Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Howarth of Breckland

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I support the amendment because I argued for it during the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill. When the Minister turned it down then, he did agree to a whole range of other benefits such as kinship carers’ allowance and so on. Frankly, I think he reached the point where he could give no more. The illogicality of saying that benefits could be paid for two sibling children but not for two children who have been adopted separately must have been for the noble Lord, Lord Freud, who is an intelligent man, something to do with the politics of it all. I say that because it was clear at the time that this exception would make sense.

We trying to increase the rate of adoption. We know that the children who are now being placed for adoption are not easy. There are very few if any white middle-class babies being placed for adoption. Most of these children have special needs or they are older and therefore it is much more difficult to find a placement.

I recognise that the Minister here may not have the power to agree to the amendment, but he can go back and talk to his colleagues. We have discussed silos in government at length and how people need to talk across government departments. This is an area in which we could make a real difference to a group of people who wish to look after children and, more importantly, it would offer a better standard of living to the children being adopted. It would be easy and I am sure that it would not be vastly expensive, although I have not yet done the maths.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, there are moments in Committee when we can listen to people with a lifetime of experience in law and the military, but we ignore at our peril someone with experience of adoption who speaks from the heart and makes such an emotional plea. Certainly our side thinks that this is an important issue.

It is not just an emotional issue, of course; it is also fulfils that awful phrase we use constantly—it would be value for money. This obviously makes sense. I had not appreciated how many low-income families adopt children. We should support them and thereby, we hope, increase the number of children who are adopted.

The last time I heard such an emotional plea was when my noble friend Lady Benjamin made a similar presentation and, I believe, stalked the Minister on a few occasions outside his office. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady King, could do the same, but I hope the Minister will take note of this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, this is an important amendment that is worthy of serious consideration. There must be something worryingly and seriously wrong when mothers constantly have their babies removed from them. We have seen social services almost having to get care orders in place as the child is born, and it can happen three, four, five or six times. Obviously in all circumstances the interests of the child must be put first, but there also must be a realisation that something must be done to support the mother. Are there mental health or emotional issues at play? This constant removal of children safeguards those children, but it does not safeguard the mother. We need to try where possible to look at why this is happening.

This is an issue of which I do not have any experience and, indeed, I have not considered it. The amendment asks in a sensible and supportive way for us to look at therapeutic support and so on. There is also the cost aspect. If a child is taken away from its natural family and we as a society have not considered effective treatments that could reasonably be made available to keep the parent and child together, then surely as a society we are failing.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I simply want to mention the organisation Pause, which has found a way of intervening with these families. I know that the Government hope to set up a unit looking at what works and that there are programmes that work in this field. I do not think this is a legislative issue. I think it is again an issue of spreading good practice through all local authorities. Sometimes the voluntary sector develops the best ways forward, and I hope the Government will do all they can to promulgate these programmes. I have removed children at birth from their mothers. It is a traumatic and appalling process to have to be involved in when working in social services. The follow up has always been poor for the mothers. We now have an opportunity to do something about it. We know how to do it.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Howarth of Breckland

Monday 4th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I obviously support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has said, although I am not going to go through the long list of experiences that I have experienced as a director of social services, as an assistant director and a social worker, and even more so, working with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which dealt with predatory grooming adults and how they got in touch with children.

I am concerned about how we work through two parts of this. One is how we make absolutely sure that the vetting is solid and absolutely reliable for all the reasons the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has said—and how we set performance standards—but also, at the same time, as having some flexibility in who the young person might see as the person who is going to be their personal adviser. I think this is more complex than it looks on the surface. I think we could set standards of training—we have all done that in our time; we could have a vetting system and place it on a register, although I would say 130 days to get a vetting back from the Met police at the moment seems to me a scandal, and is interfering with the recruitment of appropriate social workers right across the piece. But we have to look at how we have both of those things together, with the young person having some choice about who they want to be their mentor. There may be people in their lives, such as a teacher who stuck with them right through their school or a foster parent who struck right with them. Are they seen as different from personal advisers, who are a sort of profession apart? I have not yet conceptualised who those people are in relation to all the other people who are supporting the young person, and where the standard is set. The one thing that is absolutely clear is that whoever they are, they must be vetted. In my day, we had people called children’s homes visitors, and we learned the hard way what happened if you did not vet appropriately those visitors, when young people disappeared on to the street. I would underline that—it is quite a complex question.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, this is an important probing amendment. I now understand why it is in this grouping and not in the other groupings, and I apologise to whoever is responsible for that. As the British Association of Social Workers rightly said, it will be important to clarify what qualifications and capabilities will be required for the new personal advisers. Throughout our Committee discussions, we have shown how important personal advisers are and will be, in terms of speech and language and literacy, financial matters, and in putting the pathways plan together. It also is important that these are the right people for that and currently, there is no prescribed professional or occupational qualification determining which person should carry out the personal adviser’s function for any individual care leaver. There are suggestions of what a PA should normally possess. They should,

“be working towards a professional qualification … good practice …for the young person to maintain the same PA from the age of 16”,

et cetera. Presumably, the current personal advisers are DBS-compliant. If they are not, why not? I would have thought that was something that happened straightaway. They are working in a very intimate situation with young and vulnerable children, so if that is not the case, we need to know that straightaway. If it is the case, we need to look at the other suggestions that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has made. We also need to ensure that the line management of personal advisers is not something that is just put on paper and does not happen but that somebody line-manages those personal advisers and sees them on a regular basis. There is another issue—that if we are not careful, sometimes young people who are emotionally vulnerable can make allegations against personal advisers, and that personal adviser is in a very difficult situation. If an allegation is made against a teacher, at least the teacher is in a setting where there are people around who can support and advise, whereas a personal adviser is acting entirely on their own. As well as any register and making sure that correct procedures have been gone through, there also has to be proper and effective line management of personal advisers.

Childcare Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Howarth of Breckland

Wednesday 14th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness’s wish for a national workforce strategy, for children with disability generally but particularly for those with learning disabilities or in specialist nurseries. That is because the availability of places for those children is simply not there, in my experience: that is why parents cannot access them. Where parents do wish to access them, local authorities often make it very difficult for them to do so, by producing very complex financial arrangements that exclude those nurseries from the capacity to give help to children. I have spoken about this to the noble Lord, Lord Nash. The Bill is complex, and this is another range of complexities that would benefit from a further look at a later stage, outside the Bill.

At the same time, as many of my colleagues know, I believe that we need a good mix. Of course we need qualifications. Having been involved sometimes at both ends of inspections, I know that qualifications belong to a tick box that is easier to look at, measure and add up than it is to look at skills, competency and relationships. Those are the things that actually matter. They are often enhanced by qualifications, but we need to look at provision that has a mix of all those qualities, particularly for children with difficulties. I do not believe, therefore, that qualifications are everything, but I do think that it is sometimes difficult to measure the other areas of expertise. Moreover, many voluntary organisations would like to add to the training of their staff, but as their colleagues will know, if you are going to train a member of staff you have to release them. Even if organisations are doing in-house training, they have to find time. That adds to the cost, so they have to make sure that cost is covered, which puts extra pressure on the budget.

Therefore, I cannot fully endorse the amendments in terms of qualifications, but we all need to move forward and look at the complexity of what we are trying to provide for children in these situations.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 3 and 23. I find this debate a little frustrating. My noble friend Baroness Pinnock is right when she says that it is not just about care, but about educational experience: for instance, the importance of play. It is not about the type of provision or the amount of time we spend talking about costs. If the Government are going to invest—and are investing—huge amounts of money, it is important that we get the quality right. The best way of guaranteeing that quality is by the people delivering it.

I am sorry to disagree with the noble Baroness, but qualifications are not—and should not be—tick boxes. Qualifications are about a body of understanding and practice that one has to go through. It is hugely important that people working with young children know about child development. Notions that one is working with children but has no understanding of how children develop are anathema to me. Yes, it is hugely important that the assistant understands the importance of play and that the setting has an understanding of some of the special needs issues. It is not about ticking boxes but making sure that people have the qualifications.

The people who used to work in nurseries were of course called nursery nurses. They were highly regarded and highly trained, and resented it when, suddenly, nursery nurses were done away with and became level 3s —or perhaps level 4s. Level 3 is not a particularly onerous qualification to get; one can do it in 12 months or over two years. I hope that we stick our mast firmly to the top of our nurseries and say, yes, we want the people working there to have the right qualifications.

Of course, there are some wonderful people working in playgroups and helping out in nurseries who do not have these qualifications, but for goodness’ sake—we asked for a commission to look at this issue, and the Nutbrown commission spent a lot of time working on this. It said, “Yes, they should be at level 3”. Should we just ignore that and tear it up? No, we should not. We should make sure that quality is at the heart of the provision. Finally, we should also make sure that the leadership of those nurseries is of the highest calibre.

Childcare Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Howarth of Breckland

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

First, I thank the Minister for his letter, which raised a number of issues in my mind but which was at least helpful in resolving some others, and say that I support Amendment 1. I believe that I heard the Minister say in his introduction that he had had useful discussions with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and that some of the issues that he outlined in his introduction were going to come forward in any event. Despite all the difficulties that have gone before—I am glad I am not taking a political view—this gives us a really good opportunity to take a strategic view of childcare at the moment. I want to be absolutely clear about the who, the how and the what as we go through the amendments. We have a number of amendments, which we will discuss later, about what a working parent is, who in a range of other groups, such as disabled groups, might qualify for extra childcare and how that will be delivered. Will it be on an educational or a childcare basis? The Sutherland report pointed out clearly that there are differences in those two things. What will it be? Who will deliver it? Will it be delivered by childminders as well as within that educational framework?

If we could understand, through these reports, the answers to some of the issues that the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, raises, we would have a good opportunity to settle funding, cost and consistency issues. Those are among the main difficulties across the country for those trying to access childcare—you only have to move across a county border to find you pay twice as much for childcare as you did in the previous county, which can cause great difficulties, particularly with a mobile workforce. I hope that as we go through the amendments we will get answers to these questions and that we will stop, if you like, the procedural issues—we have made enough of those. We now have some baseline information from the Minister, and maybe we can move forward and get further information so that, by October, we know which parents will qualify and can understand what they will get and where they will get it from.

[Lord Storey]

First, I apologise to your Lordships for not being able to speak at Second Reading. I will speak to Amendments 1, 29 and 38A. I very much agree with the comments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Andrews and Lady Howarth, but am very nervous of phrases such as “value for money” and “best value” in local government. It has to be about what is best in terms of provision. We have seen early years childcare grow over the last two decades. We have seen the Labour Government, the coalition Government and now the Conservative Government all doing something about early years, but we have not really thought about how it is going to look and how we want it to work. I find it concerning, for example, that three-quarters of our nurseries are, as we know, independent. There is nothing wrong with that, but we know that of those independent nurseries only half have a qualified teacher on the staff. We also know that, when there is a qualified teacher, the learning experience for those children is far greater than otherwise. So it has to be about the quality of the provision, for me.

I wonder about the effects of having those extra 15 hours. It might be great for working parents, but how do they affect the child? I will give an example. Schools will have nurseries, where children will go for part-time provision for three hours a day, Monday to Friday. So you can see a system arising now whereby the working parent will take the child to the childminder and the childminder will then take the child to the school nursery for three hours. With the extra 15 hours, they cannot use the school again, because it is a different set of children in the afternoon—not in every case but in most cases—so they will look for a different provider for the afternoon session. Then the child will go back to the childminder to be taken home to the parent. So there will be four different regimes or experiences of childcare, and I really wonder what the effect will be on those children. We need to look closely and calmly not just at the extra resource and provision, which we all welcome, but at how we ensure that there is quality.