Children’s Mental Health Week 2024

Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I had not intended to speak, but there appears to be an opportunity to do so, and I am not one to pass it up, so I will make just a few comments. I declare my interests as per the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Until recently, I was also for six years the chair of the trustees of the Parent-Infant Foundation, which did and continues to do very important work on infant mental health awareness, attachment and the provision of services.

I again congratulate the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) on securing this debate. It is a subject about which she knows much, and her passion shows through. I disagree with little of what she said, although her speech became a little partisan at some stages. This issue has besieged Governments over many years, but if one looks at the figures, most alarmingly, the incidence of mental illness among children has got particularly bad since the beginning of covid, and there are reasons for that that we should continue to be worried about. This is not a gradual progression; there has been a very serious downturn in recent years, which I will come back to.

I agree with all the comments that have been made about the disproportionate impact on children in the care system, children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds and those in poverty. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) said, the issue is not exclusive to people from deprived backgrounds. In some projects run by the Parent-Infant Foundation around the country, we see parents from well-to-do city backgrounds who have serious attachment problems with their children. At times, we forget that mental illness spreads across the whole of society in different ways, and we need to be open to all of them.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Does the hon. Member not recognise that those from a less deprived background have better access to help than those from a poorer background?

[Tim Loughton]

There is something in that, and people from better-off backgrounds may have recourse to the private sector as well, but the point is that the illness impacts on everybody, although I certainly agree that the capacity to get early help for that illness is differentiated across families.

The impact of covid should not be underestimated. During covid, we saw the impact on new parents, particularly new single parents. One of the biggest impacts was the absence of health visitors able to go across the threshold of new parents’ homes, particularly on single parents having a child for the first time. There were the other horrors of covid going on, and people were detached from the normal family networks they might have, such as grandparents coming along to share their experience and give support. On top of that, they did not have a health visitor coming to visit them physically, because about three quarters of health visitors were diverted to the frontline of dealing with covid. It was only in the most deprived cases, where there were concerns, that health visitors physically got to go and visit.

On top of that, we had a decline in the numbers of health visitors, which reversed the position that the coalition Government produced, where we had an additional 4,200; quite rightly, that was a pledge by the Government, and it was actually delivered in the lifetime of one Government. Since then, numbers have declined again. I think there is absolutely a false economy.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Tim Loughton

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. and learned Friend is so right. The adoption support fund was such an important part of the complex programme of getting adoption back on the front foot again. Too often, where adoptive placement was deemed to be best for a child, I am afraid there was too much, “Here’s the child, dump them with the family,” and then the local authority disappeared in the dust. Children who are going into adoption, in many cases with complex and traumatic problems underlying that decision, need a lot of support in the early years.

If we are to make an adoption work and prevent an adoption disruption, we need to put in the groundwork and do the leg work right at the beginning, to make sure that child gets the extra professional therapeutic work that might be required to make sure that family placement can work. The adoption support fund was a really important way of ensuring the resources to provide that professional expertise, so that the adoption stood a better chance. It is a false economy not to do that, because the amount of money the local authority saves is considerable if we can make an adoption work, so why not put in the resource at the beginning to make sure that the adoption is likely to work and that child can stay in a stable, loving family environment?

[Wera Hobhouse]

I know that I am blowing the trumpet for trauma-informed services, but does the hon. Member not agree that they are at the bottom of understanding most traumatised and difficult young people?

[Tim Loughton]

Yes, and we must understand that, too often, we are too keen to show the statistics that prove the underachievement of children who have been in the care system, be that in education or other outcomes. Why should we expect somebody who has been taken from their birth family, who has been deprived of the loving care of their birth parents because they are not able to give them that loving care, who has been abused as a child—who has perhaps been sexually abused as a child, as so many children are—and who has gone through such a traumatic upbringing, to be able to achieve as much as other children without getting that extra support? Whatever form those trauma services take, it is a no-brainer that we should provide them if we are serious about wanting those placements to work, be that a long-term foster care placement, a long-term home placement or, ultimately, an adoptive placement if that is the right place to go. It has to be horses for courses.

What we also did those 10 or 12 years ago is reduce the bureaucracy in the children’s social care system. When I took over as Children’s Minister, the manual for children’s social care, “Working together”, consisted of 756 pages, or something of that order. For the previous 10 years or so, since the death of Victoria Climbié, every time a high-profile safeguarding scandal happened and another child lost his or her life—often at the hands of his or her parents or carers—the Government rushed to legislate. It was a Labour Government at the time, but frankly, we were all guilty of going along with it: “The solution must surely be more legislation and more rules.” Ten years later, we had reached a stage where social workers were so saddled with regulations and rules that they were constantly looking over their shoulder, constantly referring to page 642 in the rulebook to see what they should be doing, rather than using the professional judgment and instincts that we train them for. Being a social worker is not an easy profession: one has to be a combination of a detective, a psychoanalyst, a forensic scientist and whatever else, because people who abuse their children are usually quite smart at covering it up.

The most important thing I said to social workers was, “I want to give you the confidence to make a mistake for genuine reasons”—hopefully not too often, but by using their professional judgment, rather than covering their back by saying, “Well, that’s how it said I was supposed to act in this case on page 602 of the manual.” That was the problem. We tore apart that manual—it was reduced to something like 70 pages—and said to social workers, “You’ve been trained as a social worker. We trust you: you have the nous. You need to go out and get the experience. You need to judge something on having face-to-face time with a vulnerable child or that child’s parents and to make a value judgment on whether you think that child needs to be taken into care, to have some support while staying with the birth family, or whatever. You make that judgment— occasionally, you will make it wrong, but you will make the wrong judgment for the right reasons. That will give you more experience to make sure you make it right the next time.”