Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-34)
DR JO
ALDRIDGE, JOHN
REACROFT AND
KATHY EVANS
6 FEBRUARY 2008
Q20 Annette Brooke: I was interested
in the Children's Plan, in which it is now acknowledged that,
for young carers, adult and children's services should work together.
It is good that that has been picked up on, but my question is
whether we have run into problems because of the separation of
children's and adults' social services. Do we need to go further
than the Children's Plan?
Kathy Evans: It would be problematic
to suggest that there was a day when adults' and children's services
were well co-ordinated and delivered consistently to families
that needed both. The situation has certainly changed, particularly
in such things as services for young carers and their experiences.
We work a lot with children who are affected by parental drug
or alcohol misuse, regardless of whether their parents are caring
for them. Many of those young people are in care for periods or
being looked after by grandparents. There often remains a real
disconnect between the standard and focus of care offered to the
parent in relation to their needs and to the child in relation
to theirs. There is no real coherence about what the priorities
are in managing a whole-family case, and how to bring the matter
together and say, "Probably every member of this family has
individual needs that may sit in some tension with each other.
Our objective here is to work with the family to meet as many
of those needs as possible, with the welfare of the child paramount."
At a practical level, that is difficult to ensure on a day to
day basis, perhaps because the professionals concerned are employed
by different parts of the authority with different funding constraints
and priority regimes. It is also difficult to ensure, when we
set up so many rigorous and detailed sets of accountabilities
and integrated structures for children and go into great detail
on what that should look like, that similar reforms and reorganisations
happen in relation to adults in ways that bring them back together
when they need to be.
Q21 Chairman: John, perhaps you could
offer a solution, if you have one, as well as a comment on the
general issue.
John Reacroft: On the general
issue, I find in my project that it is very difficult to get any
service for a child from social services unless the child is in
extreme need or at risk. It did not always used to be like that,
but over a period of time it has gone much more that way. Even
if we find that, for some reason, parents are leaving a child
on their own and there are some factors leading to that—perhaps
they have no one to look after the child while they do the shopping—and
we have realised that the child is too young to be left on their
own, we have to inform the local authority that they are at risk.
The local authority then has to give a service, but it may well
consist of simply a social worker going round and giving the family
a telling off. He writes to them, saying "You mustn't do
this any more," without particularly looking at what their
life might be like in temporary accommodation and what sort of
things are leading to the problem. There do not seem to be enough
resources. Quite a long time ago, when families started living
in bed and breakfast hotels in a big way in the early 1980s, I
was a youth worker in King's Cross. We ran a group for some of
those families that was organised by the local voluntary organisation.
In those days I could ring up the local authority and say that
we were doing that, and a social worker would be allocated to
come and help run it with me. Those days have long gone. Only
children who are in extreme need or at risk seem to be getting
much service.
Q22 Chairman: A description of the
problem, not the solution, but there you go. Sometimes there is
not an easy solution.
Dr Aldridge: It has been an ongoing
problem, certainly for children who have caring responsibilities
for not just parents but siblings. It is about the duality of
their role—they are children with adult responsibilities,
which is why they have fallen through the net, or the gap in services.
But they are getting needs assessments. A lot can be learned from
the dedicated projects about how you make the link between adult
and children's services because a lot of these projects—similar
to the children's centres—take the focus of the child and
then look at what the family needs are. I think that probably
all the children we have ever had any dealings with in our research
and so on have said that what they value is the key worker who
is there for the whole family, and who is there not just for them
and takes into account the whole picture. It has not been difficult
to do that, but the problem is that after those services are set
up, they are very precariously funded, and then they run out of
funding—expectations are raised and then dashed. That is
pretty awful for the families concerned, but I think that they
are very good models of working with adult and children's services
together and they make important referrals as well.
Q23 Chairman: One of the things that
you and John are saying is something about the quality of the
person. So when a social worker goes along and tells you off,
that is not a particularly effective intervention, and probably
a waste of money. I am struck by what a senior police officer
said to the Runaway Children's Panel: "My view is that the
whole thing is driven by individuals. There are some experienced
and committed people who are the ones who are driving things.
The system itself does not provide a safety net; that is provided
by some key players, either at national or local level." If
that is the case—I think that both of you are saying something
a bit like that—is there not some way that we can make sure
that we are not that dependent on the kind of hero individuals
who do it right? Is there not some kind of failsafe that we should
be looking for?
John Reacroft: In the projects
that I manage the thing I have found to consistently make the
biggest difference for families and children is the quality of
their relationship with the person allocated to support them in
some way. When people do not feel completely on their own it enables
them to take more control of their lives, almost irrespective
of what that person does. I am not sure, though, what kind of
system would create that sort of relationship. In the projects
that I manage I make sure that a very important part of the way
in which things are organised is for people to know that the quality
of their relationship is very important, as well as the technical
advice that they give and the way in which they organise a group,
which, of course, must be done to the right standard. But I think
that putting people together with someone who they know is on
their side is a very important part of the solution.
Kathy Evans: I agree. The description
you have given is very accurate, but nothing new. It was certainly
something that we were picking up in the drugs sector in relation
to who was really behind raising the issue of young people's drug
use and needs for treatment—it was very much about individual
champions. Sometimes, at the national level, we are not going
to get away from that, but I do think that one of the mechanisms
that has developed over the years that is reliably fed back routinely
from young people—not just concerning the individual, but
because of the way they do their job, such as being there for
the young people and being really good at creating positive change—is
independent advocacy. I have a number of case studies. One that
you might like to hear is about how an advocate can play a role
in challenging the practices we are talking about, which perhaps
do not take into account a child's perspective, and can change
outcomes. It also shows that it is about putting in an independent
advocate in acknowledgment of the fact that not everyone practises
in a child-centred way from the outset. That is why it is so important
to have that overtly professional, standard-practice, child-centred
independent advocacy service in place when we know that there
are institutional risks that those children's perspectives will
not be heard or will be overlooked. Would you like to hear the
case?
Q24 Chairman: It might be sensible
to give us a copy. You often need to mull over such things. Do
you want to say something about that Jo?
Dr Aldridge: That highlighted
to me that this is what we are talking about. Certainly, in our
last study on mental illness, we called the person their "champion"
because the children saw the key workers as their champions. It
was about not just training, but developing a relationship with
these young people, and that is not necessarily so difficult.
I have done it with a lot of the families that I have done research
with, and it was an essential part of the process. Touching on
something that Kathy said earlier when looking at the Children's
Plan, it is about setting up parent panels and parent advisors
in schools. I did not get a sense of where the children's voices
were in that and where the consultation was. I keep referring
to schools because I think that they are so critical. A lot of
the time schools will say, "Well, it is okay, we have representation
because we have school councils," and that is it, but I do
not think that that is necessarily good enough. Certainly, the
research has shown that school council representation is very
problematic and does not represent all children. Where are the
children's panels and their voices in that? That could help to
pick up some of those issues from their perspective, because a
lot of children and young people are very fearful. Kathy talked
about the institution, but from our experience children are very
fearful of anyone who is professional. I have gone in and interviewed
kids and it is fine, as long as you are in jeans and not in a
suit with a clip board, which would frighten them. Young carers
are usually hugely frightened of family break-up and of being
taken into care and that is also an obstacle for professionals
working with those children. However, it is not all one-sided.
It is not always the professional's fault if they are not picking
up a lot of those children because that can be the result of fear.
How do you let children have a voice? I think that they have not
got that voice, certainly not in schools, from my experience anyway.
Q25 Mrs Hodgson: That leads nicely
on to the subject that I want to talk about: why children and
young people might choose to stay under the radar. When I first
read this section, I was aware of the inverse care law whereby
families who most need some of the care and services that we provide
are the least likely to access them. I always thought that that
was more because we did not find them, rather than because they
were hiding from the services available. From reading through
the documents available, I picked up that a culture of secrecy
is prevalent among young carers, in particular, who choose to
stay under the radar, and I am greatly concerned about that. Are
the children in the families justified in being wary of the services,
and what kind of experiences have happened to those families?
Can you give some examples of the experiences that have made them
have that fear? You spoke about the fear of being taken into care,
so is that the major fear?
Dr Aldridge: That is the major
fear, and it is well founded because our latest piece of research
on the profiles of young carers—I do not have the statistics
off the top of my head—indicated that a fifth had gone into
care or were in local authority care, whether short or long-term,
because of parental illness or disability. Therefore, they know
that that is a key issue for them if they tell someone, including
someone at school and their friends. Our most recent piece of
research looked at how children build resilience in those very
difficult circumstances. It found that they have an inner circle
of friends who they trust and an outer circle that consists of
the rest of the kids who they know, but would not dare tell. If
they are not telling the people who are effectively closest to
them, how do we get them to open up to a professional? Unfortunately,
a lot of the examples in the research show that they have very
good reasons to be fearful, particularly where there is a serious
mental health problem. As soon as a GP gets involved at that level
or a social worker comes into the house and sees a parent with
schizophrenia, alarm bells automatically ring, and that is not
what the children want. They want help and support, but they do
not want their family stability threatened. So, yes, they do have
very good reasons to be fearful.
Kathy Evans: Many of the issues
that have been raised apply to young carers, but also to some
of the other groups that I have been talking about. We know that,
for some young people and their families, if they do not trust
the institution with which they are primarily engaged, it is because
they have tried trusting it before and have been proved wrong.
We need to acknowledge that a bad experience of being overlooked
or disbelieved will tell you all you need to know next time you
need to get help. I have a quote from our research from a
young English Gypsy woman, who said that she went to school "until
some girls poured water all over me because I was a `dirty Traveller'.
My Mam went up to school and asked them what they were going to
do about it but they did nothing so Mam said I wasn't going again
'cos it was disrespectful to ignore her complaints." So,
that led to that child being taken out of school. The mother will
not allow that experience to happen again. Even one particularly
disrespectful or disbelieving engagement can have the most damaging
effect on future help-seeking or future engagement with services. In
2006, we conducted a piece of research called Just Justice
about black young people's experience of a variety of criminal
justice agencies. [2]They
talked a lot about their early experience with schools. They were
extremely convinced that no one was to be trusted and that the
authorities were not there to protect them or to be trusted. For
them, that view was forged from experience. With issues such as
bullying, even if the school, GP or care provider would be sympathetic,
if children fear that raising their concern will expose them to
stigma, teasing or being identified in ways that lead to bullying,
that can be enough. There need not be an explicit reason not to
trust the adults involved. Undoubtedly, fear of being taken into
care is a factor. Many children and young people, whether they
are from refugee, Traveller or young carer families, feel fiercely
protective of their family's dignity and honour, particularly
if the situation that they or their parents are struggling with
at home is one that their parents would feel ashamed of. Young
people are capable of taking a lot of responsibility for that
kind of protection on to their shoulders. Certainly, we work with
some families for whom generations of experience tell the children
that school is not to be trusted. Their parents have not had an
experience that leads them to respect the school or to want to
go back there to speak about things. So, there are cultural expectations
about not getting involved and not telling people.
Q26 Mrs Hodgson: You have set out
the reasons for the situation, but what can we do to overcome
them? What, in your experience, are the main factors that can
influence a child's decision to seek to disclose a situation?
Is there anything that leads up to that or that the agencies can
do? I know that teachers are probably best placed to identify
some of those children, but how can we get the children back on
the radar?
Dr Aldridge: That is difficult.
To some extent, it goes back to the idea of a champion. How do
you make a good teacher? How do you make one who communicates
well with the children and earns respect, and so on? Much
of our research on specific areas of young carers' lives has shown
that they do have significant others in their lives and that they
are not entirely isolated. It is about identifying those people
who can be advocates, which Kathy talked about, but in a more
informal sense, so that it takes away that fear. That has worked.
Certainly, young carers projects, for example, work with other
people who are significant in their lives. They identify those
people and work through them. In many ways the project workers,
for example, are seen as friends first and foremost. Such people
need to be identified. It is very difficult to do that through
school, as you said, but it does happen. A lot of our children
have said, "Well, actually, the key person I would talk to
is my teacher." How you develop those informal advocacy skills
is a difficult matter, but it is possible to use those informal
support networks, without a shadow of a doubt.
Kathy Evans: I would add that,
for children who have communication impairments, we need to make
an overt and special commitment to learn how to communicate with
them, to learn what methods they can use to communicate, and to
make sure that they are asked and given opportunities to communicate.
That is one of the reasons why we think independent advocacy is
so critical for disabled children, both those placed away from
home and those in other circumstances. So many children with communications
impairments are assumed to have nothing to say, and that can be
exactly the barrier behind which, from their perspective, all
sorts of problems are hiding. We have to make sure that such young
people can communicate with us. That also applies where English
is not a first language. We might have genuine reasons to be concerned
about many of these children. Might they be trafficked? Might
they be feeling vulnerable? Might they be caring for a parent
who is traumatised or has mental health problems? We need to make
sure we can communicate in ways that feel comfortable for them
and that enable them to express themselves, in addition to standing
by young people, trusting them and not expecting them to disclose
the most serious things on first engagement.
John Reacroft: The group I know
about—the children of families living in temporary accommodation—is,
in general, desperate to get on the radar. They fall into the
first group you mentioned. But out of those who may be falling
under the radar if they meet a service like the one we provide
it is quite easy to persuade them to get involved in different
systems, but they[3]
are quite a small minority of the group I know about.[4]
Q27 Mrs Hodgson: I have a last question
about GPs. We are having a debate at the moment about GPs, their
contracts and what we ask them to do. Young carers, in particular,
are under the radar in lots of ways, but often the person they
are caring for is not. They will be going to see a GP to access
the medication and help that they need. I imagine the GP would
know that that person has children, and could surely put two and
two together to have some joined-up thinking. What is your opinion
on that?
Chairman: Jo, you have researched this.
Dr Aldridge: You would imagine
that that would be the case. Perhaps you were not here when we
discussed it. I run training sessions for GPs in the Nottingham
region, and they do not see it as part of their role to look at
the children. That is true not only of GPs. The work I have done
with Adrian Falkov and others has been trying to push this message
to psychiatrists working with adult patients. What impact is it
having on the children? Are there any children? It is a simple
question, and it is not being asked. Often they do not put two
and two together, and that is a crucial issue.
Q28 Chairman: GPs call themselves
family doctors, so maybe they should see themselves as responsible
for the whole family.
Kathy Evans: I would just add
that if our real concern is the child in the home situation, in
particular where there may be mental health concerns or drug and
alcohol use affecting the child, it is not to be assumed that
the parent is seeking health care, and the child may be part of—and
expected to be part of—hiding or denying that problem.
John Reacroft: We have made a
particular recommendation about children in asylum-seeking families.
Children who are unaccompanied asylum seekers are given a specialist
case owner who sees their case all the way through, but if you
are a child in a family where the asylum seeker is your parent,
you get no such specialist support. Often the children are just
part of the asylum application, and are not looked at as children
at all. That is one group that could fall under the radar very
significantly.
Q29 Chairman: So one way of getting
that group of children on to someone's radar is to make sure that
the Home Office recognises them and their needs in dealing with
their parents' cases?
John Reacroft: That is right.
Q30 Mr Carswell: We have talked about
how to get children out from under the radar. Is that not the
wrong way to look at it? It is not just the terminology that is
wrong. The phrase somehow implies that it is the fault of these
individuals, and that there is an army of hyper-efficient, diligent
state officials waiting with open arms to sort out their problems.
If only these atomised pesky young people would fall into the
arms of the state sector, all would be well. Is this not the wrong
way of looking at it? In fact, all people tend to have civic relationships,
perhaps in minority communities and among refugees. They are never
quite as atomised as we like to think. The failing here is
one of a monumentally useless state system that is unresponsive.
It is not sitting there diligently waiting to help people. We
know from what you said earlier that it has not even assessed
how many people are brought into this country to work as indentured
child labour. You gave an example of a state employee who was
not even able to respond properly to an incident of what sounded
like racial bullying. Surely the problem is not what we can do
to encourage the recipients of state benevolence but the fact
that the state may not be quite as benevolent and responsive as
we like to think?
Chairman: All the people giving us evidence
are from voluntary organisations and not representatives of the
state.
Mr Carswell: Indeed. With great respect—I
know you did not mean to show any prejudice—it is precisely
because they work for the voluntary sector that I want them to
give an objective view of the role of the state.
Chairman: I just wanted to point that
out.
Mr Carswell: As did I.
Kathy Evans: As I said at the
beginning, I think you could wrestle with the definitions and
what we mean by beneath the radar or off the radar or under the
carpet. Much of what we have been talking about concerns children
who have been in regular contact with some kind of state agency.
For most children in most circumstances that would be only school
and health care. We do not expect every family to be extensively
involved with agencies of the state but some of the children at
greatest risk are under extensive scrutiny. The issue is that
their needs and welfare are not being picked up as a result of
that scrutiny. There are children whose existence is unknown to
state agencies of any kind. We have had cases where children have
been brought into the country and largely not left a domestic
home where they have been working in servitude. That is not dissimilar
to Victoria Climbié's case. Although she was not reported
as working in servitude, she did not get out and have any contact
or schooling. The social workers and housing workers who knew
about the case did not speak to her. There are undoubtedly both
situations going on. There are children whom no one in the adult
world, professional or otherwise, finds out are here and that
there are reasons to be concerned. Probably, the majority of serious
cases where there is a failure to identify children at risk, whose
outcomes are looking very poor, are actually in contact with concerned
adults, with employed professionals, whether they are voluntary
sector workers or whether they are teachers. How they disengage
with that or to what extent the adults around them would recognise
them as being at risk is what we have got to get to the bottom
of.
John Reacroft: The main issue
for families in temporary accommodation is access to services.
It is not particularly an issue of whether the services are there
or not. Moving around frequently and without any choice removes
the access to support services that you might have had. That seems
to be the biggest problem.
Dr Aldridge: A lot of families
do expect the state to be there and to be benevolent, helpful
and supportive—even if the depressing message is that it
is not. One of the reasons we are having this meeting is to address
some of those issues. It is the responsibility of the state to
pick up on them. I would hope, not just professionally as a researcher
in this area but also as a parent, that schools, for example,
are looking after children's welfare and that that is their responsibility. Given
that parents, including those with serious health problems and
disabilities, have an expectation, the problem is that they are
under the radar for a number of reasons that we have discussed,
and one of the main ones is fear. We are concerned with how to
address that. Hopefully some of the issues that we have been talking
about today have successfully looked at some of those key points.
A lot of families do not want support or are fearful, but I think
they would like to know that someone will be there at the end
of the phone.
Q31 Annette Brooke: I have a desire
to get some grasp of the scale of the issues, but I hesitate to
ask you to speculate on numbers. What sort of dimension are we
talking about of children not known to any services and what sort
of dimension are known to some services but are seriously not
getting the support they need? I am sure there are umpteen families
who are not getting sufficient support, but for the purposes of
the inquiry, we are looking at those two levels. We keep talking
about this. There are 100,000 runaways and it clocks up to quite
a large number. I do not want to pin you down, but do you have
any idea of the percentage of children in England?
Chairman: Kathy, you are probably in
the best position to make a guess here.
Kathy Evans: There are multiple
health warnings attached to this. Both times that we have done
our surveys with young people about incidents of running away,
it has come out the same. In 1999 and 2005 there were an estimated
100,000 incidents a year, based on our survey of 13,000 young
people. In relation to children affected by drug use, we are looking
at an estimate done for the Advisory Council on the Misuse of
Drugs of around 1.2 million young people in England; I think it
was 3.2 million in the UK as a whole. It gets much higher when
you talk about children affected by parental alcohol use. Children
trafficked in, and therefore deliberately rendered invisible,
are particularly difficult to estimate. CEOP, the Child Exploitation
and Online Protection Centre, has produced a really useful report
that attempts to pin down cases ranging from general scare stories
to documentable cases, and to rank them in terms of how confident
we can be that it was a trafficking case. One case may have indicators
of trafficking, but we may not be sure. The centre looked at 330
cases between March 2005 and December 2006, and it put all the
necessary caveats on how we should understand that. But we are
talking in the hundreds. We certainly have an accountable
but steady flow of cases that we are concerned about on the basis
of trafficking who come to light, through whatever means. They
come to light—often through police action—as working
in cannabis factories and working illegally, for example. We then
view them as children believed to be at risk of trafficking, but
quite often they are responded to as migrants without proper documentation
or involved in illegal working. We have definitional issues. Of
the 100,000 runaways, it would not be accurate to say that those
100,000 young people have opted out of all contact with services
or that they are not known to services. That is about the decision
to leave home. We know from the Still Running document
that of those young people who ran away for one night or more,
only one in 10 sought any kind of professional help while they
were away. For the period that they are away, almost all of them
are entirely and extensively out of professional contact. How
long is a piece of string? How many children are young carers
under the statutory definition and run away at some point? To
the immigration services, they are children in asylum-seeking
families, but to the local young carers service they are young
carers. Those are overlapping figures and it would be very difficult
to get at what you are asking for.
Annette Brooke: Yes, I know that we are
not talking about an insignificant problem.
Kathy Evans: It is not insignificant
at all.
Q32 Annette Brooke: Obviously, many
of us applaud the concepts of SureStart and of trying to identify
those problems at the earliest possible stage. However, a lot
of the evaluation shows that SureStart is failing quite significantly
to identify those hard to reach families. We keep talking about
outreach, and I would like to ask each of you very quickly what
you would see as a form of outreach that would really work and
find some of the children about whom we have been talking all
morning? Do we need specially qualified people? Are we paying
enough attention to the role of an outreach worker?
Kathy Evans: Outreach simply describes
an action. Lots of different specialist services might describe
themselves as having an outreach methodology, which might mean
having workers who go out physically to people's houses. In other
models of outreach, they might go out and take a satellite service
to a local community hall, or there might be a co-location of
services. For example, you might get a child protection specialist
outreaching to a GP surgery. Outreach is essential and it is hard
to imagine how you could find the hard to reach without being
committed to outreach.
Q33 Annette Brooke: But is this something
that we really need to get a grip on? There are people doing lots
of good things all over the place, but have we actually got this
sussed and a proper approach to outreach?
Kathy Evans: I think that we are
all guilty—we certainly are—of using the phrase "hard
to reach" as if that is what we are really talking about.
It suggests that we are reaching, but still not getting. A lot
of the time, we are really talking about services that are not
inquiring or including people properly. It is not that the people
are hard to reach or to identify, but that the service does not
provide for them in a way that would encourage them. A lot of
the issues that we are talking about fall into that category.
A child in a 52-week residential placement is not hard to reach
or to find, but if they are not being communicated with, they
are very hard to understand. For children or families who might
fall into the category of literally having very precarious or
no engagement with professional services, we must look at the
responsibility of and care provided by those who come across them,
professional or otherwise, in order to do something about it and
to alert them. We talk all the time about feral children as if
they are not human, live on and wander the streets and never return
from them. Instead of thinking about what we can do to punish
them, why do we not think about finding out what is going on at
home and why are they in a situation without boundaries? Why are
we busy running away from them when we should be running toward
them and finding out what is happening?
Chairman: Jo and John, I must ask you
to respond quite quickly.
Dr Aldridge: That was a bit unfair
for Kathy, because the question encompassed just about everybody.
I think that it is quite straightforward with young carers. We
know that support services are inconsistent and patchy, particularly
in those physically hard to reach areas, such as rural areas,
where there is not the required support, particularly from the
young carers' projects. They could progress if they were set up
with long-term funding, because they reach an awful lot of children.
It would be very easy to do that, given the right resources and
funding.
John Reacroft: My group is quite
hard to find because the people are temporary and transient residents
in neighbourhoods. My staff have to do a lot of intelligence work.
Certain types of accommodation are more likely to have homeless
households with children in them. We have to go and knock on the
doors of such accommodation. Professionals such as health visitors
and schools will have some contact with those children. That might
be intermittent contact, but we try to have as many links as we
can with those professionals, because they can refer families
to us whom they think need additional support. Even though we
are offering a service that families really need—and once
they get the service, they really want it—we have to make
huge efforts to ensure that they know that it is there and that
it is in a place where they can access it. Some points have been
made about going out and putting things in church halls and so
on. We have to do that sort of thing to ensure that people are
aware of the services that they might need. It is also important
that we can move the services elsewhere quite quickly, because
populations of homeless households move around.
Q34 Annette Brooke: That outreach
work is something that we really need to delve into. None of the
organisations appear to be concerned about the new arrangements
for money that formerly came through the Children's Fund, which
now goes into local authorities. I presume that some of the important
projects that we have been talking about would have received funding
from the Children's Fund. Will you give an indication of whether
there are concerns about that in your spheres, or whether you
are working closely with local authorities to ensure that all
is well?
Dr Aldridge: Yes, there are problems.
You are right that that funding was there, but it runs out and
it is not enough. The short answer is that there are problems
with it.
Kathy Evans: My answer is that
it varies in as many ways as there are authorities that we work
with. Some were very well prepared for the intended end of the
Children's Fund and had already done quite a good piece of work
in integrating the best of what the Children's Fund had achieved
into their local area agreements; others were caught on the hop.
I cannot give you a categorical yes or no. It would be fair to
say that all the changes to the funding streams and to the expectations
of how local commissioning should work have contributed to quite
a confused and destabilising situation for the voluntary sector.
John Reacroft: We get very little
support from local authorities for our work with homeless families.
Many authorities do not see us as giving them a service at all,
because they do not particularly want families who know what the
local authority should be doing for them turning up at their doorsteps,
especially if they are trying to divert such people from making
homelessness applications, which they should be making in their
own interests. For almost the whole of the lifetime of the project
that I manage, it has been pretty much 100% funded by Barnardo's
voluntary contributions. We have recently achieved about 40% statutory
funding through London councils. Apart from meeting the requirements
of the housing legislation for children who are living in temporary
accommodation, local authorities do not have very much money to
spend on the kind of support services that we offer.
Chairman: May I thank you all very much
for coming here? Kathy has promised us a case study, which I am
sure all members of the Committee, including those who were not
able to be here, would like to look at. I think that we have a
pretty clear picture that this is not a small-scale problem, but
a serious one. The view of all our witnesses is that there is
a key issue about professionals being able to connect with young
people, to listen to them and to give them a voice. That is what
I am hearing as a thread that runs through a lot of what you say.
What you have said will feed into some other inquiries that we
are doing about the future of children's trusts, the Children's
Plan and so on. It has been a very useful sitting—thank
you very much indeed.
2 Just Justice, March 2006, research commissioned
by the Children's Society, conducted by the University of Central
England. Back
3
ie the ones who initially do not want to be on the radar (note
by witness). Back
4
ie families living in temporary accommodation (note by witness) Back
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