Select Committee on Lord Chancellor's Department Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 295-299)

MS ROSIE WINTERTON MP, AND SALLY FIELD

22 MAY 2003

  Q295  Chairman: Ms Winterton, welcome to our session. We appreciate the fact that you have taken a close interest in the proceedings in the Committee on CAFCASS so far; we are very much looking forward to hearing from you. It is a change for us, because we used to sit on the same side of the table, asking other people questions.

  Ms Winterton: We did; we certainly did.

  Q296  Chairman: I think probably you would like to say a few opening words to us, before we start on the questions, so please feel free to do so; and welcome, Ms Field, also.

  Ms Winterton: Thank you, Chairman. I have been Minister in the Lord Chancellor's Department for Family Justice since June 2001, and during that time I have been very aware of the difficulties that CAFCASS experienced in its first year, particularly, and some ongoing problems since then. What I have done is take a very close interest, obviously, and have regular meetings with the Chairman and the Chief Executive, but also I have tried to get out to every region to meet with staff and practitioners. And I would like to take this opportunity to say that if it were not for the dedication and professionalism of those practitioners I think the organisation would have experienced even more difficulties than it did. When I first started my tours of the regions, I know certainly that there was a great deal of distress amongst staff and practitioners. I have to say that I do feel that situation has improved considerably, that morale is higher, and that the organisation is stabilising. I will continue to keep a very close eye on that, for obvious reasons, but I do feel we are now moving forward and seeing the organisation take up some of the other issues and pursue those in the way that I would like to see it doing. Could I also introduce Sally Field, who is the Head of LCD's Family Policy Children Division. Sally took up post some seven months after CAFCASS' launch, in November 2001. Sally has responsibility for the Department's Family Justice Policy in relation to children and for CAFCASS sponsorship.

  Q297  Chairman: Thank you very much. I do not know how far my colleagues share the same reaction, but I picked up from the previous evidence session something which really confirmed a feeling that I had picked up earlier in our evidence sessions. Which is that, despite the general desire of all concerned that this reform, the creation of CAFCASS, should go ahead, and was in principle a good thing, organisational reform had actually stopped people doing their job as effectively as they were doing it before. That the net effect, illustrated, for example, by the need to weld together 117 previous employing authorities, was such that delays began to be greater, and indeed were accepted as inevitably greater than in the old system, that the process of reorganisation, not just in the early stages but for a longer period, actually got in the way of delivering a service upon which vulnerable children depend utterly, perhaps to a greater degree than many other public services?

  Ms Winterton: I think there were some very real problems to start with, particularly in terms of the amount of time that was available to set up the organisation. There were various pressures on that; the legislation which allowed set-up was originally planned to receive Royal Assent, I think, in July 2000, that was delayed till November. There was pressure for the National Probation Service to be set up; and it was felt that it would not be possible somehow to take the Family Court Welfare Service out of that and run it separately. So there was not the time that was necessary, I think, to have, for example, a shadow Board to set up all members of the executive team. Following on from that, there were obviously the difficulties of the judicial review. So, in a sense, it is correct to say that there were huge organisational difficulties to start with.

  Q298  Chairman: Have you taken a personal interest in the possibility of recruiting back more of those guardians who left the service in the course of all these difficulties?

  Ms Winterton: I have had a number of discussions about the whole recruitment process, and I know that in many areas regional managers have made efforts to contact previous practitioners to see if they would be interested in being attracted back. Also, I think that in some areas where they have tried, for example, I was in Luton last week, what they did there was try to attract people back by having quite a flexible approach, for example, by allowing employed guardians actually to work from home. So I think what they have done is try to make sure that, in a sense, the attitude taken by management to the working practice that people had before is reflected, so that some of those people either will come back as self-employed guardians or will take up employed contracts but working in a way that they felt happy with.

  Q299  Peter Bottomley: It is generally accepted that CAFCASS was set up rather faster than it might have been to match what happened in the Probation Service, so I do not want to sound political but, in effect, the nationalisation of the CAFCASS work was driven by the timescale of the nationalisation of the Probation Service. The Probation Service had a shadow Board, the child welfare work in courts did not; the same timescale. Is there a reason for the difference?

  Ms Winterton: Anthony Hewson was appointed, I believe, in November 2000, and, to that extent, he worked with the Project Team to set up and get the organisation moving, but I think, ideally, there should have been more time for a greater run-in period, and it is a matter of some regret that there was not. In terms of the timing of the National Probation Service, I have to confess, I do not know for how long that had a shadow Board set up, I do not know whether Sally Field has any information about the amount of time that that had, because, in view of the legislative programme, I am not sure that would have been any more possible.

  Ms Field: I think I am right in saying, I would have to check, but I think the National Probation Service is an executive agency,[1] so we are talking about existing civil servants who are running in a shadow form, whereas we needed the actual legislation for the appointment of a Chairman and Board.



1   Note by witness: In fact it is a service, set up under the provisions of part 1 chapter 1 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Services Act 2000 comprised of 42 Probation Boards, which are bodies corporate (these are not, however, Non-Departmental Public Bodies) overseen by a National Probation Directorate, a Directorate within the Home Office. Back


 
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