Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
MR ANTHONY
HEWSON AND
MR JONATHAN
TROSS
22 MAY 2003
Q260 Mr Soley: And what is your challenging
target for allocation?
Mr Tross: I think the important
thing in public law cases is the time it takes to allocate a guardian,
because, clearly, the key stage in a lot of this is the set-up,
making sure that the case is properly scrutinised, worked on,
from the beginning.
Q261 Chairman: Let us just remember,
before you get too abstract about this, that a delay in a public
law case is a child, taken away from its home, unable to return,
perhaps see its mother, father, grandma, aunt, because a guardian
has not been appointed and no progress can be made?
Mr Tross: Absolutely, Chairman,
and, I think, if you have seen the judgment that was done in the
judicial review, we said that our requirement was to appoint guardians,
we should do so as fast as we can, and the sooner we do the better
it is for the child and the courts, and that is recognised absolutely.
The performance target in the Corporate Plan is to allocate 80%
of the cases within seven days; what we are signing up to in the
Protocol is to aim to allocate within two days, and we recognise
the importance of prompt allocation.
Q262 Mr Soley: You see, this is,
in a way, what I would assume, because my understanding is that
prior to CAFCASS they were normally, not in every case, allocated
within 24 hours, in public cases. Now you are saying actually
that your aim, never mind the reality, at the moment the aim is
less than that?
Mr Tross: The aim in the Protocol
will be two days. Our performance target and our actual performance
is less than that. And that is the target we must aim to get back
to.
Q263 Mr Soley: Why is 48 hours better
than 24 hours if you have got to use people?
Mr Tross: I do not think you can
guarantee that on the day that you get a case you can allocate
every case.
Q264 Mr Soley: That was what was
happening before, or do you think that is not true?
Mr Tross: It is true that there
are more delays in the system than there were. There is not, and
I think this came out in the MCSI evidence to you, a great deal
of detailed, hard evidence of what happened. I think, generally,
cases were allocated promptly before, so clearly that has been
a problem since CAFCASS set up. But, I think, again, the judicial
review pointed out the resource implications of an absolute duty
to appoint within a day.
Q265 Mr Soley: What we are worried
about is, and it is in the context of what the Chairman said a
few moments ago, I can understand why a case might be delayed,
if you are looking for someone who has got special skills which
are necessary in a particularly difficult or complex case, or
one where you have got linguistic problems, or whatever; what
I cannot understand is why, in general, the aim that you have
set yourself is less than it was before, given that the allocation
of cases, in the vast majority of cases, should be simply a fairly
mechanical operation of deciding who you have got available to
do it and then handing that case over to them. Is that wrong,
and, if so, why?
Mr Tross: No; that is right. The
key problem is actually availability of practitioners to do the
work.
Q266 Mr Soley: Then why are we still
aiming at something which is less good than what we have had before?
Mr Tross: We have increased our
capacity and we are going to carry on increasing capacity. As
you know, there was a long-running and very difficult and damaging
dispute, in which mistakes were made, we accept, with the self-employed
guardians, which we have tried to solve in the last year by introducing
a new contract structure which enables them to carry on, to opt
for either employment or self-employment. We increased the fees
from January, so that in London they went up to £25.50 an
hour, from £22.50, so we put a considerable increase in the
money to encourage people to take cases. We have increased and
improved quite significantly the payments that go to our employed
staff, and that is having a really important effect already on
recruitment; because one of the things I think some of the witnesses
have said is that we are recruiting in what is quite a difficult
social work market, I think nearly half of social services authorities
report difficulty in recruiting experienced social workers to
work on children and family cases, and we have increased the numbers.
If you take before April 2002, one of the consequences of the
judicial review was that we were constrained from recruiting,
if that could be seen to have put the position of the self-employed
in jeopardy. I think the figures that we have given you show that,
at the end of February, we had 1,239 employed practitioners, which
is 114 more than the previous April, and the number since we reported
to you, the latest figures show the numbers have gone up to 1,285,
so that is a 14% increase in the last year. So, because they are
important and valuable to us, we are encouraging the self-employed
to take more cases, and we have been recruiting more practitioners.
What is the issue, I think, with those, and I think it does impact
on the delay, is that, our new recruits, they do come in with
experience, they come in with commitment, they are really super
people, from the meetings that I have had with them, but, by definition,
they come in not knowing the guardian work, so they take time
to build up the cases. We do not want them to be asked to take
cases before they are comfortable and ready to do so.
Chairman: We will come on to some of
these training and professional development issues. I want to
give Mr Dawson a chance to come in on this.
Q267 Mr Dawson: Mr Tross, within
your overall targets for reducing delay across the board, do you
have any intention to prioritise certain aspects of guardians'
work, in relation to, I do not know, emergency protection?
Mr Tross: Yes. In January we issued
guidance to our staff, because we were concerned, in a sense,
that cases got allocated either by the next on the rota or by
pressure, decibels; so what we have done is we issued some priorities.
I think the first important thing was that we gave our team managers
a specific responsibility to manage the waiting list, so they
review all cases as they come in and they review them each week.
In the guidance, we covered some areas, I think, where we thought
there was a priority, and they included cases where a child was
being separated from the family, or siblings, where there was,
on the face of it, concern about the care plan of the local authority,
where there were apparent signs that the care plan proposal did
not conform with the known wishes of the child, so we have tried
to concentrate on those. What we have done also, in areas like
Wales, where there has been a problem, is we have introduced a
duty system, so that, for things like emergency protection orders,
where, in a sense, what you are having is something where the
local authority has made a judgment that some immediate action
has to be taken and what you are doing is, if you like, quality
assuring the reasonableness of that, that we will have duty guardians
available to help the courts. So that is the sort of action we
have been trying to take. So that it does mean, and I think this
has come up in some of the evidence, that we do not manage purely
in terms of the length of time that a case has been waiting, we
try to concentrate on those that are most urgent.
Q268 Mr Dawson: Right; but, presumably,
a duty guardian system implies that that person who carries out
that bit of initial duty will not be the person to carry on any
sort of long-term relationship with that particular case?
Mr Tross: No, that is right. Clearly,
what is best for all concerned, and is similar in terms of judges
who actually hear the case, is that there is continuity, so the
person who starts sees through. I think, in all these things,
it is a balance; is it better to have someone who will provide
professional input and assurance at the beginning, where, in a
sense, some of the key issues are going to be done, or whether
you wait until you have someone to start.
Q269 Ross Cranston: Can I turn to
the issues of management and organisational culture, which, in
a way, lead on, I am trying to probe some of the causes for the
difficulties that have been faced, and can I just emphasise I
am not getting at you, because I realise that you have not been
there since the start, but the evidence, as you know, that we
have had, is that CAFCASS has put corporate priorities ahead of
the interests of children, that it has been, in one sense, overmanaged,
in another sense that there have not been enough front-line managers.
How do you respond generally to that, and then I will follow on
with some specifics?
Mr Tross: Perhaps I could ask
the Chair, because, in a sense, he is there to make sure that
we do not put our eye just on what suits us, as managers.
Mr Hewson: I recognise your description
of the evidence that has been given to this Committee, and, first
of all, I would like to reassure this Committee that in no way
do we believe that we are overmanaging; indeed, in terms of headquarters
staffing, I think we are still very short in a number of areas.
But I think it really is important and I must do what the Committee
desires, but I do not want to spend a lot of time talking about
our past, but we have had a very, very difficult time since set-up,
we have done a lot better in the last 15 months, but actually
the whole set-up issue is about bringing together 117 different
organisations, and it is an incredibly complex process. And if
you look at the backgrounds of our different groups of employees,
you will find very, very different ways of working; so, for example,
guardians, by and large, are not used to what I think we would
call a managed service, whereas people from the Probation Service
would actually expect to have a very strong line management culture.
And, of course, then you get down to even finer detail, which
is, you have employed guardians and self-employed guardians, and
so on and so forth. So I think it is inevitable that some people
feel they are being overmanaged compared with what they have had
in the past; actually, we want to adopt what is called a "light
management approach". I have read evidence that has been
given to this Committee about a light management touch, but, I
have to say, what I do not see, and what I really do want to see,
and what the Board wants to see, and what the executive team want
to see, is what that means in practice, on the ground. I know
what I mean by "light management touch", I mean that
people, our employees and self-employed people who work for us,
are receiving proper support in their work, being enabled to carry
that out effectively and efficiently. But I also have to say that
we do have to address some other fundamental issues, like we are
responsible for spending £95 million worth of public funds
every year, and we cannot get away from that; and some of those
disciplines, some of those accountabilities, frankly, I do not
believe were in place in the way that we have to have them in
place, as an NDPB.
Q270 Ross Cranston: Yes, I know that
you have different organisations, with different cultures, and
there is a problem with public money, but, take the issue of the
self-employed guardians, which, from my personal impression, seems
to be one of the major reasons, because you have lost a lot of
good people; other parts of the Civil Service can deal with self-employed
people, as a lawyer, I know that, lots of work is done by the
Bar, they are self-employed. The organisation did not seem to
be able to address that issue, it did not seem to recognise a
mixed economy where you would have people who would be self-employed
out there, you would be paying them for particular contracts,
and so on. And the result has been, of course, that you have lost
these people, and the unfortunate evidence we have had is that
they are not going to come back; and the Chief Executive says
quite rightly there is a difficult market now, in getting new
people, and when you do get new people they do not have experience
straightaway, quite obviously?
Mr Tross: I think you are asking
two questions there, in a sense, and perhaps I can pick up. One
is the mixed economy and what has happened, and the other, perhaps
I can give practical examples of where we have tried to improve
our management where I think people would welcome it. You have
had a lot of evidence that there has been a mass walk-away from
the service; what actually has happened is rather more complicated
than that. There were, on set-up, something like 864 guardians,
of whom 695 were self-employed. Clearly, the issue of starting
to offer only an employed contract created major anger, and that
has cast its shadow long. When we offered the choice of either
employed or self-employed contracts, something like 314 took the
new self-employed contract, and 277 of the former self-employed
joined us as employed, so they are the same people working within
CAFCASS. The last figures I have show that there are about 300
self-employed who have five or more cases, which shows continuing
commitment, and we welcome and value that commitment; and we have
around 600 staff who are on public law contracts. So, actually,
there has not been an overall reduction in numbers. We cannot
compel the self-employed to take cases, and that is why we have
tried, through setting the contract and through increasing the
fees, to encourage them to do so, and we have done other things,
in terms of trying to show the value that we attach to them. We
are introducing a trainer bank, and we have invited people to
offer to train across the country, and we are interviewing 72
people, including people outside. We are asking a number of groups,
including NAGALRO, to bid as a consortium to provide training,
so we are involving them in that, and we give them the monthly
professional bulletin that we issue to our staff. I think, in
terms of the management, I would highlight two things that we
are doing, and I make no apologies for that. One; part of the
harmonisation is to strengthen, if you like, the team manager
role, the service manager role, which is the level at which Julie
Doughty and Colin Barnes, who gave evidence to you, are operating,
and that is because we want to build up the role of people at
that level. Using the term `service manager' rather than `team
manager', we want them to take responsibility for the quality
of the service in their locality, we want them to be actively
engaged with things like the Area Child Protection Committees,
we see them as the key management liaison with our voluntary partners
in the contact and mediation fields. So we are trying to build
that up, and we are increasing the numbers, I think, as Julie
Doughty said, if you look at it from a team manager, service manager,
point of view, the idea that they are sitting there as managers
twiddling their thumbs is not the evidence they gave, and they
are hard-working and committed people. The areas that we have
been building up in headquarters are, and, again, no apologies
for that, for example, we have seconded someone to work on information
and knowledge, we have had someone to develop our training plans,
which I am sure you will come back to, and setting up a training
unit. We have seconded someone in from the region to work on our
relationships and contracts with the voluntary sectors, and we
are increasing our policy capacity; because I think one of the
things that people would want CAFCASS to do, and I am pleased
to say I think we are now doing, is to be starting to make an
active contribution to national policies. Now, all of that, you
need to have capacity to do that. I came in as a manager, so,
in a sense, I was not part of the set-up, but my belief, from
coming in, in December 2001, was that the service was distinctly
undermanaged, not overmanaged.
Q271 Ross Cranston: I think this
is all good news, and, in fact, it may be that things are changing
and that what has happened is water under the bridge; but, obviously,
there are still gaps. I have just a couple of very specific points,
and just quick responses, because others have got questions. One
point that I think the NAGALRO people made when they came was
that the new contract will still not persuade people to come back
in; there was a particular point about travel allowances not being
available to the self-employed guardians. And another point made,
I think, was that, although there was a need for more management,
there are too many managers, as it were, you say it is undermanaged
but there are too many managers at headquarters vis-a"-vis
a research or policy capacity, you should have put more people
at headquarters into that area. So just very briefly on those
specifics?
Mr Tross: The short answer to
the last one is, yes, they are right, and we have. I think the
answer to the first is that you are getting a perspective from
people who are mainly self-employed, so, in a sense, they are
moving. The Inland Revenue made it absolutely clear we needed
to introduce a contract where there was clear blue water, and
I think one of the things that have been a difference is that
we do not pay specifically for travel costs, but what we do is,
which was not the case for most of the country, we give a combined
rate. Previously what people were paid was a professional rate
and then what could be a considerably lower travel rate, so we
give a combined rate, so, in a sense, that is subsidy for travel.
We value the contribution they make, we are committed to a mixed
economy, but, actually, as I said, we do have 300 of the former
self-employed who are holding five cases, and we have recruited
277 as employed. The other thing, I think, about offices is, if
I may, because I think it is also relevant to training and professional
standards, one of the issues is, I think, in all of this, good
professional practice seems to me to entail people having the
opportunity to share their practice, to talk with others. And
I have had some very positive feedback, from both new recruits
and former self-employed guardians, about valuing being part of
an office, getting the support from some really committed support
staff in those offices, and moving away, if you like, from operating
as a single practitioner, purely from home, into an environment
where they can discuss and share practice.
Ross Cranston: I am not sure if barristers
would want that, but, anyhow.
Q272 Mrs Cryer: Actually, I was going
to ask you about recruitment, and you have already talked a great
deal about that; but I wonder if you could just comment on what
the shortfall is at the moment of front-line staff? Because, as
has been said, the impact on the service is actually an impact
on children, and as long as you have this shortfall there is going
to be a delay in allocation, therefore a delay in children getting
back to their family. Do you know, offhand, what the shortfall
is at the moment, either a percentage or in figures, of front-line
staff?
Mr Tross: I think the capacity
that you need clearly is dependent on whether the demand carries
on going up, so, in a sense, it is a moving feast; and what we
do not know is whether the recent surge in care cases, in particular,
which are the most intensive cases, is an event or whether it
is something that will be sustained. When we did the budget-setting,
and this relates to the figures of 1,239, we put into the budget
provision for another 132 posts; what we did also was put aside
two further pots of money. We put £1 million into what we
have called an equity pot, and the idea of that is to increase
capacity in areas which have been, and this is history, relatively
underprovided for, for the work they did, and the big beneficiary
of that, as it happens, will be Yorkshire and Humberside, so we
are putting money there. And we have put aside £1.7 million
for a recovery and contingency fund, which will be available for
regions who are experiencing the sorts of difficulties that you
were referring to, to apply to have money so that, either through
contract staff or through use of the self-employed, they can tackle
some of the delays. So I think we have aimed in the budget-setting
to provide against the demand that we know about; what I guess
everybody is always vulnerable to in this sort of world is the
demand that we do not know about.
Mr Hewson: Chairman, I wonder
if I may add something to that. I do want to reassure this Committee
that the Board is very, very concerned about this delay problem,
there is not a single Board meeting that goes past where we do
not discuss this issue. I think it is very easy to slip into the
thinking that just by putting more people into this job we will
solve the problem. I have to say to you, I have an underlying
personal fear that that will not be the case; in other words,
we will not be able to match ultimately the demand we have with
practitioners on a literal basis. That is partly because I think
we are in a difficult area of work, we are fishing in a pool that
is getting smaller and smaller of professional staff, we have
seen the difficulties with recruiting social workers now, over
the last 18 months to two years, and we know a lot of steps are
being taken to improve that, but that will take some time to come
through the system. And I think, at a strategic level, one of
the most important things we are going to do over the next 12
months is to start the process of understanding more quickly the
mix of cases that are coming in, and how we match that to practitioner
demand and availability. And I think the second thing is that
we need to start to think about doing things in different ways,
we need to get the plug into the sink, if you like. Now there
are a lot of ideas about how we might go about that, but our first
priority is to get our core service being delivered properly on
the ground, day in, day out, to the best of our ability, and we
are still addressing that issue. But a lot of suggestions are
being made to us, in different forums, about how we might change
the way we work to do things in a different way, and really I
do think, long term, that is a matter we have to get into.
Q273 Mrs Cryer: I will just quote
something that Mr Tross said. "To some extent, unallocated
cases are a fact of life. Unless there are a number of staff doing
nothing at any one point, there will be requests coming in that
have not been allocated." So I think what you are saying
is that you cannot afford to have slack in the system, but that
slack in the system could prevent children being away from their
families for an unacceptable length of time. Can I just ask, is
this why you kept on with employed and self-employed, is this
why you have self-employed people, so that you can bring them
in, as and when?
Mr Tross: Yes. I think there is
real advantage in having self-employed, having a mixed economy,
because it gives you flexibility. We are also setting up a bank
scheme of people who will do contract or sessional work on an
employed basis, because they want that, and there is a real advantage.
One of the things that I have learned in this place is that a
sentence that you say in quite a long speech, or an article, gets
subject to great textual analysis; all I was really meaning by
that was that, if you have in any month something like 1,100 cases
coming in, at any one time you are likely not to be absolutely
allocating all of them.
Q274 Chairman: And that is not what
happened in the old days?
Mr Tross: Can I say, I was just
given, this week, an example of something where there is flexibility,
and this is thanks to good management and a well-respected, self-employed
guardian, where an urgent case arose and the manager contacted
the self-employed and actually matched, if you like, the cultural,
religious circumstances of the family and allocated within 15
minutes. So that does happen, and that is very much to their credit.
What I think you always have in all of this, either you have to
have employed people standing ready to do it at a given moment,
or, which is the advantage of self-employed, you have flexibility
there. But self-employment carries the consequence that, just
as we cannot guarantee work to the self-employed, equally, we
cannot compel someone who is self-employed to take a case, so
all allocations to the self-employed are a matter of discussion
and choice.
Q275 Peter Bottomley: With you, we
are trying to help make this nationalised service work; that is
the positive bit. The worry is, having looked at today's Guardian
about the drugs action teams in Bristol, that it will be a great
deal of process and the outcomes do not come. Now CAFCASS obviously
is much better than that, so I do not want to follow that down,
but if you take things like convergence training, is there a date
yet for convergence training? If there is a date, is it next year
or is it this year?
Mr Tross: What we are doing on
convergence is, first, we are now at the stage of getting the
acceptances back for the harmonised contract, we have just gone
out to people, and I think, although they had some queries, as
of the last I was told, only one of our current practitioners
has said they want to stay on their current contract. So that
will enable us to allocate work to people across public and private
law, and that is something that quite a lot of the private law
practitioners who have joined us very much welcome and are excited
about. What we will do, because I think there is the concern that
people should not be asked to do work that they are not qualified
and trained to do, is, first, this links to a broader programme
of training we are now putting in place. And what is likely to
happen on convergence, and is happening in some parts of the country,
like the North East, now, is that we will start to build up the
skills of some of our inherited private law practitioners in particular
areas, and a likely area is adoption, where that has started to
happen, so that people will develop skills over time, probably
at a pace that they are comfortable with and we can deliver. What
it will not mean is, and I think there was some discussion of
this originally, I think there was some sort of perception that
somehow people, on a given day, would suddenly become fully converged
and able to work properly across all cases; now it will not be
like that. So it will be a process over time.
Q276 Peter Bottomley: Not this year?
Mr Tross: It will start this year,
yes; and, indeed, in some of the areas where there are difficulties
it is starting already.
Q277 Peter Bottomley: Moving on;
you have not lost one in ten of your self-employed practitioners,
you have lost one in seven, not 10% but 14%, and that, in part,
has caused the major problem of being able to allocate cases.
If I were someone who had had 16 years as a guardian ad litem,
working for four different panels, with a Certificate in Qualified
Social Work, a Diploma in Child Protection and a Masters in Child
Law and Policy, why would I be told that CAFCASS have had to bow
to the General Social Care Council, who actually deny it, in saying
that my individual qualifications cannot be recognised, and that,
after all that 16 years of work and those qualifications, I have
to be on Band 1 and not on Band 3?
Mr Tross: I think the simple answer,
and the short answer, is, whatever the history, in the old contract
there was a qualification bar which kicked in at about £27,300,
and that was a source of great concern, exactly the sort of concern
about matching particular qualifications against it. What we have
done for the new contract is, there is no qualification bar, so
that people will be on a salary of between £25,000 to £30,000,
with scope for an additional responsibilities payment of £2,000
on top. So, in a sense, the answer to that person is, and I do
not know the individual circumstances, that what was a bar in
the inherited contract is not a bar now.
Q278 Peter Bottomley: Can I suggest
that, not today, you consider, with your colleagues, and we understand
their dedication, trying to find a way that people who think that
they ought to be on higher grades, and would do much more work
if they were recognised for their qualifications, can actually
have that assessed, rather than having to pursue grievances, where
the person who is supposed to pursue a grievance is off sick?
Mr Tross: Yes.
Q279 Mr Field: There is one issue
that I want to discuss which has particular relevance to CAFCASS'
relationship with the Lord Chancellor's Department, and I appreciate
some of this goes back to before your time, but prior to the establishment
of CAFCASS, in April 2001, a Project Team was set up by the Lord
Chancellor's Department to prepare for that, for the launch of
the new service. Now a number of people to whom we have spoken,
and we have received evidence, were fairly dismayed, in commenting
upon the failure, as they saw it, of CAFCASS, once it was established,
to use them for some of this work, and really I wondered whether
you had any insights as to what really had happened with some
of the work that had been done by the Project Teams pre-CAFCASS?
And really, as a related question on this, the failure fully to
take advantage of some of this work, and training being a prime
example, as we have already addressed, whether the blame for that
should be put on CAFCASS' shoulders, or whether it was fouled
up by the Lord Chancellor's Department?
Mr Hewson: Chairman, may I take
that particular question. I think the first thing to say is that
the Project Team did indeed have a number of task teams and advisory
groups, in fact, 12, in all, and a great deal of work was done,
for example, on draft interim standards, on training, as you have
just mentioned, contact, case-load management, they are just four
examples of what was looked at. But I think it is very important
to understand that, by and large, these were participatory working
groups, who were effectively storing up practical thoughts to
bring to the Board. And I think one of the first things I want
to say is, in answer to your question, that one of my most difficult
tasks in the last two years has been managing the expectations
that were created by that environment. There was a huge expectation,
I have to say, Chairman, quite unrealistic, in my view, but the
fact is there was a huge expectation about what CAFCASS would
or would not be doing on day one.
|
