Children in Care

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) and the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson). This is a very important subject and they have done extraordinarily well to put it at the forefront of our proceedings in the Chamber.

I want to say how much I agree with the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle in his emphasis on the importance of kinship care. In my constituency, I have encountered situations where a kinship care solution would have been more appropriate than what actually happened. I fully concur with what he said and urge the Government to think very carefully about how they can encourage kinship care.

The chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, frequently mentions the importance of strong family life, and I am pleased to note that in the autumn statement the Government significantly extended the troubled families programme. That programme, which began in 2013, is an important step because it signals what everybody knows: that good families are better than bad families and that families going through appalling experiences and heading towards crisis must be given the appropriate help. The Government are also right to make it easier for separating parents to go through mediation rather than a full-scale battle. That is another step in the right direction.

It is important that we have high standards of social work in order to avoid some of the pitfalls encountered in recent years. One important element here cropped up when the Education Select Committee last visited the Department: the importance of leadership—not necessarily at director level, but at assistant director level—in ensuring high-quality and timely decisions in social work. The Government should think about the quality, nature and forward planning of social work in local authorities. Another big point is agency co-operation. I would like to hear from the Minister how the ministerial taskforce on child protection is getting on. One of its key priorities should be to encourage better agency co-operation and to make it easier for them to work together. That is an important direction of travel and one that I hope the Select Committee will be pushing.

The pupil premium and children’s centres, which are linked, are important aspects of this debate. The pupil premium is for children in poverty, but there are links between those children and children in troubled families, so we should be using the pupil premium to identify and help the children in jeopardy. The same logic applies to children’s centres, because they are really useful places. I have seen how important they are in my constituency: thousands of children in my constituency are going to well-run children’s centres and benefiting from some extraordinarily good services. We need to put a spotlight on the value of children’s centres, which, certainly in my constituency, are well run and well organised.

I want to make two final points. First, we need to think about having statutory personal, social, health and economic education. I have written to the Secretary of State several times, urging her to think carefully about that, and we continue to press on that front. Finally, I end on an observation made in my meeting recently with the Youth Justice Board. We heard earlier about children getting into difficulty—with prison, criminal activity and so on—so I want to repeat the key point about the need for strong, better and more transparent agency work and co-operation.