A Failure of Implementation (Children and Families Act 2014 Committee Report)

Lord Storey Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Tyler for her inclusive chairing of this Select Committee. She acted at all times with complete professionalism, anxious to understand, engage and find solutions. My colleagues on the Select Committee and our advisers were equally thorough in wanting to shine a light on the issues and see what solutions could be found. It has been interesting listening to the valuable contributions made by colleagues.

Three themes have come out. Obviously, the first is early intervention. It makes sense in life that if you deal with a problem early, it is sorted; if you leave it and do not intervene at an early stage, the problem gets harder and harder to deal with. Secondly, we recognise—as I am sure the Government do—the need to have post-legislative scrutiny. Thirdly, the voice of the child came out in what we said, as mentioned by a number of colleagues. I was taken by what the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, said about the fact that children know and understand, and we should listen to them.

My noble friend Lady Tyler started by making the point that mental health was missing. We dealt with that issue thoroughly. She made the point about special educational needs, which I will come back to in a moment. I had forgotten the huge amount of consultation that took place with all sorts of stakeholders, which was very important.

There have indeed been seven Children’s Ministers, but the noble Lord, Lord Nash, the Minister here who started all this off, was with us for quite some time. It was thanks to him that we got this Act together. It is also right that our current Minister has been with us for quite a while now. It shows that when people stay, working arrangements are much better.

I was really interested in the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, about being more joined up. He is absolutely right that with public and private, and local and central government, when you are joined up you can succeed more speedily. I have two regrets from the coalition period—I will not tell noble Lords what one of them was, but the other was certainly the decision to discontinue Sure Start centres. There was a lack of funding for local government, which was a huge mistake. Those centres gave parents the opportunity not just to help their children but to understand issues such as financial management and to get information about jobs that might be available. I was also really interested in the noble Lord’s points about family hubs. Similarly, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, made a point about family justice—an area I know little about, which I think I made clear in Select Committee, but I recognise the importance of getting family justice right. It requires resources to be provided.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham rightly made the point that the Children and Families Act 2014 was a huge piece of legislation that had potential. As we have probably all suggested, that potential was never really met. Children need stability and consistency. I come to the first point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, about the coalition Government and that Act, because I think that we are being a bit unkind to the Act, if I may say so. She also talked about adoption.

We did not examine the whole Act in detail; instead, we focused on specific policy areas that we felt would benefit from further examination. In all honesty, I gained more knowledge and understanding of many issues than I was able to contribute. As a former head teacher of a very large primary school, with 500-plus pupils and a 100-place nursery, I had particular expertise in special educational needs but limited expertise in the other issues that we grappled with. I was actively involved with the Children and Families Bill in 2014, when it went through under the stewardship of the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I remember that, at the end of Third Reading a few months later, all the Members had worked very closely together and it almost felt like a Select Committee; we met in this Room and actually celebrated that piece of legislation. We felt at the time that it was a piece of landmark legislation and the start of real changes for family.

I was interested to understand the issues that schools now face with special educational needs. The Bill replaced statements with education, health and care plans. Doing so gave us an opportunity to understand that we needed to be more holistic and bring education, health and social care together, so the EHC plans would be a blueprint for the needs of a child, and early intervention would be so important. Parents would have the right to appeal against any decision not to put a child on a plan; local authorities would have to publish facilities, resources and opportunities that were available. While children have benefited from the SENCO legislation, for many it has become an all too obvious challenge, with long delays before children are assessed for a plan, causing needless anxiety and stress to parents. Millions of pounds have needlessly been spent on the appeals mechanism, yet 90% of the appeals have been agreed. Why are we doing this? Why are we spending so much time going to court when the court upholds the appeal and the money is lost?

The Bill was brought in at a time when resources were limited, particularly for local authorities. It is little wonder that some LEAs delay as a way to conserve their stretched resources. The Select Committee was right to conclude that the Act struggled to achieve its goals, given the sheer breadth of areas covered and lack of due concern to implementation. The committee was right to conclude that lessons should have been learned about post-legislative scrutiny; its views about mental health were so important. Children and young people with poor mental health face long waiting lists for treatment while their mental health continues to decline, allowing waiting lists to grow to unsustainable levels. In my view, the Bill was a missed opportunity not to say that some important legislation was not achieved, benefiting the lives of children and families alike.

The Bill was a missed opportunity, but there are things in it that we should still be proud of—I have mentioned the education, health and care plans—but let us think of some of the other things that were included. It agreed on the statutory role of the Children’s Commissioner for England to promote and protect the rights of children or the rights to shared parental leave and shared parental pay.

It was right to bring about EHSC plans, but wrong to dilute other special educational needs support in schools. Deleting school action and school action plan was almost a signal to say to schools, “You do not need to do special educational needs work, because we have put those children on a plan”, and that has happened increasingly in schools. On the issues of looked-after children, fostering, post-adoption support, kinship care, family justice, employment rights and race and ethnicity in adoption, I hope that the Government will give serious consideration to the report’s proposals. I know that the Minister genuinely cares about children and families and, despite what the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, I hope she will look again at the proposals in the report and try to persuade her colleagues of the error, maybe, of their ways.

Yesterday, I was chairing Liverpool City Council’s education scrutiny panel—a first for me. We were looking at paths into work for young people and at apprenticeships. We had a breakdown of the numbers of disadvantaged young people. I suddenly realised, thanks to the work of this Select Committee, that there was no mention of children in care. I immediately said, “Where are the figures for looked-after children? After all, the local authority is the corporate parent”. There were blushes from officers and they said “Yes, you are right. We will include those figures in our documentation”. That would not have happened had I not been on the Select Committee and understood the importance of corporate parentship and making sure that we look at everything we can do to help those looked-after children. I thoroughly appreciated the work of the Select Committee, and I once again thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for her amazing chairing, as well as other colleagues.