Adoption: Adoption Legislation Committee Reports

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I thank the House for appointing me to this committee. It was my first Select Committee at this end of the building, and I enjoyed being part of a very thorough piece of work with a very interesting and varied group of people, with very different expertise and experience. Of course we were expertly chaired by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I had the enormous privilege of encountering her chairmanship much earlier in both our careers, when she chaired the Cleveland child abuse public inquiry. I was new to the House of Commons but I had been working as a social worker in the north-east, so was involved and interested in the issue. I was also serving on the then Education Bill Committee in the Commons. This was, I think, in 1998—the Bill became the 1998 Act. I was able to learn from her work and report in getting a much firmer framework for child protection in this country. She was immensely gracious to those of us who were new to Select Committee work in this House, and very tolerant of our different approaches, and I am very grateful to her for that. I am also grateful that she has today given us a much more expansive report, in a sense, of the overall conclusions of the committee, because I want to concentrate on a much narrower area of the committee’s considerations. However, it is important for noble Lords to remember the whole context in which the committee was working.

Adoption is, of course, an important option for children who are not able, for whatever reason, to be cared for by their birth parents, but it is sometimes forgotten that the pattern of adoption has changed significantly over the past 50 years. No longer is it dominated by newly born babies, probably put up for adoption because their mothers were out of wedlock. These days, that is not the main reason for children coming into care or, indeed, being placed for adoption. Many of the children who are placed for adoption today will be from what the Government often call “troubled families”, which means that many of them will have had very traumatic experiences in their childhood and will be very damaged by the neglect, violence or abuse that they have already suffered.

The report is trying, in the areas with which I am concerned, to establish that careful balance between the importance of achieving early permanence for vulnerable children alongside that key recognition that the best place for a child is to be raised within the family network, provided that it is safe and in their best interests. I remember as a social worker many moons ago just how anxious and obsessed were many adolescents with whom I worked because they did not have contact with their birth parents or their early family. It did not matter what we did in the care system; they wanted to know, wanted the reasons and wanted to see what we could do to establish contact. Today, if they go down the adoption road, that is very difficult for them. For me that means that we have a responsibility to take early intervention seriously. The committee felt that the careful balance that I am talking about could be met only by effective early intervention. Again, my experience as a Minister in tackling social exclusion was that there are good evidence-based programmes around the world on early intervention. There is now a lot of knowledge and work around that, and we have a responsibility to use that knowledge, now that we know.

There is increasing evidence of the importance of the time from conception to the age of two in the development of a child. We know that this is the crucial phase of human development. It is in this period that children form those solid psychological and neurological foundations to optimise lifelong social, emotional and physical health, and that of course then has such an important effect on their educational and economic achievement. Lack of attachment, neglect and abuse all have serious detrimental effects on children, and severely affect that development.

I commend to the House a report that has been published since the committee deliberated this issue from the special interest group for nought to two year-olds set up by the Government. The report was co-written by Sally Burlington at the Department for Education and George Hosking, CEO of the Wave Trust. I remind the House of my interest as a trustee of that organisation. I hope the Minister has been briefed on that report as it clearly points out that the most effective interventions are often preventive rather than reactive. The report says that preventive interventions address risk factors likely to result in future problems for particular families without waiting for those problems to emerge. That is precisely what I urge the Government to do. Although we considered early intervention we were not able to look at that report, but I think that many of us on the committee agree with that finding.

We heard from the NSPCC about some of the work that that organisation has done in this area. I talked about evidence-based programmes such as the Family Nurse Partnership, and continue to do so. Indeed, some people think that I am obsessed with those programmes. I had the privilege of witnessing the Family Nurse Partnership in the United States of America and then persuading my Cabinet colleagues to fund pilot programmes in this country. It became clear from that work that health visitors and midwives are the key to achieving better health and well-being for children in their foundation years. We are simply not sufficiently innovative in how we use their knowledge and expertise to understand what is happening to children and prospective parents in these most vulnerable families. If we used their work much more creatively, we would be able to take decisions which could well achieve the Government’s ambition of providing more early placements and early decision-making. We have the opportunity to change the manner in which parents behave, or are likely to behave, towards their children. We now know about that from the Nurse Family Partnership; or the Family Nurse Partnership, as we have rechristened it. We know what can be done. We know how we can change the behaviour and ambition of young mothers undergoing their first pregnancy. That should be the overarching ambition in early intervention.

The challenge for the Government is to get the legislation right to ensure that families are given the right support at the right stage to avoid problems of neglect and abuse so that the child’s interests are attended to before damage is done. If that work is guaranteed, if there is no prospect of the parents’ behaviour changing, or of other appropriate kinship carers, families or friends taking on the care of the child, permanent solutions should kick in quickly. We have just not been good enough at this. We have not been good enough at early identification or early intervention to optimise the child’s opportunities. Too often potential carers among family and friends are not investigated at an early stage: it comes as an afterthought. Too often there is insufficient support for kinship carers. Earlier this week, I popped into the Family Rights Group reception in the Palace of Westminster. Members of that body gave evidence to the committee. At the reception we heard about the experience of kinship carers, which was incredibly moving. However, we also heard their pleas for greater support.

I accept that there is, on occasion, risk in kinship placements. Anyone who has listened to the remarkable story of my very good right honourable friend along the Corridor, Alan Johnson, about his experience of kinship care, knows that taking a risk is important. He had a remarkable social worker who was prepared to take that risk and leave him with his sister who was 16. However, such risk should be mediated by the guarantee of support, and that is the issue on which many kinship carers feel we let them down. The Government sort of acknowledge that in their response to the report, but I want more action on that. I would like them to take account of the recommendations of recent research by Oxford University for the Family Rights Group, which gives us a menu of how we might provide that support more effectively.

I know that I have not covered many other aspects of the report. I conclude by saying that sometimes the rhetoric from the Government about adoption overshadows the other things that the committee knows are important—indeed, our chairperson has identified them as being important—such as early identification and the menu of different forms of permanence for children in care. It is important to recognise the complex jigsaw of ways forward, and I know that that is where the Government are, even if the rhetoric sometimes belies that. We have responsibility to ensure that the legislation that we are shortly to consider enhances opportunities for the most vulnerable children. I look forward to that.