Children in Care

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me for saying that she is painting a rather malign picture of the child protection system, as if it were a bunch of child catchers wandering around the country and randomly looking for children to apprehend. Will she acknowledge that, notwithstanding the odd one that does not go the right way, the vast majority of child protection cases actually come to the right decision?

[Lucy Allan]

I will move on to my hon. Friend’s point with regard to the court system.

There will always be children who are not able to stay safely at home. It is a difficult and challenging task to identify those children correctly. As such matters are decided by an independent court, we are told that we should be confident that the correct decision will always be made. I must say to the House, however, that a court can decide a case only on the basis of the evidence put before it by child protection professionals and that that evidence is often dominated by opinion. The court does not have the discretion to disregard professional opinion in favour of a distraught parent who is desperately trying to navigate the complexities of the legal system or desperately trying to prove their innocence when up against the full might of the state.

The motion asks the Government

“to support more children to remain safely at home”.

There are many examples of good practice currently being undertaken by the Government, such as the troubled families initiative, the children’s social care innovation programme and the Pause project in Hackney. I will conclude by briefly asking the Minister to consider other alternatives to help children to stay safely at home with their families.

We know from recent research that when a mother has a child removed, the trauma and loss often results in multiple repeat pregnancies. Sadly, such children are almost always taken into care immediately. I have sat on an adoption and fostering panel to which a mother came back 10 times. Nobody ever addressed the mother’s issues, and those 10 children were taken into care. That goes back to the point made by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) about the cost-effectiveness of dealing with the difficulties experienced by a mother in such a situation. I therefore ask the Minister to consider therapeutic intervention for mothers at the earliest opportunity, because that is cost-effective and because care simply is not the answer that the professionals would like it to be.

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[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

I am delighted to join the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) in sponsoring this debate.

To declare my interest, I am the patron of the Family Rights Group, the charity that works with parents in England and Wales whose children are in need, at risk or in the care system. May I follow the hon. Lady in this preamble to my speech and say to those on the Treasury Bench that the Family Rights Group provides the only free, open-access, specialist legal advice service for such families? Governments of all persuasions have recognised its importance.

The simple fact is that demand for the charity’s services has gone up and its funding has been reduced. That is bad enough, but if the Government do not pull their finger out, the service will cease completely on 31 March —just a few weeks from now. I hope that the Minister will say something on that in his response, because the need for the work that the Family Rights Group does and the advice that it gives underpin all the various elements that we will hear about in the debate on this huge subject today. Preserving it would be the first step towards carrying out the terms of the motion.

I do not claim to have changed the world in my short period as Secretary of State for Education, but together with my children’s Minister, now Baroness Hughes of Stretford, I tried to improve the situation for children in care through the measures in the “Care Matters” White Paper. We were driven by a host of depressing statistics, but the most scandalous of all was that children in care accounted for 0.5% of the child population, but as adults accounted for 27% of the prison population. We might as well, as a society, direct them straight to Wormwood Scrubs and the other institutions they are going to end up in.

We did much in government to address that problem, but after 10 years in power, which is when I became Education Secretary, and despite an awful lot of concentration on what we used to call social exclusion, that statistic remained. My point is that this is not a party political joust. This problem is so deeply entrenched that we need to work on the solutions together across this House and not deal with it in a combative way.

[Kit Malthouse]

On that statistic, which is of course appalling, does the right hon. Gentleman accept that it does not necessarily follow that it is the care system that meant that those individuals ended up in prison, and that if they had stayed with their families, they may well have ended up in prison anyway?

[Alan Johnson]

I do not concur with that at all.

All these problems are profound and multidimensional —of course they are—but I could sum up the problem in my time, although more recent children’s Ministers may sum it up differently: children are pushed into care too easily, moved around too much and kicked out too soon. That is the issue that we were trying to face in the “Care Matters” White Paper in 2007. I will focus on the first of those three problems—the fact that they are pushed into care too easily—and on kinship care.

On the point about young people being removed from care too soon, I congratulate the Government on the important step that they took in the Children and Families Act 2014 of insisting that young people in care who reach the age of 18 may remain in care or “stay put”, to use the terminology, with foster carers until the age of 21. In response to the intervention by the hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), we used to kick them out at 16. Nowadays, children practically cling on to the door mantel when you try to get rid of them, if I may say so as a father. The average age when children leave home is 27. Kids in care—the most vulnerable children—were kicked out at 16. Of course that contributed to the pressing statistic on where they ended up.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am fully conscious of that. When I was a councillor, I established the first leaving care service in the country at Westminster Council. It won us beacon status from the then Labour Government. I was trying to make the point that it does not necessarily follow that leaving those children in their families would lead to benign outcomes as opposed to the outcomes of the care system. I fully accept the failures of the care system, but I am not sure that the alternative would have been more benign.

[Alan Johnson]

I will come on to research that might help the hon. Gentleman because I believe that it is indeed the case, not in every instance of course, that a higher proportion of children who are left to be raised with families—and friends, incidentally—will not end up in the situation that I described.

The Government introduced the welcome change for children in foster care to be able to stay there until they are 21. Can the Minister tell us in his response whether there are any plans to introduce an analogous provision for children in residential care, as the Education Committee recommended in 2014? It seems ridiculous that children can stay in care with foster parents until they are 21, but that they get kicked out at 18 if they are in residential care.

The main issue that I wish to raise is kinship care. Kinship carers are grandparents, older siblings, other relatives and friends who step in to care for children. Ninety-five per cent. of the children in kinship care are not declared “looked-after” children by the local authority. By keeping children out of the care system, those carers save the taxpayer billions of pounds each year in care costs alone. All the research evidence demonstrates that kinship care has real and substantial benefits for children. They feel more secure, and they have fewer emotional problems and behavioural difficulties. On top of that, the latest piece of research, from last November, states that those children also do better in educational attainment than those in residential care.

There is another issue about the care system for the hon. Member for North West Hampshire to consider. It used to move kids around all the time. That was bad enough, but when they arrived in a new location, they went to the worst schools. They went to the schools that had the vacancies, which were generally the most unpopular and the worst. We introduced a measure that provided that schools must accept children in care as a priority, in accordance with what the children and their carers wanted. That is another example of how we can change the care system for the better.

Despite everything that has been done, the system neither encourages nor sufficiently supports the important alternative of kinship care. Yes, there is helpful guidance, but there is no statutory duty that requires local authorities to explore the kinship care option, or even to have the all-important family group conference—the FGC—which is a crucial way of involving the wider family early in the process. In the vast majority of cases, that does not take place until after the child goes into care. It should be held before that decision is made. One of the important aspects of the family group conference is the voice of the young person, which is crucial. It is vital to the process and central to the success of family group conferences. However, not only are they almost always held after a child has been designated as “looked after”, but their number is diminishing as budget cuts force local authorities to retrench.

As a crucial step towards realising the motion, the Government should place a new statutory duty on local authorities so that when they conclude that a child may need to become looked after, they must, other than in emergencies, first identify and consider the willingness and suitability of any relative or other person connected to the child to care for them. Secondly, they should arrange a family group conference run by an accredited FGC service to develop a plan to safeguard and promote a child’s welfare. They should also ensure proper funding for free specialist independent legal advice, as both I and the hon. Member for Telford have mentioned, through the Family Rights Group.

My final point concerns the need to recognise the problems that kinship carers face, and the need for the Government to avoid adding to them through changes to the benefit system. The largest survey of kinship carers in the UK found that 49% of respondents had to give up work permanently. That is often a requirement for taking a child into their care—the authorities insist that they give up work. Some 18% had to give up work temporarily and 23% had to reduce their hours. That creates a family income problem.

The recent Department for Education review of special guardianship and Sir Martin Narey’s imminent review of residential care provide a perfect opportunity to introduce a support framework for kinship care that includes a designated council official to contact when necessary. The Government should also consider extending to kinship carers the measures that are available to adopters, such as paid leave and priority school admissions. More urgently, kinship carers should be exempted from the limiting of child tax credit to two children, the benefit cap and the extension of work conditionality rules to carers of children under five years of age. Let me briefly explain why.

In respect of the benefit cap, many children arrive to live with kinship carers following a crisis. They are deeply traumatised and many have suffered prior abuse. As a result, the behavioural response hoped for by the Department for Work and Pensions, of staying in or returning to work, is just not an option. The relevant drop in income caused by the lower benefit cap will affect more kinship carers, who, as I said earlier, are saving the taxpayer a small fortune. Limiting child tax credit to two children will obviously make it financially unviable for some relatives to take on a larger sibling group to keep the family together. The daughter of a grandmother in my constituency died. By taking in the three children, the grandmother will be hit by the two-child policy. That is no way to run a civilised social service and welfare state. Incidentally, the cost of an exemption would be about £30 million. It would only require 200 kinship carers to be financially prohibited from taking in a sibling group of three or more, for care and court costs to outweigh that amount. The Government could therefore be making a saving.

The new work conditionality requirements that will be applied to carers of children under five will place obvious and substantial burdens on kinship carers. I say to those on the Treasury Bench that there is an important precedent for the exemptions. Kinship carers have already been exempted from work conditionality requirements for a year after they take on the care of a child. We are not talking about precedents here, but consistency.

This is an important debate, which allows right hon. and hon. Members to raise issues that are aired all too infrequently. Despite the benefits, kinship care is largely overlooked by the media, Governments of various persuasions, and the Prime Minister and his predecessor. In the past two years, there has been much attention paid to adoption. Rightly, it has been the subject of Prime Ministerial speeches, Government initiatives and newly announced funding streams. On kinship care, there has been radio silence. It is time we gave kinship care the recognition and support it deserves, and which children so badly need.

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[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I commend the Members who proposed the motion. They did so for a laudable reason: they see the value of strong families and their irreplaceable role in raising children as the granite on which our society is founded, and their desire to work to help children stay with their families is to be praised. They also rightly recognise the severe limitations of our child protection system, and seek to keep children out of it. Early intervention, prevention, and encouragement and support for kinship care are intelligent parts of a coherent strategy.

It should be noted, however, that this debate is not about strong families, functional families, or even the care system. It is about families and households who all too often put the lives and well being of children in serious danger. It is about children in care who have been removed from their families because they are not safe, and because those families will not help them to grow up to be healthy, independent adults. For such children, stable families are already out of reach. When that happens, the solution is not to dither, apply half measures, or wait and see. It falls to the state to step in and protect children, and, if needs be, to remove them from danger.

That should never be done lightly, and it is, of course, far from ideal, but it is done none the less because we recognise that waiting to see whether parents can improve, or trying to improve the home, is often a very risky path to take. In recent years, we have seen again and again that the “wait and see” approach—the failure to act quickly enough—has had horrendous consequences. I believe that the cost of repeatedly failing to act frequently outweighs the potential upside of trying to enable children to stay with their families. According to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, most children in care eventually recognise that it was the right path for them. They recognise the issues that led to their being in care in the first place, and the fact that those dreadful situations demanded action.

Once it has been properly established that a child is in danger and there are no safe kinship alternatives, we have no choice other than to act. That applies to cases of severe neglect, but it applies especially to cases of child cruelty. In matters of cruelty to children, there are no second chances. There are no second chances for the child or baby who is at risk of being permanently harmed, or even, sadly, killed.

[Lucy Allan]

Does my hon. Friend agree that children are taken into the care system who have been neither harmed nor neglected? I referred earlier to actual or potential emotional abuse. Very subjective judgments can be made.

[Kit Malthouse]

I recognise that, but, as I said to my hon. Friend earlier, I have the general sense—having worked with the care system when I was a councillor, and subsequently—that in the vast majority of cases this is the right decision for the children concerned. There are some cases in which the system does fail, but the fact is that most children are removed because they are in some kind of danger or peril, whether it be emotional or physical.

There should not be any second chances for parents who put their children at risk or deliberately harm them. I must emphasise that to make that case is not to argue for one minute that, ordinarily, the state is better placed than families to look after children. Nothing is, and it is not helpful or right that children in care are still so vulnerable, or that, in many cases, they have been destined for such miserable lives after they leave. However, the fact that we fail too many children in care does not mean that we have too many children in care, or that it is wrong to remove such children from the families who were endangering them. That simply does not follow. What follows is that we should be doing more for children in care and continuing with the practice of intervening quickly when the need arises.

My rejection, sadly, of today’s motion is in two parts. The first, as I have already said, is that given that the danger of failing to intervene is so strong, I actually think we should be intervening more. The second is that all this is predicated on a drastic improvement in the care system that the Government have also indicated they are determined to make.

The care system exists to keep children safe where their families have failed them. The burden of looking after these children falls on you, me—everyone. In arguing for special measures to help children stay with their families “safely”, proponents of the motion acknowledge that they are not safe with their family in the first place. Considering the degree of damage that abuse and neglect can inflict in a very short space of time, we cannot take risks or gamble with their lives. In many cases, children should be taken into care sooner.

[Alan Johnson]

I am puzzled by the hon. Gentleman’s contribution. Nobody supporting this motion or sponsoring it does not believe that children who are in danger should be removed from that danger quickly. His whole contribution and opposition to this motion are based on a total misconception. What we are saying is there are many children who go into care—and their voice is important, by the way—who actually would be better placed, and happier, with family members. I suggest that that proposition should unite the House, not be defeated by some suggestion that people disagree that children in danger should be removed from that danger quickly.

[Kit Malthouse]

I accept what the right hon. Gentleman says and I have mentioned kinship care twice in my speech. I absolutely agree that if a safe alternative can be found in an extended family, that should be encouraged. I was pleased to hear his speech and I do think the Government could do more to support that. The motion, however, does not mention kinship care, and it laments the rise in the number of children in the care system. The point I am trying to make is that while we as a social care system seek to intervene with a family and try to make the family home safer, there is a child who is remaining in the home who may still be damaged. We have seen some horrendous situations where the social care system failed to act sufficiently quickly. My view is that if we hide behind the idea that we may be able to make some progress with the family, we are fundamentally gambling with the lives of young people.

[Lucy Allan]

In my opening remarks I referred to the fact that one in 100 children are subject to child protection investigations. It is no secret that my own son was subject to a child protection investigation, and often children in families who are not well-placed to protect themselves from that type of forceful state intervention end up in care when they do not need to be there.

[Kit Malthouse]

As I said in an earlier intervention, my experience of the care system is not that the country is teeming with malign social workers looking for children to purloin from their parents and shove into the care system. These are professional people who investigate largely professionally. Errors are made, as in all bureaucratic systems; nevertheless their motives are good and right, and more often than not they see cause for alarm that requires action.

My concern about this motion is that the tragic case of baby P, which has been referred to, led to a rise in the number of children in care, and I think it was generally accepted that before that case the child protection system was not functioning correctly. I was tangentially involved in the Victoria Climbié affair. She came through Westminster’s hands for two weeks. Pleasingly, we did everything right, but that is another case where the care system had failed. My point is not necessarily that the system is operating incorrectly now; it may well be operating correctly. My concern about the motion is about the signal it sends to social workers about the desire of this House that they should attempt to leave children in possibly dysfunctional and perhaps damaging situations for longer while they attempt the much harder task of trying to turn the home around.