Education and Adoption Bill (Fourth sitting)

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Public Bill Committees

[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.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Which way do you want me to lean?

[Edward Timpson]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could lean to the right. If he leant to the right, he could come and join us.

It is really important to understand the impact on families where the support is not in place, including around mental health. Of course, local authorities have a duty to provide an adoption support service, which includes the pre-adoption process. The £200 million injection that I spoke about earlier into local authority adoption services has helped to try to ensure that some of that early work is done so that by the time a child is adopted, time has not been wasted in trying to deal with some of their underlying issues.

[Kevin Brennan]

It is quite hard for me to see the Minister, too, because of the halo around him, which is the result not only of the praise that has been heaped on him during the debate, but of the light behind him. He has characterised the situation as though the duty and the fund were mutually exclusive. Is it not possible that the duty might complement the fund?

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[Bill Esterson]

That is absolutely right. Whether it is about adoption or other forms of permanence, we have to find more people to come forward to look after children. In my experience, there are many things we could do to make it easier and more attractive. The issue of support came up in the evidence, for example. We need to improve support for adopters or others who care for the children who end up in the care system.

[Kevin Brennan]

Would my hon. Friend care to commend the Adoption and Children Act 2002, which dealt with measures to improve adoption, but also took the trouble to introduce—by amending the Children Act 1989—special guardianship orders? They should surely be included in any debate or legislation about adoption in order to get a proper picture of all the permanency options available.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

Recent surveys show that social workers are still overburdened with bureaucracy. Four years on from the Munro review, they report that nothing has really changed on the ground. By allowing the outsourcing of child protection services, so fragmenting the system, the Government are introducing more confusion and delay. Forcing adoption to regionalise will not solve those problems, but a comprehensive approach to child protection that reforms and invests in every stage of the process and gives social workers the resources that they need to work with families certainly can. I hope that the Minister, in his response, will look favourably on what I have said today.

[Kevin Brennan]

I do not want to detain the Committee for long, but it is important to note briefly, in view of what was said earlier, that these amendments are very much in the spirit of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, which I mentioned. The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton should realise that these vehicles do not come along very often and that it is important, when legislating, to look at an issue comprehensively, rather than pick out one part of a problem. The problem that we are addressing is that of permanency for children in this situation.

The 2002 Act was groundbreaking in many ways, because it attempted to widen the number of prospective adopters. For example, my hon. Friends and I introduced amendments that, on a free vote on the Labour side, granted for the first time the right for unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, to apply to adopt. There is a small but interesting piece of history: the then Leader of the Opposition—now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—whipped his troops to vote against that proposal, and it ended with the resignation from the Front Bench of the right hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow). That was the start of his pathway into the speakership, so these things sometimes have a strange impact.

The other thing that that Bill did was not just to look at adoption, but to try to look at alternative permanency arrangements, in recognition of the fact that the popular perception of adoption, even back then, was very different from the reality. The popular perception is that it is always about young babies being given up for adoption. Although that was very much the case in decades past, things have changed significantly. That is not really the picture that we see when we look at what kinds of children are adopted and at their ages. That is why the introduction in that Bill, through the amendment to the Children Act 1989, of special guardianship orders was a groundbreaking step. It is unfortunate that we have not taken the trouble to revisit that—I would be grateful to the Minister if he explained why when he winds up—and looked at how we can strengthen other kinds of arrangements for permanency, given how important they are within the system.

[Edward Timpson]

I should like to speak to amendments 11, 25 and 26, which have been tabled by Opposition Members. I will come on to some of the matters raised towards the end of the debate, such as other routes to permanence. It is important to remember that clause 13 deals with the point at which the court has already made a decision to place a child for adoption, so we are not looking at whether that decision is right; we are accepting the fact that that decision has been made, but looking at what we need to do to improve the prospects of that adoptive placement being successful.

The amendments raise the important question how regional adoption agencies link to, impact on and work with other parts of the children’s social care system, including other types of permanent placement such as long-term foster care, special guardianship and kinship care, as well as the provision of mental health services. Amendment 26 would require the Secretary of State to commission and publish an independent evaluation on, in effect, alternative options to a regional adoption agency that capture all permanency options and approaches to prevent children from having to be taken into care in the first place.

I will speak about this in a bit more detail later, but I agree with much of what the hon. Member for South Shields said about the early interaction of children and families with children’s services and about making sure that from the earliest opportunity, the work that is done with them enables the child, if at all possible, to continue living with their birth family. That is clear not only in legislation—it was reiterated in the Children and Families Act 2014, which is underpinned by the Children Act 1989—but in the approach that we have taken through the innovation programme, which I will talk about in a little more detail later. In that programme, we seek to encourage much more work with families through family group conferences, the expansion of the family drug and alcohol court and other innovative programmes, to increase the prospect of children being able to stay with their birth family.

I thank hon. Members for raising the important issue of how we are reforming the care system and improving outcomes for all children. We share a determination to ensure that all children in or on the edge of care get the right support and decisions for them and their families and that, when children need to come into care, they are placed in strong, stable placements as quickly as possible, with the support that they need to thrive. It would be hard to argue against that approach.

I understand the desire for all permanency placements to be captured by the new regional agencies. The new agencies will have to work with other parts of the system to be successful. I assure hon. Members that our intention with this legislation is to bring down barriers to effective working, not to create new ones. However, there are clear reasons why we are proposing the power to direct regionalisation for adoption services specifically and why that is not necessarily the best approach or the priority for other parts of the system when the decision has been made on where the child’s future lies.

It is often noted that the number of children in the care system who go forward for adoption is small—a point that was made by the hon. Member for Sefton Central—relative to the number of looked-after children, which is why regionalisation is particularly appropriate for adoption services. The fact is that the adoption system remains highly fragmented relative to the number of children and adopters involved. As I said earlier, we have about 180 different agencies recruiting and matching adopters for approximately 5,000 adoptions a year, so the agencies are not benefiting from economies of scale; but worse, the localised nature of the system acts as a barrier to effective recruitment, matching and support. That is starkly illustrated by the fact that 3,000 children are still waiting for forever families.