Kevin
Brennan: It is our view that they will keep their human
rights protections under the Bill. We will explore that in more detail
as we consider the Bill further, but in our view there is no reason why
their human rights should not be protected. We consider that social
work practices will be a functional public authority. Arrangements with
providers of social work services under the clause will be
fundamentally different from the arrangements in the case of YL
v. Birmingham city council, which is the source of the concerns.
In that case, the majority of the House of Lords concluded that a
private care home was not exercising functions of a public nature. That
is the source of the concerns. In reaching that conclusion their
Lordships lay great emphasis laid great emphasis on the fact that a
private care home was not exercising any delegated statutory functions.
In other words, there was no duty on the local authority to provide
care and accommodation to Mrs. YL under section 21 of the
National Assistance Act 1948. The authority’s statutory duty was
to arrange for the provision of care and accommodation, and that duty
had not been contracted out or delegated to the care home. However, the
functions subject to arrangements under the clause will be functions of
the local authority itself. Primary and secondary legislation imposes
those functions, so their discharge, by social work practice providers,
will be funded by the local authority. For those reasons, we strongly
consider it to be absolutely clear that providers of social work
practice will be discharging functions of a public nature. I hope that
that reassures my hon.
Friend. 10.45
am Other
clauses in this part of the Bill provide context. Clause 2 restricts
the functions that the local authority can delegate to social work
practices. Those restrictions are important to ensure quality and focus
in the services offered. In particular, the independent reviewing
officer role will remain with the local authority: the IRO will have an
important role to play in the social work practice model, as it is a
mechanism whereby the local authority can quality assure the social
work service provider in relation to individual
cases. Clause
3 confirms that the local authority can be accountable for the acts and
omissions of a social work practice. I am sure that we will come on to
that in more detail, as we go through the
clauses.
Annette
Brooke: Will the social work practices engage in
preventive and family support work, as well as taking responsibility
for the child once it has been taken into
care?
Kevin
Brennan: No. The intention is that social work practices
will deal with children in care. The type of children whom we
anticipate, and the report anticipated, will be looked after by social
work practices are those who are in care and who may be likely to
remain in care
for a long time, because they are the ones most affected by the problems
that we have identified of instability and change, including in the
number of social workers that they face during their time in
care.
Clause 4
provides for regulation of social work practices. It requires those who
run SWPs to be registered with Her Majesty’s chief inspector of
education, children’s services and skills and subject to regular
inspection. It will also enable us to issue national minimum standards
for social work practices and to make regulations under the Care
Standards Act 2000 in respect of social work practices, as we have done
in relation to other establishments and agencies covered by that
Act. Clause
5 is important because it provides that the local authority power to
contract with providers of social work services in clause 1 is a social
services function for the purposes of the Local Authority Social
Services Act 1970. That means that the Secretary of State will be able
to issue statutory guidance and give directions to the local authority
about the use of the power.
Clause 6 is
critical to our work on social work practices. It provides the context
for clause 1 by allowing the social work practices set up under clause
1 to be piloted. The model’s operation needs to be tested before
we can judge whether it will deliver significantly better outcomes for
looked-after children, which is why genuine pilots are needed. We will
ensure that they are proper trials so that comparisons can be made on a
like-for-like basis. We need to support the set up of pilots, but it is
not in the interests of looked-after children for us to prop up the
pilots artificially, so that they can only succeed and not fail. We
would be failing looked-after children if we did
that. We
want to make rational decisions based on the pilots. We want to be
innovative and do things in the true spirit of social work—a
dedication to social progress and to being bold and ambitious for our
looked-after children, which, after all, is the purpose of the Bill. We
must be prepared to try out new ideas such as social work practices. On
that basis, I commend clause 1 to the
Committee.
Tim
Loughton: Perhaps I can ask for your indulgence,
Mr. Pope, given that in the first six clauses, amendments
have been tabled only to clause 6. If I speak in general terms about
these clauses, as the Minister did, we will be able to speed through
part 1. I will identify some of the problems that social work practices
aim to tackle, and then I have a list of questions about the detail for
the
Minister. We
agree in principle with the setting up and piloting of social work
practices, so we want to engage constructively. Clause 1 gives local
authorities the power to enter into arrangements to contract out their
services and responsibilities. As I understand it, the arrangements
will be similar to the way that GPs operate in GP practices or
barristers in chambers in taking on work. We agree in principle because
we desperately need to
innovate. Last
year, the Conservative party set up commission on social work, which I
chaired. We produced a worthwhile report, which was well received. It
dealt with a wide panoply of problems that face the social worker
profession, starting with the fact that social workers are simply not
valued in the eyes of the public and particularly in the eyes of the
tabloid press. The standing of social workers is worryingly low, yet
they should be regarded as the fourth emergency service. They are as
essential to the maintenance of a vulnerable child and his or her
family as teachers, doctors, health professionals and others, but they
are not regarded on an equal footing. We support anything in principle
that could contribute to raising the game of social workers and raising
the perception of social
workers. Too
often, social workers are seen as surrogate child snatchers. Too often,
the first contact that a vulnerable family has with a social worker is
the knock on the door to initiate care proceedings. Many of us would
like to see social workers instead working constructively and
preventively with vulnerable families at an early stage, doing
everything possible to keep families together, rather than adding to
the 61,000 children in
care. We
must remember that the majority of children in the care system are
returned to their families within a year. It is therefore particularly
important that the social worker—preferably the same one
throughout—establishes and maintains good relations with the
child, who may have to go into care temporarily, and with the family to
whom, hopefully, the child will
return. We
welcome anything that will provide innovation and an antidote to the
demotivation felt by many social workers. In parts of London and other
inner-city areas vacancy rates for social workers are as high as 20 per
cent. As our commission reported, many social workers complain about
the excessive bureaucracy, which means that too many of them spend too
much time in front of computer screens and filling in forms, rather
than in front of children and families trying to sort out problems at
the sharp end. They complain that they are too often reactive rather
than proactive, and that they are demonised in the
press. An
interesting report was produced by the children’s rights
director in July 2006, which was all about the comments of children in
the care system about social workers and the social work system. We
should never forget to focus on the views of the children. The report
outlined the sorts of problems that social worker practices will have
to deal with. Typical comments were that a child’s social worker
had moved them on when they were just settling down in a placement;
that children should not have had to stop all contact with their birth
families or have been split up from their friends; that social workers
should not ignore the views and feelings of young children; that social
workers kept changing; that social workers who were leaving were not
good at passing information on to whoever took on the child; and that
it was important that children got on with their social
worker. We
must remember that young people in the care system have very little say
on who their social worker is. That is an important consideration for
social work practices. All those challenges are faced by social workers
now, when they are attached to local authorities, in dealing with
children in the care system. The problems will not go away just because
we have a new structure of social work practices. Those practices are
now being
piloted. I
recently met a group of children from the care system in Warwickshire,
who came down with the cabinet member for children’s services
there. Warwickshire has
been piloting a pledge and has set up a board of children in the care
system, so that they can give their views. They have come up with some
good things. Some of their observations were that social workers were
not good at returning their calls, that social workers should turn up
to appointments on time and take an interest in what children do and
say. They also said that social workers need to keep promises, that
children need to see more of their social workers, and that social
workers should get to know the children, perhaps by taking them out
rather than staying in the house asking questions. Those are all
challenges that social work practices will have to deal
with. A
report was issued just last week by Ofsted on the views of parents of
children in the care system on how the children were looked after, and
more importantly on how they were being kept in touch in with them. As
I said, the majority of those children will go back to their birth
family or members of their extended family after a short spell in care.
More than a quarter of parents said that they had not seen their
child’s care plan, and some did not even know what a care plan
was. A quarter did not know whether the council planned for their child
to return home. What sort of a relationship is that, if parents do not
know if there is a prospect of their child coming back home and what
the family have to do to recreate a stable environment for the child to
come back to? The report also showed that 44 per cent. of parents did
not have a say in their child’s care plan, and 38 per cent. did
not agree to the plan. Fifty nine per cent. of parents said that there
had been no support from the local council to help to prevent their
children from going into care in the first place. More than three
quarters of parents said that they got no or not enough council
support, including help with the child being returned to
them. There
are serious problems facing both children in the care system and the
families whence they come, and social workers. There are the usual
problems of high staff turnover, staff being reactive not proactive,
too much bureaucracy, money and staff flowing away from the front line,
social workers being deprived of their autonomy, children coming into
contact with too many social workers—there is a lack of
continuity—and children not seeing their social workers often
enough. Those are the problems facing social workers working for local
authorities now. If we are to pilot a new form of social work practice,
we need to be convinced that those new set-ups will acknowledge those
problems and will be able to deal with them head-on and come up with
solutions. At the moment that does not happen
often. Mr.
Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con): Does my hon. Friend
agree that one of the problems is cost? The cost may be different for
those employed social workers to those in secondary accommodation. Can
he explain how that will affect the
composition?
Tim
Loughton: My hon. Friend makes a good point. One of the
questions I wish to ask the Minister is about how the finances will
work out. It is important not to look at a charge or a social work
practice in isolation. We must look at the overall cost of the
child’s experience and the overall effect on all social work
practices and social work departments within local authorities. We do
not want Peter to rob Paul, and we do not want to see
knock-on effects on other children. We do not want to see something
beneficial happening for a child in a short intensive burst because
there is extra finance available, only for that child then to slip back
into some of the problems they experienced before. It is important we
take an holistic approach and consider the social worker profession and
practices and practitioners within local
authorities.
11
am The
bottom line must be the outcomes for children. I am concerned primarily
with that, as I am sure that all of us in the Committee are. The
structures are secondary to achieving the right results for children in
the care system—the most vulnerable children of all—who
are the subject of this welcome Bill.
I have sat in
family courts, and my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich has
made a profession in cases and I am sure will have seen this first
hand. The last time, I sat in on several cases and had lunch and talked
with the judge afterwards. He said that in every case that had come
before him that morning, the social worker present was not the one who
had started the case when he had first heard it weeks or months before.
Interestingly, in almost every case in the court that I went to, the
social worker was Australian and was actually a very good social
worker. Many of them come over here, and we are grateful that they do,
because there are many gaps in the profession, as we know. However in
many cases, unfortunately, they are not going to be around for a long
time. That lack of continuity is deeply worrying in an area where,
above all, we need continuity and stability for vulnerable children and
their families. Will social work practices provide greater continuity
than the stressed and under pressure social work departments of local
authorities do now?
There are big
disparities within the system and between different local authorities.
That is one of my biggest concerns. For example, if one looks at the
records, one can find authorities where children have had had three or
more placements within the previous 12 months. Three or more placements
represents enormous upheaval for a vulnerable child who, in many cases,
has come from unsettled and threatening backgrounds. Why is there such
an enormous disparity between different
authorities? The
latest figures that I have been able to get out of the
Minister’s Department show that as of March 2007 in Cornwall,
23.5 per cent. of children had had three or more placements in the
previous 12 months—almost a quarter had experienced the
considerable turmoil of going into different foster parents, or
residential or other care in the preceding 12 months. How can being
moved that often contribute to reconstructing a degree of stability,
such as being able to stay at the same school and with the same group
of friends? I do not know why the turnover in placements was
considerable in Cornwall in particular—it may have been an
exceptional year. In Stoke-on-Trent the figure was 19.1 per cent. One
imagines that the problem may be more severe in inner cities where
there are difficulties recruiting social workers, but, in contrast, the
figure for the London borough of Barnet was just 5.4 per cent. There
will always be
divergence between local authorities—they deal with different
demographics and different challenges—but that is an enormous
range of
experiences. One
of the biggest challenges that the Government face is how to get
greater conformity in achievement and, preferably, get nearer to the
Barnet level of 5.4 per cent. Barnet has an excellent children’s
services department: it invested in its children’s services and
social workers five or six years ago and is now harvesting the
benefits. Can the Minister assure me that social work practices will go
some way to decreasing the enormous divergence of experience in those
and the other statistics relating to the achievements and outcomes of
looked-after children? Will the Minister target some of the worst or
some of the best local authorities in that range as part of the nine
pilots? I do not think that the prospective pilots have been named
yet.
There are
many other examples of good practice; I and other hon. Members
mentioned some on Second Reading last week, so I will not go over that
again. My point is that social work practices will not be the universal
panacea to the problems of instability among the social work
profession. We need to innovate and encourage the many voluntary
organisations—NCH do a lot of preventive family support, which I
mentioned last week and Community Service Volunteers do a fantastic
volunteer social worker programme.
The
Government tasked Professor Le Grand to chair the social care practices
working group, which was established by the then Department of
Education and Skills in November 2006. An eminent group of men and
women served on that group, including Alistair Pettigrew, who was the
director of children’s social care in Lewisham and a member of
the Conservative party commission on social work, Lynne Berry, who was
the chief executive of the General Social Care Council and has also
made a contribution to our commission, and Paul Fallon, who was the
head of children’s services in Barnet and to whom I am sure much
of the credit is due for the excellent figures that I have just
mentioned.
The social
care practices working group recommended the preferred model of a
professional partnership grouping of between six and 10 partners, the
majority of whom should be social workers, and the clauses suggest that
the Government have adopted that model. Interestingly, the group
recommended that the payment arrangements would allow a fixed baseline
amount to be paid to the social work practice by the local authority
and that a bonus unit based should be based on the outcome that the
social work practice achieves, presumably measured through the outcomes
for the children. Again, further detail on how that will work would be
useful, as they things come back to the financing of the practices, as
my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight mentioned.
Clause 1
leaves the details of the commissioning arrangements to regulations,
which we do not yet have. As so often happens in Public Bill
Committees, we are grasping in the dark for what the regulations that
will bring these provisions into force will look like.
I am grateful
for your indulgence, Mr. Pope, while I was trying to set the
scene. I think that that is important, but members of the Committee can
be assured that I will not repeat the process for the remaining
clauses. However, I have a few additional questions for the Minister.
We want assurances that the pilots will be meaningful and not just be
set up so that they can
report and move seamlessly into being the norm across the country. I
will be delighted if they are successful and have much to offer, but
they are controversial and a number of concerns have been raised by
professionals, local government and authorities about the knock-on
effect that the pilots might have on existing local authority-led
social work departments. Will the
Minister tell us how the pilots will be evaluated, so that they will
not just be nodded through, and will he confirm that that evaluation
will assess the knock-on effects on the local authorities and the
actual outcomes for the children involved, so that we do not risk
simply creaming off some of the best social workers from local
authority departments to join the social work practices? If the pilots
are successful, they should also have a positive knock-on effect for
social workers by attracting more people into the profession and
improving standards of social workers
overall. The
hon. Member for Stafford rightly mentioned the human rights dimension,
because the Bill does not say that social work practices, as providers
of services, will be functional public authorities, which I think is
the technical term that the Human Rights Act uses. That was left
hanging in the air after the debate in the Lords, so further details
from the Minister would be welcome.
On the level
of qualifications held by the social workers who are likely to work
within the practices, one presumes that they will be registered social
workers who are regulated by the General Social Care Council, but who
will register and inspect those practices during the pilot period? They
will, of course, be dealing with real children, because this is not
just a dummy pilot in a dummy cockpit somewhere. The pilots will have
real social workers dealing with children in the care system who have
real problems and challenges. Clearly, they must be monitored and
regulated in the same way that we would expect social workers to be
when working directly for the local authority. Does the Minister know
where the pilots are likely to be? He does not necessarily need to list
the nine or so recommended pilots, but does he anticipate that the
range of areas will give a cross-section of different
experiences? Finally,
Unison has some grave concerns. I am not pleading the case for Unison,
but it made some relevant points in the brief that we received. It
questioned whether social work practices would lack the leverage to
facilitate access to other local authority services for looked-after
children. That is a fair point. Dealing with vulnerable children
desperately needs an holistic approach. A social worker must deal with
the local school and the local education authority, and with the
housing department of the local authority if accommodation is involved.
Can the Minister assure us that social worker practices will have the
authority and standing to have that sort of relationship with
colleagues, even though those colleagues will be at arm’s
length, as they will be within the local
authority? Unison
is also concerned that the proposals will fragment the child’s
journey through the care system and work against continuity. If the
proposals are to be successful, they must address that and social work
practices must provide greater continuity than there is now. Unison
also refers to the fact that the Government have issued a prospectus
canvassing interest from local
authorities. Perhaps the Minister could update us on how expressions of
interest are going and how advanced that process
is. In
principle, we warmly welcome the proposals set out in clauses 1 to 6
and the innovation that they represent. We hope that the move will be
successful, but we need to be convinced of how it will be successful
and how that success will be judged. We need to be assured that a
proper holistic evaluation of the pilot will take place. We will have
more to say about the timing of that under clause 6. I am sure that the
Minister will reply to some of our concerns. Most importantly,
professionals who are expected to transfer to these practices and those
who will work alongside them must feel reassured rather than threatened
by these controversial, but potentially exciting, provisions of the
Bill.
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