Adoption: Adoption Legislation Committee Reports

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

I add my thanks to the members of the Select Committee and to my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss for their hard work and for this debate. Their work could hardly be more timely or the committee’s membership more expert and authoritative. I declare my interest as a patron of the National Association of Independent Reviewing Officers, a trustee of the Michael Sieff Foundation, a patron of Voice, which provides advocacy services for looked-after children, the Who Cares? Trust, which provides publications to children in care enabling them to know their rights, and the Caspari Foundation, which provides support for children with learning difficulties in schools.

I thank the Government for their welcome endeavours on adoption. We have been extremely fortunate to have had an outstanding Minister for Children in Tim Loughton MP, and his successor, Mr Edward Timpson MP, seems set to be equally remarkable. The commitment of the Secretary of State, the right honourable Michael Gove, is deep and derives from his personal experience.

I strongly support the Select Committee’s call for stronger rights to post-adoption support and highlight the need for the Government to extend their zeal to the full range of placements and services for vulnerable children and families. I praise the developing policy on children’s homes, which is not mentioned in the report but can be considered one route into placement stability. Will the Select Committee reconsider its recommendations on independent reviewing officers? Having heard what I have heard, I think the committee may well be right, but it is a contentious issue. It is very worrying that IROs have such high case loads. I join the Select Committee in asking the Government to gather more information about adoption breakdown.

On Her Majesty’s Government’s response to the report from the committee, I have mentioned independent reviewing officers. Much has already been said about the comments on post-adoption support, but I shall highlight one area. The Government have commissioned the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to produce materials for health professionals and will be looking to NICE to consider how teachers might be provided with a wider range of resources in this area. I commend the Government’s work in this area. I know its importance from the Caspari Foundation. It is essential that teachers have a better idea of child development and of what happens with children who have experienced trauma. I hope the Minister has a chance to speak with Charlie Taylor, the head of the National College for Teaching and Leadership, about these matters. He is well informed about them as a former head teacher of an EBD school.

The importance of expertise in the family court was mentioned in the debate. I highlight the need for the best expert witnesses to advise the courts in these matters. I understand the Government’s concern that in the past too many expert witnesses have been appointed in the court. This may perhaps have been because of a lack of confidence in judges, but in reducing the number of expert witnesses and saving the courts money I hope the fact that the court still needs to attract the best expert witnesses is not overlooked. As has been mentioned, there is a lot of contention about the judgment of psychiatrist and psychologists. One needs to attract the best of these people, to give the best advice and have the best outcomes for children.

There are concerns about the reduction of payments to expert witnesses. It causes me concern because we need to attract the best experts and get the best evidence for these courts. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, raised the importance of the first two years of life and intervening early to prevent such problems as we are discussing today. She talked particularly about the importance of health visitors and midwives in early intervention. I take this opportunity to say how concerned I am about the need for the best support for children under two. I was pleased to hear the Minister’s recent comments on the changes in childcare ratios, insisting that whatever happens the result will be better childcare. Indeed, it must.

Reflecting on a time not so long past, I recall the noble Earl, Lord Howe, making an eloquent case for the assessment of adopters’ needs and for duties on local authorities to meet those assessed needs in the course of past adoption legislation. I remind your Lordships of the young man I worked with a few years ago in north London. I had a summer placement on a play scheme and this 10 year-old was just about to be placed for adoption. In the lunch hour, he would rock himself in a tractor tyre in the setting. During activities, he would simply walk away and a member of staff would have to trail him on his journeys. He repeatedly got himself into arguments and fights with the other children. One saw in him what one would expect in a child who has experienced multiple trauma, multiple losses of carers, abuse or neglect. He had regressed to a much earlier stage of his development: he was more an infant than a 10 year-old in many ways.

Adopters need to be supported when they adopt such challenging young people. I am grateful for the recognition of this in the Government’s response. The prospect of inadequate support and a further placement breakdown, a further trauma or loss for the child, is unthinkable but not so unusual. As has been pointed out many times today, we simply do not know how often placement breakdown happens, and the details of why. That needs to be addressed.

Adopters also need to be supported in managing any contact the child may have with his biological parents and his siblings, and in speaking with the child about his past. Yesterday, I spoke with a care leaver about his experience. He repeated what he had said in the past: good communication is key to a child’s success through care. Adoptive parents need to have the confidence to be honest with their adopted children. The current film release “The Place Beyond the Pines” has a scene in which an adolescent tells his mother that she had lied to him, before he leaves the house to seek revenge for his father's killing. He had been told by his mother that his father had had an accident rather than that he had been shot dead. That moment seems uncanny in its appropriateness to our debate today. The young man says to his mother, “You are a liar”. One would not wish that to happen in any adoptive situation. Unless adoptive parents are really well supported, there may be similar difficulties when adolescence comes.

I will make a few comments on the challenges of adolescence. I have worked with 16 to 23 year-olds over a number of years. I have witnessed a teenager self-harming, have come across girls who may have been at risk of being groomed, have spent time both with young men who can suddenly start an outburst of anger and hatred from seemingly nowhere and with young men who in depression, as has been mentioned already, are unable to stir from the couch on which they lie.

It is generally accepted that children in the course of their development go through a period of latency between the ages of five to 10 years-old and then, as they enter adolescence, a period in which they recapitulate their earliest development, from nought to five, with its jealousy, tantrums and all its uncontrollable feelings. However, in adolescence, they experience this in bodies that can act on these impulses. They can hurt themselves or others, they can take what is not theirs, and they can set the house on fire if they choose to. Adopters need help, therefore, when their child enters adolescence. Early trauma that may have lain dormant will more than likely reappear in these years. Adopters need a right to the assessment of need and to services when their child enters adolescence.

I will now say a few words in praise of the Government’s developing policy on children’s homes. The Select Committee asks the Government to look across all placements for vulnerable children for routes to permanence and not to restrict its attention to adoption. I hope I can reassure members of the committee and the chair that progress is being made in the small but important area of children’s residential care.

There is scarcely time to do justice to this topic. The coverage on the front pages of the Times, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph yesterday on the abuse of girls as young as 12 who were in the care of Oxford local authority illustrates both the need for action and the distance we need to travel. This is just about a year on from the conclusion of the Rochdale case.

I will quote from the website of Ann Coffey MP, who has led work in this area and who refers to information released by the Government on 4 April of this year, which says:

“In future the police will be given the names and addresses of children’s homes in their area so that they can better protect vulnerable children. Rules will also be changed so that children’s homes in unsafe areas—such as in the same street as a bail hostel housing paedophiles—can be closed down or refused registration. There will also be stricter rules on out of area placements where children are placed in homes miles away from their home areas. Almost half of all children are placed in children’s homes out of their areas and this makes them susceptible to sexual predators … In future the government wants a decision to place a child in care away from their home town to only be made by a senior council official, who will have to be satisfied that the placement is in the child’s best interest. The new rules will also set out a requirement for the placing authority to consult with the local area authority before they place a child in a home. There will also be a duty on homes to notify local area authorities when children move in from other local authority areas and when they leave the home. … Better and more intense training will be set up for staff working in children’s homes and rules tightened to ensure that existing staff have completed minimum qualifications within a set period of time”.

I could go on. I pay tribute to Ann Coffey, whose report last year on children missing from care, facilitated by the charity the Children’s Society, led directly to these changes. Indeed, she sat on one of the working groups leading to this policy.

I hope your Lordships will find the Government’s progress on children’s homes encouraging. I am confident that they will feel, as I do, that much more needs to be done. However, the Government should be commended for a good start in this area. I conclude by repeating my thanks to the Select Committee, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.