Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
9 JUNE 2004
RT HON
MARGARET HODGE
MBE MP
Q20 Jonathan Shaw: Specifically then,
can you explain the nature of the local authority trust and its
relationship with members of that local authority and the member
for children's services? Can I add one final point to this? In
terms of the duty of the corporate parent, where does it stop?
Margaret Hodge: Where does the
buck stop?
Q21 Jonathan Shaw: Yes.
Margaret Hodge: What we are putting
into the Bill is clear accountability, and the buck will stop
with the director of children's services reporting up to the chief
executive and the lead member of the children's services reporting
up to the council. So that is where the buck will stop organisationally
there. The children's trusts are not in the Bill as an organisational
structure. However, what we have said, and we are just working
through the detail of this with colleagues in local authorities
and other stakeholders, is that we will expect most authorities
to have a children's trust in place by 2006 or by 2008. In broad
terms how we envisage those is that it brings together, at a minimum,
education, children's social care and children's health services,
but I think the Connexions service and that expenditure will go
in there as well and I think in many areas Yots and the work that
they do will be incorporated too. So you bring together all those
players. They jointly plan commission and then pool their budgets
to use the money to commission services for children and young
people in their areas.
Q22 Jonathan Shaw: So the local authority
(the local council) remains the corporate parent for children
in care?
Margaret Hodge: Yes.
Q23 Jonathan Shaw: I think it is important
that there is clarity on that, because you will recall that one
of the criticisms arising from the Laming Inquiry was that no-one
in the local authority was accepting responsibility?
Margaret Hodge: Yes.
Q24 Jonathan Shaw: Do you think that
the structures and the systems that are going to be put in place
from the Bill will prevent that type of buck passing from happening
again?
Margaret Hodge: Yes, because not
only will we be putting clear accountability within the local
authority, we are, for the first time, also putting clear responsibility
in two ways on other professionals who work with children, and
that is by putting a duty on people working in health, in the
police service—I am probably going to forget the total list,
but all those professionals who work with children, health, police
service, social care, education—there will be others in
there—they will all have a duty on them to safe-guard and
protect children and promote their well-being and they will have
a duty to cooperate with each other. So by creating those two
new duties, we think we have answered the criticisms about accountability
that were in Herbert Laming's report on Victoria Climbié.
Q25 Jonathan Shaw: One of the concerns
in terms of establishing a children's trust, which is in some
ways a return to the old children's departments, amongst parents
of children with disabilities is that transition from children's
services where they can get a good level of services into adulthood.
How do you respond to those concerns and those criticisms where
children with disabilities fall off the end of what has been quite
a good service?
Margaret Hodge: Two answers. One
is that in creating new synergies we must not create new boundaries;
and we have got to always ensure that we keep the links between
adult social services and children's social services.
Q26 Jonathan Shaw: That is another bit
of an apple pie, is it not?
Margaret Hodge: We have to create
the structures to keep it going. The other thing is that for most
children, children's services go up to 18. For children with disabilities,
and actually looked after children would be my other category
of children, I think we would see the responsibilities going up
to 21, so that you provide some cover towards the transition into
adulthood in the duties that you embed in the legislation. So
they are the two ways in which we are trying to deal with that
very, very important transition point that you make.
Q27 Jonathan Shaw: The trusts, as you
say, are going to work across the boundaries, but they do not
have any power over PCTs or schools, do they?
Margaret Hodge: How are we going
to get people to work together is really underneath that.
Q28 Jonathan Shaw: Schools are very individual
by their nature: some schools will be keen and proactive and wanting
to engage with the different agencies across the board within
their area and others will be resistant to that?
Margaret Hodge: Yes.
Q29 Jonathan Shaw: So—
Margaret Hodge: How will we get
there?
Q30 Jonathan Shaw: Yes?
Margaret Hodge: I think that the
key levers we will be using: we will promote good practice; we
will do a lot of sharing; we will do a lot of training; we will
do a lot of leadership—those sorts of things. I think the
two key levers I would pick out in response to your question is
(1) it is the outcomes that we set. We are currently working through
very carefully the PSA targets, the CPA targets, the targets for
health in the NSF that arise out of the spending review to make
sure that they are all coherent and require joint working. Then
there is a document out, which I hope the Committee has seen,
which Ofsted has put together between the ten inspectorates that
have got together to establish the joint inspection framework,
and whilst inspectors will continue to inspect their separate
services, they will also do an area inspection to see how well
services are working together, and they will be all inspecting
to the same principles and outcomes and they will inspect to see
how well those services are working together. So I think it is
a difficult thing to get right, but the mix of setting the right
outcomes that you seek from individual services, making sure they
gel, and getting the integrated inspection framework right will
give us two really powerful levers apart from the encouragement
to get things right. The final thing I should say is that we are
taking a new power in the Bill—I think this is another relevant
lever—which will allow us for the first time to intervene
in local authorities where their children's services are failing.
As you know, we have been able to do it around education services
to date. We have never had that power in the wider arena, and
clearly there will be inverse proportions of success, all those
sorts of principles that are well-established now, but that will
give us a power of intervention where, in our view, local authorities—
Q31 Jonathan Shaw: What would you do
in those circumstances? Send in your own social services departments?
Margaret Hodge: It could be a
mix, could it not? It will be very much . . . I think we will
build on the experience we have had around—
Q32 Jonathan Shaw: The experience you
have had in education is that you have pulled back from that.
You are hardly doing it at all now?
Margaret Hodge: No, I think the
experience where it has gone in has helped.
Q33 Jonathan Shaw: Where?
Margaret Hodge: Haringey, Swindon,
Islington. There have been a number of areas where they have gone
in and they have turned round the services, and I have seen in
the wider children's services, it could be another authority,
it could be a voluntary organisation, one of the big voluntary
organisations that comes in, it could be a private sector company
that comes in that is building the expertise. It will be an appropriate
alternative mechanism to help them sort out their services. To
some extent the old SSI did a bit of that in the way that they
have been going in and supporting failing social service authorities,
but I think this is a tougher power of intervention and there
are one or two authorities, whom I will not name, but if we had
the power now we probably would have gone in.
Q34 Jonathan Shaw: The final question—I
think it is a reasonable point—just picking up from the
Chairman's remarks asking you where it came from. You said it
came out of the Climbié Inquiry and then you looked at
best practice. You mentioned the social services inspectorate.
They consistently rejected the idea to properly regulate private
fostering, recommending to ministers in the health and the education
departments for years, did they not, and it was the Laming Inquiry
that said "you will do that". There have been two Bills
where there has been an opportunity to do that, and we know that
Victoria Climbié was a privately fostered child?
Margaret Hodge: I think the reluctance
on introducing legislation around private fostering is the practicality
of it; and, as you know, we have put a sunset clause into the
Bill so that if our attempts to get better voluntary registration
schemes going does not bear fruit, which is probably where you
are coming from, we will introduce legislation without having
to go back to primary legislation. So we have put a pretty big
stick in there to give voluntary registration schemes a final
chance, but I think the reluctance is, if I am honest with you,
I am not sure a compulsory registration scheme would have picked
up Victoria Climbié because, if you remember, her aunt
pretended to be her mother.
Q35 Jonathan Shaw: Is it not the case,
Minister, that none of this legislation can be assured of protecting
every child in the future, but you have to do the best that you
can?
Margaret Hodge: Yes.
Q36 Jonathan Shaw: And it is too laissez
faire to say at the moment; it does not stand up. There are
very few people who support your view on that within the professions
across the piste. If there were 40 people around the table, I
would not expect many of them to support that view?
Margaret Hodge: We listened, as
we always do, which is why we have got the sunset clause in the
Bill, but I think there is a perfectly legitimate argument that
you should not introduce legislation that you cannot properly
enforce.
Q37 Jonathan Shaw: Even though Lord Laming
said it?
Margaret Hodge: Even though, in
this instance . . . I am genuinely not sure it would have helped
in the particular circumstances of Victoria Climbié.
Jonathan Shaw: Okay; I will get off my
old hobby horse.
Q38 Helen Jones: Minister, you said,
quite rightly, that what you are aiming to create is a major cultural
change. If that is the case, why is the Government not requiring
local authorities to integrate education and its children's social
services? Why is that optional, and how can you create that change
that you want to create if you have, even within a local authority
(before we move on to the health service) two departments still
working separately in their own offices?
Margaret Hodge: I do not think
you will have that: because we are requiring in the Bill there
will be one accountable officer in each local authority responsible
for both education and social services. In children's trusts the
budgets, not the school budgets but the rest of the education
budgets, education welfare officers, SEN expenditure, all that
sort of stuff, will come together in the same budget as children's
social services budgets; so I do not think it is right. I think
it is difficult to envisage it forward, but I think if we were
to sit round this table again in five, six, seven years time the
nature of how local authorities organise themselves will be very,
very different.
Q39 Helen Jones: You can have a director
responsible for both services, can you not, without that necessarily
meaning that the staff on the ground are integrated? The director
may be responsible, but that does not mean that all the staff
through the local authority are still working together. How do
you prevent that becoming, if you like, a paper exercise? You
have got a director responsible but nothing else is happening
throughout the sector, throughout the local authority. You have
still got staff, often on different sites even.
Margaret Hodge: If they do not
they will not be able to meet the outcomes we have set them and
they will fail the inspection and get a poor CPA grading in the
integrated inspection framework. So it is not one lever—I
keep going back to it—it is introducing this whole series
of changes which as a whole ought to create the systemic change
that we are after. We will see whether we have got it right. You
are right to ask me that question, and we may, over time, have
to return to some of these issues, but I think if we had dictated
to local authorities: "You must organisationally respond
in a particular way that I think is the right way", I think
that would have been, well, I know it would have been viewed as
an enormous interference in the local authority's own determination
of how they organise themselves. What we can do is say, "You
are going to have one director. You have got the duty to co-operate.
We are expecting you to have a children's trust. We will do that
in guidance, which unifies the things. We are having extended
schools. We are having children's centres. We are going to give
you these outcomes. We are going to inspect you against it. We
will train you on it." Another thing I have not mentioned
so far, for example, we are developing at present a whole series
of what we call "the core competences" that we would
expect teachers, social workers, youth workers, nursery workers,
all of them, to have undergone the same training. So bring all
that together and I think you are building the systemic change.
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