Examination of Witnesses (Questions 313-319)
BOB ASHFORD,
CHRIS CALLENDER
AND DR
DI HART
23 JUNE 2008
Q313 Chairman: I welcome Bob Ashford,
Chris Callender and Dr Di Hart. We are extremely grateful that
you are giving your time for us to ask you about a particularly
absorbing and interesting area of our work. The learning curve
has been steep, as the territory was unfamiliar to some of us
who were more familiar with the narrow educational world. We are
finding it very exciting, but be careful with your use of acronyms.
Be gentle with us and sometimes do not assume that we know all
the acronyms in your area and do spell them out—I could
pretend that that is for Hansard, but it is really for
some of us. We do not want you to repeat your CV because we have
a good CV for each of you, but perhaps you could say particularly
in terms of our inquiry into looked-after children what you, in
a nutshell, think that we should be considering from your area
of expertise.
Bob Ashford: Obviously, there
are many things that we are extremely happy about in terms of
the progress that has been made. We welcome Care Matters
and the Children and Young Persons Bill. We welcome many of the
facets within that Bill, particularly in relation to young people
in residential care homes. We also welcome the moves towards trying
to restrict out-of-county placements for young people who are
looked after, because that has been one of the major risk factors
for offending and we are concerned about that. We are also very
pleased to see the progress in increasing the emphasis on education
for young people who are looked after. As always, the devil will
be in the detail. Our remaining concerns are largely related to
implementation and are in just a few areas, such as the implementation
of the protocols for young people in residential care, which were
outlined in Care Matters. Placing fewer young people out
of county will be a difficult task. Naturally, the other area
of concern is young people who are in custody and are looked after
or have been looked after, and the treatment and service that
they get from their home local authority. I am encouraged, however,
by the development of the youth crime action plan, which is looking
at the end to end reform of the youth justice system. A key facet
of that concerns young people in custody and young people who
are looked after within custody. There are many Governmental moves
that we are happy about, but we have some concerns, largely around
implementation—actually making these things happen meaningfully.
Chris Callender: I do not think
the Howard League needs any real introduction, but I would like
to emphasise the legal department, which I have the honour of
heading up, having joined and started it in 2002. Some 3,022 children
are in custody today. We represent those children and young people.
We must receive about three or four referrals on a daily basis.
We have children asking for help and legal representation on a
range of issues. The main issue that underpins this matter is
access to justice—to having their rights and entitlements
met—while they are in custody. We deal with issues around
parole and early-release applications. There are children who
are in need and who should be looked after being denied release
because they have nowhere to go and, therefore, they end up doing
additional time in prison in custody. We deal with recalls—children
who are not coping on the outside being sent back to prison and
asking for our assistance. We deal with children who are locked
into conditions of 23½ hour bang-up per day because they
have severe mental health problems, and unmet mental health needs.
One of the big issues, and one that is of major concern to you,
is the question of what we in the business call resettlement.
That is what happens when the kids get kicked out of prison or
the secure training centres and return to the communities from
which they were sentenced. The real question here is the application
of the Children Act 1989. I deal with two sections on a day to
day basis. Section 17 deals with what is a child in need, and
section 20 deals with the duty of local authorities to provide
suitable accommodation and support for these children—and
not merely a roof over their heads. Such children are the most
vulnerable and damaged in our society. We get the files of those
children from social services. We clench them and look through
them and see that big warning signs have been going up for many
years. Local authorities, in their guise as education or children
services or youth offending teams, are not picking up and providing
those children with the support that they need. I have three propositions.
Children in need, before they get in to custody—possibly
while they are offending in the community—are not getting
the services that sometimes they ask and cry for and for which
they are knocking on the door. They are refused those services.
When they get them, those services are sometimes of a very poor
standard and quality. They can be placed in bed-and-breakfast
accommodation without support. That is inappropriate. They are
knocking shoulder to shoulder with adults who have very severe
mental health problems or drug abuse problems. There is a failure
to undertake an assessment of their needs, as they are duty bound
to do, and provide care plans. Once in custody, we find that children's
services shut that file as quick as you like. That means that
that child is locked up, not provided with ongoing support—you
have seen evidence of that from other people who have contributed
to this Committee—and they do not get a service when they
are released. They are released in almost the same circumstances
as they were in when they left. Through the Legal Services Commission,
through the public purse, we are then obtaining injunctions in
the High Court, almost on a daily basis, to force local authorities
to do their duty and to provide such children with their entitlement.
I hope that you have seen my biography. I took the liberty of
giving you a long list of cases because I am trying to bring to
your attention the fact that we have had to go to the House of
Lords to emphasise that children are not getting their entitlements.
Such children are going on to offend, which is not surprising.
I am grateful.
Chairman: Thank you.
Dr Hart: My concern is also with
children who end up in custody. I have undertaken a project with
looked-after children who are in custodial establishments. The
overwhelming message that they gave me was that they felt abandoned
by the social care system. They had had social workers with whom
they were very familiar in the looked-after system. Once they
started to commit offences, they felt that they had somehow been
handed over to the youth justice system. That was while they were
in custody, and also when they came out. They lost their placement
while they were in custody, so they almost had to start again
when they came out. All of the things that had supported them
before—the relationships and placements—had been severed.
Perhaps I am less cynical than Chris, but I felt that practitioners
were trying to do a good job. If they achieved it, it was in spite
of the systems and processes that were operating. I should like
to see those systems and processes changed so that they support
practitioners in retaining contact with those young people and
meet their needs. Of the three big things that seem to get in
the way, the first is the issue of visibility. We only speculate
about how many looked-after children are in the youth justice
system. That data is not collected by anybody, and we do not know
who those children are or where they are. Because of the way services
are inspected, they are not picked out. We do not know anything
about their outcomes in relation to other young offenders. Another
thing that gets in the way is the systems and processes. There
are a lot of anomalies. For instance, if you have been in voluntary
care, you are no longer considered to be in care if you go into
custody. There are geographical boundaries: if you move to a children's
home in another local authority, you will keep your social worker
but get a different YOT (Youth Offending Team) worker. There are
all sorts of systemic problems that cut across working with young
people. More fundamentally, there are different approaches. The
social care system is based on welfare needs and the youth justice
system is based on criminogenic need, and the two approaches do
not necessarily coincide. Although we understand the need for
relationships in the social care system, that is not necessarily
translated into the youth justice system. Children are moved a
lot and their relationships and practitioners change all the time.
There is a lack of joining up of the philosophy.
Q314 Chairman: Thank you very
much for those introductory remarks. Let us get started with a
question. In a sense, the situation does not sound very good for
young people who are looked after and end up in the criminal justice
system. Is there a malign influence, or is it just that people
fall between the cracks of different departments, local authorities
and so on? If there is not a malign influence, as I suspect you
will tell me, is it common for there to be real difficulties in
other countries such as ours when there are two or more parallel
systems?
Bob Ashford: I cannot accept everything
that Di said about the youth justice system focusing just on criminogenic
needs and ignoring welfare needs—far from it, actually.
The Youth Justice Board and the youth offending teams are very
much about trying to make a bridge between welfare and criminal
justice. People in a youth offending team are necessarily social
workers, health workers, educationists, police officers, youth
justice workers and so on. There is a large spread of people within
a local YOT who are just as interested in assessing a young person's
needs and why they started to offend, and addressing their needs,
as in addressing criminogenic factors and holding young people
to account. YOTs and the Youth Justice Board very much hold a
dual approach.
Q315 Chairman: But Dr Hart would
be right in saying that they lose their local context and start
over again if they go into the criminal justice system, would
she not?
Bob Ashford: Young people?
Chairman: Say they come from Huddersfield,
to use my own constituency, and are in a youth offending scheme
down in Doncaster. They lose their local context and care workers,
do they not?
Bob Ashford: If they are looked
after in one area and placed in another area far from home—I
am sure that you are aware that that is often the case with young
people, particularly troubled young people—they almost certainly
lose not only their care worker, which changes to a local supervising
officer, but their YOT worker. That is a positive thing in many
ways, because obviously the local YOT worker will be familiar
with local resources such as housing and education. That local
resource is needed. What we are concerned about is maintaining
the relationship between the home, placing authority and the local
authority and YOT in which the young person is placed. On what
happens nationally, I am aware of very good practice models in
which the relationship between the home and placing authority
and the home and placing YOT is maintained. There are other local
authorities in which that relationship is not maintained. As a
result of that, we are working with DCSF to establish good practice
guidelines for what happens when young people are placed out of
county, and the sort of services and support that they should
receive not just from their local youth offending team, but from
children's services. Returning to the point that you made originally
about whether the separation is malign, I do not believe that
it is malign. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 is a good piece
of legislation which defined services that local youth offending
teams and the Youth Justice Board would give to young people who
were offending, It could have gone further in addressing what
other local services, such as children's services and accommodation
agencies, could and should have given to those young people who
were offending, particularly those who were looked after. What
has happened, partly as a result of that, is that many local agencies,
such as children's services, now see young people who are offending
and who are also looked after, as the remit of the local youth
offending team. That is wrong. We certainly want those local partners—not
just children's services, but housing, health and so on—to
continue to provide that local service to those young people,
whether or not they are looked after, when they are in the youth
justice system. I am sure that you are aware that that can, hopefully,
be fairly transitory. Young people come in, and leave the youth
justice system, whereas looked after children will often be looked
after for many years and some young people will be looked after
for their whole childhood. We must try to ensure that local partners
and local services continue to give that support to young people
before, during and after their contact with the youth justice
system.
Chris Callender: I think the Committee
must be clear about the question that it is asking itself. If
a child in your constituency goes into custody and is then moved
to a prison in another part of the country, it will be difficult
for a social worker, for example, to spend a whole day or perhaps
an overnight visit to maintain that contact. Staff in prisons,
and most children are detained in prisons, often do not have many
resources. There may be two prison officers to 45 kids—you
may come to social workers later—but there are not many
resources in prisons to maintain contact between the children
and their home corporate parent. The next question to be clear
about is whether you are talking about children with care orders
under section 31, in which case there should be no question about
the connection between the home local authority and the child,
and the ongoing relationship, and children who are accommodated
by voluntary arrangement under section 20. In our experience,
children under section 20 find the files closed, so end of job.
We brought a case against Manchester City Council—I have
picked out that case because we brought it—and the court
said loud and clear that it was not for children's services to
dump on youth offending teams. That was our experience. The Manchester
Youth Offending Team was told by children's services, "You
do the job, not us." We had to bring a case to the High Court
to knock some common sense into all this. It is clearly the duty
of children's services to undertake the appropriate assessments
requested and required under the Children Act 1989. Is it malign?
I become frustrated in my little office in N1 when dealing with
local authorities throughout the country who fight tooth and nail
to resist my request to look after a child. That is very frustrating,
and I am sometimes bemused at the aggressive attitude to my simple
request. Sometimes, I am in the office until 10 o'clock in the
evening asking a duty High Court judge to grant an injunction
to require a local authority to discharge its duty under the Children
Act 1989 to a vulnerable, damaged child with nowhere to go to
prevent reoffending and sending the problem back. Is that malign,
or is it a budget problem? You will see in our submission that
we refer to the corporate parent being more orientated around
budgets, accounts, balances and business plans rather than the
best interests and the welfare of the child, which the 1989 Act
invites them to deal with. I am not sure about that. Some of the
answer, when trying to be positive to get around the line, is,
"Let's create a financial incentive for local authorities
to look after children." A child who goes into the criminal
justice system and into a young offender institution becomes the
financial burden of the Ministry of Justice. If we can create
incentives for local authorities to look after children more thoroughly
and appropriately, and to comply with their duties, perhaps they
will do a better job and the children can remain in the community.
So, it seems to me that it is really a question of enforcement.
Regrettably, we often have to go down the route of the High Court
to get enforcement. You raised international comparisons. I went
to Italy not so long ago, where there are a number of differences—major
differences—in the way that they approach children who offend,
one being the age of criminal responsibility, which I will not
dwell on. What they do do, as a matter of course—automatically
when a child is arrested by an officer for committing an offence—is
to produce a welfare report immediately, prior to charge. Let
us find out the circumstances of the child. Why is this child
out in the streets? Why is this child not being looked after?
Why is this child not at school on a day to day basis? That was
their immediate concern, their immediate response. In our case,
in my experience, having worked in police stations representing
children, there is no question about the needs of the child. No
one ever asks the question about which home we are bailing this
child back to—no questions are ever raised about that, and
there is no investigation. That seems to be a big hole. We need
to understand why these children get into the situations that
they do.
Dr Hart: The system is confusing
and complicated, and there are lots of anomalies. There are often
a lot of professionals involved with the young people, and it
is not always entirely clear who is doing what and who is going
to be held to account. Some of the social workers that I talk
to were saying, "We would like to go and see them in prison,
but we do not understand how prisons work, we do not really know
what we are responsible for or what YOT's responsible for."
There could certainly be a lot more clarity in terms of who is
meant to be doing what. As Chris said, there are issues such as
financial disincentives. If you are not going to be held to account
for the fact that one of your looked-after children has gone to
prison, and you are going to save money, then I found that managers
particularly were saying to the social workers, "You don't
have to go and visit him. He has got a YOT worker, and there's
all these other cases that I would rather you were working on.
And he is placed at the other end of the country." So, there
are practical disincentives. Again as Chris says, in terms of
comparisons with Europe, the fact that they all have a much older
age of criminal responsibility obviously means that social care
services are involved to an older age. But they also have more
joined-up approaches. I know that in Finland, if a child commits
an offence, the whole family is offered a joint appointment with
a social worker and with someone with a youth justice background,
to try and tease out what is going on for this child. "What
do we need to do together to put it right?", rather than
here, where we tend to pass young people backwards and forwards
much more between agencies.
Chairman: Thank you, that has got us
off to a very good start. I would like Annette to drill down on
that topic.
Q316 Annette Brooke: I would like
to look at the whole issue of the large number of looked-after
children—proportionately—ending up in the criminal
justice system. Could you give some idea of the breakdown of reasons
why we have such a high proportion ending up in the criminal justice
system?
Dr Hart: There are three reasons.
Inevitably, children who end up in the care system will have been
disadvantaged. They will have had disruptions. We are increasingly
realising how many of those children have had traumatic bereavements
that have never been dealt with. There is a whole range of personal
factors, which make them more vulnerable to offending, because
of their distress. There are then a whole set of factors that
operate within the care system. Various people have suggested
that the worst thing to do with a turbulent, troubled adolescent
is to accommodate them in a residential home with lots of other
turbulent, troubled adolescents. There will be all sorts of peer
pressures, perhaps an inexperienced staff group, who are not good
at responding to challenging behaviour.
Q317 Annette Brooke: Is there
a lack of qualified staff in the children's homes?
Dr Hart: There is. Residential
child care is a low-status profession. Staff have some NVQ training,
some staff have no training. There are some qualified social workers,
but definitely the skill base can be quite low. Then, if we move
children—placement disruption, when they are moved to a
new place—that inevitably, with the peer pressures, might
cause young people to offend. However, I think that there is a
whole other set of factors that we are not aware of—whether
the system itself serves to label looked-after children if they
commit an offence. We do not know whether magistrates judge them
more harshly, perhaps, than other young people in the same situation.
People have suggested that magistrates might be reluctant to bail
a young person, if they live in a children's home, so there might
well be differences in people's response to looked-after children,
when they commit offences, compared with other young people. The
chances of young people offending, and of being treated more harshly
when they do, can come into play at various levels.
Annette Brooke: Do Bob or Chris have
anything to add?
Bob Ashford: Just a couple of
things: the peak age of offending is about 15 and 16, which for
many young people, I guess, is also the age at which their care
episode might begin—Chris pointed out section 20 and the
voluntary accommodation path. For many of those young people,
there is almost a belief sometimes that social services are queuing
up to take young people into care. In my experience, as a former
child care manager, the reality is far from that. I think that
social and children's services departments are sometimes reluctant
to take young people, particularly 15 and 16-year-olds, into care.
Partly as a result of that, I believe, those young people become
even more vulnerable, because they have been taken out of their
family, but are not receiving any form of care from children's
services, which can itself be an even bigger risk factor in terms
of their offending behaviour. I would also like to emphasise the
point about residential care, on which Di has touched already.
I am sure that you have seen from our submission that one of our
biggest concerns is that many young people enter residential care
without an offending history, but end up with one after becoming
involved in "incidents" at the residential home. If
the young person was in their own home or in foster care, such
incidents would be dealt with by the parents or foster carers.
As you have heard, very often, the staff in residential homes
involved in such incidents will tend to be among the youngest
and most underpaid in the social care field without the necessary
qualifications and support. They will, therefore, tend to call
the police, as a result of which incidents and behaviour that
might be fairly trivial end up as offences heard in court and
the young person ends up with a criminal history.
Q318 Annette Brooke: A magistrate
told me about an adolescent who threw a wobbly and starting throwing
china everywhere, as a result of which they ended up before a
magistrate. Would that be highly unlikely to happen to a child
in foster care, as opposed to a residential home?
Bob Ashford: I think that it would
be far more unlikely to happen in foster care.
Q319 Annette Brooke: But it could
still happen?
Bob Ashford: It can happen in
our own homes—dare I say it—when teenagers and children
kick off, but we manage that as parents. The difficulty in residential
care is that very often the staff working late nights and weekends
feel unsupported—sometimes they are unsupported—so
things that can and should be dealt with become a major issue
for that particular home. That is not just a concern of the YJB—the
Magistrates' Association, the police and ACPO have all raised
it, as a result of which lines within the Children and Young Persons
Bill are now looking at improving the work force and drawing up
protocols between local authority children's services departments,
local youth offending teams and the police, which have been used
to great effect in many local authority areas. As we pointed out
in our submission, where that has happened—in places such
as Wiltshire and Hertfordshire—there has been a huge reduction
in offending by looked-after children, because those young people,
who were at risk of offending in residential care homes, have
been supported through measures such as restorative justice, mentoring
and so on. The staff have also been supported. However, we still
have concerns and would like more movement than perhaps there
is in the development of those protocols in that area of work.
It is a huge area on which we could work more—everyone is
agreed on that.
Chris Callender: I have come across
cases where the only convictions that a child has had relate to
offences within a children's home, including criminal damage or
theft and occasionally more serious robberies. That indicates
to me that in some of these homes there is a lack of control.
I think that this comes back to Di's point about the quality of
care in certain circumstances. Some anecdotal evidence that I
get from the children relates to some pretty dire service provision—often
on a contracted-out basis. That brings in bigger and more serious
questions about who is auditing, who is inspecting and who is
going in to check that the systems are in place and that a proper
level of care and supervision is being undertaken with such children
and children's homes. On top of that, there is the other question
of the quality of care: people understanding that they have to
undertake needs assessment, produce care plans, engage with the
child, establish in detail the child's needs and then create a
care plan with that child being part of that process—participating
and engaging in their own care. You are mapping out the life of
a very fragile human being—often very severely abused and
neglected in the past—and it is simply not good enough to
go through what I sometimes see as a tick-box process when I look
through files. It is terrible to say this, but in the hundreds
of cases that I have dealt with, and of all the files that I have
had from social services, I have rarely seen an assessment of
the child's needs and rarely got a holistic picture of the child
or a regularly reviewed care plan in which the social worker was
consistent. We referred to our involvement with a case in which
there will be an inquiry. I am the only consistent adult among
that child's relationships and in her history over the past five
years. That is not good enough. If we are going to have to look
after children, we really have to do so properly and in the way
that Bob mentioned—as a parent, making parental decisions
sensitively and in an emotionally appropriate way.
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