Children and Families Bill

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I, too, lend my support to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and will link what I am going to say to my comments on Amendment 56. I have a grandson at a secondary school in Gloucestershire and, like the noble Lord, I was fascinated to see the material with which he and his parents were provided. Frankly, it was all about today and not about tomorrow. Although the quality is fairly good, I am quite certain that it could be improved.

Clause 70, later in this Bill, refers to the fact that education, health and care plans are allegedly to be denied to those being held in detention. Last week I had a meeting with two Ministers in the Department for Education who told me what progress has been made. What is most promising is that young offender institutions are to be classed as mainstream schools as far as the provision of the Bill is concerned. In welcoming the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, that this guidance should be provided for schools, I should mention that young offender institutions should be included, absolutely for the reasons set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. Above all, we must not exclude people in detention from learning to look after their children.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to underline the important point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and in so doing I should declare an interest as vice-president of the charity Relate. I am very supportive indeed of schools playing a full role in preparing children for all aspects of life, and those must include the importance of personal relationships, family relationships and parenting responsibilities. From my experience of running an organisation that helped to deliver relationship education in a large number of schools, as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, it is not always teachers who do the teaching in the classroom. I know of many schools that ask experts in relationship matters to come in from outside because they are trained to do this work. I recall seeing a report from Ofsted which suggested that trained relationship practitioners are more confident and better able to deal with some aspects of relationship education, particularly the more intimate and sexual issues. If teachers have not had the appropriate training, teachers can feel a little less than confident about it. I wanted just to underline that important point.

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[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

Since this issue has been raised, I am going to jump on the bandwagon just to say that very difficult cases are tried by designated and senior judges and family judges of the High Court where expert evidence is absolutely crucial. I have to say that I have tried cases where I have ended up with 11 expert witnesses on shaken babies with subdural haematomas and so on, asking whether it was the parents or a parent, or whether it was an accident. These are extremely difficult cases. We were greatly assisted by CAFCASS and sometimes assisted by social workers, but even in these difficult cases, the social workers came and went. In some cases there was no consistent social worker to put in a consistent, high-quality report from their point of view. Again and again, High Court and senior circuit judges have asked for an independent social worker, which the local authority has been only too grateful to agree to. That is because the authority knows that in these difficult cases it has not actually been able to do the job itself.

In an ideal world, of course, independent social workers are not needed, but we live in a far from ideal world with children at extraordinary risk of physical injury as well as sexual injury. Here it is physical injury with which I am concerned. Again, as the noble Earl has just said, we need the doctors. I am not sure what the doctors are likely to be paid, but from the point of view of a senior consultant, it is derisory. There is a limit to pro bono, particularly if a doctor has to be in court for a day or two days. Quite simply, these really difficult cases will not be properly tried if they do not have the right experts.

Norgrove was absolutely right to want to cut it down. In the majority of cases it would be quite wrong to go in for the luxury of lots and lots of experts. I am concerned only about the small minority of extremely difficult cases, where the current system is not going to be just to the child, whose welfare, ultimately, is paramount.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

My Lords, it is terribly important that this debate is kept in perspective. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has done that very well, making it clear that we are talking about a very small number of cases, involving very difficult issues, where of course an expert’s advice will be very helpful.

More broadly, I very much support the thrust of what David Norgrove said in the report of the family justice review and it is really important that we are seen to be limiting expert evidence to what is really necessary to decide, so that the judges narrow it down to the key issues where we need that expert advice and it does not add to yet more reports, with all of that adding to delay.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, quoted Anthony Douglas, the chief executive of CAFCASS. I declare an interest as chair of CAFCASS. In the intervening period I have had the opportunity to have a quick word with Anthony Douglas and the context in which he made those remarks is one in which we have done a lot of work to ensure that both local authority social workers and CAFCASS guardians are working up to the absolute limit of their professional knowledge and capacity, and that you need an expert report only in that very small number of cases which take them beyond their limits.

I have spoken recently to groups of CAFCASS practitioners who tell me that they now feel empowered and have renewed confidence because in the majority of cases their expert advice, analytical skills and the assessment that they can offer to the courts are being accepted as expert social work opinion and advice. Sometimes recently they have felt that their professionalism has been questioned, which is a danger when we have too many of these expert reports. So I hope that we can conduct this debate with a sense of perspective and balance, while understanding that we are talking about a small number of cases where we need those expert reports to deal with very specific issues.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, have put this very precisely. I was the chair of CAFCASS when the problem significantly arose and began the work to tackle the issue, together with the chief executive and the board. The real issue was the length of time that children were waiting for decisions in their cases, and every day for a child is vital. Experts were called to verify what another expert was saying or to give another opinion, and there has been a great improvement in the time taken to reach a decision in these cases since we have streamlined that.

I declare an interest as vice-president of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which prepares extremely complex expert witness reports in cases of very serious child sexual abuse. I think the Minister is well aware of its work. In those cases there have been real difficulties in getting the right expert to the right place because, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, mentioned, local authorities themselves have called the experts in to add to the decision.

All I want to say in this debate is: let us keep the focus on the child and make decisions as quickly as possible, but in complex cases let us make sure that those decisions are based on the right information.

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[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

I understand the intention behind the amendment, particularly in terms of promoting the best interests of the child and the child’s welfare, but I also feel that the signal it would send would not be the right one at this stage. I have heard the president talking about this, and I think that at the moment his mantra is, “It can be done, it will be done, it must be done”. It is all about turning around the culture from one of delay to one of urgency, with all parties involved in this—that is, the judiciary, local authorities, CAFCASS and others—doing all that they can to ensure that these cases are dealt with as quickly as they can be and in a way that is commensurate with the best interests of the child.

I was very much reinforced in this recently. I attended the National Children and Adults Services Conference in Harrogate on Friday. It was a very good three-day event with a number of Ministers and others speaking. I went to a specialist workshop all about completing care proceedings in 26 weeks. Several academics, particularly from the University of East Anglia, presented some initial findings from the research that they have been doing into the impact of the new public law outline to try to move to a 26-week time limit, and particularly the impact of what is called the tri-borough project with Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham. I have been to visit that project myself and the results, frankly, are extremely impressive: already 50% of cases are being resolved in less than 26 weeks.

Even with the knowledge that we were going to have this clause in the Bill or at least debate it, national case duration averages were already coming down from what was something like 49 weeks to about 37 weeks, and they are on a downward trajectory. While I fully understand the case that is being made for those very exceptional cases where the extensions will be needed, there is sufficient flexibility in the Bill as drafted for that. I would be concerned about anything that diluted this very important message about trying to move away from delay in the family court system.

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not briefed by the NSPCC but I have a brief from the Magistrates’ Association, which makes it clear that it also supports the 26-week time limit but also agrees that there should be specific extensions for eight weeks where people can apply to the court. It would probably be most helpful if I raised the questions that the Magistrates’ Association has raised in the brief that it sent me. Before I do so, though, I want to make the point that the examples of exceptions that my noble friend Lady Jones gave are very far from theoretical, because two of those examples I personally dealt with in the past month. They were very real examples of something that I understood very clearly.

The first of the questions that the Magistrates’ Association raised in its brief to me is really a concern that an application for an eight-week extension should resist that extension being a contested hearing, and obviously the decision of the court should be final. If there is to be a contested hearing on an eight-week extension, though, it should be as short and focused as possible. The second point that the Magistrates’ Association made was that it is not clear, from the association’s understanding, that there is any limit to the maximum number of successive extensions. The association’s final point is to ask whether there is any right of appeal if a lower court—although perhaps “lower court” is not the right expression—decides not to grant an extension. Is there any right of appeal to a higher jurisdiction?