Children’s Homes etc. Inspection Fees, Childcare Fees, Adoption and Children Act Register (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2019 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

That this House regrets that the Children’s Homes etc. Inspection Fees, Childcare Fees, Adoption and Children Act Register (Amendment) Regulations 2019, in revoking the duty on adoption agencies to provide information to the Secretary of State about children approved for adoption and approved prospective adopters who have not been matched, and in allowing the adoption register for England to lapse from 31 March, have failed (1) to put forward satisfactory evidence to justify these decisions, (2) to offer a timetable for and clarity about a replacement for the register, and (3) to explain how Her Majesty’s Government intend to mitigate the risk of reduced provision for children who may be harder to place (SI 2019/835).

Relevant documents: 49th and 50th Reports from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a governor of Coram, which has been looking after the interests of children since it was established as the Foundling Hospital in 1739. I also place on the record the fact that Coram ran the Adoption Register for England on behalf of the Department for Education for the last three years of its existence. I am also an officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Fostering.

I wish to make it crystal clear, however, that I am not speaking on behalf of Coram; I am expressing my own personal concerns. Above all, I am speaking on behalf of a small group of children, a group often described as the hardest to place, who have been waiting to be matched with adoptive parents for 90 days or more—often a great deal longer than 90 days. These are often children with special needs, children with disabilities and sibling groups.

I also wish to make it crystal clear that I do not put forward this regret Motion to try to castigate and embarrass the Government. On the contrary, as I said on the record in this Chamber on 14 May, in the debate on adoption initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, Governments of all political hues must be congratulated for a succession of initiatives which have significantly improved the standards of operation across the adoption sector and the chances of giving children new lives with loving families. It is fortunate that the Minister was at the Dispatch Box during that debate.

Under the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005, adoption agencies were given a duty to register this category of children unmatched after 90 days. During the last year of its operation, over 80% of the children referred to the register were in this category and it succeeded in making 275 matches. Despite it being a statutory requirement for this group of children to be registered, it is an open secret and accepted fact of life within the sector that not all of them have been. We simply do not know, and have never known, exactly how many children there are in this category.

Exactly five weeks ago today, it was brought to my attention that the Minister for Children and Families would be giving evidence to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee about his decision to stop the operation of the national register. I went to listen to the proceedings and was interested and encouraged by the obvious concerns felt by members of the committee. I was equally interested, if occasionally slightly baffled, by some of the explanations given by the Minister. The chairman of the committee, the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, spotted me lurking in the back of the committee room and kindly asked me if I had any questions for the Minister. I asked specifically about the potential impact of the loss of the register on the group of harder-to-place children, and was left at the end of the session with a nagging concern that the Department for Education seemed broadly satisfied and relatively unworried that there might be any negative impact, without having undertaken any really detailed analysis. This is not helped by the fact that we do not know, and have never known, exactly how large this group of children is, who and where they are and how long they have been waiting to be matched.

The Minister stated that he felt confident that, in particular, the excellent database and matching service provided by the market leader—a social enterprise called Link Maker, created by adopters five years ago—was already taking care of the needs of this group of harder-to-place children. Link Maker uses up-to-date technology which is particularly user-friendly for social workers and potential adopters. It is far fleeter of foot and more focused on customer experience than the somewhat clunky and technically less well-resourced national register. As of today, every English local adoption agency is happy to pay an annual fee of £5,000 to access Link Maker, which also provides the online platform for the Scottish and Welsh adoption registers. I have spoken at length with the chief executive of Link Maker, Mr Andy Leary-May, whom I thank for his help. He shares my concern, and that of Coram, about some children falling through the net. He wrote to me as follows: “The evidence suggests that, where a child’s agency has the resource and the will to proactively seek matches for harder-to-place children, the right tools are in place. However, we know that not all children in this cohort were referred to the register and it is fair to assume that not all are added to Link Maker. There is no mechanism currently in place to enable scrutiny of this, yet such a mechanism is perfectly feasible”. I will return to this theme later.

During his evidence, the Minister said that he agrees with the observations and recommendations of the report into foster care conducted by Sir Martin Narey and Mark Owers together with the House of Commons Education Select Committee. He said that:

“The work we do for the most vulnerable children in our care is far too siloed; fostering sits in one place and adoption somewhere else. We need to bring together our thinking and that is what the future will look like”.


He went on to describe his ambition to take all the databases sitting in local government, voluntary adoption agencies and fostering agencies and bring them into a single pipeline, so that everybody is looking at the same data, whether in fostering or in adoption. He did not make it clear whether this new capability would be designed to meet the requirement, stated by the chief executive of Link Maker, that all children up for adoption should be clearly and accurately identified. I think it would be fair to say that the Minister’s inability to say in his evidence exactly where this ambitious technology project is today, how long it may take to come to fruition and be in full operation and how much it will cost, did not appear to impress some members of the committee. None of the members, I suspect, are here, because the committee is in session as I speak.

When doing the homework in preparation for today’s debate, those with far more knowledge than me have suggested that the vision of joining adoption and fostering at the hip may be partially impracticable. What Sir Martin Narey and Mark Owers actually said in their report was that adoption and fostering should be seen as a continuum. As I understand it, their recommendation is that fostering, which has specific characteristics very different from adoption, should follow the lead of the many improvements in the adoption sector and find the best way to emulate adoption’s success. One person summed this up forensically by saying that specialism is not the same as a silo. The department needs to have another long, hard look at some of the assumptions that appear to be the foundations of the Minister’s vision of the future.

I return to the issue of the potential impact on this group of harder-to-place children. I was somewhat perplexed to read on page 6 of the Explanatory Memorandum to the statutory instrument, under the heading “Impact”:

“There is no significant impact on business, charities or voluntary bodies. There is no, or no significant, impact on the public sector”.


There is no mention or analysis whatever of the potential impact on children. How can one claim to be totally child-centred in one’s approach while simultaneously failing to analyse rigorously what effects one’s actions will have on the child?

It is timely that only yesterday afternoon, several of us met with the Children’s Commissioner for England to be briefed on her forthcoming report on vulnerable children. I want to highlight two of her four key recommendations. The first is that a focus on children should be the starting point of any initiative. The second is that our aim should be children having happy lives and good prospects. I think most of us would find it difficult to disagree with these eminently sensible recommendations. However, I feel that the Government’s approach to the abolition of the national register, in appearing not to have clearly thought through the analysis of its detailed impact—let alone what, when and how some of its duties and activities will be continued—is not in the best interests of that subgroup of harder-to-place children. Some of these children are invisible or not present within the existing registration system.

Coram estimates that some 925 children in this subgroup are waiting to be matched today. The National Deaf Children’s Society is extremely concerned that the particular needs of disabled children up for adoption are best met by looking for matches at a regional or, preferably, national level, rather than at a local level. Given the concerns stated by many that the children will potentially be put at a disadvantage by a system that, today, does not necessarily identify and register them all, and that this state of affairs looks set to continue for an uncertain period of time, to be replaced by a registration system that has not yet been clearly defined, I put it to Her Majesty’s Government that this is a genuine cause of concern and for regret, which is why I have put forward my Motion.

The suggestion put forward by many, which I share, is that the Government should move expeditiously to create and manage one centralised national list of children and adopters, clearly identifying each individual in real time, and then allow the market to develop, without charge, applications that access this data and provide social workers and adopters with different ways of searching for and identifying potential matches. Many believe that an initiative such as this would also help to accelerate the creation and operation of the new regional adoption agencies. The chief executive of Adoption UK, Sue Armstrong Brown, states that a key constraint is how to develop new adopters: “There are examples of councils that turn away would be adopters because they do not fit the immediate needs of children coming on the local list. This might be because of a family’s ethnicity or an unwillingness to consider sibling groups when these features might match children elsewhere in the country”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I assure the noble Lord that I will specifically address the issue of harder-to-place children in a moment.

Since we announced the closure back in August 2018, the Government have not received any feedback to suggest that local authorities and adoption agencies are having difficulties matching children. In fact, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services said that,

“local authorities continue to take responsibility for our children who need adoption and the adopters we approve, and have never relied on one system alone in the matching process”,

and ahead of the closure, the sector leaders spoke out about their support for the decision.

On harder-to-place children, the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Watson, sought reassurance that such children would not be more vulnerable or drop out of the system because of the loss of the register. The adoption register was never intended to be solely for harder-to-place children. Rather, it was to provide an alternative source of potential adopters for all children. To some extent, all children who are not placed locally, so needing a matching service, could be regarded as harder to place. But “harder to place” is generally understood to mean sibling groups, ethnic minorities, children over five years-old and children with a disability. One of the commercial alternatives contains a high number of hard-to-place children. I understand that its recent child cohort included 50% in a sibling group, 12% aged over five, 27% who did not identify as white British and 15% who had multiple health or emotional needs. I hope that that also addresses the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey.

In a recent survey by Link Maker, the alternative provider that was discussed, 67% of respondents said there had been no change to their ability to find matches for harder-to-place children, 14% suggested that it was now harder and 17% suggested that things had improved. Indeed one of the comments said,

“by far the most matches for the harder to place children, siblings groups etc, came via Link Maker rather than through the Adoption Register”.

The noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked how many children were likely to miss out on placements. That is the most crucial question in this debate. I would like to reassure noble Lords that children are not being left behind following this decision. There is no gap in provision; children are and will continue to be matched with loving families. The Government will of course continue to monitor this and robust action will be taken if this changes.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, asked about a lack of proactive searching. I understand that there is concern that the alternative provider offers only a system, whereas the register provided an additional service. As the noble Lord said, the register employed 10 regional business partners to search for links. In 2018-19, it found 120 matches. During the same period, the main commercial alternative found 967 matches. If a child has been waiting for a long period, the main commercial provider system will proactively contact the social worker to provide assistance.

Alongside the register, agencies have used a range of other services and also use the exchange and activity days that I have already mentioned, including commissioning them for their areas. It is important to acknowledge the important work of Coram in this area. I recognise the important work that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, does with Coram and the support he provides to it.

Naturally, I understand concerns when we talk about commercial providers, but I assure noble Lords that we are not talking about large organisations making a profit at the expense of children and adopters. The main commercial provider, Link Maker, is a social enterprise run by a group of adopters. It monitors the progress of children added to the system, and if a child has been on the system for an extended period, an email is sent suggesting ways of finding matches. I understand that another service is being launched and will be run by Coram, which, as I said, is respected for its work.

For the main commercial provider, subscriptions by local authorities are paid on an annual basis, not per child. There is no reason—in particular, no financial reason —why a commercial service would ignore harder-to-place children. Local authorities have a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of a child they are looking after, and I trust that they will continue to fulfil this duty.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked about the cost of Link Maker. I appreciate the concern about the cost of commercial alternatives. As the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State said to the committee, on average it costs a local authority about £5,000 a year for the subscription. I appreciate the concern when considering that the adoption register was a free service, but it is important to state that the majority of adoption agencies—around 93—were already paying for a subscription.

The noble Lord, Lord Russell, asked about our future plans. The Motion refers to work we are undertaking on the feasibility of a future digital infrastructure to support this area. This brings us to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, about the Select Committee and Sir Martin Narey. Both reports suggested that the Government’s work for the most vulnerable children in our care is too siloed. The reviews found that considering the component parts of the care system, for example fostering and adoption, in isolation,

“creates an unhelpful divide in the way we approach a child’s experience in the system and his or her routes to permanence”.

In response to this, we are trying to improve support across the sectors with better information and better systems. Agencies hold and share a lot of data and need to ensure that it is managed appropriately. We are exploring the feasibility of introducing a system that can bring it together to support better communication and present it in one place in a user-friendly way. We agree that this makes sound sense and we are actively considering the implementation of a single list.

Reflecting the findings of these recent reviews, we want to work with the sector to think through the best digital infrastructure to support adoption and fostering. My colleague, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, will write to colleagues to provide more detail on this work following the spending review.

Beyond the adoption register, I shall also say a few words about what else these regulations cover. They make changes to inspection fees for social care providers and childcare providers. They introduce a 10% increase to the fees payable to Ofsted by some social care providers to move closer to full cost recovery. This increase has been made annually since 2010. As well as this, Ofsted charges an annual registration fee to childcare providers on the early years register. This statutory instrument maintains the current registration fee of £50 for a specific group of providers that operate for only a limited number of hours each day, reducing the potential burden on childcare providers of a fee increase.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to the procedure used for these changes to the regulations. I understand that there has been some concern. We are advised that the negative procedure was correct for this type of change, and it is the procedure set out in the primary legislation. We spoke to the sector extensively, and it was comfortable with the adoption register coming to an end. We wanted to revoke an unnecessary duty; indeed, we were asked to do so by the sector. There was therefore a feeling that this was routine and that we were attempting to tidy up regulations so as not to leave a redundant duty. I reassure noble Lords that there was no attempt to hide this or slip it through under the radar.

I welcome noble Lords’ interest in these regulations. I want to provide reassurance that the Government have spoken to the sector extensively regarding changes to the adoption register and that that dialogue continues. Feedback shows that users of the register are comfortable with the decision to end its operation. We have not received any feedback to suggest that agencies are struggling without it. I accept the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that it is early days; however, had it been crucial to the operation of local authorities, within three months we would have heard something from them.

I hope that I have been able to provide more context to these changes and to reassure noble Lords of the focused and necessary attention of these regulations. On that basis, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Russell, to withdraw his Motion.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

My Lords, I thank everybody who has taken part in this brief discussion and thank the Minister for his response. I felt on occasions slightly as though I were sitting in an echo chamber and going round and round in circles. I appreciate that the ministerial response is written for him, but I still have genuine concerns about the fact that Her Majesty’s Government do not know, and have never known, the exact number of children—particularly harder-to-place children—who are waiting to be matched. We have never had a definitive figure; that is an abrogation of our duty. We have a duty to know who those children are, where they are, what sort of condition they are in, and to be able to track what is being done to help them find a match to transform their lives—for example, keeping sibling groups together, or helping a deaf or blind child to find a loving family who will understand how to respond to and look after their needs.

Despite the briefings that various organisations have provided, I decided to do my homework and have spoken directly to some of the people who provided the briefings, asking some awkward questions of what is behind the fine words. The answer is that, while much in the adoption sector is going well and has definitely improved over the last two decades—I take my hat off to various Governments for achieving that—we still do not know how many of these vulnerable children there are or exactly what is going on. I do not find that satisfactory.

I will not myself push this to a vote. If any other noble Lords wish to do so, that is up to them. I make it clear that, should it be put to a vote, I will abstain. My view is that this is a matter divorced from party politics; we have quite enough of that going on at the moment, including as we speak, with—to plagiarise Oscar Wilde—various members of the unspeakable classes in pursuit of the unachievable. But that is another matter. So I am not going to push this, but I hope that the Minister and his officials will read what I have said carefully; I hope that they will speak to various people in the sector to find out what is really going on, ask awkward questions rather than just listen to the answers one might hope to hear, and do everything possible to identify those vulnerable children. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Some Lords objected to the request for leave to withdraw the Motion, so it was not granted.