Children: Looked-after Children

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for introducing this very timely debate and pay tribute to the work that he has done in this House. Ever since I have been in it, he has been a great champion for looked-after children and done a great deal to bring them to our attention and that of successive Governments, which is a substantial achievement.

Perhaps it is because I am an economist by training that I quite often like to start by trying to put a problem into perspective in terms of figures. Therefore, I found the House of Commons briefing, which came out in May this year and provides some of the statistics about children in care, very interesting. It told me—and a number of people have mentioned this already—that there are some 65,000 looked-after children in England, which is a very small proportion, about 0.6%, of the total number of children in this country. The figure has increased slightly during the past five years. In 2007, it was 59,000. Perhaps the influence of Baby P and the Haringey affair connected with it have meant that more children have been placed into care.

Most of these young people in care—58% of them—are aged from 10 to 18, while 36% are aged one to nine and 6% are under one. Boys account for 56% of them and girls 44%; 77% are white and 23% black, ethnic minority or of mixed race. I found this an interesting set of statistics: 62% are in care because of abuse or neglect at home, 12% because they come from dysfunctional families and 9% because of family stress. In other words, 83% of those in care are there because of problems with their families and 62% of them because there has been neglect or abuse at home. That is very significant. Only 14%, about 8,000, are in residential accommodation, putting children’s homes, residential care homes and residential schools together. Although there has been a change in the law, approximately half of these are still outside the area where their family is located. In other words, they cannot easily meet up with their families, with all the consequences that a number of noble Lords have drawn attention to.

The cost to the state of those in residential care is about £1 billion a year. In other words, each one of those young people costs the state rather over £100,000. The cost of those in foster care—the large majority of them—is £2.5 billion, approximately £37,000 per child. When the noble Lord, Lord Laming, talked about the financial advantages of putting children into foster care, you can see the difference. I know that the local authority where I live, Surrey County Council, has been much influenced by the very substantial cost of putting children into residential care, partly because it managed to close most of its own residential homes and has had a very expensive time trying to cope with the number of young children.

As my noble friend Lady Brinton mentioned, it is not surprising that we see quite a number of children running away, particularly from residential care, yet there are no adequate statistics at the moment. Again, I echo noble Lords who have asked the Minister whether we are going to get some adequate statistics about those who are running away. In the light of all this, it is not really surprising that these vulnerable young people, many of whom have been abused to start with at home, should find themselves involved in the many cases there have been over the years including, recently, those in Rochdale and Derby, and perhaps not least the Jimmy Savile situation, which has been very much before us over the past few weeks.

I was interested in the quotation that was given in the briefing produced for us by the Library. I pay tribute to Edward Scott, because I thought it was an extremely useful briefing. It quoted the chief executive of Barnardo’s, who said:

“Our services have heard countless stories of men waiting outside care homes to befriend these unwitting children, some as young as twelve, desperate for love”,

which picks up a point made by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about the need for these young people to feel, and to be, loved. The chief executive continued:

“Men attract them with flashy cars, gifts and feigned kindness, waiting for the child to fall in love with them before abusing them on a scale which is incomprehensible to most, but sadly very real”.

I will quote two further bits that come from the same briefing. One is from the review from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre:

“Offenders often act together, establishing a relationship with a child or children before sexually exploiting them. Some victims of ‘street grooming’ may believe that the offender is in fact an older ‘boyfriend’; these victims introduce their peers to the offender group who might then go on to be sexually exploited as well. Abuse may occur at a number of locations within a region and on several occasions. ‘Localised grooming’ was the term used by CEOP in the intelligence requests issued to police forces and other service agencies in order to define the data we wished to receive”.

Given that situation, it is and was extremely disturbing that the internal review from Rochdale stated:

“However, for those children who came into contact with children’s social care, it often appeared that ‘no further action’ would be taken. Case files state that the children were often considered to be ‘making their own choices’ and to be ‘engaging in consensual sexual activity’”.

That is extremely disturbing, but there is a real dilemma for those who run children’s homes. They often contain some of the more difficult young people, 14, 15 and 16 year-olds who have proved to be difficult to put into or keep in foster care. Do you treat those young people reasonably as grown-ups, or do you lock them up? Locking them up just makes them more resentful. If you want them to grow into adults and take responsibility for their lives, the last thing that we want to do is for those homes to be seen as prisons.

The response one sees in Rochdale reminds one very much of the problem that arose in relation to Victoria Climbié and Baby P: a failure of joined-up working on the part of the local agencies, which, because of those failures, missed opportunities to take early and preventive action. I had cause to discuss issues of youth policy with Surrey Police not long ago, and one issue that came up on that occasion was its feeling that it wanted to work much more closely not just with local social services but with schools. As it pointed out, often, if the family is chaotic and dysfunctional, the schools see things happening before anybody else, because the children react at school. It said that it would be so useful if it knew when children were misbehaving in school sometimes, because that would make it aware of the fact that problems were rising in that family and then it, and social services, could take preventive action.

Many of us have asked: where should we go? I pick up on the basic recommendations of the Munro report. What should be done about this? One aspect is early intervention. Where there are dysfunctional or chaotic families or where abuse is known, the sooner one can put together teams that work with that family, the more probable it is that something can be done about it. We want early intervention wherever possible.

Eileen Munro’s second recommendation is to give professionals the time and scope to do the job properly. The story that we have heard so frequently is of inconsistent care, of so many placements, so many social workers—due to the turnover, and so forth. We also know how hard pressed many social workers are, what huge caseloads they are often expected to bear and the fact that they are not given the time to do the job properly. It came up in the Munro report that too much time is spent on bureaucracy and that there are too many tick-boxes, and not enough time looking after the children—developing, as the noble Lord, Lord Laming, said, the therapeutic and healing processes necessary.

I have two final points: the need for more joined-up thinking; and the point that the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and others made, the need for proper training, continued emphasis on training and the quality of people in the service.