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Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab): I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend about maintaining the highest possible standards in care, particularly in children’s homes. Did his Committee look at how we can improve standards of care in children’s homes, perhaps by looking at Ofsted’s inspection process and considering ways of improving it?
Mr. Sheerman: I can assure my hon. Friend not only that we did that, but that we looked at how we reward social workers, who work in the most difficult situations. As I have said, that is why we are also looking at the training of social workers. We have nearly completed that work, which we are doing now because we could not do it as thoroughly as we wanted before. In the generality, however, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North is absolutely right. We pay minimum wage-plus to so many people working in early years—we did an inquiry into early years—and they are the most poorly trained people in the work force. There is no doubt that things are getting better, but they are not getting better fast enough and we need crossover, particularly into residential care.
We said in the report that level 3 qualifications should be the absolute minimum, but in residential care we found the lowest paid, the lowest rewarded and valued, and the least trained people in the social care work force. That is not good enough and it has to change. Residential care should be as good as we can get it. We should experiment, pilot schemes and copy some of the good practice that we saw in Denmark and this country. Size matters a great deal—my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley said that 12 or 14 for a unit was quite big—so it is important to get it right.
Let me make a general point. The care should be absolutely fantastic, but that will not come cheap—I remind the House that people in Denmark pay 50 per cent. income tax and 25 per cent. VAT. However, if such care is a touchstone or a litmus test of how civilised we are as a society, we should persuade our constituents to pay the money and make the necessary sacrifices.
John Hemming: The Committee’s experience of the quality of care in Denmark was that the children were less miserable because they were kept in touch with their parents. I have checked the hon. Gentleman’s figure of 90,000 or 85,000 for the number of children who may have been in care in any one year, but it is not the number of children who go into care or come out of it. In practice, about 7,000 to 8,000 children go into care as a result of care orders. Of those who leave care, the majority leave to adoption—the figure was about 3,800, but it has come down slightly. However, that drives a wedge between the parents and the practitioners, because the practitioners have to reduce contact with the parents to prepare the children for adoption, which is the complete opposite of what happens in Denmark. Would it perhaps not be a good idea to invite somebody from Denmark to do a critique of the system in England?
Mr. Sheerman:
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. He has also pulled me up on my figures. I should tell him that he has read that part of our report more recently than I have—that report is three reports away in this poor brain of mine, but I thank him for his intervention. He is probably quite right about getting external evaluation, but in a sense that is what we try to
do as a Select Committee by going somewhere that we think has good practice. Some of the things that we saw informed our report and we made some strong points.
Tim Loughton: Let me bring the hon. Gentleman back to cost and Denmark, about which I would like to make a comment if I have an opportunity. I was there about three years ago and visited some of the homes that I think his Committee visited. Interestingly, although a lot of extra money goes into training and child care in Denmark, the cost of housing children in some residential homes, including the one that I visited, which was run by the local municipality in Copenhagen, works out at about £56,000 a year. That is half the average cost of a residential home for a child in the UK, so in fact the cost need not be more expensive.
Mr. Sheerman: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point.
Mr. Graham Stuart: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Sheerman: Let me make just a little more progress.
I want to cover the fundamentals, which are these. First, residential care should be better, and people should be paid and supported better. I do not want to go down the road of talking about social workers too much, but when we interviewed children who had been in care, we found that the problem was the rotation of social workers. There was no one person whom they knew—no person whose face they knew; no one with whom they were familiar or with whom they had a good relationship.
We cannot have a system where a child—any child, let alone a child in care—never knows which social worker he or she will meet or when they will meet them. There has to be a consistency of relationship in the caring system. That was one of our sharpest criticisms of the experience that those children had had. Consistency means knowing someone—knowing their face and knowing that if everything went wrong at midnight or three in the morning, there would be someone whom the child could phone whom they knew, respected and, hopefully, loved. That is a tall order, but the Committee decided that we wanted to make a strong point about how key that stability in relationships is.
Fiona Mactaggart: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Sheerman: Let me give way to the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) first.
Mr. Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the failures of the current system, notwithstanding improvements. We need a shift in the whole political system so that we take the issue more seriously, because progress is glacially slow compared with the moral outrage that is happening to the most vulnerable children in our country, despite this country’s wealth and our expenditure in other areas. We need to speed up that change if we are not to let down another generation of children, so what specific measures would the hon. Gentleman most like to see in major party manifestos at the general election, when it comes?
Mr. Sheerman: The hon. Gentleman is being slightly mischievous. I am not going down that route; I am going to make my speech, which will encapsulate some of the things that I would like any party to adopt as policy.
Fiona Mactaggart: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Let me finish on the quality of the work force, which is at the heart of our report. The other quality is the quality of the care situation, which usually means foster carers and foster families. The people who do that job in our country and do it well are absolutely amazing. I have visited some of them individually and met others, and I know that it takes a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of dedication and a whole lot of love to do that work over a number of years for children who have no one else. There are some fantastic carers out there and they know what those children need. We know that is true: we have evidence of it and we met some of those carers, and I have certainly met some in my constituency.
Those people do an extraordinary job, but there needs to be more of them. They are not well supported. The care is very patchy indeed across the 150 local authorities in our land, which is one of the great problems of care. We need to get rid of that patchiness, so that every child in every local authority can have good quality care.
The problem is the old problem: that those people are not supported well. The Government have rejected our recommendation that there should be a national framework for the kind of support that a carer receives. Support is meagre in some local authorities and more generous in others, but it is unknowable. People genuinely do not know where they stand. When a child is taken away from someone whose profession is caring—it is what they do and where their income comes from—they lose their income. They do not get any income back until another child appears or the original child comes back because the return to the birth family was not successful.
There has to be a system that better assures those who want to come into caring that they will be well supported. They do not go into it because it pays a fortune, but they ought to be adequately rewarded. They must also be supported, because working with difficult children who kick over the traces can be a stressful job. They also need back-up from the professional social work contact that keeps them supported and on the right road.
Fiona Mactaggart:
My hon. Friend is quite right to mention the important role that social workers play in backing up foster parents. A point that was made strongly to the Committee concerned a child’s need for a good relationship with their social worker, which could help if they had an unsatisfactory relationship with their foster parents. In my constituency, the children’s social workers who deal with child protection are each carrying 20 cases at the moment, and those who deal with children in need are carrying 33. This is partly
because of a huge increase in the number of children in Slough. The situation is pretty unsatisfactory. What would my hon. Friend say to the Government about ensuring that the resources are made available to places such as Slough in order to provide enough good social workers to deal with this issue?
Mr. Sheerman: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. She will know that we made a recommendation for a cap on the number of cases that such social workers should carry, and we have developed that argument further in the new inquiry.
This is also a question of recruitment and support. We found that the role of the carer in the substitute family was quite mysterious in some places. It was unclear how they got into the work, how they had been recruited and how they were maintained in the profession that they had chosen. The process was very professional in some local authority areas that I visited, and not very good in others. In many of our inquiries, one of the great dangers that we find is cases being thrown into the agency pot. The most horrific term that I have come across—and the idea that I am most worried about—is the “spot purchase” of placements. I find it horrible that there is a market in which someone with an emergency case can purchase a placement through an agency. No one can guarantee where such placements are going to be. They are often miles from the child’s school or from the kin family, and sometimes within a different local authority area. The spot purchasing of placements in foster care is extremely worrying; it is the mark of a failure in the system.
Ann Coffey: Does my hon. Friend agree that a similar problem exists in residential care? Stockport is a net importer of children from outside the area—the figure is the third highest in the country—and the cost of such placements is astronomical. The homes advertise for children with difficulties or problems such as antisocial behaviour. Do you think that there is a problem with ensuring that those children are getting the quality of care that is offered by the homes? Is it not probable that some of the homes are making an undue profit and not putting the money that they get for looking after those children back into paying better wages to their workers and providing better training for them?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. I think that it is time for one of my periodic reminders to hon. Members that all remarks should be addressed to the Chair, and that the use of the word “you” should not come into it. Perhaps more importantly, from the hon. Lady’s point of view, is that turning away from the microphone creates great difficulty in capturing her words for the record.
Mr. Sheerman: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I know that I have gone on for too long because I have taken a lot of interventions, so I shall bring my remarks to a conclusion.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that this is about quality. There is some very good residential accommodation, some in the independent sector and some run by local authorities. One cannot judge it
purely on the basis of which sector it is in: we found no evidence that private was bad and local authority good. There is good and bad in all institutional care, and there was also evidence of good agencies supplying places and finding foster homes. It is, however, completely unpredictable. In our report, we stated that the quality of care that a child gets should not be a question of luck. We talk about postcode lotteries, but this should not be up to luck. Children should be guaranteed a first-class service anywhere in the country. I would not say that about many aspects of the policy area, but vulnerable children deserve that commitment.
This has been one of the most enjoyable reports that my Committee has produced. We enjoyed it because we felt that we were breaking a path and adding value—in other words, doing the things that a Select Committee does at its best. The Government have responded positively to some of our recommendations, but, as ever, they have not done enough and not acted quickly enough. As the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said earlier, there is not enough sense of urgency that the culture needs to change quickly. Improvements have taken place slowly over a number of years, but this has not happened fast enough and they have not been effective enough to get rid of the terrible situation in which what happens to a child is a question of luck.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab): I congratulate my hon. Friend on the report. I was not on the Committee when that work was done. A key issue is what happens when children leave care and are transferred. Will he say a little about that? I feel that a lot of work still needs to be done on managing the massive transition when children leave care to go into the outside world.
Mr. Sheerman: I was going to leave out that section of my speech, because I have been speaking for too long, but I shall mention the subject briefly. Children in middle-class, better-off homes often hang around and seem to take a long time to leave home—I do not know whether you have had this experience, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Sometimes they stay until they are in their late 20s or—in the case of some of my colleagues—their 30s. The link to the family certainly goes on for a hell of a long time. I celebrate that and love it, especially in the case of my four children.
So why should children in care be kicked out into the world at 16 with very little support? Some of them are put into rented accommodation in the most vulnerable parts of our towns and cities. Young girls are expected to live on their own at 16, and we have all heard evidence of the pests and pimps who know where these vulnerable young women are. It is wrong that children from troubled backgrounds are suddenly pushed out into the world and expected to live independent lives on their own at 16.
I think that that is also true for 18-year-olds. I make myself unpopular with some hon. Members, including some Labour Members, when I say that the protection of childhood up to the age of 18 is very important. I sometimes worry that if we were to scuttle into constitutional reform that includes votes at 16, the protection of childhood could be nibbled away. The protection of childhood until 18 and the outcomes of Every Child Matters are fundamentally important, especially for looked-after children.
In fact, I believe that the care package for such vulnerable children—to whom we owe so much—should go right through to the age of 25. I have not had time to talk about one of the weak links that we found in relation to special care, but these children are among the most troubled. They probably have many more psychological challenges than most children, and we found evidence that it took them a long time to get the psychological and psychiatric care and support that they needed from the health sector. The health sector should prioritise those children, just as they are prioritised in regard to schools admissions. They need support right through to 25, and much more support from everyone.
Bill Wiggin (Leominster) (Con): I am curious: why has the hon. Gentleman chosen the age of 25 and not 21?
Mr. Sheerman: Because I think children in supportive homes get that right through. It can be a very turbulent period and the figures on psychological problems experienced by children show a high level in the early 20s, going on through to 25. Indeed, as the hon. Gentleman knows, that is also clear in the data on psychological challenges presented to students in universities and higher education. The fact is that we owe these people support through to 25, if needed.
I am sorry if I have taken too long to make my remarks, but it is partly because I took so many interventions. I recommend the report to the House. It is a good report; it is an all-party report; it is a report based on much hard work from the team of MPs from the three parties and also from the magnificent team of people who worked with us day in, day out—the Clerk, the Deputy Clerk, the two Committee specialists and our two administrators.
Select Committees are very important to the House. This is the 30th year of having such Committees and I currently have a hand in writing about their achievements over that time. I sometimes worry that the link between what we do in the Committees upstairs and what happens in this Chamber is not strong enough, so it has been a welcome change to have the chance to talk about a report in detail today.
2.1 pm
Mr. David Laws (Yeovil) (LD): I appreciate that many hon. Members wish to contribute to the debate, so I will try not to make my comments too extended in what is nevertheless an extremely important debate.
I would like to start by congratulating the Select Committee on a thorough and thoughtful report. I also congratulate the Select Committee Chairman, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) on setting out so clearly the principal issues that the Committee identified and addressed. He mentioned at the beginning of his speech that Select Committee reports are sometimes very influential and sometimes perhaps overlooked by Ministers. I hope that this will be one of the reports that Ministers take very seriously, even in the areas where the Government’s own response to the report is weaker than some of us would like.
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