Queen’s Speech

Baroness Young of Hornsey Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Hornsey (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle and thank her for her excellent speech. I very much look forward to her future contributions, especially on education.

I very much support those measures in the gracious Speech which are aimed at improving the experience of children and young people in the care system. I wish to raise some issues regarding local authorities and their responsibilities to care leavers. While I recognise that much of what I say will be of interest to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, the Access to Care Records Campaign Group is keen to make further headway with local authorities in their role as “corporate parent” and in recognising the key issues for care leavers when accessing their records. When the Access to Care Records Campaign Group uses the term “care leaver”, we are referring to people of any age in young, middle or senior adulthood. All share the experience of living away from their family in a state care arrangement provided by either a local authority, a voluntary agency or other forms of state care. As one person put it, “You never stop being a care leaver”.

In 2013, with the backing of the campaign group, I tabled an amendment to the Children and Families Bill which, although not included in the subsequent Act, led to a debate about the barriers that care leavers experienced when seeking their care files. In response, the DfE amended statutory guidance to local authorities in 2014, stating that they should support care leavers up to the age of 25 to access their care records. This includes providing clear, coherent information about how to access records and the support available, and having suitably trained and supervised staff. The revised guidance also states that these same fundamental principles should apply to older care leavers. We are grateful to the respective Ministers—Edward Timpson and the noble Lord, Lord Nash—and DfE officials for helping us make significant progress in this area of work. They committed to help the campaign group hold regional round tables to raise awareness of the new requirements placed on local authorities.

As a result of the sheer hard work put in by members of the campaign group, logistical support from the DfE and sponsorship from a range of partners, between June and September last year the campaign group held six round table workshops across England to explore the issues and dilemmas arising from providing care leavers with their records. The workshops were attended by data protection and information governance managers, social care and care leaving teams, legal advisers and care leaver support agencies. The aims were, first, to promote the statutory guidance on access to records and, secondly, to act as a forum for practitioners working on records access and their managers to share good practice. Key stakeholders, including the Care Leavers’ Association, Ofsted, the ICO, the DfE, local authorities and various legal firms participated in these workshops, and a video made by care leavers about their experiences was shown at each one. Delegates were then invited to discuss different aspects of the issue and to generate solutions.

The round-table discussions considered a number of key areas and identified several key issues that needed attention. These were: legal parameters—differing interpretations of the law around access to records, particularly in relation to data protection, and the consequences of litigation; how to work more effectively together across departments; identification of the specific needs of care leavers; training and awareness; and redaction.

This last issue caused much comment and discussion because it seems that while the Data Protection Act was intended to be a liberating Act, it does not really have the flexibility and enabling capacity that is needed when it comes to care leavers seeking their records. We want to make sure that there is improved best practice for making redactions to those records. Generally it was agreed that the current data protection framework was not the best structure and was actually unsuitable for meeting the rights and needs of care leavers.

Other key issues raised were: an apparent lack of joint protocols between data governance officers and social care workers to develop professional practice; and decisions made about the redaction of information in care leavers’ records appearing to be influenced by anxiety about breaching data protection legislation and the consequences of that, and possible future legal action against the local authority or care agency.

We made a range of recommendations, many of which I hope to pursue when we look at the children Bill later in the parliamentary year. I will briefly summarise some of them. We would like to involve Ofsted inspections more in the whole issue of accessing records and making sure that there is effective training for practitioners who have that responsibility. We want much more effective cross-departmental working in local authorities, aimed at sharing knowledge and expertise. Where redactions are necessary, a clear record of decisions made should be kept and an explanation given to the care leaver of why information has been withheld. It is not acceptable for care leavers of any age to come across a whole bundle of notes, most of which have been blacked out so they cannot read what is actually in there, with no explanation of why that has happened. There are several other detailed recommendations which I do not have time to go into today.

Several people have already talked about life chances. It has been a big theme over the past couple of days. In my mind, a strong and positive sense of self-identity is critical to contributing to one’s life chances. That is what care leavers need to be able to get from their records, no matter what age they are. When they make that decision to access their records, it has become a leap in the dark as to what kind of support they will get. Decisions about redactions in care leavers’ records should therefore be audited for consistency and empathy with the needs of care leavers, which should be at the heart of this.