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

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Public Bill Committees

The Secretary of State will be able to cancel duties in Acts of Parliament and subordinate legislation in a particular area simply because a local authority wants to test different ways of working. This would be to an amended version of the corporate parenting principles. The Committee will recall that the Government are refusing to bind local authorities to these principles; they only have to have regard to them. In short, the statutory purpose of legal exemptions and modifications is simply to test different ways of working to a set of non-binding principles: not better outcomes, not even the same outcomes, just a different way of working.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I invite the hon. Lady, either now or later in her remarks, to set out what she has, in principle, against professional local authority officers and elected local councillors seeking to serve their communities to tailor services to meet local need and demand, compared with the man in Whitehall with the bowler hat and the umbrella, who seems, in her mindset, to know best. What has she got against the localism agenda in respect to tailored local solutions?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I will come on to that later in my comments. To clarify, I have nothing against local authorities knowing what is right for them and making decisions. [Interruption.] However, this is a slightly different case and if the hon. Gentleman keeps calm and listens, I will get to my point.

Another change concerns statutory requirements selected by the Government for special treatment. There are six sections of the Children Act 1989 and the Children Act 2004 and one part of one schedule to the Children Act 1989 that cannot be touched by this new power. I am sure I am not alone in wondering how the Minister came to select this list of core legal duties. Can he explain how he decided that the many remaining duties in the Children Act 1989 and the Children Act 2004 and their associated statutory instruments could, in principle, be disapplied? How did he decide that none of the children’s social service functions in any of the following Acts of Parliament are worth saving: the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, the Mental Health Act 1983, the Housing Act 1996, the Adoption (Intercountry Aspects) Act 1999, the Adoption and Children Act 2002, the Mental Capacity Act 2005, the Children and Young Persons Act 2008, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and the Care Act 2014?

Are we really being shown a glimpse of a brave new world where all that will be left of children’s social care legislation could be these six saved sections of two Acts of Parliament? I point the Committee to some of the frightening scenarios sent to us by Dr Ray Jones. We cannot say that we have not been warned how dangerous these new clauses are.

Children’s rights charity Article 39 has listed a number of statutory requirements that could be removed. These include—although this is not exhaustive—a local authority’s duty to provide accommodation to children it is looking after, assess the support needs of disabled children as they approach adulthood, allow children in its care to have reasonable contact with their parents and visit children it looks after. Is the Minister really convinced that none of these duties are fundamental to promoting and safeguarding the welfare of vulnerable children and young people? Why is there such resistance to undertaking a public consultation prior to the introduction of these clauses? Does the Minister not want to ensure that he and his Government have got this 100% right?

Let us also remember that part of this Bill will also be under threat of exemption once—and if—it receives Royal Assent. In fact, every single future children’s social services function that this House introduces will have a fragile and uncertain existence if we allow these new clauses to go ahead.

The Minister has written to the concerned parties, claiming these new clauses are about empowering the frontline. The frontline does not want these powers. The vast and varied range of organisations that have submitted evidence to the Committee want us to reject these new clauses. In fact, 47 organisations have come together specifically with the goal of opposing these new clauses.

The Government set out their stall on this radical new power in their strategy “Putting children first”, which was published in July last year, two months after the Bill appeared. It said that exemption trials would offer

“a controlled environment in which we could enable local authorities to test deregulatory approaches that are not currently possible, before taking a decision to make substantial changes to existing legislation that would apply across the board.”

Any proposed full repeal of legislation would have to come back to Parliament—I understand that—but for trials to have any credible and reliable influence on future legislation, they must be ethical and robust. Nagalro has correctly told us that if a local authority obtains an exemption, all the children in its jurisdiction will be subject to it whether they agree with it or not. They will have no individual say in the matter. What on earth does the Minister envisage happening if some children who do not agree come back to a future Government and claim that they were treated wrongly compared with those in neighbouring authorities?

In “Putting children first”, the chief social worker for children and families asserted:

“We must be enabled to use our professional judgment in flexible and creative ways, rather than having to follow a procedural path”

or a set of “legal rules.” The chief social worker avoiding having to follow legal rules is concerning and not a positive message for social workers or those considering joining the profession. Who would choose to work in a local authority that has fewer duties to vulnerable children and young people than its neighbouring councils?

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[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I thank the Minister; I will get to what I am insinuating very soon.

Some local authorities are being placed in an impossible situation. If they do not back the Government, is it fair to assume that they will not receive funding—especially given that, last October, many of them received a rather threatening letter from the chief social worker stating that if they did not back the new clauses they could never again complain about bureaucracy and grandly suggesting that this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for them all to do the right thing? If she is so certain that this policy is in the interests of young people and children, why has she not shared her thinking with the Committee? It is telling that the Committee has received no evidence from her.

The fact is that the Local Government Association is being placed under immense pressure to back the new clauses. Is it not the case that only a small number of local authorities, if any, back them? Can the Minister tell the Committee that the Secretary of State’s intervention powers will never be used to coerce local authorities into applying for exemptions?

My final comments concern the Minister being well aware that much of the anxiety about the new clauses comes from the fear that they pave the way for the privatisation of child protection services. Despite new clause 2(3), those fears legitimately remain. If the Government are so resoundingly against profit in child protection, why, in the explanatory memorandum attached to the 2014 regulations, do they advise companies that subsidiaries of profit-making companies are not banned from running such services?

The Deregulation Act 2015 now means that social work services to individual looked-after children and care leavers operating outside local authorities are no longer required to register with Ofsted. Add to that the LaingBuisson review, commissioned by the Department at the behest of the chief social worker and two others, which gives advice on how the market could flourish in children’s social work and says that independent providers are happy to play the long game on a journey to whole-system outsourcing.

Companies such as G4S, Serco and Virgin Care have all attended meetings with the Department to consider how they can play a role in delivering and shaping statutory children’s social care services. It is little wonder that very few trusted the motivation behind the original clauses or that fears persist that behind this power is an insatiable appetite for breaking up children’s social care. The Minister has tried to distance himself from this report for which his Department wrote the terms of reference and which it funded, yet refused to release for a considerable time. Perhaps it is waiting until the Bill has passed through both Houses.

If the Minister really means what he says about profit and child protection, he should be seeking to prohibit subsidiaries of profit-making companies from delivering social care functions. Getting legislation right in children’s social care is extremely important. Our legal duties are vital in protecting those most in need. We should always approach change in this area with great care and caution, to ensure that children and young people are not put in any jeopardy.

The new clauses have no place at all in the Bill. I implore hon. Members to reject them and to bring an end to the enormous fear and concern that have built up outside the walls of this place. The Minister has not fully responded to the comprehensive critique from the Lords, and there remains a gaping black hole as to which legislation the sector is crying out to be exempted from, and who on earth is crying out for the exemption.

The Government should withdraw the new clauses as a matter of honour and out of respect for the vulnerable children and young people who depend on the legal protections that Parliament has given them over decades. The Minister may then undertake some robust and meaningful consultation, and could return to the House later if he wished.

[Simon Hoare]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. We should be grateful to the hon. Member for South Shields for sharing with us her Momentum-commissioned essay; possibly the instruction was “Write an essay about what you think a wicked Tory Government might want to do with regard to children’s social services”—that is, without actually having seen any of the new clauses that the Minister has tabled.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I assure the Committee that I have read the new clauses, thank you very much.

[Simon Hoare]

It is an enormous shame that having read them the hon. Lady did not include them, or edit her speech having reflected on them. I am not entirely sure—[Interruption.]

[The Chair]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is speaking.

[Simon Hoare]

Thank you, Mrs Main. I have great respect for the hon. Member for South Shields, and it is with great respect that I say that I do not think she has read the clauses. She seemed to conjure up a picture in which the current rules and regulations are perfect and the best practice and statutory requirements set out for local authorities to follow are so beyond any form of change or improvement that there should be no scope for innovation. [Interruption.] I do not want to detain the Committee too long.

One might almost think that the cases of Baby P and Victoria Climbié, for example, had never taken place. I am in no way suggesting that the new clauses tabled by my hon. Friend the Minister will guarantee that such atrocities do not happen again, but there may well be benefits from the use of local professional expertise and from local authorities’ designing of innovative proposals for better care of vulnerable young people.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

rose—

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[Simon Hoare]

I give way to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak, who looks as if he may burst a blood vessel unless I do.

[Steve McCabe]

My blood vessels are in good shape, I am happy to say. Given the hon. Gentleman’s extensive understanding of the subject, would he care to say which specific item of legislation he would like local authorities to be exempted from at the moment, to advance innovation in child social work?

[Simon Hoare]

The hon. Gentleman has fallen into the trap of misreading or misconstruing, accidentally or otherwise, the purpose of the new clauses. We can all read them, but the Opposition Front Bencher has characterised—

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Simon Hoare]

No. The way the hon. Lady has characterised the proposals in her remarks is—I conjure up a scenario—that someone from some town or city hall knocks on the door of the Secretary of State and says, “I have a whizzy idea: we are going to do this,” and the Secretary of State says, “Oh, that sounds quite interesting—go ahead and do it,” in some secret smoke-filled-room deal.

Let us look at new clause 2: it talks about the purpose of helping to promote physical and mental health. Contrary to what the hon. Lady said, it is also about

“taking into account the views, wishes and feelings of children or young people”.

That is in subsection (1)(c). As to the idea that there is carte blanche for the private sector, I suggest that she look at subsection (3), which specifies a different set of criteria. The hon. Lady talked about six years as a de facto, but if she looks at the new clauses she will see that the period can be up to three years with one further three-year extension, which makes six years—not six years from the outset, as the hon. Lady said. The Secretary of State will also need to be persuaded of the need for an extension.

It is not only the Secretary of State. We are very lucky to have a Minister who, owing to his personal family experience, is recognised for his interest in and understanding of this subject. However, my hon. Friend will not always be the Minister in charge. The Bill is not couched or tabled in a way that purely relies on the bespoke integrity of my hon. Friend. New clause 6 clearly tells us of the new obligations on the Secretary of State. They

“must invite an expert panel to give advice about…the capability of the authority”,

because it is absolutely key that the authority should have the wherewithal, financial skills and so on to be able to deliver the innovation. That advice must also assess “the likely impact” and

“the adequacy of any measures that will be in place to monitor the impact”.

The idea that the hon. Lady did her best to present to the Committee as the root of her opposition to the new clauses—that finger in the air, pie in the sky, blue-sky thinking ideas would merely require the sign-off of a Secretary of State—is, I think, a gross distortion of what the new clauses intend. If the hon. Lady and her Opposition colleagues have no faith in the independent veracity of, for example, the Children’s Commissioner or the chief inspector of education, children’s services and skills, who are stipulated in new clause 6(2)(a) and (b) to provide advice to the Secretary of State, I think that is a poor state of affairs.

On the consultation, new clause 6(4) and (5) clearly state the timetable and the trigger for action that the Secretary of State must follow. I do not see the new clauses as a way for local authorities to duck out of their obligations. I served on a Local Government Association panel for several years, and I must tell the hon. Lady that the LGA is unbeatable and incoercible; if it thinks a Government of whatever stripe are doing something wrong, it will always tell the Government that that is the case.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

The fact is that local government is split on this issue; there is not a consensus. In relation to all of the times the hon. Gentleman refused to give way, he should go back and read Hansard; he has misquoted everything I have said and I look forward to his apology.

[Simon Hoare]

I will certainly be reading Hansard; I do not quite follow William Hague’s example of reading it under the bedclothes at 2 o’clock in the morning, but I shall look at what the hon. Lady said; if I have misconstrued her, I will of course apologise unreservedly. However, I took from what she said and how she presented her arguments that this will give carte blanche to a Secretary of State, in cahoots with a chief executive or a head of children’s services in a local authority, to find a way to deliver below-the-radar financial savings and to deliver some sort of third or fourth-rate children’s protection, and that there is a whole cadre of local authority professionals who are desperate to be freed from the shackles of statute, regulation and guidance.

I was not quite sure what the hon. Lady was moving us towards in her thinking—whether those people will turn around and say, “Gosh, we are now free of all of that, we are saving ourselves a huge amount of money; we can sit around and have a cup of tea and a biscuit and talk about things in a rather ideological or theoretical way”, or whether they are going to pilot things that are so conspicuously dangerous and ill-advised for young people that there would be an enormous rise in the amount of terrible cases. That is the impression with which the hon. Lady left me and, I suggest, other Government Committee members.

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[Kate Green]

rose—

[Simon Hoare]

I give way to the hon. Member for—

[Kate Green]

Stretford and Urmston.

[Simon Hoare]

I was going to say “Stratford”.

[Kate Green]

It is not quite the same. What concerns me is that as a result of these proposals we will see the risk that currently good joint working across agencies may become fragmented. That particularly troubles me in relation to children within the ambit of the criminal justice system, who are very under-addressed in this legislation. The hon. Gentleman has just said that, as a local councillor himself, he thought that there were really good opportunities to work with officers to devise good quality, flexible local solutions. Can he give me an example of that kind of achievement in the local authority of which he is a member—or indeed any other local authority?

[Simon Hoare]

I certainly defer to the hon. Lady, who has a wealth of experience in this area, far greater and wider than I have. I will leave the point she makes about young people in the criminal justice system for the Minister to comment on, because I am not entirely sure about that. I think it is best to say that.

On the opportunity for joint working, if the hon. Lady looks at local government she will see shared services and joint chief executives and joint directors of this, that and the other, and councils coming together in order to safeguard frontline services, often across geographical boundaries. I was a councillor in Oxfordshire, where we hooked up with three councils in Gloucestershire to do all sorts of things.

The order of general competence contained in the 2011 Localism Act allows for that to continue and flourish, where there is joined-up working between local authorities and statutory partners and others, under these new clauses. All it will mean is a discussion between two, three or four parties to see if they want to buy into an innovative idea which they will then take to the Secretary of State.

To conclude, I think the new clauses are absolutely right. The tone and the tenor of the debate in the other place was a gross distortion of what the Government wish to do. That was certainly echoed in the remarks of my noble friend Lord True, leader of Richmond Council. Chris Wright, the Chief Executive of Catch22 said:

“Rather than restricting social workers to box ticking”—

that is not saying we are taking away all the boxes, there will still be boxes to tick, of course—

“we should give them the power to build interventions based upon their professional expertise”.

This clause moves us closer to the goal of more human services that work for children and their families. The phrase “human services” certainly struck a chord with me. These new clauses should be supported. The argument deployed by the hon. Lady should be resisted most strongly.

[Steve McCabe]

I agree with the Minister in welcoming innovation in our approach to children’s services. It is something he and I have in common. We both have a history of working with children in this area, and I welcome measures designed to free up social workers to do better for children.

When a Government embark on a radical change of this nature, we normally have some kind of preparation for that change. There might be a Green Paper or a White Paper, or extensive consultation to allow us to shape what will happen. What seems to be happening—I do not know whether this is what the Minister intends—is that we are legislating without any real sense of what the pilots are designed to do and without any real description of them. In fact, the Bill does not refer to pilots at all, and for all anyone knows, they could be an exercise in exempting local authorities from long-standing primary legislation.

I accept that the notion of pilots exists in the Minister’s mind and that that is his intention, but it is not clear from what we are debating or from what we are being asked to vote on, and will not be the result of the legislative changes. I do not want to restrict or inhibit any effort at innovation, but it would be useful if he could give the Committee an explanation of why he is departing so radically from the normal approach to these changes in the way he has decided to proceed.

I have some specific questions about what will happen. We debated the three-year limit with the potential extension of a further three years, but what will happen at the end of six years? Let us suppose that a pilot is an outstanding success. Will the Minister then legislate for the change to be applied across the entire country, or will the exemption simply lapse at the end of that period? As the hon. Member for North Dorset reminded us, the Minister might not be in post forever. Let us suppose there is a change. What will happen to the policy then?