Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 8 APRIL 2003
MR KIT
CHIVERS AND
MR ARRAN
POYSER
Chairman
1. We welcome to the first part of this two-part
evidence session on CAFCASS Mr Chivers, who is Her Majesty's Chief
Inspector, and Mr Poyser, who is the Director of the CAFCASS Inspection
Unit of the Magistrates' Courts Service Inspectorate. Welcome
to you both. We have a substantial programme of evidence sessions
and witnesses of which you are the first. I wonder if I could
start by asking you why you felt able to give a relatively upbeat
assessment of a service about which almost all the written evidence
we have received in advance is deeply critical?
(Mr Chivers) Chairman, the last thing
we would want to do is be complacent about the CAFCASS service.
There is certainly much still to do to establish the service at
an acceptable standard. The reason we have given an upbeat assessment
is that we believe that the service is at last beginning to put
itself in a position to make the necessary improvements. As I
say, there is still much to do, but we believe that the troubles
that affected CAFCASS in its early days are beginning to be surmounted
and plans are beginning to be laid which will lead to the service
reaching the standard that is necessary.
2. You have an obligation in your guidelines
to be `positive in tone' in your inspections. I can understand
that this may be intended to ensure that the reports are of assistance
to staffing improvements rather than simply lowering their morale,
which seems to be low enough anyway in the service. Has this influenced
you unduly in the terminology and phraseology you used about the
very real problems we have been told about?
(Mr Chivers) No, sir. There are very real problems,
but the fact of the matter is that the service is still by and
large being delivered. There are areas in which the service is
patchy and areas in which it is not good enough, but by and large
the service continues to be delivered and this Inspectorate firmly
believes that the establishment of CAFCASS was a good and right
step to take and that it has great potential for the future.
3. I think all our witnesses agree that it was
right in principle, there is unanimity on that point. Could I
ask Mr Poyser how well the work of the original project team was
used in the establishment of CAFCASS, and I ask him because of
his prior involvement here?
(Mr Poyser) Quite a lot of work was done by informed
groups drawn from the three services and the relevant professional
associations and unions particularly about training and about
national standards and a wide range of other topics. I think at
the time that CAFCASS was actually established a lot of that material
disappeared from sight and I think that was a matter of acute
frustration for those within CAFCASS because what tended to happen
was that task teams were recreated to go over some of the same
ground again. I think from our point of view in retrospect there
were wasted opportunities. The early task teams in the project
did not necessarily come up with all the answers, but we felt
they were good enough as interim guidelines.
Mr Dawson
4. I am interested in that comment, Mr Poyser,
about so much work disappearing from sight. Certainly what we
have heard from guardians is that people very much valued the
integrated induction training programme and they felt that that
would be a really effective means of bringing people into the
service and integrating the disparate elements of the service.
Can you explain a bit more why that disappeared from sight?
(Mr Poyser) With respect, Chairman, I think you will
need to ask CAFCASS itself about that. From our point of view,
the reasons why integrated training for guardians and for private
law practitioners disappeared was that it was necessary under
the terms of TUPE and the harmonisation agenda to sort out these
120 sets of pay and conditions before you then began officially
to merge teams to take on joint casework. It was possible for
new staff coming into the service to take on joint private and
public law and there was some patchy shadowing around the country,
but shadowing is not quite enough in these situations. There was
not an effective national training programme and it has taken
nearly two years to get that off the ground for front-line practitioners
at the induction level and from this autumn we understand there
will be on-going modules of training contracted out to Royal Holloway
College, London University. In the task team that I chaired about
professional accreditation and training we were all of a view
that it was not an optional extra, it was a fundamental necessity
for all practitioners and from other distinct groups of staff
that there should be within CAFCASS continuous professional development
and that this should be at an advanced level not a basic social
work level.
5. How effective do you think that the current
board have been in seeing CAFCASS through this initially very
difficult period?
(Mr Chivers) I think the board certainly struggled
in the first year of CAFCASS. They were faced with an exceptionally
difficult situation at the outset aggravated by the fact that
there was this Inland Revenue decision about the tax status of
self-employed guardians. The setting up period was extremely short.
The board was a new board and it had a management team initially
which was not a complete permanent management team but included
a number of temporary interim managers. They then suffered the
misfortune of losing certain key persons in the course of that
and got into the judicial review process which occupied an enormous
amount of the time and energy of the board. So they had a very
very difficult first year but, fortified by having got the services
of a very good acting chief executive, the board has been functioning
much better in the past year and that is the crucial reason why
on balance we have confidence that they are on the right track
now, although there is still a great deal to be done.
6. You have suggested a review of the terms
and deployment of board members when the time comes, I am not
sure when that time will be. Are there particular skills and expertise
that you would want to see represented at board level that are
not there at the moment?
(Mr Chivers) Yes, sir, I think there are. The board
members are all people of ability and one can see why they were
appointed to it, but when you look at the board as a whole, there
are, as you were suggesting, some gaps there. One wonders why
there are not some of the distinguished academics or psychiatrists
who are expert witnesses to the High Court there, some of the
people who are recognised as the professional leaders in this
community. Obviously it is a good thing for a board to have some
people from outside and who perform the classic non-executive
director functions of challenging business cases and chairing
audit committees and things, but my feeling is that at the moment
the board is a bit too balanced towards outsiders and particularly
since the resignation of His Honour Judge Fricker, there are just
not enough people there who are really eminent practitioners in
the field.
7. Or people with such good extensive social
work practice.
(Mr Chivers) Indeed.
8. You also say in your Report, Mr Chivers,
that CAFCASS needs people of recognised stature on its side to
help shape strategic choices. Is that what you are referring to?
(Mr Chivers) That is the sort of thing. I think they
could either do it by co-opting some people onto the board or
possibly including them in the executive team, they could either
be non-executives or taking executive roles, but one way or another
CAFCASS clearly needs to build up its professional expertise and
thereby its credibility and its authority in the field, I think
that would help with recruitment too. The higher the status of
the organisation and the better it is respected the more people
are likely to want to join and contribute.
9. I was a bit surprised by the fact—I
suppose it is a bit of an anthropological comment—you said
that the service is in some respects at a pre-scientific stage.
I do not think that you could describe this work as a science,
although I am not sure whether it is a craft. Surely that does
not imply that there are not a vast amount of skills and experience
and knowledge of the work which could be available to the CAFCASS
board?
(Mr Chivers) Absolutely not, no. What we have here
is a great number of very skilled practitioners, but—and,
as you will appreciate, I come to this as an outsider from the
social work field—when I look at them, they look to me like
practitioners who may have been in medicine at an early stage,
where lots of good medicine is being practised but the science
has not been applied to it in the sense of collecting the information
systematically about the cases. There is a great lack of management
information based on an analysis of different types of cases,
tracking them through and seeing what actually works in relation
to different sorts of cases. There is a whole management information
thing that is needed which requires categorisation first and seeing
what the outcomes are and then seeing what the cost effectiveness
of those are, and that is exactly the sort of process that happens
in medicine and in the management of the health service and I
think that is one of the areas in which CAFCASS most needs to
make progress.
10. Given the skills and expertise of guardians
outlined to them, they are the people who are working in the service
now and people who have recently been lost to this service must
be a rich source of expertise and advice.
(Mr Chivers) Indeed, that is the only way of getting
the expert advice. When I talk about pre-scientific, what I was
really meaning was it is a question of trying to translate that
expertise which undoubtedly exists there in the field into principles
which assured consistency. What you are looking for in a nationally
delivered service above all is assured quality and consistency
of standards and in order to do that you have got to have the
management information and the agreed measures are those on which
you are going to judge whether you have got that standard.
11. Do you think there is any way of re-engaging
with people who have left the service and whose skills and expertise
might continue to be of use to you?
(Mr Poyser) I think there may be for some. I think
for others the disappointment and the depth of disenchantment
about what has happened has gone too far and for them and the
organisation one needs to move on. It may be possible to bring
others back in a training role or in a mentoring role or some
other kind of role. Given the age profile generally of the workforce,
some would have been coming up towards retirement in any case
and one would be looking for new blood to come into this organisation
in considerable numbers in fact.
12. Mr Chivers, how do you feel that CAFCASS's
management structure compares with that envisaged when it was
originally proposed to create the body?
(Mr Chivers) I take it you are referring to the way
that the headquarters has increased in size?
13. Yes.
(Mr Chivers) Quite a bit since it was set up. I think
that has been necessary. Our first Report showed that the headquarters
was weak in a number of areas and there was a necessary process
of strengthening some parts of the centre. What I would hope would
happen in the future—and I believe this accords with CAFCASS's
own thinking—is that more of the functions that are done
at the centre will be devolved to the regions. I would like to
see the regions taking more autonomy in matters of personnel management
and financial control. So there should be a process of devolution.
It may not be that the headquarters actually becomes smaller because
there may need to be some further strengthening in areas like
professional development, actually building up a core of professional
expertise at the centre which can provide professional leadership
as opposed to just managing the operation.
Mr Solely
14. You have described an organisation that
is getting better. If I asked you to provide a photograph of where
it is at now and compare it to the situation before CAFCASS was
created, would you say that a child going through the system now
had a better chance of getting the right decision in the right
timescale or a worse chance?
(Mr Poyser) When we talk about the situation before
CAFCASS started, sir, I think we need to be clear that there was
pretty poor data around the country as to exactly what was happening.
Nevertheless, taking the spirit of your question, I think in parts
of the country children now in the first two years of CAFCASS
have experienced an unacceptably worse service, but there have
been a lot of regional variations and variations within regions
which need to be picked up. There are some risks about generalising
across the whole of England and Wales. One of the problems about
having difficulties at a local level is that if there is a shortfall
in Cornwall, for example, it is not much help having extra staff
in Bristol, which is still within the same region, because they
cannot physically get down to Cornwall and replacing staff and
the rest of that degree of flexibility in practical terms poses
certain problems.
15. So if I asked you to provide a table of
regions as to how well it is doing, obviously to some extent it
would be impressionistic, could you give such a table?
(Mr Poyser) I do not think we could on the basis of
our inspections because our inspections took place at different
times throughout 2002-03 and therefore it would be a very distorted
table. If one takes the narrow issue of unallocated cases, when
we were in the East Midlands recently, for example, which we have
not yet reported on publicly, at least at that moment they were
not facing unallocated cases although they were warning that they
might do before too long. In January we were in the South East,
again we have not yet reported, and there are significant pockets
of unallocated work there, but that would only be one factor that
ought to be in any theoretical league table perhaps.
16. Do you think you ought to try and get to
a situation where you could give us some idea of that on a regional
basis?
(Mr Poyser) I think the whole question of league tables
within the CAFCASS regions or between teams in CAFCASS is an important
and interesting concept and one which clearly has been pursued
more broadly in the public services. We have given it some initial
thought and we think at the moment one of the issues that would
make it really difficult, which Mr Chivers has already alluded
to, is the absence of robust management information to describe
precisely what is going on and what are the factors that ought
to contribute. I would not rule it out in the medium term either
for the Inspectorate or for CAFCASS itself to collect data in
a way which allowed fair comparisons between units of its operation
whether they be teams or regions, but there are certain risks.
17. Taking you back to my first question, you
are implying that in some areas the child might get a better service
than before and in some areas worse, is that right?
(Mr Poyser) I did not mean to imply that any would
be getting a better service. What we said in our first Report:
Setting Up was that in terms of volume and quality, remembering
that the new service was meant to be applying the inherited standards,
then many children would have got the same sort of service as
before and not better. I recall vividly going to see one care
centre judge in the early days and he said, "What change?
I had a very good service before CAFCASS. I've got a very good
service now." In that area in the Midlands there was high
judicial satisfaction at that time six months into CAFCASS.
18. But if you are acknowledging that the photograph
now would not be as good as it should be in effect, is this due
to the quality of the decision or the time taken? There are two
things that affect a child in this respect, it is whether the
right decision is taken with the right judgment being made and
the other one is the period of time that it might take in which
the child might be expected to put up with inadequate secondary
provision for a period of time.
(Mr Poyser) I think there are a number of interacting
factors and they will weigh differently in different situations.
There is the delay in allocating cases that clearly need to be
allocated straightaway. There is the quality of staff and whether
with experience they can get on with the job effectively and perform
their role vis-a"-vis the children, the families and the
courts. There are also wider environmental issues in relation
to what is happening generally to proceedings in that area as
far as delay and duration are concerned, the availability of experts,
the time-tabling of the courts and the wider situation. As far
as CAFCASS is concerned, the three most important would be the
availability of staff, the quality of staff and the internal quality
supervision of staff.
19. Can I ask you a final question on the quality
of the reports that are prepared compared to the decision prior
to CAFCASS. In reading those reports, which I presume you do on
a sampling basis, would you say the samples that you read now
are of a higher quality than the ones that were done before CAFCASS,
the same or worse?
(Mr Poyser) We ourselves never read reports before
CAFCASS and so the evidence about what they were like historically
is somewhat anecdotal. During our inspections we read routinely
in each region about 120 reports both public and private, so we
have built up a knowledge of several hundred reports so far. What
we find is that at one end of the spectrum there is superb work
and at another level there is certainly good enough work, but
occasionally we come across recent reports where we are left with
some doubt about the quality, the adequacy and we would have thought
in some of those reports the courts would have been less than
satisfied.
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