Children and Families Bill

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Timpson]

We have provided local authorities with £150 million to try to improve their adoption service. This is a good opportunity for them to show that they can deliver for children in their care whose plan is for adoption. I do not see why the hon. Lady should feel that this is not an appropriate way of trying to resolve this national crisis. What we are trying to do is simply to provide a practical solution to the problem created when all 180-plus adoption agencies have no incentive to recruit beyond their own boundaries, which prevents children from being placed with a family that is potentially waiting for them in a different part of the country. We want to break down such barriers, ensuring that every child whose future lies in adoptive placements gets that opportunity as soon as possible.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Is not the key issue the fact that although about 4,500 children are waiting to be adopted, potential adopters are being put off by the checks and the intrusive nature of the whole process? Is it not important to streamline the system to encourage more adopters to come forward rather than to worry about whether it is local authorities or adoption agencies that are providing the placements?

[Mr Timpson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why we are streamlining the assessment process for adopters so that it will take no longer than six months, whereas I have heard of cases in which it takes as long as three years for a couple or a single person to be approved as a prospective adopter. It is also why we have launched the national gateway to provide a single point of advice and information for anyone who is interested in adopting so that they are not immediately cocooned within their own local authority area as regards any potential assessment and thereafter matching. We are doing what we can right across the adoption system to make it more adopter-led and more streamlined to break down some of the barriers that have existed for far too long.

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[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in support of the Bill, albeit briefly. I offer my apologies for not being in the Chamber for the beginning of the Minister’s comments; I was upholding the honour of the parliamentary hockey team, which is why I am now limping.

There are many things in the Bill to support. It takes forward much of the work done over our past few years in government, and indeed when we were in opposition, especially on adoption and parenting, and I shall talk about those two subjects in particular.

I very much welcome the special educational need reforms, and I think the Minister is open to amendments to tweak and improve them. I welcome the Children’s Commissioner reforms, on the basis of John Dunford’s excellent report. I also welcome the innovative proposals on parental leave and flexible working, especially in respect of adoption. The hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) should be complimented on her private Member’s Bill a couple of years ago, which brought the matter to the attention of the Government.

I welcome those provisions, but a number of things could be done better. The subject of shared parenting, or parental involvement, as we are now to call it, has a lot of history. We put forward proposals for the 2006 Children and Adoption Bill. I was disappointed that although more than half of Labour MPs, and Liberal Democrats, supported an identical early-day motion, they voted against proposals that could have brought in the provisions in 2006.

The Bill should be seen in the context of many other things that the Government are doing on private law cases in the justice system, such as better mediation services, better relationship support upstream and better enforcement. The Chairman of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, seemed to think there was not a problem. There is a perceived problem and an actual problem. In research on children who do not live with both parents, resident parents reported that between a quarter and a third of the children rarely, if ever, see their non-resident parent. That is a real problem. In 2011, despite serial breaching of contact orders in the many cases that as constituency MPs we see week in, week out, only 53 enforcement orders were granted for non-resident parents to have contact with their children.

[Charlie Elphicke]

We know there is a problem, do we not, because these cases so often fill our constituency surgeries. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work in helping to bring forward this part of the Bill.

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful. It is a problem that we have all known about, but have shied away from doing something about. This is a real opportunity at last to do something about it. It is not about parental rights; it is about parental responsibilities. That includes the responsibilities of parents who have done a runner. The legislation will make it clear to them that they have a responsibility to their children, whether they are on the scene or not. The provision does nothing to dilute the principle of the paramountcy of the welfare of the child; that is absolutely clear. If it did anything else, I would not support it. It is in clause 1; it is subjugated to that very important paramountcy principle in the opening section of the Children Act 1989.

The Bill must send out a very clear message to warring parents—to the 10% of cases who still go to court: “If you think you can play winner takes all, and freeze the non-resident parent out of your child’s relationships and childhood, forget it. Think again, because both of you will have a responsibility to the children, or will be expected to play as full a part as possible in their upbringing.” That is what the provision is all about; it does not dilute the welfare principle.

A lot has happened on adoption in the past few years. This legislation builds on the work of the adoption action plan and the adoption gateway. It was encouraging to see the early glimmers of a reversal in the trend in adoption numbers since 2007; we saw a tick up in 2012, but it is early days. I very much support the measures on fostering for adoption, or concurrent planning, as we used to call it. Coram in particular has done some excellent work on that. It is about a seamless transition for a child, with the risk being taken by the prospective parents, not the child, and about maintaining continuity of care, which is so important to a child in care in the early years.

I strongly support the adoption support services mentioned in the Bill. Peri-adoption support services are probably the most important thing in ensuring a good-quality, lasting placement. As the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) said, we absolutely need to do more research on those adoptions that are disrupted. I am afraid that it is also necessary for us to do more around ethnic matching. As to whether we need legislation to do it, I do not know, but we absolutely need to make it clear that first and foremost a child needs a safe, loving, stable environment from a family. If that family happens to be an ethnic match, that is a bonus; it should not be a deal-breaker for the child.

I am concerned that the £150 million taken from the early intervention grant may mean that provision is taken away from children who remain in care. Even if we double the number of children going into adoption—that is not a target—90% of children in the care system will remain in it, in foster care and residential homes, and will not go into adoption. Yet the only measures in the Bill relating to looked-after children are those for virtual heads, which I welcome, and those on contact arrangements. Why do we not extend personal budgets to foster carers? Why do we not do more to give children in care priority access to mental health services? Half of children in care suffer from mental health problems. That is probably the single biggest contribution we could make to giving them greater stability and a chance to do well at school.

As the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has said, half of children who come into care because of abuse or neglect suffer further abuse when they return home, with up to half of them returning to care. If we did more to support them, so that they could stay with their families, we would have fewer kids in care.

We need to do more. Where I take issue with the Government is on recruitment. We desperately need to recruit more prospective adopters. We desperately need voluntary agencies to recruit more adopters, but it is too early to compel local authorities to take away the responsibility for recruiting adopters. It has been only a year since the adoption scorecard came out. They are three-year track records, and they are always retrospective. We need to give local authorities a greater chance to show that they can recruit more adopters and work in partnership with voluntary agencies. One thing that we could do to help those agencies is create a bounty fee; voluntary agencies would be paid for recruiting prospective adopters. At the moment, the more they recruit, the more they have to pay to retain and train them. They do not get paid until they receive the inter-agency fee. A bounty measure would incentivise voluntary agencies to do more of what they so successfully do to recruit. The Bill risks de-linking adoption from other permanent options.

Finally, I would like to see more measures for supporting young carers, as many hon. Members have mentioned. I would like to see an effective independent complaints or ombudsman system in adoption, for those cases that have gone badly wrong. I would like to see child performance regulations in the Bill—which my ten-minute rule Bill will propose—as it is the only opportunity that we have had and probably will have in this Parliament to introduce them. I would also like to see us do more to compel local safeguarding children’s boards to publish their serious case reviews and to commission them in the first place, as we do not have any primary legislation to do that. There are many other things that I would like to see, but I have run out of time.

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[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I start by paying tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), for the exceptional way in which he introduced the debate and took the House through the detail of the Bill, of which he has such an incisive grasp. It is an excellent Bill, particularly when it comes to the rights of children to have a relationship with both their parents, an issue on which I have brought a ten-minute rule Bill before the House. I also want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for his part in helping to prepare this Bill.

Some 3 million children in this country are growing up in families that have separated, and around 1 million of them have no contact with one of their parents. The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service has been criticised in the past for having a heavy case load and for too often not being timely enough, so the provisions in clause 10 relating to mediation are extremely welcome.

Clause 11, most of all, is dear to my heart. It will give children the right to know, and to have a relationship with, both their parents. We need the understanding that the child must have the right to a relationship with both parents, because too often it is about mums’ rights and dads’ rights, but this is actually about the rights of the child. It is not right that a parent should sink their child’s right to know the other parent in a sea of acrimony when they split up. From my point of view, that is a very timely and welcome reform. I have had so many complaints about that from constituents, such as Mrs A of Wootton, who wrote about her son’s experience. She said, “Each time a visit is due, their mother creates a great deal of hassle, never being able to give a precise date etc., and she has twice prevented the visit completely.”

It is not simply about mothers with residence. There are cases in which the father has had residence and has blocked the mother from seeing the child. What I have to say is that it is wholly wrong in both cases, as it is an abuse of the child’s rights. It is a child’s right to know and have a relationship with both parents because both parents have love, affection, knowledge and mentorship to offer—and the law should not stand in the way of that; the law should assert and assist that and make it more possible.