Children’s Social Care

Debate between Tim Loughton and Ellie Reeves

Thursday 17th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

Gosh. I am afraid that my hon. Friend has got me on to a subject that is an issue for an entire whole-day Adjournment debate in itself, so may I say that he raises a very good point but that I have quite enough to say without straying down that important, though slightly esoteric, pathway?

There have been other reports in recent months. The Children’s Society published its “Crumbling Futures” report, which highlighted that almost 60,000 children aged 16 and 17 are in receipt of support as a child in need, but that as many as 46% of those referred to children’s services did not meet the threshold for support. I am particularly concerned about those who are just below that intervention threshold, who do not feature in any of these numbers and are not getting timely support when they need it.

There have been numerous reports from the Children’s Commissioner, and we have had the Narey review on fostering. The Select Committee on Education has produced its own reports and we have had a Government response. My hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) secured a debate on the Care Crisis Review, which was published last year and raised some concerning things about the state of the care system. In October, a report from the Education Policy Institute found that the number of referrals to specialist children’s mental health services has risen by no less than 26% over the last five years, but that 24.2% of the children referred for support had been turned away.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman talks about the number of reports. In 2016, Bromley’s children’s services were judged to be “inadequate” by Ofsted. Following an inspection in November, the council has now received “good” in all areas and “outstanding” in one area. These improvements are no doubt due to tremendous hard work, particularly by frontline staff in Bromley. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, in the light of all these reports, children’s social care needs to be supported by continuous and comprehensive funding to sustain the current levels of service?

[Tim Loughton]

I will come on to that. Obviously funding is a factor in this. I remember that in my time Bromley was always an exceptional council. I learned many interesting things about volunteering with children in Bromley. There was a pioneering service where volunteers worked alongside social workers helping children who were the subject of safeguarding plans, child protection plans—or whatever they were at that stage—to stay out of the care system. There has also been some very good work in Bromley by former employers in the Department for Education to help to bring that about. There is a combination of factors, but as I have clearly said and will restate in a minute, there is a problem with resources.

The Education Policy Institute also estimated that at least 55,800 children were turned away for treatment in 2017-18, but that is probably an understatement due to the shortage of data.

I am particularly disappointed by a report from the Institute of Health Visiting, headed by the excellent Dr Cheryll Adams CBE, which states that

“despite the health visiting mandate having been extended, it is apparent that universal services for children continue to bear the brunt of public health service cuts”

The health visiting workforce continues to experience significant reductions, with NHS posts falling from 10,309 in October 2015 to 7,982 by April 2018. The report —it is absolutely right—states:

“It is both astonishing and extremely worrying that the visionary work of David Cameron’s government to increase the number of health visitors across England by 50% between 2012 and 2015 could have been undone so quickly. Especially as the evidence for the importance of the very early years impacting on individuals’ future health and wellbeing is now so strong.”

Health visitors are experienced frontline early intervention professionals who often get into the houses of new parents at an early stage and gain their trust. They have been an early warning system for safeguarding problems as well as offering parenting support classes and other mechanisms that parents so often need. We have allowed their numbers to decline, and that is a false economy. I hope that the Minister might pick up on that. Obviously it is a dual responsibility along with the Department of Health.

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the first 1,001 days, which deals with perinatal mental health and the crucial first three years from conception to age two when a child’s brain is developing exponentially, I know how important it is to get that early support, particularly for parents who are lacking in some parenting skills. There are safeguarding issues, and it is a false economy not to be doing it. As our report, “Building Great Britons”, showed, the cost of getting perinatal mental health wrong is just over £8 billion a year, and the cost of child neglect in this country is over £15 billion a year. So we are spending £23 billion a year getting it wrong for new mothers and early-age children. That is a heck of an amount of money to be going on failure, frankly.

To put into perspective the importance of children’s services and the apparently relentless increase in demand, the County Councils Network recently reported that counties are responsible for 38% of England’s entire spend on children’s services, and that the councils in England alone overspent by £816 million on protecting vulnerable children just in the last financial year. The Local Government Association—I am grateful for the research that it has done—is predicting a £2 billion shortfall in children’s social care funding by 2020, as the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) said, and it could be as much as £3.1 billion by 2025.

There is good news. I do not want to be such a doom merchant, because the positive work by councils in helping our children and young people to have the best start in life has been illustrated by the latest Ofsted data on children’s social care. It shows that last year the proportion of council children’s services rated good or outstanding has increased, and that more children’s services departments have come out of special measures. I was delighted to hear in the past 24 hours that Birmingham, which has been problematic for so many years—I spent more of my time there than in any other local authority area—is no longer rated inadequate. There is still a steep hill to climb but there are good signs of progress in that huge authority that has all sorts of challenges.

There is a worrying trend in a recent report from the Nuffield Foundation, “Born into care”. It found that in 2007-08 there were 1,039 babies subject to care proceedings within one week of birth, but by 2016-17 this number had more than doubled to 2,447—an increase of 136%. That suggests to me that we are failing to do enough early to prevent babies from having to be taken into care because their parents are deemed inadequate or a risk to them. If we did more earlier on, those children may be able to stay with their parents.

At this point, I want to pay tribute to the family drug and alcohol courts, which were set up by Nick Crichton, a visionary district judge who did an amazing job of providing support and sensitive intervention services to people—usually single mums—who are at risk of a child or perhaps another child going into the care system and giving them an added chance. It was a tough challenge, but the success of the FDACs more than doubled the likelihood of those children staying with their parents and, more importantly, staying permanently.

That work carries on. There are 10 FDACs around the country, and we hope the Minister will be charitable in extending some funding for the FDAC co-ordination unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. He has been very helpful in discussions there. Nick Crichton sadly died just before Christmas, but his work has affected the lives of hundreds of children, and I want to put on record our tribute to him.

The Children’s Commissioner found in one of her reports that England now spends nearly half its entire children’s services budget on the 75,420 children in the care system in England, leaving the remaining half of spending for the other 11.7 million children, which includes spend on learning disability. The LGA reports that between 2006 and 2016, the number of child protection inquiries undertaken by local authorities rose by no less than 140%, while the number of children subject to a child protection plan almost doubled. More and more children are being taken into care. As I said, there were 75,420 children in care as of March last year, which is up 4% on the previous year.

Barnardo’s found in its report that 16% of the children referred to its fostering services had suffered sexual exploitation. There is increasing evidence—it is what police, teachers and social workers are saying—that there has been an increase in the number of particularly vulnerable children in the last five years. We have more children coming into the care system, often with more complex problems and requiring more intensive support, but we do not have enough going on—we have much less going on—to intervene early to try to keep them out of the care system. I do not think what I said earlier about a potentially impending crisis is an overstatement.

Barnardo’s also found that in 2010, roughly half of children’s services budgets were spent on family support and prevention, while the other half was spent on safeguarding work and children in care. Now, just under a third is spent on family support and prevention, while the remaining two thirds goes on safeguarding and children in care. We are building up problems for the future by not acting earlier.

Shoreham Air Show Crash: Access to Justice

Debate between Tim Loughton and Ellie Reeves

Tuesday 9th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Shoreham air show crash and access to justice by families of the victims.

I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), as the last man standing in the Ministry of Justice. I will be easy in my comments and certainly not apportion any blame to him for the inadequacy of any answers he may be able to provide.

This is an important matter. On 22 August 2015, a vintage Hawker Hunter jet plane crashed at the Shoreham air show in my constituency. Eleven men tragically lost their lives, and many stories of the personal tragedies that accompanied that loss touched a chord across the nation. It represented at the time the largest civilian loss of life in the United Kingdom since 7/7, and the first fatalities on the ground at any UK air show since 1952. Those statistics will give little comfort to the victims’ families, and I am sure that I echo the feelings of the whole House when I say that our thoughts and prayers go out to them, and that the first priority remains to give them the support that they will need in these difficult times.

Those were the words that I used when opening a debate in this Chamber on 15 September 2015, just three weeks after that tragic accident. Twenty eight months on, the coroner’s inquest has still not happened and is not scheduled until November 2018 at the earliest, and no decision has been taken by the Crown Prosecution Service about whether any charges will be brought against anyone or any body. The lack of any decisions about prosecutions has already led to delay in the coroner’s inquest. Indeed, the West Sussex coroner, Penny Schofield, has written again just this week to families of the victims to postpone the third pre-inquest review hearing, due on 24 January, to 26 March. There is growing concern that the inquest may well not happen in 2018 at all, given its dependence on getting prospective criminal proceedings out of the way, despite the huge efforts being made by the coroner, which I know are greatly appreciated by the families of the victims. I want to pay tribute to the sensitive and sympathetic way in which the coroner for West Sussex, Penny Schofield, has dealt with the families in this tragic case.

I raised this issue directly with the Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s Question Time on 1 November 2017, and specifically the extraordinary decision by the Legal Aid Agency not to extend funding from the exceptional cases fund to the families of the victims at the coroner’s inquest when it eventually takes place.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

I am sorry to learn about the difficulties that the hon. Gentleman’s constituents have experienced in trying to secure legal representation and legal aid. Legal aid is an issue that I take great interest in, and I previously tabled early-day motion 498 in relation to legal aid for inquests. Does he agree that the Government should review legal aid for inquests and ensure that legal aid is granted in all cases for bereaved families where the state is funding one or more of the other parties?

[Tim Loughton]

I do agree, and indeed the Government are doing that. I will come to that point later on.

I originally raised that decision in a letter to the PM in August jointly with other Sussex Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman), but, alas, had not received a response directly from the Prime Minister at the time. The Prime Minister replied at PMQs that she fully understood the concerns of the families and assured me she was committed to ensuring that

“where there is a public disaster, people are able to have proper representation.”—[Official Report, 1 November 2017; Vol. 630, c. 814.]

Those were her words. The Lord Chancellor was asked to look at the problem, which is connected to the point that the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) made. I appreciate that the Prime Minister takes a close interest in this tragedy. Indeed, in contrast with the apparent indifference of No. 10 under the previous Prime Minister to the magnitude of this tragedy, the now Prime Minister championed the outstanding role played by the police, especially in the traumatic days that followed the crash, and added her tribute and flowers for the victims.

It is deeply disappointing that since 1 November, all that has happened effectively is a confirmation from the Ministry of Justice that the Legal Aid Agency made its decision properly, that the application and subsequent appeal were considered in line with relevant guidance and that Ministers cannot intervene. The Prime Minister simply pointed out that, before I raised this issue, the Lord Chancellor had announced a post-implementation review of the legal changes made by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and I might consider making a submission to that review. That is the point that the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge made, and I will certainly be using the transcript of this debate to put that case.

The air accidents investigation branch produced a very thorough and comprehensive report on 3 March 2017, but it was not its job to apportion blame and instigate legal proceedings—that is not the way it is set up. A number of questions were raised by that report. The law firm Stewarts Law, which has been representing pro bono some of the families, has made a number of comments about that report. The AAIB report says that the investigation found that

“the parties involved in the planning, conduct and regulatory oversight of the flying display did not have formal safety management systems in place to identify and manage the hazards and risks. There was a lack of clarity about who owned which risk and who was responsible for the safety of the flying display, the aircraft, and the public outside the display site who were not under the control of the show organisers.”

It goes on:

“The regulator”—

the Civil Aviation Authority—

“believed the organisers of flying displays owned the risk. Conversely, the organiser believed that the regulator would not have issued a Permission for the display if it had not been satisfied with the safety of the event…No organisation or individual considered all the hazards associated with the aircraft’s display, what could go wrong, who might be affected and what could be done to mitigate the risks to a level that was both tolerable and as low as reasonably practicable. Controls intended to protect the public from the hazards of displaying aircraft were ineffective.”

Stewarts Law notes:

“Further, there is a valid, proper and serious legal argument that the CAA failed as a regulator in properly implementing a safety recommendation made over six years ago by the AAIB from a previous fatal Hawker crash at Shoreham in 2007.”

As it stands, at the official coroner’s inquest, there will be 19 interested parties involved. All non-family properly interested persons will be legally represented. Only the families of the victims—surely those with the closest and strongest interest in the proceedings—will not have legal representation.