Supplementary written evidence submitted
by NAGALRO, the Professional Association of Family Court Advisers
and Independent Social Work Practitioners and Consultants (CAF
68)
1. This addendum is prepared to address
issues raised by Members at the hearing on 6 May 2003, especially
in relation to the institutional culture CAFCASS has developed.
2. From the outset CAFCASS has prioritised
its need to create an organisation over its primary purpose, which
is to provide a service to children. It has created a managerial
bureaucracy rather than a professional service. NAGALRO is concerned
that CAFCASS has emphasised presentation rather than maintaining
the high quality public law service it inherited. Examples include
the Power Pack launch [see NAGALRO submission 14 March 2003, para
7.8]; the slogan "putting children first"; and, most
recently, "CAFCASS aims to be a listening and responsive
organisation" [May 2003, Protocol for stakeholder engagement].
3. The most obvious and most serious failure
of CAFCASS management is its growing inability to ensure that
children in public law have a guardian throughout proceedings.
Its consistent response to difficulties has been to lower expectations
rather than to maintain standards.
4. It seems that the senior management of
CAFCASS and the LCD have accepted this development. The Chief
Executive, Jonathan Tross, in a recent interview [childRIGHT April
2003] 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". The Director of Legal Services, Charles Prest,
[evidence to High Court in CO/2587/4182/2002, P & R and others]
has suggested that there is no scope for Guardians to do any preliminary
investigation before the first hearing, (in cases where a child
is fortunate enough to have a guardian at that stage), when the
DoH training for guardians before CAFCASS strongly emphasised
the need for such independent and active investigations. The Parliamentary
Secretary to the LCD, Rosie Winterton, has written [22 March 2003]
"The issue CAFCASS needs to consider is: how does one judge
whether it is better for someone to do more work on the case in
hand rather than move on to a new, possibly more urgent case at
the beginning of its route through care proceedings"
5. This reflects a culture within CAFCASS
and the LCD of acceptance of failure rather than seeking to explore
how it was that these problems did not exist before CAFCASS was
in charge. It is not clear how far this is due to lack of understanding
of the role of guardians as part of the child protection system,
or to a lack of commitment to ensure that vulnerable children
have the full protection to which they are entitled.
6. Before CAFCASS the expectation, almost
universally met, was that public law cases would be allocated
within 24 hours. In many parts of the country children subject
to Emergency Protection and Secure Accommodation applications
were allocated within two hours, which does not happen under CAFCASS,
with serious Human Rights Act implications.
7. It is a grotesque achievement by the
LCD, the CAFCASS Board and the Executive Team of CAFCASS that
some children now have to wait for three months for a guardian;
a wait which can have lifelong implications for the child. Failure
to protect the child is being accepted and institutionalised by
CAFCASS.
8. Even in managerial and organisational
terms, CAFCASS and its sponsoring Department, the LCD, have demonstrably
failed in many areas. Major organisational failures that cannot
be made the responsibility of anyone but the LCD or CAFCASS include:
expensive recruitment followed by dismissal of staff at the highest
levels; apparent waste of millions spent by the LCD Project Teams;
current waste of money on IT hardware and software [see evidence
from CAFCASS Managers Association 6 May 2003]; continuing refusal
by the Executive Team to produce a costing to compare the use
of employed staff to self employed practitioners; and, after over
two years, continuing inability to produce reliable management
statistics eg about public law caseloads.
9. CAFCASS has created an expensive bureaucracy.
Before CAFCASS no Panel manager earned over £40,000 a year.
Now the service has to bear the cost of about 20 managers and
Board members paid well in excess of that figure, all with costly
support staff. None of these people were necessary to deliver
the service before CAFCASS, and this structure constitutes a substantial
shift away from direct service provision to children. These costs,
and the offence caused by this expenditure, may explain some of
the shortage of practitioners.
10. Since NAGALRO's written submission,
there have been proposals by the Executive Team to introduce a
sixth tier of management, just below the Operations Director,
and the introduction of public law report formats without broad
consultation with the writers of the reports or those who have
to read them, such as judges and lawyers, without piloting these
changes.
11. At the same time, CAFCASS has effectively
managed to lose the trust of many of its core stakeholders—among
them the judiciary and magistracy, child care lawyers, social
services child care practitioners and guardians. (For the purpose
of this addendum, we have limited our comments to public law matters.)
12. No advantage in the creation of a national
service is yet discernible. There are different and apparently
arbitrary management practices across the country. For example,
it is clear that in the South West efforts are being made by regional
management to avoid using self employed practitioners at all,
so losing any of the past flexibility that demonstrably met Children's
needs.
13. In Avon CAFCASS management, in their
drive to recruit employed staff, have so mismanaged the budget
that they have recruited two more employees than their budget
allowed. Consequently there is no budget for 2003-04 for the allocation
of any cases to self employed guardians, including children for
whom they have previously been guardian. This gives the lie to
CAFCASS' repeated commitment to a "mixed economy" of
guardians, and the flexibility it gives. It will drive away even
more self-employed practitioners whose trust in CAFCASS will be
further eroded. NAGALRO has had no reply to their letters of 30
April 2003 to the regional manager and the Chief Executive seeking
clarification.
14. NAGALRO knows of examples around the
country where CAFCASS managers are not allocating guardians to
children in public law proceedings even though there are self-employed
practitioners available to do the work. NAGALRO also knows of
children who are being allocated to employed guardians, even where
in previous proceedings they have made a relationship with a self
employed guardian, who is still available to act for them. This
is an unnecessary discontinuity for the child at a point of acute
vulnerability. Quality is being diminished.
15. The Committee heard evidence from the
ALC, Judith Timms and Katherine Gieve, among others, of recently
appointed employed Guardians, some of whom have insufficient social
work experience combined with a lack of effective professional
support. Experienced NAGALRO members are repeatedly informed by
judges, magistrates, court clerks, lawyers and social services
managers of guardians who, in the view of the informants, are
quite inadequately protecting the interests of children. CAFCASS
management denies this, insisting that their reduced entry requirements
and almost non-existent training programme, combined with management
by people without guardian experience, is sufficient.
16. These are the elements that make up
CAFCASS' culture, a culture which has to change entirely if children
are to be protected and ex-guardians and those guardians who have
reduced their commitment to CAFCASS are to be attracted back to
the work.
17. There has to be a return to the shared
responsibility and shared ownership of the service, instead of
the CAFCASS ethos of "management knows best". In the
past, guardians would have been encouraged by Panel managers to
make individual or group submissions to a Committee such as yours,
but many NALGALRO members report that they perceive it is too
risky for them to do so now. This is a demonstration of the distance
and alienation CAFCASS has created between managers and the workforce.
18. Speedy and easily understood signals
that a genuine culture change is taking place would include:
— Statement by the LCD, the Board and
Executive Team that CAFCASS has failed hitherto to take account
of Children's needs as the first priority.
— That henceforth CAFCASS will make
no organisational decision without first considering the possible
impact on individual children subject of public or private law
proceedings.
— Waiting lists must be ended if CAFCASS
is to have any long term credibility. The only way this can be
done effectively is by encouraging the greater commitment of those
still involved in CAFCASS and encouraging the return of some of
the 200+ experienced practitioners who have left the service.
It would not require these individuals to take many cases each
to end the waiting list problem. In the climate CAFCASS has created
new incentives may now be necessary to encourage the allocation
of cases. The Board and Executive Team need to enter into urgent
and open discussions with relevant organisations to establish
how this might best be done.
— Announcement that at least the proposed
extra tier of management will be scrapped, and that managers will
now focus on the administration of the service to children rather
than organisational ends.
— Early consultation with all stakeholders
about the composition and structure of a professional development
unit as a central component of CAFCASS.
— Advertisement for new Board members
with child focussed interests and experience.
— Making the inclusion of guardians
with training experience a priority for establishing ongoing training
programmes in public law.
— Payment to the self employed of travel
expenses for journeys over 70 miles return, and/or costing more
than £35, to assist in the allocation of adoption cases,
long distance cases and to include the exploration of extended
families as possible carers for children who cannot return to
their parents.
Alison Paddle
Chair on behalf of NAGALRO Council
18 May 2003
1. NAGALRO has been grateful for the opportunity
afforded by the Committee to make written and oral submissions,
and hopes it is helpful to address a few points arising from the
evidence of Mr Hewson, Mr Tross and Ms Winterton.
2. These witnesses referred to the dispute
with Guardians and the Judicial Review of September 2001 as being
a significant cause of difficulties. The reality is that the Cafcass
Board and management, supported by the LCD, unilaterally decided,
against much advice, to have a workforce made up solely of employed
Guardians. NAGALRO recognized that this would drive away most
of the existing workforce (an even worse outcome than we have
now) and so started the Judicial Review proceedings, in which
Cafcass was found to have acted illegally. It was not the dispute
which caused difficulties for Cafcass, it was Cafcass' decision,
based on an ill-conceived understanding of the role of the Guardian.
3. Mr Tross says (Q270) that there about
300 self-employed who have five or more cases. Regrettably, and
we have advised Mr Tross of this on a number of occasions, this
includes a significant number where we suspect Cafcass' statistics
are incorrect [see evidence of Managers Association concerning
statistical retrieval], as well as a number who are running down
their case load prior to leaving Cafcass. The picture painted
of a "mixed economy" will soon not be accurate.
4. Mr Tross (Q271) and Ms Winterton (Q301)
refer to the Inland Revenue. There has never been a suggestion
from the Inland Revenue that self-employment as a Guardian is
not possible. There has never been any ruling by the Inland Revenue
that Guardian contracts pre-CAFCASS were not compatible with self-employment.
It is regrettable that after this has been repeatedly explained
to Cafcass, the Chief Executive and the Minister continue to suggest
this as a cause of their difficulties.
5. Mr Tross suggested as the primary reason
for delay in appointment of Guardians (Q256) the increase in demand.
Pre-Cafcass the predominantly self-employed workforce was able
to absorb great variations in demand. For example, in 1991-92,
following the implementation of the Children Act 1989, there was
a massive reduction in care proceedings in most parts of the country.
In the following year there was an equally large surge in numbers
of care proceedings as local authorities came to terms with the
new legislation. Both the reduction and the increase were absorbed
by the predominantly self-employed Guardian workforce. Cafcass,
because it chose to have a mainly employed workforce, which has
more rigid time constraints, does not have the flexibility to
respond to changes in demand. Thus the waiting lists increase
not least because there are not enough employed Guardian hours
to take on more cases.
Alison Paddle
Chair on behalf of NAGALRO Council
3 June 2003
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