Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Lord Warner Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Warner]

29: Clause 1, page 2, line 4, at end insert—
“( ) In discharging its responsibilities under subsection (1), the responsible local authority must—(a) ensure that all partner bodies responsible for health, housing, police, employment, education and training services are aware of the needs of children and young people for whom they are responsible; and(b) advise the individual children and young people concerned of the availability of services offered by partner bodies which meet their needs and assist them in securing such services.”

[Lord Warner (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I want to put Amendment 29 in context. I see it as part of a package relating to Clause 1. In our previous debate on Clause 1, there was a large measure of agreement that the corporate parenting principles needed to be kept tightly drawn and manageable in length. There was also a sense, however, that some important aspects, such as mental health, needed to be specifically incorporated into those principles. We also discussed at some length the importance of requiring the co-operation of other key partners in supporting the corporate parent in living up to those principles. I am sure that on this latter issue we will come back with amendments on Report to place a clear duty on key partner agencies and services to co-operate with the responsible local authority corporate parent.

I wish to raise a point on this, on which the Minister left me, and possibly other Members of the Committee, rather confused. Let me seek clarification from the Minister on what he said about other agencies co-operating with local authorities on the delivery of services linked to the corporate parenting principles. At one point he suggested that this was covered in Clause 10. As I said then, it is not. Then there was some suggestion that what was meant was Section 10 of the Children Act 1989. With a great deal of help from the Library, to which I give thanks, I have checked: it is not there in the 1989 Act. Then I asked the Library to show me the current version of the 1989 Act, as amended subsequently. It is not in the amended version of Section 10. I am struggling to find it elsewhere in any of the legislation. My request to the Minister, therefore, is that he write to me and other Members of the Committee as soon as possible—certainly well before Report—citing the text of the legislation that requires other agencies, and which of those agencies, to co-operate with the responsible local authority in delivering corporate parenting principles. Without that legislative clarity, I am sure many of us will want to press an appropriate amendment on this issue on Report.

I now return to my Amendment 29, which is linked to this issue. Alongside the corporate parenting principles and the co-operation and involvement of other relevant agencies, a third important element is, I suggest, required to make it all work in practice for the young people concerned. That is an obligation to help those young people get the services they need, which is where Amendment 29 comes in.

The amendment does two things. First, it requires the local authority corporate parent to ensure that all the relevant services are aware of the needs of children and young people in care or leaving care. We know that many of these services, some of which were cited in our previous discussion, are not aware of the special needs of those in care or leaving care. History suggests that we should strengthen the obligation on local authorities to bring home to the other agencies the special needs of those for whom they are corporate parents. Because of the unfortunate timetabling of the Bill, I had little time to prepare the amendment. I know that some services have been omitted from it, but this can easily be rectified.

The second part of the amendment places an obligation on the corporate parent to make sure the children and young people for whom it is responsible know about the services available to help them make their way in the world. It also obliges the corporate parent to help these young people secure those services. I regard this second aspect as very important indeed. Public services can be very complex; they can be very siloed—as was said in our last discussion—and pretty inaccessible. Many of us, as experienced and knowledgeable adults, often struggle to penetrate public sector bureaucracies, so why should we expect these young people to do it without help? It is not good enough to await young people coming forward and asking for help, which they often do not even know about. I recognise that I may not have got the wording quite right and this amendment would need to be aligned with the other amendments to Clause 1 that I have mentioned. However, I hope the Minister will see merit in this amendment and will be willing to make an amendment of this kind to the Bill and possibly discuss it with some of us beforehand. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support this amendment. I do so because it reminds me of my experience of being acquainted with a young woman who left care some time ago. She did get access to mental health support and saw a therapist over a quite considerable period. She is thriving; she is doing well and supporting young people leaving care. When she spoke to me about her experience, she highlighted how important it was for her to have that access to a counsellor. So if this amendment helps her with that, I would definitely like to support it. We will hear from the Minister about the Children Act duties and I hope that will comfort the noble Lord, Lord Warner.

This woman has a younger brother in care and she is concerned about the access that he is getting to therapy. This is a real issue for many young people in care and care leavers, so I am looking for as much reassurance from the Minister as possible in his response.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, before I respond, I am sure noble Lords will be interested in the documents that my department has published today relating to children in the social care system. The first is a policy paper entitled, Putting Children First: Delivering Our Vision for Excellent Children’s Social Care. It sets out our programme of reform to children’s social care for the next four years. The second is an independent report on children’s residential care by Sir Martin Narey, the former chief executive of Barnardo’s, who is an independent social care adviser to the Department for Education. Sir Martin paints a positive vision for the future role of residential care and we are grateful for his report. I am sure noble Lords will be interested in both publications, which we have today emailed to all noble Lords who were present on the first day in Committee. They will be available in the Library of the House.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for this amendment. I fully appreciate the intention behind it. However, what he seeks to achieve is already encompassed within the corporate parenting principles and existing legislation, which I will explain.

The fourth corporate parenting principle is designed to ensure that the local authority, as a whole, acts as a corporate parent, and helps looked-after children and care leavers to gain access to the services and support they need, including those provided by other relevant partners—to avoid the silo mentality that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, referred to, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, to ensure that all those who can help are involved. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, about Section 10, I apologise for the confusion. I am sorry to have created so much homework for him. Perhaps in future he can send me a short note and I could save him some time. After all, that is what officials are for. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, we are talking about the Children Act 2004, and I will write to the noble Lord with the relevant section and an explanation.

On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to make this section and duty more effective, for the first time we are bringing in the principle of corporate parenting. I am happy to discuss that with him further and, to take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to hold a meeting to clarify amendments and ensure, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, says, that we get a sensible Bill without imposing too many new duties that are not really necessary on local authorities.

Local authorities are already under a duty under Section 10 of the Children Act 2004 to make arrangements to promote co-operation between the local authority and each of its relevant partners, including health bodies, schools, local policing bodies, probation boards and youth offending teams, as well as the voluntary and community sector. On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, I know she would always like to have more money, but this does not impose any more responsibilities on local authorities. The intention of the existing duty is to improve the well-being of children in the local area and the corporate parenting principles are matters that the local authority must consider under the existing legislation. They do not add further functions.

Therefore, it seems inconceivable that under the existing legal framework relevant local agencies would not be aware of the needs of looked-after children and care leavers in the area. If that is the case, the issue must be with how well the local authority is putting its existing responsibilities into practice rather than it being a problem with the law. Therefore, I see no need to add to the seven principles in the way the noble Lord suggests.

The approach used in the existing legislation is broadly similar to the way the duty to co-operate works in the Care Act 2014, which the noble Lord, Lord Warner, referred to during the Committee’s first sitting. The local offer for care leavers will take us further than ever before in helping to ensure that the needs of care leavers are in the minds of services related to health, housing, education, police and employment. In developing their local offer, local authorities will need to talk to those services about what they intend to bring to the table based on what care leavers have told them they need.

For too long care leavers have told us that they do not always have the information they need about the services they need to access and about what they are entitled to. We expect the local offer to set out in one place the full range of relevant services, any additional facilities or entitlements that are on offer, and information about how to access them.

The care leaver covenant, which I have mentioned previously, provides a truly exciting opportunity to build the offer of services and support from a wide range of agencies and individuals. There is no reason why there should be a limit on this. We would like local communities to be as inventive as possible in finding ways of supporting and helping their children in care and care leavers.

I appreciate the very positive intentions behind the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Warner. However, I do not think it is necessary, given the requirements of the existing legislation and the enhanced focus on children in care and care leavers which the corporate parenting principles and the covenant will bring about. I therefore ask him to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I listened very carefully to the Minister. Before responding, perhaps I may say that he offered to write to me. When I did not receive a letter, I went to the Library.

With this approach of simply asking local authorities to find different obligations in different bits of legislation, the Minister is undermining the strengths of Clause 1 and the corporate parenting principles. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham has given me some interesting information about the Children Act, so technology is giving us instant access to some of these bits of information. However, they do not cover some of the issues that were raised in the debate about the corporate parenting principles; they are narrower in scope where the partners are asked to intervene. We have been having a debate about the full range of services and agencies that need to co-operate with the local authority to enable the corporate parenting principles to be delivered to children. The Minister did not really deal with the issue in the second part of my amendment, which is about the local authority taking the initiative and showing children and young people what services are available.

I looked very carefully at Clause 1(1)(d). It is a pretty general proposition about helping young people, and it does not define who the “relevant partners”—the wording in the legislation—are. If the Minister wants to get the best out of this well-intended set of corporate parenting principles, we have to beef up the Bill in terms of the duty to co-operate placed on the full range of services, and we may need to specify them in the Bill with something along the lines of my Amendment 29. I will certainly come back to this, as I suspect will other Members, on Report. In the meantime—

[The Earl of Listowel]

Before the noble Lord withdraws his amendment, casting back to the Children Act 2004, one agency that was excluded was the Immigration Service. On the duty for all agencies to work together to secure the welfare of children, I am not sure that the Act was successful by excluding that service. In his letter to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, perhaps the Minister can make clear whether that is the case.

[Lord Warner]

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 29 withdrawn.

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[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, the Bill as drafted places responsibility on the young person to request advice and support. No one in this Room or reading the Bill would be in any doubt that we are talking about vulnerable young people, so the question has to be asked: what support will be offered so that young people know about all their entitlements; and what systems will be in place to help a child make that request, remembering that many of these children will have literacy difficulties? It is one thing for a young person to turn down advice and support that they have been offered. There are two ways of looking at that if it happens. One is that that the individual does not lack a certain amount of confidence, which is a good thing. The other is that they may not have thought the thing through or may lack the requisite amount of common sense, turning away from what is clearly valuable and important information.

Confidence is a big issue for many children who are leaving—or young people who have recently left—care. That lack of confidence is simply because of their life experiences up to that point. They are moving into a world of their own, taking many important steps in a way not experienced by children fortunate enough to live within a family, who have that family as a safety net after they have left home, should things not go entirely to plan. A young person leaving care may not have been informed that they can ask for advice and support. Even if they have been informed and have had that support, it could depend on how that was done. The young person may not always grasp what is available to them.

The question must be asked: why take that risk? Why leave it up to the young person? Much better surely that the duty falls directly on the local authority, not the person himself or herself. We have to have a sense, as we debate issues like this, that we have a duty of care in terms of framing legislation that affords the maximum amount of support to young people. I think Amendments 52 and 53, to which I am speaking at the moment, do that. I mentioned earlier—as did the Minister—that his department has today published the policy paper entitled, Putting Children First: Our Vision for Children’s Social Care. If that means anything at all, I suggest the Minister should live up to it by accepting Amendments 52 and 53 and making sure that the onus is firmly on the local authority to be proactive rather than reactive.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I briefly support Amendments 52, 53 and 54. These have echoes of the debate we had on my Amendment 29, in which I argued—with support from other Members of the Committee—that the onus should be on the local authority to take the initiative in offering help. I ask the Minister to think about the circumstances in which many of us are placed as parents, where the Government are trying to get the principles of corporate parenting as close as they can to the responsibilities of parents looking after children who are not part of the responsibility of a local authority. We as parents—I can speak from personal experience—do not watch our children walking over a cliff and wait for them to request us to do something. If we see that they do not understand something or they are going to take some ill-advised action, we do not wait for them to ask us: we intervene. We try to intervene in a sensitive manner but we do try to intervene to give them the information they require to make better decisions. Why are the Government asking a group of people who, on their own acknowledgement, are vulnerable, who often find it difficult to interact with public bureaucracies, to make a well-informed request for help? Indeed, if they are capable of making that well-informed request for help, there is a large chance that they do not need it in the first place. What the Minster has set up looks like a gesture, but the “on request” totally minimises the effectiveness of that gesture. I ask the Minister to reconsider the Government’s position on this, in the light of the moderate way that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and others have argued for the amendments.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I add one sentence because I clearly heard the Minister say that there would be young people who would not need personal advisers or would not wish to have this sort of help. I understand that absolutely, but all the amendments are suggesting is that we move out “on request” so that the local authority has to take responsibility to ensure that information is given so that a refusal could be made. If we do not ensure that the young people have the knowledge of what is available, they can walk into difficulties.

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[Lord Warner]

The Minister seems to be praying me in aid as somehow opposed to the amendment advocated by the noble Lords, Lord Wills and Lord Watson. I am not; I was supporting what they are saying. I am sorry if I was not clear but I want to put it beyond peradventure to the Minister that I support their amendment to delete “on request”.

[Lord Nash]

I fully understand that; I am sorry if I created some confusion.

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[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I feel that I could already write the Minister’s response by saying that of course these needs are already met in Clause 3(5)(a) or (b), as the subsection refers to meeting “his or her needs”. However, when, year after year, report after report notes that these needs are not dealt with, surely we reach the point where they need to be specified—hence I support the noble Baroness’s amendments. The needs of these young parents have so consistently not been adequately met that we now need to specify them so that they are.

I would also comment that, on occasions, young men may also find becoming a parent a positive turning point. There is a need to support young men who are looked after and become parents who recognise that they have now come to a point of responsibility and they would like to step up to it. They also need support. I invite the Minister’s comments on that.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I, too, support Amendments 61A and 71A in particular and draw the Minister’s attention to a Select Committee report produced by your Lordships’ House on post-legislative scrutiny of adoption legislation. Somewhere in the Department for Education archives, there will no doubt be copies of that report and the oral evidence given to the committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, was on it, and, I think, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong.

Among those who gave oral evidence was a remarkable judge, Nicholas Crichton, from one of the London family courts. He was so fed up with a procession of the same young women coming before the family court and having their children taken away. The women would reappear 12, 15 or 18 months later and would continue through their 20s with the same judges in the same court taking away their children and putting them into care. He got so fed up with that that he found some charitable funding to produce some support for the young mothers to whom it was happening because he was trying to stop this escalator of producing more children to be taken into local authority care.

That judge was doing the job that we could argue is the responsibility of the local authority because the great majority of these young women had been in care. We had a bizarre situation where an energetic and innovative judge was trying to do the job of a local authority that was not able to provide these kinds of services to young women who had been in care and who had repeat pregnancies. I would ask the Minister to look at that before he rejects fully these amendments, because there is a lot to be said, in the public interest as well as the interests of these young women, for moving down this path.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for being unavoidably unable to come to the first day of Committee. I should like to add some comments in support of Amendments 61A and 71A. We should see these amendments as being very much about early intervention and prevention. The Bill, welcome though it is, is a little light on early intervention and prevention. The amendments point to situations from the point of view of the babies born to young people who have been in care. Unless there is specific early intervention with a great deal of support provided, we may not be preventing those babies at some point coming into care or being subject to serious difficulties.

I say that for two reasons. We know from the statistics that, generally, babies of young parents—right across the board, not just those who been in care—do not fare as well on any number of developmental indicators, despite the ability of some individual young parents to be outstanding. Those babies suffer a series of stresses from that situation that impair their development, in many instances irrevocably. The vulnerabilities suffered by a young parent who has been in care can only add further stress and difficulty to that situation. It is really important from the point of view of early intervention and prevention for children born to young people who have been in care that there is a specific focus that points the statutory services to make sure that they intervene early and prevent adverse consequences further down the line to another generation of children. I hope the Minister will take these amendments seriously.

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Moved by

[Lord Warner]

73: Clause 3, page 5, line 16, at end insert—
“( ) In making available personal advisers under this Act, the Secretary of State must make regulations to provide—(a) performance standards and training for personal advisers;(b) arrangements for vetting as to their suitability before taking up posts; and(c) a publicly available register of approved personal advisers.”

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, this is a probing amendment on an issue of great concern to me: safeguarding young people from predatory adults. Clause 3 is the first place in the Bill where I could find the term “personal advisers”, so I have grafted the amendment on to the clause to seek support in principle for the idea that personal adviser is the kind of job that could conceivably attract people with predatory intentions towards vulnerable young people.

Many of those young people over the age of 21 may themselves, despite their chronological age, be rather immature and vulnerable, so reaching the magic age of 21 does not necessarily produce a lack of vulnerability. That is why I drafted the amendment, which requires the Secretary of State to make regulations on three matters relating to personal advisers, irrespective of age. The Minister has to some extent tried to deal with that in his previous answers about a review and the rather mysterious deep dives that seem to be taking place in the Department for Education. However, I am not sure that we should miss this opportunity in legislation to put safeguards relating to personal advisers in the Bill: first, a provision for performance standards and training for personal advisers to be set out in regulations; secondly, arrangements for vetting them as to suitability before they take up posts; and, thirdly, a publicly available register of approved personal advisers. Those are the minimum safeguards that are required before we proceed with the introduction on a national basis of personal advisers, whatever reviews the DfE may be carrying out.

I shall say a few words about my personal experience, which causes me to feel so strongly about this amendment. First, some of the experiences I had as a director of social services brought home to me the vulnerability of young people with low self-esteem, a lack of love in their lives and bad experiences at the hands of adults. If a person in a position of trust abuses that trust, often after a period of grooming, many young care leavers are very vulnerable to damaging overtures. I have a few examples that I have had to deal with—and I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, has had not dissimilar examples. A foster father sexually abused a teenage girl; a Catholic priest abused young people in an adoption agency; a care home manager was caught in a teenaged girl’s bed in his own care home, in the middle of the night; and care home staff practised so-called regression therapy by encouraging children to sit on their laps. These are just a few of the people who find themselves able to get near vulnerable young people. Incidentally, the care home manager caught in flagrante took me to an employment tribunal for wrongful dismissal. These are real-world examples of what corporate parents may have to deal with.

It was that experience that led to Virginia Bottomley, the then Health Secretary, appointing me to chair an inquiry in the early 1990s after a series of scandals into how we recruited, vetted and trained staff working in children’s homes. Our report, Choosing with Care, led to some strengthening of the safeguards against predatory adults. But with the passage of time, we are in danger of assuming that some of those problems have been dealt with. As the Jimmy Savile and other examples have shown, we have to be ever vigilant. If we introduce a new group of people with easy access to vulnerable young people, we need to do all we can to safeguard those young people. The predators will always be around, and we are failing young people if we do not do our utmost to put in place protective procedures.

That was brought home to me very graphically when, a couple of months ago, I saw a play by Phil Davies called “Firebird”, at the Trafalgar Studios—I am not doing a commercial because it is no longer running there. This shows how a predator, seemingly someone who works with young people, grooms a lonely, vulnerable, young person into prostitution. I am sure that the wording of my hastily produced amendment could be improved, but I hope that the Minister will accept in principle that, if we are going for a national system of personal advisers, we should put in the Bill some safeguards for young people against potentially predatory personal advisers.

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[Lord Nash]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for his amendment and the points that he, the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, the noble Lord, Lord Storey, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the noble Lord, Lord Wills, made about the importance of safeguarding young people from predatory adults and the qualifications, training and management of personal advisers. These are of crucial and, in the case of safeguarding, paramount importance, and I will ensure that these points are covered in our review of personal advisers, to which I have already referred in some detail. This will inform what we say on Report, although I recognise the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Lord, Lord Wills, about flexibility and stability and will look at the worrying delays to which the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, referred in relation to vetting.

I hope that the noble Lord will accept that I do not want to prejudge the outcome of our review by accepting his amendment now, and I hope that he will therefore consent to withdraw it, but I assure him that I recognise the importance of the points he makes.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister and everyone else who has spoken in this debate. I could really identify with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wills. I recognise how complex this issue is, certainly do not want to go into bat for the particular wording of the amendment and I accept that the Minister needs to carry out a review.

However, given what we have learned about predatory adults and vulnerable people over a long period, I ask the Minister and his department to reflect whether we should signal the issue of vetting in some brief way in the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made the important point that there are two sides to this: the vulnerability of young person but also that of the personal adviser if they are isolated without adequate supervision. This is a difficult area and it is not easy to find solutions, but it behoves all public bodies and Governments, particularly with the Goddard inquiry going on, to recognise upfront that this is a real 21st-century issue which has to be wrestled with. Signalling in the Bill not the detail but a willingness to grapple with the issue is very important. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 73 withdrawn.