Care Crisis Review

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Lucy Allan

Wednesday 5th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Allan]

The hon. Lady has done wonderful work in Parliament promoting the role of kinship carers. She is absolutely right: the opportunity to explore other avenues before taking children into care is often overlooked. Too often, social workers say, “This person won’t be suitable,” but they have not actually done the due diligence to determine whether extended family can be supported to help keep a child connected with their identity, school, friends and network. All those things are so important to the stability of children. I hope that the hon. Lady will continue to do work on kinship carers. If I can assist her in any way, I would be more than delighted.

It used to be considered that increasing the number of children in child protection investigations or taking more children into care was a good thing. Thank goodness we no longer think that way. Clearly, it places intense pressure on children’s services and on the family court system. Too often, statutory intervention does nothing specific to help a family and is more punitive than supportive. Often, it is all that is available at the end of a long process. If all we can offer struggling families is care proceedings, of course they will not engage and work collaboratively with social workers.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on this timely debate, which in actual fact has been a long-running debate for a number of years. When we talk about problems that social workers have and criticisms of them, we tend to forget that a social worker probably has too many cases on their hands, which does not allow them to concentrate in the way that they should concentrate. Of course, there is a lack of resources.

Often, police are called to a house about an issue that has nothing to do with childcare, only to discover some appalling situation affecting children, and have to get on to the relevant authorities to try to sort it out. We have had one or two cases in Coventry like that. There is a need for a more joined-up approach. We can have as much legislation as we want, but if we do not have a proper joined-up approach, we will get nowhere fast.

[Lucy Allan]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. One of the issues raised by the care crisis review was the intense pressure on social workers and the need to work in a problem-solving way rather than in the process-driven way that is so often their focus. They often find themselves in a blame culture where they are quite defensive, and therefore focus on getting the process right rather than finding the right solution for the child. The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point.

Placing children in care or triggering forcible state intervention is never a solution to a family’s problems. Too often, it is evidence of our failure to support children before problems escalate so they can stay safely at home or, as the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) said, with a wider family network. Time and again we hear that action is taken only at the point of crisis, and often only in the form of assessment, judgment, monitoring or scrutinising a parent’s ability to parent. The action taken is not practical support for the drugs, alcohol or mental health issues that are the cause of the crisis, but simply saying that the parents are not really good enough, and all the state can offer is removing the children from the family. Meanwhile, people often overlook the role that the extended family and the community can play in supporting families.

For all those reasons, I invite the Minister to take very seriously the solutions that the care crisis review has put forward. There is an emotionally damaging cost to children, families and to society, as well as a financial cost to the state. That is why we must have an overarching long-term view on the problem—a longer-term strategy, rather than sitting back and saying that this is a local issue for councils to decide locally what is right for them. They are on very tight budgets that often are taken up with statutory measures rather than being available for early intervention and preventive measures.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Allan]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that contribution. He has a long track record of expertise in this area, not least as an excellent Children’s Minister. His point about different treatment in different local authorities is vital, because it demonstrates that with the right support for families there is less need to take children into care. With the right support, children are more likely to be able to thrive safely at home. That illustrates my argument.

All Members would agree that taking children from their families must be a last resort. Indeed, the Prime Minister said exactly that when I raised the care crisis review at Prime Minister’s questions a few months ago. However, if nothing else is on offer to support a family in crisis, it suddenly is not a last resort—in some cases, it becomes the only tool a local authority can deploy. As I said, that will be of huge consequence to children, society and the state if we continue down the path of saying simply, “Let’s not invest in the long term and enabling children to stay safely at home with their families.”

Had I not seen it for myself, I would not have believed the cost of care proceedings where parents object, or the agonies they go through to keep their child with them. I have seen cases where the legal process has cost the state millions. Just think of the difference we could have made if only we had been able to support such families before they reached crisis—not only to the children’s lives, but with the millions of pounds we have spent on the court process, which is the most awful process for any family to have to go through.

I pay tribute to Edward Timpson, another excellent former Children’s Minister, for the work he did and for his knowledge and understanding of this area. He initiated fantastic projects such as Pause, which works with women who have repeatedly had children taken from them and put into the care system. To deal with their loss and grief, women continued to have children, which the state simply took away from them one after another without doing anything whatever to help them get out of the situation they were in. The futility of all that anguish seems senseless, so I am grateful to Edward Timpson for his legacy.

The only thing I would say about such projects is that, admirable as they are, they too often tinker at the edges rather than setting an overarching, long-term view of what could be done differently. That is why I welcome the suggestions in the care crisis review. Yes, some of them are about funding, which I have touched on, but the review contains all sorts of other suggestions. The Minister is very familiar with them, and I urge him to consider which ones could be implemented and which he could put his weight behind. It is important that we do not just have debates in which the Minister says, “I’m going to consider it,” and then the proposal dies a death. I have seen that happen many times. This is a real opportunity to use work that has been done for the Government by experts in the field to look carefully at what the Government can do to improve the system and make things better for children and families.

The cost to the state of a child being in care is enormous. We all know about the outcomes for care leavers and the huge challenges they face when they leave the care system. We know the statistics about the make-up of the prison population. Too often, people who have children taken from them are care leavers who did not have a parenting role model. The state deems that in itself to be a risk factor when assessing their suitability to parent. In too many cases, there is a self-perpetuating cycle of misery, and the Government do not intervene in the way they could to do amazing good. We have seen from the great projects I mentioned how much good can be done, but there does not seem to be an overarching, long-term Government strategy. Instead, understandably, the point is made that local authorities have to act on a case-by-case basis and the Government cannot intervene.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

The hon. Lady is being generous in accepting interventions. She has worked hard on issues such as child abuse, which are related to this debate. One of the big problems is that successive Governments—not just Conservative Governments—have passed legislation but have not provided the funding to see it through. That is why we often get situations where things are botched, for want of a better term. We all know that local authorities have been starved of resources. Whether we accept the figures or not, that is a fact, and it puts another burden on local authorities. If we are going to have a proper strategy, it will have to be properly funded and we will need cross-party consensus to ensure that whichever party is in power sees it through.

Timpson was one of the very few Ministers I knew who actually understood the problem. I met him many times because of the problems we had in Coventry. I hope the present Minister, whom I do not know too well, has the same depth of commitment as Timpson. If he has, I am sure he will realise what the hon. Lady advocates. That will be the test for him.

[Lucy Allan]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comments and for echoing what I said about Edward Timpson’s contribution. He is correct about funding. I am not one who thinks the solution to a problem is just to throw money at it—never, never, never—but in this case, where local authorities do not have funding for early intervention, prevention and support for families, they will only be able to keep coming back to the Government and asking for more money for statutory services. There will be a cumulative effect. That will happen unless the Government step in and say, “Right, we’re going to ring-fence funding to ensure there is at least an attempt to provide adequate support, particularly where we can see a family is struggling.”

We know that if a crisis is not addressed it continues to escalate. We must be able to act. We must be able to say, “Okay, that’s no good.” People normally end up in court proceedings, where the judge says, “Ah yes, the mother needs to have therapy, she needs to go to counselling and there needs to be”—[Interruption.]