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Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I shall certainly come on to that point, but at this stage I shall just say that independent advocacy is particularly important for those severely disabled children who may be forced by the severity of their condition to remain in a residential placement for most of the year. It is very important that their voice is heard, and in respect of children with extreme needs I can see that happening only when they have somebody who can work closely with them and almost tune in to how they feel about certain issues. That independent advocacy is vital, particularly when such children are far away from home. As far back as 1997, Sir William Utting, in his report ““People Like Us””, concluded that looked-after children needed independent advocacy as a source of protection and as a means of making their voices heard within an otherwise closed system. Most importantly, children and young people say that they want advocacy. A National Voice indicated that up to 90 per cent. of children it surveyed held that view. There are two aspects: the expression of a child's views by those responsible for the outcome; and the representation of a child's view and their rights by a professional advocate. Those are two very different things, and the role of the independent review officer never entirely covers both aspects. I would firmly come down on the side of those who have long argued for a statutory right to independent advocacy for looked-after children when significant decisions are being made in their lives. It is sometimes suggested that with all these adults in a child's life, an advocate would be just one more, but I think it would help them to make sense of the roles of all those adults. We have heard a lot about the work force, and of course social workers are absolutely key to the futures of looked-after children, who want a stable relationship with their social worker and find it very disruptive when there is a churn of temporary social workers in all the areas where there are shortages. The right training for social workers is absolutely vital. I have some reservations about the proposal for independent social care practices. We do not know whether that will produce the outcomes that might be achieved—we do not have evidence one way or the other. I can therefore see the point of having pilots, but we are in danger of having more and more pilots with long periods before evaluation. In this case, I wonder whether we will get more social workers or end up with the displacement of social workers. As the Select Committee said, the pilots need to fill the evidence gap on social work practices. It is vital that they are properly evaluated and are not rolled out unless there is clear evidence that they will provide essential continuity and stability for looked-after children. The evaluation must also take account of any knock-on effects on our local authorities in terms of whether there has been any diminishing of services, perhaps because of an overall shortage of social workers. The jury is out on that. We saw some welcome policy evolution in the other place. We started with the commendable objective that we wanted to have as many children placed within their own local authority as possible, but overlooked the fact that some children need to access highly specialised provision that will not be in the immediate area. We have reached a point where local authorities have a duty to secure a sufficient and diverse provision of accommodation for looked-after children in their area, to make decisions that are in the best interests of the child when there are out-of-area placements, to take on board the issue of schooling, particularly in the critical years 10 and 11, and to look on kinship as a preference when there is consideration of a child perhaps being moved away from its immediate birth family. I have long been committed to the idea that we should expand the use of kinship care, which is very patchy across the whole country. We need to be clear about what financial payments are made in those circumstances. I am sure that we have all had visits to our surgeries from grandparents who are struggling to cope because there has not been the necessary funding.