Munro Report

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Edward Timpson (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this significant, serious and now rather too short debate on this extremely important issue. Only a few months ago, I was granted an Adjournment debate on how we can improve outcomes for children in care and I am pleased that many of the arguments I raised with the Minister, together with recommendations on how to reform and strengthen the care system, particularly around child protection, are very much at the heart of the Munro report. I must declare an interest as a non-practising family law barrister specialising in care cases as well as being the son of foster carers who have fostered 90 children over the past 30 years.

The reaction to the Munro review has been almost universal in its praise. I have read the responses of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Action for Children, Home-Start, the British Association of Social Workers and the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, among others, and they all agree that the report is an important opportunity to create a high-quality child protection system. This prompts me to ask why these changes have not already happened. It is not as though previous reviews and reports have not drilled down and exposed the inherent flaws in the system.

In his second report of March 2009, Lord Laming lamented the

“over-complicated, lengthy and tick-box assessment and recording system”

that has developed since the Climbié report in 2003. Of course, he is right, but despite his exasperated pleas the tick-box culture has continued to spread its tentacles across social work and to sap the morale and professional judgment of the work force. Children in need do not require reams of paper produced by case reviews and do not benefit from a social worker who spends half their time strapped to their desk and sat in front of a computer. They also do not need social workers who sit in endless meetings.

Social workers do not want that either. As part of her social work taskforce report, Moira Gibb asked social workers to identify the factors that would most improve their professional lives and, by implication, their ability to do a professional child-focused job. They indentified: first, fewer targets; secondly, smaller case loads; thirdly, the abandonment of the integrated children’s system; and, fourthly, more experienced social workers in their teams. Of course inspection, accountability and good record keeping are important, but it has been clear for too long that, as the ADCS says, social workers are

“hindered by the restrictions and regulations concerning assessment, risk management and performance indicators that do not focus on the best outcomes for the children and young people involved.”

The social work taskforce found that those engaged in child protection work spent only a quarter of their time with the children they were there to protect. In short, the system has become too preoccupied with compliance, bureaucracy and defensiveness. As a consequence, we have a demoralised child protection work force who are depressed by negative media attention but without the confidence to break free and get on with doing what motivated them to take on such an admirable vocation in the first place. As one BASW member said:

“I feel exhausted and stressed for the majority of the time. I have only been in the child protection team for 3 months and have already decided that the work is too stressful and too risky—I am now actively looking for another job.”

High staff turnover, high levels of sick leave, a high percentage of agency workers—the figure is as high as 50% in some children’s services departments—and an increase in long-service leavers are all signs of a failing organisation. More worryingly, however, that puts the children who need protecting at a greater risk of harm. The culture needs to change once and for all.

In their response to the report on looked-after children that was produced during the previous Parliament by the Children, Schools and Families Committee, the Government clearly identified those problems and endorsed the report’s view that high staff turnover, heavy work loads and administrative burdens lead to relationships that cannot flourish and social workers who do not feel empowered. They went on to express their commitment to changing the system so that social workers have

“more freedom to make decisions, more support and understanding, and less prescription and censure.”

It was extremely gratifying that the Minister re-emphasised that the Government take those important issues seriously. I do not doubt their determination, but given that people have asked why that is yet to happen, there is a worry that if we are not careful the critical state of some children’s services departments could lead to another round of regulations that result in even more prescription and red tape, which, as history has shown, would only make matters worse.

Eileen Munro is right that we need to reduce radically the amount of central prescription so that we help professionals to move from a compliance culture to a learning culture. We need to focus on the essential rules for effective multi-agency working that have been so successful in places such as Hackney and Ealing, as well as on the principles that underpin good practice elsewhere in our child protection system. We also need to focus on the quality of the help that is given by paying close attention to the views and experiences of those who receive the services and the professionals who help them. We will never completely eradicate the risks of harm to children, but by building a system with the child at its centre, rather than one that is driven by process, we can be in a much stronger position to anticipate, flush out and deal more effectively with the risks that still remain.