Safeguarding Children

Debate between John Hemming and Ian Mearns

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

I must congratulate the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) on his very good speech, much of which needs to be listened to and understood. It is not that we do not have the right laws in place; it is that the professional judgments made by practitioners are often basically not common sense.

Let me declare a declaration of interest on account of my involvement in the Justice for Families campaign. What I tend to see are the over-interventions, where the state intervenes improperly.

Returning to the issues of Rochdale, I raised a number of years ago the situation of a children’s home in Birmingham, where the practitioners did not mind if the children were prostitutes but did mind if they made toast for each other—because there was a health and safety risk to making toast.

I have made the effort to get the statutory guidance. If the motion supported the statutory guidance, I would probably have to vote against it, because it goes no further in looking at the definition of what is a risk of significant harm. It is quite clear that certain practitioners do not believe that being a prostitute is a risk of significant harm. [Interruption.] That seems to be the case, and it is not necessarily a UK-only situation. A family currently living in Wimbledon had similar problems in New Zealand where an under-age relationship was encouraged by the practitioners in that country because they thought it was right. That was on the New Zealand media last week.

[Ian Mearns]

In the Rochdale case and others I have read about, the abuse perpetrated against young girls has been so systematic and has lasted over such a prolonged period that the girls themselves did not see themselves as victims. In that scenario, who is going to look after them? We must think deeply about the implications of that problem.

[John Hemming]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that excellent intervention, but I shall not take any more because of the Speaker’s advice.

Let me explain one of my concerns about the Government’s complacency on this issue. We have the SSDA903 return, which tracks what happens to children as they leave care. A number of possible destinations are listed: for example, adopted; died; care taken by another local authority, and so forth. There are also those who leave care for an unknown reason. In America, this is tracked to find out who has run away. These are children who have been abducted and trafficked. Across the country, we find that 5,950 children left care for unknown and other reasons. Of those, 430 were aged one to four; 350 were aged five to nine; 630 were aged 10 to 15, and there were many more at the ages of 16, 17 and 18. I have the detailed figures for my local authority, if anyone wants to see them.

What is sad is the fact that the Minister has refused to consider trying to gain more detailed information so that we know what happens to these children. If I were losing 5,000 children here, not knowing what was happening to them—rather similar to the situation in Rochdale—I would not be feeling very happy as a corporate parent or as a parent in any form whatever. The failure is in not having proper systems of checks and balances on the judgment of practitioners who operate on a daily basis.

There are some excellent practitioners. I know of one social worker who was recently suspended because she would not change her view that a child should go back to its parents. The management tried to bully her into agreeing that the child should be adopted, but she would not do that, so she was suspended. We should be looking at what those managements are doing, and establishing whether it is valid. We know that much of the evidence is unreliable as a result of the excellent work of Professor Jane Ireland, which is the only proper independent work that has been done to assess the quality of evidence in the family courts.

I have here a letter from the Health Professions Council, which is refusing to investigate allegations about bad psychologists. Giving the reference FTP04616, the HPC says that it cannot “progress the concern” because of the current law. I think that it misunderstands the law: I think that the 2009 changes enable it to investigate allegations about rubbishy psychologists without the permission of a judge.

We have a problem with checks and balances, and with the failure of quality control in respect of evidence and the family courts. However, we also need to look at the wider issues of why children are taken into care. The failure of the statutory guidance to go beyond “risk of significant harm” implies that there is a real problem. The care system is very complex and involves very subtle judgments, but the Government come along wearing big boots and try to kick it in a particular direction.

Puerperal psychosis involves extreme baby blues or post-natal depression. When a mother has given birth and is depressed it can be dangerous for the child, who may need to be taken into care; but is that the sort of case that should be driven towards adoption, just because mum was depressed after giving birth? Such action is likely to make mum even more depressed. The Government’s policy is, “We need to speed it all up: we need rapid decisions.” The flaw in their approach is that there is none of the individual judgment on cases that is really needed. It is a very simplistic approach to what is a very complex system.

Domestic violence is another example. Angela Wileman is writing a book about what happened to her. She has been to Spain, Ireland and all over the place to avoid the UK care system, which was persecuting her in various ways. She has been in the newspapers plenty of times. She was a victim of domestic violence, on the basis of which the system wished to take one of her children from her, put that child in care and have it adopted—but only that child, because she had had the other child abroad.

Ms Toni McLeod, who lives with her family in Durham, is thinking of going to Ireland because she is pregnant. It is a difficult situation. She was a supporter of the English Defence League. I hate the EDL. Three of my children are mixed-race, and I protest against the EDL. Toni McLeod says that she is not racially prejudiced, but that children were taken from her partly because of her membership of the EDL. It was

“felt that conversations and opinions may be expressed in the children’s presence.”

That is a “thought police” approach to care. The system intervened because of what Toni McLeod might say in front of her children. She says that she has many friends who are Muslims and Sikhs, and that she disowns the EDL nowadays, but whether that is true or not, we should ask whether it is appropriate for the state to remove a child because children may be radicalised by a parent. Is that an appropriate use of the phrase “risk of significant harm”? That brings us back to the statutory guidance, which makes no effort whatsoever to give any indication of what is meant by the phrase.

One of the biggest problems in relation to the accountability of the family court and the care system is insufficient proper, academic access to the details of the proceedings. We do not know whether we are achieving something for the children or not. An excellent report by Ruth Gilbert, published in The Lancet late last year, raised major questions about whether we are getting anywhere at all with the overall system. We have some extremely serious problems, and in my view the interventions are often damaging.

I work with a number of care leavers. It is important to remember that care leavers remain care leavers even when they are in their forties and fifties. As people get older, they gain the confidence that enables them to speak out about what happened to them when they were younger, whereas many people in their late teens and early twenties do not have enough confidence to explain where the real problems lay. We need to be very careful. Lucy Allan may be going to speak to the Minister about her experience. She was a Conservative councillor. The same psychologist wrote two different reports about her, which was complete nonsense, of course. If a specialist of some kind writes two completely contradictory reports about the same person, what intellectual value does any of that information have?

Although I have a lot more to say on this subject, I only have 54 seconds left, so let me just put on the record that the Education Committee has done an excellent job in listening to people on different sides of the argument. The family justice review panel included only people who operated the system. It therefore did not properly consider the views of those who are affected by the system. The Home Affairs Committee will kick off an inquiry that I hope will be run on a far better basis. The Munro report is quite good, but we need to look more rationally at the detailed ways in which things are operated and make sure steps are taken that actually benefit the children in the long term, not just hit Government targets.