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

Steve McCabe Excerpts

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

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to return to the Committee, Mrs Main. I wish all Committee members a happy new year. I strongly support what my hon. Friend says. I am dismayed that our response to an absence of suitable secure accommodation close to children’s families and homes is leading us to reach for the solution of sending them, effectively, to another country—certainly to another jurisdiction in relation to law and, as my hon. Friend pointed out, education. I particularly want to press the Minister on that point.

The education system in Scotland is different from that of England and Wales, and it is not clear to me what, if any, thinking the Government have done about the impact on young people’s education of moving them to a different country with a different school system. Many young people in secure accommodation will be teenagers approaching the age of 16 when they should be taking examinations, planning their futures, and receiving careers advice and support. It would be helpful to the Committee to understand what thinking the Minister has done and what planning there has been to address those children’s educational needs.

Is the arrangement really seen as some kind of stopgap in which the children would be moved back as quickly as possible to secure accommodation closer to home; or does the Minister believe its purpose is for a child posted to secure accommodation in Scotland to spend the entire period there? I can understand the wish, having found suitable accommodation for a child, not to disrupt it; but equally it seems to me that if we are dealing with a shortage of suitable spaces in England it would be helpful to know whether the Minister intends children placed for a period in Scotland to be brought back home as quickly as possible.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Main; I also wish you a happy new year.

I want to put three or four quick points to the Minister in relation to the measure. Could he give us an idea of how many children he thinks will be transferred north of the border, or, indeed, the other way? It would be interesting to have some context, and to know the scale of the problem and perhaps when he first became aware that there was a problem in need of such a resolution. I am particularly interested in how many children from England are likely to move to Scotland, and would like an indication of which local authorities are under the most severe pressure, so that they must look north of the border.

Whether or not the Minister accepts new clause 27, does he accept that if there is not some kind of time limit on the proposal the danger is that we will be legislating to export a problem? That seems a strange way to deal with children who are often very damaged and difficult. I am not sure that in the long run it is in the best interest of the care system in this country that we should end up simply exporting the problem.

Finally, I have on previous occasions heard the Minister say he does not support the idea that children should be moved far from home; I think that particularly in relation to Rotherham he had some strong opinions on that, which I agree with. While I accept that awareness of an impending problem or crisis may have brought him to introduce legislation, I wonder how he would reconcile the notion of sending children north of the border with his strongly held view that it is not in children’s best interests to move them too far from their home base for care provision.

[Edward Timpson]

I begin by thanking hon. Members for their contributions to this debate and for raising important issues about not only this new clause but, more widely, the secure children’s homes available to our most vulnerable children and young people in England, Wales and Scotland.

I will address some of the specific points raised. The latest information I have is that there are currently 17 children who have moved from England to secure children’s homes in Scotland. We first became aware of the issue that the new clause tries to fix on the back of a judgment of the family division of the High Court on 12 September last year that children could not be placed by English or Welsh authorities in secure accommodation in Scotland under section 25 of the Children Act 1989. This is a long-established practice, hence the legislative issue we are seeking to resolve was a surprise to everybody.

No child has been placed by an English or Welsh local authority in secure accommodation in Scotland without the authority of the courts in England and Wales. That is an important point. Every case where a child is moved to a different part of the United Kingdom on the basis of a request to place them in a secure children’s home outside their original area will be subject to court approval. The court has to decide on the usual basis under the Children Act of it being in the child’s best interest.

I will write to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak about which local authorities currently have children placed north of the border. The hon. Member for South Shields alluded to some of those, but I will endeavour to provide the hon. Gentleman with a comprehensive list.

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[Steve McCabe]

The Minister is telling me that he is proposing a reciprocal arrangement and that there will be a transfer of children from Scotland to secure accommodation in England as well. If he has the numbers will he give them to us now? If not, perhaps he will write to us. I am curious to know how many children from Scotland are in secure accommodation in England. I am also curious to know how a country with such a small population compared with England can have an excess of secure accommodation. Can he say more about the particulars, without identifying individuals, although I realise that 17 is a small number? Is there something special about the accommodation available in Scotland which differs from accommodation in England, making it necessary to have that transfer? I am curious to understand what that is. If it is not simply a question of numbers, I am curious to know the particular circumstances that necessitate that sort of shift.

[Edward Timpson]

I may come back to the hon. Gentleman with further information, but I can tell him that in Scotland there are 89 welfare places in secure children’s homes. They are available to children both in Scotland and in England and Wales, as has been the case for a considerable time. On the range of provision in Scotland, every decision made for each individual child is based on what is in their best interests. Clearly, therefore, some specialist provision in Scotland is deemed suitable as the best for a child in England with their particular needs.

I cannot give the hon. Gentleman chapter and verse on exactly what each secure children’s home offers, but I undertake to provide further detail, so that he is reassured that the decisions made by the courts are such that those very vulnerable children and young people are getting the best possible care and support. Furthermore, all those children and young people who have been placed in Scotland will still have placement visits from their social worker and regular reviews of the quality of that placement, even when they have been placed in Scotland or Wales.

Part of the care plan for a child or young person is about how their educational needs will be met. It will have to be set out and approved by the court before the placement is allowed to go ahead. However, I will look carefully at what the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston said, because I wholeheartedly agree with her that, wherever a young person is placed, it is important that they need to have opportunity—to advance themselves as an individual and in what they are capable of achieving academically and in getting into the workplace—and some stability in their life. That placement must meet all those requirements. I will look carefully at what she says and perhaps have a further conversation with her about how we ensure that children and young people in those circumstances are not missing out on the benefits of the education that is vital to their life chances.

Although I understand the points that have been made—I hope I have shown that I appreciate what hon. Members have said—I go back to where I started: the amendments do not seek to change existing policy or the practical circumstances in the system of secure children’s homes. They provide a technical fix to clarify the legal position of a long-standing and mutually beneficial arrangement that works for and should continue to work for our children.

We need to look carefully at how to continue to co-ordinate across England, Scotland and Wales and at how to improve provision in England. That is what the co-ordination unit is trying to do and why we are working hard with the LGA and the ADCS to see how we can make sure that the provision meets the future needs of this small but important and group of vulnerable children and young people who deserve the best possible support. I hope that on that basis the Committee will support the Government’s amendments and that the hon. Member for South Shields will be sufficiently reassured not to press her new clause.

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[Edward Timpson]

I will speak to new clause 2 and the other new clauses in this group which deal with the power to pilot different ways of working. The purpose of the new clauses is to enable a local authority to test the extent to which changes to the complex legislative framework surrounding children’s social care might achieve better outcomes for children.

I will begin by briefly outlining the purpose of the clauses before I turn to the improvements that have been made since they were debated in the other place. The Government believe that the legislative framework is the bedrock of children’s social care services. However, that does not mean that it is perfect. In 2011, the Munro review showed us that over-regulation can be a barrier to good social work practice and can prevent social workers from putting the needs and wishes of children first.

Too frequently, legislation sets out not just what local authorities need to do, but exactly how they must do it. However, when it comes to changing the law, especially where those changes are about prescribing less process and leaving more to professional judgment, we often fail to act. That is because we do not have evidence of how a change would work in practice. Without evidence, it is simply unclear what applying a change to all local authorities would mean.

The power would enable an individual local authority to test new ways of supporting children and young people. That would be done in a carefully controlled way, for a limited period of time with the sole purpose of achieving better outcomes for children. The evidence from each pilot will allow us to assess the need for changes to legislation across the country.

Local government supports this power. Local authorities want to do their best for the children in their care and to be trusted to try new approaches to do just that. However, we also heard concerns expressed in the other place and by those organisations that we consulted about the risk to children. Clearly, that is not something that would ever be on my agenda. The Government have listened and I will outline the changes we are making which I believe address the concerns that have been raised.

Government new clause 2 introduces the power to test different ways of working. It outlines the purpose of pilots that could be granted and the scope of the power. A pilot can be granted only if the application has demonstrated clearly how it will benefit children or young people in at least one of the following ways: promote their physical health and wellbeing; encourage them to express their views, wishes and feelings and take them into account; help them gain access to or make the best use of services provided by the local authority or its partners; promote high aspirations; promote stability in their home lives, relationships and educational work; or prepare them for adulthood and independent living.

The new clause makes it clear that the local authority must use the power with a view to achieving those aims. Efficiency and cost considerations are not a sufficient basis for a pilot. It makes it absolutely clear that pilots can be conducted only for the purposes of promoting children’s best interests and for no other reason.

Another important aspect of the new clause is that it sets out areas of legislation that the power cannot be used to revisit. That should remove any lingering concerns that some hon. Members expressed on Second Reading that pilots may be undertaken for the wrong reasons. In particular, it makes it clear that the power cannot be used to allow local authorities to contract out functions to profit-making organisations. While I confess to being puzzled by some of the debate that characterised the power wholly inaccurately as a means to privatisation, subsection (3) puts the issue beyond doubt.

[Steve McCabe]

Will the Minister clarify something? Unless I have misunderstood something, the new clause does not refer to pilots at all. What we are legislating for is the power for the Minister to make regulations to change the way in which local authorities deliver some services or meet some requirements. I do notice, however, that subsection (5) says that local authorities must apply to use the power. When they apply, will they have to propose a clear pilot that expresses what the innovation is, what the changes are and what they are designed to achieve, or will they simply have to say, “I’d like to change this regulation as it applies to us at the present time”?

[Edward Timpson]

To address the two points the hon. Gentleman made, we are introducing pilots because we are testing, in very controlled circumstances, a different way of carrying out the functions of a local authority: what they have to do and how they propose to do it in a different way. We will then be in a position to consider that in the controlled way that I will set out regarding both the process and the safeguards that follow, so that we have the evidence that, as I said at the start, we need to have—I think every hon. Member would agree—before we consider making any change more profound than simply piloting something that a local authority wanted to test as a way of establishing a new way of working.

I will come on to explain what that process is, because it is tightly controlled and heavily safeguarded which, in many respects, is unprecedented when compared with, for instance, the pilots under the previous Labour Government in relation to social work practices. I commend the Labour Government on setting those up, because they tried to find new ways of working within social work and they have led to some different ways of delivering those types of services—in Stafford, for example. That was done in a similar way by setting up pilots, testing ideas, seeing whether they would be successful and were something with which others might want to proceed.

I want to make it clear that I do not believe that changes to the duties would ever have been the subject of a successful application for the use of the power. Under the process and safeguards put in place, the case simply could not have been made that modifying one of the duties could result in better outcomes for children. However, by excluding them from the power, that point is put beyond doubt. The power to innovate is about testing changes to how local authorities deliver services, not questioning their fundamental responsibilities to children and young people.

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[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

rose—

[Steve McCabe]

rose—

[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—

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[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?

[Kate Green]

I agree that we need to know what the intention is if these pilots roll out successfully, but do we not also need to know what will happen if they roll out unsuccessfully and whether there is any scope for early cancellation of an experiment if it is harming children?

[Steve McCabe]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. It would be helpful if the Minister could make his intention clear to the Committee. It would be horrific if people were trapped in a failing system for three years because the legislation was passed in such haste that no one had envisaged what should be done if something went wrong. We seem to have had enough examples of that in legislation for children over the years.

I am genuinely curious to know what will happen if the pilots are successful. How will the Minister ensure that, if there is a change in the occupancy the post, what he seeks to do will continue beyond the six-year period? He mentioned the Labour pilots as an example of this not being particularly new, and that is the case, but if I remember correctly, those pilots were tied to sunset clauses that had to be renewed in legislation. I seem to recall being in this very Committee Room when he proposed a statutory instrument to enable one of the Labour pilot provisions to be converted into law.

Will the Minister say a little more about research into the pilots? I have no problem with his panel of experts. They look like people we should be able to rely on; I hope we can. As I understand it, their role will be to assess the initial offer and proposal. We need to know about the thorough examination of the pilot.

How will we know that it is a success? Presumably, we are not going to rely simply on the local authority saying, “Hey, this has worked. Isn’t it good?” Will the Minister tell us whether there will be a requirement, when the local authority introduces the measure, for it to describe exactly how the proposals are to be assessed and measured, so that the expert panel can take that into consideration? Will he also tell us whether this innovation will cover only a single local authority introducing a pilot, or is it likely that two or three local authorities in partnership could come to him with a specific proposal?

[Kate Green]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a particularly important question in the context of Greater Manchester, for example, where children’s services are the responsibility of each of the 10 local authorities? There may well be a wish to look across the footprint of the whole Greater Manchester conurbation when we move forward with the Government’s devolution plans.

[Steve McCabe]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend because she anticipates what I was going to ask. This proposal comes at a time when a lot of other innovation is taking place in local government. We have the proposals in Greater Manchester, Merseyside and the West Midlands Combined Authority. I am not clear how this measure would fit with a proposal from one of those authorities. I am not trying to be clever; I assume the Minister has discussed this with colleagues and some thought has been given to it. It is part of the question about what happens after three or six years. I am interested to know how the proposal would make progress. I do not want to dwell on this matter.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I am sure the Minister will respond to my hon. Friend’s points but I asked the Minister in written questions what would happen after the six-year period. The response was that it would not be possible for a trial to be extended beyond six years. So, even if this measure works, it will be totally pointless because it will not be extended beyond six years.

[Steve McCabe]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I assumed that it could not be the case that we would spend hours in Committee legislating for something that could be a success but would simply end after six years. It is important, since we are being asked to make decisive changes to primary legislation, that the Minister provides answers not just for the Opposition but for his own Back Benchers, as they may have to explain this in their constituencies. That would be very helpful.

I want to deal with the question of who is or is not supporting the Minister’s proposals. It is always difficult when a Minister starts reading a list. The rule of thumb is that his officials find a list of supporting organisations and give it to the Minister so he can read it out. That is standard and happens in every Government. What the Minister never mentions are the people who do not share his view.

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[Edward Timpson]

I want to reassure the hon. Gentleman—I am sure this issue is something he will follow through—that the process I set out earlier is very clear. Every application that goes through that very rigorous process, which includes the application going through the expert panel and the Secretary of State then deciding whether to go ahead with a pilot, has to be put before Parliament so that it can decide whether that pilot should go ahead. It is a time-limited pilot; it does not change any legislation on the statute book in relation to children’s social care. There is rightly an opportunity for Parliament to have its say and express its view.

[Steve McCabe]

I am grateful to the Minister. It is absolutely fair that by negative or affirmative resolution there will be an opportunity for a small weighted Committee of Members of Parliament—like all Committees, its membership will be determined by the parliamentary majority—to determine that outcome. I would not want to mislead the Committee by pretending otherwise. None the less, the crucial decision about giving the Minister a blank cheque to remove protections will be taken today by this Committee. We will find out the consequences of that decision further down the line. That is the point I am seeking to make. In my view, that is innovative, but I am not sure it is the kind of innovation I want to be associated with.

[Kate Green]

I had not planned to speak at this point, but a number of points that have come up in the past hour have raised further questions in my mind, and I hope that the Minister will allow me to explore a few of them a little more. It is important to say to all Members that no Labour Member is against innovation or the notion that we should take seriously a lot of the ideas and suggestions of local experts around local circumstances, but when it comes to child protection, we have a long history in this country of learning from when things go wrong, and it is important that we protect that learning. Much of the range of child safeguarding legislation that we have today has been a result of very dire consequences for very vulnerable children.

It is therefore important that we are mindful of what we could be unpicking, particularly given that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak, pointed out, we have got a permission in advance that says, “Go off and do what you like, and then come back and tell us how it went.” That causes some concern for Opposition Members. May I ask the Minister specifically whom he sees as being accountable for the outcome of a pilot authorised by him or the Secretary of State, particularly if it has caused harm to an individual child? It is really important that the public understand who is responsible and ultimately accountable in those circumstances. As he knows, those are the most difficult, public, contentious and distressing cases; it is very important that we know where the buck stops.

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[Steve McCabe]

I do not want to get too bogged down in detail. The Minister may need time to answer this, but I am curious: if the circumstances he just described led to a court case over a care outcome, with one local authority arguing that it had never supported the exemption and the other having argued for it, how does he think that might affect the outcome of the judgment?

[Kate Green]

I am afraid I have no idea. The Minister might be able to offer his reflections on that—if not immediately, perhaps he could come back to the Committee in due course.

As well as social care, the other area where there is real interest in Greater Manchester in moving forward with a combined authority footprint is the justice system—both the criminal and family justice system. I declare an interest: I am a life member of the Magistrates Association, which has raised particular concerns and submitted written evidence to the Committee. I am very unclear what the intentions are in Greater Manchester in terms of reshaping the justice system on that combined conurbation footprint.

The Magistrates Association has rightly pointed to the useful work of Lord Laming, which highlighted the need for a much more integrated approach to young people in the youth justice system. There are concerns that such integration could be impacted if the proposed pilots do not specifically engage with the justice agencies with which those young children might come into contact. It is unclear what impact the proposals will have on the family courts and on young people in the criminal justice system.

This is my final question to the Minister. In Greater Manchester and more generally, how does he see relationships between local authorities making suggestions for innovation sitting alongside the relationships that need to exist with a whole range of other non-local authority services with which children and families come into contact? It is not clear to me what happens if a local authority says that it wants to innovate in a particular way and take advantage of exemptions from current statutory positions if other public authorities say that that really is not acceptable to them or may conflict with their statutory obligations. Will the Minister explain to the Committee how such potential conflicts would be handled?

[Edward Timpson]

I am grateful for hon. Members’ contributions to this important debate, which have, understandably, provoked a lot of discussion on the attempt in these clauses to enable local authorities to try new ways of working with the sole purpose of improving children’s outcomes. We have had an opportunity to explore not only some of the detail around the process, which is a crucial part of this House’s scrutiny, but what we are seeking to achieve, and for me, that is ultimately the main driver behind these clauses.

I should say at the outset that the principle behind this approach is not necessarily new. I spoke earlier about the social work practices under the last Labour Government, and of course there are also the provisions that were brought in in 2002 by the last Labour Government to allow for innovation in education. In many ways, the proposals before us are closely modelled on those provisions. It is helpful to have that context when discussing how we try to do in children’s services what the last Labour Government tried to do in education.

I will do my best to address the many points made by hon. Members, and apologise in advance if I am unable to remember all of them, or to scribble quickly enough to ensure that I answer every question, but I will do my best. I want to start by talking about the question around the Secretary of State’s intervention in this process. I assure the House that it is absolutely not the Government’s intention to direct a local authority to use the power against its wishes. It is really crucial that the House understands that this is a grassroots power, designed for those working most closely for children; it is for them to decide how to use it. This is not a top-down policy. It is a bottom-up policy that enables local authorities, under their own steam, to come forward with their own ways of trying to improve outcomes for local children, which will then be closely scrutinised, as has already been set out. The Secretary of State’s powers of direction arise where a local authority is not discharging any of its children’s social care functions to an adequate standard. That is where it would apply.

Hon. Members have asked why we have chosen to exclude specific duties. I want to be clear that by excluding certain duties from the scope of the power, we are not signalling the wholesale disapplication of other duties that apply. The chief determinant of whether a pilot will be granted is whether it can promote one of the outcomes that I have outlined.

[Steve McCabe]

I think I must have misheard the Minister there. Did he say that it would apply where a local authority is not adequately discharging its duties?

[Edward Timpson]

What I said was that the Secretary of State only uses her powers of direction when they arise where a local authority is not discharging any of its children’s social care functions to an adequate standard. I apologise if I did not speak with enough eloquence, or provided one less word than necessary in that sentence to make it acceptable to the hon. Gentleman.

There are many aspects of legislation where I expect local authorities would find it extremely difficult to demonstrate how a change would be in the best interests of children. We are seeking to remove a small number of specific duties because they reflect the core responsibilities of local authorities to protect the wellbeing of children. We have taken extensive legal advice on exactly what those core duties would be, based on the legislative framework, and we have also worked with local authorities to make sure that we have the right aspects and duties in place to ensure that they are out of scope. We aim to put that beyond doubt, so that these core duties cannot be revisited. [Interruption.] I can see that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak is itching to get up.

[Steve McCabe]

indicated dissent.

[Edward Timpson]

No, he is just listening intently. That is good to see. I should also reassure the hon. Member for South Shields that the principles that are set out—