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Children and Families

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, on securing this debate and on an opening speech of such clarity and width. She is a tireless advocate for children and their families and I can testify to the fact that she also encourages other Members of this House. Families come in all shapes and sizes and, although we all hope that every child can be brought up in a stable environment, we know that family breakdown happens. Most parents manage to make good arrangements for the care of their children when divorce or separation occurs, but for the 10 per cent who fail to come to an agreement the family courts must help and intervene. I shall spend my few minutes this afternoon talking about the children and family courts system and about the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service and the social workers who try to help the families who come before it. CAFCASS is a non-departmental public body that comes within the framework of the Department of Children, Schools and Families; it is therefore part of the government framework. I declare an interest as its present chair and previous deputy chair for five years. It is no secret that CAFCASS has had a difficult journey and that we still have much to do. However, we have consolidated 113 organisations into one national CAFCASS and we have built a corporate identity as a service provider and an employer. We have much to do in the areas of standards, but we are working on it. We must remind ourselves that we have a statutory responsibility to ensure that children and young people are put first in family proceedings, that their voices are heard properly, that the decisions made about them by the courts are in their interests and that they and their families are supported throughout the process. As such, the organisation plays a key role in family life within the legislative framework set by Parliament. We are involved with some 80,000 children a year and have a staff of around 2,000, most of them social workers. Care and separation proceedings are fraught with conflict. For many, it is about winning a battle where the children have been either the victims or weary bystanders. Much of our work is about helping families to see the conflict through the eyes of the child and to seek a resolution. In private law, divorce and separation start with the presumption that it is in the child’s best interests to maintain contact with both parents, unless there are good reasons to the contrary, such as domestic violence or neglect. We must remind ourselves, particularly this week, of the importance of protecting women and children from domestic violence. There is a view, however, that the law treats non-resident parents unreasonably in the family courts. This view has led in part to the opening up of the courts to the press. The Government’s own research, however, and our most recent gender outcomes statistics show that there is, ""no evidence that non resident parents as a group are systematically unreasonably treated by the family courts"." On the contrary, it looks as though fathers are taking more part in the lives of children. We in CAFCASS work closely with support groups such as Families Need Fathers, which has done excellent work in supporting the role of fathers and, indeed, now separated mothers. Of course, there is a small minority of cases where a parent is determined to continue the relationship battle whatever the detriment to the child. Ending contact in these cases can save that child from emotional harm. In public law, where children are likely to be removed from both parents for care reasons, CAFCASS carries out some of its most high-profile work, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, mentioned. Key to this, as in all our work, is the role of safeguarding—ensuring that children are properly protected. In the aftermath of the case of the murder of Baby P, the number of care applications has escalated sharply. The trend continues. It represents a shift in intervention threshold by local authorities. We have found that there is an increase in the number of cases coming to court of children who are already known to local authorities and where chronic neglect is the main feature. Each child and family needs intensive help, clear assessment and decisive plans. My concern is that none of the agencies is meeting this requirement at the present time, as reflected in the second report of the noble Lord, Lord Laming. Work with chaotic, disordered families, where there is poverty linked with alcohol or drug abuse, or both, and where parents have limited emotional ability, requires the highest-skilled workers, either to keep the family at home or to make the difficult decision to remove the child. One thing is certain: the social worker who will undertake this task on behalf of us all will be damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The Secretary of State has made a commitment to supporting social workers and I hope to hear the Minister today reiterate her support. We have to come through this crisis of backlogs and difficulties. We have to come to the point where we can find other ways of helping families and their children. The debate introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, is a useful way of focusing on many ways forward. Government policy and the Every Child Matters agenda must mean every child because, as my chief executive Anthony Douglas put it: ""Each child is not a statistic but a person with complex and long-term needs which the State has a duty of care to meet"." In these difficult times, I know that the Minister and the Government will do everything possible to meet those needs; we in CAFCASS will do everything in our power to play our part.