Children and Families Bill

John McDonnell Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Timpson]

We know from research done by Julie Selwyn at Bristol university that for every year a child is not adopted there is a 20% reduction in their prospect of being adopted. By ensuring that adoption is timely and that the matching process has been done in conjunction with the prospective adopters rather than as an adjunct to that process, we will get children into the right placements in a quicker and more quality-assured way than has happened in the past. The longer children wait to be adopted, the less prospect there is of their being adopted. Adoptive placements are some of the most secure and stable arrangements outside the family. Clearly, adoption breakdowns still take place. We are looking at every stage of the process to make sure that the support that is made available and the information that is given to prospective adopters about the child they are adopting is as transparent as possible so that the prospects of any breakdown are reduced to a bare minimum. The right hon. Gentleman makes a key point that we consistently bear in mind as we make these reforms and push them forward.

Not all children in the care system will or should be adopted. But for all children, the difference it makes when someone cares whether they do well at school is crucial. When someone has high aspirations for them, they are more likely to have high aspirations for themselves. Yet in 2012 only 15% of children who had been looked after continuously for 12 months achieved five or more GCSE grades at A* to C, including English and maths. There have been slight improvements in recent years, but these results are simply not good enough. We have a duty to these children as corporate parents—a duty to care for them as we would our own children.

Of course, we should not forget that, thanks in large part to the fantastic foster carers we have across the country, the large majority of looked-after children benefit from their time in care. However, we want to drive up the focus, commitment and effort within our schools, councils and, yes, foster and residential care homes to make sure that the education of children in care is a real priority. The Bill introduces a duty on every local authority to have an officer—the “virtual school head”—to promote the educational achievement of its looked-after children, because these children are our children and they deserve the very best chance in life.

I want to turn to family justice reform. There is no debate about the need for reform of the family justice system. It is simply not acceptable that children wait, on average, over 47 weeks—until recently, over 56 weeks—for their care or supervision case to be resolved. In 2011-12, 21,553 children were involved in care proceedings and subject to this delay.

David Norgrove’s widely welcomed family justice review made the case for setting a clear time limit for the length of care cases, ensuring that decisions are child-focused and aimed at reducing duplication in the system. We know how important family courts are in making sure that vulnerable children end up in appropriate placements safely, but we need to do more to speed up the process to make sure that children can find stability as quickly as possible. To this end, the Bill includes measures to tackle delay through the introduction of a maximum 26-week time limit for completing care and supervision proceedings.

We also want to see a reduction in the number of additional expert reports commissioned, by ensuring that expert evidence is used in children’s cases only when it is necessary and not as a matter of routine. We will make it explicit that when the court considers a care plan, it should focus primarily on those issues that are essential to its decision about whether to make a care order. We will also help to reduce bureaucracy in the system by removing the need for frequent renewals of interim care and supervision orders.

Our private law reforms are also based on the family justice review’s detailed analysis and recommendations. Simply too many children are involved in private proceedings. Just over 56,000 children were subject to new contact and residence cases in 2011-12. For many families involved, the process can be drawn out and emotionally draining. As someone who spent the best part of 10 years practising as a family law barrister, I can testify that this is rarely the best way to resolve family disputes. Taken together, the Bill’s private law provisions keep the needs of children firmly at the centre of the system, while explicitly acknowledging the important role that both parents should play in a child’s life post-separation.

Our starting principle is that separated parents should resolve their disputes out of court whenever possible. The Bill makes attendance at a mediation, information and assessment meeting—known as MIAM—a prerequisite for applying to court for certain types of family proceedings. This support to help parents reach their own agreements will be underpinned by better online support, access to information programmes and encouragement to develop parenting agreements. The material will also emphasise the importance to children of relationships with wider family members, particularly grandparents.

The principle that most children benefit from the involvement of both parents in their lives after family separation is also pivotal to our private law reforms. Too many children lose contact with a parent following family breakdown. One survey suggests that between a quarter and a third of children who do not live with both parents rarely, if ever, see their non-resident parent. We will emphasise in the out-of-court support we offer to parents the importance to the child of both parents playing a role, but we also believe it must be explicit in the court environment.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

The role of mediation has been generally welcomed, but it will require mediators. At the moment, a lot of the mediating is done by court officers and others. Who will play the role of mediator? Their responsibilities will include identifying the safeguarding of children and domestic violence issues. What qualifications and accreditation will be required of them?

[Mr Timpson]

The mediator will not be a court clerk or court officer. An independent mediator will be assigned to carry out the mediation in a particular case. When the Bill goes to Committee, we will go into the detail of exactly how the role will be performed. There is a difference between those who go through publicly funded proceedings and those who do not. I will be happy to provide more information on that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg]

I am wary of ever disagreeing with the illustrious Education Committee—[Interruption.] That applies to the entire Committee, including its Chair. This is such an important issue, however, that using the positive resolution procedure merits consideration, although I welcome the Minister’s assurances regarding the publication of the code so that it can be scrutinised in Committee.

[John McDonnell]

We have had situations where affirmative and super-affirmative resolutions have been used so we can have a wider dialogue. One of the other issues apart from the code of practice is the regulations, particularly with regard to the local offer. The component parts of the local offer should be contained in the regulations. Is it not important that we at least have some sight of them during the Committee stage, too?

[Stephen Twigg]

That is absolutely right and sensible. The spirit of the Minister’s speech, and his and the Government’s handling of this issue—and the fact that he is nodding at me—suggest that my hon. Friend will get what he wants.

--- Later in debate ---

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

The general view of the House is that the Bill is a good one that could improve the quality of life of large numbers of children. It is not the revolution, to be frank, that some of us wanted, and there is also an underlying fear that the austerity measures being introduced might undermine the Bill’s potential. Let me say to the Minister that if the Bill requires a battle with the Treasury, he has allies on all sides to fight the fight over resources.

As we legislate, we need to learn lessons. For a Bill that relies so heavily on regulations and codes of practice, we need to learn the lesson that it would have been better to have those regulations and codes of practice available to us on Second Reading. I know that it will happen in our Committee consideration, but it would have been good to have them before us today, as without them we will be working on some issues in the dark until the detail of the regulations is revealed over the next few weeks.

I shall concentrate on two elements: family justice, and children and young people. We have all received many briefings on family justice, and I think we should thank those who supply them to us. On the family justice side, I have received briefings from the National Association of Probation Officers, or NAPO, and the Public and Commercial Services Union, which organises Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service workers and others.

I have three issues to raise. The first is about mediation in clause 10. I raised the issue earlier, but we need to know in some detail how mediation is to be organised in the regulations. Who will undertake the mediation; how will it be structured and organised; how will it be resourced? In addition, I raised the point in an intervention, and it was taken up by the Chairman of the Justice Committee, about the qualifications of the mediators. How will they be trained, and what accreditation will they have? They will have to deal with issues such as the safeguarding of children, the identification of domestic abuse and other matters. That is a professional role; it needs to be professionally resourced.

On the child arrangements orders in clause 12, I am anxious that this new procedure is being introduced at a time when legal aid has been cut. I am concerned that in complex cases adequate legal aid must be available to ensure that the children are properly represented by guardians. It would be worth exploring that further with the Minister in Committee; we must have confidence that the resources will be available to protect children and ensure that their voice is heard.

As for clause 15, I am concerned that the Bill amends the Children Act 1989 so that the courts focus on the central issue of whether the child should be removed from their parents, and the scrutiny of the detail of the care plans is to be left to local authorities. Frankly, when local authorities are under significant financial pressure, my anxiety is that that scrutiny might be influenced by that fact. I welcome the role of the courts in that respect. We sometimes need the independence of a judicial view on these matters.

On the special needs elements, I am grateful for the briefings we received from the Association of Educational Psychologists, my own local group the Hillingdon Autistic Care and Support society, and the National Autistic Society itself. Future work will be based on the foundation stones of the assessment procedure. The regulations or the code of practice need to be explicit about what is expected in the assessment. There will be a requirement to draw on very specialist services. I would welcome it if those services were spelled out in some detail in the regulations—for example, that there will be recourse to educational psychologists and to speech and language therapy. It should be obligatory that that sort of service will be part and parcel of the assessment procedure. Again, I fear that in this economic climate some local authorities, for example, might be tempted to save money by using less rigorous assessment procedures or by using under-qualified or inappropriately qualified staff to save money. That can be overcome, I think, only by central direction from the central Government in regulation.

Time limits will be important in these assessments. I am anxious that there are no time limits in the Bill and hope that they will be determined in more detail in regulations. We should set out in regulations the specific time limits on responses to parents’ requests for assessment, on providing a mediation certificate, and on when a plan is to be put in place. There also need to be regulations on the form and content of the plans, because there are anxieties not only about a postcode lottery, as others have said, but about the possibility that form and content could vary across the piece. That could not only create difficulties for parents but make it difficult for the Government to monitor the effectiveness of the implementation of the plans.

On local offers, the regulations need to be very specific not only about what local authorities are saying exists, but about what should exist, in individual services—best-quality standards rather than minimum standards. The regulations should also ensure that schools are required to set out what they are making available in terms of their local offer. Now that school action plans, among others, are no longer to exist, parents will require that information to make their judgment about the placement of their child within a school setting.

With regard to tribunals, I reiterate the point that others have made about the lack of enforceability with regard to health and social services. I cannot understand why we have a different system from Scotland, where there is some enforceability over health and social services in the development of plans. I welcome the encouragement towards mediation services. I am grateful that the Government have listened to parents so that we do not have an obligatory form of mediation, but having dropped the element of compulsion they have introduced a cumbersome certification process that ultimately can only delay matters.

I fear that personal budgets will not cover the specialist services that are required, particularly in educational psychology. We need to be much more specific about how those personal budgets will be spent to ensure that they can draw in the expertise that children need.