Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important and timely debate on children in the care system.

It is imperative that we see investment in a new approach to keep young people safe and supported, and to rebuild services and skills around their needs. In this debate, we must be mindful that millions of parents have excelled in nurturing their children in loving, secure homes—but sadly that is not everyone’s story. Good parenting takes skill, time and patience. That is why parents, foster carers, kinship carers and adoptive parents are simply amazing. No matter the relationship, when there is a cry for help, it must be heeded.

Asylum-seeking children, disabled children and those with learning disabilities or from minoritised groups need excellence and care; they need safe, secure and loving homes. That is what we want for every child. Tragically, for too many, that is not their experience. We worry, and we have to act. Serious case reviews shake us, they are aired in this place and then they are filed, until we are reminded by the next report, and then the next.

The story is familiar: invisible children, overstretched services, social workers drowning in demands, warning signs—and then it is all too late. Children disappear between agencies, between the multitude of social workers who are never given the chance to excel as they are squeezed by demand. Parents are let down, children are let down. Parents endure the pain of separation from their children, just because life failed them—life went wrong. If only the system had time to break in and break the intergenerational cycles to provide the very best early interventions.

There are half a million children in need of support, 82,170 of them residing in the caring system. If we do not pivot, it will be 100,000 in a decade. But they are not numbers: they are our future, they are our now, they are our children. Like all of us, they want to know they are safe. They want love. They want family.

We get it. Life is hard. Parenting is really tough, and where there is little support and stress presses in, something breaks. However, when children’s social services are under-resourced and overwhelmed, reparation is harder. Take Ava, who was placed in foster care when family hardship meant she was not provided with the care she needed. She moved far away, separated from her brother and sister. On the cusp of turning 18, she was told to move out and is now living alone in an unfamiliar town, all because her family struggled. That is not care.

I think of the young mum desperate to do the right thing, but not supported to parent before the painful adoption order is granted. The trauma never leaves her. I think of parents not coping with complex needs and complex relationships, coercion and control, violence in the home, poverty knocking on the door, isolation and poor mental health. I think of the children left lonely, afraid, neglected, in need of care, and sadly, for some, in need of safety. I think of those sucked into slavery: from county lines to sexual exploitation, they disappear, lured by the promise and the hope of better, then destroyed. Sometimes, thing just go wrong.

We all know the stories, because these are our constituents. That is why we are here—not to make another speech but to lever in change. The Minister has the power to make that happen. There is a blueprint on the Minister’s desk: to cut the number of children in care by 30,000 in a decade and to make countless more families thrive. If Government really grasp the urgency and importance of this, they will find the money, too, not least as they will see the return quickly.

Last May, Josh MacAlister published his independent review of children’s social care. We are waiting for the Minister’s response. We need the reforms and the funding in full. For children in and around the care system, time is not on their side. Key parts of the workforce are contemplating their future. Families are under ever growing stress, as are services, and children need to be kept safe. The power of the report is in its echoing of the voices of people with care experience. Their aspirations must turn into Government ambitions. From the outset, it would be unethical for Government to speak of pilots for implementation. Clearly, every authority has its differences—some have better leadership, some better funding, and some are already on the path of reform—but to leave an authority behind would be to leave a child behind.

Secondly, on funding, may I remind the Minister that the total package would cost just £2.6 billion? The cost of children’s social care is £10 billion a year right now, and the current cost of adverse outcomes is £23 billion a year. Not to act will cost £15 billion in 10 years’ time and have a higher social tariff, too. The Minister cannot afford not to implement now. Any delay will cost her and cost families.

Investing in families is the most pressing reform, by bringing together multidisciplinary teams from across agencies together to input into, support and transform families, with health, mental health, education, social services and families working together. It is about building families, investing in families, and getting the right support to families in the right time. We need family help delivered by brilliant practitioners through family hubs and schools, with skilled and intensive support from the first 1,001 critical days through to childhood and adolescence, and into young adulthood—one team around one family, one assessment process and one plan; radical help, bringing radical resolution.

Rachel de Souza’s report, “Family Matters”, encourages the wider involvement of family, recognising their role in raising a child and, if the child is entering care, the interventions they can make, including through kinship care, which is today homing 162,000 young people. Having a family network plan will unlock the potential of the wider family role in supporting parents and caring for children, not least when a new placement is sought. The Mockingbird project provides networks of support around foster carers, but could be extended to recognise wider community networks. Supporting families in the context of society builds more sustainable, resilient families.

For some, adoption is the path forward, but this must change, too. I chair the all-party parliamentary group for adoption and permanence. Our report, “Strengthening Families”, highlights the cracks in the system. There is inequality, with some children taking longer to place—sibling groups, minoritised children, disabled children, and older children too. We need better matching, and they need better support, but adoption is more than family matching. We need excellence in family building and trauma therapy, too.

In the social media age, children are finding birth parents, and birth parents are finding children. Instead of being well prepared, they are doing that on their phones, alone in their bedrooms. The trauma from the intrigue can be devastating, not least as life’s journey of questions may not produce the hoped-for answers. At worst, it can destroy both families and the child. More open processes can be safer.

Strong leadership leads to strong services. We need the very best leaders heading up services—one controlling mind driving through this once-in-a-generation reform. From here, we need confident and competent key workers. Social workers are too often thrown into the deep end before learning to swim, or are drowning in paperwork when families need their skills. Sixty-five per cent. of children have more than one social worker in a year, and 27% more than three. It is not acceptable. Building an early careers framework will grow the skills of graduates, so that they gain experience, make a positive difference and work with a safe case load, with the mentors, learning and supervision necessary to make them excel as professionals. After five years, practitioners can then seek posts that demand higher levels of expertise and clear, focused, decision making, such as in child protection. They need that experience.

There is a proposal for a national pay scale, which is right. I look at what Agenda for Change did for the NHS. It built workforce stability and pay transparency, and it helped people to build their careers. The pay market, fuelled by the spike in agency workers, is like a magnet. Areas that pay less are often where the greatest needs are, escalating workforce churn and leading to disruption for families. The use of agencies must end. Not only are costs out of control, but it is in the interests of neither the practitioner, the service, nor, especially, the child. Everything must relentlessly focus on young people, improving their futures, opportunities and safety. Service improvement commissioners must challenge and improve services, not just assess them, so that excellence is achieved in all areas at all times.

But even when taken into the arms of the state, into residential care, as 16% of children in care are, they face multiple placements, of which 20% are neither good nor outstanding. Thirty-seven per cent. of placements are more than 20 miles away, some in unregulated, unsuitable settings, as I found out from children in my own constituency. These are places profiteering out of the most fragile of children. Seventy-eight per cent. of residential care places are provided in the private, for-profit sector. This failure on availability, quality and costs demands reform, as set out in the Competition and Markets Authority report. On average, profit margins rose by 22.6% from 2016 to 2020, an average of 3.5% a year above inflation, with total costs of £1.33 billion to these organisations, but for a child with complex needs the costs are limitless. So why are people profiting out of children?

As for quality, these services are rated more poorly, violate more requirements and are rated more negatively. The CMA’s “Children’s social care market study” also outlines fears of market disruption, as private equity firms have overreached and carry substantial debt. A closure would be disruptive. Even the Minister, Baroness Barran, said

“it sticks in my throat to have private equity investors”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 November 2022; Vol. 825, c. 449]

in this role.

The chair of a Government review of private children’s home providers found that children are being failed as the largest providers make millions in profit. New regional care co-operatives need to sort that out. As partners of local authorities, they can provide the scale and focus to oversee fostering—particularly when 9,000 new foster carers need recruiting, training and supporting—and residential care. We must rid the market of such responsibilities and rebuild outstanding therapeutic and homely facilities, with the very best of staff.

The ambition of the review must be fulfilled, so that every child is loved, healthy and happy, excels in school and then work, and is safe and secure. Being care-experienced will never leave a person, but adopting this as a protected characteristic will help with navigating life. Above all, the child must always have a strong voice. The independent reviewing officer has been that voice and changes to the role, while questioned, have pointed to the conclusion that every child needs a competent practitioner the child trusts who will advocate for them. Of course prevention is vital. Understanding the intersections between poverty, life’s challenges and family must guide wider policy choices, but starting with the reforms we are debating today will secure a necessary workforce reset and provide every child with the care, love and safety they need. We must not let these young people down; they have ambition and so must we.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is so right. I fear I am in danger of making a long speech; I rarely do so, but we do have some time this afternoon, and such good interventions are being made that I will indulge them—if you will indulge me, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is such an important subject, and my hon. Friend is right that too often in the past, we have measured things not on the quality of the outcomes, but on the way we can measure them and tick the appropriate box.

At the end of the day, what matters is not whether all the processes and procedures set out in the rulebook have been followed. The only thing that matters is whether the intervention of the state through the medium of the social worker, the local authority children’s social care department, the foster carer, or whoever has had a meaningful and beneficial outcome for the welfare of that child. That is what section 1 of the Children Act 1989—which is still so relevant today, 33 years on—says is how we should judge whether we should be making those interventions, and how we should measure their impacts. I am afraid that it was too much about whether we complied with certain pages in the manual and whether we could tick all the boxes, regardless of the impact or the outcomes for the child.

The problem 10, 12 or 15 years ago was that too many people were studying social work at university because it was an easy degree to get into. A third of them dropped out during the degree, another third dropped out after a year in the social profession, and only a third went on to be social workers. We spent a lot of money on training people, two thirds of whom did not end up in that important profession, which I call the fourth emergency service.

“No more blame game” was appropriately titled, because social workers were always the butt of everybody’s criticism. Social workers do not kill babies and vulnerable children; it is evil carers or parents who do that. For social workers, it is a question of how and when they can intervene, hopefully to lessen the chances of adults doing cruel things to children, which they will always do. All we can hope to do is minimise the opportunities and try to detect them before they manifest themselves.

[Rachael Maskell]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech. One of the things that has constantly dogged the profession has been the pressure, the extent of the case loads and the circumstances that social workers and other professionals work under. Those pressures are not abating at the moment, as local authorities are facing significant pressures as well. Is it not crucial that we build a proper multidisciplinary workforce plan to ensure that every child gets the time and the professional support that is needed to do the things that the hon. Member is talking about?

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and I will come on to case loads in a minute.

It is about getting highly motivated and qualified students to go into studying social work. It is about getting better training for those students to become professional social workers and then holding on to them, because we have a real problem with retention at the moment.

We raised the status of the profession by bringing in principal child and family social workers, who were senior social workers with great experience. They were not just put behind a desk and given managerial responsibility when they were promoted. They also had frontline casework, so we did not lose their valuable experience; they were able to pass it on by mentoring newly qualified social workers.

Step Up to Social Work was a fantastic programme, like Teach First, with well-qualified, motivated and energetic people making a change in direction and going into social work. In many cases they were the shock troops, going into really challenging areas and bringing a fresh approach. That approach was carried on by Frontline, to an extent, but its origin was in Step Up to Social Work, and I have to say that it did it in a rather more cost-effective manner.

We created the role of chief social worker. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley will remember well our conversations in 2007 with the chief social worker for New Zealand, which was the inspiration for our recommendation. Of course we should have one—we have a chief medical officer and a chief veterinary officer, so why would we not have a chief social worker to look after the interests of children? That was one of our key recommendations in 2007, and the chief social worker was appointed some five years later.

The new report mirrors the plea that the Munro report made in 2011 for early help—all we have done is rename it family help. As hon. Friends have said, we can be so much more effective by intervening early than by responding retrospectively and firefighting the problem when a child may have been irreparably damaged. We need to ensure that we have vulnerable families on the radar, getting intervention and support services early on, if possible to keep the child with their birth family by giving them the support they need, rather than have the social worker knock on the door when the child is about to be taken into care. It is such a false economy to react rather than intervene proactively. We have lost too much of that proactiveness, I fear.

We find ourselves coming almost full circle to high vacancy rates in the social work profession. Too many experienced, grey-haired social workers are burnt out and leaving the profession early, and are unable to pass on their great wisdom, experience and mentoring skills to new social workers coming into the profession. We find ourselves with case loads that are, again, too heavy. I remember one former, very distinguished director of children’s services, Dave Hill, who very sadly died just a year or two ago. He started part of his career in Essex and later became president of the Association of the Directors of Children’s Services. When he took over the Essex children’s services department after it had been failed and was going through a rough period, he got all the social workers in front of him and said to some of them, “Right, list your cases.” Several social workers went through their cases, and when they got to No. 16 or 17, they started struggling to remember them. Mr Hill’s response was: “That’s probably the limit of the case load you can manage, isn’t it?”

It is not rocket science. If a social worker is struggling even to remember the names of the vulnerable families they are looking after, they probably have too many families. That approach was not rocket science but common sense. Too often, social workers’ case loads are too heavy and they are chasing their tails from one case to the next. That is when things get missed. In their complex and challenging profession, social workers have to notice things, and they can do that only when they cross the door threshold, look in the fridge to see why the kids are not being fed properly, inspect their wardrobe and eyeball the mother who they suspect is not looking after the kids properly. It is not all done on a computer, and it cannot be done if social workers have to rush to their next appointment because they have so many cases to get through within an eight-hour working day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and I will be looking at that carefully. The heart of what we want to do is to make sure that all people have these powerful relationships in their lives. As he ably pointed out, that is what we expect for our friends and families and actually everyone deserves to have those people who will go the extra mile for them.

On our ambitions for this area, first, I come to our ambition for families. Many Members spoke eloquently about the importance of families. They are at the heart of what makes us happy and well, so when families are struggling we should provide rapid and intensive multidisciplinary support at the right time to help to fix the issues. Lots of Members talked about early intervention and I completely agree that that is the core issue here. We want to make sure that our programmes improve early help services from birth to adulthood. We want to build a strong evidence base on what works to support families to turn around difficult situations, and I would particularly like to thank the Children’s Commissioner for part 1 of her recent excellent review of family life. There was a comment from the shadow Minister about our lack of ambition in this area. I gently point her towards our ambitious reforms on domestic abuse and on drug and alcohol addiction, reducing parental conflict. We talk about prevention to make sure that people are not suffering from the kind of trauma that the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) set out movingly. These programmes are both important and exactly the right place to start.

[Rachael Maskell]

What keeps me awake at night is knowing that poverty levels are rising sharply. It is those pressures on families that often lead children into the care system. Given that the report did not have the remit to look into the intersection between poverty and the challenges that families face, will the Minister ensure that she puts more pressure on her Government to put the protection around families so we do not see children having to go into the care sector?

[Claire Coutinho]

As someone who has been working on the cost of living challenge for the past 18 months, I can say that it has been a priority of this Government, during the pandemic and into the energy crisis, to support the most vulnerable households. That has exactly been our impetus in these times.

Our second ambition is for child protection. The murders of Arthur and Star have sickened us all. The recommendations of the national panel aim to ensure that such terrible incidents are as rare as possible and, when children are at risk of harm, to ensure that we intervene quickly and decisively through a more expert and multi-agency child protection response. The hon. Member for Bath had a question about developing our understanding of sibling sexual abuse. Nothing in this area should be taboo. We are looking at the evidence base via our child sex abuse centre. I am happy to discuss these things further with her.

Local authorities, police and health services are under statutory duties to work together to safeguard children. We will use the recommendations of all the reviews to support them.

Thirdly, on foster care and kinship care, I agree that the John Lewis advert was touching, providing an exciting opportunity for us to talk more about this area. Where children cannot be looked after safely by their parents, we should properly support wider family networks to step up and family-like environments. At the moment, there are practical, financial and cultural barriers to some of this, particularly some of the ethnic disparities that have been mentioned today. But moving in with a relative or people from one’s own community provides a strong chance of achieving the kind of lifelong stability that children need. We need to encourage the system always to look to wider family before care outside the family and to help to equip families to do this where that is in the child’s best interests. Many Members also mentioned adoption. We set out a strategy last year and that will also be an important part of our solution here.

Our fourth ambition is for the care system. Where family is not an option, the care system should provide stable and loving homes. Again, I echo the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who said that it was very sad that some people do not have what other people have: a loving family home. The care review found that supporting children in the care system also needs to be focused on outcomes. That has been widely discussed today and it is absolutely right. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) movingly set that out, saying that we must focus on the outcomes. I also pay tribute to John from Plan B who sounds like a thoroughly brilliant man in all the work that he is doing to help people in this regard.

The number of times that children move homes was mentioned in a couple of speeches. Care-experienced people whom I have spoken to in the past couple of weeks talked about children moving 21 times. That is not the kind of situation that we need to set up the relationship that we think are so important for people.

While we are considering all the recommendations to support young people and to get those outcomes that we have been talking about, we have also been working in close partnership with Departments across Government and with Ofsted. What is clear is that the continuing status is not an option, although I gently say to the shadow Minister that the trajectory has been positive and that there has been a huge amount of work from dedicated teams to try to get that good and outstanding level from 36% to 55%, and to reduce the number of local authorities that have been judged to be inadequate. I pay tribute to them for their work. Of course, we must continue. We must not accept any failure in this area, but they have done exceptional work so far.

Our fifth ambition relates to the workforce, which the hon. Member for York Central, who I know has great experience in this area, my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley and my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), who is always so interesting on this issue, all talked about. We must equip the children’s social care system with the people and tools it needs to do a good job of supporting all those who need its help. That means a skilled and empowered workforce, better data and transparency and clear system direction.

We have committed to a national framework for children’s social care and are working to publish a draft of that alongside the implementation strategy. We will also continue to work closely with Ofsted, which plays an important role in the intervention and improvement programme.

Finally, by far the most important factor in achieving success will be the people delivering the vision. I am sure this House will join me in paying tribute to every social worker and all those supporting children, such as workers in children’s homes and foster carers. They are there tirelessly, day in, day out, providing support to children and their families. We will bring forward proposals to support the workforce and foster carers to ensure they have the right skills and strong leadership.

I am proud to be responsible for a system that has been shown to help children to recover from traumatic experiences and often to succeed against the odds, but the children’s social care system cannot do it all. A young person’s success is driven by many different factors and actors. I want other parts of the local council system, the school system, the health service and many others within and outside Government to do all they can to give our children the best possible start in life. Children’s social care cannot do it alone and we cannot do anything at once, but this is a programme for a long-term, once in a generation reform. We will start by laying the foundations for a system that is built on love and the importance of family.

[Rachael Maskell]

This has been an incredibly powerful debate and the quality has been of the highest standards of this place. I thank all hon. Members for their contributions, including my hon. Friend the shadow Minister, and the Minister for setting out her proposals.

It is disappointing to hear that we will have to wait until the new year to hear about the Government’s implementation plan, but I trust it will come with strength and fortitude when it comes. Certainly we look forward to seeing that, scrutinising it and pushing the Minister further to make sure that it goes the furthest that it can.

We are indebted to Josh MacAlister for the careful consideration he has given to the future of children within the care system. We are also indebted to all those who step up, day in, day out, to care for children—be they social workers and other professional staff, charities and local authorities, parents, adoptive parents, foster carers or kinship carers. For the children who are dependent on us, we cannot let them down. We cannot give them second best. I trust the Minister will do her utmost to make sure we see the real transformation that those children deserve.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The rules of this House are very clear: should any hon. Member be visiting another Member’s constituency, they are to inform them in advance and in good time. The ministerial code is also very clear that any Minister undertaking an official visit should do the same. Today, the Secretary of State for Education visited a school in my constituency but sadly failed to inform me of the visit. I am concerned, because she is the third Minister to visit my constituency in the space of six weeks without informing me. My making this point of order is becoming a regular occurrence and something I should not have to do. May I just seek your guidance on how to ensure that everybody adheres to the rules of this House?