Children and Families Bill

Baroness Young of Hornsey Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Hornsey]

My Lords, the purpose of the Bill is to ensure that all our children have the best possible start in their lives as they move towards adulthood. Of course the Government are right to seek to improve the way that we treat our children.

The focus of the Bill is on some of the most vulnerable children in our society, and the Government’s desire to improve the outcomes for looked-after children is particularly welcome. However, while there are praiseworthy elements alongside the laudable sense of purpose underpinning the Bill, a number of measures need interrogation and I look forward to some robust, thoughtful debate as the Bill makes its way through Committee and Report, as has already been indicated in many of today’s speeches. I also think that the sections relating to children in care are perhaps too modest in ambition, in spite of the commitment to establish the virtual head teacher on a statutory basis. I shall return to these points.

The focus of my remarks will be on adoption and looked-after children. I should declare an interest as a patron of the Post-Adoption Centre, although I speak in my personal capacity. The first area that I want to address gives cause for concern to many, including the House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation, so ably chaired by my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss and which was charged with pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill.

Clause 2 seeks to repeal the requirement to give due consideration to racial origins and ethnicity. The Government claim that black, Asian and minority ethnic children wait longer to be adopted because social workers adhere too strictly to the requirement to consider ethnicity in the previous adoption Act. I have looked in vain for something apart from anecdotal evidence and a few high-profile press examples to support this contention but have struggled to find any. Given the vigour with which the Government have defended their position on this matter, I expected agencies in the field to tell me about the queues of people being denied the opportunity to adopt across racial and ethnic lines, but that was not the case. On the contrary, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph,

“a review of delays in the adoption system by Ofsted concluded that there was ‘little evidence’ that this”—

finding a perfect match—

“was a significant problem ... The study concluded that the main obstacle was not the search for adoptive parents but the complicated legal process of putting children up for adoption in the first place ... ‘There was little evidence of delay caused by an unrealistic search for a “perfect” ethnic match’”.

Last year I hosted a round table organised by the NSPCC with representatives from major adoption and fostering agencies, leading academics with a body of research from the UK and overseas, and adults who had been fostered, adopted, in care and/or were adopters themselves. None could see the merit in getting rid of the need to at least consider race, ethnicity or whatever you want to call it when placing a child for adoption. By the same token, no one suggested that it would be right to say that it was better for a child to languish in care rather than be adopted by parents with a different cultural or ethnic experience. The evidence points to a number of reasons why it takes longer for black, Asian and minority ethnic children to be adopted, a principal reason being that some ethnic groups come into care at an older age than others and are therefore not the desirable babies that many potentially adoptive couples seek.

The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, argued this point most emphatically. I am sure that she and professionals like me in the field fail to see why the Government refuse even to include ethnicity and race in the welfare checklist, given that these characteristics fit comfortably alongside the other elements of a child’s welfare. Can the Minister give a substantial, evidence-based reason as to why this option has been rejected? Does his department have a view on the extent to which it would be helpful to encourage more people from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds to become adoptive parents and foster carers? I have not heard much on that issue.

Clause 3 is of concern also, as many noble Lords have pointed out from a range of perspectives. Giving the Secretary of State sweeping powers to direct local authorities effectively to outsource adoption services without consultation presents real problems. Of course any local authorities that are failing in their duties with regard to adoption must be held to account, but it is that accountability that would be diminished were these services to be given over in their entirety to the voluntary or private sectors. In the case of the latter, if this is the Government’s ultimate aim—and I hope that the Minister will strenuously deny it—how would this benefit adoption services? I find it hard to imagine how a private sector company would expect to make a profit in this most sensitive of situations, and voluntary organisations have not indicated that they have the will or the capacity to take over from local authorities.

As noble Lords will be aware, adoption is not the end point but the start of a challenging adventure that has ups and downs. Experienced skilled support for all the parties involved is an essential component of the process and can make all the difference to the quality of the outcome. Adopters should be entitled to a comprehensive package of support, provided by the local authority as part of its statutory obligation. Too often, adoptive parents do not know where to go or whom to speak to for the professional advice and support that will help them over the difficult patches; often the children who come into care have been traumatised, have attachment difficulties and so on. Similar support should also be available to foster carers, special guardians and family and friends carers.

The recently formed Access to Records campaign group comprises seven organisations working together to achieve better experiences for looked-after children and care leavers. It points out that an estimated 350,000 adults in the UK have spent all or part of their childhood in foster or residential care. Around 4,000 people a year seek out their records, and some of their experiences are quite distressing. I also want to address the issue of access to the records and notes from one’s time in care. Unlike an adopted person, a care leaver has no right of access to information about their past, their siblings or even their parents; they might simply have a restricted amount of information handed to them, as the following example illustrates:

“I had been in care for 15 years and found out I could apply for my records, but all I got were 10 sheets of paper with lots of information tippexed out”.

The redaction of notes is a big point of contention for many care leavers too. The experience across the country is very varied, so the campaign that I referred to earlier is looking to introduce an amendment in Committee to consider whether we can clarify this position and make it easier for people who have left care to access their records in their entirety.

The last issue that I want to address is what the right age is to expect a care leaver to cease accessing support services. This has been raised in a number of different contexts today, and the age of 25 has been cited in a variety of contexts. We, too, think that that should be the age until which care leavers can access support, whether that is through foster carers, if both parties are in agreement, or through other forms of support. At the moment that is not available to all people who leave care. Indeed, those who go to university are eligible to have that kind of support but those who do not are not, and we think that should be levelled out. I also support my noble friend Lord Listowel’s idea of an amendment that would establish something like the Staying Put programme as the norm for children and young people leaving care. I, too, am convinced that such a measure would help to mitigate some of the worst outcomes that care leavers experience.

Although there is much to be commended in the Bill, there is still an awful lot of work to do to ensure that care leavers and looked-after children have outcomes more equal to children who grow up in more conventional family arrangements. There is a huge range of questions that we have to ask, one of which is to ask why this keeps happening. This disparity in outcomes is not a new phenomenon; it is not exclusive to the late 20th or early 21st centuries. Instead, it has dogged us for decades and we do not seem to make any real inroads. How do we deliver really high-quality care for those who need to come into the system? How can we get more black, Asian and minority ethnic foster parents and mentors? How can we stop young vulnerable girls in care in particular being groomed and violently abused while apparently being looked after by the state? These are some of the really pressing questions that need to be addressed with some urgency.