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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for highlighting those important points about criminal justice and young people, and for her chairmanship of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children, which is very much appreciated by other Members. I was shocked recently to learn from a briefing that we incarcerate more children than do several of our neighbouring countries combined. When the noble Lord, Lord Warner, was chair of the Youth Justice Board, he always used to say, ““We are trying to improve conditions for children in the secure estate, but it is as if one is chasing a bus: each time one moves a little forward, it pulls away further””. Professor Morgan, who was until recently the chair of the Youth Justice Board, had very much the same experience. We continue to have rising numbers of children in custody, as we have had for many years. I am most grateful to the Minister for laying out the Bill with his customary clarity. He has been a champion for the education of looked-after children. I hope that we may hear news of his important work in increasing the use of boarding schools for children in these circumstances. I shall now say something not for your Lordships’ sake, but for those who may be reading the record of this debate. We have been given helpful information on the statistics involved, but we need to bear in mind the fact that very few children who enter care have had any involvement with the criminal justice system beforehand. Sixty per cent of them have had experience of abuse and a significant further number have seen family breakdown. Many end up in the criminal justice system, but we must remember that by far the majority of young people leaving care do not go down that route. I was grateful to my noble friend Lady Howe of Idlicote and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for their kind words. In this House, our praises are our wages, so I value what they said, although I wish their praise were better deserved. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was sad not to be able to be present today, because of a long-standing engagement, but he will want to table amendments to the Bill that make supervision of those for whom a social worker is responsible a statutory duty throughout the period when a young person is in custody. That would include taking part in case conferences and making suitable arrangements for accommodation and release. As vice-chair of the Associate Parliamentary Group for Children and Young People In and Leaving Care and a patron of the children’s advocacy service, Voice, I warmly welcome this Bill. It had a careful gestation and there is much in it of which the Government can justly be proud. However, there is also room for improvement and I trust that we may be permitted to assist in that. Furthermore, I regret to say that there is the significant omission of a promise made in the White Paper, which I considered to be its most important offer. We were promised a, "““statutory duty on local authorities to secure a sufficient and diverse provision of quality placements within the local authority area””." It is clear from the Bill’s impact assessment that the resources that are to come with the Bill will not be sufficient to ensure a long-term, stable framework for children in public care. That might come only with the duty that was promised. I accept the caveat of my noble friend Lady Howarth of Breckland, that legislation often disappoints, but if a duty is put on local authorities to provide sufficient placements, that at least puts some obligation on the Government to fund them. If there are not enough placements, one young person will continue to be pushed out of care prematurely to make room for the next. This obligation is fundamental to the success of Clauses 8 and 9. Good-quality local placements will often be more expensive, because most of the children concerned will be from metropolitan areas. Cheaper distant placements in the country will be less of an option. At Second Reading, it is right to speak of principles, which need to be understood by reference to the history of public care. The Minister is a historian. I hope that he will forgive my reductive and tentative narrative and correct me where I am wrong—if not now, perhaps later. From 1979 there was a recognition that the state had promised what it could not deliver and should not be expected to deliver. For many people it had created a culture of dependency. There followed a rolling-back of the state, an essential liberalisation that revived the economy. However, at the high point, it came to seem as if sometimes there was no such thing as society. Critical responsibility for the elderly and for children and families passed more and more from central government to local authorities, which often had neither the resources nor the expert leadership to care for the most vulnerable. Their first priority, understandably, were their electorates, whose own first priorities were neither foster care nor social work. There was a wasting away of services or a failure to develop them adequately. The most vulnerable in society above all need a personal, enduring commitment from their carers. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, called it a trusting relationship over time—correctly, in my view. Their carers, professional or otherwise, require an equal commitment from society. It has been likened to a set of Russian dolls: a child cradled in a foster carer, in a social worker, in a local authority, in education and health services, in the Government, and in the taxpayer and elector. That commitment broke down. A child in residential care was pinned down in punishment. A foster carer with no experience was given a child with a long history of neglect, very difficult to manage. A social worker was given a case load of 19 and a child died after months of torture. A child had 50 different placements. A young person had 15 different social workers. Regulation, inspection and bureaucracy ensued following these avoidable failures. These reactive measures incurred further costs and made caring more unattractive. The vacancy rate for social workers in London went up to 20 per cent. The Government have made serious attempts to address these decades of neglect, but we must remember the history and the challenge that are faced in addressing this. The Bill provides the opportunity further to rebalance the equation that increasingly disfavoured children in need and at risk in the last decades of the last millennium. This Bill provides the opportunity for central government to move closer to taking their share of responsibility with local government. There is a hole in the Bill: the impact assessment does not account for the cost of local authorities securing a range of suitable placements for children in public care, nor is there the promised provision in the Bill. Only if the Government place such an obligation on local authorities will there be the funding and only then can we be sure that children will not be edged out before they are 18 or 21. Without the required number of placements, we cannot be sure of children staying near their schools. Three years ago, the chief inspector of the Commission for Social Care Inspection said that 40 per cent of children were in inappropriate placements. BAAF identifies a shortage of 8,000 foster carers in England alone. The Minister has spoken of resources and he may reply by saying that Her Majesty’s Government have increased annual spending on looked-after children from £1.3 billion to £1.9 billion per annum, with only small improvements in outcomes for those children. I remind him of the second joint chief inspectors’ report into provision for safeguarding children, which we debated two years ago. The chief inspectors found that lack of resources resulted in thresholds of intervention being set too high. Consequently, children taken into care in this country have often experienced such trauma that only costly interventions can remedy and we have underestimated that cost. This year, the Commission for Social Care Inspection highlighted that thresholds are still too high, denying many access to services. My second response to this question of resources and their impact is that until the Government’s White Paper Options for Excellence, which the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, mentioned, we had no strategy for placing or using our investment effectively. It takes years to develop the committed people who can deliver the change that we all want to see. Of course, there are local authorities that do well even under financial constraints, but they often have to work against the grain. On education, I particularly applaud placing designated teachers on a statutory footing. Many young people in care are worried about schools having information about their care status. At the same time, the school needs to partner the carers and support the child’s personal education plan, so it is vital that there is the expertise to manage this information sensitively. I hope that the concerns raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, can be responded to in Committee. The duty to provide local placements, except when this is against the welfare interest of the child, is welcome. It is right that children should be able to veto moving out of their placement before the age of 18 and, indeed, 21. Given the trauma that many of these young people have experienced, their support needs may well extend beyond 18 and 21. We should be able to accommodate that. I am concerned at the proposed introduction of pilots for independent social work practices, as many other noble Lords have been. I read with interest Consistent Care Matters: Exploring the Potential of Social Work Practices, which was the product of a distinguished working group. One can see the attraction of a GP-style practice in keeping social workers close to their children. Professor Le Grand recognises that the proposal is controversial—one had the sense of strong doubts even from members of the working group—and that it is not a panacea. However, to be effective it is necessary to concentrate. Her Majesty’s Government already have a strategy for the social care workforce, Options for Excellence, and there is much to do in implementing that. If Her Majesty’s Government have money to spare for pilots, should they not rather invest it in reducing social work case loads? Should they not invest it in building capacity in local government? For instance, the Minister and his civil servants might consider ring-fencing some social work funding. They might seek to trial this with a sympathetic local authority—a controversial step, I know, but we saw how very effective the three-year ring-fenced funding was under the Quality Protects programme. We already offer our schools such ring-fencing. The Government have made a good start in addressing the needs of the social care workforce and I know that they are renewing their efforts as we speak. Yet I am told that entry to a social work degree course can be gained with three Ds and that a student can complete the degree without one placement in a social services department. We still need to pay foster carers and social workers an amount reflecting the degree of their responsibility. Director of Barnet social services, Paul Fallon, originated the idea of allocating senior members of the local authority with a guardianship role, at a distance, of looked-after children. He reduced his social work vacancies from 33 per cent to 3 per cent in three years. He did this in part by asking himself daily, ““What am I doing for my social workers?””. I am worried lest Her Majesty’s Government lose their focus on their main task. I hope that the Minister can reassure me. A foster carer’s response to the proposal for these practices was that in his local authority there are so many vacancies that two social workers carry the case load of a team of eight. In such circumstances, of course they would leap to join such a practice, but who then would do their work? It seems ill advised to invest funds, the energies of our civil servants and all our attentions on a proposal that seems impractical from the outset. Will not such practices strip social workers from the services around them, creating centres of excellence and deserts in between? In early years care, I have had voluntary providers tell me that, as soon as they train their staff, those staff leave for the statutory sector. Private prisons tend to recruit the best senior staff whom the statutory sector has developed and then neglect to develop their own front-line staff. In the past, some of the best social workers have left front-line practice, where we need them, for work as guardians in family law, where we also need them, because the working conditions have been so much better. Children’s homes lose their most qualified staff to field social work. I can see why these practices appear attractive, championing their children against the local authority, but it may be better to ensure that local authorities are obliged to provide, and are resourced by the Government to do so, a sufficient range of appropriate local placements and to concentrate on implementing the established strategy for social care, including its recommendations on case loads, supervision and continual professional development. I have spoken too long and should like to conclude. We shall have opportunity to look at these other issues in detail in Committee. I look to learn more from the Minister about social work practices. This Bill will do a great deal to improve the lives of children and young people in public care; it will raise their lives on the agenda of local authorities and I applaud the Government for bringing it forward. However, there should be an obligation on local authorities to provide a range of appropriate placements for these children, thereby obliging Her Majesty’s Government to fund such a provision. At the very least, we need a commitment from the Minister that he will press for such a duty in the next Comprehensive Spending Review in three years’ time. There needs to be enabling legislation in this Bill for later regulation. I hope that I am being fair to the Minister. I look forward to working with him on the Bill and hearing his response to this debate.