Munro Report

Andrea Leadsom Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is right. An understandable result of what happened with baby P is that social workers have become more risk averse. If it is a marginal decision, they might take the child into care just in case, whereas if they have the time, space and appropriate tools and applications to deal with that family, it might be possible to keep it together rather than break it up.

I have set out Professor Munro’s recommendations for reform. Rightly, they address every aspect of the system. Rightly, they place the child at the centre. And rightly, they have as a basic principle the importance of placing trust in skilled professionals at the front line. It is of course the case that there are vulnerable children outside the immediate child protection system, and we need to improve radically how they are supported and make sure that they have a voice.

One of the main groups of such vulnerable children, for which I have responsibility, is of course children in care. With more than 64,000 children in care at the moment, we need to improve all aspects of their lives, including placement stability, education, health and the transition to adulthood, which are all priorities for Government and the wider sector. If we get Munro’s proposals right, there will be benefits for all those involved in children’s social care, not just those at the acute end of child protection.

From 1 April, we introduced a new statutory framework for looked-after children, which is far more streamlined, coherent and clear about the “must dos” for local authorities. In particular, we have brought together the care planning regulations and guidance into one volume, which should ultimately help councils put together better care plans. Less is often more. We have also strengthened the role of independent reviewing officers so they can challenge poor care plans, and make sure children’s voices are at the heart of all reviews. We have given clear steers in the revised fostering guidance about how local authorities should support foster carers and children better. The revised transition guidance makes it clear that young people should leave care only when they are ready and have a strong support package in place.

I have also written to every local authority about foster carers being encouraged to treat foster children in their care no differently from their own children. In March, I launched the foster carers’ charter, which sets out clear principles for the support that should be available, what foster carers can expect and what foster children can expect of their carers.

I also launched earlier this year the Tell Tim website so that carers and, in particular, children and young people in care can let me—as the Minister responsible—know directly what they think is working well, what improvements they think need to be made or what is going wrong. I have also set up reference groups so that I can hear from foster children, care leavers, adopted children and children living in residential homes. Just this week, I met my regular group of young people who have left the care system, who recount their often moving and relevant experiences of what is going wrong in the system. We could all learn a lot if we spent more time with the children who are still being failed because, through no fault of their own, they have become part of the care system.

As hon. Members will be aware, some children and young people—including young runaways—become victims of sexual exploitation. The report published by Barnardo’s in January, “Puppet on a String”, highlighted the scale and severity of this horrific abuse. I pay tribute to Barnardo’s work and expertise in this area and I especially congratulate Anne Marie Carrie for hitting the ground running in her first few months at the helm of Barnardo’s.

The Government are determined to do everything possible to stamp out this abuse and safeguard vulnerable children and young people. Recent events brought to light in the midlands through Operation Retriever and the other ongoing police investigations underline the extent of this insidious abuse. As the lead Minister in this area, I have been urgently considering, with my colleagues at the Home Office, Barnardo’s and other national and local partners, what further action should be taken. The Government are now committed to working with partners to develop over the summer an action plan to safeguard children and young people from sexual exploitation. This will build on existing guidance and our developing understanding of this dreadful abuse, including through local agencies’ work around the country. It will include work on effective prevention strategies, identifying those at risk of sexual exploitation, supporting victims, and taking robust action against perpetrators.

Another area where excessive central prescription has had unintended consequences, leading to risk aversion rather than risk management, is in vetting and barring. The Government believe that children will be better protected if we move away from unnecessary and top-down bureaucracy towards more responsible decision making at a local level. It is vital to balance the need to protect the vulnerable against the need to respect individuals’ freedoms, and not to create a system that imposes unnecessary burdens on individuals or organisations. That is why the Government undertook a review of the barring and criminal records regimes in order to scale them back to common-sense levels. We need to get away from a system that has unintentionally driven a further wedge between children growing up and well-meaning adults who come forward genuinely to offer their time to volunteer and to work with young people. They have been deterred from doing so by all the regulation.

I spoke earlier about the action we were taking to improve the lives and prospects of children in care. For many of those children, adoption will be the most appropriate outcome, which is why in February I issued new guidance with a call to arms to local authorities to re-energise their efforts on adoption and improve front-line practice. This refreshed and improved statutory guidance will be an important element in the Government’s programme of reform aimed at supporting adoption agencies in removing barriers to adoption, reducing delay and continually improving their adoption services.

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is essential, when adoption is the best answer, for it to take place before the baby is two in order to give that child the greatest chance of bonding with the new family?

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend, who has great expertise particularly in dealing with young children and in the whole area of attachment, knows how important it is that a child growing up is able from an early age to bond with, and develop an attachment to, parents or carers. We know from all the statistics that young children who are unable to grow up safely with their own parents benefit from adoption, where appropriate, at an early stage. If we can find them an appropriate adoptive placement, their chances of growing up as normally and conventionally as if they were with their own parents are greatly heightened, and they will have a better chance of catching up with their peers who are lucky enough to be able to grow up with their parents, so she is absolutely right.

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[Toby Perkins]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The problem is not just 10 or 15 years down the line; it is more immediate. When we know that there are social work vacancies around the country, it seems bizarre that newly qualified people in this sector are finding it difficult to find work. Professor Munro’s recommendations on practice and assessment years at the early stages will make a significant difference—at least, I hope they will. My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the considerable anecdotal evidence that newly qualified social workers are finding it difficult to find work. I hope that the proposed measures in the report will be followed through, as it is vital that people should choose to work in this area. As the Minister has said, we want to make social work an attractive career option for talented people leaving university, but if those people find it hard to find work as a social worker, that is going to become more difficult.

[Andrea Leadsom]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one way to support new young social workers freshly out of university would be to provide a better end-to-end network of support, taking into account what is already available in children’s centres and other therapeutic services that could be available in a package, which could help to provide the network of support that social workers desperately need?

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[Toby Perkins]

As I said, we take advice from specialists in the profession and many people within the social work field are deeply concerned about that issue; page 61 of Professor Munro’s report alludes to those concerns. Of course transparency is important, and it is precisely for that reason that we would like an organisation that is seen as independent continuing the evaluation of serious case reviews. However, alongside that important transparency, we need to deal with key issues relating to the protection of anonymity of both professionals and people within the families. It has been relatively easy for people in local areas to identify who has been alluded to in many of the serious case reviews. In one example that I was told about by a social work professional, a serious case review referred to a relative of a soldier serving on the front line. If that review had been published in full, a difficult situation could have been caused for someone who was already in a difficult position. Although I share the hon. Lady’s idea that transparency is important, and it is for precisely that reason that an independent review of the evaluation must remain a part of the system, I question whether this approach will aid learning and will instead reduce people’s willingness to get involved.

Much of this review is dedicated to the importance of improving the quality of social work training and the continuous professional development journey that social workers go on, yet worrying signs are already emerging about councils reacting to the savage cuts forced on them by cutting back on CPD and training. We also share Professor Munro’s alarm about the evidence of cuts to early years provision. Some 25% of Children England member organisations are experiencing cuts of more than a quarter of their income—for them it seems as if the big society is rapidly shrinking. The Minister needs to stand up for early years funding if the measures on sharing responsibility for early help set out in this report are to be more than warm words. Continued denial about the scale or fact of the cuts will simply suggest that the Government are not serious. It is particularly worrying that areas with the highest level of deprivation and the highest demands on social services are the very ones that have seen the largest Government cuts.

[Andrea Leadsom]

rose—

[Toby Perkins]

I will just make this point and then I will be happy to allow the hon. Lady to intervene.

I have referred to the survey that we sent to every director of children’s services in England on the state of safeguarding services. We had an excellent response from a significant proportion of local authorities and a number of patterns emerged. Local authorities are trying desperately hard to protect spending on safeguarding, and we salute them for that. However, despite that commitment, 36% of local authorities expected case loads to increase this year and only 10% expected them to fall. One assistant director of children’s services explained the paradox of statutory guidance.

Before I move on any further, I will allow the hon. Lady to intervene. I was trying to find a natural pause, but the words just flowed so wonderfully that I could not stop.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I am very grateful. In this time of financial austerity, is it not more important than ever to get good value for money by focusing on prevention rather than having the massive costs, further down the line, of taking children into care?

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[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

The greatest risk of dying a violent death is when you are less than one year old. And the greatest risk comes not from strangers, but from those who are closest to you in your own home—those who should love you and take care of you. Social workers are in the front line of the battle to protect babies and children. The importance of caring, motivated and well-trained social workers just cannot be overestimated. Frankly, if we do not recognise the massive potential of a good social worker to turn around life chances for babies and children in vulnerable families, we shall get the society we deserve.

I congratulate Professor Munro on her comprehensive report on what is generally recognised to be a difficult and troubled area. I want to focus today on recommendations 10 to 13 of that report, because I have spent the last 10 years of my life developing a passion for and a detailed understanding of why she may have made those points.

Recommendation 10 states:

“Government should place a duty on local authorities and statutory partners to provide sufficient early intervention services for those children and young people who do not meet child protection thresholds”.

That, to me, is the key recommendation, and I can encapsulate why in the shortest of slogans: prevention is kinder and cheaper than cure. Supporting vulnerable families and enabling them to form a secure bond with their babies in the first two years of life has profound consequences for society. Can anyone here imagine what the relationship is like between a mother and her baby if she would allow her boyfriend to stub out cigarettes on her little boy, as happened in the case of baby Peter? No, none of us can quite get our heads around what on earth possessed a mother to so violate the nurturing role of parent and carer as to allow her own need for a boyfriend to overrule the tigerish instinct of a mother. For my own part, I am quite sure I would kill rather than let anyone harm my children like that.

What makes one mother or parent neglect, abuse or even kill her own child, while another would kill to protect her child, is simple: the quality of the attachment between the carer and the child. This attachment begins during pregnancy, and its development is most critical during the first two years of a baby’s life. We could call it the Harry Potter syndrome. Harry was loved and nurtured by his parents until Lord Voldemort murdered them when Harry was two years old. He then suffered unspeakable cruelty and neglect at the hands of his uncle, aunt and cousin, but through it all he kept his unshakable sense of self-worth, personal resilience and his ability to make friends and form strong relationships. Those qualities are the reward for secure early attachment between baby and adult carer.

That is not just an entertaining story; the scientific evidence is overwhelming. When a baby is born his brain is significantly underdeveloped, but between six months and 18 months, as a result of the stimulation of a loving relationship, of peek-a-boo games and silly baby-language chatter with mum, the brain puts on a massive growth spurt and the central frontal cortex—the part of the brain that enables empathy and deals with social interaction—starts to develop at an astonishing rate. Conversely, the baby who is neglected, abused or treated inconsistently by uncaring adults will fail to develop a healthy frontal cortex. His ability in later life to form strong relationships with friends, a partner, work colleagues and so on will be severely impaired—and for a girl baby who does not form a secure bond, the incredible tragedy is that without help, she will struggle to form a bond with her own babies in later life, and so the cycle of misery is perpetuated through the generations.

It is at the critical end of the spectrum of poor attachment that the social worker is the key to the outcome for the child and the family. Where a baby is severely neglected or abused, the development of the frontal cortex may simply never happen. Babies left to scream for hours at a time suffer other problems as a result of having constantly raised levels of the stress hormone. Those babies develop a tendency towards high-risk-taking behaviour, drugs, violence and self-harming. Our prisons, streets and psychiatric hospitals are full of the evidence of poor early attachment. It is in these cases—the most difficult to resolve—that social workers often represent the only chance of survival for the family. However, their challenges are manifold. How can they identify those particular cases? How can they tell if the problems are temporary or life-threatening, and how can they be supported in what is an almost impossible task?

I put it to my hon. Friend the Minister that providing parent-infant psychotherapy will dramatically change the work load of social workers and the amount of support available for these vulnerable families before those problems happen. I wanted to give you a perfect case study, Mr Deputy Speaker, but time does not permit, so you will have to take my word for it that the Oxford Parent Infant Project, a charity that I have chaired for the past 10 years, provides an enormous amount of life-saving support for families in Oxfordshire by working with social workers to reduce their work load, to provide them with the support they need and to help these vulnerable children. OXPIP also provides training in the crucial understanding of parent-infant relationships. What is so sad, to my mind, is that for many of those who attend, it is a “road to Damascus” moment. Previously they had no understanding of brain development, the critical importance of early attachment and the possible interventions.

I would like to leave my hon. Friend with these two thoughts: first, we need to provide parent-infant psychotherapy across children’s centres in the UK, and secondly, we need to improve significantly the quality of education not just for social workers but for everyone who works with babies.