Children and Families Bill

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 8. Before I do so, I join in thanking the Minister for the helpful meetings that he arranged between Grand Committee and Report and for the extremely encouraging meeting with the new chief social worker. As vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers, I agree with his analysis that the biggest difference to be made for these children and their families is in raising the status of child and family social work and recruiting and retaining the best workforce for them. Finally, I thank the Minister, the Minister for Children and Families and the Secretary of State for moving forward with the staying put amendment, which will make a huge difference to many young people leaving care. I am so grateful for that but I will not go further now because of the need to move forward.

Amendments 7 and 8 would ensure that when young people return from care to their biological families they have the support that they need to be successful in doing that. I will quote briefly from a letter published in the Telegraph yesterday, which had among the signatories Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC, Dr Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner for England, and Dame Clare Tickell, the chief executive of Action for Children. The letter said:

“The Government has moved decisively to improve prospects for adopted children by offering an entitlement, in the form of a personal budget, to services for them and their parents. But most children who are taken into care are not adopted. They will return home where research shows that half of those who entered care as a result of abuse or neglect will suffer further harm unless changes are made. Too many young people end up in a revolving door of care that is damaging for them and has a significant cost for local authorities. The support offered to adopted children should also be made available to those who return home after a stay in care. Support should be driven by need and not by legal status”.

The purpose of my tabling this amendment again is to secure an assurance from the Minister that we can meet subsequently and discuss this issue and look at the welcome work that the Government are doing and some of the gaps that remain. I hope to establish a timeline for change. I will come to the problem in just a moment but I would be grateful for an opportunity to meet officials and, I hope, the Minister and any interested colleagues to look at how to take this forward and to monitor progress. It is moving in the right direction at the moment but it needs to move further and faster.

The problem, as laid out in that letter, is that the NSPCC conducted some research a year or so ago and was horrified to find that half of young people returning home from care were then returned to care fairly shortly afterwards. The needs of the families were not being addressed. They were still alcoholic or misusing drugs and those children were being returned home to unsafe places. Furthermore, what one finds in these circumstances is that children who are returned home, then taken back into care, then sent home again and taken back into care are damaged by that. In the worst cases, they lose all trust in adults and become people who are dependent on the state. They may be in prison. They are very damaged and it is hard to help them to recover from that damage.

I am extremely grateful for the actions that the Government have been taking following that NSPCC report. In their consultation which looks at permanency for children, they have looked at returning children from care and dealt particularly with the issue of accommodated children. There are new measures, including that there should be a plan established by each local authority for those children returning from care. I am grateful for the fact that they have set up a working group, which includes the NSPCC, to look at just this matter. There is one other step which the Government are taking and for which I am also grateful. I was pleased to meet officials and to hear from them that there will be opportunities to meet further with them and the NSPCC following this debate.

I really am grateful for the measures that the Government are taking but I am concerned that there are still some gaps. In particular, the consultation which has just been completed deals only with accommodated children. That is the majority of children who return from care but a substantial minority have either interim care orders or full care orders, and those are not currently covered by the measures proposed by the consultation. While local authorities have the power to ensure that young people returning from care to their biological parents have the equivalent to the personal budgets we are giving to adopted children—the equivalent of a guaranteed range of services to support those families—there is no obligation on them to do so. Given the many responsibilities that local authorities have and the shortage of resources, the concern is that many will not do that. Finally, there is no consistent assessment of young people and their families before they return home from care to ensure that they are returning to a safe place where they can be secure and have a good, settled life.

I hope that we can discuss those gaps further subsequent to this debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I am going to propose Amendment 9. Perhaps I may do that first—I am not intending to close down the debate.

Amendment 9 which stands in my name is on the subject of maintaining sibling contact. The amendment would require local authorities to give specific consideration to enabling children in care to remain in contact with their siblings. Many noble Lords here today will remember that we had a very good, if disturbing, discussion on that in Grand Committee.

First, we were confronted with some stark statistics. Some 63% of children in care whose siblings are also in the care system are separated from them. Surprisingly, those living in children’s homes are much more likely to be separated than those in foster care. What is more, children care very deeply about this separation; 85% said that it was important to keep siblings together and more than three-quarters said that councils could do more to help brothers and sisters keep in touch with each other. Secondly, we heard a number of moving individual stories of the distress caused to children who were separated from and unable to contact their siblings. For many, the relationship was more important than that with their parents and was a particular bond when they had been through a traumatic family break-up or protected each other in an abusive family. Often the elder children felt a particular responsibility for their younger siblings and were desperate when they could not check that they were okay; they had almost a quasi-parental concern for them. Although there will be occasions, of course, when children need to be separated for very good reasons, it seems that in the remaining majority of cases a lack of priority or perhaps just practical issues have been allowed to develop as an excuse for contact not happening on a regular basis. Our amendment would make that sibling contact a priority in social work practice and would give the requirement the additional weight of being in the Bill.

When we debated this in Committee, and in subsequent discussions, the Minister showed sympathy for the problem but resisted the need for primary legislation. He drew our attention to the current requirement for children’s individual care plans to set out the arrangements for sibling contact. He has also drawn up updated guidance on sibling contact for children in care. Of course, we are very grateful for that additional work. However, the point is that the previous guidance had little effect on practice on the ground, as the statistics have shown, so it is hard to imagine that the updated guidance will be any more effective. That is why we believe that emphasising the importance of this issue in the Bill can send a stronger message to those who are currently routinely failing to nurture sibling contact.

The Minister also referred to the views of an expert group, which looked into this issue and concluded that more needed to be done to improve practice on the ground. Obviously, we agree that more can be done in terms of advice, training and good practice dissemination. I do not know when that group reported its findings, but, again, so far there appears to be little evidence of a major improvement in sibling contact as a result of this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Young of Hornsey]

My Lords, in speaking to Amendment 10, I, like other noble Lords this afternoon, place on record how grateful I am for the help of the Minister and his officials in trying to get to grips with this issue of access to records for care leavers, especially as it was not originally part of the Bill. I understand why we needed some considered negotiations around the subject. I found those very useful, as did my colleagues from the access to records campaign group, which comprises professionals from the Care Leavers’ Association, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, the Child Care History Network, the Post Care Forum and Barnardo’s. It is also supported by the fostering and adoption charity, TACT.

Some of the key issues that this amendment seeks to address are the lack of consistency across the country’s local authorities in the way they deal with giving access to records to care leavers, and also, importantly, how they deal with the issue of redaction of those records. A number of care leavers gave us evidence of how they received notes from their past which were essentially incomprehensible because of the amount of redaction that had taken place. Again, that seems to depend on whereabouts you live in the country. That should obviously not be the case. In the amendment, we call for clear, effective statutory guidance and the opportunity for care leavers to access support once they have accessed their records.

That is another important point. I am not sure that all noble Lords are aware how difficult that experience can sometimes be for people. It does not matter what age you are. This is not just for young people who have recently left care. Many older people also have that experience. At the moment, no kind of support is necessarily offered to them. Of course, care records must be properly maintained and every effort made to trace records from decades ago as well as more recent ones. That ties in to my earlier point about the ages of people seeking their records. In fact, colleagues at the Care Leavers’ Association say that the average age of those seeking its help in looking for their records is around 35 and goes up to a 90 year-old—who found her records, triumphantly. Whatever age you are when you eventually get your records, if you are fortunate enough to do so, the experience can be difficult.

During meetings with officials, it emerged that both the Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Nash—and the Minister for Children and Families agreed that the current wording on access to records in the care planning statutory guidance could be strengthened. Colleagues from the access to records campaign and I have worked with officials on that particular subject. It is also my understanding that Ministers have agreed to work with us on a programme to ensure that front-line managers and staff are aware of the new guidance. Again, that was raised earlier this afternoon in relation to how statutory guidance is used and the extent to which people take it seriously. We need to ensure that they do—once we have, as I hope, developed some new guidance in this area.

That activity will include supporting a round table for local authorities and voluntary sector organisations, and sending messages via the department’s various communication routes to relevant bodies which can raise that issue with their local authorities and make sure it is firmly on the agenda. We also understand that officials have spoken to the National Care Advisory Service, which runs the National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum for managers. It said that it would be happy to run a session where the managers talk about how to improve their local practice, based on the proposed revised guidance and best practice. Could the Minister confirm my understanding of that? Also, would he be prepared to ensure that the voice of older adult care leavers is heard during all consultation processes and that an assessment of the effectiveness of strengthened statutory guidelines is carried out?

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, having listened to the comments on the other amendments in this group, I am very interested in what the Minister will say in reply. I certainly have considerable sympathy with what has been said. However, I added my name to the amendment of my noble friend Lord Listowel and it is on that amendment that I wish to press a little further.

The Government’s consultation on permanence goes some way to ensuring that voluntarily accommodated children receive the support they need, but, as was made clear from the reference to the letter in the Telegraph, an awful lot of important bodies in this area, as well as academics, support the need for further action. As others have said, the Government’s attempts to improve the adoption system should undoubtedly be praised. However, adoption is not the outcome for the majority of looked-after children. Instead, most children placed in care return home to parents or carers. In 2012, 10,000 children went home after a stay in care compared with just 3,440 who were adopted.

However, many children go home without a proper assessment of their and their parents’ support needs prior to leaving care or after they have returned home. For example, in cases where children were returned to households with a high recurrence of drug and alcohol misuse, only 5% of parents were provided with treatment to help them address their substance abuse. The lack of these types of support services often results in children going back home to face a significant risk of experiencing further abuse. In fact, research by the NSPCC shows that around half the children who came into care because of abuse or neglect suffered further abuse when they returned home. Recent DfE statistics show that a third of children who return home subsequently go in and out of care twice or more. Suffering from or being at risk of further abuse, and moving in and out of care, only compounds these children’s already traumatic childhoods and can cause significant long-term harm.

The NSPCC believes that a child should only return home from care when there has been a comprehensive assessment of that child’s needs and effective support is provided for children and their parents, in particular to tackle the underlying problems—as well as drugs and alcohol, there might be domestic violence, mental health conditions or generally poor parenting. Research shows that such an entitlement is unlikely to place an additional burden on local authorities—it could save them money, given the high financial cost of failed returns home. In one case highlighted in the recent DfE data pack, the total social care costs were £22,068 due to the child having frequent episodes in care. That was as opposed to an estimated cost of £13,124 if support to tackle substance abuse had been provided to the child’s parents.

The Bill provides an important opportunity to address this issue and ensure that local areas are required to provide such an assessment and the subsequent necessary support. I very much hope that, along with these other amendments, the Minister will give welcome attention to what best can be done under these circumstances.