Examination of Witnesses (Questions 271
- 279)
MONDAY 24 JANUARY 2005
MS BRIDGET
LINDLEY AND
DR DEBORAH
GHATE
Q271 Chairman: Can I welcome Bridget
Lindley and Dr Deborah Ghate to our proceedings. I have already
given an apology about our rather frenetic timetable this afternoon
but we will win through despite it. The Committee always gets
slightly dangerous when it has got to this stage in an inquiry
when we have had a reasonable amount of highly informed witnesses
before us, and even more so today because we have just returned
from British Columbia where we were looking at the working of
their Children's Act. We are very keen to get as much as we can
out of this session but we always give our witnesses an opportunity
to say something in opening if they wish to, or we can go straight
into questions.
Ms Lindley: Can I say that I am
here from the Family Rights Group but I am on behalf of the Family
Policy Alliance and it is three organisations, one of which was
not on the announcement. I am here from Family Rights Group, Family
Welfare Association and Parentline Plus, and I am afraid FWA was
missed off the list. I would just like to flag that up because
everyone has contributed to all the thinking behind anything that
I will say.
Q272 Chairman: It is good to get
that on the record.
Ms Lindley: Yes, thank you.
Q273 Chairman: Do you want to go
straight into questions?
Ms Lindley: I have already prepared
some notes which I think have been circulated. We prepared a longer
submission and then we did yet more notes. We may have ended up
repeating ourselves perhaps but I thought that would trigger some
discussion.
Q274 Chairman: Good. Dr Ghate?
Dr Ghate: Perhaps I should quickly
introduce myself. I am Deborah Ghate. I am Director of the Policy
Research Bureau which is an independent research centre specialising
in applying social policy research and on children, young people
and their families. I am here as a reader of the research literature
and as a research practitioner. I guess the most relevant piece
of work for your purposes that we have done recently is a major
review of the international research literature on what works
in parenting support, which we did for the Department for Education
and Skills. You may or may not have seen that. That is a very
useful major source of what the evidence base says about these
issues.
Q275 Chairman: As I said, we have
got quite a lot of evidence already. Can I ask you, Dr Ghate,
in terms of your research, although we have only dipped into the
work of other countries, how you think the model we have adopted
in the UK in terms of Every Child Matters and the Children
Act compares? Is it a robust model? We were concerned in British
Columbia to see a Children's Act that had been around rather longer
where the Children's Commission and Commissioner had already been
abandoned, where it seemed that they had reduced the focus of
the act to child protection issues rather than a broader concept
and where it was the least popular brief in the cabinet to become
the Children and Family Minister. Is our model a robust model
given your international knowledge?
Dr Ghate: I find that a difficult
question to answer. I do not think there is a great deal of evidence
on the way that systems work together to produce good services
for children and families There is a relatively good and growing
body of evidence on how individual interventions work and in relation
to individual interventions the way in which they may draw in
various multiple agencies and work together to effective or ineffective
ends, but I do not think that the model that is described in Every
Child Matters has been in that form robustly evaluated, certainly
in any of the countries that I can think of. The intention to
integrate services and to have agencies working much more closely
together is supported by the evidence in terms of what seems likely
to be a promising approach. As to whether in practice it can be
made to work effectively the jury is very definitely still out.
Q276 Chairman: But it is a very large
investment, is it not, and some of the predicted costs of this
Act are quite astronomic, especially the cost flow in terms of
a very expensive IT system for tracking every child in the country
when some people have argued that that should flow into better
quality services on the ground? Bridget Lindley, have you got
any view on that?
Ms Lindley: I would like to flag
up the fact that I think there has been reluctance, all the way
through Every Child Matters being published, the responses,
the programme that is being rolled out as a result of that, to
acknowledge the role of parents and family members. I know that
concessions have been made and parents are part of the programme
but I think there has been a philosophical reluctance to acknowledge
that every child's family also matters in order for every child
to matter. Just on the basis of statistics, almost all children
who are in need live at home, 85% of children who are on the child
protection register live at home and 92% of children who are not
looked after eventually return home. One cannot have a policy
that is looking to improve the wellbeing for children that does
not really address how best to engage parents, and certainly research
around child protection, and I am sure Deborah will agree with
this, has shown that partnership with parents has been the key
to the successful protection of children. What we would like to
bring from our advice work—and we advise tens of thousands
of families every year—is what it is really like to be involved
with the system and to be looking for support but to be in fear
once you enter the child protection arena and how best to engage
families with services in a true partnership. It is about respect
and being able to be heard. There are various ways in which I
would like to be able to elaborate on that but that is the base
line, that parents do matter. There was extensive lobbying and
debate in the Lords in order to get parents recognised on the
face of the Bill at all. I just think it reflects an implicit
reluctance to put families in the centre of the policy.
Q277 Chairman: Deborah Ghate, in
the whole debate about universal targeted services is it one or
the other?
Dr Ghate: It is definitely both.
I think it is important to recognise that the same families may
want to access both universal and targeted services at different
points in the family life stage as different circumstances change
around their family. They are not different groups of parents
necessarily. They may well be the same groups of parents but all
the research evidence suggests that good universal services are
absolutely vital, not least to stop larger numbers of families
needing to access the targeted services that then provide more
intensive help to address greater needs. Perhaps ironically, despite
the label that we give them, we call them universal services and
they are intended to be available to all and to be available on
an open access basis which does not necessarily take account of
need, but in fact what little research we have suggests that universal
services quite often fail to reach all parents in the community
and all families in the community and they particularly tend to
fail to reach the neediest. It is for those families that you
need the targeted approach where you can reach out to them and
address their particular needs in a sensitive way. I would say
that you undoubtedly need both. It seems to me that the strategy
spelled out in Every Child Matters is entirely supported
by what we think will work to support children and families better,
both integrated and universal. It is going to be absolutely critical
that we improve the way that universal services identify different
ranges of the needs that families may have and refer them on to
other kinds of services which may be better suited to meet their
particular needs.
Q278 Jonathan Shaw: You have identified
six criteria as crucial for success. If I read them out it might
be helpful: reachable services, recognition of the families' need,
responses to the need of the whole family, respect of family expertise,
referral to services which meet their express need, and to check
whether support that is provided is useful. You say that these
are crucial to the success of Every Child Matters. You
have said that you think the Government has been dragged in in
terms of parenting. Are you not being a little ungrateful in terms
of the fact that we have got this very important piece of legislation
and all we hear from you is just complaints that we are not supporting
parents enough? You have not mentioned the Secretary of State's
first speech which was littered with the word "parents",
was it not?
Ms Lindley: I think what I said
was that there has been some reluctance but there has been an
implicit movement towards acknowledging the role that parents
play. When the Green Paper was first published parents were not
seen as central to the solution. The purpose of mentioning this
is not to complain and be difficult. I would like to emphasise
that our role in the Alliance has been to try to find constructive
ways forward. We have certainly been involved in many consultations
with civil servants around the different papers that are being
produced to try and improve things. Underpinning it all is how
to make partnership work and how to make services available to
families that families want and are going to be useful at a point
when it has not reached crisis. There is a massive problem around
investment in family support, or rather lack of it, such that
the gatekeeping of family support is fairly strict until you get
into child protection and once that happens then services follow,
but the context in which services are provided when it is child
protection is one much more around fear and distrust. It is much
harder to work together in a true and equal partnership because
there is the possibility all the time that if the parents get
it wrong their child will be removed. We have many cases where
families are crying out for support much earlier on. For all sorts
of reasons they are not able to access it until it becomes critical.
If we want to really look at prevention, and the Government have
said a lot about prevention and that is very welcome, the trouble
is that there is quite a gulf between policy intention and what
is delivered on the ground.
Q279 Jonathan Shaw: We are seeing
the development of children centres and the Government is talking
about wrap-around school provision. Is that the sort of policy
development you want to see?
Ms Lindley: The key to its success
will be involving service users in the design and delivery of
services and how those systems work. That is one factor. The second
is to acknowledge that investment is key. Part of the gatekeeping
at the moment happens by families not having a right to assessment
when their children are in need and that legal flaw means that
it is extremely difficult to challenge a refusal of services.
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