Children and Young Persons Act 2008 (Relevant Care Functions) (England) Regulations 2014

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I want to raise concerns about these regulations but also to welcome certain aspects of what the Government are doing. It is good to hear from the noble Lord, Lord True, about what seems to be a very positive initiative in Richmond and the other local authority he mentioned. Certainly, the principle of allowing professionals to use their own judgment is a very important and powerful one. We have seen it across the board in terms of children’s services, and I welcome the intent. The Government are frustrated that outcomes for children are not improving as they should and they are not going to leave any stone unturned in order to change that. I commend that intention.

The former Secretary of State, Michael Gove MP, really pushed the use of voluntary adoption agencies in terms of the adoption system. That made a good and positive improvement in terms of the numbers of children being placed for adoption more swiftly. I welcome, too, the Social Care Innovation Fund, which seems to be a very good initiative to improve and make sure that we make best use of the resources available to us.

However, I have a number of concerns. I regret that if I am not fully reassured at this point, I may come back and seek to debate the regulations in the Chamber. I recognise the Minister’s frustration at not being able to improve outcomes as swiftly as we need to for young people. I would underline a couple of issues in that context. The fundamental one is the question of professional capacity in the workforce. I commend what this Government and the previous one did about raising the status of child and family social workers. I remember speaking to a former Secretary of State for Education a few years ago. When I told her that it was not necessary to have a degree to be in child and family social work, she did not believe me. Of course, it has only been a requirement in the last three or four years for child and family social workers to have a degree. A lot of good work has gone forward in this area, but we still have a long way to go. Many social workers in practice still will not have a degree qualification. If we look at residential care and staff in children’s homes, we only require those staff to have an A- level qualification equivalent. I was told by an expert recently that most managers still will not have a degree qualification. We must bear it in mind that we need to address the professional capacity within the workforce if we are to see improved outcomes, and that will take some time. As impatient as we are to see change, we may have to be patient for those changes to feed through. My concern is that, in being really frustrated with the system as it stands, we need to be thoughtful in the way that we change it, in case we bring in changes that are unhelpful. That is why this particular regulation needs very careful scrutiny.

I had an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from an academic who has followed the educational outcomes for looked-after children for many years and first raised the concerns about the disparity between educational outcomes for looked-after children and the other population of children. She highlighted concerns that there was not enough support for foster carers. There was no expectation that foster carers would have a good education. She looked across to the continent and saw that where foster carers and staff in children’s homes were recruited from a background in which they had a higher level of education, there were better educational outcomes. She is about to publish a book, in which she highlights that better outcomes on the continent are very strongly associated, in her experience, with the fact that they expect better qualified people to work directly with their vulnerable young people.

As I see it, the risks are, first, fragmentation of services. I was speaking with an academic last week. He is developing an innovative programme in his local authority for looked-after children. He is developing a multidisciplinary team and a one-stop shop so that a child can see the mental health professional, teacher and social worker all in one place. He was regretting the fact that this was how it used to be in local authorities, but that, over time, somehow it had been lost. I was speaking with a children’s home manager several years ago in Camden. He said that the particular advantage of that home in Camden, being in the local authority, was that he could easily and quickly draw on all the necessary resources to get the best outcomes for the children. I think that he had had experience of working in the private sector, but my sense has been that the risk with private sector children’s homes is that they can be more separated from all the services on offer. They may have to develop their own personal services, so that they cannot necessarily draw all the services together, particularly those in mental health, to get the best outcomes for children.

I worry that, if we are going to move towards a system which requires greater reliance on good contracts to make it work, contracts will look at rather short-term outcomes, which are not necessarily the sort of measurements that one would want to use. The key thing with children in care and care leavers is to ensure that they learn how to make relationships, to trust people, and to bear and tolerate intimate relationships. That can be quite a hard thing to measure in the short term. I am a little worried. The Government’s efforts to improve educational attainment and qualifications for looked-after children and care leavers are commendable, but you cannot ignore the ultimate need for those young people to make and keep relationships. You can get them to do well in exams but, if they cannot make relationships with other people, they will have very unsatisfactory lives. Specifications within the contracts will therefore concern me.

Concerns have been raised about whether the bodies concerned will need to be registered and therefore need to follow minimum standards, but I am sure that others will raise those points.

There are concerns about consultation with children in the process. I admired the great pains to which Timothy Loughton MP, when he was Children’s Minister, and Edward Timpson MP have gone to listen to the voices of young people and of care leavers. These measures are likely to affect young people significantly. It was good to hear how positively young people in Richmond spoke about the experience, but to present to young people what is being done and to have their thoughts presented back would be very helpful. Those were my concerns. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the regulations in so far as they will allow, as the Minister has intimated, the potential for local authorities to innovate and to improve services for young people. I also welcome the change to the draft regulations that the Government made in response to the consultation. I am not opposed in principle to the enabling power in the regulations. As the noble Lord, Lord True, has illustrated, used in the context of the right values, these possibilities can open up new ways of delivering better services and, more importantly, better outcomes for children and young people.

However, I have some concerns, not about the principle but about the lack of clarity in the regulations on some important issues. Some of these issues were touched on in the consultation; the responses were not concerned exclusively with the principle of privatisation. I want to raise three issues: accountability, inspection and the not-for-profit status of new providers that the Minister has alluded to. If the Minister could flesh out the Government’s thinking on these issues, it would be really helpful, not least to the Commons when they come to consider the regulations, as they will be looking for answers on some of these issues.

The Government have said that, if children’s services are outsourced either in large part or in whole, the local authority will retain overall accountability for those services. However, we need to understand what that means in practice. Does overall accountability mean that the local authority alone will be responsible for individual children’s outcomes, or will the service provider have any accountability? When I was Minister for Children, I knew a number of directors of children’s services who made a point every month of selecting at random six, seven, eight or 10 case files from their department and reading them to get a measure—a dipstick measure, but none the less a measure—of the quality of his or her social workers’ work. Will directors of children’s services similarly be able to collect a random sample of case files from the service provider and look at what is going on? What direct access will a director of children’s services have to the evidence of the work being done with individual children in an ongoing way, not just with outcomes at the end of the year? That question concerns how the local authority will be expected to put in place continuing quality assurance mechanisms so that it can see what is being done with individual children in a continuing, real-time way.

Given that parents and carers will have an indirect relationship with the local authority through this outsourcing, what would happen if a parent or carer wanted to make a complaint relating to the outcomes for their children or to the way the service was being provided? To whom would that complaint be made and how would it be handled? Under the overarching statement I think that the local authority will remain accountable. There are a number of very detailed questions about how that accountability will be exercised, particularly on how quality assurance, which the local authority must surely seek, will be done on the way in which services are provided.

A related issue is inspection and what appears to be a lack of direct regulatory oversight, in the detail of the Government’s proposals, of the service provider to whom the responsibility for a service is outsourced. As I understand it—I hope the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—the Government propose that external providers of children’s services will not be inspected in their own right by Ofsted, nor registered as inspectable providers, like children’s homes and adoption societies currently are. As I understand it, the local authority will be inspected and a judgment will be made of it, but that is a very indirect look by Ofsted at what is going on. Surely to goodness the service providers have to be inspected. Would it not be important for that provider also to be given a public judgment by Ofsted?

This would be particularly important—unlike in the example of a community interest company conjured up for us by the noble Lord, Lord True—if we were talking about a rather big, profit-making company that set up a not-for-profit subsidiary, which was undertaking service provision for a number of different local authorities in some respect. Would it not be important to have an overview of what that company was doing across the board in different geographical areas, not just an atomised view of each individual local authority, indirect as that would be? Will Ofsted directly examine the case files that the service provider keeps and the quality of the social work and care provided by the agency? Will Ofsted speak directly to children and families? Why will the Government not allow Ofsted to rate the agency as well as the local authority? It is the agency that actually provides the services.