Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, there is much to welcome in this Bill. It is a genuine attempt to make life better for our most vulnerable children. However, we must not forget those children outside the scope of the Bill who are living terrible lives but have not yet reached the threshold that would lead to them being taken into care. I agree with my noble friend Lady Pinnock that this is an opportunity missed. I would like to focus on four of the many issues that I could mention—corporate parenting, mental and physical health, safeguarding the rights of children, and learning from cases when something has gone wrong.

First, I welcome the Government’s attempt to lay out the responsibilities of the corporate parent, though I endorse what my noble friend Lady Pinnock said about the need for clarity about who that is. Unfortunately, as they stand, the principles are weaker than existing duties under the Children Act 1989 in respect of looked-after children. In Clause 1, local authorities must only,

“have regard to the need”,

to act in accordance with each of the principles. Yet separate, stronger duties already exist, though not for care leavers. Surely, all we need to do is to add care leavers to existing principles. There are things missing, and some of them have been mentioned, such as the importance of keeping siblings together; valuing children and young people’s backgrounds and personalities; and the promotion of the rights and entitlements of children and young people and their full and equal participation in society.

I agree with the NSPCC that it is essential for this clause—which, after all, is a list of what children have a right to expect from corporate parents—to include a responsibility to support recovery from the trauma of abuse or neglect. Over 60% of children enter care due to abuse or neglect, and the trauma of these early experiences can have a significant impact on long-term life chances.

The NSPCC has recently highlighted the shocking lack of therapeutic support in its new campaign, It’s Time. I have been in Your Lordships House now for 16 years. I clearly remember, soon after I came in, going to a presentation about the lack of therapy for children who had been sexually abused. This is not a new problem; it really is time it was addressed, because failure to address it ruins lives and costs the state money.

Neglected children often suffer poor physical health, through physical abuse, a lack of a good diet, et cetera. Along with that go mental and emotional health problems. It is crucial for these children that all their needs—physical, mental and emotional—are addressed together. It is not enough just to feed, clothe and educate the children if we are to compensate them for what they have gone through, and prepare them for the adult world. Therapeutic support to recover from past abuse or neglect must form the bedrock of the care experience.

As my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield said, current statutory guidance requires that children entering care receive a physical health assessment by a trained clinician. However, mental health and emotional well-being are assessed only through a strengths and difficulties questionnaire. I agree with her that this is both insufficient and carried out by the wrong people. Children need a full assessment of their physical and mental health when they come into care, as well as continuing services to address their problems all along the way.

Going back to the corporate parenting principles, I have another point to make. I welcome the bits that encourage children to express their views, wishes and feelings. It is nice not to have to badger the Government any more about including something about children’s wishes and feelings in a Bill. However, I would like to make two more points about Clause 1. First, many of these children will have speech and language difficulties. It is essential that these difficulties are identified during their health assessment and speech therapy provided. Otherwise, they will struggle to express their wishes and feelings; they will not have the skills to do so. Secondly, children need information about the local offer and their entitlements in a format they can understand. Their foster parents need that too in order to provide the stability children need.

I now move to the plans for the new Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. This panel will have the duty to identify and review those serious child protection cases in England that raise issues deemed complex or of national importance. Well, they are all complex. I listened very carefully to what the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, expressed about her concerns. I think it is justified for such a panel to look at those cases that appear to be of national importance. However, any new system must ensure that lessons are disseminated and incorporated into meaningful changes in practice. The panel will be judged on how well it does that. Given the difficulty in disseminating learning from serious case reviews in the current system, how will the Government ensure that the learning from national reviews trickles down and creates a process that delivers better safeguarding practice on the ground?

Secondly, as I suggested a moment ago, there is a danger that the establishment of two parallel processes—with local learning reviews at one end and the national review panel at the other—could lead to a two-tier system. That is highly undesirable. Can the Minister say what steps the Government will take to ensure that local practice review panels are not considered a lesser counterpart to the national review panel? After all, they know their local area, their local children and local circumstances. How will thresholds for consideration by a national review be determined, and by whom? As to the criteria for the involvement of the new panel, would not greater protection be provided by broadening the definition of harm? This could be developed from the definition of harm already contained in section 31(9) of the Children Act 1989. I think that the definition should include physical injuries and harm caused by unlawful or abusive restraint. This is a national issue. The vulnerability of children to such abuse was graphically illustrated by the BBC “Panorama” programme on the Medway secure training centre earlier this year, and here we have an opportunity to address it.

On the matter of innovation, I welcome the Government’s determination to improve outcomes for children, but I confess to having serious concerns about the measures in the Bill and we will be looking for assurances and safeguards for children’s rights. I worry that the proposals set out in Clause 15 are too broad and could be used by cash-strapped local authorities—for which we have great sympathy—to avoid carrying out some statutory duties. Those duties were put in place for a purpose, usually by Parliament, and they comprise the rights of children in law in respect of their care. We tamper with them at our peril.

To exercise the new powers, the Secretary of State would have to introduce regulations. However, these could be approved without a debate and vote in Parliament, which is a matter of concern. I support the concerns raised by the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, and others regarding the skeleton nature of this Bill. This appears to be a trend. We need a lot more information before we can carry out our duty to scrutinise. Where exemptions are made to legislation which was passed with active parliamentary approval, these must be subject to appropriate parliamentary scrutiny and agreement, specifically through affirmative resolution.

I would like to know who will be consulted before exemptions from statutory duties are made. Will the responses be published? What are the criteria for judging whether this would improve children’s outcomes? Could this judgment be made by an independent body? How will progress over a three-year pilot period be monitored, and will this oversight come from an independent body? For instance, if a local authority is exempt from Ofsted inspections, how will we know that outcomes for children are improving or are neutral? Can the Government guarantee that directors of children’s services and lead members for children will remain accountable under the new proposals?

Under Clause 18, this system would also apply where a local authority was failing to perform its duties and the Secretary of State had already intervened under Section 497A of the Education Act 1996. Currently too many vulnerable children are failed by the system. For every child subject to a child protection plan or on a register in the UK, it is estimated that around eight other children are likely to be ill treated. How can we be sure that the exemptions being called for will improve these failing authorities? Is it really the duty to carry out statutory duties that is getting in the way of improving quality or is it more likely to be management failures, a poor corporate culture, poor multiagency working or one of the other possible causes, such as workloads or case loads that are too heavy? What is the Government’s evidence of the need for these enabling powers, and will they demonstrate in each case how the exemption will lead to better outcomes for children? I think that we need some examples. There are many issues of concern in relation to this part of the Bill.

Before I finish, I want to say a brief word about the idea put forward by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham concerning the regulation of social work. I am very attracted by his suggestion of a royal college but it would absolutely have to be independent. I just wonder what would happen if the Government said that they were going to set up the BMA and decide who was to be on its council. There would be a riot. I think that we ought to provide similar scrutiny of the suggestion of the Government setting up the regulation of social workers.