Queen’s Speech

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

It is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, particularly after his comments about the reduction in the number of young people in the youth justice system and his call for a similar system for women—a women’s justice board—to focus on their needs. Not only have they had the experiences that he describes, but many of them have been in the care of the state, which has often not provided them with the care that they needed. I support the call of my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham for further work on the Corston recommendations. It is so disruptive to children’s lives when they are taken into the secure estate.

I rise to speak to a matter omitted from the Queen’s Speech. I want to share my concerns with Her Majesty's Government about the lack of professional capacity in our children’s homes. I take this opportunity to encourage the Secretary of State, the right honourable Michael Gove MP, to give thought to developing a strategy for the professionalisation of staff in children’s homes. Professionals who come into contact with children’s home staff are unanimous that the quality of staff is highly variable and that staff often show little understanding of children’s needs. That is the view of the social workers and child mental health professionals to whom I speak.

The front page of the Times on Wednesday last week read as follows:

“A nation’s shame: Nine men are found guilty of sex grooming crimes against vulnerable young girls after a trial that has exposed the shocking scandal in Britain’s children’s homes”.

Andrew Norfolk, the journalist, goes on to write:

“Hundreds of girls in children’s homes are being sexually abused by organised networks of men, The Times reveals today. England’s children’s homes, which care for 1,800 girls, have recorded 631 incidents of girls being sold for sex during the past five years, including 187 in the past ten months”.

I am most grateful to Mr Norfolk and the Times for the extensive and careful coverage that they have given to the horrific exploitation of these vulnerable children. On page six of that day’s Times, Jenny Pearce, Professor of Young People and Public Policy at the University of Bedfordshire, said:

“You’re talking about poorly trained, poorly supported staff working with some of our most vulnerable children and young people. That combination is an ideal setting for an abuser to exploit”.

It seems clear that the Times successfully identified a systemic problem with our children’s homes, which needs to be remedied as soon as possible. We need to move to a professional cadre for our children’s homes as soon as possible if we are to minimise future risk of harm, sexual and other, to these our most vulnerable children.

In his report of the 1990s on children living away from home, Sir William Utting wrote that the best safeguard for children is an environment of overall excellence. I am concerned that we may be failing in our duty to these children by forgetting his words.

Why do these children need such care? These are often children who have experienced multiple failures of foster placements. They have therefore generally experienced abuse in the family and then been further harmed by being passed from pillar to post. They are normally the older children with longer histories of neglect, who are physically more difficult to manage. The Office for National Statistics in its 2004 survey found that 69% of children in residential care had a mental disorder and that the majority of these disorders were conduct disorders, which are particularly hard to manage for carers. That compared with about 40% of disorders in foster care and 10% in the general children’s population. A head of a child mental health service department put it to me that the profile of these children in these children’s homes is very little different from that of children in psychiatric units. In the latter, children are cared for by nurses who are managed by doctors; in the former, they are cared for by staff qualified to national vocational qualification level 3, who are managed by those qualified to be level 4 managers. There is a world of difference in the capacity of those staff.

On the continent, residential care is a far more popular option, with about half the children in care in residential settings. Staff are also generally more highly qualified. In Denmark, 90% of staff have a degree-level qualification. The continentals choose to have the most highly skilled qualified staff caring for their vulnerable children. In this country we have made the opposite decision. Because our children’s homes cater for only about 8 per cent of the children in local authority care, the needs of our children in residential care are significantly higher than those of such children in France, Germany or Denmark, yet our care staff are much less well qualified. We choose to place our most vulnerable children with our least qualified workers.

[Lord Northbourne]

I am most grateful to the noble Earl for giving way. Does he agree that a considerable number of children’s homes do not fit the description he has given, and that their qualified staff look after the children extremely well?

[The Earl of Listowel]

I agree with my noble friend on that point. For instance, there are some exceptionally good therapeutic communities in this country and some very good examples of practice. The difficulty is that the quality is so variable. These vulnerable children deserve a consistently excellent quality of care from their carers.

Gangs of men meet former residents of children’s homes and use those girls or young women to “hook into” the young women in those homes. It is very hard for staff to resist that. We need to have the very best staff in children’s homes to prevent these cunning, wily gangs of men gaining access to these children; and not only gangs are involved.

There has been progress in skilling-up staff. Ofsted inspections report improved performance. There are some very good homes and therapeutic communities and many residential care staff work the hardest they can in the interests of these children. I agree with my noble friend in that regard. Regulations have been tightened and there is the prospect of further strengthening of regulations over the next year, yet I fear that a fundamental problem will not be addressed unless a clear strategy for professionalising staff in our children’s homes is introduced as soon as possible. Therefore, I beg the Government to give consideration to developing such a strategy to bring this about. There is great expertise in this area in this Chamber. I look forward to the Minister’s response.