Children in Care

Debate between Lucy Allan and Yasmin Qureshi

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Allan]

I will move on to my hon. Friend’s point with regard to the court system.

There will always be children who are not able to stay safely at home. It is a difficult and challenging task to identify those children correctly. As such matters are decided by an independent court, we are told that we should be confident that the correct decision will always be made. I must say to the House, however, that a court can decide a case only on the basis of the evidence put before it by child protection professionals and that that evidence is often dominated by opinion. The court does not have the discretion to disregard professional opinion in favour of a distraught parent who is desperately trying to navigate the complexities of the legal system or desperately trying to prove their innocence when up against the full might of the state.

The motion asks the Government

“to support more children to remain safely at home”.

There are many examples of good practice currently being undertaken by the Government, such as the troubled families initiative, the children’s social care innovation programme and the Pause project in Hackney. I will conclude by briefly asking the Minister to consider other alternatives to help children to stay safely at home with their families.

We know from recent research that when a mother has a child removed, the trauma and loss often results in multiple repeat pregnancies. Sadly, such children are almost always taken into care immediately. I have sat on an adoption and fostering panel to which a mother came back 10 times. Nobody ever addressed the mother’s issues, and those 10 children were taken into care. That goes back to the point made by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) about the cost-effectiveness of dealing with the difficulties experienced by a mother in such a situation. I therefore ask the Minister to consider therapeutic intervention for mothers at the earliest opportunity, because that is cost-effective and because care simply is not the answer that the professionals would like it to be.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

Before becoming a Member of the House, I represented parents whose children were taken into local authority care. One thing I noticed was that, when a baby was up for adoption, there was an unseemly haste, and local authorities did not try to work with the family or the mother to be able to give the child back to the family. I found that very disturbing.

[Lucy Allan]

I agree with the hon. Lady. There is a requirement to facilitate reunification and rehabilitation. I, too, have worked with those families, and often found that local authorities do not engage. Local authorities are required to consider those points but the preliminary steps are difficult and potentially fraught with risk. That is why they are often skipped over or dismissed. The words used so often are: “It would be inconsistent with the child’s timeline,” or, “It is not in the best interests of the child,” or, “It shows unmerited optimism to assume that rehabilitation and reunification is an option.”