Children and Social Work Bill [Lords]

Marion Fellows Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 5th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

I am aware that very few clauses in the Bill affect Scotland but, as a member of the Education Committee, I may have some points of interest and I might be able to help the Bill to become even better.

When a child or young person cannot live at home, we all owe it to them to make the process of finding a new, stable family as efficient and straightforward as possible. Clause 1 would introduce seven “corporate parenting principles” that local authorities must “have regard to”. I ask the Minister: why are those not mandatory? The Joint Committee on Human Rights has said:

“We have considered the arguments and the evidence for and against introducing a statutory duty on public authorities in England requiring them to have due regard to the rights of children in the UNCRC in the exercise of their functions relating to children, equivalent to the duties already introduced in Wales and Scotland.”

If Wales and Scotland can have such a duty, I find it difficult to understand why it will not be mandatory in England. The Joint Committee went on to recommend that Parliament takes the opportunity presented by the Bill to ensure that there is “such a duty”.

It is important that children are the focus of and are at the heart of any Bill that is introduced in this Parliament. We need to look at how children are affected by legislation introduced by not just the Department for Education, but Departments across the board.

In Scotland, the First Minister has said that people who have experienced the care system will be the driving force of an independent review of how Scotland treats its looked-after children. That is the mandatory duty in action. In Scotland, we want to move forward and to listen to young people, and we are looking at extending what is happening in Scotland to people who have been in care and are going through the process of becoming adults who stand on their own. It is good that the Bill looks at what happens to children after they leave care, but I ask the Minister to examine what we do in Scotland, because we are moving forward at a far faster pace than England and Wales.

A former children’s Minister in Scotland has said:

“children don’t need a system that just stops things happening to them”.

We have safeguards, but we also need a system that

“makes things happen for them. A system that supports them to become the people they can be”,

fostering a sense “of belonging”. I am sure that the Minister agrees with that and with the fact that that should be a guiding principle for any legislation. What steps will the Government take to respond to the recommendations made earlier this year by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child? When do they plan to publish their official response? What further steps will the Government take to ensure that policy development across Whitehall has children’s rights at its heart?

Clause 31, which is the one measure in the Bill that affects Scotland, relates to whistleblowing. The Scottish Government acknowledge and respect the need for whistleblowing. They believe that procedures should be in place across the public and private sectors to support staff in raising any concerns to ensure that people can work in a safe and secure environment. They believe that it is important that NHS workers in Scotland should be able to raise any concerns about patient safety or malpractice, because that helps to improve our health service. That should be the case not only in the health service, but across all professions, especially in the social work sector, given the importance of child protection. We welcome this measure and are really keen for the Government to see it through.

Social work is regulated in Scotland, and I again ask the Minister to look at how the Scottish system works. When the Education Committee heard evidence from social workers and their representatives as part of the inquiry referred to by its Chair, the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), one of the first things they said was that we should look at the Scottish system. I encourage Ministers to do that. The Scottish Social Services Council regulates the profession and all social workers in Scotland have to belong to it. I am pleased that England will be moving forward in a similar way.

I share the apprehensions expressed by the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) about creeping privatisation in the care sector, especially in relation to children. It is imperative that children should be looked after when they cannot be with their own parents and families, and the duty to protect children is shared by us all in society, not just by professionals. This is another reason why whistleblowers can be important.

The Bill will improve the situation in England, but it has to be seen in the context of child poverty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies states that child poverty in the UK is projected to rise by 8 percentage points by 2020, which makes it even more important that these provisions are right. Many more children could be drawn into the care system as a result of the ongoing austerity programme across the UK, so will the Minister please look at what we are doing in Scotland? We might not be perfect, and we might not get everything right, but we put children and their experiences at the heart of our system and we listen to them. I ask him please to look to the north, as well as to Wales, which is also doing really good work on child protection and childcare across the board.

Children and Social Work Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Marion Fellows Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I thank my hon. Friend for her excellent intervention. She touches on an important point: elsewhere, if we want to save money, we have to invest. Investing in care leavers prevents them from entering the justice system and from being homeless, which costs more in the long term.

I suspect that the Minister will reiterate what Government peers said in the other place: it is not for the Government to set in statute what local authorities should be doing, and I expect he will get a cheer from the hon. Member for North Dorset—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] We are not asking the Government to tell our local authorities what they should be doing; we are just asking for a minimum standard for care leavers. These amendments seek that new minimum. Care leavers surely deserve safe, secure, affordable accommodation, but under the current proposals I do not see how they can be expected to make their way in life and deal with the issues of having lived in care with the extra burden of financial difficulty. Does the Minister agree that council tax enforcement undertaken by local authorities completely undermines the principles in this Bill? Does he therefore agree that care leavers should be exempt from council tax until the age of 25?

The Minister is well versed regarding the many challenges that young care leavers face, particularly those of a financial nature. I am sure, deep down, he wants to make sure that the state plays a greater part in supporting care leavers, but the current plans just do not hit it. Last year, almost 11,000 left the care of their local authority and began the difficult process into adulthood. The Government have a duty to those 11,000 vulnerable young people to say that they are not forgotten and that they do not just become another poverty or homelessness statistic on our streets.

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I want to speak to new clause 16, which seeks to make provision for care leavers to help them avoid financial difficulty. We are grateful to the shadow Minister for bringing it forward. Although it would apply to Scotland only in part, I wish to put on the record the views of the Scottish National party.

The Children’s Society points out that young people leaving care struggle with their finances and are at an increased risk of falling into financial difficulty. Our First Minister in Scotland has already acknowledged that we have a duty to protect and help our young people most in need and that those who have experienced the care system will be the driving force of the recently announced independent review of how Scotland treats its looked-after children. Our First Minister has committed to listen to 1,000 people with experience of the care system over the next two years. I hope that some of these concerns will be raised during that review. In making that commitment, our First Minister said:

“If we are to live up to our ambition to be a truly inclusive country, we have a particular duty to those most in need. We have to get it right for every child.”

I think that should apply across the UK.

The part of new clause 16 that would apply to Scotland includes the limit to sanctions, the extension of the working tax credit benefit and the exemption from the shared accommodation rate of housing benefit. Given the barriers to employment for care leavers, providing adequate support and safeguards in the system via these changes would seem to be appropriate. As the Centre for Social Justice outlined in its report, “Survival of the Fittest”:

“Current labour market conditions, such as unreliable hours due to zero hour contracts and low pay for entry level jobs, mean that most 18-25 year olds rely financially, at least to some extent, on either their parents or the benefit system for support. As care leavers are unlikely to have substantial family support, they are much more likely to rely on the benefit system”.

As the shadow Minister outlined, the new clause will apply a limit to sanctions under universal credit, including a higher level, medium level and lower level of sanction. The Children’s Society found that 4,000 benefit sanctions were applied to care leavers between October 2013 and September 2015. As we found out with the National Audit Office report only a few weeks ago, sanctions are not rare and they are not working.

Protecting young care leavers from sanctions is a welcome move, particularly as they would lead to further hardship for those possibly already facing financial difficulty of the kind outlined by the shadow Minister. Although the new clause would not remove sanctioning from care leavers under 25, it would place them in the same regime as 16 and 17-year-olds, meaning that the maximum sanction period under these proposals would be four weeks. The second part of the new clause seeks to extend working tax credit eligibility to all care leavers in full-time work of more than 30 hours per week.

The risk of falling into debt due to the cost of living, which many of these people are unable to cover in full, is a bad and sad reflection on our society. The current system of working tax credit assumes that many of those under 25 and on low incomes live at home and are supported by a family. However, that does not apply to care leavers, so additional support should be given to help these young people face independent lives. Surely the whole purpose of the care system is to enable our most vulnerable young people to go out there and stand on their own two feet equitably with those children who are brought up in caring and loving homes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy]

I support the core principles of the amendments that Labour Members have tabled this morning, and I recognise that some Government Members do share those principles; the difference is in how we achieve those outcomes. Let me be clear about the aspirations that I think we all share. They are, as I have already said: to treat all children in care as we would treat our own children, to do so in a fair and equitable manner, and to do so in a way that is possible to implement. The difference is in recognising how we get implementation right.

As the shadow Minister has said, it is the difference between having a minimum standard—a base below which we will allow nobody to fall—and recognising that there may be variation at a local level. The treatment of particular groups of care leavers, particularly young asylum seekers, is important, as is the recognition that there is a particular challenge when it comes to care leavers and financial management. It is right that we should seek to address those three core principles in a Bill such as this.

The amendments proposing a basic minimum standard are not intended to be restrictive; they are intended to help our young people know their rights. When dealing with care leavers in our casework, I think that we all recognise young people struggling to understand what will happen to them next. A national minimum standard is about being able to answer that question with certainty, without necessarily saying that the outcomes will therefore be the same universally, but recognising that there will be a basic standard and a basic principle about how we treat these young people. That does not mean that things cannot be personalised; it simply means that we can all be confident that every young vulnerable person is helped. As I have said before, just because someone turns 18 does not stop them being vulnerable; it simply means that they are moving into a new phase in their life. We must address that.

If the Minister is not minded to accept the amendments, he must tell us how he can have confidence that, across the country, those young children who we accept responsibility for through corporate parenting will get those services. I say that because I think that all of us have seen in our surgeries the consequences when there is not that support.

The shadow Minister talked about special educational needs. I think that all of us have dealt with cases of parents trying to argue for their children to have the rights that they should have. Even if there is a statement to that effect, it provides a basic standard for what that child should get. It does not mean that there is not then further work to be done about how things are enacted, but it does mean that the parents can be confident about what the child will receive. We are talking about the same principle here. It is about recognising that these young people need to know what will happen next. Having a national minimum standard would mean that we in this place could be confident that these policies will be implemented on the ground to a level that all of us would want as a starting point for those children.

On the second principle, particularly with regard to children who are asylum seekers, the discussion is a complicated and sensitive one to have in the UK right now. Other amendments, especially those that I have tabled—I am pleased that my hon. Friend the shadow Minister also has two—deal with how we would treat young children, the guidance and the principles to do with basic rights in the UN convention on the rights of the child. Those amendments continue in the same spirit, recognising that when we stand up as a country to support those young people, that support must be consistent with how we treat every young person.

That is the right thing to do morally, and legally internationally. I worry for the Minister—I am interested to hear his take on this—because if he has not included young asylum seekers in the principle, what are the legal ramifications, given that we treat them similarly under the age of 18? What might such a child have seen? Today we are having an emergency debate on Syria, where children will have seen horrors in their lifetime that many of us cannot even begin to contemplate.

How do such children end up here? One of the questions all of us have is about safe and legal routes. When children do end up here, however, and we take responsibility for them, in our hearts are we suggesting that at the age of 18 we stop caring about what happens to their outcomes? If we do not stop caring, we have to recognise that at the age of 18 they again need our help, just as we recognise that children born in the UK who come from troubled backgrounds might need our help past the age of 18. If children are to be excluded from the very provisions that we would like to see apply to other children we recognise as vulnerable, I ask Government Members to think about why they feel it is okay to discriminate on the basis of nationality—in essence, that is what excluding young refugees from the amendment will do.

The third issue is debt. Young people in care are disproportionately more likely to be in debt. Again, all of us recognise the myriad reasons for that, but the outcome is the same: a group of young people in our society for whom we have taken corporate responsibility have a particular problem, and one of the consequent problems manifests itself in how they deal with our benefits system. The amendments are designed to address that. All of us can see at first hand in our constituencies and when we deal with such children that they might not have backgrounds that give them the best understanding of budgeting. The hon. Member for a Scottish constituency, the name of which has completely slipped my mind—

[Marion Fellows]

Motherwell and Wishaw.

[Stella Creasy]

It was on the tip of my tongue. The hon. Lady put it very well when she argued that our benefits system, especially when dealing with young people, is designed on the principle that even if they do not live at home, they probably have a home relationship on which they are able to draw; that they can draw not only on financial support, but on support to be able to budget and to manage at that point in life when we start to get our own rent and bills. That group of young people do not have such support as a background, so we have to make specific arrangements for them. That is what the amendment would do.

As I said to the hon. Member for North Dorset, in places we do not do that, which costs us more as a result, so again I ask the Minister to do something, even if not in this legislation. I completely take the point of the other hon. Gentleman for—I am doing terribly this morning at remembering constituency names—

Children and Social Work Bill [ Lords ] (Fourth sitting)

Marion Fellows Excerpts

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 15th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I beg to move amendment 39, in clause 31, page 20, leave out line 4.

This amendment would retain reference to the Health Service in the Employment Rights Act 1996.

This brief amendment would retain reference to the health service in the Employment Rights Act 1996. Social workers and others in the sector have been pleased to see that whistleblowing arrangements have been included in the Bill, but we query why child protection and other children’s social workers employed by the health service have been omitted from the whistleblowing provisions, given how many there are. Why are children’s social workers employed in hospitals and other areas omitted? It would be a shame, especially in the wake of what we know of institutional abuse in certain hospitals, if such employees were not accorded the same whistleblower protections as their peers employed privately or by local authorities.

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

I apologise for my earlier error, Mrs Main.

The Scottish Government acknowledge and respect the need for whistleblowing and believe that procedures should be in place across the public and private sectors to support staff in raising any concerns in order to ensure that people can work in a safe and secure environment. Without whistleblowers, serious concerns may take longer to be noticed and rectified. Any proposals that strengthen whistleblowing procedures and help protect employees and service users across the public sector are welcome.

Robust whistleblowing procedures are in place across Scotland, including in our NHS, but the Scottish Government and the SNP support further reforms to protect and embed an honest and open reporting culture in which all staff have the confidence to speak up without fear and in the knowledge that any genuine concern will be treated seriously and investigated properly. All children and young people have the right to be cared for and protected from harm. The amendment will help with that and we support it.

[Edward Timpson]

As we have heard, the clause provides the Secretary of State with the power to make regulations to prohibit relevant employers who carry out children’s social care functions from discriminating against those applying for roles in the children’s social care sector on the basis that it appears to the employer that the applicant has made a protected disclosure. This includes when the employer refuses the application or in some other way treats the applicant less favourably than it treats others for the same application. I am pleased that we were able to work so productively with Lord Wills in the other place over the summer to produce these important protections.

For the benefit of the hon. Member for South Shields, let me clarify that social workers employed in the NHS are already covered by the 2006 provisions and will be captured in the relevant regulations, with the consultation due in the new year. That is another consultation that I suspect she will want to keep a close eye on, and to which she might wish to contribute.

The Government are clear that those working with the most vulnerable must be able to report their concerns. They deserve effective protection when they make a protected disclosure. Workers with such concerns can already make a disclosure to their employer or the prescribed bodies for child protection and wellbeing social workers. We agreed with Lord Wills’s proposals that, in addition, we should protect those seeking employment with specified bodies in roles relating to local authorities’ children’s social care functions. We are delighted to have worked with him to produce a suitable amendment.