 3rd Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, the regulations that we are considering today would allow approved prospective adopters in the named pilot areas to look at information about children on the register. The regulations are some of the first to be laid under Part 1 of the Children and Families Act 2014.

The Adoption and Children Act register is successful in finding adoptive families for children. In the past three years, more than 1,040 children in England have been matched by the register with families who can meet their needs and give them stability and security. However, despite this success, there are still large numbers of children waiting on the register for a new family. At the start of June this year, the register contained 1,345 children waiting for adoption and 747 adoptive families. Once they have been approved to adopt, adopters have to wait to be matched to a child, with possible matches first scrutinised by the adopter’s and child’s social worker. The adopters currently have a limited, passive role to play in that process. This leads to delays for children that might otherwise be avoided, which is detrimental for those children. It can also be enormously frustrating for adopters when they are unable to play a more active role in identifying children for whom they might be suitable adopters. We believe that opening up the register so that adopters can access it will significantly speed up the matching process. This will be particularly beneficial for those children who are currently seen as harder to place yet so desperately need a loving home. These include children from minority-ethnic backgrounds, sibling groups and disabled children. We discussed this point at length during the passage of the Bill. Too many of these children wait too long for adoptive parents.

Evidence for this approach is already demonstrated by the current exchange days, where social workers are able to meet adopters to share more details about the children who are waiting for homes. The register held six national exchange days between March 2013 and January 2014 and 109 children were matched by local authorities at these events—that is, 80 groups of children. A total of 412 prospective adopters attended these events with around one in five matched with a child as a direct result of attending. An adoption worker from the London Borough of Barnet recently emphasised the benefits of this adopter-led approach:

“Exchange days really are unique … they help to bring the children to life for the adopters, and allow them to explore potential matches that they may not necessarily have considered”.

Exchange days are important and we are working with the sector to increase their use. They are not the answer alone, however. Exchange days work because adopters have better information about children waiting for adoption. This helps them to identify with children they would not otherwise have considered. Many of these matches might not be ones that would necessarily have occurred to social workers. The best way to capitalise on this approach and achieve more matches more quickly is to allow adopters to have direct access to the register. Allowing adopters to search the register for themselves, to see videos and pictures and to hear and see children speak and laugh will allow the child’s real personality to shine through. In short, it will allow some opportunity for all-important chemistry to play a part in adopters identifying a child who they might wish to adopt.

Of course, noble Lords will already be aware that allowing approved adopters to search the data of children is not new. Many already choose to subscribe to magazines such as Be My Parent and Children Who Wait. Opening up the register will take this one step further as local authorities are under a statutory duty to refer children to the register if they are not exploring a specific local match for children. We want to pilot this approach for nine months to ensure that we can understand in detail how to make the process work most effectively in practice before undertaking a national rollout. Of course, the safety of children and the privacy of their information are paramount. That is why we are putting in place all the necessary safeguards to ensure that sensitive personal information about children and adopters is fully protected in line with the Data Protection Act 1998.

I reassure the Committee that the information that approved adopters will be able to access will be non-identifying, so there will be no risk that individual children’s full names or precise locations will be identified. Only approved adopters will be able to search details of children on the register. They must give written confirmation that they will keep their password and information about children safe. Noble Lords will also be reassured by the fact that the pilot will be subject to stringent data security measures. In addition, it will be run by the experienced team from the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, which has run the register service for 10 years without a data security lapse.

Noble Lords will remember that we published the indicative version of the regulations shortly before the House began scrutinising the then Children and Families Bill. We later undertook a formal public consultation. Respondents were very supportive of the pilot proposals. Noble Lords will see from the schedule to the regulations that, subject to approval of the regulations, adopters from 29 local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies across England will be involved in the pilot. I was delighted that all 29 agencies agreed to participate within a week of our invitation. No agency declined. This demonstrates the real appetite across the sector for these improvements. Caroline Ibbotson, director of the Yorkshire Adoption Agency, said:

“We are really looking forward to being involved in the Register pilot. We believe it gives our approved adopters a great opportunity to get fully involved in the family finding process and that it will increase the number of potential families being considered for each child”.

Piloting these improvements to the register will give us the best chance of evaluating the impact before making decisions about how to proceed. Our evaluation will include suggestions made during the consultation earlier this year. We will publish an evaluation report within three months of the end of the pilot.

In summary, I know that this Committee will agree that we must do everything we can to find loving homes for some of our most disadvantaged children. The work of the register is a crucial part of this effort. These regulations would enable the register to match children more effectively. Jeanne Kaniuk, managing director of adoption services for Coram, has said that this kind of approach,

“has given adopters a good opportunity to get a real sense of the children and what their individual personalities and needs are. This helps adopters to understand the reality of the children waiting, and has proved an effective way to find good matches—for example, brothers aged 12 months and 4 years were successfully placed with adopters following an Exchange Day in the East Midlands, and have since been successfully adopted”.

I commend the regulations to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, I too welcome in principle the regulations, which will enable access to the register by prospective adopters. As the Minister has said, we debated the principle of this extensively in the course of the Bill, when it was a Bill, and I do not intend to spend time on that. It is worth experimenting further to see if this will improve the timescales within which children can be successfully matched, provided that there are sufficient safeguards, as the noble Baroness has just said.

The safeguards as regards access by prospective adopters, and the identities of the children outlined in the arrangements, are satisfactory and robust. The issue is the one identified by the noble Baroness opposite: data security. I agree with her that we want to be as clear as possible about this.

I know the register will be separated into Part 1 and Part 2, the latter for those children who could be placed in a fostering-for-adoption placement, which is sensible and important. I simply want to make two points. One is about the consultation. Although the Minister said it was a full public consultation, there were only 41 responses to this. Given the importance of this measure, that is a very low level of response. I wonder if that is because, as the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has pointed out, there were only six weeks for this consultation over a very busy bank and public holiday period from the end of February through to April, taking in Easter and so on. That is important, and I would be grateful if the Minister could comment as to why it was only six weeks, when the normal period of 12 weeks might have got more responses and more helpful pointers from respondents.

My second set of points concerns the pilots. This is extremely important, as the Minister said, not only to ensure that the systems work, but to see if we can garner any further information about the outcomes for children from this approach. Nine months is not a terribly long period to see what happens to children as a result of adopter-led access to the register. I do not know, but there may be unintended consequences of adopter-led adoption. Surely we would want to know, for instance, if—relatively—more of these matches instigated by adopters either failed or were more successful. I have looked carefully at the explanatory notes that set out the scope of the pilot, which I think should be made a little wider, looking not just at the actual matches but at what happens to the inquiries by adopters in relation to particular children. How many of them actually lead to a match, and how many are stopped in process by social workers for whatever reason? Can we extend the remit of the pilot, so we get under the skin of what is happening before the whole facility for access goes live nationwide?

Thirdly, I have a thought. I have great respect for both the Department for Education and for the BAAF, but I wonder if there was merit in this pilot being evaluated independently, and not by either the department or the BAAF, which are obviously responsible for its administration. But I broadly very much welcome the measure, and look forward to seeing the results of the pilot.

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to noble Lords for their comments. Turning to the points raised by my noble friend Lady Tyler, I reiterate a few points and add a few more on the safety front. Of course the safety of children—and of adopters—and the privacy of their information is paramount. The pilot will be subject to stringent independent accreditation to ensure that any risks are managed appropriately. It will be run by the BAAF, which has a very good record of this, as I said. Section 129 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 sets out that wrongful disclosure of information on the register is punishable by a fine of up to £5,000 and up to three months in prison. Information that approved adopters will be able to access about children will not enable them to make any direct approaches. All approved adopters must give written confirmation that they will keep their password safe and will be reminded of their data protection duties. If they do not use the register within a fairly short period, they will not be able to continue to access it. We will have a pretty close idea who has access to the register at any time.

The noble Baronesses asked about the number of adoptions made. It is early days. There is good evidence from the States. We know that one-fifth of matches are made through exchange days. In answer to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, I can say that we will analyse in detail the experience of these matches to make sure we improve matching and for what we can learn. I pay tribute to her party for introducing exchange days in the first place.

The real driver here is to try to speed up the process. The evidence is clear that every year that children fail to be adopted reduces their chance of being adopted by 20%. We must be very mindful of the damage to those children during that time.

On the length of the consultation, I should say that we published indicative regulations five months before the consultation began, so we thought it was long enough.

I hope I have answered all the points that noble Lords made. I can think of no better way of concluding our discussions today than by quoting an adopter who visited an exchange day. The adopter said:

“For the first time, these children featured in magazines were suddenly real and we could potentially be their new forever parents… I don’t think I would have approached some of the children just by reading their profiles or seeing a picture… It was a very effective way of dispelling some preconceived ideas or anxieties about children waiting for placement”.

Motion agreed.