Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 299)
MONDAY 24 JANUARY 2005
MS BRIDGET
LINDLEY AND
DR DEBORAH
GHATE
Q280 Jonathan Shaw: How would you
define when a family is in need?
Ms Lindley: I would look to section
17(10) of the Children Act 1989. Unfortunately, in the 15 years
that the Act has been in place there has been an ever-growing
practice to redefine it in each local authority area, which then
sets up a hierarchy of eligibility criteria. If you are in the
top bracket you are in child protection and you get support. If
you are in some of the next brackets you may get support, but
if you are way down the line in need, and clearly the kind of
children that the common assessment framework is seeking to support
are way down the line, there seems to be a gulf between the policy
intention, which is to bring it right down and provide support
when need is first identified, and the investment which is not
there to make it happen until it reaches a much more critical
point. We all avoid talking about resources because clearly there
are pressures on budgets and it is difficult in terms of the Treasury
and what money is available to the DfES but I think that is the
nub of it.
Q281 Jonathan Shaw: You are advocating
that there should be some minimum standards in terms of assessment
or are you advocating a national assessment framework?
Ms Lindley: There is a national
assessment framework which is great, and it is issued under section
7 of the Local Authority and Social Services Act, which means
that it should be complied with unless there are exceptional circumstances
to justify departing from it, but the reality is for individual
families that, short of threatening and taking a judicial review,
they cannot access it until things become acute. In fact, in my
notes I have referred to Michelle's case, which is a very good
example—a mother of three, living on her own in deprived
circumstances but parenting skills were not really an issue except
for the fact that she had a son who had extremely challenging
behaviour problems. She for years asked for support and only accessed
it by leaving her child at school one day and just refusing to
pick him up. Then, of course, it became child protection and then
she got support and now he is finally getting what he needs, but
that was an extremely desperate measure to get what could be provided
and is intended to be provided under the new proposals for the
common assessment framework.
Dr Ghate: There have been lots
of research studies which on a larger scale would bear that out,
that families who are really in the most extreme need will say
when they are finally given a service, "I have been screaming
for services for years and years and isn't it not ironic that
it has to get to this point of crisis before I receive any?".
In the research that we did for the Youth Justice Board, parents
who received parenting support services as a result of having
parenting orders particularly said that, "Why did I have
to wait for my child to be identified as a young offender before
I received some basic support?". I think you are right; that
case is probably indicative of many cases.
Q282 Jonathan Shaw: You are saying,
Bridget, that we do not want to talk about resources, but the
potential investment is enormous if you are going to meet every
single need. Every single parent who has a child causing a particular
difficulty or a young person who is exhibiting some level of antisocial
behaviour is going to receive parenting classes. That is an enormous
amount. Is it realistic? Do you think the Government is being
realistic to talk about this? You are saying universal and targeted,
both, are what we want.
Dr Ghate: Not all parents will
want particularly intensive help. In fact, the majority probably
will not, and their needs will be relatively short-lived and transitory
and if they can get a bit of help and advice when they need it
that may prevent problems escalating. The point about the argument
on cost is yes, all these reforms will be very expensive if they
do not work but if they do work they will be tremendously cost
effective because the costs of poor outcomes for children in the
long term, both social outcomes and in terms of cost to the Exchequer,
are enormous, and we know from the relatively few cost effectiveness
studies that have been done on some of the interventions to deal
with children at greatest risk that when they work they save money.
It is about taking the long view.
Q283 Jonathan Shaw: They do not always
save money in terms of the year's budget, do they? That is the
problem. It is 10, 15 years in advance.
Dr Ghate: It is a long view.
Q284 Jonathan Shaw: Unfortunately
we do not have ten years of one parliament.
Dr Ghate: It is problematic when
policies are disrupted when changes are made which are intended
to run for a certain number of years and then in a much shorter
framework everything changes again. It makes it very difficult
to evaluate what is effective, even though it may be responding
to very real needs.
Q285 Jonathan Shaw: You said that
it is not every family that wants an intervention but very often
the families who perhaps need a level of intervention are perhaps
reluctant to come forward in the first place, hence the argument
about targeting not being the best way to hook in families who
do have difficulties. There is this tension, this dilemma, that
is bound to arise with seemingly a potential for unlimited services.
What are local authorities going to do?
Ms Lindley: Can I make two suggestions
about it? One is that it is time to be completely up front and
honest and say it is too expensive to do that, but therefore to
set some minimum standards of where support services will be provided
by the state. Maybe the definition of "in need" is too
wide and needs to be qualified through guidance. I do not know
if it would take primary legislation to do it but I think there
could be mechanisms by which we could be more precise about categories
or indicators of the need for support. The second thing is rather
more bold but I think it would require a period of double funding.
Q286 Jonathan Shaw: How much double
funding?
Ms Lindley: I have no idea.
Q287 Jonathan Shaw: Double funding?
We have got double counting. It has got in trouble before with
that.
Ms Lindley: The cost of family
support is incredibly inexpensive compared to the cost of keeping
a child in the looked-after system for a week or a month.
Q288 Jonathan Shaw: We hear that
all the time and it is an easy thing to say, is it not? Still
local authorities have to have the money in case children do come
into care. It is easy to say, "We can save this money over
10 years, 15 years", whatever. It is not so easy to do though,
is it?
Ms Lindley: But Every Child
Matters is about making changes. It is optimistic. It is about
making things better for the future. I think that we are going
to have the same discussion in 5 and 10 years' time until we are
bold enough to put money into family support and are respectful
enough of families and clear enough about the criteria for when
they can and cannot expect services.
Q289 Jonathan Shaw: So the first
step to address honestly and boldly this tension between "Have
whatever you want" services as opposed to more realistic,
"What happens now?", the targeted service for particular
children and families in the greatest need, would be a redefinition
of that section 17,—
Ms Lindley: National standards.
Q290 Jonathan Shaw:—national
standards so that there are clear criteria, because it is quite
open and wide now, is it not, in terms of its interpretation?
We need a clearer definition as to what "universal"
actually means. It is not everything to everyone. It is a specific
thing.
Ms Lindley: It is more what "targeted"
means effectively, is it not?
Q291 Jonathan Shaw: Wider targeting;
new targeting.
Ms Lindley: Do you want me to
redefine it now?
Q292 Jonathan Shaw: No, I do not.
That is the challenge. Be realistic: we are not going to have
double funding, we are not going to have a bottomless pit of money
for these particular services. However much we might save in 15
or 20 years' time that is not going to happen, but what you are
saying to the Committee is that what we want are some clear definitions
of what families can expect within the communities they live in.
Ms Lindley: I can tell you very
quickly about a project that we are currently developing, which
is that families will be invited to self-assess in terms of their
needs and it will be coupled with some work with several local
authorities to be clear about eligibility criteria. If those two
were to work in tandem it would combine the respectful approach
to working with families with clarity about their entitlement
to services. It will be interesting to see whether we can get
that off the ground and really get something out of that. It is
about being constructive in spite of the fact that we might not
always appear like that.
Jonathan Shaw: I am just being devil's
advocate.
Q293 Chairman: We know what a constructive
group of organisations you represent. Does my colleague not have
a point in the sense that if you start a policy—because
we have just been to British Columbia and compared it—on
the basis of one tragedy and you work back, you seem to develop
a policy that is focused at stopping even more tragedies rather
than what you seem to have been articulating, saying that there
is a whole group of people who need support, a broader group,
and perhaps in starting your creation of a group of services it
is better to look at that focus rather than just panicking about,
"Can we stop any more tragic child deaths?". We certainly
picked up a bit of that in British Columbia. How do you feel about
that?
Ms Lindley: Clearly the extreme
end of any child protection policy is stopping tragic child deaths.
Nobody wants to see that, but many more children come into the
child protection arena than end up in that extreme category. One
needs to look at the broad picture of what is going on in child
protection and then we need to look at the broad picture of what
is going on before child protection. Can one reduce the numbers
coming into the risk of harm category? That is our approach and
we know that there are thousands and thousands of families who
end up in child protection who have been crying out for support
earlier.
Q294 Valerie Davey: I did not go
to British Columbia but in my Bristol constituency it is the voluntary
sector which in my experience is doing a lot of this preventive,
supportive work at an early stage. Do you see the voluntary sector
as having an important part in delivering Every Child Matters?
Ms Lindley: Yes. There could be
terrible confusion because of the lack of clarity of thresholds
of when different things happen, particularly the common assessment
framework. The Government response has come out very recently
about how that is going to be approached, and there is no definition
of "threshold" of when a common assessment framework
would be provided, so, although there are many voluntary organisations
who may be in contact with families, there is going to be no clarity
about when a professional should judge that they should or should
not start an assessment. We could end up with the big postcode
lottery coupled with huge variations in practice between professional
groups. At the same time they are a key service, they are there,
they are on the ground, they are in the community. People like
going to community based services. I think it needs a lot of careful
thinking.
Dr Ghate: Yes, I think the voluntary
sector is hugely important in the front-line delivery of an awful
lot of our preventive services in particular. What the voluntary
sector does less well is the strategic thinking and planning and
I think the lead for that has to come from elsewhere.
Q295 Chairman: If we use them who
is going to support the voluntary sector and give them the training
and the background which you have clearly articulated in order
that they play whatever role is seen to be appropriate?
Dr Ghate: There are a lot of differences
in terms of practice amongst the various different providers of
family support. I think it is probably true in the statutory sector
as well but in the voluntary sector there are clearly degrees
to which some agencies are providing a better quality of service
than others and that certainly needs to be worked at. Sometimes
it is very obvious why: they are extremely under-resourced, they
are trying to do too much. They are often picking up the cases
that do not quite make it above the threshold for statutory help
but whose needs are nevertheless quite far-reaching and difficult
to address. The other point about these very heavy end cases,
the extreme cases of a child death or whatever, is that these
are the most difficult families to help and it does need a different
approach for those families. We are increasingly seeing that their
needs are so all-encompassing; they have needs in every possible
dimension of their lives, and they really need a very seriously
integrated, genuinely wrap-around, almost physically wrap-around,
service in order to achieve change for them in the long term,
but they are not typical of all the families who could use a bit
of help and who might do better and whose children might do better
if they got a bit of support.
Q296 Valerie Davey: Were they different
from day one or, if had there been a very valuable voluntary sector
group, if they had got other friends, if other things had happened,
they would not have been?
Dr Ghate: The families?
Valerie Davey: Yes. Is it from day one,
from the birth of the first child, that that situation is crucial
and different or do they become different as a result of not getting
that integrated support?
Dr Ghate: I suspect it is both,
that they already face considerable disadvantages. If you look
into the personal history and circumstances of those families
very often you find a history of abuse in the parents' childhood
and so on. But I think it is made worse by the fact that there
are not services that can intervene early enough to stop problems
escalating further. It is probably a bit of both, to be honest.
Q297 Valerie Davey: Then, of course,
we go back to Victoria and it was not her parents, so here we
have got a different family set-up and we are doing an awful lot
of work on the basis of that case where we are not talking about
parenting at all.
Dr Ghate: Yes, and that is a danger
if we only react to cases that make it into the media, that we
get the focus slightly wrong. Clearly there are very important
lessons to learn from that case and some of them generalise to
practice in other respects. That case is not necessarily representative
of all the sorts of families that we are talking about when we
talk about families in need or children in need.
Q298 Valerie Davey: Do you want to
add anything, Ms Lindley?
Ms Lindley: Yes, just a couple
of things about the use of the terms "parent" and "parenting".
I think we need to be very inclusive about what we mean. Parenting
is caring for a child whether you are the direct biological parent
or however you come to be in a situation of caring for that child.
We need to be very careful to be inclusive. Also, I do think that
in the case of Victoria Climbié it is evident that there
was not a proper thorough assessment of need at the very early
stage, and that is partly what I am talking about. I am not making
any more judgement about that but it flags up the need for assessment
and identification of need and then a proper plan for services
at whatever level of the spectrum we are on.
Q299 Valerie Davey: Coming back specifically
if I may to the nature and the need of the parent, does this set
of proposals support the parent or regulate the parent? Which
side is it on as far as the parent is concerned and which side
should it be on?
Ms Lindley: The reality is that
it was going to vary according to when it was provided. If one
has already reached a point where there is reasonable suspicion
that the child is likely to suffer harm we are into section 47
inquiries, child protection. The context in which support is provided
once there is a section 47 is basically, "This is what you
are being offered and we expect you to take it, and if it does
not really do the trick or you do not meet expectations more will
flow and your child may end up being removed". If it is offered
one stage back from that, as is intended with the common assessment
framework, then the context is completely different. I think I
outlined attending a parenting class in my notes which had two
completely different flavours to them. One is very supportive
and the other one is coercive and undermining to partnership and
partnership we know is necessary to protect children who are living
at home on the register.
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