Adoption: Adoption Legislation Committee Reports

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the committee for their very impressive work on the adoption legislation.

Both reports that we are debating today represent a thorough and wise insight into the real issues being faced by adoption agencies and families around the country. I was impressed that the Committee has drawn extensively on its witness interviews and the evidence it had received and that, as a result, its recommendations are not based on ideology but on cold, hard facts and real experiences. As such, we see the reports as a genuine opportunity to embrace some fresh thinking in this area.

We remain proud of the fact that the last two pieces of adoption legislation in 2002 and 2006, introduced by the previous Government, genuinely transformed provision and put children’s rights at the heart of the process. However, we also see the need to reflect, learn and move on, and I hope that we can do this today.

I also hope that the Minister is genuinely minded to listen and engage with the debate given the imminent arrival of the Children and Families Bill in your Lordships’ House, which will result in the opportunity for these issues to be debated even more widely. While on this subject, can the noble Lord update us on the proposed timetable for the Bill’s arrival in this House, as there seems to be an ominous silence on that matter?

Having read through the reports again, I was struck also by how little the legislation requires changing. This point was made by a number of noble Lords. The more fundamental challenges that we face are about funding, training, the quality of reports, joint working and improved communication. I hope that these issues will not be lost when we finish debating the Bill, and that we can find a way to return to them. Perhaps a post-post-legislative scrutiny report will be required from the committee. I am sure that it would do a very good job.

I will highlight some issues in the report where there might be differences of approach between us and the current Government. A number of points that I will make echo those raised by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, in her excellent introduction to the debate. First, we believe that the benefits of adoption over other permanent care solutions have been overstated. As the report points out, adoption is a sensible route out of care only for a proportion of children, and there is a danger that the current emphasis on this option will skew resources away from those providing equally beneficial forms of care. This point was made eloquently by my noble friend Lady King. Therefore we believe that it is essential, when a child’s future care options are assessed, that all potential provisions are considered on an equal footing, including long-term fostering, kinship care and special guardianship. We would like to see this in the Bill.

Secondly, we believe absolutely in the importance of early intervention. This means early intervention in supporting birth mothers and early intervention if a decision is needed to remove a child into care. This is why we have been so frustrated that the Government have allowed the Sure Start schemes to wither on the vine through lack of funding. This was and is a cost-effective way of providing community support and education to new mothers, particularly in deprived areas. It encourages new mothers to step out of the isolation of a potentially dysfunctional home environment and learn how to nurture their child successfully. It is crucial for identifying family problems from birth. I echo the points made by my noble friend Lady Armstrong concerning the role that health visitors and midwives can play. No other schemes that the Government are proposing come anywhere near the scale and comprehensiveness of the services that are being disbanded.

Early intervention also requires social workers with the training, judgment and experience to act decisively when a family is unable to meet the expectations of basic care and nurture. This is inevitably a tough call and should not be made alone. Equally, we should not allow bureaucratic form-filling to get in the way of social workers acting in the child’s best interests, and should not allow parents to play the system and drag out any chance of their child being removed and having a better life. These issues go to the heart of how we value, judge and reward good performance among social workers. I agree very much with the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, with her considerable experience.

Thirdly, there has been considerable debate about the status of ethnicity in matching children to potential adopters. We believe that the wording on this in the previous legislation was clear. It made it clear that the interests of the child were paramount, and that in this context due consideration should be given to their religion, race, culture and linguistic background. Since then, there have been a number of allegations that the requirement is being overprescribed, leaving children trapped in care and awaiting a perfect racial match. The extent to which this has happened is difficult to quantify, but if the fundamental principles of placements need to be restated, let us use this opportunity to do so.

We are concerned that the Government have moved too far in the opposite direction by attempting to remove altogether the reference to ethnicity. Again, I echo the point that it would be helpful if the Minister would clarify the Government’s position, because it appears that by denying that we risk causing real hardship and unhappiness to children by placing them in families that do not understand their heritage. That is why we will push in the Bill for ethnicity to be listed as a welfare factor in the checklist to be taken into account in the matching process. This point was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.

Fourthly, we absolutely understand the argument that there are too many adoption providers in England, which reduces the scope for making successful matches for adoption. Clearly, it is not acceptable that agencies guard information about suitable adopters or children awaiting adoption and are not prepared to share it for the common good. We are pleased to see that consortia and joint local authority working, combined with improvements to the national register, are beginning to address these problems. Further funding and inspection mechanisms could be used to make this the norm.

However, we share the concern of the committee that it is premature for the Secretary of State to take on extra centralising powers, in addition to the swathe of powers that he has already taken across the education sphere, to force outsourcing of adoption services. If anything, this might result in a greater fragmentation of the service at a time when streamlining is required. In addition, we want to be assured that proper measures are in place to scrutinise the decision-making process of the Secretary of State and hold him to account when the outsourcing of services is imposed. This is something that has been missing in other aspects of education provision, and we will return to the issue during the course of the Bill.

Finally, the key to judging how successful any measures are is to look at the outcomes. We know from statistics that looked-after children have worse health, education and employment outcomes than their peers, and this should continue to be a real worry for us. We have also heard that the older the child being adopted, the more likely it is that the adoption breaks down. However, as the report suggests, we need more hard facts on this. We believe that it is our responsibility to compensate looked-after children for the effects of early trauma, including removal from their birth mother, by providing extra investment in their care and support so that they can catch up and have parity with their peers. One way of doing this is to provide all looked-after children with a virtual school head, who will take responsibility for their educational attainment. We are also keen to explore other means by which outcomes can be measured and improved. Again, we will raise these issues during the course of the Bill.

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise these issues today as a rehearsal for the issues arising in consideration of the Bill. Again, I thank the committee for providing such a comprehensive prism through which to judge the Government’s proposals, and look forward to the Minister’s response.