Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, at this point, there is only one person I feel more sorry for than myself, and that is the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, because, like mine, his carefully crafted speech is in shreds as everyone else has made the points. I will say one or two things that are different from those I have on my bit of paper, so if I am not as coherent as I usually am, that is why.

I want to make some points because this is an important Bill—but possibly not because of the way it appears on the surface. I think its value is under its skin. It is because the three things it represents—social workers, the regulation of the social work profession and social work itself and the people who are being helped, particularly children in care—are interrelated. A little earlier, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, asked why the number of children in care was going up. I can indicate why it is going up: it is because good preventive work keeps children out of care. If you are working with families, you can maintain many of them in communities. I say this because I have been a social worker for about 50 years—I am not really that old, but I trained in 1963—and I still maintain work with various groups, so I have a hand on what is happening in social work now. I know how crucial it is that we take a really good overview.

That is why I said at the briefing that in some ways this important Bill lacks vision. The vision it could have had was for all children in difficulties. There are children in chaotic families—the troubled families programme touches only some of them—and children living in anxiety-provoking debt or experiencing a culture of violence. We know that there are some very good social work programmes that work, and that we have some tools to help families—but the one way to get service is to get into care or to have even more difficulties. That is because we have abandoned very good preventive service.

We have heard a lot about the closure of centres that have made a huge difference in the past, so I want to start there rather than where I had intended to start. Most of the valuable work that we undertake starts too late, even when children come into care. We do not have a vision of continuity when a child is in difficulties at home and may have to come into care.

My other point is that thousands of children every year go in and out of care again and again. That is when we need really good rehabilitative work in the home with those children who return home but need the services building around them. Time and again I see children returned, and that is it—until they have a crisis and they are back in care. Then they get a bit more social work, but their family situation remains chaotic. At the end of the day, it really is a matter of chance as to whether you are in care at 18 or 19 so that all the services that are on offer for children leaving care kick in. You might be unlucky and not be in care at that moment, at which point you are on your family’s resources and you just do not get any of these additional benefits.

The Minister knows I recognise that the Government’s strategy of giving care leavers more time in foster homes, known as Staying Put, has worked well in councils that have embraced it. Leeds was mentioned earlier today as an exceptional council, although I am a little worried that we do not have more than one or two of those. At the moment the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children is looking at the state of social care, but we have found only a handful of really good local authorities that are embracing a different way of working.

I do know that Leeds may well find it very difficult to sustain the policy. It receives £200,000-plus in income but it is paying out over £1 million. The council thinks that the programme works, and the children who are on the Staying Put programme are doing well. The programme deals with some very difficult youngsters. I met some of them recently and they talked about their experiences and their behaviour and how their foster parents had seen them through and they were now in employment or education. We really have to try to make that work because the savings are in other departments. My noble friend Lord McNally talked about the juvenile justice system, but these children are not even getting into that system because they have a family to give them sustenance.

I want to say one sentence about young people whose immigration status stops everything at 18, even if they are in a foster home. Some children arrive here without proper legal status. Their schools never find that out—it is a mystery to me why it does not come up during the education process—and it is only when they are going to go to college that they find that they cannot go until they have fought removal from this country. That is something on which we will bring forward amendments, and I wanted to mention it to the Minister because we need to return to it. Often these are children who have been brought up in this country: again, the Children’s Society has introduced me to some of them.

We have heard a great deal today about the Children’s Society looking at the impact on young people of financial planning and the need for them to have a really good education in how to manage their money. Moving into permanent accommodation, struggling with apprenticeships that do not pay enough and being unable to meet their council tax leaves them destitute. If you talk to homeless groups, you will find that many young people who have become homeless have done so because they have not had the sustained help that I hope the new programme will develop. Cheshire expects that a policy of not imposing council tax until young people reach 25 will result in a decrease in emergency payments made to care leavers in crisis, as well as reducing the dependency of these young people on other services.

While we are talking about financial issues, I know that this issue was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, but I cannot believe that while we have spent a great deal of time enabling many other young people not to be on benefits, we actually train our young care leavers to claim benefits in order to pay for their costs. That is a very easy programme to rectify between departments.

I turn to what I think a corporate parent should be doing and who a corporate parent should be. Having been a director of social services, I took my local authority responsibility as a corporate parent extremely seriously—and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, said, the local authority is the corporate parent. But it has a lot of corporate parent partners, many of which are in the local authority; again, Leeds has pulled that together. But, like many other speakers this afternoon, I want to see central government and other departments taken on board. I wonder whether the care leaver covenant will do this. Can the Minister say whether it will extend to all these other departments? After all, it is interesting that Alan Wood, in his report on the role of LSCBs, which I do not have time to address here this afternoon, points out that,

“national government departments do not do enough to model effective partnership working between themselves”.

The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, made that point.

I will say something briefly about the local offer: again, I find this a very strange phrase. Can the Minister tell me whether there has been any assessment of the local offers made under the previous legislation that we saw through this House, and whether a local offer programme ensures that young people get the services and that they are not just on a list? Have we any assessment of what happened under the previous legislation?

Like everyone else, I welcome personal advisers. Again, many of the issues I have just raised would be dealt with if we had personal advisers, but they have to be consistent people. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, said, it is no use having someone who happens to pop into your life now and again—they need to be a mentor who understands your life and who will stand by you. But it could be a number of different people, and I do not see why a foster parent who has done very well by a child should not remain the mentor if the young person wants that. It is extremely important to take the young person’s view into consideration—but not altogether. Sometimes what they want might not be in their best interests, and we will still have to take the parental role.

I am interested to know whether we will get the regulations on the training and standards of advisers and the baseline before we get through the Bill.

I will say very briefly that I welcome the high ambition for social work. I will not talk about regulation, because the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, has done it far better than I could, but I will say just one thing. Nicky Morgan wants to see an extra 755 qualified social workers coming from fast-track programmes in the next year alone and has promised £100 million to the Frontline and Step Up training programmes. I subscribe to her vision of a confident social work profession, constantly pushing boundaries and redefining what works by rigorous and evidence-based practice. The only problem is, will the local authorities have the resources or framework to employ them, and do the Government see the resource issue as a real one or think that we can squeeze out still more from local authorities that are trying to provide these services?

I commend my noble friend Lady Meacher for what she said about inquiries. I have been subject to three child abuse inquiries in my life; they have left scars. Can the Minister ensure that these inquiries do not turn out to be simply fodder for the media but that we will learn lessons, and that all the lessons from previous inquiries, as well as these, are properly integrated into social work practice?