Politics and Social Work
The new Children and Social Work Bill covers the same issues and
concerns which were raised over fifty
years ago, when I commenced to monitor Parliamentary proceedings for the
Association of Children’s Officers and then for the Association of Child Care
Officers as editor of the first 100 editions of Parliament and Social Work and
then as Parliamentary Officer for A.C.C.0.
Providing Frank Allaun, then a
back-bench Labour Member of Parliament with information on Rackmanism Housing
conditions of immigrants from Ireland which he raised in Parliament in 1964 in
a debate which led to headlines about living in a Twilight zone in one area of
Birmingham Council, led to the threat of expulsion from the Home Office
arranged and paid Child Care Certificate Course at Birmingham University, an
offer of a job from Birmingham Council where I was working for two and then
three days a week in the Children’s Department and a subsequent annual seminar
on politics and social work on what became a course in generic social
work. I can mention that I took two of
the children of the Chairman of Children’s Committee into temporary care on a
bus to a foster home when his wife went into Labour because he had made a press
statement about the event to show his confidence in the service, which had been
the subject of national media criticism.
The problem is that most Parliamentarians to-day, together with most
social work practitioners, have little or no sense of child care social work
history and the notion that they are too busy, under impossible media pressure,
undervalued and scapegoated now more than then must be challenged. I suggest no
more that very little has changed in terms of the basic role of the authorised child care officer to intervene in the rights of a parents
or legal guardians because of the defined need set out in statute such as the 1933 Child Care
and Protection Act and redefined by
subsequent statutes; the duty to provide
care for looked after children as established in the 1948 Children Act and
subsequent statutes, and the duty to prevent children coming into care, remaining in care and
appearing before the courts as first established in 1963 and subsequent Statutes
and that he problem has always been that
of providing the training defined for
the primary required tasks, finding ways
to retain the services of the trained worker and providing them with the time to effectively undertake
the tasks set by the state through
Parliament. At no time has this ever been done as all the research undertaken
over the past half century demonstrates.
My first ever visit as a student
social worker in 1962 attached to the Manchester and Salford Family Service
Unit was to listen to the mother whose many children had all been in trouble
and in care, with those who had grown up on the books of the unit, as were
several other families where the father, right wing and patriotic, had fathered
some of the children when he was not in prison. I listened for at least two
hours while the grandmother went through the various voluntary and statutory
workers who had called at their homes (the latest two four bed council houses
knocked into one) and where she said several liked to visit to tell her about
their problems) thus confirming that when you look in the abyss the abyss looks
back into you.
Two years after this I was
attached for a month to Lee Crescent in Birmingham, an independent service
which offered flats to mothers and their children who had been evicted from
local authority or privately rented accommodation and who were required to
attend classes on running a home and on child care and with one of my regular
tasks to check that the pill had been taken on daily basis because while men
were not permitted to be resident they would call when the opportunity arose.
The local authority agreed to rehouse the families in nearby accommodation when
the voluntary body considered sufficient progress had been made for mother and
children to be discharged from what was in effect family residential care.
Fifty years later, I was alarmed
when attending the presentation by John Cooper for the establishment of the UK
People’s Tribunal on child sexual abuse in 2014 to listen to the education guru
Sir Cyril Taylor that several hundred thousand children presently living with their
families should be removed and placed in a variety of educational based settings with “normal”
children mentioning an establishment which only recently had been the
subject of a Panorama investigation into its history of sexual abuse of
residential pupils by staff.
The reality is that there is no
simple solution for children who come to the attention of the state because of
their own and their parental behaviour and circumstances.
There has never been a golden age
of UK wide good child care outcomes. In 1967, nearly two decades after
Children’s Departments had been established, the National Children’s Bureau
published two summaries of available research projects from the UK, the USA and
in other nations into the effectiveness of Fostering and the new forms of
Residential Care. The problem with fostering placements was the turnover of the
social workers and the unwillingness of foster parents to cope with challenging
behaviour especially when children became teenagers and most children were
found to have had a succession of placements and workers. Having secured a residential place social
workers tended to only visits for reviews and with the overwhelming majority of
those looking after children on a day to day basis having no training and
little understanding of how to cope with teenagers let alone teenagers with
additional problems. In the 1960’s we understood more fully the problems that
had arisen for children evacuated during World War II and those who had sent
without parental knowledge let alone approval from the UK to the former
colonies. Children could still be given away or placed with strangers with only
limited supervision if such placements became known and it is noted that the
issue of private placements is being raised in 2016.
Because of our increasing
knowledge of the limitations and high risk nature of adoption and the
associated problems of identity Parliament took a bold step, in major part
because of my intervention to make the ability of adopted children to search
for their biological parents on reaching eighteen years’ retrospective when the
measure became law in 1975. The concept of enforced adoption against maternal
wishes will result in demands for a new national inquiry in a decade or two as
those who have suffered therefore make the demand at the surgery door of future
Parliamentarians.
In the 1960’s few questioned the provision of large residential nurseries
for preschool children and as late as the mid 1970’s there was little understanding
about the importance of intervention before children commenced at primary
school, and I had to point out to a meeting at a Labour Party conference in the
mid 1970’s alongside Barbara Castle, Dr David Owen and David Ennals on mental
health that there was not one resolution from constituency parties or trade
unions any aspect of preschool care or on older looked after children.
in the mid 1960’s my case load
rose to 100 as I also managed the work of a colleague who was away on a course
being trained and travelled most days from my patch centred on Witney, the
Brize Norton base and the village of
Carterton where over fifty single parent families lived on four mobile home
sites where the children had been fathered by USAAF men who returned to their
homeland without them, then travelling
to Henley several evenings a week, clocking up 100 miles a day in the process, and in addition to undertaking unpaid emergency duty at weekends I made
visits to children who had been placed in specialist establishments throughout the UK with agreement of Juvenile
Courts as an alternative to the Approved School. Many of the private and independent establishments
which attempted creative solutions have become the subject of investigations by
the police and the various National inquiries into past abuse tolerated and
covered up. The well intentioned professional supported political decision to
abolish Approved Schools and create one
system of regional planning for special residential
establishments with education on the premises for Children in Trouble led
to the importation of Pin Down
behaviour control and behaviour modification approach of young
offender institutions and the Approved schools into existing and new residential care
establishments provided by local authorities and independent child care bodies
provided mainly by the Catholic Church and several Protestant bodies.
Before placing the provision of
child care social work in its economic and political context as the Member for
South Shields, the Shadow Minister for Children’s and Families, did in her
summing up of the debate for the Opposition, I suggest it is important to also
remind of the Religious and International context which any legislation needs
to be considered. I suggest that the setting of any standards for looked after
children must apply to all children.
If in practice most parents can
insist that their female children before and after marriage are not allowed to
leave the home without parental and partner consent, prohibited from specified
work and social activities then should this also be the standard set for looked
after children? In the 1940’s I attended
a private catholic school, attended Sunday School and served at Mass where we
were urged to limit our contact with non-Catholics who were doomed to live in
purgatory but where the parish priest provided cigarettes after mass and gave
us a taste of the wine. In 1963/1964 my white male supervisor, married with a young
family, was not allowed by his religious community beliefs to drink a cup of
coffee with me or any of his colleagues, to share in a meal or attend any
social activity. Three decades later
when undertaking an assessment for the National Lotteries Charities Board, I was
asked to assess an application from a woman only group who lived entirely
separate lives belonging to one end of the Jewish spectrum where the community
lived together and controlled schooling. The Rabbi in training husband of the
female applicant sat in on the interview but did not speak and the children
when they returned from school entered excitedly to look at someone from the
outside. The Lottery Board had good reason for asking a male to undertake the
assessment in this instance. I mention these historical examples because of the
publication of the Dame Louise Casey Report on the growth of segregation in
Britain and where the issue of faith schools and the attempt to turn state
schools into faith schools remains a significant issue.
A Labour member of Parliament
raised the crucial subject of sex and relationship education in schools and
where the historical context is also significant given the continuing
opposition to same sex adult relationships by leading religious bodies such as
Catholic and Muslim which it must be assumed are part of any religious
education which Catholic and Muslim children now receive as they did before
secular legislation changed the position and role of the state. I am unaware of
the content of human growth and personality development which child care
workers now receive and where “professional” training provided in 1950 and 1960
was governed by fundamental Freudianism which treated same sex relationships as
an explainable deviation in upbringing and not a biological condition. Does the state have role in prescribing the
sex and relationship education for looked after children irrespective of the
religious beliefs of the birth parents?
Participants in the second
reading debate in the House of Commons also raised the issue of child
protection and I have been struck by two television programmes, one fictional
and the other a documentary over the past week. I have written at length about
the abduction and holding as prisoner for years’ female children for sexual
purposes (Missing) an eight-episode series which ended last week because the
crimes, collusion and cover up was by and within the British army in Iraq and
Germany and the Stacey Dooley (W channel) exposure of child prostitution in
Cambodia, primarily an industry serving male Cambodians was also concentrated
in one area frequented by white males from overseas.
It is understandable that
Parliament when considering an individual subject for new legislation tends to
set aside the wider economic and political differences as if recent political decision
have no bearing such as the imposition of rigid central financial control on
local government from Westminster, insisting that a third of the workforce be
made redundant because of ideological
hatred of the public services and
demanding that conditions of employment
developed through national negotiations should be set aside.
It was the Shadow Opposition
spokesman for Children and Families who attempted to introduced economic and
political reality in to the debate when she summed up the position of the Opposition
following the debate.
18:34:00 Mrs Emma Elwell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)- “As we have
already said, we will not be dividing the House on this Bill this evening.
However, I will take this opportunity to deliver some home truths to the Government.
This is a Bill, which, from its very inception, has been ill-thought out and
hastily put together without any guidance from children or from the very
industry that it purports to be helping to improve. In short, it is a Bill
about children and social work with negligible input from children and social
workers. By not listening to the profession, the Government have once again
shown how little value they see in using the professional experience and
expertise of those who work, day in, day out, and often at the risk of their
own welfare, to protect children and families.
What social workers want is to be
out in the field with vulnerable children and families, because the more time
they spend with them the more vulnerable children are identified and supported
or saved from harm. It could not be simpler than that.
So far, the Government’s social
work reform agenda has been a total failure, rooted as it is in structural
system change and in tinkering around with individual, mainly Labour-held,
local authorities. [Interruption.] The Minister twists in his place, but he
will get his turn soon I am sure. There
continues to be an obsession with adoption to the detriment of early
intervention and work that can keep families together and children out of the
care system. This Government are completely oblivious to the severe impact that
their austerity measures and punitive welfare policies are having on our most
vulnerable children and families. They are causing untold damage (my
highlighting)
I remind the Minister, as I have done many times before, that social
work is a holistic profession. The Government’s closure of Sure Start units and
removal of early years help in family support centres, and the disproportionate
cuts to local authorities in the most deprived areas have measurably taken
their toll. All this Government seem to be doing for desperate families is
turning the screw tighter and tighter, year on year, until they break. As other
hon. Members, have already said, the demand for help and protection is rising.
Over the past 10 years, there has
been a 124% increase in serious cases—where a local authority believes that a
child may be suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm—and the varied
spending on social work has been found to be totally unrelated to quality. In
short, all the Government’s initiatives and changes are not yielding positive
results. This is systemic not local failure. In other words, it is the
Government’s fault.
Both the National Audit Office and the Education Committee considered
social work reform and noted that there are significant weaknesses in the
Government’s agenda, and that the reforms focus on “changing structures
potentially to the detriment of the people delivering this key public service.”
( I am reminded how the succession of
changes to boundaries, organisations structures resulted in the loss of
expertise and experience in child
protection and care services for children between 1970 and 1975 with the
creation of the bureaucratic Social
Services Department, the imposition of
centralised control of the social work at a local level by Legal and financial based Chief Executives overriding the former
role of the Children’s Officer, followed
by the reorganisation of local government outside of London and the reorganisation of
the National Health services removing democratic accountability for most health services and placing effective
control on those imbued with profit and the
statutory duty to further the interest of shareholders before that of public service. Most Directors of Social Services in England
and Wales (unlike the Directors of Social Work in Scotland) had no
qualifications or experience in child care and some were openly hostile to
specialist requirements of the Children’s service, imposing generic practice as
well as generic management. South Tyneside was the first local authority to
create a Children’s Department within the framework of the Social Services
Department).
What the social work profession
needs is continuity, stability and confidence, and a Government who can hold
their nerve on how best to help children and families by putting in place and
embedding good policies—policies such as the introduction of personal, social,
health and economic education, which was referred to by my hon. Friend the
Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), and supported by the right hon. Member
for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller).
The Shadow Minister continued “The
Government are failing to get the basics right. They are not reducing social
worker caseloads, preventing experienced professionals from quitting the
profession or training social workers in a holistic way—they are fast-tracking
them, and forcing them to specialise before they have even been trained in the
basics. The Government are not amending IT and the bureaucratic process across
the board to achieve the goal of getting social workers where they want to be,
which is out from behind their desks and seeing the families with whom they
work. This Bill does nothing to respond to the crisis in social work and to the
hundreds of thousands of children who need better services right now.
Like other Members, I wish to
take this opportunity to thank the Labour lords and other peers whose tireless
work has resulted in the Bill before us today being markedly different from
that which was first introduced. I wish to congratulate peers on defeating the
Government and forcing them to remove dangerous clauses from the Bill that
would pave the way for privatisation of children’s social care. It is
scandalous that these clauses are soon to reappear at Committee stage. The
Government’s proposals will allow local authorities, under the guise of
innovation, to opt out of protective primary legislation. That legislation,
which has taken decades to achieve, has led to us having one of the safest
child protection systems in the world. It was hard fought for by the profession
in this place and in the other place. These proposals have caused alarm and
outrage in the profession and the sector overall. I have yet to meet a social
worker who supports the changes. I have had no clarity from the Minister about
where the demand for change has come from and what pieces of primary
legislation local authorities and social workers say prevent them from carrying
out good social work. Will he tell us today?
This is legislation formed in the
worst possible way, without demand and without any evidential basis for fixing
the problems it purports to fix. The Government have invented a solution to an
invented problem, because the Bill will not solve any of the problems in social
work. What I know from my time in social work practice is that the things that
social workers find restrictive, such as case recording, derive from secondary
legislation, guidance, or the custom and practice in their local authority—all
of which can be changed without primary legislation.
The Government have denied time
and again that the opt-out clauses were about privatisation, yet late last
week, two years after it was written and after an inexplicable delay in
responding to freedom of information requests, the Department for Education
released a report, referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for
Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), which sets out how children’s social care
can be moved out of local authority control—a report which states that
independent contractors have said that they are willing to play the long game
and wait for councils to hand over the majority, if not all, of their
children’s social care services after they have developed their experience in
children and families social work. There we have it—independent contractors are
going to use vulnerable children and families to experiment with, once the
Government allow local authorities to opt out of protective legislation. These
are the most dangerous changes to child protection that I have ever seen.
Labour, bolstered by the support
of the profession and related stakeholders who have expressed outrage at these
plans, will fight the Government every step of the way on these clauses.
Vulnerable children are not to be used as market experiments, and any child
protection strategy that requires the dispensation of the law to achieve it is
counter-productive and downright dangerous.
Of course, there are parts of the Bill that we can support. The
introduction of detailed principles of corporate parenting, the extension of
the personal adviser role to care leavers up to the age of 25, and the local
offer for care leavers are all steps in the right direction. Our concern is
whether the Government can deliver it. For example, they promise in the Bill to
promote the physical and mental health of looked-after children, but on their
watch child and adolescent mental health services are in meltdown, with many
looked-after children waiting not just months, but years, for specialist help.
Changes need to be properly resourced, otherwise they are warm words and
nothing more, so can the Minister confirm that these proposals will be properly
resourced? (my highlighting)
The Bill establishes a new social
work regulator. In Committee, we will carefully consider this change and those
that relate to local safeguarding boards and the child safeguarding practice
review panel. We share some of the concerns of the hon. Member for East
Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). We have ongoing concerns about the
independence and impact of the proposed non-departmental public body model,
especially the lack of detail in the current proposals which envisage
Government appointments directly to the leadership of the organisation. Can the
Minister please explain why the social work profession is treated no
differently from other health and care professions?
Finally, the Bill is impotent in
its response to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. These children are
experiencing the most immense suffering and trauma. Thanks to Lord Dubs forcing
the Government’s hand and reminding them of this crisis, we will see a strategy
in May next year, but these are urgent and pressing matters and deserve further
debate in this place. We fully support the amendments so eloquently and
passionately outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow.
What we have here is a Bill with
some nice-sounding elements that do not appear to be fully resourced, and are
therefore not guaranteed, and the continual threat to open children’s social
care to the market by allowing opt-outs from legislation. In fact, we will be
presented with a Bill in Committee that local authorities could, in theory,
dispense with if it became law. That is a completely ridiculous approach to
legislation and an insult to the House.
I know that getting things right
for children and families in the social work arena is not an easy task—it is
difficult and complex, and many Governments have grappled with it. But trust
me, this Bill is not the answer. We will seek significant amendments in Committee
and make sure that the Government understand that privatisation and
micromanagement are not the answer to every problem. Labour will never allow
the Government to use our most vulnerable children as experiments in Tory
ideology.
The debate had been opened by The
Minister for School Standards (Mr Nick Gibb)
I beg to move, That the Bill be
now read a Second time. I am delighted to be able to open the debate in the
absence of the Secretary of State, who is in Shanghai at the education summit.
I know she regrets not being here, and she sends her apologies.
As the Secretary of State made
clear when she spoke at the national children and adult services conference a
few weeks ago, nothing is more important than making sure that children get the
best start in life, feel safe, are well looked after and can fulfil their
dreams. Nowhere is that more important than for those children who do not have
the benefit of a loving family to help them on their way and to support them as
they grow up, or who face other significant challenges, which make it harder
for them to flourish and thrive.
Children’s social care
professionals perform some of society’s most vital, most important work, and we
entrust them with nothing less than keeping our children safe and making
life-changing decisions about what is best for their futures. These are highly
challenging, highly complex tasks, performed by deeply dedicated and committed
individuals.
However, as we all know, the
system in which these individuals work is far from perfect, meaning the help
and support being offered to vulnerable children in different parts of the
country is a long way from being consistently excellent. Evidence from Ofsted
shows that most local authorities struggle in some way to provide consistently
effective core social work practice.
That is why this Government are
determined to bring about the widest-reaching reforms to children’s social care
and social work for a generation.
Reviews by Professor Eileen
Munro, Sir Martin Nary and Professor David Cogsdale-Appleby, among others, have
given us a deep understanding of the challenges faced by children’s social
care. They have described a system in which initial social worker training is
not consistently preparing students for the challenges of the job, and those already
doing it too often lack the time, specialist skill and supervision needed to
achieve real change for children and families; a system that focuses too much
on management and is governed by prescribed approaches rather than excellent
practice; and a system where services have not always been designed around
vulnerable children, and innovation has not been given enough space to thrive.
Over the last six years, the
Government have taken important steps towards addressing these challenges. For
example, we have raised standards in children’s homes and enabled young people
in foster care to remain with their carer up to the age of 21. We have invested
£100 million through our innovation programme to allow radical new approaches
to children’s social care to be developed and tested. In April, we announced a
£200 million extension to the programme to take this further still. We have
taken a variety of steps to enhance the status, skills and capacity of the
social work profession—both for children and for adults. Those include
appointing chief social workers; publishing definitive statements of the
knowledge and skills required by adults’ and children’s social workers; and
investing over £750 million since 2010 in traditional and fast-track routes
into the profession.
Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge
and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op) Will the Minister give way?
Mr Gibb If the hon. Gentleman
will forgive me, I would just like to explain some of the tenets of the Bill,
and then I will take his intervention. We are starting to see things change.
This year, we have seen the first “outstanding” judgments under the most
recent—and most challenging—Ofsted framework. Local authorities are testing
innovative ways of supporting families through the children’s social care
innovation programme. Examples of excellent leadership across the country are
being celebrated by Ofsted and others.
However, we are under no illusion
that there is still much more to be done. That is why, in July of this year,
the Department for Education published a clear and ambitious vision and plan
for the changes that need to be made to drive sustainable improvement across
the whole country. This is our plan for putting children first. It sets out
fundamental reforms across each of the three pillars on which the social care
system stands: people and leadership, practice and systems, and governance and
accountability. This Bill is a crucial part of delivering reforms across those
three pillars.
Part 1 concerns children who are
in care or supported by the state. Clause 1 sets out, for the first time, a set
of corporate parenting principles designed to establish consistently high
standards in the support of looked-after children and care leavers, and drive a
culture of excellent corporate parenting. The principles are intended to help a
local authority to think and act in the interests of the children in their care
in the same way as any good parent would. This is not about putting a new set
of duties on local authorities; it is about changing behaviour and practice.
The aim is to ensure that all parts and every tier of local government have the
needs and circumstances of looked-after children and care leavers in their
minds in their planning and decisions. This responsibility goes beyond just
children’s social care, reaching across the whole of the local authority.
Clause 2 will ensure that the
corporate parenting ethos extends into adulthood and that all care leavers are
clear about the support on offer to them and how to access it. Care leavers
will have access to information about the services available to them through a
local offer from their local authority, with each local offer based on
consultation with care leavers themselves.
Clause 3 will give all care
leavers access to support from a personal adviser at any point up to the age of
25. We amended the Bill in another place to make sure that the service is
offered at least annually so that care leavers can take advantage of it
whenever they need to.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and
Shoreham) (Con) Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr Gibb If my hon. Friend will
forgive me, may I make a little more progress, and then I will come back to
him?
The next section of the Bill
recognises that children who are adopted or who leave care under another
permanence order often have ongoing difficulties resulting from their early
life experiences. Clauses 4 to 7 will therefore give them access to the same
support that looked-after children receive from virtual school heads at local
authority level, and that designated teachers provide in schools to help with
their education. Following an undertaking given in the other place, we are
bringing forward amendments that will extend these provisions to children who
have been adopted from overseas.
Clauses 8 and 9 expand the
factors that courts and local authorities must consider when deciding on the
most appropriate place for a child. They do not give priority to one type of
placement over another, but they do place more emphasis on stability and what
would be in a child’s best long-term interests, taking account of the impact of
any harm that the child may have suffered.
Jonathan Reynolds rose—Mr Gibb I
now give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Jonathan Reynolds I am extremely
grateful to the Minister. I was trying to tell him that I must speak in a
Delegated Legislation Committee at half-past 4, so the clock was ticking down
for me. I want to ask him about a specific point relating to some casework that
I have done in my constituency. It is about the lack of safeguarding checks for
16 and 17-year-olds in private fostering arrangements. I had a situation where
a young person within that age group in my constituency went into a private
fostering arrangement, and the parents were unable to get the assurances they
would have had in a public setting. That is not addressed in the Bill, and I
wonder whether the Minister would be willing to look at it if I tabled an
amendment at a later stage.
Mr Gibb Yes, of course. My hon.
Friend the Minister for Vulnerable Children and Families is very keen to engage
in debate on the details in Committee. I know that he will be very interested
in the case raised by the hon. Gentleman and want to debate it with him.
John Howell (Henley) (Con) In
Oxfordshire we have had a situation where children in care have been abused,
and that has led to Operation Bullfinch. How will what the Minister has set out
make that situation better?
Mr Gibb the local safeguarding
arrangements set out in the Bill will provide a strong statutory framework that
puts responsibility on the police, the NHS—through the clinical commissioning
group—and the local authority to ensure that a robust safeguarding system is in
place, but with greater local flexibility than we have now, so that the
arrangements are as effective as possible in meeting local needs. I also believe
that the combination of improved national arrangements for analysing serious
cases, which I will come on to, including child sexual abuse and exploitation,
and for learning from them in a more systematic way, including higher standards
for social workers, as set out in the Bill, will enable Oxfordshire and other
counties across the country to keep children safer than is currently the case.
I will not give way to the right hon. Gentleman because he
was not here at the beginning of my speech, when I set out a lot of the basic
principles surrounding the Bill.
As I said, those changes will be
in addition to amendments the Government tabled in the other place about the
scrutiny process that accompanies the power and ruling out the use of the
provision for profit. The Government are committed to working with the sector.
The changes we have made are the result of significant consultation and we
believe these clauses are the safest possible way to test new approaches. My
hon. Friend the Minister for Vulnerable Children and Families is very keen to
meet any colleagues who have concerns to discuss these provisions further.
This is a Bill for the welfare
and prospects of vulnerable children and young people. All its measures are
designed to improve the services that so many of them rely on, and I commend it
to the House.
16:31:00 Angela Rayner
(Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab) (my addition -The
Shadow Secretary of State for Education elected to Parliament in 2015 and who
has made public that her first child was born when she was 16 years of age
leaving school pregnant and with no qualifications who became a care worker.) “We welcome any attempt to improve the
lives of children in care, and I am sure that aim is shared in all parts of the
House. The challenges facing those children are significant, as is the effort
needed to tackle them. The National Audit Office said recently:
“Nationally the quality of help
and protection for children is unsatisfactory and inconsistent, suggesting
systemic rather than just local failure.”
The Government need to act in the
Bill to address that failure, rather than make it worse. I hope that the
Secretary of State is listening to this very important debate, even if she is
not able to attend the Chamber. A new report by Laing Buisson for the
Department for Education, which was published only last Friday, considered the
options of outsourcing and developing markets in children’s social services.
That is privatisation by another name. Quite simply, it would be not just the
wrong solution, but no solution at all.
Following the excellent work of
my noble Friends and others in the other place, the clauses that would have
allowed local authorities to derogate from their existing legal obligations are
no longer in the Bill. However, given the seriousness of the proposals and the
timing of that report, I must ask the Secretary of State’s Department to think
again and guarantee to this House that the Government will not seek to use the
Bill as a vehicle to privatise children’s social services.
I hope the Minister can give us
that assurance later, because there is a good deal to welcome in the Bill. From
the principles of corporate parenting to the local offer for care leavers,
there are steps towards helping young people in care and leaving care that we
welcome. I do not want to have to divide the House in later stages and the
Opposition would like to make progress collectively.
This issue is vital to the
collective good of our nations. The services that are provided and the great
work that is done on the ground by many public-sector workers should be
applauded, as they change lives every single day. I must declare an interest as
my niece is one such worker. Our aim collectively within the Bill should be to
enhance and enable that important work. Privatisation and fragmentation are not
the answer. Our overall concern is less with what is in the Bill than with what
is not in it. In short, the Bill lacks the ambition to have the meaningful
impact on the lives of vulnerable young people that is needed. If we are to
make significant progress, we must improve child mental health services. The
Bill focuses on adoption, which is hardly a surprise—in the past several years,
the Government have taken several steps to make it easier to adopt, such as the
Education and Adoption Act 2016—and we welcome measures that support adoption,
but surely the Minister is aware that only one in every 20 children in care goes on to be
adopted, so can he explain to the House why the Bill, much like the last one,
focuses exclusively on adoption and does not contain provision for other forms
of care? Would this not have been an opportunity to come forward with a
comprehensive strategy for children in all forms of care? Will he indicate
whether we might anticipate further legislation or whether he thinks that no
changes are needed?
Similarly, we welcome the
principles of corporate parenting, but there are questions about why the Bill
does not go further. I am sure the Minister agrees that children in care will
often have complex needs that require a joined-up approach across public
services to get the best possible outcomes, so will he explain why there is no
provision in the Bill to facilitate ways for public services, such as health
and education, to play a key role in ensuring good corporate parenting? These
public services play a key role in ensuring the best outcomes for children in
care, yet there is no apparent involvement for them in the corporate parenting
principles.
The principle of the local offer
is welcome, and we supported it when it was introduced for children with
special educational needs and disabilities in the Children and Families Act
2014, but we have since seen failings in practice, with the quality of local
offers varying wildly between local authorities, no minimum guarantees of quality,
no statutory guidance and no certainty that the local offer will be available
to all those who need it. When there are no minimum guarantees of quality, we
know which areas will lose out. Overwhelmingly, it will be areas already facing
disadvantage that will not get the support they need.
There are already unacceptable
variations in spending on children’s services between regions. In one local
authority, £4,970 is spent on children in need; in another, it is only £340.
The Department for Education’s own figures show that these spending
inequalities fall along our all-too-familiar geographical divides.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull
North) (Lab) In my conversations with Hull City Council’s children’s services
department, it talks to me about the resource inequalities it faces and the
very disadvantaged community it serves. It is not asking for powers to
innovate; it is asking for proper resources to provide the services that young
people need in the city.
Angela Rayner My Hon. Friend
makes a significant point. Local authorities in the north-west, such as mine,
have faced cuts of 50% since austerity while trying to deal with the complex
needs of their communities. I ask the Government to look again at that.
In the south-east, spending tends
to be much higher than average, but, as we move through to the midlands and the
north-west, spending in local authorities is far lower. Once again, levels of
spending on public services fall on either side of the north-south divide, with
the north losing out. In his final report as Her Majesty’s chief inspector of
schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw has singled out the north-south divide as one of
the great challenges facing our education system and our country, and only this
morning the Children’s Commissioner said that the problem was simply that
parents in the north were not as ambitious as those in the south. I am sure
that the Minister for Vulnerable Children and Families, a parent from the north
himself, will agree that such comments are neither acceptable nor helpful. To ensure
that all regions of our country, north and south, benefit from the local offer,
I hope he will seek to put clear national standards in the Bill that all local
offers must meet. There is a clear case
for proper guidance on what the local offer should contain and how to make it
accessible to all those who need it, drawing on the best available practice.
Will the Minister tell us why these issues have not been addressed in the Bill,
and whether the Government will bring forward amendments during its passage?
Part 2 establishes the new
regulator, Social Work England. I want to pay tribute once again to the
excellent work done by the parties in the other place. Following their
scrutiny, plans to place regulatory control with the Secretary of State were defeated.
I am sure that the Minister would acknowledge the norm that regulators are
operationally independent from Government and, in this case, serve the
interests of children. Will he guarantee today that independence will be
respected as the Bill is ultimately agreed?
While we welcome the new
regulatory body, if it is effective and independent, we will seek answers to several
questions about how it will function. After all, the Government seem to want
Social Work England to have a representative improvement and regulatory roles
within the profession, yet they have not told us how it will be achieved. We
have no detail on the remit of the work of the new regulator. As it stands, we
will find out only through a series of regulations to be made by the Secretary
of State. Will the Minister tell us exactly what the remit and powers of the
new regulator will be, and why it is appropriate for those to be decided in
secondary legislation, away from scrutiny of the full House? After all, we have
been down this path before. Only four years ago, the General Social Care
Council was closed. What, then, will be done differently this time to ensure
that we do not look back in a year or two and see yet another regulator that
has been closed?
We broadly welcome what is in the
Bill, although we hope that the Minister will answer some of the many questions
that remain. Once already in the other place, the Government’s plans for the
outsourcing and privatisation of our children’s services, dressed up as
“innovation”, were defeated. Nobody in the profession believes that
privatisation is the answer to the immense challenges it currently faces, and
neither can it alleviate the growing demand for children’s services.
Mr Lammy My Hon. Friend is doing
a very good job of putting forward the case that exists in the country. Is she
concerned that the Minister has not said much at all about what “innovation” he
expects would require a local authority, in effect, to wash its hands of its
statutory duty in respect of our young people and children?
Angela Rayner My right hon.
Friend is right. Most people who work in the profession believe that
privatisation is absolutely the wrong answer and will not help with any form of
innovation that the Government might currently want. In fact, the best way of
helping would be to restore the investment in our community and local services
that the Government have cut over the last few years.
I call on the Minister to confirm
today that the Government will not seek to bring these clauses back into the
Bill. I am sure that he knows as well as Opposition Members and indeed all
Members, that these plans do not offer a real solution. If the Minister fails
to take that suggestion on board, Opposition Members will be far less
conciliatory when we debate the Bill again.
16:43:00 Neil Carmichael (Stroud)
(Con) The Bill is a very good one. It has been amended in the House of Lords,
and we will need to consider the implications of that in due course. The
central points of the Bill are well founded. I am particularly impressed with
the theme of reflecting the work of the Munro report and improving the capacity
of social workers to use their own judgment, rather than simply rely on box
ticking. That is an appropriate theme for the Bill and it explains why the
regulatory structure +
introduced by the Bill will help.
It is through such a regulatory system that the ability to make judgments will
be made easier.
It is important for social
workers to have a clear eye on what professional regulation is all about. The
profession should be operating, of course, at arm’s length, which is usefully
stressed in the Bill. A register of social workers makes a lot of sense,
because one of the things that we must do is enhance professionalism in social
work. That is where I have some difference
with the Government, in that I think that ultimately, we should have a
professional body for social workers.
The Education Select Committee made it clear in a recent report that it
thought there was a strong case for such a body, and I think there is an
appetite for that beyond the Chamber. I urge the Government to have an open
mind, and I suggest that they continue to send signals that they would like a
professional body to be established. I also think that an independent review of
proceedings in five years’ time makes a huge amount of sense, because that is a
realistic timescale.
There is, however, one area in
which I think the Bill needs some additions, or at least some
recognitions. Given that more than
70,000 children are effectively children of the state, that so many more
children are subjected to sexual abuse and given the historical sexual abuse
that has taken place, our failure to place the issue of sex and relationships
education front and centre is becoming increasingly obvious. The Government must embark on a full
consultation to provide reassurance that something will be done about this most
important matter. I ask the Minister to
confirm that there will be a realistic and meaningful consultation on the
introduction of statutory SRE.
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow)
(Lab/Co-op) I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman has raised that point. May I ask him to back Labour amendments to
make SRE part of the safeguarding of all children, so that we can finally
ensure that we keep every young person in the country safe?
Neil Carmichael to an extent,
that will depend on what the amendments are, and whether the Government make it
clear that they will organise a full consultation. However, I note what the hon. Lady has said,
and I am sure that the Government have noted what I have just said. We need a full, meaningful and comprehensive
consultation on this important matter.
Five Select Committee Chairs sent
a letter to the Secretary of State.
Obviously, I organised one of them.
The others came from the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Committee—Members may well ask what it must do with SRE, and I can explain if
they wish me to—the Women and Equalities Committee, the Health Committee, and
the Home Affairs Committee. All those
Committees effectively said precisely the same thing: we need SRE to be
introduced statutorily in our schools.
Finally, I want to say something
about latitude for local government. The
Select Committee did some work relating to children in care, particularly those
with mental health difficulties. When we
went to Trafford, it was strikingly obvious to us that through co-operation
with other agencies, coterminous structures and strong leadership, the council
was delivering outstanding results. Its
ability to benefit from strategic leadership at the top end, operational
leadership within the structures themselves, and a coterminous relationship not
only with its own organisations and related agencies but with the police force
was clearly extraordinarily beneficial for working practices and the way in
which decisions were made and responses given on issues connected with children
in care and children at risk. Therefore, the Government are right to move
towards giving local government more latitude in the way it formulates its structures
to deliver outcomes.
In short, there is a lot to be
said for the Bill. It is critical that we acknowledge that some form of
professional body will be good for social workers and social work generally.
The absence of SRE is a pity. It is important, however, that the Government
give the firm commitment I have asked for. The Government are going in the
right direction on local government.
16:50:00 Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP). I am aware
that very few clauses in the Bill affect Scotland but, as a member of the
Education Committee, I may have some points of interest and I might be able to
help the Bill to become even better. When a child or young person cannot live
at home, we all owe it to them to make the process of finding a new, stable
family as efficient and straightforward as possible. Clause 1 would introduce
seven “corporate parenting principles” that local authorities must “have regard
to”. I ask the Minister: why are those not mandatory? The Joint Committee on
Human Rights has said: “We have considered the arguments and the evidence for
and against introducing a statutory duty on public authorities in England
requiring them to have due regard to the rights of children in the UNCRC in the
exercise of their functions relating to children, equivalent to the duties
already introduced in Wales and Scotland.”
If Wales and Scotland can have
such a duty, I find it difficult to understand why it will not be mandatory in
England. The Joint Committee went on to recommend that Parliament takes the
opportunity presented by the Bill to ensure that there is “such a duty”. It is important that children are the focus
of and are at the heart of any Bill that is introduced in this Parliament. We
need to look at how children are affected by legislation introduced by not just
the Department for Education, but Departments across the board. In Scotland,
the First Minister has said that people who have experienced the care system
will be the driving force of an independent review of how Scotland treats its
looked-after children. That is the mandatory duty in action. In Scotland, we
want to move forward and to listen to young people, and we are looking at
extending what is happening in Scotland to people who have been in care and are
going through the process of becoming adults who stand on their own. It is good
that the Bill looks at what happens to children after they leave care, but I
ask the Minister to examine what we do in Scotland, because we are moving
forward at a far faster pace than England and Wales.
A former children’s Minister in
Scotland has said: “children don’t need a system that just stops things
happening to them”. We have safeguards, but we also need a system that makes
things happen for them. A system that supports them to become the people they
can be”, fostering a sense “of belonging”. I am sure that the Minister agrees
with that and with the fact that that should be a guiding principle for any
legislation. What steps will the Government take to respond to the
recommendations made earlier this year by the UN Committee on the Rights of the
Child? When do they plan to publish their official response? What further steps
will the Government take to ensure that policy development across Whitehall has
children’s rights at its heart?
Clause 31, which is the one
measure in the Bill that affects Scotland, relates to whistleblowing. The
Scottish Government acknowledge and respect the need for whistleblowing. They believe that procedures should be in
place across the public and private sectors to support staff in raising any
concerns to ensure that people can work in a safe and secure environment. They believe that it is important that NHS
workers in Scotland should be able to raise any concerns about patient safety
or malpractice, because that helps to improve our health service. That should
be the case not only in the health service, but across all professions,
especially in the social work sector, given the importance of child protection.
We welcome this measure and are keen for the Government to see it through.
Social work is regulated in
Scotland, and I again ask the Minister to look at how the Scottish system
works. When the Education Committee heard evidence from social workers as part
of the inquiry referred to by its Chair, the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil
Carmichael), one of the first things they said was that we should look at the
Scottish system. I encourage Ministers to do that. The Scottish Social Services
Council regulates the profession and all social workers in Scotland must belong
to it. I am pleased that England will be moving forward in a similar way.
I share the apprehensions
expressed by the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) about
creeping privatisation in the care sector, especially in relation to children.
It is imperative that children should be looked after when they cannot be with
their own parents and families, and the duty to protect children is shared by
us all in society, not just by professionals. This is another reason why whistle-blowers
can be important.
The Bill will improve the
situation in England, but it must be seen in the context of child poverty. The
Institute for Fiscal Studies states that child poverty in the UK is projected
to rise by 8 percentage points by 2020, which makes it even more important that
these provisions are right. Many more children could be drawn into the care
system because of the ongoing austerity programme across the UK, so will the
Minister please look at what we are doing in Scotland? We might not be perfect,
and we might not get everything right, but we put children and their
experiences at the heart of our system and we listen to them. I ask him please
to look to the north, as well as to Wales, which is also doing good work on
child protection and childcare across the board.
16:57:00 Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con) I draw the
House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I
welcome most parts of the Bill, and I particularly welcome the fact that it is
now without certain parts, as I said earlier. It is good to have this
opportunity to discuss child protection and social workers. We spend far too
little time in the House highlighting the excellent practices that we expect
our social workers to achieve in highly adverse conditions. I have always
referred to social workers as our fourth emergency service, and I am proud to
be a patron of the Social Worker of the Year awards, along with the hon. Member
for South Shields (Mrs Elwell-Buck). I attended the awards dinner just over a
week ago, at which fantastic examples of dedication, hard work, skill and
expertise were on display. Alas, none of that made it into the mainstream
media, as is so often the case.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood
Green) (Lab) Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the challenges facing social
workers are particularly intense thus not only of immense reductions in
funding, but of the fast-changing climate and the Government’s occasional
initiative-itis that seems to attach itself to the social work sector?
Tim Loughton Social workers are
certainly under a huge amount of pressure, but that initiative-itis has, to an
extent, gone into reverse, not least through the shrinking in the past six
years of the “working together” rule book—the bible of social workers and social
work practice—which amounted to more than 750 pages when this Government came
into office. Social workers were spending all their time checking what the
rulebook said, looking over their shoulders and ticking boxes, rather than
being allowed to get on with the business of being social workers, and
eyeballing families and the vulnerable children whom they are there to protect
and work with. With the support of Professor Munro, that work was an important
initiative that tried to take away many of the administrative burdens on social
workers, notwithstanding their other pressures and challenges.
I am proud of the work that the
Conservative party has done in this area, starting with the commission on
social work that I chaired back in 2007. I am delighted that my hon. Friend the
Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond) is in the Chamber because she played
an important role in the commission. We produced the document “No More Blame
Game—The Future for Children’s Social Workers”, which is as relevant today as it
was then. The trouble is that social workers are still too often subject to the
blame game, especially in the tabloid press, from which it is social workers
who abuse and murder vulnerable young children.
Of course, they do not; they are there to try to protect such children.
Parents, carers and others commit those foul acts, but people would not believe
that based on the reports. Too many people view our social workers with
disdain.
From that piece of work, of which
I am proud, came the suggestions for consultant social workers and a chief
social worker. In 2010, our manifesto commitment was to take child protection
back to the frontline. I am also pleased and proud that the first review
initiated by the Department for Education after the 2010 election was not about
schools or education matters; it was the excellent Munro review into child
protection. I was slightly surprised that the Minister prayed in aid Professor
Munro so explicitly. I appointed
Professor Munro and worked closely with her, but the problem is that many of
her 15 pertinent recommendations are still to be implemented, and they do not
involve the removal of a local authority’s basic duty to protect vulnerable
young children.
I support the Bill as it stands,
but it could certainly be improved by several enhancing amendments, although I
would not include among those any that would rehash clauses 29 to 33. I was
alarmed by the Minister’s comments that strongly suggested that those clauses
will be revisited. That would be a shame because, after the good work done in
the Lords, we were promised a period of reflection—perhaps it could be referred
to as a pause, as we have had for other legislation—but that reflection will
not have lasted long if the Government return with amendments. I caution them
to extend the period of reflection before they hurry into repeating what was
clearly a mistake. A clear majority in the House of Lords and a great majority
of important organisations involved in child protection were not in favour of
the proposed changes and made their feelings clear.
Many good things have happened
around child protection under this Government. The reform of fostering and
adoption regulations has helped not only fosterers and adopters, but children
who are being fostered. It has also helped
more children to get adopted. There is more to be done, but a lot of progress
has been made over the past six years. Ofsted’s inspection system is now much
more appropriate and rigorous.
The Munro review gave rise to a
lot of innovation in child protection. The child sexual exploitation action
plan was published back in November 2011—way before the Savile scandal became
so public and made CSE a headline issue of which we have never seen the like.
We have the Staying Put policy which, although perhaps underfunded and less
effective in certain local authorities, includes the right to a personal
adviser until the age of 25 and places a duty on local authorities to stay in
touch. These are all good things being innovated through the Bill that, along
with staying close until the age of 21, offer support to vulnerable children in
the care system at what is often a most fragile time in their lives.
Previously, at the age of 18 or even 16 they faced a cliff edge, coming out of
care into the big wide world without the help and support—the safety net—that
so many of these children and young people need.
Catherine West the Hon. Gentleman
is being extremely generous in giving way a second time. Does he agree that
much of this could be quite academic if funding does not accompany these
exciting developments?
Tim Loughton Funding is, of
course, part of this, but we can do a lot better with existing funds, although
the NAO report showed funding on vulnerable children had gone up as well. But
what was not working properly is when social workers were spending, through the
integrated children’s system and other very bureaucratic systems, up to 80% of
their time in front of a computer filling in forms to do with child protection,
rather than getting out there and dealing with children face to face. That was
a huge waste of resources, but more importantly a huge waste of opportunities
to deal more effectively and early on with children, who really did need to
have the support, and often intervention, of professional services and social workers.
Despite all these innovations, we
still need to do an awful lot better for vulnerable children, children in the
care system and our care leavers. It is a fact that 40%—almost half—of our care
leavers aged 19 to 21 are classed as NEETs and 4% of them are in custody. Two
thirds of children in the care system have special educational needs, almost
half of them with a diagnosable mental disorder. The percentage for the
educational achievement of children achieving A* to C GCSEs is still in its
teens, compared with its peer population now with over 60% achieving those
grades.
I particularly welcome some of
the Bill’s corporate parenting principles— although it will be interesting to
see how they work in practice—that apply to physical and mental health, which
is so important. Although this Government have again done a lot to raise the
profile of mental health, particularly among children and young people, and
have injected a further £1.4 billion into that area, the problem is that not
nearly enough of it—and that is not enough in itself—is getting through to the
frontline, to help the children and young people who so desperately need it,
when they need it and where they need it.
These are challenging times. The
NAO report on children in need of protection, to which various hon. Members
have already referred, flagged up some worrying observations. Too often the way
we look after vulnerable children is a postcode lottery. We are still very poor
at sharing best practice in this country, yet a child in need, a child in care
and a child in desperate need of protection should be dealt with no differently
whether they are in Durham, Worthing, Exeter or anywhere else throughout the
United Kingdom.
There was a surge following the
horrific case of Baby Peter, but the number of children coming into the care
system continues to rise: there are now more than 70,000 children in the care
system in England—the highest since 1985, when the environment in respect of
why children tended to come into the care system was very different. I do not
know whether we need to take more children into care, or fewer, but I do know
that we need to take the right children into care at the right time, and give
them the right support and services if they cannot be supported living with
their families or other kinship carers.
Another thing I am very proud of
is the Government’s initiative on promoting adoption, which had fallen into
neglect, frankly, after the good work done in the Adoption and Children Act
2002. The adoption figures have started to fall back considerably and there is
still a very big grey space following the Munby judgment. But that should not
have happened, because those adoption reforms were about bringing forward an
easier system for adopters to offer their services and for children to go
through all the hoops. There were too many hoops and it took too long for
children to get adopted. We needed to bring onside not only those involved in
adoption at the local authority level, which largely we did, but, contemporaneously
and in sympathy, those in the legal profession, as many judges felt put upon,
in that they were being told how to run cases in their courts. I am afraid the
Government have failed to do that and should not therefore be surprised by the
disappointing reversal in the adoption figures, which I hope will be reversed
again, because adoption does offer the best chance at a second childhood—a
second possibility of being brought up in a safe and loving family—for a lot of
children who still do not get that chance and are still in the care system.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North
West) (SNP) Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that although many younger
children are being adopted, it is far more difficult to place older children?
We need to do more to promote the benefits to those children of adoption at a
later age.
Tim Loughton the hon. Lady is
right about that, but shiny, squeaky new babies have always been much more
attractive to people who want to adopt than problematic teenagers who have been
through all the trials and tribulations of broken families—perhaps abuse,
neglect, mental health problems and behavioural disorders—and have been pushed
from pillar to post in the care system. Those are the children we have most let
down, which is one reason why the introduction of adoption scorecards was based
not just on improving the number of children adopted, but on concentrating on
those harder-to-adopt children: older children; large sibling groups; and
children from black and minority ethnic communities. Too often these children
were at the back of the adoption queue. I am glad to say that in recent years
disproportionately they have found themselves more likely to get adopted than
they were before. This is still not enough and there remains a lot to be done, but
that was absolutely the right focus to bring in over the past few years.
Another thing I am concerned
about is that despite all the good work the Government did on paralleling the razor
system for health visitors in Holland, we have lost 722 health visitors since
January and there has been a 13% decrease in the number of school nurses since
2010. They are important people in early intervention—in identifying children
with problems, and those for whom the support of social services and other
caring services is essential, sooner rather than later.
Of course, I am also worried by
the recent rise, again, in social worker vacancy rates in many authorities
around the country, and too often the positions are taken by temporary social
workers. Social work, particularly when dealing with child protection, is an
area where staff need to forge empathetic relationships with those vulnerable
children and families whom they are there to look after. Being pushed from
pillar to post, from one home to another, from one social worker to another
reviewing officer—or whoever it may be—only accentuates the instability and
vulnerability of those children.
I worry when, even in this place,
we are still too quick to point the finger of blame at the social workers
because a child has been brutally assaulted or killed, as still happens in too
many cases, by their carer, parent or close relative. We hear the talk of
“wilful neglect”. There are social workers who are not doing their job
properly, and there are social workers who are not up to the job and should not
be in social work, and they should be removed from it, but they are a small
minority. We should not make the rest of our excellent, hard-working, dedicated
social worker force feel constantly that they are the ones to blame for many of
these tragedies. We must up everybody’s game, but they are part of the
solution; in the clear majority of cases, they are not part of the problem.
It is odd therefore that at the
heart of the original Bill, since eviscerated of clauses 29 to 33, which it
would seem are about to make an unfortunate reappearance, were radical new
proposals supposedly to test new ways of working, under the guise of promoting
innovation. As I said earlier, the clauses were not remotely welcomed by the clear
majority of people who are involved in the whole field of child protection.
They were opposed by the British Association of Social Workers, the Care
Leavers Association, the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, Coram BAAF,
which is the Government’s appointed adoption provider, the Fostering Network,
the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Action for
Children. In various polls, about 90% of working social workers did not support
those clauses either, which was hardly surprising given that the clauses came
out of the blue. There was no consultation on fundamental changes to the way in
which we apply duties of care to vulnerable children in this country.
I pay tribute to the House of
Lords, particularly to Lord Rams Botham, for putting forward the amendments
that saw those clauses taken out of the Bill. Lord Rams Botham referred to
clause 29 as nothing less than “the usurpation of the proper parliamentary
process.” He asked “how the courts are
expected to respond where a young person or child in a particular local
authority area is clearly disadvantaged by the arbitrary disapplication or
modification of the law as it is applied in all other parts of the country. ”—
[Official Report, House of Lords, 8 November 2016; Vol. 776, c. 1056.]
As I said earlier, a child needs
protection wherever he or she may be in the country. We cannot have a
competition between different areas on ways of looking after vulnerable
children, some of which will not work and some of which might. Every child
needs the protection of the law as set out by Parliament, and it should not be
subject to a postcode lottery, as is convenient for certain local authorities.
In the debate in the other place,
Lord Low said: “It is perfectly possible to test different ways of working…within
the existing legislative framework…it makes no sense to get rid of the duty.”—
[Official Report, House of Lords, 8 November 2016; Vol. 776, c. 1063.] The
squeeze on funding, which Members have mentioned, and which is, I am afraid,
inevitable now—[Interruption.] I am afraid that it is inevitable because of the
disastrous way in which the Labour Government ran the economy into the ground.
In too many cases now local authorities are providing only what is their duty;
additional services are no longer on the agenda at all. Taking away that duty
means that some of these fundamental things could not happen in the future. Clause
29 as it was would have allowed local authorities to request exemptions from
their statutory duties in children’s social care. Every Act of Parliament and
every subordinate piece of legislation concerned with children’s social care
from 1933 onwards could have been affected. The proposed mechanism for
exemption orders was to be statutory instruments, which would have handed over
enormous powers to the Secretary of State and the Department for Education. I
am afraid that the Minister for School Standards is wrong: the DfES
acknowledged that this part of the Bill directly concerns children’s
fundamental rights. How can vulnerable children challenge those lacks services?
I gave an example—it was one of many examples raised in the House of Lords—of
independent reviewing officers. I am a big fan of IROs—I think we can do
better, and there is a bit of a postcode lottery—as their role is to stand up
and be the voice, or the advocate, of children who are not getting the services
to which they are entitled and which they need from local authorities. If no IRO is available because an exemption
has been applied for and granted, which means that the authority has no IROs,
where is that child to go? There are not just IROs, but key legal protections
that exist in the form of regulations now, including the ban on corporal
punishment in foster care and children’s homes, protection for disabled children
placed away from home, leaving care entitlements and complaints procedures. All
of those could be granted an exemption and could disappear from fundamental
rights, which we apply to protect vulnerable children now.
This would be the first time in
the history of children’s welfare that legislation made for all vulnerable
children and young people could be misapplied in an area. This is a very
radical proposal that warranted at least a Green Paper and a White Paper and
proper consultation, but there was none. It is not surprising, therefore, that
the NSPCC and Action for Children said that
“the case that the Government is
making presents considerable risk. Despite numerous conversations with
ministers and officials, the evidence for the need for this power remains
unconvincing and does not justify the potential risks of suspending primary
legislation.” The British Association of Social Workers said: “If the clauses
are re-introduced it will pave the way for significant and dangerous changes to
the provision of children’s social care which would jeopardise hard fought
victories for children’s rights spanning decades.”
How would the pilots for these
provisions be monitored? How would we monitor whether children were still safe
and what the results were for those children? It is no surprise that only one
in 10 practising social workers surveyed by the BASW and by Unison thought this
was a good idea. That is why I have severe reservations if the clause is to be
returned to the Bill.
The Munro review took away much of
the bureaucracy from social workers. It gave flexibility on the timing of
assessments of children and how social workers could prioritise. It gave
greater powers and confidence back to social workers to use their professional
judgment to do what they thought best in the interests of vulnerable children.
Sometimes they will get it wrong. I always say to social workers, “What I want
to do, and what the Munro review was all about, is to give you the confidence
to make a mistake—hopefully, not often, but to do it for the very best of
reasons, not simply because that’s what it says on page 117 of the rule book
and you needed to tick the boxes.” That is not what social work is all about.
It is not a science. It is a complicated and challenging job.
If we are going to give social
workers those flexibilities and allow them to act in different and innovative
ways because they think that is the best way of looking after vulnerable
children, we do not need to take away the statutory duties of the local
authorities which are the corporate parents of those children, so that those
new ways do not have to abide by the fundamental duties which ensure that
social workers are doing the right thing and looking after those vulnerable
children.
Finally, I shall look at a few
specific clauses and ask the Minister some questions, which I hope he will
refer to in his summing up. Clause 1 is about corporate parenting principles,
which I welcome, but it is not clear exactly what they amount to in practice.
Are they in addition to the section 23 commitments of the Children Act 1989 or
do they replace them? I have used examples which I welcome: promoting physical
and mental health, promoting high aspirations and securing the best outcomes
for those children and young people. Nobody could vote against such things, but
in clause 3 new section 23CZB (7) states: “Where a former relevant child to
whom this section applies is not receiving advice and support under this
section, the local authority must offer such advice and support . . . at least
once in every 12 months. “Once in every 12 months will not go very far for a
vulnerable child who needs intensive help. Subsection 4 makes provision for
personal advisers. The problem is that too many children in care whom I met and
children leaving care had never heard of personal advisers, let alone knew who
their own personal adviser was. In clause 4 new section 23ZZA (3) gives a local
authority this extraordinary power: “A local authority in England may do
anything else that they consider appropriate with a view to promoting the
educational achievement of relevant children educated in their area”— motherhood
and apple pie. Why do we require that sort of thing in legislation? It strikes
me that a bit much of this is a bit too mushy and full of cotton wool—too many
vague assumptions which in practice, particularly with funding pressures and
duties taken away, will not amount to a row of beans, if we are not careful.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield,
Southgate) (Con) Obviously, the primary focus and concern is the duty of care
to children, but there is also the issue of mothers who might well end up
having successive children who end up in care. The local authority needs to
have a responsibility for those vulnerable women, who may well be victims of a
coercive relationship and have complex needs thus. The sooner there is
intervention and therapeutic care, the better, to avoid subsequent issues—maybe
subsequent children and subsequent costs and concerns for all.
Tim Loughton My Hon. Friend, who
has great expertise in this area, is right. Of course, we cannot look at
vulnerable children in isolation; we need to look at their families
holistically. There are some good examples. I hope that the Minister will stick
to his word and provide funding for things such as FDAC, the family drug and
alcohol court set up by the excellent Nick Crichton, a fantastic family
district judge. At FDAC, a mother—often a single mother—at risk of losing a
child to the care system because of substance abuse or an abusive partner, say,
is given a clear choice of an intensive package that will help her back on to
the straight and narrow so that she can bring up her own child. It is a tough,
challenging exercise. Alternatively, perhaps both parents will be involved. If
they can do that, the whole family is put back together and the child stays,
which is the best outcome. If not, that child will head for care. I have sat in
court, as has my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who
will speak shortly, seeing mums who have had six, seven or eight children taken
into the care system. We must tackle the root of that problem: why is it? Is it
that the mother just does not know how to parent, in which case what are
society, social workers and the troubled families programme doing to help her
become a fit parent if she remotely can? If she cannot, that child must go to a
safe family elsewhere who can give them a second chance of a beneficial and
happy upbringing. I would like to make a few other quick points, Mr Deputy
Speaker; I am aware that there are not too many speakers for this debate, so I
have an opportunity to elaborate on some important points a little longer than
the Chair normally allows. I know how generous you are in these matters, which
are of great interest to you. Clause 5 is about the designation of a member of
staff at school. “having responsibility for promoting the educational
achievement” of children in the care system. That is a good initiative, but it
already exists for children with caring responsibilities and alas that does not
work in practice. It is a good idea, but it must have some teeth so that it
means something on the ground: that children in the care system have special
attention from a designated teacher who understands the needs of such children,
who are often subject to bullying, mental health problems and everything else.
There must be more than a clause on paper in a Bill: the proposal must work in
practice.
There are some good points on the
child safeguarding review panels, although I have concerns about the
independence of the panels. Certainly, when we gave a commitment before the
2010 election that we would publish serious case reviews—opposed by the Labour
party, although the reviews have now become the norm—one of my concerns was
also about the calibre of the people producing those SCRs and the quality of
some of the reports. Effectively, they were not properly monitored; they were
monitored only on a local basis. Some time ago, I put forward the idea that a
national body should oversee the quality and that there should be a national
register of authors of serious case reviews with a requirement for continuous
professional development; there needed to be training, which would be updated.
Before now, anybody, effectively, could apply to be the author of a serious
case review. We need to regulate that important area rather better. Under
clause 13, the panel “must publish the report, unless they consider it
inappropriate to do so.” Given that, previously, when serious case reviews were
published, they were seen only by a few people locally and Department for
Education officials if we were lucky, it was important that, other than in
exceptional circumstances where there could be detriment to surviving children
or families, the reviews should be published and the lessons learned to see how
they could apply elsewhere. This new review panel is an exercise in doing that
and in disseminating best practice rather better. I very much support that, and
I would like more details on how it is going to work.
Then, however, we have the
section about safeguarding partners. These appear to be replacing the local
safeguarding children boards, which are an important feature of bringing
together local agencies to make sure we have workable solutions and
partnerships in place, particularly to deal with child sexual exploitation now.
We need to be convinced about how these new bodies are better than, or
different from, local safeguarding children boards and about how they are going
to be funded. Clause 20, on funding, says: “The safeguarding partners for a
local authority area in England may make payments” towards the expenditure of
these bodies “by contributing to a fund” or making payments directly. It also
says: “Relevant agencies for a local authority area…may make payments”. The
problem with LSCBs now is that not all the partners pull their weight. In too
many cases, key partners are, first, not turning up at the table and, secondly,
not helping to fund the work of the LSCBs. Too often, it falls to the local
authority—the default partner—to pick up too much of the tab. If we are going
to put these things on a statutory basis, can we make sure that it is laid out
clearly and unequivocally that the funding contribution from, and the active
participation of, all the relevant partners is essential? I am also concerned
because clause 21 says: “The safeguarding partners for two or more local
authority areas in England may agree that their areas are to be treated as a
single area”. How big can they be? It is important that LSCBs can come up with
local safeguarding plans and local plans to tackle child sexual exploitation in
their areas—plans that are relevant to Rotherham, given the problems there, to
Rochdale or to wherever. If these bodies are going to be looking after huge
areas, their effect will surely be diluted in key hotspots. The Bill also talks
about having cross-border constabulary co-operation, but these are very large
areas, and I am concerned about how big these new bodies could become. On the
part of the Bill about the new body, Social Work England, I think we need to
improve the regulation of social workers. I am not sure whether this is the
right way to do it, and I would like to see more details. The demise of the
College of Social Work is a shame, and I think it would have performed a lot of
this function if it had been allowed to continue and to thrive. A lot of effort
went into setting it up in the first place.
I am also concerned about the
independence of Social Work England. My understanding is that it will be an
executive agency of the Department for Education, and we need to have some
clarity over that.
The Minister for Vulnerable
Children and Families (Edward Timpson) Will my hon. Friend give way?
Tim Loughton Yes—I am delighted I
am getting a response.
Edward Timpson
I can reassure my hon. Friend
that the new Social Work England regulatory body will not be an executive
agency; it will be a non-departmental public body, so it will be at arm’s
length from the Government and provide the independence that people called for
and that I think is right.
Tim Loughton I am grateful, and
gratefully reassured, and I look forward to being able to support that
provision, as opposed to some others that I am not so reassured about. In
clause 31, one of the overarching objectives of Social Work England is “to
promote and maintain public confidence in social workers in England”, and that
is quite right. However, that is also the job of the chief social worker. One
disappointment to me is that when we set up the chief social worker—originally,
it was to be one chief social worker covering the elderly and children, but
then it was split into a child social worker and an adult care social
worker—the point was for them to be a high-profile face of social work,
particularly for the public, and a reassuring face of child protection for the
public in times of high-profile tragedies and disasters involving safeguarding
issues. Therefore, while the current chief social worker for children said
recently: “I don’t pretend I am the voice of the profession. I am a civil
servant and I see my role” as “offering advice to ministers based on what other
people tell me about the system”,
I think there is more to the
role. This person must not just be a civil servant. They need to work closely
alongside Ministers and civil servants, but equally—in action out on the
street—to work alongside social workers, consultant social workers and
practitioners at the sharp end. We need to revisit the balance that we
currently have in that regard.
I apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker,
for going on at length. This is a subject that interests me enormously. I have
spent most of my career in Parliament involved with child safeguarding and
child protection. I am very proud of the progress that has been made over
years, but very worried that we still have a long way to go. Most of this Bill
will help in that journey, but certain parts will not. I hope that when
scrutinising the Bill in Committee and on Report, the Government reflect a
little more before they rush to do some things that clearly are not in the best
interests of vulnerable children.
17:35:00 Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op) It is a true
pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim
Loughton) and his detailed, precise and, some might say, exhaustive analysis of
the Bill before us. I think I can speak for all Labour Members in saying that
we share many of the concerns that he outlined about getting right the
legislation on how we protect young people in our country. I associate myself with
the excellent introduction by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne
(Angela Rayner) in which she raised Labour Members’ concerns about the Bill
while recognising that many parts are welcome and could take us forward. We
share the wish across the House to provide the best safeguarding for all
children.
I see this Bill as being about
how we best support our children in an imperfect world—a world that we are all
painfully aware of through our casework and work within our communities. That
is why we all share the concern expressed by the hon. Member for East Worthing
and Shoreham about the importance of partnership working—in particular, working
with professionals. Many of us will have dealt with cases where we are acutely
aware that we are not professionals but wish to help, and where the guidance of
social workers with years of experience in complex and delicate matters has
been of vital assistance to us. We therefore recognise that not involving them
in this conversation may take us backwards rather than forwards as a country.
Some of us have real concerns about what will replace the local safeguarding
boards, and how we make sure that the multi-partnership work that has worked in
some parts of the country and led to some significant changes is not lost in
the process of recognising where change is needed.
In a wish, not to indulge one of
the customs of this House where the same thing is said several times, let me
try to offer the Minister some ideas about things that I believe are missing
from the Bill. I hope that we will find cross-party consensus in adding to it.
One of those things, as well as a concern to avoid any suggestion of
privatising such a delicate and important service, is to make sure that in
talking about safeguarding we involve the concept of prevention, particularly
the idea of acting earlier within the system to make sure that children are
protected. I am particularly drawn to clause 16, which talks about the
safeguarding and promotion of welfare of all children, and the role that local
authorities might play in that.
Bearing in mind the comments of
the Minister, who is sadly no longer in his place, about ensuring that a robust
safeguarding system is in place, I wish to let him know that I will table
amendments to bring in one of the most crucial parts of safeguarding we have
yet to get right—sex and relationships education for all young people. We
cannot say that we safeguard our children when we make sure that they are
taught about composting but not consent. Many of us may have stories of our own
sex and relationships education. I might have feared that I was forever scarred
by having once fallen asleep in a classroom only to be awoken by somebody
waving a female condom in my face. However, it is no laughing matter. Many of
us are acutely aware of the many pressures on our young people that we need to
be able to address, and, crucially, in a positive and inclusive manner. All
parents will tell us that they are concerned about the world today. In a former
lifetime, I was a youth worker, and we used to say that we had all been
15-year-olds but none of us had been 15-year-olds in today’s world. I am
incredibly grateful, for a start, that Facebook was not around when I was at
school. One third of young girls in this country report being sexually harassed
at school. Three quarters of girls in a Girl guiding survey said that they were
anxious about sexual harassment in their age group, and 5,500 sexual offences,
including 600 rapes, were recorded in UK schools over the past three years alone.
I say that not to make parents
fearful, but to ask what we can do to make sure that every young person in this
country has the tools and the confidence to lead the lives that we would all
wish for them, and to be able to know when no means no and yes means yes. That
is why it is important that we do not let it become the internet that educates
our young people or the playground that tells them what passes for acceptable
sexual conduct, but that we give every young person the kind of training that
we would want for our own children.
That is not a critique of
parents. Indeed, many parents work very hard to make sure that their children
have good ideas about sex and relationships education. We need to recognise
that parents can only ever be 50% of the answer, because this is also about the
other children that children will meet. Giving every child good sex and
relationships education should be considered part of safeguarding, because it
will make sure that every young person, whoever they meet, has the skills and
the tools to lead the life that they wish to lead and to deal with the modern
world as it is, not as some might wish it to be.
I know that Members across the
House will support that proposal. I am mindful of the support of the Select
Committee Chairs, one of whom—the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs
Miller)—is in her place. I was taken by her Committee’s report, but this is not
just about the Women and Equalities Committee: The Select Committees on Home
Affairs, Education, Health, and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy all
agree that now is the time to make sure that every child is given access to
good sex and relationships education.
Mr Burrows the Hon. Lady has
prayed in aid the Home Affairs Committee. I think that she is referring to the
previous Chair, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who
signed up to a letter, but he did not do so on behalf of the Committee. As a
member of that Committee, I did not support it. I certainly support proposals
for high-quality sex and relationships education. There are ways of achieving
that, not least through building resilience and supporting families, which is
what the Bill is about. We can do that in lots of ways, not just the path
suggested by the hon. Lady. I ask her to please acknowledge that there is
significant opposition to her proposal.
Stella Creasy I thank the hon.
Gentleman for his comments, but I hope that we will be able to change his mind
during our discussion. We have been having this debate for some time, and I
tell him plainly that the young people of Britain are crying out for this kind
of education. Time and again they say, “Ignorance is not bliss; confidence is
what we want.” It is not about replacing parents; it is about supporting them
and making sure that young people, wherever they are, have the right
environment. It is too important not to listen to our young people when they
ask for this kind of education to be done in an age-appropriate fashion in
their schools. Now is the time to get it right. Select Committee Chairs
acknowledge that, and, although the hon. Gentleman did not support the letter,
I believe that many do. It is right that we have this debate and I hope that we
can allay those fears, because the consequence of not doing so is to leave
young people at risk, and I do not think that that is acceptable in the 21st
century. I agreed with the Secretary of State for Education when she said that
she was minded to see this happen and that she wanted to consider all the
options, and I believe that this Bill is the right way to do it. There were
discussions about doing it as part of the proposed education Bill, but that has
stalled, for whatever reason. The matter is too important to delay any longer.
That means using this legislative opportunity to acknowledge that, to safeguard
every young person, they need to be taught about consent—not just the biology
of sex, but how to have positive, equal and safe relationships. The truth is
that that is not happening for too many of our young people and we are seeing
the consequences. I will ask the Government to make sure that that work is part
of safeguarding at a local level; that schools are given the guidance to make
it available to every young person in an age-appropriate and inclusive way;
that they work with communities; and, above all, that they do not simply
consult, but set a timetable, because for too long our young people have been
asking us to get this right, and for too long their voice has not been heard. The
hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) is no longer in his place, but I hope
that there will be cross-party support for amendments that I will table on this
subject. I will certainly seek that support, and I know that many Labour
Members—including, I suspect, the Front Bench team—will support those amendments.
I would be happy to sit down with Ministers and look at how we can make these
proposals work, because I do not think that any of us can be happy with the
situation that obtains. There is general agreement that this needs to happen,
and yet there is no legislation to make it happen. We are failing our young
people if we keep kicking this issue into the long grass.
I hope that I can convince the
Minister that there will be cross-party support on another area as well.
Although the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrows) is yet to be
convinced about the case for the changes I have just outlined, I hope that he
will be convinced to back the amendments that I will propose around child
refugees. He and I were certainly on the same side when it came to supporting
the young people left in Calais. I acknowledge the Minister’s statement about
safeguarding child refugees and recognising the importance of extending
safeguarding proposals to our young people. However, I believe that his
statement was undermined by the guidance that was issued by the Home Office at
the same time. The Minister’s statement caused the noble Lord Dubs—a tremendous
champion of our child refugees—to withdraw his amendment to this very Bill
about this very matter. That amendment was withdrawn on the basis that there
was good will across the House about making sure that we safeguarded child
refugees, including during the process of transferring them from overseas to
the UK.
Catherine West I congratulate my
hon. Friend on her outstanding work on unaccompanied asylum seekers, who are
often voiceless. Does she think that enough is being done to provide
post-trauma and post-traumatic stress counselling for those children, who have
seen things that are quite unimaginably horrible?
Stella Creasy My Hon. Friend
raises an incredibly important point. Counselling should be part of the
safeguarding process. Many of us who deal with these young people are concerned
about the fact that many of them are still in France, precisely because of the
guidance issued by the Home Office, which set out a two-step process and
specified that nationality would be one of the criteria for helping child
refugees—ahead of their best interests. It cannot be in the best interests of a
child to put nationality before need, and I hope that the Minister will
recognise that the detail in his statement of 1 November is undermined by such
a strategy. It is right that we clarify in amendments to the Bill that the
country will always put the best interests of a child first, and that includes
child refugees.
Mr Burrowes I was with the hon.
Lady on the Dubs II amendment. Perhaps the link with her proposed amendments is
that we can agree on the outcomes, but the question is how we achieve them. If
we will the ends, is a prescribed piece of statute needed or are there other
means to achieve what we want? We will debate amendments about SRE at a later
stage, but the issue with her proposals about safeguarding is the practical
implementation. We saw with the Dubs amendment that we need to pay careful
attention to practical implementation. Prescribed legislation is not always
required, but we need to hold the Minister to account and ensure that he stays
true to the good words in his statement.
Stella Creasy I thank the hon.
Gentleman for that point. I agree with much of what he has said about the
difference between having to prescribe, and recognising locally-led solutions.
However, I disagree with him fundamentally on both points for precisely the
reason that he is putting out. The outcomes that are being achieved are not
what we desired; they are not the will of this place. The desired outcome in
sex and relationships education is not being achieved at a local level because
there is no clarity about what schools should be teaching, so too many young
people are not getting the appropriate support. Even with the best will in the
world and the best parenting, unless we wrap those children up in cotton wool,
the other young people they meet may present a risk to them.
So, too, with child refugees.
Sadly, with the Dubs amendments, good will has slowly ebbed away in this place
when the implementation has not matched the outcome that we desired. Nowhere is
that clearer than when the Government try to say that nationality is more
important than need. Many of us were delighted by the statement that the
Minister made on 1 November, and then we were horrified to read the Home Office
guidance, which seemed to stand against the spirit of the statement. I believe
it is necessary to clarify that we must always act in the best interests of
those children, just as Lord Dubs sought to act in their best interests when he
tabled his original amendment.
The hon. Member for Enfield,
Southgate will know the battle that we have had throughout proceedings on the
legislation. As difficult and uncomfortable as some of the debates may be, and
although some people may have concerns about child refugees, we must surely all
want to act in their best interests. I am sorry to have to tell the Minister
that some of the Government’s conduct has led many of us to believe that
amendments are necessary. I will seek support from across the House to make
this happen so that we can put the matter beyond doubt, because, sadly, the
guidance from the Home Office does cast doubt on it.
I do not wish to echo the hon.
Member for East Worthing and Shoreham in terms of length—not to undermine
anything he said—but through my proposals I am looking forward to being part of
the legislative process. I am looking forward to scrutinising the Bill. I am
looking forward to seeking cross-party agreement on these issues, because all
of us in this House recognise that protecting children is one of the most
important jobs we do. There may be disagreements about how to get there, but we
do have to get there. We cannot avoid these issues any more. Whether it is our
young people facing an uncertain world or the young people stuck in child
centres in France right now, we have a responsibility for all of them, just as
we have a responsibility for children through our corporate parenting rules. I
hope that the Minister will listen and respond on all these issues. I am happy
to meet him, as I am sure are many others, but we will not rest until this is
resolved.
17:50:00 Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con) It is a great
pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and to have
heard not only Opposition Members’ broad support for the Bill, but the
important points they have raised. There can never be too much consensus on
these issues. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim
Loughton) said, we just need to do better for vulnerable children. Challenge is
part of that, as are new ideas. We cannot allow the Bill to be a missed
opportunity in terms of prevention or the knowledge we give to children,
because they are as much a part of the safeguarding process as any other
structure or law that we put through this place.
The focus of the Bill is very
much children who cannot remain in the family home, but its scope has been widened,
particularly through Government amendments made in the other place, to broader
issues around child welfare. I will focus on: some of the broader issues,
particularly the provisions regarding adopted children and ongoing support for
them; the more contentious issue of the power to innovate, which some Members
have talked about today, the measures on which were voted down in the other
place; and, finally, what more the Bill could do to improve the welfare of
children and to empower children.
The Bill proposes improvements to
the long-term placement of children for adoption and the assessment of their
current and future needs through care orders. I hope that the Minister will
take this opportunity to tell the House how the new measure sits alongside recent
Government announcements on the adoption support fund. I am thinking about the
interim cap on financial support that was put in place midway through the
financial year.
The adoption support fund ensures
that important therapeutic support can be funded for adopted children, some of
whom are coping with difficult trauma, complex and challenging behaviour, and
mental health problems. That can result in a high risk of adoption breakdown.
The fund already helps thousands of families—I believe it was 3,500 last
year—and the Government are increasing the budget to about £23 million this
year. That significant investment perhaps underlines the Minister’s deep
knowledge of the subject and his understanding of the challenges that parents
of adopted children face, which he has gained from his own family’s
experiences. I put on record my thanks to the Minister for all that he has done
to support families with adopted children. I know that my constituents are
enormously grateful for his expertise in this area.
Perhaps we should be unsurprised
to hear that the demand for the fund has outstripped the supply of finances.
The Minister, with the inevitable fiscal duties on him, had to introduce a cap
to the budget in October. Although that was understandable as a normal response
to keep control of budgetary pressures, it has inevitably created uncertainties
for families such as my constituents, Mr and Mrs Cross, who adopted their son
in August 2013. Mr and Mrs Cross are incredible. They have adopted a young
child with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder which, as many will know, means
their son requires significant support. Mr and Mrs Cross have taken the
necessary measures and are doing a fantastic job. The child’s therapy has been hugely
beneficial, leading to real progress, but because it costs more than the new
£5,000 cap, it is uncertain whether the funding will be available soon. The
next phase of treatment costs about £10,000 and would require the local
authority in Hampshire to match fund, in year, any costs over £5,000. Clause 8
calls for long-term plans for the care of a child to be in place, yet my
constituents, who have made an incredible choice to care for a severely
disabled child, are now unsure whether his care can be funded. I hope that the
Minister, perhaps in his response to the debate, will reflect on how a local
authority such as mine in Hampshire might respond, and reassure Mr and Mrs
Cross that the support for their child will continue.
The second issue I want to speak
about is the controversial power to innovate, which was contentious in the
other place. Indeed, the then clauses 15
to 18 were removed from the Bill after a vote.
The provisions would have allowed local authorities to apply to the
Secretary of State to test new ways of raising children’s outcomes and to allow
high-performing local authorities to be involved in that work. It is important
that we pay heed to the strongly held concerns raised by expert voices, not
just in the other place but out with this place, and I will be interested to
hear the Minister’s response to those concerns, which have been echoed again
today. None the less, the Department has put in place something that we need to
look at again: the idea of giving “partners in practice”—my local authority in
Hampshire is one of only eight in the country—the opportunity to look at
innovative ways of working. If we are to find better ways to care for the
vulnerable children about whom we all feel so deeply, we need to be open to new
ideas, so I hope that we can revisit this idea, which was strongly supported by
my local authority as well as experts such as Professor Eileen Munro. It is
right that this tightly regulated area is as protected as it is, but I cannot
believe that there would not be a benefit from our looking at new ways of working.
We will all have seen examples in today’s briefings.
The problem might be—hon. Members
might have put their finger on it today—that the proposals came somewhat out of
the blue, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham said. We
need to take care that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I do
not think that the Minister had any intention for the proposals to create
competition between local authorities; rather, the intention was to drive
improvement, which we would all applaud. No one is suggesting that this
approach would do anything other than drive innovation in an area that has
developed, inevitably, in a piecemeal way in response to the various and
sometimes quite appalling situations in which local authorities have found
themselves.
My hon. Friend the Member for
East Worthing and Shoreham talked about the need for policy and law to work in
practice. When I read the Hansard report of what the Minister in the other
place said, I felt that that was exactly the purpose of the proposals. I think
the intention is that local authorities can look at how they can make the law
work in practice, rather than creating something of a postcode lottery. When
there is an insight into better ways of working, authorities need to be able to
pass it on to other areas to improve the way in which we care for this
vulnerable group of individuals.
The final issue I want to raise,
building on what the hon. Member for Walthamstow said, is what we are doing to
empower children themselves, especially vulnerable children who might not have
the consistent involvement of their parents in their lives and who, frankly,
face difficult situations when they must take decisions about their own welfare
without the input of other adults to guide them. This Bill is one of many
pieces of legislation that have put in place laws, procedures and protocols to
help to protect and improve the welfare of children through a whole host of
agencies, but that does not directly address what we will do to help those
children themselves. We need to ensure that they are armed with the knowledge
that they need to make the right choices to safeguard themselves.
That is not a new concept, but
something that we have done for many years.
For example, we have tried to encourage children to understand the
dangers of drugs, alcohol and, indeed, early pregnancy. It will be important if
can take that forward in a more structured way. As parents and carers, we know
that we have the prime responsibility to protect our children, but we also know
that our children need the ability to make good choices. We cannot be there
24/7; social workers cannot be there 24/7. It is crucial that children can make
decisions themselves in an informed way.
The Bill provides a perfect
opportunity for the Government to respond positively to the five Select
Committee Chairs who have called for PSHE and sex and relationships education,
to be made compulsory for school-age children. I am one of those Select
Committee Chairs. Our work taking
evidence on our recent inquiry on sexual harassment and sexual violence in
schools was a sobering experience for all members of our Select Committee.
We need to help to empower
children to make their own decisions. When we hear the evidence and some of the
statistics about the challenges that young people face in respect of their own
personal welfare, it becomes clear that this debate is overdue and that we need
to act now. Two thirds of girls regularly experience sexual harassment in
school. Children as young as eight are
seeing online pornography as a place to learn about sex, and there were 47,000
sexual offences against children in this country in the last year, a third of
which were perpetrated by children against other children. Communities should be able to enjoy freedom
and safety, and school communities are no different from any others.
When we look at what happens to
children after their school life, we find that, per a study the National Union
of Students, 68% of students say that they are subject to verbal or physical sexual
harassment on campuses. The problem does not stop there, as some 85% of women
are experiencing unwanted sexual attention in public places.
The hon. Member for Walthamstow
is right when she says that this is all about prevention and making sure that
we can stop these problems from happening in the first place by ensuring that
children have the knowledge they need to make good decisions, to understand
what consent means, and to achieve some control over their own personal space
and their own bodies. The Bill has been extensively debated in the other place,
where many amendments were tabled, particularly relating to the importance for
the welfare of children of joint working between agencies, including local
authorities, the police and clinical commissioning groups. In the other place,
the Government tabled amendment 113, which dealt with that, because they
recognised that a multifaceted strategy was vital to children’s welfare.
Another set of organisations also
have a crucial role to play in children’s welfare: schools. If the Bill is to do what it sets out to do
and to promote welfare for children, it must make sex and relationships
education compulsory. What is currently
compulsory in secondary schools is the science of reproduction; the rest is
based on guidance that was last updated at the turn of the millennium and makes
no reference to pornography, through which, as we know, more young children are
finding out about sex. We also know that
40% of schools do not teach SRE very well.
Perhaps all that explains why organisations such as Barnardo’s have made
clear that the development of an early understanding of and respect for each
other’s bodies, and a knowledge of when to ask for help through PSHE can help
to build resilience and an understanding of what healthy relationships look
like, as well as mitigating the effects of exposure to such things as
pornography.
Tim Loughton I am closely
following what my right hon. Friend is saying and agree with much of it. As is the wont of speeches on Bills concerning
children, hers is straying into several subjects that relate to children but
are not dealt with in the Bill, but I support her on this subject. Does she agree that one way of securing the
better-quality PHSE and SRE that we desperately need would be to bring in
experts from outside schools, especially young experts such as youth
workers? They could empathise with young
people who would listen to them, take notice of them and act on their advice. Would that not be better than giving the task
to Mrs Miggins the geography teacher who just happens to have a couple of free
periods on a Thursday afternoon?
Mrs Miller My Hon. Friend is right. Expertise is necessary when it comes to
teaching those subjects. However, as I
have said, I have raised this issue because if we are to tackle the welfare of
children, we must ensure that we do so effectively. It is no good leaving children out of the
equation; we must tackle their welfare head on.
While I do not disagree with my hon. Friend’s point that undertrained
teachers will not provide effective sex and relationships education, I think
that all teachers—whether they are Mrs Miggins teaching geography or anyone
else—need to understand how they can stop the sexual harassment and sexual
violence that too many young people told the Committee they took for granted in
their everyday school lives, and which we would never take for granted as
adults. All teachers should have some
sort of training in this sphere because they are responsible for the wellbeing
of children while they are at school.
Stella Creasy The right hon. Lady
will know that I completely agree with everything that she is saying. May I help her by reassuring the hon. Member
for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) that her speech is entirely in order
in relation to the Bill? Clause 16 not
only deals with the promotion of the welfare of children in local authority
areas, but requires local authorities to work with the “relevant agencies”,
which are those that are exercising functions in relation to children in their
areas. That is exactly what schools do,
and that is why we need to do this now.
Mrs Miller I thank the hon. Lady
for her helpful intervention. We sometimes worry about raising the issue of sex
and relationships in the House because we feel that we are taking away a
primary function of parents, but that is not the way parents see it. Research conducted by YouGov shows that 90%
of parents want compulsory SRE because they understand the pressures that their
children are under. Those pressures have
the potential to undermine the welfare of those children, especially when they
are at school. Teachers understand that,
too. They understand the importance of
helping young people to navigate, in an appropriate way, the pressures of being
a teenager in the internet world.
There is overwhelming evidence of
the need for change and I make no apology for underlining it today for the
Minister’s benefit. Five Select
Committee Chairs have made the same point because of work that their Committees
have done, and the Department for Education itself told the Education Committee
that good PSHE underpins good academic achievement. We know that children who
have received sex and relationships education and PSHE more broadly are less
likely to engage in risky behaviour and much more likely to seek help when
things go wrong. Children need to be able to recognise abuse, grooming and
predatory behaviour. As Alison Hadley of the University of Bedfordshire told
the Education Committee, if children have no “ammunition to understand these
things, no wonder they are ending up in very dangerous situations.”
Educating children about this is
not an optional extra; it needs to be mandatory and an integral part of the
Government’s safeguarding strategy. In January 2014, in response to the
Education Committee’s report, the Government said that they would work to
ensure that all schools deliver high-quality PSHE, but 40% still do not. In
November 2014, the Government established an expert group for PSHE, which
recommended that PSHE should be a statutory entitlement for all pupils. Two
years on, can the Minister update the House on the progress that has been made
on the issue, which 90% of parents want action on, and which Girl guiding, End
Violence Against Women, the NSPCC and Barnardo’s—the list goes on—are calling
for action on?
I call on the Minister to put in
place a timetable for action, including a comprehensive consultation to ensure
that we get this right. No one is calling for rushed measures but, as Members
have said, the issue of making SRE compulsory has been ongoing for some time. Of
course, the education should be age-relevant in all cases, and any proposal
should be implemented in a way that brings the whole House together, because
that is always the best way to handle such important cross-party issues.
18:11:00 Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
I am pleased to follow my right
hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller). I very much welcome this
debate and the time and focus that this Government are devoting to the outcomes
for children who are looked after and to the social work profession. However, I
must declare an interest. My sister is a senior practising social worker and,
prior to becoming a Member for Parliament, I worked for Supported Fostering Services
in a contact supervisor capacity. I am also still connected with that charity
as I remain an independent visitor for one of our looked-after children.
I consider myself to be extremely
lucky. I was brought up in a safe and loving environment and was given the
necessary tools to go out into the big wide world and make my own way. In 2007,
via my sister, I got involved for the first time with Supported Fostering
Services. That was the first time I had the privilege to meet and work with
some of our looked-after children, their families, carers and social workers,
and to see at first-hand the challenges that our young people and the social
work profession face. There has been an increase in children becoming looked
after, and some of that has been attributed to the number of unaccompanied
asylum-seeking children, representing 6% of the looked-after population. I have
also seen at a local level the increase in the number of children in care.
In that environment, it is right
that this Government, and society, are putting the outcomes of our young people
at the top of the agenda. It is also right that there is a focus on the
decisions made about the futures of those young people. In my limited
involvement over the past nine years, I have seen some fantastic outcomes for
our young people, but far too many disappointing ones—some due to decisions
made about their futures and to a lack of understanding of the child and of the
use of timely interventions that are best for that child.
One young person who has been in
care for over 10 years since the age of four has had to go through unbelievable
experiences, which even an adult would struggle to cope with—being split from
siblings, attending therapy, a failed adoption, time in a therapeutic centre,
and number of foster placements and social workers. That young person has
amazing strength of character and a resilience that we could only hope to have.
Luckily, an amazing placement has now been found and that person will succeed,
but it will be despite some of the interventions and not solely because of
them.
If a young person is ready for
adoption by a family that is the perfect match, no one would disagree that
adoption for the child should be a major consideration for social services and
the courts. Achieving the best outcomes for that young person should be the
duty and focus of social services and the courts. Unfortunately, I have seen
decisions on adoptions being delayed by too much focus being placed on
challenges by the birth parents and on their needs, even after several reports
from professionals have recommended a decision. Allowing judgments to be
challenged over long periods does not put the interests of the child first.
A social worker once told me that
she did not like adoptions and that they made her feel nervous. I asked her
why, and she said that the stakes were too high. At the time, I did not know
quite what she meant and I thought it rather an odd thing for a social worker
to say. However, having subsequently seen the damage that a failed adoption can
cause, I finally understand. Relationships with children are like all
relationships. We as adults do not like everybody we meet, and it is the same
for children. We ask a lot of children and adopters when, after an introduction
period of perhaps only two weeks, we put those strangers together and hope that
it works out okay. I know that the process is far more complicated than that,
but fundamentally we hope that a good relationship will be built after only a
short honeymoon period and that the adopters and children will be given the
support they need to make it a success.
I have seen children being given
the best chance of a great life when their adoption has worked, but once an
adoption order has gone through, the support from the agencies stops. The
stakes are high with adoption. It should be regarded as the perfect solution,
but its success will always be dependent on the individual child, and the use
of special guardianships and placements should not be undermined by a focus on
adoption.
I welcome the fact that support
for care leavers features heavily in the Bill, through the local offer and the
extension of personal advisers. This is a major step forward in supporting this
vulnerable group of young people as they make the difficult transition from
coming out of care to going it alone. Some of our young people have had
upbringings and experiences that we would struggle to comprehend. The care
system tries to wrap them in a safety blanket, so a child in care can be far
less prepared to go it alone without a support network of trusted people giving
guidance, or to make decisions for themselves after most decisions have been
made for them up to that point.
It is a long-outdated view that
once a young person reaches 18 or even their early 20s, they do not need any
help. I very much welcome the extension of personal advisers to work with our
young people to ensure they get access to the services they need, to give them
the support they deserve for them to succeed, and to put them on the pathway to
achieving their full potential. That is great, and I very much welcome it, but
will the Minster tell us how this will work in practice? Will personal advisers
always be social workers? How will plans for young people leaving care be
monitored and evaluated to ensure that this is not just a box-ticking exercise
by local authorities, that it provides meaningful help, support and advice to
our vulnerable young people and that the personal advisers get to know the
young person and truly understand their needs?
The local offer will be extremely
important to young people, but we know that due to local authorities’ budget
burdens the availability of that support will very much depend on a council’s
priorities unless there is a statutory obligation to deliver the services.
Investment in our most vulnerable young people at this crucial time in their
lives can only bring rewards, and I would like to see high quality offers from
local authorities for our young people.
A high proportion of formerly
looked-after children are not in education, employment or training. We also
know that leaving care and going it alone can present barriers to prevent a
young person from moving forward with their life in a positive way, even though
they might think of this time as being exciting and full of hope. However, some
of those young people will never have to manage their finances while in care
and are therefore much more vulnerable to getting into debt and not being able
to manage without the safety net that a family or carer can provide. We must
ensure that young people are given all the tools they need to succeed. They
deserve to be treated differently in terms of accommodation provision and
access to funds so that they can move forward and get the best chance to
succeed. My constituency contains a young offender’s institution and a secure
training centre and, sadly, too many of the young people in such institutions
were once looked-after children. That is a direct outcome of not only what they
experienced growing up, but a lack of support and access to the services they
needed as they moved towards adulthood.
My final point relates to social
workers. Policemen, doctors, nurses and firemen are public servants and many
sectors of our society stand up to defend them and will hear no criticism.
However, social workers are often criticised, blamed and singled out when
something goes wrong. They put up with a negative dialogue about their
profession, including stereotypes and being dismissed as interfering
do-gooders. However, our social workers should be held in the highest esteem as
professionals who make decisions, intervene to protect children and families
from harm, work with families to help them stay together and have an impact on
outcomes—day in, day out. They see some of the most terrible situations daily,
including where children are being neglected or physically and mentally abused,
and they work with children who have severe, complex disabilities. Social
workers do not go into social work for the money; they do it because they want
to protect children—often a thankless task.
I remember when my sister was
working in a duty team and would struggle to sleep at night as she worried
about what was happening within some families after she went home. She feared
what she would be presented with when she got into work in the morning. That is
not unusual. It is the daily life of a front-line social worker. I welcome the
creation of Social Work England, even though the profession has some concerns
about the change. Social work is so important and it is right to have a
regulator focused on raising standards, good practice and strengthening formal
training pathways. However, I spoke to several social workers before today’s
debate and, owing to the level of their caseloads, some were not even aware of
the Bill.
Social workers carry out a
mentally and emotionally demanding job, and I feel that one element has been
missed. There is a high burnout rate among front-line social workers and
individual social worker caseloads are far too high in some parts of the
country, causing some to feel unsafe in their work. For example, a social
worker working 40 hours a week with a caseload of 20 would have only two hours
a week per case. The casework could involve a mixture of children in need,
court cases or child protection, all requiring a different amount of attention
in any one week. Some cases require a significant amount of time and yet we
expect social workers to know the children and the family and can make safe
decisions. Such circumstances do not give our professionals the opportunity for
thinking space or allow them to carry out the preventive work that many want to
do. The nature of their work means that every child and family is different,
and social workers innovate every day within the current framework in sometimes
challenging circumstances.
In conclusion, everyone in the
House should champion outcomes for children, who will go on to become the
parents, workers and leaders of the future. It is unacceptable in this century
for some of our young people’s future to be predictable based on their past or
where they have come from. State intervention must work, and I hope that this
Government will continue to push for better outcomes for vulnerable
looked-after children.
I see this Bill as being about
how we best support our children in an imperfect world—a world that we are all
painfully aware of through our casework and work within our communities. That
is why we all share the concern expressed by the hon. Member for East Worthing
and Shoreham about the importance of partnership working—in particular, working
with professionals. Many of us will have dealt with cases where we are acutely
aware that we are not professionals but wish to help, and where the guidance of
social workers with years of experience in complex and delicate matters has
been of vital assistance to us. We therefore recognise that not involving them
in this conversation may take us backwards rather than forwards as a country.
Some of us have real concerns about what will replace the local safeguarding
boards, and how we make sure that the multi-partnership work that has worked in
some parts of the country and led to some significant changes is not lost in
the process of recognising where change is needed.
18:24:00 Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
It was my choice to be last
today, so I am very pleased to be speaking now. It is a great honour to follow
my very hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Kelly Tolhurst), who
made an excellent speech, and I completely agree with her on the support for
adoptive parents; I have a close relative who has adopted three children and it
really is not easy, so I completely agree.
I am very pleased with this Bill,
and particularly welcome some of its measures, including on decision-making
support for looked-after children, and especially the raising of the age of
care leavers to 25 in respect of local authority services. I know that young
people in their 20s still need looking after, having four of my own in their
20s. There is plenty of evidence to show that the brain does not fully develop
until 25, and the state needs to keep its parental responsibility until young
people are firmly launched.
In March 2016, there were 70,440
looked-after children in England, and based on the 2016 data there were 26,340
care leavers aged 19, 20 or 21 of whom 40% were not in employment, education or
training, compared with 14 % of all 19 to 21-year-olds who did not go through
the care service. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham
(Tim Loughton) said, 4% of these care leavers end up in the criminal justice
system.
The role of the corporate parent is
to safeguard the young, but there is a resource aspect to it. Portsmouth
children’s services estimates that if a young person is kept out of a single
involvement in the criminal justice system, it saves the state £100,000 in
various ways, for instance in avoiding the need for probation services, the
cost of the criminal justice system and social services for rehabilitation.
I also mentioned the increase in
age on Second Reading of the Homelessness Reduction Bill a couple of weeks ago,
many twenty-somethings are still living at home, and therefore we need to look
after the housing of our care leavers, too. That protection should follow the
care leavers around the country, so, like any other young person, they are
looked after by either the local authority where they have settled or their
original local authority. I welcome the amendment of the Earl of Listowel for a
national offer for care leavers. Independent living is very different from
living in the care environment in terms of budgeting and looking for jobs, and
there is also the question of setting up home, including dealing with bills and
council tax. I hope the national offer will be accepted, and personal advisers
are clearly identified.
On social workers, I welcome the
establishment of Social Work England as an independent non-departmental public
body. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham mentioned, I
worked with him on a commission on children’s social workers in 2007, called
“No more blame game”. Some of the recommendations were adopted—for instance,
that of the chief social worker—but the General Social Care Council, which was
the regulator, folded in 2012, and the new regulator, the Health and Care
Professions Council, looks after many other jobs. It is important that social
work is a unique job, and therefore we must recognise that it is a separate
profession, on a level with other professionals such as doctors and nurses.
Some of the other recommendations
have already been accepted, but I thought it would be a good idea to remind the
Minister in case he has not read the report. The first recommendation is that
the generic nature of social work must be maintained and resources better
targeted to enable social workers to work with families in a preventive role.
That is largely happening already. There is also the role of the consultant
social worker, which I think is what the sister of my hon. Friend the Member
for Rochester and Strood does. That is a senior practitioner who must be
introduced to keep experienced social workers on the frontline, rather than
putting them into management. That requires an appropriate career and pay
structure to be put in place to support them, because if they do not want to go
into management, there is no other way of going forward.
Thirdly, every social worker
should be encouraged and have an opportunity to become a member of a
professional body like the British Medical Association or Royal College of
Nursing, which could advocate on their behalf, negotiate on salaries and
conditions of services, provide good public relations on behalf of the
profession and influence future Government policy. Consideration should also be
given to a requirement that employers, including agency employers, fund this
membership for the first post-qualifying year to ensure that all entrants to
the profession can become members.
We also recommended that there
should be a chief social worker—an idea we took from New Zealand, where it
works incredibly successfully. This person would work across Departments, and
with Unison, the British Association of Social Workers, other representative
bodies and the media. Again, my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood
mentioned that the attitude some people take about social work is appalling,
because it is an incredibly tough profession. We need to get the media to look
at the health of the profession, and provide good news stories and cases. I do
not know whether anybody is watching “Damned”, but it shows how hard the
profession works, although it is made to be amusing. It would be nice if we
could also have positive stories coming out in the media.
Our next recommendation was that
the social work degree must continue to be generic to allow social workers a
good foundation in all aspects of social work, so that they can get a good
grasp of all the different aspects of looking after children in the care
service. The content and the length of the degree course might be reviewed, to
equip them with the right knowledge and skills for rewarding jobs—I believe
that is in the Bill, too. That is beginning to happen. We also considered that
the course should extend to four years, so that they have a year out in
practice and get a good grasp of what they are getting themselves into.
Our next recommendation was that
multi-agency training should be incorporated into the qualifying degree and
should continue to be part of continuing professional development. In many
professions, be it teaching or medicine, professional development is incredibly
important. Social workers need that continued professional development and
support throughout their career. We also recommended that the Department of
Health and the Department responsible for children’s services work with local
authorities and other employers of social workers to ensure that resources,
both course fees and replacement time, are available so that all social workers
can undertake the level of post-qualifying education and training necessary for
the roles and tasks they are employed to undertake. Again, that goes back to
the point about continued development.
There should be a combination of
a national recruitment campaign and local headhunting to encourage more people
to enter social work. As we have heard, there are a lot of vacancies and social
workers are incredibly overworked. It is an incredibly rewarding profession and
we need to ensure that we get more people into it, so we need a national
recruitment campaign. One way of doing that is through high-impact advertising,
like that we see for the Army, for the police and for teaching. We need it to
send a clear message that the role of social workers is important in society
and should be respected.
Another recommendation was for
the establishment of the newly qualified social worker status, which is
essential to supporting and retaining inexperienced social workers. Often, they
were coming out of university and going straight into work in harrowing
circumstances and were not getting the support they needed. I hope we will also
look at apprenticeships in social work. I know we are doing those in nursing
and it would be great if that could extend to social work. Social workers need
to have protected caseloads and guaranteed post-qualifying study and training
time, so that we retain the social workers we already have. There also needs to
be a flexible pay structure that corresponds to those of other similar
professions working in multi-agency teams and that recognises the difference in
living costs around the country. We also said that the numerical adoption
targets and other targets that are not in the best interests of the child
should be phased out, and I am pleased that has already been adopted. We also
suggested that better targeted funding should go into research and development
in social care.
Some of our recommendations have
already been accepted, but this very good report is now nearly 10 years old, so
if the Minister has not read it I insist that he does so. I ask him to look at
anything that we have not done already, with a view to putting it into
practice. I hope that the new regulator continues the improvement that has been
happening in the social work profession. It is a tough job at the front line
but it is a very necessary and rewarding one. I look forward to seeing this
Bill go into Committee.
18:45:00 The Minister for Vulnerable Children and Families (Edward
Timpson)
I begin by thanking hon. Members
for their enthusiastic engagement with the issues at the heart of the Bill. We
all share a commitment to improving the lives of our most vulnerable children,
and that has been demonstrated by the energy shown throughout this debate. As
we enter Committee, I look forward to exploring in much more detail aspects of
the Bill that have been raised today.
As the Minister for School
Standards set out in opening the debate, protecting our most vulnerable
children and giving them the care and support they need to thrive is one of the
Government’s most important responsibilities. The children who need support
from social care services have often faced challenges that most of us can only
ever imagine. They have disabilities, they have faced abuse and neglect, or
they have been let down time and again by the people who are supposed to love
and protect them. They may be being exploited by perpetrators preying on their
vulnerability. Children’s social care professionals deal with these highly
complex and demanding challenges every day. They step up and take on
responsibility for protecting our vulnerable children.
In my time as children’s
Minister, as a family barrister and as a foster sibling, I have often been
inspired by stories of children whose lives are transformed by social workers,
foster carers, residential care staff, adopters and others. These people
epitomise the compassion and deep desire in our society to help others, without
which we, and our children, would be so much the poorer.
The Bill we are debating today is
a critical part of creating a children’s social care system that enables those
people to do the very best job possible for our children. It builds on the
Children and Families Act 2014 and takes forward important measures from our
overall strategy “Putting children first”—a strategy that I think represents
the most fundamental reforms to the system in a generation.
The Bill places the interests of
vulnerable children right at the heart of the social care system. It defines
what good corporate parenting looks like, and secures the involvement of the
whole council in looking out for children in or leaving its care. It requires
every local area to set out exactly what support it is offering care leavers,
and extends the help of a personal adviser to all care leavers up to the age of
25. It introduces improved national arrangements for analysing serious
incidents and learning from them, and strengthened arrangements for local
multi-agency co-ordination of safeguarding.
The Bill extends educational
support to children leaving care via adoption or special guardianship. It
creates the conditions for good placement decisions to be made for children
coming into the care system, by ensuring that the child’s long-term needs and
the impact of the harm they have suffered are properly considered. Furthermore,
it introduces a new, bespoke regulator for social work, Social Work England—an
organisation that will be empowered to raise standards in social work and raise
the status of that vital profession.
Members have raised a multitude
of important points in today’s debate, and I will do my very best to respond to
them without detaining the House longer than would be deemed acceptable. I am
grateful for the constructive engagement of Members, and want to work together
to move forward with these legislative provisions, which have huge potential to
improve the life chances of the children we all care so deeply about.
The hon. Member for
Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), the shadow Secretary of State, asked where
our comprehensive strategy for all children in care was. We have it: it is the
“Putting children first” document, and I urge her to refresh her memory of that
all-encompassing strategy for children in care, which goes through to 2020.
The hon. Lady asked about
spending on children’s services. It is right to say that the pattern of
inspection outcomes is not about how deprived an area is, the local geography
or even the amount of money being spent on children’s social care. Some of the
local authorities judged inadequate by Ofsted this year were among the highest
spending, while higher performers were found to spend their money more
effectively, investing in the best services and bringing costs down. The key
here is identifying where investment makes a difference, and spreading
knowledge and practice about what works.
The hon. Lady asked about the
local offer and about what guidance there would be for local authorities. The
legislation already sets out the areas where local authorities should provide
support: health and well-being, education and training, employment,
accommodation, participation in society, and relationships. We expect a wide
range of services to be covered, from relevant universal health provision, to
careers advice, to specific financial support, which care leavers can access
and will benefit from. We have also developed a prototype local offer that sets
out the areas we expect local authorities to consider and that provides examples
of more specific support a local authority may choose to offer, and I am happy
to share that with the hon. Lady so that she can scrutinise it in more detail.
The hon. Lady asked about the
independence of the new regulator—Social Work England. The Bill makes it clear
that Social Work England will be a separate legal entity, with its own staff
and set of responsibilities as a non-departmental public body. The Government
have always been clear that they have no intention to make decisions about
individual social workers, and that is reflected in the legislation.
The Chair of the Education
Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), made some
central points about the foundations of the Bill, which he welcomed, and that
included the regulatory changes. He raised the issue of a professional body for
social work, and I agree that it is important for the profession to have a
strong body to represent it, to provide support and guidance, and to help it
develop its own practice. I set out at the national children and adult social
services conference a few weeks ago, exactly how I want to work with the
profession to make sure we come up with the right solution. We have tried a
whole host of different ways of making these things work, and we now need to go
further to make sure we have something that will endure long into the future.
My hon. Friend alluded to
Trafford, one of the outstanding care-leaving services in England, and to the
virtue of its having strong leadership. I agree with him, and I have been
hugely impressed by the work that has been done there by Mark Riddell and his
team. There is a lot they can show others in terms of what works.
The hon. Member for Motherwell
and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) told us to look at the work in Scotland. I am always
happy to look at the Scottish perspective. As ever, I invite her to look at
what we are doing in England, too. She said Scotland has children at the heart
of the system; so, do we—if she looks at the “Putting children first” strategy
document, she will see that. Although Scotland may lead the way in some areas,
we lead the way in others— “Staying Put” being a good example.
The hon. Lady asked why local
authorities are only to “have regard to” corporate parenting principles. The
reason for that is that the local authority is the corporate parent and is
legally responsible for looked-after children and care leavers. We believe that
maintaining this clear accountability is right. There is an existing duty under
section 10 of the Children Act 2004 in terms of who the key partners are, and
they include health, police, education services and others. The intention is
that the provisions will help improve the response in terms of them carrying
out the duties they already have set out in legislation.
The hon. Lady asked about the
Government’s commitment to the UN convention on the rights of the child. The
Government remain fully committed to protecting children’s rights and to the
UNCRC. We have considered the concluding observations of the UN Committee on
the Rights of the Child, and we responded through the written ministerial
statement published in October and through the permanent secretary’s letter to
his counterparts across Government. The Bill is an example of how we constantly
seek to not only protect children’s rights but enhance them. A full child
rights impact assessment was conducted during the development of the Bill.
There was considerable debate in the Lords on this issue, and we recently
reaffirmed our commitment, through the written ministerial statement, to
reinforcing the message of the importance of the UNCRC across every Department
and to making sure there is a proactive approach to considering children’s
rights in policy making.
I will do my utmost to address
all the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and
Shoreham (Tim Loughton). I do join him and my hon. Friend the Member for
Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond) in praising the incredible work and dedication
of our social work workforce—something that was reiterated by the hon. Member
for South Shields (Mrs Elwell-Buck). Children’s and adults’ social workers do a
fantastic job, which is so difficult, day in, day out.
I agree that the administrative
burdens on social workers—sitting in front of computers filling in forms—has
hampered much of the progress of social work. I have read on several occasions
the report, “No More Blame Game”, which my hon. Friend the Member for East
Worthing and Shoreham was instrumental in producing. The whole purpose of the
changes we are making to the serious case review process is to get away from
pointing the finger and to look at where things have gone wrong, why they have
gone wrong and how we make sure that it does not happen again in future.
My hon. Friend set out some of
the highlights of the Government’s reform programme in children’s social care
over the past six years, mentioning “Staying Put” as one of those. I can inform
him that there has been an exceptional response to this, with 54% of
18-year-olds, 30% of 19-year-olds and 16% of 20-year-olds now choosing to stay
put. Of course, however, we keep the mechanism under review to ensure that it
will continue to benefit more children and young people in future.
My hon. Friend talked about some
of the deficiencies in the system, including in sharing best practice. Again, I
agree. That is why we are setting up a what works centre for children’s social
care that will build a robust evidence base, and disseminate learning about
what does and does not work in children’s social care practice, to help local
practitioners and commissioners to employ the most cost-effective front-line
practices to support children. Crucially, it will work closely with the child
safeguarding practice review panel to ensure that practice developments
identified through reviews are also widely disseminated.
On adoption, I share my hon.
Friend’s pride in the work of this Government to try to improve the adoption
process for prospective adopters and, crucially, for children. The number of
children being adopted has risen to over 5,000 per year, and they are being
adopted more quickly. On the back of the Re B-S judgment, however, there has
been a disappointing fall in those numbers, and we are seeking to do all we can
to address that so that we do not lose the ground that we made up in the early
years of this Government. Over 10,000 families have benefited directly from the
adoption support fund, which was also mentioned by my right hon. Friend the
Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller). Although we reluctantly had to put in a fair
access limit in the short term to enable more families, where at all possible,
to benefit from the fund, we want to try to find a sustainable solution so that
we can continue this support in the long term. I am happy to meet my right hon.
Friend to look at the case she raised, as it may exemplify some of the wider
issues we need to look at in getting the decision right.
My hon. Friend the Member for
East Worthing and Shoreham asked whether the corporate parenting principles are
additional to section 23 of the Children Act 1989. This is not about trying to
put new duties on local authorities, as the duties are already very clearly set
out. We are trying to engender a whole-council approach with councils taking
responsibility for children and their care, and having regard to the principles
in any decisions they make on their behalf.
Although we are extending the use
of personal advisers, I concur with my hon. Friend that there is a whole range
of quality and access for care leavers to personal advisers. That is why we are
conducting a review of both those issues to make sure that the scope of what a
personal adviser is there to do, and the types of people who become personal
advisers, together with the training that they get, really matches the needs of
care leavers in the way that they have told us they desperately want.
My hon. Friend raised some
drafting issues and details around the additional support for education of
children in care. I will look at that carefully, and I am sure we will address
those issues in Committee.
On serious case reviews, I could
not agree more with my hon. Friend about the need for transparency. We worked
hard in opposition on the issue of their publication. I remember substituting
for him on “News night” to talk about this very subject. We now need to make
sure that the new system reflects this important element of an approach that
will provide us with a shining light on where practice has fallen short.
My hon. Friend asked about active
participation in new local safeguarding arrangements, including financial
contributions. That is an important part of the new system and we will set out
in more detail, in guidance, how we expect to engender such an approach. He
also made a clear pitch for where we should go next with the power to innovate.
I will talk about that at the end of my speech.
My hon. Friend the Member for
Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrows) asked about cases of mothers who have repeat
pregnancies. He should know that we will spend a total of about £11 million
until 2020 on the Pause project, which has been extremely successful in trying
to break that cycle, helping mothers find a different path through their lives
and reducing the number of children coming into the care system.
The hon. Member for Walthamstow
(Stella Creasy) talked about the need to concentrate on prevention, which must
be at the heart of any decision about where money should be spent and where
policy should be moving to. Several other hon. Members also talked and sex and
relationships education, and I will come to that subject towards the end of my
speech.
On child refugees, the hon. Lady
referred to my written statement on the safeguarding strategy across
Government. I am grateful for her support for it, but she queried how it sits
alongside the Home Office guidance. I will look carefully at what she has said
and talk to Home Office Ministers. The Home Office has published guidance
setting out the eligibility criteria for children to be transferred to the UK
from Calais. Those criteria are: all children aged 12 or under; all children
referred to us by the French authorities who are assessed as being at high risk
of sexual exploitation; and those nationalities most likely to qualify for
refugee status in the UK aged 15 or under. As the Dubs amendment makes clear, children
transferred should be refugees, and the best interests of the child are also
established in every case as part of the process. The hon. Lady will appreciate
that we must have a method to ensure that those children who are at greatest
risk are prioritised. I am happy to discuss the matter further with her, in
conjunction with my colleagues at the Home Office.
Stella Creasy
Does the Minister acknowledge
that that guidance explicitly sets out nationality before the best interests of
the child and, further, that it identifies nationalities, thereby ignoring, for
example, the Oromo and Afghan children who are currently in France, a third of
whom have now gone missing because of the gap that it has caused? I appreciate
the Minister’s offer to look carefully at the situation, but will he look at it
speedily as well, because we are very worried about those children in the
run-up to Christmas and the cold in France?
Edward Timpson
I am happy to do that. Like the hon.,
Lady, I do not want to create conditions that are counterproductive to our
shared mission. I will make sure that acknowledgment of the further work that
needs to be done is as rapid as possible and that we progress in a way that
does not create more difficulties, but that brings about positive solutions.
My right hon. Friend the Member
for Basingstoke mentioned the adoption case in her constituency. I am happy to
discuss that further with her. We need to move to a more sustainable approach,
but the adoption support fund has shown that there was a real need for that
additional therapeutic support. As the Minister with responsibility for
children, I am committed to doing what we can to continue to do that into the
future.
My hon. Friend the Member for
Rochester and Strood (Kelly Tolhurst) spoke of her enduring experience of many
issues touched on by the Bill. She raised delays in the adoption process, and I
agree with much of what she said. She will be pleased to know that the average
time that it takes for a child to get through the adoption system has reduced
to 18 months—a reduction of four months from its peak—but more work needs to be
done, because every month that goes by is one that the child will never get
back. More children are receiving that adoption support and I know that my hon.
Friend will ensure that that message gets through to families in her own area
who may not yet realise that it is available. She was also clear that the new
provisions for care leavers are a major step forward, but I acknowledge that we
need to make sure that social workers and personal advisers have the necessary
tools to make the most of those changes.
I am grateful for the support of
my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South for our measures to improve the
support for care leavers. She raised the issue of a national offer. I have met
the relevant Minister at the Department for Work and Pensions to see what
further practical action we can take, and I will be able to allude to that in
more detail in Committee. I take her point on social worker training, which is
very much behind the work that we are doing on the assessment and accreditation
process to make sure that we raise standards in social work wherever possible.
The hon. Member for South Shields
and I get on very well, but I agreed with very little of what she had to offer
this afternoon. She questioned the value that we place on the experience and
expertise of social workers, but I must say to her that that is exactly what
this Bill is about. I ask her to look more widely at the work that the
Government are doing, such as the innovation programme, where we have already
spent more than £100 million. That money has gone directly to local authorities
to test new ways of working, and there will be another £200 million up to 2020.
That £300 million of value has been put directly into improving children’s
services.
When the hon. Lady started her
speech, I felt as though she was determined to try to turn the debate into some
sort of ideological struggle on many of the issues. I do not think she wanted
to do that, but we seemed to be moving in that direction. I understand her
desire to oppose and to be seen to oppose, but I hope that when we get into
Committee, we can have a constructive debate about what is in the Bill and how
it fits into the wider Government programme. I do not doubt that we have a
shared desire to improve outcomes for vulnerable children. I have a pragmatic
streak running through me; I am not some ideologue who will sit here and create
a wall of noise. I want to hear the hon. Lady’s argument, but I want her to
hear mine, too.
The hon. Lady raised the Laing Buisson
report, but I note that she failed to share with the House the official
Government response to that report, which states that “we disagree with the
option in the report relating to the privatisation of children’s social care
services and we will not be implementing this option.” We could not be clearer
about our position.
I want briefly to talk about the
power to innovate, which has generated the most debate. Several hon. Members
have raised questions about the power to innovate, a provision that was removed
from the Bill in the other place, and which my hon. Friend the Minister for
School Standards referred to at the opening of the debate. We intend to revisit
those powers, because of the important role that they stand to play in
improving the quality of children’s social care. I am grateful to my right hon.
Friend the Member for Basingstoke for her support in explaining that new ways
of working are a means of driving improvement in practice.
Whenever I visit local
authorities and speak to front-line social workers—I am obviously not meeting
the same ones as the hon. Member for South Shields—I am always struck by the
passion, energy and dedication that they bring to their work. Too often, though,
I leave with a message that, rather than helping them in their task, the
structures and processes that we have put in place prevent social workers from
using their professional judgement to truly respond to the needs of the
children they look after.
As Professor Eileen Munro’s
landmark review of child protection told us, over-regulation can get in the way
of social workers’ ability to put children first. The power will address that
challenge, and it is being called for by local authorities around the country.
It will give councils the ability to test new ways of working that are designed
to improve outcomes for children in a safe and controlled environment, where
the impact of removing a specific requirement can be measured and evaluated
carefully.
That is not to say that important
points have not been raised in the House and in the other place. I have
considered them all carefully and I will continue to do so, and I will bring
back a power with significant changes and additional safeguards that will, I hope,
provide the reassurances that have been requested.
I want to be clear: we do not
want to privatise protection services for children. We will not privatise child
protection services. There are already clear legislative restrictions on the
outsourcing of children’s social care functions, and it was never our intention
to use the power to innovate to revisit those. To put that beyond doubt,
however, we tabled clarificatory amendments in the other place.
Neither will we remove
fundamental rights or protections from children. Our aim is to strengthen, and
not to weaken, protections. My mission—since entering this House and before—has
always been to improve the lives of vulnerable children. It is our job as a
Government to create the conditions in which excellent practice can flourish. I
am convinced that with proper safeguards in place, the ability to pilot new
approaches will, in the long term, allow this House to enact more effective,
evidence-based legislation and drive wider improvement for our most innovative
practitioners and services across the system. I agreed with Professor Eileen
Munro when she said:
“I welcome the introduction of
the power to innovate set out in the Children and Social Work Bill. This is a
critical part of the journey set out in my Independent Review of Child
Protection towards a child welfare system that reflects the complexity and
diversity of children’s needs.
Trusting professionals to use
their judgement rather than be forced to follow unnecessary legal rules will
help ensure children get the help they need, when they need it. Testing
innovation in a controlled way to establish the consequences of the change…is
a sensible and proportionate way forward.”
I ask hon. Members, before
casting a final judgment on the power to innovate, to consider the amendments
that we intend to table, which I believe provide that “sensible and
proportionate” approach, built on the clear and single purpose of improving the
outcomes of vulnerable children.
Finally, my right hon. Friend the
Member for Basingstoke, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud and the hon.
Member for Walthamstow spoke powerfully about sex and relationships education.
I, too, recognise its importance. Of course, the Government already issue
statutory guidance on the teaching of sex and relationships, and have made
funding available to improve the quality of that teaching. However, I have
heard the call to go further in this area to build the resilience and
confidence of children and young people in tackling what the modern world
throws at them, not least online. This is, of course, a topic on which there
are many, and strongly held, views and it will be important to look at those in
the round, not least because PSHE and SRE are inextricably linked.
This matter is a priority for the
Secretary of State, so I have already asked officials to advise me further on
it, but I will ask them to accelerate that work so that I can report on our
conclusions at a later point in the Bill’s passage, when everyone in the House
will be able to look at them and have their say.
I am sure that these reflections
only start to do justice to the range of important issues we have debated here
today. I look forward to picking up these matters in greater detail as the Bill
moves into Committee. I see the contents of the Children and Social Work Bill
as a major step forward in making sure that our most vulnerable children get
the levels of support, protection and opportunity that any of us would want for
our own children. I welcome the debate and challenge we have engaged in this
afternoon—it helps to maintain the momentum behind what is a shared endeavour
across these Houses. We are all united in our commitment to improving the lives
of our most vulnerable children. Please let me leave the House in no doubt that
I recognise and accept the challenges we face. This Government are more
determined than ever to rise to those challenges, with our clear and ambitious
plan for fundamentally reforming the system. Our vulnerable children deserve no
less. I commend the Bill to the House.
Our next recommendation was that
multi-agency training should be incorporated into the qualifying degree and
should continue to be part of continuing professional development. In many
professions, be it teaching or medicine, professional development is incredibly
important. Social workers need that continued professional development and
support throughout their career. We also recommended that the Department of
Health and the Department responsible for children’s services work with local
authorities and other employers of social workers to ensure that resources,
both course fees and replacement time, are available so that all social workers
can undertake the level of post-qualifying education and training necessary for
the roles and tasks they are employed to undertake. Again, that goes back to
the point about continued development.
There should be a combination of
a national recruitment campaign and local headhunting to encourage more people
to enter social work. As we have heard, there are a lot of vacancies and social
workers are incredibly overworked. It is an incredibly rewarding profession and
we need to ensure that we get more people into it, so we need a national
recruitment campaign. One way of doing that is through high-impact advertising,
like that we see for the Army, for the police and for teaching. We need it to
send a clear message that the role of social workers is important in society
and should be respected.
Another recommendation was for
the establishment of the newly qualified social worker status, which is
essential to supporting and retaining inexperienced social workers. Often, they
were coming out of university and going straight into work in harrowing
circumstances and were not getting the support they needed. I hope we will also
look at apprenticeships in social work. I know we are doing those in nursing
and it would be great if that could extend to social work. Social workers need
to have protected caseloads and guaranteed post-qualifying study and training
time, so that we retain the social workers we already have. There also needs to
be a flexible pay structure that corresponds to those of other similar
professions working in multi-agency teams and that recognises the difference in
living costs around the country. We also said that the numerical adoption
targets and other targets that are not in the best interests of the child
should be phased out, and I am pleased that has already been adopted. We also
suggested that better targeted funding should go into research and development
in social care.
Some of our recommendations have
already been accepted, but this very good report is now nearly 10 years old, so
if the Minister has not read it I insist that he does so. I ask him to look at
anything that we have not done already, with a view to putting it into practice.
I hope that the new regulator continues the improvement that has been happening
in the social work profession. It is a tough job at the front line but it is a
very necessary and rewarding one. I look forward to seeing this Bill go into
Committee.
The second reading was agreed
without a division.
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