Children and Families Bill

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2013 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

I, too, welcome the Minister to his first Grand Committee day of a Bill and thank him for his time over the summer in dealing with some of my concerns. As I listened to the debate, my mind went back to a meeting four months ago with women whose children had been taken away from them in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, they were single women and were strongly encouraged to give their child away. Those women bitterly regretted having done so and were campaigning for an apology from government. It is unlikely that this Bill will result in women campaigning in 20 or 30 years’ time for an apology from Parliament for what is being done now, but we really have to raise our game. It is clear that if we took a more consistent approach towards to some of these vulnerable families and helped a few more parents off drugs and alcohol, as we could well do, we would not need to take their children away. We must not be too optimistic and allow children to be kept in those families and be harmed, but we see through the effectiveness of Louise Casey’s focused work with troubled families and through District Judge Crichton’s work in the family drug and alcohol court that, where a real effort is made and where central government is prepared to step up and take responsibility, we can make a difference with those families. I welcome what the Government are doing, but some of these children would not have to be taken into care if we raised the overall quality of our child and family practice.

This debate highlights the great judgment required of child and family social workers. They are in the position of making that lifetime decision: will a child stay with its birth family in kinship care or will it be removed for adoption? I welcome the huge investment that this Government and the previous Government have made in raising the status of child and family social work through the social work college, the new post of Chief Social Worker and the Munro review. Despite those all being very helpful inputs, a social worker who was training in London—an intelligent woman—said to me last week, “I was bitterly disappointed by my training. I didn’t get the feedback. Many of my fellow students felt the same way. I’m now going to Bristol to carry on my training in social work”. There is therefore an awfully long way to go in the nuts and bolts of getting the social work profession to where it needs to be to serve those families properly.

What progress are we making in the retention of child and family social workers? People are saying—I heard it said again recently—that we are getting the best young English social workers into the profession now and have seen a great improvement over the past two years, but are we succeeding in retaining those young people? Are we managing to retain experienced social workers close to the front line so that they can mentor and support those child and family social workers?

I have one final question for the Minister, which he might care to write to me about. It is a concern raised in the past by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and raised today by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, about the outcomes for children in adoptive placements. We need robust evidence about outcomes for children in adoptive placements. We have them already for children in kinship placements. We need to compare, contrast and make good policy decisions based on those. I hope that the Minister can give an assurance that, if that cannot be produced at the moment, research projects will be put in place so that in future we know how stable those adoptive placements are. The worst outcome would be for a child or children to be placed for one or two years, to be settled, and then to be rejected again by their new family. I am sorry to have gone on so long.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests. I, too, was a member of the Adoption Legislation Select Committee. I have what feels like a lifelong involvement with Action for Children, which certainly goes back to when I was very small and collecting money for the National Children’s Home, which has changed its name a few times. I think I am now an ambassador for it. I also had some experience of supervising adoptions when I was a social worker, but that was a very long time ago so I am not sure that it is really a relevant interest because the legislation and everything else was very different.

One of the things that were different in those days was that most children who were placed for adoption were babies. When I hear the rhetoric about adoption from the Government at the moment, I sometimes suspect that they still think that that is the case. The reality is that most children being placed for adoption now, before the changes, are not babies, and that if the Bill as it stands becomes law, that will be even more true.

I have worked with and still know several people who are both foster parents and adopters; some are just foster parents and some are just adopters, while others have done both. They perform a remarkable job. Far too often we take for granted the work, the commitment and emotional support that they put in and the trauma that their lives and their families are put through, and it is very important that we do not do that.

I have concerns about this issue. Even when I was a social work student, I did an adoption supervision and took it to court. I was very impressed with, and supported, the judgment and the words of the presiding judge. I know that you really have to get the law right. You have to ensure that the family understand their rights, and that the adoptive family understand not only their rights but the rights of the parents who are placing their children for adoption.

We are talking here about going to a further stage, where the parents are not placing the children for adoption but the local authority will decide that there should be permanence, and therefore fostering for adoption should be considered. That is legally a new situation. I need convincing by the Minister that the Government have done the work to ensure that the family court will not then come back and say, “Actually, we are not convinced that the rights of this child and its natural family were properly considered in your decision around permanence and therefore around placing for fostering up to adoption”. That means that when the case gets to court for adoption, the judge may then be tempted to say, “I’m not convinced that this is in the interests of the child or that the process has ensured that the rights of the child, which are expressed very clearly in all sorts of places, including the UN convention, have actually had due attention paid to them”. We would then be putting social workers and local authorities in an invidious position, and we really have to take account of that.