Education and Adoption Bill (Fourth sitting)

Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Steve McCabe]

That is absolutely right.

We must remember that the reason for a young person being adopted is that we have concluded that there is no other possibility of providing a decent, stable chance at life for them. We have concluded that all other options are closed and that the best thing to do is to make a fresh start with new parents and a new family elsewhere. I assume that in the vast majority of situations, social workers do not arrive at that conclusion lightly. There has been criticism in the court about whether they could be more rigorous in how they pursue some of the options, but it seems inconceivable that someone could arrive at that conclusion lightly. That conclusion is arrived at because a judgment is made that the young person’s life prospects are pretty limited unless that deliberate, final step is taken. These young people need every ounce of support and help we can provide if they are to have any chance of making progress.

I was saying that it would be good if the Minister indicated that he was thinking of moving in the direction I mentioned on access to support and mental health assessments. I recognise that such a request is beyond the scope of this amendment so I will leave it there.

The amendment simply asks that if the provision of adoption support services is included in the functions that will be part of the new arrangements as directed by the Minister, such support services must include fair and reasonable access to support identified in any assessment. Otherwise, the child and his or her parents are being short-changed. They are permitted an assessment to determine what is wrong when they are not entitled to the help or support that might put it right. That seems to be a glaring omission—not one for which the present Minister should be held responsible but one that he, in his current position, has the capacity to do something about and put right. He could do that by accepting the amendment or by giving us his word that he will go away, look at the issue and propose a practical means of addressing it.

With all the focus on structures contained in this legislation on adoption, surely it is not too much to ask that there is some focus on the needs of the child. I hope that the Minister takes this opportunity to right a wrong and strengthen his legislation and the life chances of the very children we are all concerned about. The purpose of the amendment is to ask him to look at that.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. Amendment 9 is about ongoing support for families who adopt. There is a danger that a successful adoption placement is often considered the end of the story when it certainly is not. Although it is wonderful when a child is placed with a new family, we should never fool ourselves into thinking that their story ends there or that the case is closed. Matching a child or children to their adoptive parents begins with a paper match when the profiles of the adopter and the child are perceived to work, but a real assessment of that match can only happen when the introductions begin. No matter how well a child is matched to their adoptive parents, the process of bonding is never easy and there will always be challenges. Likewise, for adults who adopt, the difficulties of parenthood are joined by extra challenges when they have not lived with the child from birth. If that child has been attached to multiple foster-carers, they will take even longer to attach to their new family.

Children who have experienced instability in early life and have been through the care system are more likely to develop mental health issues. About 45% of children in care experience a mental health disorder, compared with 10% of the general child population. In the worst-case scenario, those combined factors can lead to adoptions breaking down and we should do everything that we can to avoid that, which is why it is essential that families who adopt get the ongoing support that they need after the adoption process is completed.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak said, needs assessments for families detail the support that is needed but, in practice, those assessments are often stored away in a filing cabinet and the support is never provided. A family in one area may get ongoing counselling and support but another family with the same rights, who have a child with similar, or even more, needs receive nothing. That kind of inconsistency is just not acceptable and it is bad for families.

It is in no one’s interests for an adoption to break down. The local authority will have put years of work and substantial resources into finding an appropriate placement. Breakdown is the worst-case scenario. For many more children, the transition into their new home is made more difficult than it should be.

There is a gap in post-adoption services. Just as proper support services can prevent family breakdown and the need for adoption in the first place, ongoing support can prevent adoptions from being disrupted and can keep families together. The Bill needs to reinforce the responsibility of local authorities to meet the needs of the adopted children and their parents, which is why I am supporting the amendment.

[Bill Esterson]

I, too, have my name on amendment 9. I want to comment briefly on the identified support needs of adopted children.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields said, there is often a lack of services for supporting mental health problems. Perhaps the Minister will take on board her well-made point about the need to improve child and adolescent services, particularly for children who end up in the care system. For those of us who have adopted children, the lack of ongoing support can make the process even harder. From personal experience, I can say that the promise of ongoing support by the placing authority is not the same as its delivery once the child is adopted.

An area of concern that has recently come to my attention is the damage done by alcohol consumed by mothers during pregnancy. The damage caused to babies by foetal alcohol spectrum disorders can continue for their whole lives, as the brain damage is irreversible. In this country, we are only recently coming to realise how much of a problem foetal alcohol spectrum disorders are. One estimate is that 7,000 children are damaged each year in that way, but the true figure may be much higher. The all-party group on foetal alcohol spectrum disorders was formed just two days ago—I happen to be its chairman. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Thank you. I urge all Members to follow our work in raising awareness and attempting to improve support. A high proportion of the children who are damaged by alcohol during pregnancy end up in the care system, and a significant number end up being adopted. The members and supporters of the Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Trust and other groups that are supporting the APPG are often people who have adopted children who have been damaged by alcohol during pregnancy.

There is a need for better identification—that is certainly true in the context of adoption—and for much greater support. The evidence I have seen shows that behavioural problems among children who end up in care or being adopted, with which we are all familiar, are far worse among children who have foetal alcohol spectrum disorders. I want to draw the Minister’s attention to that serious problem. The problem is not growing, but awareness of it is, so perhaps he will refer to it in his response.

Amendment 12 states:

“the Secretary of State shall consult children who have experience of adoption functions, adopters and such persons as he considers appropriate.”

I think that we mentioned in passing on Tuesday that we may have been remiss in not hearing evidence from children and young people. I repeat that comment now. It would have been a good idea had we had written or, in particular, oral evidence from children and young people themselves.

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[Edward Timpson]

I would like to speak to amendments 9 and 12 and proposed new clause 1. As we have heard, the amendments concern the functions that can be included in a direction, in particular about the adoption support function. The new clause would require the Secretary of State to report on the fitness of agencies to deliver the functions. Amendment 9 would add

“support identified in needs assessments of adopted children”

to the list of functions that can be included in a direction under the new clause. Amendment 12 would require consultation with children, adopters and other relevant people before any amendments to the type of local authority functions that could be included in a direction. The new clause would require the Secretary of State, before giving a direction, to commission and publish a report on the fitness of the authorities and agencies that he or she intends to direct. It would also require the assessment to consider specifically agencies’ ability to deliver support for education and adult employment for adopted children, mental health assessments and support services, and matching services.

I am grateful to the hon. Members on both sides who contributed to the well-informed debate on the amendments. I can understand the reasons why the amendments were proposed; it is certainly imperative that we ensure that the list of functions that regional adoption agencies can deliver is the right list and, as the Committee would expect, I wholeheartedly agree with the ambition to ensure that those carrying out adoption functions are fit to do so. That is particularly true when it comes to the needs of adopted children and their families for good, timely adoption support services.

Let me turn first to that last point, which is particularly raised by amendment 9. The amendment would add the wording proposed to the list of functions that can be included in a direction under the new clause. The amendment seeks to ensure that local authorities are under a duty to provide the adoption support identified in the needs assessments of adopted children. I should note that the wording does not describe an existing function and therefore it cannot be added to a list of functions in the way proposed. The clause already enables the general adoption support function to be covered in any direction. However, I fully appreciate the hon. Members’ reasons for proposing the amendment and seeking to ensure that local authorities are under a duty to provide adoption support identified in needs assessments of adopted children. As the hon. Member for South Shields said, we can all see the strong moral argument for providing high-quality support to children and families who are dealing with the impact of early abuse and neglect. There is also a strong financial imperative, for obvious reasons.

It is in no one’s interests for adoptive placements to falter, or even break down, in ways that could have been avoided had good support been available at the right time. I know from my family’s experience of adoption that unless there is support and a good assessment of the needs of not only that individual child but the family coping with the fallout from that child’s early life experiences, it can cause unnecessary harm and damage to the prospects of that family. It is also the support that will best ensure that the underlying causes that have created the behavioural difficulties, outbursts or friction in the family are understood and dealt with.

That is precisely why I was determined to establish the adoption support fund, which rolled out this year. We are providing more than £19 million of funding to support adopted children and their families. That means that when local authorities assess the needs of adopted children they can now draw on the fund to provide a wide range of support services. I am delighted that already more than 250 families have been supported through the fund since it began in May, accessing around £1.5 million of the overall funding pot.

As I argued during the passage of the Children and Families Act 2014, I believe that the adoption support fund is a better solution to the ongoing challenge of meeting the needs of adopted children and their families, compared with imposing a duty to provide on local authorities. By adding significant extra money into the system, the fund will help both to improve access to adoption support services and build provision of those services. It will enable local authorities to assess properly and not be tempted, as they could be under a duty to provide, to under-assess, and do it consistently in the knowledge that there is an additional source of funding to pay for packages of support.

In addition, we expect that the fund will help to stimulate the opportunity for adoption and support providers to grow by acting as a commissioner of services. Those benefits would not have been realised through a duty to provide.

I shall take this opportunity to share with the Committee one of the stories that have already started to emerge from the adoption support fund, about a family that has benefited. The family said that Jacob had settled really well into his family but, as a result of experiencing parental drug use, domestic violence and neglect in his birth family, he had been having some emotional problems at home and school. An application was made to the adoption support fund and, as a result, Jacob, his mum and dad are taking part in a course of Theraplay. The money provided by the adoption support fund has meant that the therapy has been able to happen quickly in their home town and is delivered by a worker whom they trust. That opportunity has had a significant impact on the family and it means that Jacob has the best chance to settle into his school and continue to be loved and secure in his family. That is exactly the sort of outcome that we hoped for when we set up the fund at the beginning of last year.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I really welcome the fund. In discussions around establishing the fund, did the Minister consider that a lot of these children have mental health needs and issues prior to adoption? Was no consideration given to putting money into services that could help the children before they were adopted, as opposed to once they are adopted?

[Edward Timpson]

The hon. Lady is right to highlight the role that mental health plays in the lives of many children, not only those who are adopted but in the care system. I was struck when growing up by how many children, sometimes very young, were displaying what I now know to be the impact of mental health problems. The role of mental health in the therapeutic support that the adoptive families will need through the fund is very much part of what is on offer. We have a list of different therapies that are available through the fund, and that is kept under review to ensure that we have the right mix of therapies to meet the demand from applications to the fund. The greatest need and the main source of applications has been post-adoption therapeutic support.

We are struggling to see each other through the hon. Gentleman’s head.

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[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend finished his contribution by saying that whatever we do must be in the best interests of the child. His comment says everything about what we should do for vulnerable children and children who end up in the care system, whether or not they are adopted. Everything we do should be done with that in mind. The principle of paramountcy matters above all else. The interests of the child should come above the interests of any adult. That is why these three amendment are important. I put my name to amendment 11. It seems that I was slightly more fortunate than my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, in being allowed to use the term “foster care” in my amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields went further and managed to get “kinship care” and “residential care” in her amendment.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

Job done.

[Bill Esterson]

Indeed.

I have a sense that the Bill is a missed opportunity, and I said as much on Second Reading: it

“raises concern that adoption is being considered the gold standard”—[Official Report, 22 June 2015; Vol. 597, c. 647.]—

at the expense of other forms of permanence. That point has been put to me on a number of occasions. Let us bear in mind than only a very small number of children end up being adopted. The best way forward for the much greater number—in excess of 90%—of children who end up in the care system is to be kept with their families, perhaps extended family, with special guardianship orders or in foster or residential care. It is a great shame that the Bill does not pick up on that. We heard in evidence that point being made in one way or another by a number of witnesses. Annie Crombie was probably the first witness to touch on it when she suggested that it is only right to think more broadly and not think only about adoption:

Many of the voluntary organisations that work in this area provide services across more than just adoption; some do not, some are very adoption-focused, but many do.––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 47, Q10.]

Most of her remakes were about adoption, but she also made that point.

The other witnesses spoke in more detail. When Andy Leary-May spoke about the challenges in adoption that the Bill was trying to address, he mentioned that there are barriers within fostering, too. The essence of his remarks was that, by focusing only on adoption, there was a danger of missing a

“large part of the picture”––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 56, Q25.]

When I asked him and the other witnesses on that panel about the Bill’s impact on other forms of permanence, he made the point that a number of local authorities have already created permanence teams and he expressed the concern that, unless the changes the Government are considering are carried out very carefully, they may create what he called “a separation”. I think that he was saying that there is a danger that we will damage existing services, and that is what my amendment seeks to avoid.

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[Bill Esterson]

Yes. We heard evidence from Andy Elvin about the increase in the number of children who are subject to special guardianship orders, so something is clearly working for those children, and he said that the outcomes were just as good.

We have 65,000 children in the care system, and we might have a piece of legislation that deals only with 3,000 or 4,000 children a year. Although it is important and right that we do as well as we can by those 3,000 or 4,000, we must do something for the other 61,000 or 62,000 as well. My worry is that this is a missed opportunity. It is a second missed opportunity, as my hon. Friend has reminded us. Perhaps the Minister will tell us when the Government will introduce equivalent proposals to address the support for the much larger group of children and young people—the 61,000 or 62,000—who are not covered by the provisions in the Bill.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I would like to speak briefly to amendment 11 tabled by my hon. Friends and to my own amendment 26, which at this stage is a probing amendment.

I and my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak and for Sefton Central have said before that the Government treat adoption as a special case and focus on it at the expense of other approaches. There is a danger that clause 13 could go even further in setting adoption apart as a preferred option, relegating other types of permanence arrangements to second-order solutions. That would be a mistake.

At the very least, there is a danger that, because the reforms are applied to adoption services only, the process for adoption will be separated from other forms of permanence such as fostering, kinship care, special guardianship or long-term residential care. Such options exist because, as we all know, the job of finding a home for a child is never routine, and children’s needs and family circumstances are far too varied for one single answer to be applied in all cases.

If clause 13 is to be effective, fostering and other arrangements need to remain properly integrated with adoption. We cannot have a two-tier system in which the process for adoption differs from that used for fostering or kinship care. That is a sure way to create a disjointed procedure and encourage confusion and delay.

[Steve McCabe]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I am particularly struck by subsection (6B)(c) of her amendment and the point she is making. We all receive from time to time communications from people who refer to forced adoptions. Often people talk about the tendency of social workers to select the youngest child in the family, perhaps the baby, and consider him or her for adoption, but not consider that option for other children in the family. I am curious about how that works and what drives social workers to make that kind of decision. Does my hon. Friend agree that it may be due, in part, to the fact that adoption has been separated from other forms of permanence?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I will try to shed some light, from my practice, on why younger children are often separated from their siblings and placed for adoption. From my experience, when a child reaches three or four years old, they become, to put it bluntly, unadoptable. More often than not, adopters want babies.

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We created the children’s services innovation programme, which is giving £100 million directly to the local authorities and voluntary organisations that come forward with the most innovative and creative approaches to delivering children’s services. Those approaches include—I hope that this reassures the hon. Member for South Shields—encouraging closer working with families who want to have a child returned home but would find it difficult without a certain type of intervention. We are funding Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust to the tune of more than £3.25 million to create a national family drug and alcohol court development unit to test out the model that is working successfully in four parts of the country. The unit works with the family—it is normally with the mother, but often with the father—during the court proceedings to ensure that there is every prospect of their overcoming their addiction or problems so that they can care for their child. Anyone who has an opportunity to talk to Judge Nicholas Crichton about how the courts work and gone to see them—as I have—can only be impressed by the work that they do to turn around families who have found themselves in crisis, but who desperately want to care for their children.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I welcome the programme that the Minister is discussing, but am I right in thinking that the innovation programmes apply only to certain local authorities, not right across the board? Those authorities who are not taking part will be those who are saying that they are overburdened and unable to meet demand. In my experience, social workers are already incredibly innovative, so they do not need money chucked at them to be that. What they need is freedom from bureaucracy and the scope to do their jobs.

[Edward Timpson]

The innovation programme was set up specifically to address freedom and flexibility at ground level so that practitioners—whether social workers, health visitors or others who work in children’s services—can do what they came into the profession to do: to work directly with families, helping them to turn their lives around, and to use their professional judgment, which for too long has been shackled by much of the prescription and box-ticking that is expected of them.

We were purposely not prescriptive in the innovation programme, either. We said to local authorities, voluntary organisations and others, “You come forward with your own ideas as to how you think you can better deliver children’s services. Tell us what barriers are preventing you from doing exactly that. They may be regulatory, financial or cultural, but, whatever they are, we want to try to remove them so that you can provide the highest possible standard of children’s services.” The response was overwhelming, with almost 300 replies from every region, right across the country, including the north-east. I am happy to provide the hon. Lady with a list of the projects in her area.

I had the opportunity to go up to the city of Durham, where an excellent programme is working with families in the community to ensure that they do not reach that point of crisis at which interventions may be needed. That illustrates that there is desire and enthusiasm to improve what is available in the care system before intervention in a child’s life and interaction with children’s services.

Such learning will not be owned solely by the local authority or the groups who collaborate to deliver that project. The information can be disseminated through the innovation programme, which is being carefully evaluated. I will give the hon. Lady and other Members another example. In North Yorkshire, there is £2 million for the “no wrong door” approach, which is testing out how specialist foster carers can work alongside two children’s homes to provide better support, which includes mental health services, education and rebuilding links with their families, for up to 700 young people leaving care. That includes testing what is called a staying close approach, which supports care leavers up to the age of 21 in ways that they say they wanted to be supported. That may be through accommodation, a trusted mentor or keeping links with their education provider. Those are all examples of some of the many projects—53 to date—that we have funded to inject greater innovation and creativity into children’s services so that we can tackle some of the entrenched issues. We are determined to build on that record in this Parliament, and transform the quality of child protection services in England to ensure that the quality of support for looked-after children, whatever placement is right for them, continues to improve. The new child protection taskforce is a strong demonstration of that intent.

Of course, no one would disagree with the hon. Member for Sefton Central that the best interests of a child have to be at the heart of every decision made on their behalf. Clearly, adoption is no panacea when deciding what the future holds for a child in care, but it provides a fantastic opportunity for children for whom adoption is right to have the life that they deserve. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton made an excellent point that the fact that we are trying to fix what Sir Martin Narey called the long-term decline in adoption—commendably, the Labour Government also tried to fix that decline—does not mean that we cannot continue to drive improvement across the system. I welcome any views, experiences or suggestions from hon. Members on how we can do that further.

Special guardianships, which were mentioned by the hon. Member for Cardiff West, are an interesting and important innovation. In the almost 10 years since their inception, there has been exponential growth in special guardianship orders to the point that they are at about the same level as adoption, but we have never seen a proper review to understand their impact. Which children are being put forward for special guardianship? What is their age profile? Who are the special guardians? How are the placements faring in terms of support? What is the breakdown rate? There has been some research, but the time has come for us to understand the role played by special guardianship orders. They are helping to provide more children with permanence.

Taking that cohort together with adoption and long-term fostering, more children are getting the permanent placements that we all want them to have. We have instituted a review, and we have set up an expert working group, of which Andy Elvin, who gave evidence to this Committee, is a member. I will be meeting the group in the coming weeks to establish exactly how we can pool together the collective knowledge out there on special guardianship orders so that we can understand the role they can play in future.

This has been a helpful debate. I reiterate that the focus on adoption is right, but that does not mean that we are not capable of making improvements elsewhere in the care system, as we did during the previous Parliament. That remains our goal, and I hope that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak feels reassured enough to withdraw his amendment.