Education and Adoption Bill (Second sitting)

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

On resuming—

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

Q 2 May I ask all three of you, what problem are these proposals designed to address and will they do it?

Sir Martin Narey: I have been instinctively against structural change. When I first started advising the Government, I just wanted us to encourage local authorities to get on to it and, actually, they did. They have done really well with recruitment. The measures address a fundamental problem with matching. As well as chairing the national board, I spend a bit of time in the north-east, which is where I live. For many local authorities, the last adopters they want are adopters who live within the confines of their area. They are placing neglected children, who need to be put somewhere else for their safety. Matching on a more regional basis will make a difference. I hope that the proposals will reduce the parochialism of local authorities so they will look for the very best adopters, whether they are from another local authority or from a voluntary adoption agency.

Carol Homden: There is huge variation in performance between different agencies across the country, which results in a postcode lottery for children. It is important that we bring together the agencies and organisations in the pursuit of excellence and best practice for all children. The proposals may assist that process.

Annie Crombie: One of the things that the proposals are trying to address is the challenge of sequential decision making. We have seen this problem in the adoption system for years whereby a local authority will look first to adopters that it has within its own pool and then only after it is clear that there is no one suitable there will it look beyond to what we call an inter-agency placement.

These proposals could help significantly with that, meaning that local authorities will look immediately towards a bigger pool of adopters. There is a risk that, unless the voluntary adoption agencies are a really key part of the regional adoption agencies—we hope that they will be—they will find it harder to continue to provide adopters. That is a risk that I think needs to be managed, but we need to ensure that the adopters that voluntary adoption agencies provide are also available to local authorities and that the regional adoption agencies would look for those adopters as well for ones within a local authority pool.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 3 If the problem is largely about matching and there is a postcode lottery, would it not make more sense to give the local authorities the role of purchaser and allow specialised agencies with all their expertise to go out, find the families and do the matching? Would that not be just as adequate a solution as this proposal?

Sir Martin Narey: One of the things I like about the proposal is that it is not very prescriptive about how regions will do that. I think if some local authorities in a region came together and decided that the best thing to do would be to contract out their recruitment of adopters to a voluntary adoption agency, they could do that. I like to think that the Government have listened to advice, including from me, and I think the Government have listened to local authorities, many of whom I have met, who instinctively want to do something differently. They realise that the current limitations in 152 local authorities—180 organisations including VAAs—doing this is not very sensible. They have been given an opportunity, with a bit of money, to help them to improve their own service.

I go around the country quite a lot and I have yet to meet an adoption manager or director of children’s services who does not think that this is something that could make things better. They are thrilled about the opportunity to design what is best for them themselves, rather than taking a top-down model.

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[The Chair]

Dr Homden.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 4 Sir Alan, before we come to Dr Homden, could I just check something? I was asking why not go for a purchaser-provider split, and Sir Martin said that the great thing is that this proposal is permissive, non-prescriptive and allows people to innovate. Actually, the legislation before us for which you are a witness, is about the powers of direction that the Secretary of State is planning to take. Is that not the case, Sir Martin?

Sir Martin Narey: Yes it is, but the Government have made it clear that the powers of direction will not be used unless local authorities do not move. Local authorities are actively doing that.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 5 Sir Martin, that may be the case. The point I am making is that you cannot say that the legislation creates this permissive environment. The legislation is to give the Minister powers of direction. Your desire in what he is telling people externally may be what you are describing, but the legislation is about giving him powers of direction.

Sir Martin Narey: I understand that.

[Steve McCabe]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Q 6 Dr Homden, I think you were about to answer the question before we went to vote.

Carol Homden: In establishing regional entities, which Coram has already done, local authorities have taken a range of different views in what will best meet their needs, and have used a procurement and contract process in order to align those needs. Different local authorities will apply different modules and commission different services.

We have in process the formation of such an entity with a set of five local authorities, which will see those different approaches taken, but all of them will benefit from a centre of expertise with resilience in practice leadership and social work retention and, therefore, offering added benefits to children and adopters locally on a hub-and-spokes model. You are quite correct, Mr McCabe, that this is about taking a power, but I am sure that good sense would prevail: if excellence in practice is being delivered and something is not broken, then it does not need to be mended, irrespective of questions of scale.

Annie Crombie: What we want is a local authority to look as widely and swiftly as possible for the best possible match for a child, and not to be constrained in doing that by looking only, or for a long time, introducing delay, within their own local authority area. We need to ensure that in moving towards regional adoption agencies we do not introduce a disincentive for local authorities to look outside a regional adoption agency if the right placement is outside rather than inside. It is that kind of issue that is again around that sequential decision making, which we need to ensure we address as the policy on this develops.

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[The Chair]

We have time for just one more question, and then we will have to wind up and move on to the next session.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 16 You said that these powers will not be used. If they are, should the people affected have a right to challenge any decisions made by the Minister? Is there anything about these proposals that you would do differently? One word and one sentence will suffice.

Sir Martin Narey: I don’t know.

Carol Homden: I don’t know, either. The criteria need to be clear in any system that is designed for optimal effectiveness.

Annie Crombie: The thing that we need to make sure that we do well is to have dialogue between all the different partners involved in the adoption system early on, so that we do not inadvertently design systems that do not make the very best of the expertise that we have out there.

[The Chair]

Sir Martin, Dr Homden and Ms Crombie, thank you very much for your participation. We are very grateful. We will now move on to the next session.

Examination of Witnesses

Andy Leary-May and Hugh Thornbery gave evidence.

[The Chair]

Q 17 Mr Thornbery and Mr Leary-May, we will ask you to present a background of yourselves to Committee members, who will then ask you questions. We apologise for the earlier delay, which was due to votes in the House. Your session should continue until approximately 3.40 pm. Mr Thornbery, would you like to make your presentation?

Hugh Thornbery: Thank you, Sir Alan, and thank you for inviting me to give oral evidence on the Education and Adoption Bill. I am chief executive of Adoption UK, which is a membership organisation for adopted families. Our purpose is to support those families, to campaign and lobby for change and to inform and educate both the general public and professionals in relation to the needs of children adopted from care and of their families in parenting those children. We have a membership of over 11,000 individual members and most adoption agencies in the UK are also members. On such matters, we draw our position from what our membership tells us on a daily basis, both through our individual contact with it and from surveys and research.

Prior to joining Adoption UK in October 2012, I was employed by Action for Children for 15 years. Part of my responsibilities there were for the adoption and fostering services within that charity. I have been involved in children and social care since the late 1970s.

Andy Leary-May: Thank you for inviting me. I am an adoptive parent, and my first experience of adoption was about nine years ago. I have run an adoption support charity for most of the intervening years. More recently, myself and colleagues who were more experienced in IT than I was started to look at the barriers that exist to inter-agency matching and the barriers to children finding the most suitable placements in adoption. We consider one of those barriers to be the lack of an effective and efficient way of exchanging information between agencies or between consortia of agencies. We felt that in this day and age there is no reason for that to be a barrier, given that in most other walks of life effective ways are created online to enable that kind of activity. Therefore, we developed Adoption Link, which is being used by over 80% of local authorities in England. So far, it has matched over 250 children with families, and it is also finding placements in all four nations in the UK, which is significant.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 18 We are frequently told that these proposals are designed to address the problem of the 3,000 or so children who are languishing in the system and could and should be adopted. Where does that figure come from, and is it accurate?

Hugh Thornbery: Shall I answer that question first? First, the number of children waiting is declining. That is probably good news, if those children are being found families; but it is certainly so that too many children still wait and wait too long. We also have the issue of the number of children subject to reversal decisions, who start off with a plan for adoption but for whom the plan changes, often because the right family cannot be found. That amounted to 1,450 children last year. In terms of the accuracy of that figure, it comes from the quarterly local authority returns and the voluntary agency returns that come to the Adoption Leadership Board. There is a 100% return, which I see as a member of the board, so we must trust that the information being provided is correct. However, it does not seem to fit with the number of children who are being promoted for placement, both through the national adoption register and other matching agencies such as Adoption Link or my own service, Children Who Wait, which Adoption UK runs. Although there is a question mark about those figures, however, it is definitely so that too many children are waiting too long—hence the determination of the previous and current Governments to do something about that.

Andy Leary-May: There is either a question mark about the figure itself or about just what the local authorities who have those children are doing for them at the moment. As a best-case scenario, 1,000 children are currently either on the adoption register or on Adoption Link that I run, which is only a third of the children that are waiting. So there is a question about whether it is the accuracy of the figure or not. I am not sure.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 19 I do not know whether you heard the earlier evidence, but we were told that voluntary adoption agencies consistently achieve better inspection ratings than local authorities. Do you have any concerns that voluntary adoption agencies could be marginalised by these proposals?

Hugh Thornbery: I do have a concern. It is definitely the case, if one generalises, that the voluntary adoption sector demonstrates a higher level of quality across the sector than local authorities are able to achieve. That does not take away from the fact that some local authorities do exceptionally well. We have heard, as part of the justification for the clauses in the Bill, that some agencies are too small. The first point I would like to make is that there is no necessary direct correlation between quality and size, and it would be tragic if we lost some of the real expertise that exists within some of the smaller voluntary adoption agencies, which focus particularly on trying to find the right family for some of the hardest-to-place children.

Because my organisation is UK-wide, I have been involved in developments in Wales that have led to a national adoption service and the development of five regional agencies, rather than 22 individual local authorities doing adoption. It has been our experience there that the voluntary agencies were left on the margins of that change process and found it very hard to have a say, despite the fact that they were delivering high quality and were placing about 20% of the children placed each year. So that risk does exist. The proposals set out in the Bill do nothing to reassure me, necessarily, that we will not lose some highly efficient and effective voluntary agencies as a casualty of this.

Andy Leary-May: Yes, I would urge caution as well. There are a lot of things that are working well in adoption, and if the powers in the Bill are used, we should be very careful not to lose some of those things. They include the work that goes on in voluntary adoption agencies and the skills and specialisms that exist within them.

[James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)]

Q 20 How can we avoid voluntary adoption agencies being marginalised? You have both said that that is a risk.

Hugh Thornbery: I think one of the things that mitigates that risk is the investment that the previous Government and this Government are making in the capacity building of the voluntary sector. This comes at a very difficult time for the voluntary sector, with the steep decline in the number of children, which creates incoming cash-flow difficulties for voluntary agencies. So there are other challenges for the voluntary sector at the moment, as well as impending regionalisation.

The other way of dealing with this goes back to some of the questions and answers I heard in earlier evidence around the criteria used in determining what direction should take place if the need arises for the Secretary of State to direct. Prior to that, it would be very helpful if the Department were able to find a more bottom-up, locally driven approach. That is not, I think, something for legislation, but perhaps for guidance, to strengthen the role of the voluntary sector in the discussions and developments that take place at a local level. That happens exceedingly well already in some regions. I was in Yorkshire and Humberside the other day for a meeting at which all the voluntary adoption agencies had been pulled together by the consortia. It happens far less well in other areas. The risk is not across the board but particularly in some areas of the country, where there is perhaps no culture of engaging the voluntary sector.

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[The Chair]

Q 31 Ms O’Sullivan, Ms Sharkey and Mr Elvin, we will allow you to present your CV to the Committee and then the Committee will have a variety of questions that it hopes you can answer.

Andy Elvin: Afternoon, all. I am Andy and I am a social worker by profession and background. I am chief executive of the Adolescent and Children’s Trust, TACT. We are a fostering and adoption agency who look after about 630 young people in foster care across England, Scotland and Wales and we make somewhere between 50 and 30 adoptions a year. Most of our adoptions are with black and minority ethnic adopters and with adoptions of sibling groups. I was a foster-parent in the United States during the 1990s, so I have seen this from both angles.

Anna Sharkey: I am Anna Sharkey, the chief executive of Adoption Focus. We have existed for the last six years, having come previously from Father Hudson’s Society, the Catholic adoption agency—we moved out and came out as a separate agency. I grew up in a family that fostered and adopted, so have also seen it from the other side.

Our central office is near Birmingham, so we are in the west midlands. We have three offices; we are based in Staffordshire and Oxfordshire as well as the west midlands. We are part of the west midlands consortium, which comprises 14 local authorities and now three voluntary adoption agencies. I am chair of the west midlands consortium. I am also chair of the Midland Family Placement Group, which also includes the east midlands, and I am vice-chair of our adoption leadership board.

Interestingly, in terms of regionalisation, because Adoption Focus was a recipient of an expansion grant from the Department for Education we were able to become equal partners in Adoption in the Black Country, an existing sub-consortium of the west midlands consortium, where four local authorities—Walsall, Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Dudley—are working with us on joint recruitment, training and assessment of adopters, who are shared between the region. We were included to increase their sufficiency. Because we cover a wider geographical area, it is hoped that children can be placed also in the Staffordshire and Oxfordshire region, and that our adoption support provision can be utilised as well.

Alison O'Sullivan: Good afternoon. I am Alison O’Sullivan, the director for children’s services in Kirklees in West Yorkshire. I am also the president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, representing 152 directors of children’s services across the country.

I began my working life as a social worker in the 1970s. I have worked in social services departments and in the health service. I was a director of social services in Bradford for four years and I have been the director in Kirklees since 2006.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 32 Good afternoon. Do you have any views on governance and accountability for these new regional arrangements?

Alison O'Sullivan: You are looking at me. Would you like me to begin to answer? The points made by the previous speakers were quite important here. I think it is really important that we do not get entangled with governance. It will be necessary, as has happened with the existing collaborations that have already been formed, to be clear about where the responsibility sits and also how the necessary investment and funding of those arrangements is going to work. We have the experience of good arrangements that have worked for some time to learn from. It is really important, though, that we do not get bogged down in that.

Anna Sharkey: From our point of view, when we entered into the partnership with ABC—Adoption in the Black Country—we had to spend quite a lot of time looking at what their working agreement was because the four local authorities’ legal status was very different from ours as a voluntary adoption agency. So we have a formal agreement that was drafted and agreed by the local authorities with us. Obviously, in terms of the governance from our board of trustees, their input is somewhat different from the responsibilities that local authorities have, but we have found a way to manage that.

Andy Elvin: The only thing that I would add is our experience of fostering arrangements where we are on contract tenders throughout the UK. There is sometimes a temptation for local authorities to return to try to vary the terms of tender, usually—in fact always—by lowering the price. That can be an issue for voluntary agencies if they have agreed to provide services on adoption at a certain price and then it is returned to six months later to try to lower that price. That could be difficult, so I would want the contractual arrangements to be very clear.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 33 Thank you. You have all got different experience of the issues of placing children. Do you recognise the problem of the harder-to-place children? Who in your judgment are harder-to-place children, and how will these proposals specifically help them?

Andy Elvin: I am very wary of labelling children as harder to place. Generally, it is not that children are harder to place; it is that we as a state have failed them at some point. There are far too many children who undergo multiple placements, and there really is no excuse for that. Often first placements are made in an emergency; it can happen when you do not know the family or late on Thursday and you go with the carers that you can find.

When you are into the second and third placements, there is no excuse for not getting that placement right. It is children who are labelled harder to place who tend to be in their fifth, sixth, seventh placement. It is not their fault. They have given up on making relationships with adults, which makes them very difficult to care for, no matter how skilled the carers. My worry about this move and this legislation generally is that it ignores that permanence for the vast majority of children who are looked after is not adoption. It is long-term fostering, it is being looked after within the extended family and, for a certain number of children, it is residential care.

We cannot separate out permanence options, because providing long-term, stable, predictable families for children is what we should be doing. We should be getting permanence right earlier. If we start separating out and creating a hierarchy of permanence options, we are not going to serve the whole looked-after population well.

What we should really be legislating against is multiple placements. Real failure is failing to find good placements, and permanent placements, for children early. That does not just exist in adoption. The outcomes are just as good for children on SGOs—special guardianship orders—with extended family and for people in permanent, long-term foster care. We must not forget that. The hierarchy that seems to be being pushed for is dangerous, and is very, very clearly objected to by children, particularly children in foster care, who are often made to feel second rate because they are not going forward to adoption.

Alison O'Sullivan: We know from experience that older children—those over the age of five, six, seven—can be quite hard to find the right family for. If it is in the interests of children to be placed with siblings, placing sibling groups can be challenging. And children with particular needs, either because they are traumatised or have special needs or learning difficulties—that combination of things can make it harder to find the right family. But certainly from a local authority point of view, we do think it is important to persist in trying to find placements for those children. It can take longer.

If the emphasis on making early and speedy decisions, which is absolutely right for the vast majority of children, were to deny those children the opportunity of a permanent family, it would be an unintended consequence. We are making judgments in each individual case. For some children, we will try very hard for a longer period to find them a placement and that will be a great success. They will not necessarily be waiting in an unsatisfactory situation. They might already be with very caring foster-carers that they may have been with for some time, but their need is for permanence, and if it takes us 18 months to find them that permanent family—that forever family—that is what we will do.

Anna Sharkey: In terms of the experience that my family had, the fostering that was started in the late ’60s was for pre-adoption babies. We would have two or three at a time for six weeks, then they would move to their adoptive parents. As we moved into the ’70s, the children placed with my parents had more complex needs, and they are the types of children that we place for adoption. By “more complex” children, I mean older children, sibling groups, children who had experienced significant abuse and neglect, and children who were born drug withdrawing and with alcohol problems. Those were very different in terms of adoption outcomes, because the adopters that we had in the late ’60s and early ’70s were looking for those little babies who were going to be fairly straightforward, and the children became more complicated and more complex.

Our agency has always specialised in harder-to-place children, and that has been to do with the supply of children. Local authorities needing to place the relatively straightforward child do not need to come outside of their internal resource, so they will come to the voluntary sector to find their harder-to-place placements. The children that we place, predominantly, are over the age of four, are in sibling groups or have disabilities.

Of the placements that we have undertaken since we have been operating, we have had 68 single children, 45 sibling placements of two children, and five sibling groups of three. The youngest was six months old, but that was the youngest child in a sibling group. The oldest child we have placed was 10 years and two months. It is a wider range and they are children who bring with them many more complex needs than those very little people to start off with, which means that they have many more needs when it comes to the longer-term support for their adoptive families.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 34 May I pick up on the point you were just making? What needs to happen to get more people to come forward as either adopters or foster-carers? Are there issues around education, awareness and being much more honest with people, or is something else needed to increase the number of people available?

Anna Sharkey: It is interesting that we have had an increase. There is the recruitment activity, which was very definitely promoted. First4Adoption was very involved in that—the education and highlighting options for people. The fact that a very different cohort of people is coming forward as potential adopters and foster carers has been significant.

In terms of bringing more people forward, the education challenge is about which children actually need placements, in comparison with where someone’s starting point might be in terms of the type of family they thought they were going to be. That is the bigger challenge for adoption agencies and fostering agencies in managing the longer-term outcomes for those children. That stage becomes more of a challenge.

Alison O'Sullivan: It is important to help prospective adopters to have in view the kinds of support that are available. On the one hand, we should be being more direct about the sorts of needs that children requiring adoption may have. But in the same breath we need to be able to say, “And this is the kind of help that you could reasonably expect,” which will include financial support in some circumstances. It is important that we raise awareness but are also equipped to support those more complex children over a longer period of time.

Andy Elvin: I would echo that point about support. It is not just about recruiting carers; it is about keeping them. That is with foster-carers, doctors and those family members taking children on special guardianship. Far too often the support is not there—it is not there in a timely manner, it is not there in a non-judgmental manner—and that is what we need to get right. Our job is to support the placement. Sometimes the mistake is made of thinking that the child protection task is the main task. That is 10% of the work; 90% of the work is helping that child to recover from trauma and go on to have a successful adult life. Far too little support is given post the permanency placement order, whichever order that happens to be.

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[Edward Timpson]

Glad to hear it.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 46 I have heard what has been said about permanence but, given that this legislation is supposed to be about speeding up the adoption process, cutting out the delays and helping match children to families—that is what we are taking evidence on—is there anything missing from the legislation that we should be taking on board and which would really make a difference to speeding up adoption and helping the matching process?

Andy Elvin: When you are in the court process and you have a CAFCASS guardian, you have a judge and everyone is represented, often delays are caused by availability of adoption panels and the panel process. I have often wondered about how much oversight is actually needed in terms of an adoption. There is a question about if you are overseen at a court process, you have an independent court witness in the guardian, and whether that could be looked at. I know working in local authorities that was often the cause of adoption delay; it was being unable to reach panel in a timely fashion to do with court deadlines. I think that is a more systemic problem that has been around for quite a long time.

Anna Sharkey: For me, the concern is thinking about how the financial situation would work. The levelling of the inter-agency fee meant that local authorities obviously charge each other the same amount of money as I charge them, so it was a recognition of the work that is done. If there are regionalised adoption agencies that are all part of that, my view is that the framework under which financial transactions happen is likely to change.

If that is the case, my concern would be that we do not have the same sort of framework as in the fostering arena, which you, Andy, have alluded to in terms of spending a huge amount of time trying to do tender documents and different arrangements, depending on who you are working with, which come back and do something later that was not necessarily intended. It is trying to work out what that would be.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 47 How would you stop that happening?

Anna Sharkey: I suppose with some clarity about the funding arrangements for every aspect of the care process for children, so that we did not have the sectionalising of different parts of the process. For instance, if the provision of that bit of money has ended, you have a bit of a problem if you have to plan for a child who needs that service. It needs to be properly costed and sorted so that every party to the arrangement is funded to do it properly for the child and the adopters.

Alison O'Sullivan: The issue that I would shine a light on is not one that I think you would legislate for. It is about the professional confidence and competence of the social work decision-making process. I know that that is already in view in how the Government are working on the broader issues of care planning and decision making. This is a complex and delicate system, with professional and legal decision making involved and so many elements that it is important to have the right confident, strong and professional advice at lots of points.

[The Chair]

Mr Elvin, Ms Sharkey and Ms O’Sullivan, we are grateful for your participation. We will examine the evidence that you have given and deliberate on it. We may come back to you about that evidence or, indeed, we may ask you some more queries in the future. We wish you a safe journey home.

Examination of Witness

Russell Hobby gave evidence.

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[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Q 100 We heard this morning about Downhills primary school and the campaign against its academisation. I am a governor of a school in Stourbridge which is now an academy and the process of academisation there took place against an orchestrated campaign, which ran for more than 12 months. Given those experiences and the potentially even greater struggle that failing schools or struggling schools in poorer areas would have in the face of such a campaign, do I take it from you, Mr Gibb, that the speed with which the measures in the Bill will enable the Secretary of State to turn a failing school into an academy will be the answer to those sort of problems? Under the measures in the Bill, how quickly do you think the improvement in a child’s education and the life chances of those children in a school that was failing will be turned around?

Mr Gibb: We heard from Sir Dan Moynihan this morning about how they managed to turn Downhills school around in two years and it is now good with some outstanding features. He also cited the metrics of the improvement in the proportion of pupils reaching level 4. It is quite staggering. That is in the face of delays that were caused by the “save our failing school” protests. It is a tragedy that any month is wasted when children only get one chance at an education. The Bill is designed to speed up that process and that is why a school that is in special measures or category 4 will automatically be issued an academy order. The whole issue of whether a school is going to become an academy will vanish. There is no point in protesting because that is going to happen and then we can get these outstanding academy groups to take over the school and bring in support and leadership and transform it very rapidly. I think Lord Nash might want to say how rapidly.

Picking up the earlier question from Louise Haigh about morale, I would say that this is a great time to be a teacher. We have between 400 and 500 new academy groups developing that are based on a good school. A headteacher can use their expertise to develop other schools. We heard that earlier today from the lady from Sunderland—her name escapes me—who runs the WISE academy chain. It is a wonderful professional thing to be able to do, to take your expertise and experience and to spread it into three, four or five other primary schools and raise their standards. Those opportunities were not available before the coalition Government came in in 2010 and there will be increasing numbers of those opportunities available to the profession in years ahead.

Lord Nash: Our mottoes are “Every child deserves to go to a good school” and “children before adults”. I know the experiences you are talking about from personal experience as an academy sponsor appointed by Andrew Adonis for a school in Pimlico which was in special measures. We had a group of teachers and parents who were very against the whole idea and came up with a lot of appalling tactics, including breaking into my office and various other things, but two years after we took the school over, it went from special measures to outstanding, thanks to the leadership team and teachers that we recruited. The people I have just referred to asked after a year if they could change their name from, I think, the Pimlico School Association to the Friends of Pimlico Academy. They got quite a short answer from me on that. We do not want other people to have to go through that experience because it is just adults putting their dogmatic prejudices before the interests of children. That is what part of the Bill is about.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 101 Mr Timpson, during the passage of the Children and Families Bill, your colleague Lord Nash here, accepted that a power to require all local authorities to undertake joint arrangements should

“be subject to full and rigorous scrutiny by Parliament.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2013; Vol. 750, c. 622.]

When Baroness Hughes pointed out that the steady use of powers of direction could result in the same effect, she was assured that that was not the Government’s intention and that any direction

“would be preceded by a letter setting out the Secretary of State’s intention…This would explain the underlying reasons and provide the affected local authorities with an invitation to respond. Only then would the Secretary of State take a final decision to issue the direction.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2013; Vol. 750, c. 625.]

Will you follow roughly the same procedure with these arrangements? Is it fair to assume that the risk is still pretty much the same as the one identified by Baroness Hughes?

Edward Timpson: First, I do not know which particular aspect of the Children and Families Act 2014 you are referring to.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 102 I was referring to the joint arrangements covering adoption.

Edward Timpson: From memory, that was clause 3, but it may have changed during the Bill’s passage through the House of Lords.

As we heard in the evidence earlier this afternoon, the whole purpose of this clause is to have a backstop power in circumstances that we envisage will be extremely rare, if used at all, to enable regional adoption agencies to be fulfilled right across England. We want that to happen voluntarily, to be locally developed and to be done—I think this is where we can have a higher level of agreement on your point, Mr McCabe—in a transparent way. It must be clear who is involved and what will be expected of those who are in conversation with other local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies and the Department for Education, so that we get what our “Regionalising adoption” paper sets out clearly: excellence in every regional adoption agency.

The details of how we do that will, I am sure, be discussed in Committee, but I can certainly give an assurance that we want to see a transparent process. Much of that is already happening, as we have heard. I fully expect that to continue with the support we are offering through the £4.5 million over the next year and the practical support that the Department can offer, as well as the adoption leadership board and the regional adoption boards. That will ensure that excellence, where we know it exists, is brought to the attention of local authorities that do not know already about it and are looking to build up a consortia.

[James Berry]

Q 103 For constituents I have spoken to about adoption, the key concern and key failing they identify in the system is the time it takes to achieve permanency. Are you confident that the Government’s proposals in the Bill will speed up the process?

Edward Timpson: I am confident that if regional adoption agencies develop in the way that we expect and are already starting to see, that will help—particularly with the matching process and trying to bring down the time it is taking for far too many children whose plan is for adoption to be matched with their forever family. We know that there are 3,000 children in care at the moment whose plan is for adoption. Over half of those have been waiting for 18 months for that match, despite the fact that there has been a 27% increase in adopter recruitment in the past few years.

We have, in the past three to four years of the coalition Government, seen a reduction of about four months in the time it takes for a child to be adopted. That is good progress, but we think we can go further. The creation of regional adoption agencies will help in that endeavour, as will the area of recruitment and improved support for children who have been adopted—in particular, the specialised services that are not always available in every local area. If those services are commissioned and drawn from a wider area across the region, more families and children will be able to access them when they need them.