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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to take part in a piece of legislation which so obviously has the objective we all share—improving the life chances of children and young people in public care. The legislation might better have been called the Listowel Bill because during all the years that I have been in this House, it is the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, who has kept the attention of the Government and noble Lords on the issue of children in care. No one in this House knows more than he does about such children, and I very much look forward to hearing his critique of the Bill later this afternoon. The Bill is a real step forward and will promote more stability in care placements, a bigger place for the voice of the child, more independent support for the child and, I hope, a better quality of care and more appropriate placements. There are many good things in the Bill. For example, we welcome the higher education bursary for children in care, but feel it is important that they are given training in how to manage their own money, or they will not feel the full benefit of it. We also welcome the £500 education support grant, but we would like to see social workers having to consult the child and his foster parent about how to invest it. These are only two of the matters about which the voice of the child should be heard. It is vital that he also has the right to independent advocacy whenever any significant decision is being made about his future. Sadly, with all its virtues, the Bill stops short of that. Many of these children are extremely articulate, but they are still children and need the support of a friendly adult to help them to express their views. The Bill, of course, is not the only change that will help children in care. The Care Matters implementation plan and the review of the national minimum standards for fostering services next year should also deliver major improvements. However, today we are considering the Bill and there are a number of areas where we hoped the Government would have gone further. I should like to mention some of the issues about which we will be calling on the Government to do more during the Bill’s course through your Lordships’ House. First, on the subject of refugee children, we welcome the duty on local authorities to appoint an independent person to visit all looked-after children, including those in custody and long-term residential placements, but we would like to see this extended to young asylum seekers. I would like to see unaccompanied refugee children treated no differently from any other children in the care of the state. Can the Minister explain how the Home Office reforms fit in with the Care Matters agenda? Of all children, separated asylum-seeking and trafficked children need the most support. That is why many of the children’s charities, including Save the Children, are calling for an independent guardianship scheme. This seems like a very good idea and could easily be piloted and evaluated. Most children in care these days are fostered rather than placed in children’s homes, as we have heard, so I should like to raise the matter of the proposals to restrict out-of-area placements. I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton. Of course we agree that usually it is in the child’s best interests to be placed near to his family, friends and school. However, although we support in principle the desire for most placements to be local, restricting this to a particular local authority boundary can be a rather clumsy tool. We know it is usually cheaper but we do not want a local authority to find it easier, after the passage of this Bill into law, to move a child into its own area on financial considerations only. There are situations in which the special provision the child needs cannot be provided ““in area””, or protection issues that make it desirable for the child to be placed away, so we want the child’s safety considered as well as other aspects of his welfare. Some local authority boundaries are a little idiosyncratic, to say the least, and the nearest suitable provision could be over the border. We do not want this proposal as a lead weight around the ankles of local authorities. How will it work and how will children be protected from local authorities using this provision as an excuse to cut costs? How are the Government planning to ensure that all local authorities provide sufficient and diverse quality placements so that all children can be properly catered for locally? Many young people in care will have experienced massive disruption in their lives and need extended support as they move into adult life. We welcome the provision that prevents 16 to 18 year-olds being pushed into independent living without their consent, which I gather currently sometimes happens, and it is important that they have independent support in making these decisions and making their views known. But the Care Matters White Paper expressed a desire to see 18 year-olds able to stay with their former foster carers until they are 21. That should happen whether or not they are in full-time education. It should be noted that the average age at which young people leave home these days, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, is not 21 but 24. The young people we are talking about need more support, not less, than those who live with their families. So we welcome the pilot schemes but feel that every local authority should provide supported transitional living arrangements for young people leaving care and moving into independent living, and that the Secretary of State should take powers to regulate such arrangements. We also call on the Government to publish the results of the pilots before rolling out these arrangements. Many young people in care have been placed since they were very young and have little knowledge about their background and birth family. In that way they are similar to adoptive children, yet the law about their right to information is very different. We will be exploring ways in which the law can be changed to give them similar rights to information about their family. My noble friend Lady Barker will be saying something about that later on. I am very disappointed that the Government intend to postpone for another three years a compulsory registration scheme for private fostering. The enhanced notification provisions brought in by the Children Act 2004 are clearly not working well enough. Although the numbers registered have increased from 730 in 2005 to 1,250 in 2007, it is estimated that the real number is between 8,000 and 10,000. Just over one in 10 is not good enough. Are the Government planning to postpone the implementation of a registration scheme just because they do not have enough evidence of whether the current system is working, or because it is not being implemented energetically enough? I would have thought the figures showed that the current system was not working properly, so what are the Government doing to raise awareness of the need to notify private fostering arrangements? I do not want to inhibit families from making their own arrangements, nor am I advocating a clumsy one-size-fits-all system. There is a wide range of perfectly safe arrangements agreed within families for short periods that would not benefit from the dead hand of bureaucracy. However, the fate of poor little Victoria Climbié reminds us that there are arrangements where the safety of the child is seriously at risk, and the Government must devise a system to track down such cases and protect the child. Whenever we debate fostering in this House, we always pay tribute to the excellent and valuable work of foster carers throughout the country. Without them, thousands of children would never know what it is like to live in an ordinary home with an ordinary family. However, foster carers often deal with very disturbed children and sometimes allegations are made about them. Some may be true and should be dealt with accordingly, but some are false. It is therefore important that foster carers should be afforded every opportunity to clear their name and should not suffer financially while that is being done. I welcome Clause 29, which says that decisions about their approval or reapproval should be reviewed by an independent body. However, we will be exploring the meaning of ““qualifying determination””, which we believe needs very clear guidance. We also believe that fees should continue to be paid while allegations are being resolved or we will risk losing good foster carers who will be forced, because of financial need, to come out of the service and take other jobs. We cannot afford to lose them. Indeed, we call on the Government to work with the local authorities to make their published fee scales much more transparent, and to work towards having all foster carers properly paid in a way that reflects the value to the community of the work they do. Most foster carers are keen to constantly enhance their skills and become more professional in the way they support children, yet they are currently not able to register with a professional body. Are there any plans to allow foster carers who so wish to register with the General Social Care Council? Of course, sometimes the best foster carer is a member of the child’s own family—what is known as kinship care. We welcome in Clause 7 the Government’s intention to introduce a new framework for care by family and friends, but are concerned that it offers no guaranteed levels of financial support and, crucially, no right to assessment for financial support. Whether grandparents get financial help or not is often a matter of chance; it can depend on whether they were asked to take the child at the weekend or on a Monday morning, when proper applications can be made. That needs sorting out and we will table amendments accordingly. Having a child raised within its own family is highly desirable and we welcome the increased flexibility to give support to families with children in need, to enable them to stay in the heart of their family. The intensive family support services provided by the NCH and others save many children going into care, which is highly desirable, but if they have to leave the immediate family and live with extended family, that family should not be financially penalised. The family should also be consulted if there is a strong possibility of the child having to go into care as a matter of best practice. Most young people in care go to school. We welcome the Government’s decision to heed our blandishments and put the designated member of staff on a statutory footing, but we would like to ensure that this responsibility is not given automatically to hard-pressed SENCOs. We also welcome the provision that children should not be moved in years 10 and 11 except in exceptional circumstances. However, although some examples are given in the Explanatory Notes, perhaps the Minister will say something more about how the provision will affect the post-14 and post-16 opportunities available to these children. Perhaps I should say something also about the proposals in Clauses 1 to 6, which allow private social work practices. My noble friend Lady Sharp will say more about this, but we will assess the proposals on their ability to provide more and better social services to the most vulnerable children and families. Anything that is in danger of providing better services in one area at the expense of another has to be viewed with scepticism. There is a danger of these services creaming off the best professional social workers and offering them better pay and conditions, while nearby local authority services suffer. The knock-on effects worry me. With recruitment and retention of social workers still in disarray, I am worried about shaking up the system in this way. We must have full information from the pilots, not just about their work but about their effect on all the services around them. We must have robust evaluation in a diverse set of authorities for an appropriately long time. If they raise the overall standard and reduce from 30 the number of social workers that some children see, as the Minister has just told us is the case, that is fine; if they do not, it is not a good idea. Finally, I shall say a word about children with disabilities. There are 13,300 disabled children and young people who are placed away from home in England. They, too, should enjoy the statutory right to independent advocacy. Although guidance states that they should be doing so already, it is not happening everywhere, so perhaps it is time to introduce a statutory duty. There are many good things in this Bill for those regarded as looked-after children, but some disabled children are not given that status. We would like the Government to consider giving them that status because of the advantages that it will bring. Children who do not enjoy such status include all disabled children placed away from home in 52-week specialist residential provision. On the other hand, there are disabled children who receive short breaks but remain normally resident with their families who do not need looked-after status. These things need sorting out. We hope that the Government will clarify in guidance the difference between a regular programme of short breaks to support the family where parents retain parental responsibility and situations where the child really needs looked-after status. I could talk about many other aspects of the Bill. I will leave it to my noble friend Lady Sharp and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, to talk about provision for the physical and mental health of looked-after children. Suffice it to say that I look forward to our debates in Grand Committee and beyond, and hope that this promising Bill can be made even more so when the Government, as they always do, listen to your Lordships.