Children and Young People: Local Authority Care

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on securing this critically important debate and introducing it so expertly.

Pressure on children’s social care is at an all-time high. As we have already heard, there are almost 84,000 children in the care system. In my view we are facing a perfect storm, with escalating numbers of young people coming into a system that has become increasingly focused on delivering late intervention services, in particular high-cost residential care placements. Councils are unable to invest in early intervention services that can prevent families reaching crisis point and children having to enter care in the first place.

The figures are stark. On average, the cost of a residential placement is four times that of a foster placement. In the last 10 years, spending on early intervention has almost halved, while spending on late intervention has risen by almost one-half.

We know that more children are entering care with complex or multiple needs. There has been an increase in the number of older teenagers entering care. School age children in care are more likely to have special educational needs and mental health problems. Children in the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods are over 10 times more likely to be in care or on a protection plan than those in the least deprived 10%.

I think we can all agree that children in care need stability to heal and thrive, yet for too many their experience of care is characterised by instability: being moved from home to home or school to school, being separated from siblings, being moved far away from their support networks, or facing a revolving door of social workers and other professionals.

Over the past decade, as we have heard, there has been a significant change in the way that care placements, particularly residential care placements, are provided. As of last year, private providers operated over 85% of all children’s homes. The Competition and Markets Authority has reported how this changing market has led to what it calls a power imbalance between private sector providers and local authority commissioners, reducing local authorities’ control over the type of provision that is developed, where it is located, and the cost. Little wonder that there are increasing concerns about the role of private equity companies in providing residential care, excessive profit levels among the largest providers and the rising sums that councils are having to spend on residential care.

A recent report by the investigative journalist Justine Smith in The House magazine, already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, provided truly alarming figures, including a 25% hike in prices in just two years, at the same time as 23% profit margins were taken by the biggest operators. The Competition and Markets Authority report also highlighted that the level of debt carried by some of the largest private providers presents a real risk to local authorities and the wider care system. A real concern is that studies have shown that for-profit children’s homes are too often rated of lower quality than other provision types.

We need to introduce a more effective children’s social care commissioning system as a matter of urgency to help reduce the reliance on private sector firms that are carrying large amounts of debt. I can put it no better than the words of Josh MacAlister, chair of the independent review of children’s social care, who said:

“When sovereign wealth funds are investing in your country’s children’s homes, you know there is something very wrong”.


Like the noble Lords, Lord Laming and Lord Wood, I am concerned about the use of unregulated care homes, which is the subject of another recent Observer investigation. It seems to me that something is going very wrong. I would be grateful if the Minister told me what the Government are doing about this.

Sadly, I do not have enough time to talk, as I would have liked, about the Government’s strategy for reforming children’s social care. As I have said before, it is a very much a step in the right direction but does not go far or fast enough to address the scale of the challenge. I would therefore like to finish by asking the Minister a couple of questions. First, the Government’s Spring Budget provided some welcome additional money for extra children’s home placements. It said that the Government were going to develop proposals to combat profiteering in the sector and look at new ways of unlocking investment in children’s homes. Could the Minister please spell out what these proposals are and how quickly they are likely to come into effect? Finally, could she also give a timetable for when the Government plan to publish a children’s social care Bill, which would provide a vehicle to bring forward many of the reforms of children’s social care that this Government committed to in their Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy?

Schools (Mental Health Professionals) Bill [HL]

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 1st March 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to introduce this Bill on a subject that is very close to my heart. I have been calling for counselling to be available in all schools since I first entered the House. I declare an interest as vice-president of the charity Relate. My heartfelt thanks go to the many organisations in the sector that have shared their expertise and briefings with me in preparing for this debate.

Only last Thursday, we had a good debate on the vital role that schools play in promoting good mental health and well-being. Along with other noble Lords, I talked about the need for a whole-school approach to mental health and highlighted evidence pointing out the links between children and young people experiencing mental health difficulties and attendance, exclusion, bullying and academic attainment. My Bill, which provides for all schools—primary and secondary —to have a counsellor or equivalent-level mental health professional, very much fits with that whole-school approach.

Our many previous debates on children’s mental health have revealed a fair degree of consensus that the scale of the problem is growing and requires an ambitious and comprehensive response. It is also clear that the Government take this issue seriously and have taken important steps to improve mental health support in schools, the NHS and the community. I have always welcomed that action. The only real difference is whether that action is sufficient and nationally available. My Bill is about plugging one vital gap in mental health support teams that many who are active in the sector have highlighted, which would improve much-needed mental health support for many young people.

Our debate today is timely. This week’s Resolution Foundation report, on poor mental health preventing people in their 20s working, provoked a predictably wide range of reactions in the press. However, there is simply no getting away from the fact that, unless they are tackled early, mental health problems can easily escalate as a young person enters adulthood and the workplace.

Let me briefly explain why the state of our children’s mental health and the support available to them is so important. I know that it is familiar territory for many noble Lords here, but it is vital to put my Bill into context. According to NHS statistics, almost one in five—18%—of children between the age of seven and 16 years old have a probable mental disorder. For slightly older children, almost half—44%—of those aged between 17 and 18 were classified as experiencing high psychological stress.

According to a report last May by the Children’s Commissioner, the number of young people urgently referred to mental health services had tripled since 2019. Last year, less than half—44%—of the 1.5 million children who needed additional support had received a CAHMS appointment. The average waiting time in England between referral and the start of treatment is the highest it has been in two years.

According to a survey conducted last year by Young Minds, 65% of the young people surveyed who were struggling with their mental health had not asked for any sort of formal help. Critically, 61% of those waiting for some support had stopped attending school, college or work, with one in five children waiting for support missing six months or more of school. According to a YouGov poll commissioned by Barnardo’s, 61% of parents with school-age children experiencing mental health difficulties said that those difficulties were affecting their performance at school. Almost half noted a drop in concentration and focus on their schoolwork.

The cause of this increase is much debated, including in this Chamber. In last week’s debate, although I recognised that many schools are doing a great job, I pointed to the increasing pressure from the academic environment, the growing influence of social media and the online world, and the lasting impact of the pandemic. Indeed, surveys show that most parents are worried about their children’s mental health, with the impact of social media a major cause of concern.

In January 2023, the House of Commons Education Committee stated that it had seen

“overwhelming evidence indicating a radical increase in mental health difficulties amongst school pupils since the Covid-19 pandemic”.

Additionally, the committee argued that the capacity of mental health services was “grossly inadequate”.

I turn to the detail of the Bill. Clause 1 places a duty on governing bodies of state-funded schools in England to provide access to a qualified mental health practitioner or school counsellor. Clause 1(2)(b) states that the qualified mental health professional or school counsellor should be an individual with a graduate-level or postgraduate-level qualification of that name accredited by NHS England. Normally that would be a counsellor or a psychotherapist. Clause 1(2)(c) states that schools with 100 pupils or fewer may collaborate with other schools and share access to this provision, while Clause 2 places a duty on the Secretary of State to give, or make arrangements for, financial assistance to state-aided schools to help them to meet their duty to provide this mental health support.

Before explaining precisely what the Bill would achieve, I reiterate my support for the concept of mental health support teams in schools, which were first piloted in 2019. These teams support a whole-school approach to mental health, working closely with school staff and delivering group and individual interventions offering low-intensity therapy—that is what cognitive behavioural therapy is called in the trade—for children and young people with mild to moderate mental health difficulties.

The teams are mainly staffed by educational mental health practitioners—I am sorry about all the jargon today—who study on a one-year postgraduate course. By last December, nearly 400 mental health support teams were operating in schools and colleges across England covering some 3 million children, which is roughly 35% of pupils. The Government have said that they aim to increase that coverage to 50% by April next year, although that will be considerably lower for primary schools and of course it still leaves millions of children and young people without any support.

An early evaluation of the programme found that many schools reported that they needed most help for children and young people whose mental health exceeded the threshold that the mental health support team practitioners could provide but either did not meet the threshold for CAMHS or needed support while they waited, so a gap in provision is becoming clear. However, I was encouraged by the evaluation showing that, where mental health support teams and counselling services were already working together, the teams were able to pick up and deal effectively with the lower-intensity need, enabling counsellors to work with the more complex issues. Those are two different roles and skill sets but they are a mix that works well together.

I was struck by the research evidence from Barnardo’s, which delivers a number of these teams across England. It found that support teams are effective at supporting children and young people with mild to moderate mental health problems; they improve outcomes for those with access to them and, critically, are cost effective, saving the Government £1.90 for every £1 invested. However, the research also identified a specific gap in the current model in addressing the needs of children with moderate or more complex needs, those with special educational needs or younger children for whom cognitive behavioural therapy is often not appropriate or who do not respond well to its structure. Simply put, some children need to explore their feelings more fully in other ways that are not time limited. The report recommended that the model should include school counsellors to fill this gap, which is what my Bill is all about: ensuring that every school also has access to a qualified school counsellor or psychotherapist.

I shall explain what has been called this missing middle in what I hope are everyday terms. Qualified counsellors and psychotherapists can work safely with young people who are experiencing trauma and abuse, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, violence, anger, issues with food and eating, bereavement, bullying and so on but none the less still do not meet the threshold for CAMHS. Lower-intensity interventions that are currently delivered by existing mental health support team practitioners might include such issues as motivation, exam anxiety, mild to moderate anxiety and depression and behavioural difficulties. Please do not get me wrong: existing practitioners within these teams provide a vital and valuable role, working with children experiencing less intensive symptoms linked to their poor mental health, but many are not trained to work with children who are seen to be at active risk, such as those who may be self-harming or experiencing suicidal thoughts.

There is a clear need for a wider range of therapeutic interventions to be delivered in schools by counsellors and psychotherapists, whose training generally lasts between two and four years, which enables them to hold a greater level of complexity and risk. Without a clear pathway to counselling where required, issues can easily spiral, increasing pressure on already overstretched CAMHS. It is very much a question of both/and, not either/or.

I turn briefly to workforce considerations. When we have had these debates before, Ministers have often raised workforce issues as the reason for the slow pace of rollout or the limited scope of support teams. However, there is good news to be had. The workforce challenge is not simply a question of training more practitioners from scratch. The major counselling and psychotherapy registration bodies—BACP, UKCP and NCPS—collectively represent over 25,000 therapists who currently work with children, most of whom are trained to work with considerably greater levels of complexity than existing support team staff. According to BACP’s most recent member survey, these existing therapists have the capacity to offer over 50,000 counselling sessions for children and young people every week. I strongly urge the Government to look at ways of harnessing the capacity of this workforce in schools, including exploring the integration of counselling within the national mental health support team model. This model has a richer skill mix and the benefit of providing important career progression opportunities and learning opportunities for existing staff, where there have been high levels of turnover.

I cannot end without a quick word on funding. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that the last couple of years have seen welcome increases in funding, but the money is not ring-fenced, nor is it presented in a format that easily enables us to look at total spending across the NHS, schools and elsewhere. There is simply no getting away from the fact that years of underfunding and neglect of children’s mental health services have taken their toll. Recent increases do not in any way match the scale of demand. Back in 2022, the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee, in those days chaired by the current Chancellor, called on the Government to increase the funding and scale of mental health support teams to cover all schools by 2027-28. Might we expect to hear something to this effect in next week’s Budget?

To conclude, we have the opportunity to transform the landscape if mental health support teams are rolled out to all schools and colleges, as I fervently hope they are, and within that model include a school counsellor in every school, as my Bill proposes. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her thoughtful response. It is true that we share broadly the same aspirations and, as she said, there is plenty in the spirit of the Bill that we can all agree on. I thank all noble Lords who contributed to this excellent debate. I know we often say, “It’s been an excellent debate”, but this really has been, and I have learned so much from it. It has really added to my understanding.

I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for pointing out the position of children detained under the Mental Health Act and in secure units. That was an extremely important point. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for his support and for emphasising that children need to go into schools ready to learn. At the moment, too many do not. I thank him for his support and for saying that the Bill would ramp up the provision needed.

I am particularly indebted to my noble friend Lord Russell, who, as other noble Lords said, so movingly referred to his personal experience. He highlighted the plight of parents who cannot afford to pay for the provision that they know their children and young people need. It is heart-rending, frankly, to think of that. He vividly described the missing middle that I have been talking about in the Bill. I just wish I had thought of that analogy myself.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, for his insightful contribution and for raising the issue, which I had not thought of before, of children with Tourette’s, and how that is another example of children falling through the gaps in provision. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester made a powerful and wide-ranging intervention; I was grateful to him for drawing the links with poverty and disadvantage.

It has been my pleasure to work closely with the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld. I am so grateful for her support for the principle of the Bill and for reminding us about the importance of family hubs. As she said, there must be hope, and I hope that the Bill can in some way add to that hope.

I thank my noble friend Lord Storey for his historical perspective on the development of mental health provision in both the NHS and schools. I thank him for his focus on teaching and non-teaching staff, which was a really important point.

I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his general support and welcome, and particularly for the way he highlighted the problem of navigating the system, which so many people and parents find so difficult.

Putting that all together, I have been heartened by the cross-party support for the spirit of the Bill. There is a strong understanding that at the moment too many young people are in that missing middle and falling through the gaps in provision. I am firmly of the view that mental health support teams, which do an excellent job, must contain professionals who are properly qualified to help young people who have moderate to more complex needs so that they do not fall through the gaps because they still do not meet the threshold for CAMHS.

I thank everyone for their contributions. It is heartening to have so much support on the principle. There is perhaps slightly less agreement on the precise way of securing it, but the consensus on the importance of this issue has been exemplary. That is why I hope we can carry on these discussions. I would welcome any amendments to the Bill to explore the practicalities that people have pointed out might not be quite right at the moment. I hope we can find a way that will allow us to take this debate forward and find a way forward. We all wait with bated breath for next week’s Budget—let us see what happens there—but I hope to continue engaging with the Minister on this important issue.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on securing this debate. We have had a number of debates on children’s mental health in recent times, and the role of school always features, but today’s debate challenges us to think about the wider role of schools in relation to children’s well-being and confronts the perennial question of the purpose of education. Is it simply about academic attainment and preparation for the world of work? Is it also about preparing young people more widely for adulthood, including how they fulfil their potential in all spheres of life, become full citizens in our society and build healthy relationships? Is it also about providing the skills to build their personal resilience and emotional well-being to help deal with the knocks that life inevitably brings?

The answer, of course, is a combination of those things, but not everyone will agree on the precise mix. It might be trite to say that growing up in the modern world feels more complicated, with a whole new range of pitfalls to navigate, but I think it is true. It is clear that young people face increasing pressures from the academic environment, the growing influence of social media and the online world, and the lasting impact of the pandemic. I was struck by some research conducted for the Mental Health Foundation which found that the advent of technology, while offering unprecedented connectivity, also introduces new stressors, as individuals battle with the constant pressure to meet online standards and portray an idealised version of their lives.

It is worth reminding ourselves that The Good Childhood Report 2023, which has already been referred to, focused on children and young people’s experiences of school. Frankly, it did not make for comfortable reading, with more children and young people unhappy with school than with the other nine aspects of life they were asked about. Primary and secondary schools have an important role to play and have great potential to be a protective factor for mental health, but sadly that is not how too many young people feel about school. In a recent survey by Young Minds of more than 14,000 young people, only 3% said educational settings were a positive influence on their mental health, while 59% said that school or college had affected them negatively in some way. What is going on?

As we have heard already today, many schools have become heavily focused on exam results, and pressure to do well in exams can be overwhelming for some young people. Fundamentally, I believe that a whole-school approach is needed which creates a school culture and environment that has well-being at the core, where mental health and well-being are promoted and protected and which includes all pupils, students, teachers and staff members. In my experience, this happens only when the leadership of the school is actively engaged in and championing this work. It means ensuring that every adult who interacts with a child has the knowledge, understanding and wherewithal to support the child. Of course, parents and carers play a key role in teaching children and young people how to understand and manage their feelings as they grow up, and I would like to see more support in this area.

We know that staff in school are often the first point of contact for a young person struggling with their mental health; hence, they need to be provided with knowledge and understanding around behaviour and mental health and how to identify when a child is struggling. An independent study from NatCen on adolescent mental health and educational attainment observed a strong association between mental health difficulties between the ages of 11 and 14 and later academic attainment at age 16. The study found that children experiencing poor mental health are three times less likely than their peers to pass five GSCEs. I am sure that most schools understand this link, but it seems crucial that mental health issues are not viewed as yet another problem issue that they are forced to deal with. It is about creating the very foundations for learning and academic success.

Furthermore, exclusion from school is strongly related to poor mental health in children and young people, so we should be concerned that the rates of exclusion from school have increased in the last five years. I was interested to read in a recent study that, on average, children who had experienced at least one fixed-period exclusion in the year before attending counselling lost significantly fewer school sessions to exclusion in the year when they had counselling. That was from Place2Be, a charity that operates in many schools, providing drop-in sessions, family work and one-to-one counselling for those with more complex issues. Its analysis of pupils receiving counselling indicates that consistently poor mental health over time was associated with higher levels of persistent absence, which we heard about earlier, whereas improving or consistently good mental health was often associated with lower levels of persistent absence. Its findings also suggest that strengthening children’s engagement with and enjoyment of school over time was associated with reduced persistent absence. The same can be said about bullying but I do not have time to go into that now.

Preventing mental health problems arising in the first place is key. When support is available in schools in a non-stigmatising format, young people benefit. Young people themselves have talked about the need for safe spaces at school and safe conversations. By intervening early, building resilience and nurturing a positive understanding of emotions and well-being, we can ensure that young people learn lifelong skills so that their problems do not grow with them. That can be done through whole-class work, lessons and the curriculum. Critically, it needs to start at primary school age, to which we do not give enough attention.

Finally, I turn to mental health support teams. We have heard quite a bit about them and I have always supported them but, alongside many others, I have argued that the rollout should have proceeded at a much faster pace. As we have heard, on the current plans there is funding to achieve only 50% coverage of schools by 2025, leaving over half of schools, particularly primary schools, uncovered, and pupils without the support they need. To be clear, MHSTs are a welcome and important part of the jigsaw of mental health support, but they go only so far.

I will have a lot more to say on the subject next Friday at the Second Reading of my Private Member’s Bill, particularly my concern about children urgently needing mental health support who meet neither the mental health support teams’ “mild to moderate” criteria nor the criteria of specialist CAMHS support, with its very high access thresholds and extremely long waiting lists. Noble Lords should watch this space.

Children’s Care Homes: Private Equity

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am glad that the noble Lord used the word “profiteering”: he beat me to it. As he has heard me say before, the Government are not against profit-making but they are against profiteering. Having much greater financial transparency will go some way to addressing his concerns, but the fundamental thing that has to shift is having fewer children in children’s homes and more children in foster care. That is why the Government place such emphasis on supporting foster carers and, indeed, kinship carers.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, a recent DfE review found that a third of the just-over 6,500 youngsters in residential care homes could have gone to foster homes, which usually offer better outcomes and a better quality of life, and cost about a 10th of the price. The Minister has just referred to this. What precisely is going to happen to ensure that there is proper and meaningful investment in foster and kinship carers to reduce the councils’ dependence on some of these private equity residential care providers and stop this extreme and excessive profiteering?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness will be aware that we are investing £36 million in foster care, starting with work with local authorities in the north-east to encourage recruitment of more foster carers. That programme has got off to a very good start. We have also launched the first ever national kinship care strategy, backed by £20 million of investment in the financial year 2024-25.

Children’s Social Care Implementation Strategy (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, on opening the debate so compellingly, and I congratulate her and the whole committee on this excellent report.

It happens that it follows, helpfully, the recent debate on the implementation of the Children and Families Act 2014. We were told then by the Minister, who is on duty again tonight, that many of our recommendations would be considered and taken forward as part of the implementation strategy we are debating tonight. I welcome that commitment and look forward to working with Ministers on it.

In the short time available, I shall make some general points about children’s social care. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has reminded us, the independent review of children’s social care called for an immediate investment of £2.6 billion to address the existing crisis in children’s social care. It talked about a revolution in family help to prevent children entering care where possible. It talked, as we have been told, of a

“once in a generation opportunity”

to better protect children, deliver the right support for families at the right time and create a sustainable system that delivers value for money.

However, more than a year later we seem to be little further forward on the reform that is so urgently needed. The Government have pledged just £200 million over a two-year period to fund 12 family first pathfinders and regional care co-operatives, but the national rollout of new family help services will not happen until 2026 at the earliest, and there is no legislative timetable for introducing further reform. I agree that we need to see a far greater sense of urgency and pace to these reforms.

Recent analysis commissioned by some of the UK’s leading children’s charities reveals that the funding will now need to exceed £2.6 billion due to the impact of inflation and the cost of delaying reforms. That research supports the Public Services Committee’s finding that the level of investment in the stable homes strategy is “inadequate” and will have long-term social and financial costs.

I underline the importance of a shift to a focus on early intervention. As we have heard so many times, not least in reports from the APPG for children in recent years, we need to switch from crisis to preventive work to protect children properly. That means championing the importance of family help and support.

The research that I mentioned by children’s charities has already found that local authorities across England increased their spending on children’s services by £800 million in 2021-22, a substantial 8% surge from the previous year. However, as we have heard, over 80% of that increase was funnelled into crisis intervention: safeguarding, child protection and the ever rising number of children in care. In short, of the additional money spent, £4 in every £5 went on late intervention services. In the light of that research, the Public Services Committee’s recommendations—to roll out early help nationally and to ensure that this is linked to family hubs—are welcome. Unless this pattern of expenditure is shifted significantly, frankly, nothing is ever going to change.

Turning very briefly to child protection, the record number of children who are now looked after by the state, the horrific killings of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, and the abuse of disabled children recently uncovered in residential settings in Doncaster are powerful reminders of the urgent need for reform. Meaningful, sustainable change requires long-term investment, yes, but the Government must also introduce an emergency package of measures to stabilise the current child protection system. Can the Minister please provide an update of what is happening in this area?

We also need to see sustained funding for family help services, ranging from children’s centres and youth clubs to targeted support on issues such as drug and alcohol misuse, to stop problems further spiralling. Of course, we cannot ignore the workforce challenges, which we have already heard about from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris.

Finally, on links with wider policy, particularly on health and disability, what assurances can the Minister give that the major conditions strategy will focus on children and young people, in particular mental health, to help alleviate the additional pressure that the crisis in mental health support places on social care? Can the Minister say what support will be made available to adopted children needing help to overcome trauma and what special measures are being put in place for children in care, who are four times as likely to experience mental health issues as their peers?

The Government’s test-and-review approach to reform is unlikely to lead to the level of investment and changes so desperately needed. I conclude once again by urging the Government to reconsider the scope for further investment at their next spending review.

A Failure of Implementation (Children and Families Act 2014 Committee Report)

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Children and Families Act 2014 Committee A Failure of implementation (HL Paper 100).

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure and privilege to open this debate. The purpose of the Select Committee’s special inquiry, which I had the honour to chair, was to conduct post-legislative scrutiny on the Children and Families Act 2014, a seminal and wide-ranging piece of legislation. I declare my interest as co-chair of the All-Party Group for Children and my former interest as chair of Cafcass.

I start by thanking a number of people: my fellow committee members for all their highly insightful contributions; our excellent clerks, Theo Demolder and Christopher Clarke; our policy analyst, Sarah Jennings, who stepped up magnificently when Theo moved on; and our operations officer, Matteo Garelli, for whom no task was ever too much effort. I also thank Louise Shewey, our communications officer who was involved throughout, not just at the end. Finally, I thank our two special advisers, Professor Rob George and Professor Julie Selwyn.

The Act was envisaged as a landmark piece of legislation, giving greater protection to vulnerable children, including those being fostered and adopted; better support for children whose parents were separating; a new system to help children with special educational needs and disabilities; and help for parents to balance work and family life. Given the breadth of the Act, the committee focused on areas that we felt would be most likely to benefit from further scrutiny—principally adoption, family justice and employment rights.

One area we looked at which we felt was missing from the Act was mental health, because when those systems that I just mentioned fail, it is children’s mental health that suffers. I hope that other colleagues will focus on that in the debate today. We also looked briefly at special educational needs but, to ensure that our insights could feed into the SEND Green Paper, we sent a letter to the Government in May setting out our concerns, well before publication of the main report.

So how did we go about our work? We took oral evidence from 44 expert witnesses and received more than 150 written evidence submissions. Above all, however, we wanted to hear directly from members of the public who might not otherwise take part in Select Committee inquiries. We visited a school and a SEND centre. We spent a day at the court in Oxford and an afternoon at the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell. We held round-table discussions with birth parents, adoptive parents in Yorkshire, young people with experience of the family justice system and people working in mental health, as well as conducting an online survey.

Our reluctant conclusions were that, despite the admirable intentions of those who worked hard to get this Act on the statute book, the sheer breadth of the areas covered by the Act, a lack of any real focus given to implementation and a lack of joined-up action at all levels—compounded, I must say, by incessant churn by government—have contributed to too many children and their families feeling let down by the systems, resulting in poor SEND services, increasing mental health referral waiting lists and ever-growing delays in family courts. In short, we felt that it was a missed opportunity.

We concluded that much of the legislation had, frankly, sat on the shelf and languished as a result of that lack of focus on implementation, poor or non-existent data and inadequate monitoring of the impact of the Act to see how well it was working, hence the title of our report. In my view, it was not until our inquiry was established that the Government gave any thought to a comprehensive post-legislative review of the Act, eight years after it received Royal Assent. After pressing, we finally received a post-legislative memorandum, despite the Government’s public commitment to produce such a memorandum three to five years after an Act receives Royal Assent. Eight years is a long time in the crucial early years of a child. Post-legislative scrutiny, by either the Government or Parliament, is not just a “nice to have”; it is crucial to ensure that legislation is achieving its goals, providing value for money and improving people’s lives.

Why is it that we spend so many hours doing line-by-line scrutiny of legislation but next to no time following through to see whether implementation has happened and has worked? I cannot help feeling that we have the balance badly wrong. This is a wider point about how we govern and the purpose of legislation, which is way above my pay grade, but I hope that those in positions of power will reflect on how post-legislative scrutiny can be taken more seriously and not viewed just as a “nice to have”. There is so much more that government and Parliament could do.

Our report made a number of specific recommendations on how the Government could realise their ambitions contained in the Act across adoption, family justice and employment rights. I shall briefly go through some of the main ones. They included establishing an outcome-focused taskforce, accountable to the Secretary of State and dedicated to addressing the unacceptable ethnic and racial disparities in the adoption system; reinstating the statutory national adoption matching register on its original terms, working with commercial service providers to build a more functional platform which combined the usability of existing services with the matching support and referral requirements of the statutory register; improving post-placement support for adopters and kinship carers, including the expansion of the Adoption Support Fund, allowing it to be used for more than therapy and ensuring that it is focused also on early intervention; and developing a safe and modern digital contact system for post-adoption contact. The committee felt strongly that the failure to modernise contact threatens to undermine the adoption system.

The report also recommended: addressing the ever-growing delays in public family law cases, which began in 2017, long before the pandemic. The latest data shows that the 26-week target now stands at 46 weeks, which is a huge issue of concern. That requires improved data gathering and sharing, and top-level leadership of a fragmented system through the Family Justice Board. Other recommendations were: producing an impartial information website for separating couples, providing clear guidance on the family justice system and reconsidering proposals to make mediation obligatory, replacing the current MIAMs and the mediation voucher with a universal voucher scheme for a general advice appointment; reviewing the current approach to empowering the voice of the child in family law proceedings, including recommending that the Family Justice Council reviews the guidance setting out the approach to judges meeting with children; and creating an ambition to move towards a new, dedicated 12-week parental leave allowance and making flexible working a day-one right to request. On the latter, I am pleased to say that the Government committed to that on the very day our report was published. Finally, we urged the Government to improve their systems for monitoring and assessing the implementation of legislation, particularly by robust data sharing and collection. I very much hope that other committee members today may be able to focus some of their remarks on some of these quite disparate issues.

I will say a quick word on special educational needs, which was not one of our main areas of focus but came up repeatedly in our engagement activities. Part 3 of the Act reformed the law on support for children and young people with special educational needs or who are disabled. It was intended to reduce the fight families faced to get the support their children need and to deliver integrated support across education, health and social care. The legislation received a great deal of detailed scrutiny, and it was widely supported. The consensus is that it remains the right legal framework. Sadly, however, the reality of implementation has not matched the ambitions of the legislation—a key theme of our report. At the time, the Government said that the test of the reforms working would be a reduction in the number of appeals to the tribunal. However, the opposite has happened: tribunal numbers have soared, and in the vast majority of cases, the tribunal finds in favour of the parent. I cannot help reflecting that the fact that there have been seven different Children’s Ministers since the review was launched in 2019 is relevant here. Last year, the Government published a new Green Paper on SEND, and this year followed that up with an improvement plan. Could the Minister give me an update on what has happened since that plan was published?

Finally, we also looked at some critical cross-cutting issues, including mental health, early intervention, data collection and data sharing. On the latter point, the Health and Care Act 2022 introduced significant improvements to information sharing between health and adult social care. I had hoped that the Government’s recent review of children’s multiagency information sharing would achieve parity for the children’s system, but I do not believe it has. The report does not go far enough to address the distinct barriers faced by children’s health, social care and other key partners, nor does it set out a clear policy on a consistent child identifier, which I find very disappointing. It is crucial that government moves forward with pilots of the NHS number as a consistent child identifier as soon as possible. Will the Minister agree to meet with me and other interested Lords on this issue?

The Government’s response was published on 6 February; I thank Ministers for that. The committee’s report contained 24 conclusions and 17 recommendations. Overall, the Government broadly agreed with many of the committee’s findings but rejected many of our specific recommendations. In doing so, they often pointed to existing interventions and policy measures which they deemed sufficient to address the committee’s concerns. I found this really disappointing after all the effort the committee had put in.

Finally, I turn to some specifics. Can the Minister give me an update on a few issues that were left vague in the response? In particular, when will the Government next publish data on the time it takes for ethnic-minority children to be adopted? What are the results of their reflections on what more can be done to ensure that the Family Justice Board is as effective as possible, including the committee’s recommendation that there should be a senior independent chair? When can we expect to see the final report of the Government’s review of the presumption of parental involvement? When will the Family Procedure Rule Committee publish a response to its consultation on early resolution of private family law arrangements?

The Government’s response placed a strong focus on their new children’s social care implementation strategy, entitled Stable Homes, Built on Love, published in February in response to The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. It stated that the strategy contained ambitious plans to take forward and build on the Children and Families Act, including issues raised by the Select Committee report that required further examination. I hope we will see that in practice.

It is perhaps worth remembering that the independent review called for the immediate investment of £2.6 billion to address the existing crisis in children’s social care and a revolution in family help to prevent children entering care where possible. Yet more than a year later we seem little further forward on this reform and the Government are currently set to spend an additional £1 billion on children’s social care over 10 years.

Finally, the Government’s “test and review” approach to reforms is unlikely to lead to the level of investment and change that the system so desperately needs, so I conclude by urging the Government to reconsider the scope for further investment at the next spending review. We must not allow another eight years to pass before making the improvements that are so desperately needed. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for that response. I personally found it extremely helpful and very informative, and I very much appreciated the warm words, which I know were sincerely meant, about the in-depth work that the committee has undertaken, because it does make it feel that that work was worthwhile, so thank you very much for that. I also acknowledge the presence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, which I very much appreciate. It is a really visible demonstration to me of the joined-up nature of the Government on this issue and I thank him for attending.

It has been a really excellent debate; it has really demonstrated the breadth and complexity of this issue, and its importance, but also the huge expertise, knowledge and commitment that we have in this House. I was hugely lucky to work with the colleagues I did on the Select Committee, bringing not just their knowledge but their passion and commitment to this area. We had excellent contributions, which I am not going to try to summarise, in the key areas of adoption and kinship care, how the family courts work, special educational needs and disabilities and employment law. I will say one point only, if I may, about the family courts. I feel very strongly that the voice of the child must be at the heart of the family courts. I am hoping that is something we can continue to work on.

We heard some excellent contributions about the committee’s decision to highlight some very important cross-cutting themes. We heard about mental health, about the need early intervention and the need for really important information collection and sharing—all incredibly important. We heard about one or two more general issues, which was very interesting: the importance of couple relationships, relationship breakdown and the role of family hubs. This is all the broader context within which this report was operating.

I agree that it is important to put on record that I agree that the intentions of the Act were very good. I think the legislative framework was the right one. I called it a landmark piece of legislation, and I meant that. Of course, it is right to acknowledge the things that have happened as a result of it, but I think it is inevitable that when we have post-legislative scrutiny, we look at the things that have not happened—hence the focus we had.

Someone said a very good thing: where you get both political will and pace, the world can change and things can happen. I just hope from this debate that that is what is going to happen—that we are going to unleash some real momentum and change in this area. I know that all noble Lords in this Room would like to be part of that, and I hope we can have further debates on some of these key issues that I have just mentioned.

My final point is to return to the issue about the process of post-legislative scrutiny and why I think it is so important. I managed to have a quick word with the Senior Deputy Speaker earlier and I intend to write to the powers that be—the Leader of the House, the Lord Speaker, and the Senior Deputy Speaker—saying why I feel it is so important that post-legislative scrutiny is really taken seriously and there is so much more we can do, both in Parliament and in government.

Motion agreed.

Secondary Schools: Autistic Pupils

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think I have already said that the implementation plan will be published early this year.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

Does the Minister agree that some children diagnosed with autism are also experiencing mental health difficulties, and that that is a complex interaction? What training is being given to mental health professionals working in mental health support teams in schools to understand and support autistic children who also have mental health problems?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I may need to write to the noble Baroness on the specifics of the training, but she is correct that we are supporting those professionals to respond and help identify mental health issues early among children in schools.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on securing it. I declare an interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children, and as chair of the Lords Select Committee conducting post-legislative scrutiny of the Children and Families Act 2014, which has already been referenced by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake. The committee published its final report this Tuesday, with important findings on the state of children’s social care in relation to adoption, kinship care and families going through the family courts. I will return to that in a minute.

Back in 2017, the APPG for children published a report on the state of children’s social care in England and concluded that there was a significant lack of resource for and focus on preventive and early intervention services. It would seem that nothing has changed. In 2018, we published a follow-up report which shone a light on the extent to which children, young people and families were subjected to a postcode lottery of services, and to which rising thresholds for support were simply storing up trouble for later on.

Sadly, these predictions have now all come to pass, and we have seen a huge shift towards late and crisis intervention and record numbers of looked-after children, up from around 65,000 a decade ago to over 80,000 now. The average age of children in care has risen, with children entering care with more complex needs. The care system in places is in a parlous state; that is why reform is so badly needed.

I will give a few specifics which we have heard about this afternoon. First, in the last decade, the number and proportion of children in care who are placed miles from home or in unregulated accommodation has risen steadily, which is a huge cause for concern. The CMA report that we have heard about stated that this year, there were significant problems with the functioning of the care market, with some private providers making disproportionate profits from the care of children and young people.

A significant workforce shortage in children’s social care and high levels of churn mean that children and young people face a revolving door of professionals entering and leaving their lives. The number of social workers leaving children’s posts in English councils is at its highest point since comparable data collection began, resulting in unsustainably high caseloads for those remaining.

As we have heard today, the care system is currently costing £10 billion per year. Josh MacAlister’s very welcome review estimates that this will rise to more than £15 billion in the next 10 years without reform. The review’s final report argues that the current children’s social care system is,

“increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise.”

It concludes:

“For these reasons, a radical reset is now unavoidable.”

I totally agree.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group that I mentioned recently held an excellent event at which Josh MacAlister spoke, as well as the new Children’s Minister, the Children’s Commissioner and others. What was notable to me at that event was that the children’s sector, statutory services and parliamentarians were all calling for the same things: for progress on social care reform that prioritises early intervention and co-production with children and families and sufficient investment to restore the long-term erosion of support.

With the independent review of children’s social care and the other key reviews on child protection that we have heard about, we have momentum behind us, and I like to think that vulnerable children—at very long last—have a political profile that has not been the case for many years. It is vital that the Government’s response to the review, which we have heard this afternoon is now being pushed back until next year, maintains that momentum and that we all continue to press for action and hold the Government to account, a point made so compellingly by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris.

However, before we get there, the overriding concern for families right now is the ability to put food on the table for their children and to heat their homes. The highest rates of inflation for 40 years will undoubtedly push more families into precarious situations and put more children at risk. Soaring inflation and energy prices are also putting huge pressure on local authority children’s services, and we face the very real prospect of further cuts to essential services.

We must act now to protect children and stabilise services. We need urgent government action to shield children from the brunt of the cost of living crisis and to shore up public sector finances after the impact of inflation and rising need. What assurances can the Minister give us on these points?

While we must not ignore the here and now, we must also hold on to the hope of a brighter future where children and families get the help they need. I welcome many of the proposals in the review, particularly those that seek fundamentally to rebalance children’s social care towards helping families earlier and the significant investment that is needed in the system.

There are three things I would like to see feature prominently in the Government’s implementation strategy. The first is working with families rather than doing things to them. Many of the parents who spoke to the independent review expressed distrust of children’s social care and felt they were blamed for circumstances beyond their control. Children’s social care will be sought out by families who need it only when they have been fully involved in the design of the approach and the offers the services can make.

The second is a focus on improving data and information sharing. In response to amendments in this Chamber during the passage of the Health and Care Act 2022, the Government acknowledged the serious challenges with sharing relevant information about children, particularly around safeguarding, and committed to a review of how to improve it. They also recognised the potential benefits of a single consistent identifier to bring together disparate records about an individual child. I expect to see significant reference to this review in the Government’s social care implementation strategy.

Finally, there is workforce, on which all else hangs. We know there are huge challenges in recruiting and retaining children’s social workers, along with other parts of the children’s workforce. We need to kick-start a longer-term project to rebuild the workforce.

I return to the Select Committee report on the Children and Families Act 2014, given its relevance to today’s debate. As well as containing a raft of important recommendations to improve support for adoption, kinship care and the family justice system and to help parents to balance work and family life, it identified some critical cross-cutting themes. One of those was the, frankly, dire state of children’s mental health services, with unacceptably long waits for referrals and treatments, including post-adoption trauma support. Our report highlighted the fact that children in care are four times more likely to experience mental health issues than their peers. Surely there should be some form of priority access for these exceptionally vulnerable children.

A second key theme was the importance of early intervention, which has been so well covered in today’s debate.

The third theme was the lack of coherence, both within government and between services. Indeed, throughout our inquiry we met children and families who said they felt let down by the systems that they had encountered, suffering long delays and needless bureaucracy. Calls for coherence of care extended to social care. Our witnesses raised concern that children and their families often do not receive continuity of care, undergoing numerous changes in their social workers.

Lastly, in the area of kinship care, which has been key to this debate and spoken to compellingly by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, we recommend greater support for kinship carers, including financial support, and that kinship carers with a special guardianship order be given the same right to paid leave as adopters.

All eyes are now on the Government’s implementation strategy. It was initially expected before Christmas, but we are now told that publication will be in the new year. In line with many other speakers today, I ask the Minister what assurance she can give us that the Government will not let this drift and will publish the strategy as early as possible in the new year.

I ask the Minister to respond on three specific points. First, what assessment has been made of the impact of the cost of living crisis on already stretched children’s social care budgets? Secondly, what plans do the Government have for stabilising the current children’s social care system, as local authorities and other public services grapple with rising inflation and increasing demand? Thirdly, will the Government commit to additional funding for the measures outlined in the forthcoming implementation plan in order to make these reforms a reality?

Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly in the gap. As others have said, it was a real privilege and pleasure to be a member of the Public Services Committee, under the admirable leadership of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, when this very important inquiry was undertaken. As we have heard, the report contains a number of very important recommendations, and I have been pleased to be able to pursue some of these issues relating to kinship care, mental health and other things in my new role as chair of the Select Committee conducting post-legislative scrutiny of the Children and Families Act 2014.

As we have heard from the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Hogan-Howe, the report contained some important recommendations on information and data sharing, and I wanted to add a small postscript. In the report, we highlighted the important issue of how legislative and practice barriers meant that vulnerable children were already falling through the gaps between local agencies, being invisible to social services, the NHS and the education system. We highlighted agencies feeling unable to share the data that they needed to determine which children needed their help.

I was pleased to be able to take forward some amendments to the recent Health and Care Act that were very much inspired by the work that we have done in this committee, particularly on highlighting the need for a consistent child identifier, or what is sometimes called a unique identifier. I am really pleased that, as a result of those discussions, the Act now commits the Government to laying a report before Parliament within a year, setting out their policy on information sharing, et cetera. I know that a review in a year might perhaps sound like a modest step forward, but it is important. Many parliamentarians and charities have been campaigning on this for many years, and I am very much looking forward to seeing that report next year. Can the Minister say anything about the progress and timing of it?

The report also set out a very powerful case for early intervention and preventive services for children and families in need, particularly to prevent poor education, health or social outcomes and, critically, as we have heard, to try to prevent more children from going into care. Of course, this whole thrust was strongly reinforced in the recent Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, led by Josh MacAlister. So I strongly support the notion of a national strategy on vulnerability to promote greater collaboration and co-ordination, and indeed multi-year funding allocations for early intervention; I was disappointed by the Government’s response in this area.

As others have said, the report contained some important recommendations on family hubs, which I support. I recognise that the Government committed investment to a further 75 in the Budget, and that is welcome, but we need a commitment to a national network of them as soon as possible to make sure that every community has somewhere that families can go to access universal family and parenting support as well as targeted support for families with the greatest need.

For me, a key test for the Government’s levelling-up agenda will be whether it improves outcomes for families and children, particularly vulnerable children. I hope that an incoming Prime Minister will give this issue the priority that it deserves.

Social Care: Children

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend raises an important issue. Indeed, one of the young women to whom I was speaking just before this Question talked about exactly the point that he raises. I would be delighted to meet the organisation that he mentioned.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I too had the privilege of meeting some of those young people a little earlier, which included hearing a rather harrowing story of two brothers who had been brought up in foster care. The review recommends more support, both practical and financial, for kinship carers, which include grandparents, aunts, uncles and others who care for family members. Is the Minister able to say what is going to happen to that recommendation and whether the Government are planning to take it forward?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government recognise the incredible role that kinship carers play in the system. It would be premature for me to judge what the Government will decide, but obviously it is being considered carefully along with the other recommendations.