Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540-559)
THE BARONESS
MORGAN OF
DREFELIN
29 OCTOBER 2008
Q540 Annette Brooke: I think that
that is the issue in every local authority—that these young
people do not have a genuine choice of suitable accommodation
at the moment.
Baroness Morgan: That is absolutely
unacceptable. I am being reminded that we are producing new statutory
guidance that will cover this particular challenge. We will look
at how the vetting and assessment of supported lodgings providers
should be conducted and how children's services will be expected
to work in genuine partnership with the full range of local housing
agencies, including social housing providers and registered social
landlords. In addition, there was something else that I was particularly
concerned about, which is the issue of young people who leave
care being over-represented in the homelessness figures. In May,
we produced guidance, jointly with the Department for Communities
and Local Government, on joint working with housing and children's
services to prevent youth homelessness. You are highlighting the
issue where the choice of accommodation is between two unacceptable
offers, and that situation is unacceptable. We are making that
clear to local authorities.
Q541 Annette Brooke: I hope that
that will be in your annual report.
Baroness Morgan: Yes, absolutely.
Q542 Chairman: You are aware, Minister,
that wicked people, usually men, in practically every town in
this country target children in care, particularly those who are
very young, with the aim of bringing them into prostitution. That
is well known. In my own area, a group called the Coalition for
the Removal of Pimping, or CROP, tried to campaign about this
issue. As I say, it is well known that young people, particularly
females but not just females, who are aged 16 and on their own
in a care setting—a situation that is known in the locality—become
very vulnerable young people. So, from where I am sitting, it
seems wrong that children at 16 are exposed to that level of danger.
Baroness Morgan: I absolutely
agree, and that is why we have made it clear that we expect 16
and 17-year-old looked-after children to remain in properly supported
accommodation in care, unless there are some very strong reasons
why they should do otherwise. So we aim to completely flip over
the expectation, towards that of 16 and 17-year-olds being expected
to stay in care.
Q543 Mr Pelling: What can the Government
do? From what we have heard elsewhere, it strikes me that there
is a great deal of grooming of young girls while they are in care.
What do you think the Government can do in terms of setting public
policy to try to stop that happening? Unfortunately, it almost
seems as if this exploitation is being dovetailed into the public
provision that we already have. It is very disturbing to hear
that that is happening. I am not blaming the Government at all,
but I am just trying to think what the public policy solutions
might be.
Baroness Morgan: It is absolutely
unacceptable that these cases should arise. Any person associated
with a care setting, whether they are employed there or otherwise
associated with it, must be absolutely safe to work with and support
children and young people. That is an absolute must. We have a
framework for safeguarding children. We have local safeguarding
boards, whose responsibility is to ensure that children are protected
in their care. I cannot emphasise enough how seriously we take
this issue. There are local structures in place to promote the
safeguarding of these vulnerable children, but I would never suggest
that we are complacent at all about this. If the Committee would
like me to come back to you with more information about the exact
processes, I would be happy to do so. It is a very big area of
concern.[4]
Q544 Fiona Mactaggart: One of the ways
in which young girls are groomed into prostitution is through
the ineffectiveness of the care system in dealing with runaways—temporary
runaways, young people who absent themselves from care overnight.
Sometimes it is made worse by the fact that it is difficult for
people to absent themselves with permission. It is more complex
for adolescents in care to get permission to go to overnight stays
with other people because foster carers or whoever are not authorised.
They are then more likely to run away. They then get reported
to the police as runaways at a point when the children's home
or the foster carer knows where they are, but does not have the
authority to deal with them. There is a real issue here which
is going into the "too hard" box despite the extra investment
in runaways at the moment. That is leading young girls to be very
vulnerable to being groomed as a class. A lot of people are targeting
children's homes and places where they know there are children
in care in order to turn them into prostitutes later on. We are
not talking about 16-year-olds, but about 13-year-olds. If you
were to make it a priority as a Minister you could make a difference
on this. Nobody yet has.
Chairman: Minister, will you make it
your priority?
Baroness Morgan: It is difficult
to say—
Chairman: We did not say "the priority".
We said "a priority".
Baroness Morgan: Yes, "a
priority". I would very much like to rise to that challenge.
Maybe I am a bit fixated about the work force strategy. I might
be. It is because I think it is so important. There is also something
in there about evidence and making sure that we are asking the
right questions about what is happening to runaway girls and whether
we have the right measures.
Q545 Chairman: Until a few members
of this Committee organised a campaign some years ago, the fine
for being found to be running a brothel was larger than for luring
a child into prostitution. Our campaign changed that so the legal
framework is more helpful to you than it used to be.
Baroness Morgan: I am reminded
that in the young runaways action plan, which we published this
summer, we committed to a range of actions, including publishing
new guidance on children missing from care and home by April 2009.
That is not that far away. Certainly I would hope to have a good
look at this area before then so that I can come back to this
Committee in good time.
Chairman: We will come back to the criminal
justice side in a minute. Sharon, you have been very patient.
Q546 Mrs Hodgson: I want to ask you
a bit more about the work force, and specifically the training
of the work force. You said that you were going to publish the
work force strategy some time before Christmas. I do not want
you to give anything away, but could I tease some responses out
of you. You will be aware that children in residential care in
England have far more severely disturbed backgrounds than children
in other countries, yet the training and education of staff in
this country is a lot lower than in other countries. The Committee
visited Denmark earlier this year to look at looked-after children,
and one thing that we all came away with was the fact that in
Denmark, there is a whole professional level of staff called pedagogues,
and we do not have that in this country. They are professionally
qualified, they do a three-year, degree-like course in pedagogy,
it is a highly regarded profession and their pay is just below
that of teachers. They are, however, paid much more than our equivalent
work force, although they are recruited from similar backgrounds.
The difference is that they have invested in training. Added to
that, in 2002, the standards for care homes stipulated that by
2005, a minimum 80% of staff in the residential and care environments
should have had an NVQ Level 3 in caring for children and young
people. However, the national average in 2006-07 was only 56%—so,
way below 80%. And, in 25% of local authorities, the NVQ Level
3 figure is only 33%, so, even though we are talking about only
a Level 3 qualification and not a Level 4, we are still nowhere
near the target. Why are the levels of adequately qualified staff
in residential care homes persistently so far below the national
standard?
Baroness Morgan: I am not sure
that I can speculate on why they are so far below; I should like
to focus on what we are trying to do about it. I have already
talked about the work force strategy, which will focus a lot on
training, as you would expect, and particularly on the qualifications
for the residential care work force. In the Children and Young
Persons Bill, we are strengthening Ofsted's powers to enforce
the standards to which you have just referred, and ensuring that
we have that tough enforcement is part of ensuring that we drive
up those standards. The Bill will allow Her Majesty's chief inspector
to issue compliance notices to homes that are in breach of the
regulations, setting out the training requirements, and will have
the power both to restrict admission to homes that she deems not
to be meeting the standards, and to notify local authorities so
that they can take the issue into account when making their placement
decisions. Those are important levers for influencing and driving
up the standard of training in residential care homes.
Q547 Mrs Hodgson: Do you see the
future work force as being, across the board, more highly trained—perhaps
raising the level of how that work force are perceived, with the
additional pay that would have to follow; or, do you think that
the work force will be the same but just a bit more trained?
Baroness Morgan: I suppose I need
to be careful about what I say, given that, yesterday, we had
a conference in the Department with all the stakeholders from
the work force, working together to identify priorities and help
the Government to develop a practical and deliverable strategy.
It is going to be key.
Q548 Mrs Hodgson: I do not want to
put words in your mouth, but if we are looking at teaching as
being a master's-level profession, should we start to think about
residential care and looking after children as a degree-level
profession?
Baroness Morgan: I have already
said that we need to raise the status and importance of the professions
who support looked-after children.
Q549 Chairman: But you said that
before, and I was a bit discontent with it, because the Hackney
evidence yesterday, and other evidence that the Committee has
gathered, demonstrates that the state of training is awful. I
am a governor of the London School of Economics, and the representative
from Hackney pointed out that the LSE has ceased to do social
work; a good institution has walked away from it. Surely there
is something deeply wrong with the social work training system
if a director of social work in a leading London borough can say
that.
Baroness Morgan: It is obviously
not working in a profession where we have such high vacancy rates.
We have been looking at how we can support newly qualified social
workers to stay in the role by giving them protected work loads
and so on.
Q550 Chairman: What I am pushing
you on is that it is not just the esteem and status of the profession—it
is the quality of the training. You have half of the LSE directors
in the House of Lords. Perhaps you can chat with them about why,
in a place which produced Professor Richard Titmuss and which
was a focus of social work training and had a proud tradition,
they gave it up.
Baroness Morgan: I will happily
take that away as an action point and talk to colleagues. When
we talk about what makes a profession, it is education, training,
ongoing professional development, having a culture where senior
members of that profession are dedicated to bringing on junior
members—there is a lot to it.
Chairman: Quite right. We want it all,
but we want it now.
Q551 Fiona Mactaggart: I was looking
at the Youth Crime Action Plan, which specifically recognises
that children from troubled families are at risk from being involved
in crime. We look at children in care and it is almost as though
the system is a way of opening a door to being involved in the
criminal justice system. The Prison Reform Trust estimates that
more than 70% of young offenders have a history of being in care
on in contact with social services. When reading the action plan,
although there is all this emphasis on troubled families and on
parents and so on, I was struck by the fact that there is nothing
in it which concerns the responsibilities of the care system in
a situation where a young person has been involved in crime. We
are giving corporate parents a free ride. I want to understand
first, why that is. Secondly, I want to know what we can do to
more explicitly address that issue in our planning for children
in care.
Baroness Morgan: I have looked
at this coming in from the other end of the spectrum. I have taken
note of concerns that were raised with me about how the care system
should do better in supporting young people who end up in the
system. Those concerns relate particularly to people in custody
and how we need to do more to ensure that local authorities are
engaging with those young people, so that there is proper resettlement
planning and that when they are released they are assessed and
supported further. There is also the debate, which I understand,
about whether the care system is contributing to criminalising
young people. Is it a question of children and young people coming
into the care system from very distinct—I think you described
them as troubled—families, with all the risk factors that
are associated with young people who go on to offend? I think
that we are talking about all the services and all the professionals
that work to create the corporate parent system. Can every ounce
of their activity—every moment of their working day—be
about creating the right environment, in which these young people
would flourish and which would not trigger the kind of offending
behaviour that you are referring to? That may be about helping
these young people to excel educationally, to achieve their aspirations.
What I am driving at is that we need to take account of the additional
risk factors that young people in care bring with them, but we
also need to ensure that we do not lower our aspirations for them,
so that we do not assume that they will end up in the criminal
justice system. I am not sure whether I am answering the question.
Q552 Fiona Mactaggart: At the moment,
we have some tough, simple, straightforward measures regarding
education. We find that bit of it easy. For example, we have put
in place a requirement on schools to admit children in care. That
is a practical thing that has been done. We do not find it easy
to prevent children from ending up in prison, and when they are
in prison they are frequently not visited, even when the local
authority is still the corporate parent. When the local authority
is not the corporate parent, visiting them is an added responsibility—that
is interesting and it would be lovely if that happened. However,
at the moment we cannot make visiting happen even when the local
authority is the corporate parent. I do not get the sense that
there is the drive on this issue that there is, for example, on
educational achievement. As a parent, the last thing you want
is your child to go to jail. A high proportion of our children—in
our role as corporate parents—are ending up in jail, while
they are still children.
Baroness Morgan: I feel the need
to check what our national indicator set says about that—I
am not able to find it in my pack. But what is extremely important
is that we do not take our eye off the ball in terms of understanding
the real evidence about what is happening to these particularly
vulnerable young people. It is completely unacceptable for local
authorities not to be visiting as corporate parents. As I said,
the Children and Young Persons Bill extends that duty, and we
will be providing guidance to local authorities so that they know
how to do that and do it effectively.
Q553 Fiona Mactaggart: I think that
they know how to do that; they are just not doing it. What are
you going to do to ensure that they do? I understand that that
is hard, but we do not have a mechanism that makes local authorities
carry out their current legal responsibility. I am anxious that
giving them a new responsibility will mean that there are more
people not doing what they are legally supposed to do.
Baroness Morgan: I am advised
that we will use the powers given to the Secretary of State under
the Children and Young Persons Bill, and that there is revised
statutory guidance to ensure that there is planning—as I
just said—for all looked-after children in custody, so that
for each child there is a resettlement plan, including arrangements
for accommodation and training, which will be put in place well
in advance of the discharge. Ultimately, in answer to your question,
it is about having a tough inspection regime so that if local
authorities are not doing this, their Ofsted inspection will show
that their children's services are not delivering in the way that
we expect them to. There is a lever; we just have to make sure
that we are using it.
Q554 Fiona Mactaggart: The problem
with the Ofsted lever for children in care is that it is does
not have the same impact as the Ofsted lever for school effectiveness,
and local authorities are frankly ignoring it. That is a real
worry, because many of our frameworks are about management systems,
developing the plan and so on. They are not about how many children
have actually been visited and how many have not, and whether
there is an impact for the local authority that hurts them if
they fail on those basic things that the law says that they should
be doing, which many of them are doing presently. I do not think
that your Department is able to deploy any punishment. The youth
crime action plan contains a lot about punishment, but there is
no punishment for the local authorities who are not fulfilling
their legal responsibility. I am afraid that unlike gabby middle-class
parents—bless them—who are effective at making education
authorities carry out their responsibilities, the parents of the
children we are concerned with are not going to do that.
Baroness Morgan: If I could just
stress that the inspection regime, through Ofsted and the local
authority performance management system, is at a point of change.
Without going into all the detail about the national indicators
set, everyone is well versed in how that change is happening:
we have the national indicators set, we have the local area agreements.
Central Government and all the inspectorate bodies have been through
an enormous amount of consultation about how to reform the inspection
of local government. One area that has come out of that, which
I think is important for us, is that most of the programme-led
area level inspection that has happened in the past by all the
different inspectorates will not take place anymore, because of
the reformed inspection process and the joint inspections that
local authorities will have. Those will involve the Audit Commission,
the Care Quality Commission, Ofsted, the inspectorates of the
police and the probation services. They are all coming together
to do these joint inspections. However, because of the incredibly
important role of corporate parent, the programme of inspection
led by Ofsted for services for looked-after children and safeguarding
services for children will continue to have a specific and detailed
inspection every three years, and that is an important exception
for those services. While all the other inspections are being
unified into a streamlined process for light-touch local authority
inspection, we are maintaining an intensive and important three-year
inspection process for children's services, and I think that that
is going to be very important.
Q555 Fiona Mactaggart: We have had
evidence that pulling together the Ministry of Justice and the
Department for Children, Schools and Families has helped in bringing
together welfare and justice policy, but there is another group
of very vulnerable young people in the system: young asylum seekers.
I can think of one who I met shortly after she had arrived here
from Uganda, where her father had been put in jail, in 2003. She
was given leave until she was 18, which I think was about 2005
or 2006. In that period she managed to get three A-levels and
is now at university. However, the Home Office still has not interviewed
her or decided on her status. In the meantime, this young vulnerable
woman on her own has had a baby—oh, what a surprise. She
is doing well at university despite all these troubles. It seems
to me that that the Home Office has said she is part of the backlog
that needs to be dealt with by 2011. So our social services, bless
them, are still taking their responsibilities to her very seriously.
I do not believe that every local authority would do the same.
I am very concerned that all around the country there are such
vulnerable young people and nobody is driving the Home Office
to make sensible decisions from the point of view of the State
being a corporate parent for these children. I ask you to press
for joint responsibility between the Home Office and DCSF in relation
to these young asylum seekers. In my view, this would help the
Home Office as well as you to provide care needs for them. Perhaps
you could take that back.
Baroness Morgan: I will happily
take that back. There are various things I want to say about unaccompanied
asylum-seeking children and to use this as an opportunity to stress
the point you were making about the local authority fulfilling
its role as corporate parent. There should be no ambiguity. When
unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arrive in this country they
are looked-after children and should benefit from all the services,
support and care that any looked-after child should expect, or
that we should be expecting to deliver as the corporate parent.
That should involve all the support through the transition to
adulthood that you have just described. It is important to put
on record that that is absolutely how we see it. There is an issue
I want to flag up. These children, as you have said, have an immigration
status and all that goes with that. The UK Border Agency is required
to have regard to the code of practice for keeping children safe
from harm, which was consulted on earlier this year and will be
published later in the autumn. The code of practice sets out how
the UK Border Agency can better play its part in keeping these
children safe from harm while they are in this country. We are
committed to further developing the UK Border Agency's role in
safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all children in the
asylum process. This is why we will be using the opportunity provided
by the Immigration and Citizenship Bill that comes before Parliament
in the fourth term to place a duty on the UK Border Agency to
have regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of
children in exercising its functions. I thought it would be helpful
to share that with the Committee, although you are probably already
aware of that. Guidance will be issued jointly by DCSF and the
Home Office. I think that picks up some of your points.
Q556 Fiona Mactaggart: It does indeed.
As well as giving such guidance, which is good to hear about,
could you focus on the issue of the transition to adulthood for
these children? I think there is a leaving-care issue which is
very significant for them. My constituent is now over the age
she would be in care. She has a committed local authority and
she has now got a baby, so things have become much more complicated,
but there is an issue that in most cases these young people simply
disappear at the point that they would be leaving care. There
is no sensible plan. The Home Office is so inefficient that it
does not deal with their immigration status, which it has a duty
to do at that point. If you are giving guidance, you must give
guidance about that transition to adulthood where the Home Office
decides the future status of those young people, as well as the
local authority taking responsibility for funding them. Some of
them face complete impoverishment on becoming adults.
Chairman: Minister, would you like to
respond briefly to that because we must move on.
Baroness Morgan: Thank you. I
have just been reminded that when such young people reach legal
adulthood at 18, the authority—I presume that you mean the
local authority that has been caring for them—has related
responsibilities to offer them support and services as care leavers.
That picks up on the point that I was making earlier that they
are looked-after children. This matter will be covered in the
guidance.
Q557 Mr Pelling: I can see that this
is an ambitious programme by Government because many of the questions
have been about working on a cross-cutting basis with many parts
of the public sector. I do not want to impose a further request,
but it strikes me that Care Matters is conscientious on
the role of taking initiatives for looked-after children and supporting
them in their education. I have one question with two parts on
health care provision. Why does there seem to be a greater resonance
with putting in place the structures that will provide micro-level
support for young people in care? On a more macro-basis, do you
think that the statutory status of the guidance promoting the
health of looked-after children will put specific responsibilities
on the performance of health bodies in delivering in this important
area? Have I been unfair in my assumptions?
Baroness Morgan: I am not sure
whether you are being unfair in your assumptions. It is right
that we question whether we are getting the right pieces of the
jigsaw in place to support looked-after children. We know that
the health outcomes of such children are significantly lower than
the population of children at large. It is right that we should
be concerned about promoting the health and well-being of looked-after
children and create extra emphasis on that. Coming back to the
statutory structures, it is important to note that primary care
trusts are accountable for delivering services locally. They are
joined through local area agreements with local authorities. As
part of their duties, they must undertake a joint strategic needs
assessment for the commissioning and provision of health services
jointly with the local authority. For the first time, there will
be statutory guidance on the joint strategic needs assessment
that states that the specific needs of vulnerable groups such
as looked-after children should be taken into account. That sounds
like a high-level answer, but it is local primary care trusts
that must examine the health needs of their communities. We are
putting a specific duty on them to look in detail at the health
needs of vulnerable groups such as looked-after children. That
is a new duty, but it is very important and we will make sure
that they do that. A particular concern is mental health services
for looked-after children, and we are doing a review of that area.
It is something that I am particularly interested in, and we will
report on it shortly. I hope very much that we will be able to
create some strong emphasis on the needs of looked-after children.
It is a real issue.
Q558 Mr Pelling: I am sorry, but
I want to ask a question as a follow-up. I suppose that there
are not really the resources for mental health care for you to
be able to impose very much responsibility on PCTs and other public
sector health providers to make that important provision. Also,
a further follow-up: when it comes to these young people being
supported in their education, there are some specifics such as
virtual school head teachers and statutory designated teachers.
Will there be something similar for health provision? There are
two questions there.
Baroness Morgan: I am a bit confused
as to which question I am answering.
Chairman: Go for the first one.
Mr Pelling: Are there sufficient resources
for mental health provision? Will you be able to live on the aspirations
that you say you may reveal at a later stage?
Baroness Morgan: The PCT is responsible
for prioritising the resource. To go back to my first answer,
that is why it is so important that we put the duty on them to
take account of the needs of vulnerable children. I cannot sit
here and devise the health care budget for each PCT. It is not
possible for me to do that—it is very much a matter for
the PCTs. We are saying that this is a priority for them, and
that they have to ensure that they cater for and commission for
those needs.
Q559 Chairman: But the Department
of Health does not have any requirement to prioritise children's
issues, does it?
Baroness Morgan: The Department
of Health—
Chairman: You are not the only person
who can receive notes. One of my advisers tells me that these
schemes are not working on the ground because there is no Department
of Health requirement to prioritise children's issues, and that
that is why we have the delay in the child health strategy. It
is not happening. You are the lead Minister. You have responsibility
for these children. How often do you meet someone from the Health
Ministry or Home Affairs? You are the lead Minister, you are the
boss. How often do you say, "Come over to my office so that
we can sort this out"? How often do you do that, or do you
do it?
Baroness Morgan: I certainly will
do it. I have not done it in my first three weeks, but I have
a strong personal interest in health, and I was particularly pleased
to be given this responsibility—I think they call it a dual
key—not only for looked-after children but also for health
and well-being in schools. I see it as very important. The duty
for PCTs that we are talking about is new. It is a new requirement
and we will expect to see some results because of it. As far as
I am aware, PCTs take very seriously their commissioning and needs
assessment roles, and I would expect them to take this duty very
seriously.
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