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Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]

We certainly welcome the Bill. This is another year and another children's Bill, and, as with previous such legislation aimed at protecting vulnerable children, we will support it. This latest and long-awaited Bill deals with probably the most vulnerable group of children and young people in the UK—those in the care system. As the Minister has rightly said, it has been a scandal for too long, and remains so, that the treatment of, and outcomes for, children in the care system are woefully poor. Those children have been the victims of systemic neglect and of an institutionalised paucity of expectations for too many years, and it is vital that the Bill marks a major turning point in reversing that. I welcome what the Minister has said about the change of culture that is required, and I share her praise for social workers and foster carers, many of whom have lobbied us today about their vital and dedicated work. Some 61,000 children are in care in England and Wales, 42 per cent. of whom will return to their families within six months. However, we should not forget the estimated 350,000 adults who have spent part or all of their childhood in foster or residential care in this country. For many of them, the experience will become a generational legacy, as their own children end up in the care system, which happens all too often. We have heard about the scandal of outcomes for children in the care system in areas such as education. Despite the public service agreement targets, the priority action toolkits for key stage 4 looked-after children, the Education Protects programme, life chances funds and so on, the achievement of children in the care system on basic measures such as the achievement of five good GCSEs is still too poor. Worse still—the Minister alluded to this—the gap between children in the care system and mainstream children has widened over the past few years. All standards have gone up, as measured by GCSE achievement, but the gap in achievement between those who are and those who are not in the care system has widened. Furthermore, the increase in achievement has not been nearly as fast for those in the care system as for all children, which is deeply worrying. In addition, children in the care system are more than 10 times more likely to be excluded from school. Some 33 per cent. of them end up not in education, employment or training; just 2 per cent. of them go on to university; and 27 per cent. of them have statements for special educational needs compared with just 3 per cent. of all children. The same thing is happening in the justice system. Some 25 per cent. of people in prisons came through the care system, and the figure is anything up to half of those in youth offender institutes. Such children are four times more likely to smoke, drink under age and take drugs, and last year, 9.5 per cent. of over-10s in the care system were cautioned for or convicted of an offence. Not doing something more urgently about this situation is a false economy, because by the age of 19 a persistent offender will have cost £164,000 every year. That figure includes the cost to the victim, the court costs, the cost of prison and benefits and the cost to social services, which is an enormous cost not only to society but, most importantly, to the individual involved. We must also consider teenage pregnancy rates—one in four women leaving care is either pregnant or already a mother—and health statistics. Children in the care system are more than five times more likely than children in general to have a diagnosable mental illness, and many still do not receive the health checks that they are supposed to receive within the first 14 days of coming into the care system. Some two thirds of those children will have at least one physical health complaint. Perhaps the most tragic and disturbing statistic is that last year no fewer than 100 children in the care system died, which was an increase on the figure of 95 in 2004. We often talk about children who are killed at the hands of their carers or parents—the relevant figure is about one or two a week—but more children are dying within the care system for a host of reasons. The system is there to protect those children from the ravages of deprivation and health inequalities, so those figures are deeply disturbing. The Bill is desperately required and very welcome, but there is an urgent need to translate its good intentions and good directions into actions and results. We will do everything possible to speed the Bill's implementation. It has enjoyed close and positive scrutiny and improvement in the other House. I pay tribute to Lord Adonis, who has great personal experience of children in care, to my noble Friend Baroness Morris of Bolton, who has great expertise in and dedication to this area, and to many other Lords who brought about constructive improvements to the original Bill. They, like the Minister, are all too aware of the challenges that we all face in helping children in the care system, because the effects of failure will impact on the whole of society and are not restricted to the cost of more than £2 billion a year of children in the looked-after system. We welcome much of the Bill, such as, for example, the rewriting of clauses 7 to 10, particularly in respect of the mechanics of placement and the preference for placement with extended family members, which should be, but is not, happening already. We also welcome the references to proximity placement, which has been discussed since Sir William Utting's report in 1997 suggested a 20-mile radius cap. Although kinship placements are supposed to be the preferred option in this country, only 1 per cent. of social worker-instigated placements ended up with kinship carers, compared with 45 per cent. in Denmark, for example. We need to maintain continuity of school and education. The poor outcomes are not surprising, given that the social exclusion unit reported that 29 per cent. of children had undergone three or more educational placements during secondary school and that 25 per cent. of children had been in six or more care placements during the same period. We also support the Bill's hierarchy of kinship care placements locally to retain a familiar environment. We are talking about providing appropriate foster carers locally or, ultimately, in a residential home, where the appropriate care can be made available, especially for those with complex needs. We recognise that residential children's homes, which look after about 6,500 children at the moment—they tend to look after older children—have a place. They may be more appropriate as the first port of call, but the average cost of some £2,100 a week in those residential homes is leading to some local authorities cutting placements, although those fees include contracting for psychiatric and other specialist services in many cases. We need to take on board the shortage of skilled foster carers as well. On any day in this country, 50,000 children are living with 43,000 different foster families. Just last month, local authorities said that they urgently need at least 5,250 more foster carers to come forward this year, with the worst shortages in Manchester and the north-west. That results in thousands of children being sent to residential homes or being forced to travel miles to temporary placements and siblings having to live apart from their brothers and sisters, according to the Fostering Network. We welcome the greater specifications for visiting children far away from home in the residential placement provisions contained in the Bill. We welcome all those measures, not least because many of them were included in the 2005 Conservative manifesto, ““Action for Vulnerable Children””. [Interruption.] I am sure that hon. Members want to participate in the shared congratulations. As the Minister has rightly said, all of us have campaigned on those issues for many years. However, we must recognise that what counts is not just passing the Bill, but the effectiveness with which it is put into action, backed up by resources and implemented by professionals at the sharp end who are appropriately trained, appropriately motivated and free to get on with their jobs. This week, we remember yet again the death of Victoria Climbié more than eight years ago, because the social worker who was responsible for her welfare has had her appeal upheld by a tribunal, but how much have we actually learned post-Victoria Climbié? Is the whole system of children protection now in better shape to protect children from death and injury at the hands of parents or carers, or to give children the best second chance of a successful and stable upbringing when taken into care? If it is in better shape, why are so many children still dying before they can be taken into the care system or even after that? Is the system sufficiently flexible either in care or with the birth family? This is a good Bill. Lots of work has been done to improve it, but there are a number of areas where it can be made better and will stand a better chance of working in practice, and we will table amendments to that effect. I hope that the Government will continue to engage with us in a constructive manner, as they have in their lordships' House. In particular, we want an amendment that will put a welfare checklist at the forefront of the Bill. There are concerns that many of the measures in the Bill do not go far enough and that many local authorities will only do the minimum to comply, not least given the constraints on spending, because of all the other children protection requirements that the Government are rightly introducing, and the more thinly spread funding for children's centres, which are now competing for funding within children's services budgets. We suggest a checklist at the beginning of the Bill mirroring section 1 of the Children Act 1989, which forms the heart of that legislation and which remains an important benchmark today. For every case, the actions of the local authority or other agency that acts for looked-after children would be expected to measure up against a checklist of considerations designed to be in the best interests of individual children, and such bodies would be accountable for that. We will table an amendment to propose the post of a chief social worker. That measure was recommended by the Conservative party commission on social workers, which reported last October and which I chaired. Such a person would be the public face of social workers, akin to the chief medical officer or the chief veterinary officer. We have such an officer for animals, for goodness' sake, and we should have one for people who deal professionally with children as well. The officer would be directly responsible to the Secretary of State and advise on ways to promote the image and perceptions of social workers among the public and on how social workers can do a better job and be held accountable when that is not the case. Too often, the perception of a social worker is as someone whose first contact with a vulnerable family is the knock on the door to initiate proceedings for a child to be taken into care. They are caricatured as child catchers. Not only is that deeply demoralising and not in the interests of social workers, but it is certainly not in the interests of the children and vulnerable families with whom they work and with whom they need to establish a relationship of trust and empathy in difficult circumstances. Such a role is used in New Zealand, and I have had a long conversation with Marie Connolly, who is the chief social worker for New Zealand. There are signs that that post has done a lot of good for the perception and standing of social workers in that country. We revealed yesterday that one in five of the 76,000 social workers in this country have signed off work for 20 consecutive days or more in the past five years. That is not good for the profession, and it lies behind why we still have high vacancy rates. My local authority has vacancy rates of about 20 per cent. for child social workers., yet those people are absolutely integral to the success of child protection legislation and the Bill, and we need to do more to boost their position. We support the inclusion of new clause 7 in the Bill to extend the duties in respect of the welfare of children to the Border and Immigration Agency. That provision was proposed by my noble Friend Baroness Morris and passed in the House of Lords with a large majority against the Government, and we very much hope that the Government will not seek to remove it in Committee. We want more direction in the Bill. Wherever possible, and in accordance with the interests of the child, the default position should be that an extended family member is the priority for a placement. We want greater safeguards for children in care over the age of 16. As the Minister mentioned several times, it is absurd that the majority of children leave care at the age of 16 or 17, when they are facing most turbulence in their lives with exams at school, the possibility of getting a job and trying to sort out accommodation. Yet for our sons and daughters, with their birth family, that happens when they are at least 24. We look forward to a discussion with the Minister on that front. There has been some progress since the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, but 41 per cent. of children leave care by the age of 17. We need to give more focused, ongoing support. We need far tighter controls over multiple placements. We need greater specifications for the qualifications of responsible social workers who visit children placed out of the area, usually in children's homes—out of sight and out of mind in too many cases. That was supposed to happen already. Some of us took a delegation to see Lord Warner, the then Minister responsible, but it is still not happening in too many places. In my authority in West Sussex, it is estimated—it can only be an estimate—that more than 700 children have been placed in the care system by other authorities. That compares with 42 children placed by West Sussex out of county—in Kent, the figure is estimated to be 1,250. Yet the local children's service department, the local police, the local council or the local justice system must pick up the pieces when things go wrong. That notification should be happening; it is not happening, and it must happen in the interests of all those involved. Clear concerns have been expressed by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, which produced a survey showing that 81 per cent. of looked-after children appearing in court in those areas where they were placed out of their home authority did so without the prior knowledge of the local youth offending teams. Again, that is an absolute travesty. We welcome the inclusion in the Bill of a designated teacher responsible for promoting the welfare of looked-after children. Again, that should be happening already—if it is not happening, it must happen, and the guidance must be followed. We also want a designated governor to oversee that teacher and ensure that the governing body is fully behind the new role, and we shall table amendments to that effect. We will table amendments stipulating that incentive payments cannot be paid to local authorities to increase adoption numbers, which is a perverse incentive that we cautioned against during the consideration of the Adoption and Children Act 2002. One has only to look at the extraordinary discrepancies between the number of adoption placements in certain authorities and the Minister's admission that those payments had been made to question why that perverse incentive still exists. In Committee, I will quote the Minister's written answers to my parliamentary questions, which show that those payments, which are not in the interests of children, have been made. We also want to give greater powers to foster carers, so that they can take on the role of as normal a parent as possible. We want them to have the authority, without having to refer back to the social worker, to say whether a child can have a sleepover with a mate from school or go on a school trip. At the moment, much of that must be delegated back to the social worker. We need foster carers, many of whom are long-term foster carers, to be able to play the role of the pushy parent—a figure whom those children lack and so desperately need in the place of a birth parent. We need to give foster carers greater powers by sending out a clear message from the Government to local authorities to back them. Similarly, we need safeguards to ensure that foster carers do not become the victims of vexatious allegations by difficult children. There needs to be a balance so that children are protected. As we heard from foster carers again today, too many vexatious complaints against them result in their being instantly suspended and their allowances' being suspended too. We need to get the balance right. In our amendments, we will return to the thorny subject of private fostering. It was mentioned and recommended by Sir William Utting in 1997 and by some of us in amendments to the Adoption and Children Act 2002. It was mentioned in my private Member's Bill in 2003 and again in 2004, when the Minister came up with a sunset clause that the Bill will extend and that we will try to abolish. Surely, now is the time at long last to implement a proper legal requirement for the registration of private foster placements, given that the voluntary scheme has yielded only a relatively small number of cases. Too many private fostering schemes go on at the moment without the knowledge of local authorities and without proper safeguards for vulnerable children, as we have seen in certain tragic cases over the past few years. We also want to see better safeguards on birth parents' passing on medical records for adopted children. Again, there are too many cases of children who have been through the care system falling foul of what turns out to be a congenital illness. If the medical records had been available from their birth parents, preventive action might have been taken. We also want to explore how we can get greater transparency in the family courts, which remains a serious bone of contention. We also want to see greater rights of sibling contact, if children cannot be placed together. A National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children survey showed that 40 per cent. of children and young people said that they did not have enough contact with siblings. That evidence was backed up by A National Voice and the Who Cares? Trust. Such contact should not merely be allowed by local authority, but facilitated and promoted. I am sure that many other considerations will come up in Committee and I greatly look forward to debating children's issues with the Minister again. Most of this is not rocket science. There are already many examples of good practice around the country. For example, a few months ago I opened the new Horizons education and achievement centre in Ealing. It is a fantastic institute manned by former care leavers who have been to university and come back and who now teach educational, computer and other skills to young people in the care system. It is no coincidence that 14 per cent. of children in care in Ealing now go on to university, which is substantially more than the national average. In Barnet, the authority has invested in a buddy system. Every child in the care system has a buddy who is an officer in the local authority, from the chief executive down. That officer looks out for them and asks the questions that a pushy parent would ask at a school parents evening or about health records. Barnet invested in its social work force some years ago. It invested to save, and it is now no coincidence that the vacancy rate for child social workers in Barnet is less than 4 per cent., which is one of the best in London. Other great examples of best practice include the Community Service Volunteers scheme—I think that the Minister has mentioned it. I declare an interest as a trustee of CSV. It has piloted the use of volunteer social workers in child protection in Bromley and Sunderland. The volunteers primarily support the parent with the stress of having their children on the register and the threat of their children being taken into care. They can establish more stability by helping parents to manage the heavy schedule of meetings with schools, social workers and health professionals, attending parenting classes and ensuring that children go to school or nursery, and they can help to organise a routine at home. When the approach was piloted in California, instances of child abuse fell by 80 per cent. The volunteers are viewed differently from social workers, who are metaphorically in uniform. They have a great role to play, and I hope that the legislation will allow the flexibility to promote similar schemes and the use of volunteers, whether through CSV or other organisations. Family support is key. As the Minister has said, we are talking about children and the care system, but we need to do an awful lot more to prevent children from entering the care system in the first place. The charity NCH, for example, has been running the Phoenix project, which I recently visited in Merton. The project works with families in crisis using a solution-focused therapy model of work. Support is offered for a period of three months, with all interventions regularly reviewed. When the work is completed, families are tracked after six months to see whether their progress has been maintained. The project consists of a rapid response team, an adolescent resource team, family group meetings and so on. It has found an enormous fall in the number of children who then go off the rails, thanks to the fact that those families have been kept together. Let me give a third example, which is another project by NCH in Fareham on intensive fostering. Intensive fostering has learned from the positive practice used in remand fostering of co-ordinating services around the young person. This tried and tested method has many proven benefits. Research by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering to evaluate the NCH's remand fostering scheme found that more than 70 per cent. of young people committed no offences during their placement despite persistently offending before and that all the young people were engaged in school, training or employment by the time that they left the placement. Intensive fostering has a great role to play, because it has been piloted and has been shown to work. Those are good schemes that are working, and we need the flexibility to promote more of them. Perhaps there is too great a focus on the child rather than on the problems undermining a family that might result in the loss of a child to the care system. We need to talk more about fostering families, rather than just fostering the child, and keeping families together wherever possible. We need greater flexibility and greater innovation. We must ensure that the work force is appropriately trained, motivated and free to get on with the job of looking after children at the sharp end. We need to end bureaucracy and the excessive aversion to risk that can culminate in perverse incentives to take more children into care rather than working preventively with families to keep them together. At the other end, the system hurries children aged over 16 out of the care system to free up social worker time and resources. That is likely to turn out to be a false economy as vulnerable young people slide back into the mire of the familiar problems that I described earlier. We also need to listen more and take note of children and young people. A report by the ““What Makes the Difference?”” project revealed that 40 per cent. of young people in care said that they rarely or never have a say in a placement, which is another great sign of weakness that we need to address and reverse. The Bill is a last chance for many in the care system whom we have failed for too long. Every two months' delay represents 1 per cent. of childhood with the child in the care system condemned to mediocrity and the likelihood of underachievement. That situation is simply not acceptable any more. It is an enormous waste to society as a whole, to us and, most of all, to the 61,000 children and young people in the care system for whom the failure to invest seriously in the problem has been a false economy for far too long. We should approach the Bill by asking ourselves whether the current system, or the proposals, would be good enough for our own children. If we cannot answer yes, we are not doing our job properly. For those reasons, we wish the Bill well and will engage positively with the Minister in Committee.