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Local Government and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I am pleased to take part in the debate. I particularly welcome the announcement in the Queen's Speech of a Bill to improve services for vulnerable children and young people, including those in public care. It is good that Ministers are taking forward their proposals in the ““Care Matters”” White Paper, to improve outcomes for looked-after children and young people. The Government have made real progress in the past 10 years in helping children and young people, especially under the Every Child Matters agenda. It is right that we are offering universal support and help to parents through services delivered in children's centres. In my constituency, Stockport, in two of the most deprived areas parents are being offered a range of services that include parenting courses, speech therapy for young children, advice on diet, StoryBus read and play, and share care schemes. Many years ago I was a social worker in those same areas. At that time it was almost impossible to access services for vulnerable families. The services that were available in specialist centres stigmatised and separated those families from the wider community and labelled them as social care families—a label that followed the children through their school years to the time when they became parents, and the cycle started again. Of course, those families are hard to reach and to help, but the difference now is that services are available, and because they are universal and are often provided by local parents and the imaginative use of volunteers, those hard-to-reach families will be reached. Their children will benefit and will stand a better chance of staying with their parents, with better parenting than happened in my day, when the choice was to leave children in bad situations or take them into care, which meant placing them in situations that did not improve their life chances. As the Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan) said in a recent speech,"““We need to recognise that, where the state is responsible for a child's welfare, it has a moral obligation to care for that child as any other good parent would””." So I particularly welcome the White Paper's focus on improving outcomes for children in public care, especially in their educational attainment at school. I am especially interested in improving outcomes for the group of young people who, because of the complexity of their problems, are often cared for in children's homes. There are 6,500 children in children's homes and hostels in England. That is 11 per cent. of all children. Children in children's homes tend to be older. Just 1.5 per cent. of looked-after five to nine-year-olds are in such accommodation, compared with 14 per cent. of 10 to 15-year-olds and 23 per cent. of those aged 16-plus. Those children and young people are—understandably, because of their backgrounds—among the most challenging in their behaviour, and the most needy of the best care that the public system can provide. Without a stable care placement, there is little chance of a stable school or training placement, and without that there will be no improvement in outcomes or in their life chances. They need the best care both in the care placement by the provider and in the support and interventions of the corporate parent—the local authority that has responsibility for looking after them. One of the issues that concerns me locally is the number of children from other boroughs who are placed in my local authority area, Stockport. In 2005 Lord Filkin, then the junior Minister with responsibility for children and families, wrote to all councils stressing that"““a firm Government commitment that, save in exceptional circumstances, out-of-authority placements for looked after children should be restricted to cases where they are clearly in the child's best interests””." He argued that too often such placements were not in a child's best interests and made it harder for a local council"““to act as an attentive corporate parent””," and that children were"““less likely to thrive if they are living well away from their own communities””." He added that"““out-of-authority placements can also result in unhelpful concentrations of children with high levels of need in particular parts of the country””." I wholeheartedly agree. This is exactly the problem that we are experiencing in Stockport. How can social workers miles from a children's home satisfactorily discharge their corporate parenting responsibilities without delegating them totally to the provider, whose interests may not always coincide with what is in the best interests of the child? My concern is that in some parts of the country local authorities are not heeding this Government advice, and that children, especially those with complex behaviour problems, are being ““exported”” from one borough to another. The growth of independent children's homes has created some positives—for example, choice and tailored placements suitable to children's needs—but also some negatives. While it has allowed some local authorities to seek better value by closing their own children's homes, it has led to an increase in exporting children elsewhere. For example, I understand that more than 1,000 children from other authorities are placed in Kent. In Stockport we have 200 children placed from other boroughs; indeed, we have 17 per cent. of all children's homes within Greater Manchester. Although most homes offer a good if not excellent service there are, as there are everywhere, ““rogue traders””. There are incentives for local authorities to place children out of their own borough. While the placing authority pays fees to the private home—in some cases up to £4,000 per week per child—it is the receiving local authority and the police that have to foot the bill for tackling repeat offending and running away, education and health, including mental health. A Greater Manchester police analysis showed that 81 per cent. of all children missing from home are missing from children's homes in Stockport, compared to a conurbation average of 65 per cent. That reflects the complex difficulties of those young people, the high level of private provision in the borough and the difficulty that those private homes have in managing those children. Our local research showed that children missing from home during a particular six-month period had committed on average just under five offences each, and that 47 per cent. had been victims of crime on more than one occasion, which included physical and sexual assaults. There is also evidence of substance misuse and prostitution when missing. A failure to manage those children in care not only has a high resource cost for the authority in which they are placed but, more importantly, exposes them and the wider community to risk. In Stockport we have seen the profitable development of a market in importing prolific and priority offenders from other boroughs. In one case, authorities were leafleted by a Stockport home owner with an offer to send their persistent and schedule 1 offenders to his private children's home in Stockport. The problem is that the care provided by such homes does not seem to manage or stabilise the behaviour of those young people. The area round one three-bedded children's home in Stockport that took offenders from Liverpool was hit with a swift rise in burglary, car thefts and criminal damage. My interest is in ensuring that the children in those small homes are looked after and supervised properly, and that the inspections are rigorous in taking into account factors such as repeat offending and the number of times children run away or go missing. Children's homes of whatever size are now regulated by Ofsted, which registers and inspects them a minimum of twice a year. There are national minimum standards that children's homes must adhere to, and each home must have a statement of purpose. Inspectors should assess the home against the aims of the Every Child Matters agenda, which includes categories such as ““Staying safe””, ““Enjoying and achieving””, ““Making a positive contribution”” and ““Achieving economic well-being””, so there are criteria against which homes can be measured. However, there is anecdotal evidence in Stockport that in practice the inspection reports are not as rigorous as they should be. I understand that some reports do not adequately report how often children get into trouble or go missing, and are more concerned with issues such as the quality of food and the cleanliness of bathrooms. It cannot be right that an inspection report on one Stockport home failed to mention that one young person had offended 89 times. Surely reference to that would have been relevant under the ““Staying safe”” category of Every Child Matters. If such issues are not reported, how can other agencies provide the interventions needed to help the young person concerned and others like them? As Lord Filkin said, children are less likely to thrive if they are away from their own communities. If the child or young person is a long way from home, there is less opportunity to do whole-family work. Also, if a young person is placed in their authority of origin, offender management and safeguarding will rest with those who are more familiar with the case. There will therefore be greater stability in the resourcing and provision of substance misuse services, child and adolescent mental health services, family work, parenting, education, training and employment. I am also concerned that the requirement under the Children Act 1989 to promote contacts with families can be difficult to meet if children are placed away from home. Children in children's homes will often have complex physical, behavioural and educational needs. If we are to improve the outcomes for such children, it is crucial that all the local agencies have a full knowledge and understanding of the problems. The children and young persons Bill offers an opportunity to address those issues and the gap in outcomes between children in care and their peers, and to improve placement stability and consistency for children in care. It should be mandatory for the local crime and disorder reduction partnership to be notified by private homes when a prolific and persistent offender is exported into their area. However, some homes will not share information as to who is resident, which makes the CDRP's task of either safeguarding or reducing crime more difficult. We should also consider standardising the base assessment of young people before and during placements to ensure both that the inspectors are mindful of the ““Staying safe”” category in reducing crime and tracking runaways, and that inspectors report fully on such incidents. If those measures were used robustly, they would stop providers from offering inappropriate placements for young people who they know they cannot manage, and act as a lever for improving staff training. There can be no doubt that it is best to place children in a home near to their own home, because the social worker responsible for supervising and reviewing their case can easily access and make use of local agencies to improve the life chances of that young person. That is inevitably more difficult if a child is placed outside the area, many miles away. Inevitably, however, some children will be placed outside their own authority, for very good reasons and because it is in their best interests. It is important that we have a robust and strict inspection regime that reports on all aspects of their progress, so that the child who is a long way from home can be properly parented and his or her life chances can be improved. It is important to address those issues with this most difficult group of young people—and we cannot achieve that without improving public care and corporate parenting.