Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, this is an excellent report. One of the more interesting things in it is the set of examples that it gives. It confirms what I have seen all my life, which is how complex families in crisis can be. There is no “this is a family in crisis” model. They are all different.

I am here to give your Lordships a bit of what was mentioned earlier: lived experience rather than professional knowledge. I declare that I am not a vice-president of the LGA; there are not many of us in this House who are not vice-presidents of the LGA, but I am one of them. However, I began a part of my life at the London School of Economics, looking at children’s services among other things. Children’s services as a distinct subsection of social policy really ran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, from the Curtis report to the Seebohm report. The Curtis report grew out of the abuse of children who were sent to foster homes during the war, where they were often abused and in one or two cases died.

That led to the setting up of a committee and to the Children Act 1948, which positioned children’s services not in education or health but in the Home Office. One of the great advantages was that a children’s service grew up that was devoted to children. That may sound a bit odd, but at that time social services was very much welfare services. It was still the old workhouse. The children’s service was the one beacon. I remember early in my life meeting a remarkable woman, Baroness Lucy Faithfull, and her sidekick the children’s officer for Oxford, Barbara Kahan, who did a lot of pioneering work concerning children. I was struck by how all the problems were different and how local authority children’s services were, above everything else, conditioned by being flexible. The best of them could respond to the individual demands, which meant that the social workers and the heads of social services departments had to have a certain autonomy, while the local authorities had children’s departments and children’s committees.

I speak with some knowledge. I was a child “in care”, as they said. I was extraordinarily well looked after by Sheffield City Council. My first point for the Minister is that privatisation does not work. Children’s services and social services must be public services. You cannot put a profit motive in there and expect a humanitarian concern. There must be a very careful look, because many of the decisions that you are called on to take are not taken against a strict financial backdrop.

My second lesson is that you need devolution. Having been David Cameron’s envoy to the trade unions, I read very closely what the Labour Party is up to. I see that it is up to a bit of devolution at the moment. Devolution to local government is a jolly good thing, but it must be accompanied by financial devolution. It is no good saying to local authorities, “Get on and do the job”, unless you give them the money to do it. My lifetime in local government leads me to believe that there is no finer structure for local government than the old county borough arrangement, where you had the services under one authority without the conflicting authorities, and they were able to get on with the job. I say to the party opposite that you cannot just devolve power. You must devolve financial power, and local government has to be trusted. If you live in a democracy, you must trust people to raise the rates from the people and get themselves either elected or thrown out. This is quite crucial.

If we are to make children’s services work, they have to work—and be seen to work—at a local level. The fact of the matter is that when you build up a local service, you are actually building up dozens of individual services. I would not have been as well looked after in a for-profit organisation; I do not think the children of Sheffield would have been as well looked after in one. We were well looked after because we were professionally looked after and there were professional people looking after what we had.

I must say, I remember all the “loving relationship” stuff. It falls on stony ground a bit when you are 13 years old with, as someone just said, a bin bag in the children’s services department. You need the kindness of strangers but let us not delude ourselves that, somewhere out there, there are lots of people with their hearts brimming over. I saw evidence of some people seeing having a foster child as a way of supplementing their income, which was often not very high. It was a legitimate way but it needed a business-type relationship. It was not that they were overwhelming in their love and gratitude. They were in many ways overwhelming with wishing to help, but it was also a business relationship. We have to remember that.

The job of the professional in this sort of area was to hold the ring between kindness, compassion, obedience to the law and the best interests of the child. It is a very difficult ring to hold. I say this to the Minister: go back to the department and look at devolution. Look at letting people get on with the job and setting up what I would call a loose field of rules and regulations. Above everything else, look to the official guidance of strangers.