Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson) who, as a former Children’s Minister, speaks with great sincerity and expertise on the subject. I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing this important, timely debate.

Our children are falling through the cracks. The pandemic has left a lasting mark on children up and down the country. As such, the timing and outcomes of this debate could not be more important. I welcome the support for kinship carers in this report. We have already heard some support for the idea. Thousands of grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings are stepping in to support children in crisis, yet the Government treat them as if they are invisible. These carers receive only a fraction of the financial support they need for the care they provide. I thank them for their incredible work. However, they need more than just a pat on the back; they need material support from our Government.

I hope that the Government will support the Kinship Care Bill in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson). The Bill would introduce weekly allowances for kinship carers, just as foster carers get. It would implement proper parental leave when kinship carers first welcome in a child and provide extra funding to help children in kinship care thrive in school. Unfortunately, kinship carers are just one group being overlooked by our Government. In 2019, it was estimated that 140,000 children on the fringes of social care in England were not receiving any support. The Local Government Association suggests that social workers are seeing record numbers of children with mental health problems. Social workers say they have no time to give the children on their case loads the support they need.

Social workers are the backbone of our society, helping future generations to thrive. Unfortunately, the Government have treated them with utter contempt, asking more and more of them. No wonder we are seeing staff shortages. Who would want to work in an industry where people feel overlooked and undervalued? The Government must make the social care profession attractive to enter and stay in, so that we have enough care workers with enough time to help the children under their care. One of the most important things that the Government must do is make it the valued profession it deserves to be.

Adverse childhood experiences, also known as ACEs, are the biggest drivers of poor mental health in children. They can be anything that threatens to overwhelm the child, including abuse and neglect. When a child is unable to process prolonged stress, it can alter normal brain function. This is what we call trauma. I know that the hon. and learned Member for Eddisbury is also working hard on childhood trauma, although he is not currently listening. A child’s brain helps them to survive in the moment, but assumes that that persistent stress or danger is normal. They adapt to constant adrenaline. Because of that, those who experience childhood trauma are twice as likely to develop depression and three times more likely to develop anxiety disorders.

Many children carry their traumatic experience into later life. Someone’s chances of dropping out of school, being obese and even developing diseases such as strokes and chronic bronchitis are higher the more ACEs they have experienced. Those with six or more ACEs have life expectancy 20 years lower than peers with none. There is no limit to the reach of ACEs. Unnoticed and unaddressed, adverse childhood experiences are a potential lifelong sentence. The Government must look at how they can prevent adverse childhood experiences from happening.

The number of ACEs a child suffers has a clear link to the likelihood of that child engaging in social care, as well. Meanwhile, research by the WAVE Trust suggests that the adverse childhood experiences of abuse and neglect alone cost the UK more than £15 billion a year. What a no-brainer it is to do something about it. It is clear that the cost of acting to prevent adverse childhood experiences is less than the cost of inaction. Just focusing on the fallout from trauma is not enough; we must prevent every form of adverse childhood experience.

One factor that helps to prevent childhood trauma is whether the child can feel capable and deserving. Supportive, reliable adult presences are key, and we have already heard quite a lot about that this afternoon. Trauma-informed services across the board would be transformative. They allow social workers to recognise the effect of ACEs early in children’s lives. Early years practitioners can spot signs of trauma at the age where they are most easily resolved.

I became a member of the all-party parliamentary group for the prevention of childhood trauma, and serving on that APPG was the most informative and transformative experience I have had. I am currently its chair. Preventing childhood trauma could be the foundation of how we transform our society, because childhood trauma does not end with the child; it gets transferred into the next generation. If childhood trauma is not addressed, those who become parents will carry their adverse childhood experiences into the next generation, and their children might suffer, too, so doing something about it should be at the heart of what Government are looking into.

When we look at how trauma affects minds, we gain an enriched understanding of behaviour. Better insights and changes in approach lead to better care for children. As it stands, the Government are failing to even consider many of the problems that cause childhood trauma, such as sibling sexual abuse. Shockingly, that is the most common form of child sexual abuse in our homes. Estimates suggest that a child is three to five times more likely to be abused by their sibling than by a parent or adult living in their home environment. Its impact on the entire family is lifelong and devastating. Parents are often faced with a double dilemma of supporting both children involved in dealing with the relevant authorities.

Local and national safeguarding policies and strategies do not name, measure or prioritise sibling sexual abuse. The Home Office’s “Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy” does not even acknowledge the existence of sibling sexual abuse. Even the report we are discussing today does not mention it. I had a Westminster Hall debate on the subject, which is riddled with taboo. It is so shocking that we do not want to contemplate it, but it is widespread and it is important that we name it. It is a significant oversight that must be addressed. The Government must acknowledge the problem before it can be tackled. Their blindness to sibling sexual abuse means that social care professionals are not properly equipped to offer the support needed. I hope that, in future strategies, the Government can at least investigate this terrible problem, which is beset by taboo and silence.

The Government’s failure to support the social care system leaves children as the victims. We must safeguard children from adverse childhood experiences and support those who go through them. The solutions involve more Government spending, yes, but we need to acknowledge the problems that children are facing. Where would we be if we did not invest in children and future generations? We need to work for a better future for our children. It will be a better future for us.

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[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who has again shown the breadth and depth of his knowledge of all the issues we cover in this House. I thank the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for securing this debate.

I associate myself with the remarks of the hon. Member for York Central about acknowledging that there are very many families who do an absolutely fantastic job of caring for their children, without underestimating how difficult that is. We are talking in this Chamber about families who are struggling, and I do not by any means underestimate that. As someone who does not have children myself, I give words of advice with caution and I understand that the challenge is really enormous, but surely the size of that challenge puts a bigger onus on us to support people to do it effectively.

I thank Josh MacAlister and all of the team who helped him deliver such an authoritative and important report. In particular, I thank not just the people who wrote the report, but the very large number of people, including very many people in care or who have left care, who contributed to the report. I think that that is what has given it its strength and authority, because he has done such a good job of giving people who have experienced the system a voice.

For me, child welfare is or should be the biggest priority for everyone in society. It is a really good example of an issue where it is not just the state that has a role to play, but families, society and individuals. All of us have to do something to make sure that children in our country get a good start in life. One of the main reasons why I got involved in politics was that I want everyone to benefit from the secure, warm, loving environment that I experienced as a young person growing up. We know what an important foundation that is for young people because we understand the different outcomes that people get if they do not receive that warm, loving start in life. Poor attachment to care givers leads to higher rates of delinquency, crime, offending, poor mental health and wellbeing, and unemployment.

Similarly, if we look at not just attachment but adverse events, which the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) spoke about, from all those things early on in life we can predict someone’s future outcomes, and their outcomes are much worse than those of their peers. As we have heard, that is not just a moral failure but a financial failure for the state because all these things cost money across the breadth and depth of Government spending. Those costs skyrocket when young people cross the threshold to care involvement, where the gap in outcomes compared with peers gets even bigger. Sadly, their outcomes are still distant from those who have benefited from a loving start in life.

We have 80,000 children in care and many more subject to some kind of intervention. If we do not get better at supporting people, those markers and failures will get worse. The report talks about how we are heading towards 100,000 children being in care and, for each of those additional children in care, there will be an even bigger number unfortunately likely to be subject to some kind of proceedings or intervention and not getting the start in life that we would want for them.

The report lays out authoritatively what we can do. I pay tribute to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson), who did a fantastic job of going through all the elements of the report, including what we could do better. I will not seek to replicate that as I am sure that I could not do as good a job. The report makes it clear that we need short-term funding to deliver the £2 billion that it identifies. The Minister will not need convincing that we cannot look at the costs in a narrow way—there is short-term additional spending on extra children we might see in care as well as spending across all areas of Government that pile up but which the Department itself does not see—but we must ensure that the Treasury understands the full breadth and depth of that expense when it comes to weighing up what we should be investing in children’s social care.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Does the hon. Member agree that this really affects everything—we have prisons full of people with mental health disorders, who often carry childhood traumas with them—so investing at the beginning will help us save so much money in the end?

[Dr Mullan]

I completely agree. It would probably be fair to say that there is not an area of Government spending in which we could not make a saving if we did better at getting children a warm, stable start in life. As I said, I hope that the Department is clear about the breadth in spending.

I turn to one short-term area. Again, I pay tribute to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury and the work that his family did, as well as that done by many families who choose to be foster carers. Fostering and adopting are probably among the most powerful, special and important things that someone in our society can do for another person. Taking on that responsibility of caring for someone else’s children in the short term—not permanently—is the most noble thing that anybody can do, and I pay enormous tribute to every single person who does that.

Every child who ends up in a loving home instead of a care setting—of course, care settings can produce good outcomes—is being given the best shot at life. Again, that saves a financial cost, and the wellbeing of that young person is enormously improved. Sadly, we could do better. It is a good example of the fact that, no matter how good the Government get at doing things, individuals must step up and be willing to do it. It is not just about the state fixing the problem; we all have a role to play.

My understanding is that, of the 160,000 people who registered an interest in fostering last year, just 2,000 were registered to be foster carers. That is an absolute tragedy. Given the process of becoming a foster carer, we should expect a big drop-off once people come to realise everything involved, but that kind of drop-off is very sad. It says to me that at least tens of thousands of people who could and wanted to be foster carers did not become them. What does the Minister think we can do in the short term to get to the target of 3,000? Can we not be more ambitious than that, get to at least 10,000 and convert that huge moral willingness to help our fellow man in society and see the money that comes in savings from that?

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[Tim Loughton]

My hon. and learned Friend is so right. The adoption support fund was such an important part of the complex programme of getting adoption back on the front foot again. Too often, where adoptive placement was deemed to be best for a child, I am afraid there was too much, “Here’s the child, dump them with the family,” and then the local authority disappeared in the dust. Children who are going into adoption, in many cases with complex and traumatic problems underlying that decision, need a lot of support in the early years.

If we are to make an adoption work and prevent an adoption disruption, we need to put in the groundwork and do the leg work right at the beginning, to make sure that child gets the extra professional therapeutic work that might be required to make sure that family placement can work. The adoption support fund was a really important way of ensuring the resources to provide that professional expertise, so that the adoption stood a better chance. It is a false economy not to do that, because the amount of money the local authority saves is considerable if we can make an adoption work, so why not put in the resource at the beginning to make sure that the adoption is likely to work and that child can stay in a stable, loving family environment?

[Wera Hobhouse]

I know that I am blowing the trumpet for trauma-informed services, but does the hon. Member not agree that they are at the bottom of understanding most traumatised and difficult young people?

[Tim Loughton]

Yes, and we must understand that, too often, we are too keen to show the statistics that prove the underachievement of children who have been in the care system, be that in education or other outcomes. Why should we expect somebody who has been taken from their birth family, who has been deprived of the loving care of their birth parents because they are not able to give them that loving care, who has been abused as a child—who has perhaps been sexually abused as a child, as so many children are—and who has gone through such a traumatic upbringing, to be able to achieve as much as other children without getting that extra support? Whatever form those trauma services take, it is a no-brainer that we should provide them if we are serious about wanting those placements to work, be that a long-term foster care placement, a long-term home placement or, ultimately, an adoptive placement if that is the right place to go. It has to be horses for courses.

What we also did those 10 or 12 years ago is reduce the bureaucracy in the children’s social care system. When I took over as Children’s Minister, the manual for children’s social care, “Working together”, consisted of 756 pages, or something of that order. For the previous 10 years or so, since the death of Victoria Climbié, every time a high-profile safeguarding scandal happened and another child lost his or her life—often at the hands of his or her parents or carers—the Government rushed to legislate. It was a Labour Government at the time, but frankly, we were all guilty of going along with it: “The solution must surely be more legislation and more rules.” Ten years later, we had reached a stage where social workers were so saddled with regulations and rules that they were constantly looking over their shoulder, constantly referring to page 642 in the rulebook to see what they should be doing, rather than using the professional judgment and instincts that we train them for. Being a social worker is not an easy profession: one has to be a combination of a detective, a psychoanalyst, a forensic scientist and whatever else, because people who abuse their children are usually quite smart at covering it up.

The most important thing I said to social workers was, “I want to give you the confidence to make a mistake for genuine reasons”—hopefully not too often, but by using their professional judgment, rather than covering their back by saying, “Well, that’s how it said I was supposed to act in this case on page 602 of the manual.” That was the problem. We tore apart that manual—it was reduced to something like 70 pages—and said to social workers, “You’ve been trained as a social worker. We trust you: you have the nous. You need to go out and get the experience. You need to judge something on having face-to-face time with a vulnerable child or that child’s parents and to make a value judgment on whether you think that child needs to be taken into care, to have some support while staying with the birth family, or whatever. You make that judgment— occasionally, you will make it wrong, but you will make the wrong judgment for the right reasons. That will give you more experience to make sure you make it right the next time.”

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[Helen Hayes]

We need to have a higher aspiration for children across the country to be supported by the best possible services. I welcome the Minister’s comments on the ongoing work to achieve that, but I believe much more can be done. That requires political will, and greater attention in this place, to drive improvements in performance.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Councils are struggling financially, although good and outstanding services are not all about finances. Does the hon. Lady agree that councils with the flexibility to spend a bit more money, such as Bath and North East Somerset Council, are in a much better position than those that are already in a difficult financial situation, usually in deprived areas?

[Helen Hayes]

It is indeed the case that local authorities with the flexibility to divert more resources into this area have that benefit, which can be significant.

The independent review of children’s social care was published six months ago. It called for a “total reset” of children’s social care and made a wide range of recommendations for reform. There is a high degree of consensus on many of those recommendations, such as the need to restore early help services, to provide better support for kinship carers, to end private profiteering in residential care and private foster care services, and to end the placement of children in unregulated settings. These things should be happening right now.

It is also essential that, as the reform of children’s social care is taken forward, the professionals working with children and families, care-experienced people, and the children and families themselves are placed at the heart of the process. None of this will happen unless and until the Government prioritise children and move this agenda forward. The previous Prime Minister, during her first Prime Minister’s questions, made a commitment in response to my question that the Government’s response to the independent review and an implementation plan will be published by the end of the year. There are just three full sitting weeks left before Christmas. I therefore ask the Minister to confirm the publication date of the Government’s response to the independent review, and to confirm that it will be before Christmas, as promised.

While Conservative Members have been arguing among themselves in recent months, taking an ideological sledgehammer to our economy and scrambling to reinvent themselves as a completely new Government with no connection to the last one, of which they were all a part, it is the most vulnerable children and young people, and those who care for them, who are being let down. Childhood is short, but its experiences last a lifetime. When will this Government stop letting children down?