Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, for raising that point because it informs what I was going to say about Amendment 9. I was going to explain what I meant, and that is the amendment on which to do it.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with much of what has been said so far. I am looking at the end product—the child who will one day grow up to be a parent. We need to demonstrate all the skills necessary for that child to understand what parenting means. Perhaps all of us should become corporate parents as a way of making sure that, when young people grow up, they understand what parenting is. Many young people who go through sexual abuse and grooming misinterpret what love, understanding, nurturing and caring are about. So when we read every detail in these amendments, we should do everything possible to make sure that we get it right for the children because the end product is that one day they will become parents and grandparents.

[Baroness Redfern (Con)]

My Lords, as another corporate parent from a local authority, I am pleased to join in this discussion today. It is our duty and our responsibility as a corporate parent to do what we would do not only for our children but for other children. We should focus totally on that.

I want to focus on care leavers, in particular, and the importance of working with partners to enhance their life chances, enabling a continuous celebration of their achievements and talents—and there are achievements and talents in children in care and care leavers. We have a responsibility to work even harder to create a positive narrative about what children in care and care leavers can achieve.

As a snapshot, in north Lincolnshire we have a corporate parenting pledge which incorporates our ambitions for care leavers. We have made a specific commitment in regard to staying put. This includes a children’s campus and a children’s home with four self-contained staying-close suites, where children who move on from the home can live under the same roof and, importantly, have the safety and protection of trusted adults. As one young person said, “Being invited next door for a Sunday lunch is something we treasure”. Care leavers are encouraged to stay in touch and, for our part, our children in care council works with them into early adulthood.

I look forward to the opportunity to innovate, practise and implement new ideas to support and protect children. This includes supporting children and families at the earliest point to prevent the potential need for statutory intervention.

I shall focus, too, on the disengagement of young people and the variety of factors and vulnerabilities that we know may cause it. In the first instance, it could be because of welfare issues, special education needs, additional needs with ill health and school refusal.

It is vital that we look at bespoke alternative education packages for young people who may be outside mainstream education. The Children and Adolescent Medical Needs Education Team, CAMNET, provides direct tutoring and mentoring for children unable to access education due to acute health needs, supports young people who are NEET and provides independent careers advice and guidance. In all cases the aim is to support the child to achieve their hopes, dreams and aspirations. This is fundamentally what this Bill addresses. There is particular emphasis also on the transition to adult plans for disabled children, with mentoring for independent living through progression of education and work. We simply cannot do this alone, so it is about working with schools, colleges and other providers to establish fair access to ensure continuity of education for young people excluded from school in some instances but at risk of permanent exclusion and of disengagement post 16.

I am encouraged that the Bill will address and strengthen the role of local authorities in promoting and defending the interests of care leavers. We do all we can to defend the interests of those care leavers and all who want that support up to the age of 25. The Bill addresses and promotes high aspirations. That is what we need to focus on to help these young children secure the best outcomes, taking account of their views, wishes and feelings. We need to make sure that they feel safe and have stability as we prepare them for adulthood and independent living. I also welcome further support for innovation in children’s social care by allowing local authorities such as mine to pilot new, innovative approaches. We must embrace and learn from other areas where it works well.

Finally, we will help every child in care to build a better life. I welcome the Bill, particularly the steps to help strengthen our social work profession to make social workers feel valued and supported, as well as delivering a valued and personalised service. We should also test different ways of working to achieve better outcomes, and also the same outcomes more effectively.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I support Amendments 10, 16, 34 and 87 and the separate issue that is Amendment 33. I am not going to rehearse all the arguments about why looked-after children and children taken into care are a very special case in relation to access to mental health services, but they are. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, made the point about the inadequate assessment of the state of their mental health and the trauma they have suffered. It is pretty intolerable. Some of us who are veterans of the discussions on the Health and Social Care Act 2012 spent a very long time trying to persuade the Government to deal with parity of esteem between physical and mental health in that piece of legislation. Finally, the Government gave way and it is in there. It is part of the way the mandate has been changed for NHS England.

That is fine in terms of that piece of legislation but there needs to be some follow-through in this legislation as well. That is why Amendments 34 and 87 are so important because not only do they deliver parity of esteem in terms of physical and mental health, they lead to some practical ways of making that happen. We all know that access to CAMHS is extremely variable around the country. There is no equivalent access in different parts of the country. That is why we should start to really push the boat out on this issue in this legislation. I hope the Government will recognise the seriousness of the issue of proper mental health support in the Bill for these children who have very special needs. They have gone through particular sets of trauma in getting to the point where the state has had to intervene and bring them into the care system.

I wish Amendment 33 from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, had been on the statute book when I was a director of social services. I would like to have been put in the position of having to address that issue. I became the Children’s Commissioner in Birmingham in 2014-15. There is a deeply depressing familiarity for me when talking to children in private meetings about their experiences in care. They would readily tell you how many social workers they had had, not just in their time in care but in the last 12 months. There is massive turnover for a group of people who have already lost a lot of confidence in the adult world. These are young people who have often had very bad experiences at the hands of adults. They have often had a transition of adults through their lives with no consistency.

The noble and learned Lord has raised an important issue and I wish we had had more time as I would have added my name to his amendment. The Government should take this amendment very seriously. It will of course be difficult always to get that right in the present circumstances, but at least it should be clear in law that that is what the corporate parents should be trying to do as soon as the child comes into the care of the local authority.

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I visited my GP last week and she expressed her concerns about the number of care leavers coming to her surgery with mental health issues—anxiety, depression, self-harming, suicidal emotions and erratic behaviour. She said: “Floella, if only we could do something about this when the child is entering care. If only we could identify that they are suffering from mental problems it would save the NHS resources and save them suffering and long-term unhappiness.” That is what many Peers have said this evening, while charities such as the NSPCC have said it for a long time. I, like others, strongly believe that we need to adequately identify the issue and that children should receive assessment for their mental and emotional well-being by professionals with specialist training in the mental health of looked-after children. This is necessary because the children are suffering long-term. We spoke earlier about corporate parenting. I believe that the principles should include the responsibility to ensure that children are offered the support they need to recover from psychological harm caused prior to their entry to the care system. That should be paramount when we have to look after those children.

There must be provisions made to guarantee that the children in care will never be denied access to, or disadvantaged when trying to access, mental health services. They are finding that this is a problem. They must never be told that they cannot get professional help because they are not in a stable placement, or disadvantaged because they have moved out of an authority placement. We know that a high percentage of children in care end up in prison or are homeless, and that many suffer from mental problems while in prison. During my prison visits, I often speak to young people who say. “If only things had been different for me when I was a child”—a phrase repeated over and over again. Children who have been abused or neglected could face serious long-term mental problems throughout adulthood because of the lack of support, so it is essential that we are able to deal with difficulties early and offer the right support to children.

Children need that support but the NSPCC has found that there are not enough therapeutic services for those who have been abused or neglected. This has to stop. There is cause for concern because more and more children are reporting sexual abuse, which is occurring every hour of the day, and because we have almost 70,000 children living in care in England. This has to stop and we have to help these children. We must not let them down. That is why I am supporting and have put my name to Amendment 87.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, nothing has been said during this debate that one could reasonably disagree with. My only question is: would it help if we had it all in the Bill? I would draw attention to the Local Government Association’s concern, which is that if all these things are in a Bill they restrict the capacity to think through the targeting of where there is greatest need. In some communities, the greatest need may not be for the in-care community.

We know, as I said this afternoon during Questions, although I was rather interrupted, that the children who are on the list of those in greatest need are likely to have a greater need for intervention than some of the children in care. We should not do anything that inhibits local authorities and their partners from making proper assessments and being able to direct those services. I know, having talked at length to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and to other people who have been in poor authorities, that there is some despair about whether some local authorities will ever reach that point of being able to make good assessments. I also know from work that I am doing with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children that some remarkable work and turnaround is happening in other local authorities. We should try to work with the best towards the best and enable a local authority to do that.

I am interested that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, is so sanguine about the suggestion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. I can see a million difficulties in having his suggestion on the statute book. Again, much as the bit of me that was a director of social services would have liked to have had that, the other bit would know how impossible it is to get one person. What is the role now of the independent reviewing officer, for example? We know that IROs have not been particularly successful, yet those are the people who we have identified as the ones to focus on the children. There must be alternative ways.

This is where the two parts of the Bill come together. If we are able to get the social work bit of it right and develop really good social work, it seems that the other issues will not be so pressing—apart from the ones raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. The mental health issues of children in care are of particular concern and I would support her. This is because CAMHS is in such disarray, probably in greater disarray than some other areas in local authorities, and although I think that the Government have good intentions to put money into the service, we know how hard it is to get that funding properly directed. However, we could make a real difference to young people’s progress if we ensure that their therapeutic needs are met early on, not when they are developing serious mental disorders and personality conditions. We know that behavioural work with children at an early stage works very well. While I am finding it difficult to support a wide range of the amendments, again because I want to keep the Bill as simple and implementable as possible, we should look seriously at these mental health issues.