Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1-19)
David Bell, Permanent
Secretary, Department of Education and Anthony Douglas,
Chief Executive, CAFCASS, gave evidence.
Tuesday 7 September 2010
Q1 Chair: Right,
welcome. We're a bit chaotic; this is the second day back. Welcome
to David Bell and Anthony Douglas. Thank you for coming to see
us. Now, David, if I can turn to you first. I think we all understand
the impact of the Baby Peter case. I think we can take that as
a given, but on reading this report, there is a whole range of
performance measures where CAFCASS have been failing. To take
a few, not just in the non-allocation of cases, where, at its
worst, there were children subject to care proceedings for 40
days on average—so goodness knows what the worst case in
that was. If you look at the timeliness of the reports to the
courts, there is a figure there that 37% were late and nearly
a third of those were over 11 working days late. If you look at
staff sickness and staff morale issues, they are dreadful. If
you look at the inaccuracy of data, it is shocking—27% of
the data in one area, South, was inaccurate. One in five of the
areas had not submitted a business plan four months into the financial
year. If you look at the Ofsted inspections, eight out of 10
failed; it was not just that they were on the "okay/adequate"
line, they had actually failed. If you look at overspending, they
spent more than their budget consistently; we have had to bail
them out. All that reads to me as—it is one of the most
shocking reports that I have read—of an organisation that
is not fit for purpose; and you are responsible for it.
David Bell: I wouldn't
dispute those facts that you have laid out because they were in
the report, but I would want to say two or three things by way
of introduction. First of all, CAFCASS was subject to a massive
change after a damning Select Committee Report in 2003, and it
was almost unprecedented to have the whole board removed. That
actually illustrated the depths of difficulty that CAFCASS faced.
From that period onwards, there was a very significant programme
of change and improvement; and it was moving forward—it
wasn't moving perhaps as fast as we would've wanted—but
I think as you have acknowledged, and the report acknowledges,
it was then significantly blown off course by the events of 2008.
Now, I don't sit here and make excuses for what then happened,
but it was, to use the words of the report, "unprecedented".
What we then did, what CAFCASS did, was to try to
react and respond. In all the areas that you have described, I
think we now see improvements—whether it's on the sickness
absence, where the figures for the period that we have just gone
through are substantially down from where they were previously;
whether it's to do with the improvements on the back of the Ofsted
"inadequate" judgments that you've pointed out; whether
it's on the business planning; whether it's on the data—all
of these we have seen improvement. In fact, from the Department's
point of view, we ourselves took action through the Accounting
Officer's review that I commissioned in 2009.
One of the features of that report, I think, was
the recognition that while there were improvements that CAFCASS
had to make itself in relation to its own operating procedures
and so on, it was also under very significant pressure because
of the other demands after Baby P, and that's why we had to put
in extra money. So I think we have been very clear throughout
the process on the pressures that CAFCASS has been under, the
areas of underperformance, and we have sought, with CAFCASS, to
bring about improvement. Now, we're not where we need to be yet,
but with all of those measures that you described, I think we
can point to improvements and, perhaps, as this hearing goes on,
we can say more about that.
Q2 Chair: I just
want to come back to you because this organisation has now been
in being, I can't remember—2001.
Mr Bacon: Eight years.
Chair: Eight years.
Mr Bacon: Nine years.
Chair: I remember when
I had responsibility for it that we tried to completely reconfigure
it; you had a 2003 report, which was damning, we are now 2009,
and we all accept that, okay, Baby P created an increase in demands
for children to go into care, but I cannot—and I don't think
any of us who read this report can—accept that that was
the sole reason for every indicator. Find me one indicator which
demonstrates that CAFCASS is providing an efficient, effective,
valueformoney service to the courts, to you as the
commissioning Department, to the public and to the taxpayer. There
is not one indicator. You can come here and say, "Of course,
since they did the report, it's all got a bit better", but
actually this is eight years of failure to perform.
David Bell: There
are key performance indicators that the Department sets for CAFCASS
that we can point to in relation to improvement and allocation
of cases and so on, which we will come to, but, Madam Chair, on
the point regarding 2008, I am not sitting here and saying that
it was all the result of the new pressures that hit us in the
aftermath of 2008. For example, I don't think anyone could argue
that staff morale and sickness levels in CAFCASS were at an acceptable
level prior to 2008; I'm certainly not arguing that at all. We
are simply trying to understand in a sense the magnifying effect
that 2008 had on some of those pressures that CAFCASS was facing.
Of course, it meant that the progress that CAFCASS was making
was knocked sideways and, in some cases, put back as a result
of 2008. So I am not under any illusions about what was happening.
Q3 Chair: Were the
Ofsted inspections post-2008? No.
David Bell: Indeed,
that it is what I am saying. In fact, the five areas which have
now had a revisit or re-inspection by Ofsted have moved from "inadequate"
to "satisfactory", so we have seen these failures or
problems highlighted, and since those Ofsted inspections have
taken place, we have seen improvement. I just want to make one
more comment before Mr Douglas might want to comment on the performance
indicators. I think the system, which CAFCASS is a part of, is
recognisably under strain. For that reason, the previous Administration—and
it's been maintained by the current Administration—have
a review under way and in progress of the family justice system.
Now, we don't know what the outcome of that review will bring
and I can't obviously pre-empt it, but I think that in itself
was a recognition that we have a system—not just CAFCASS,
but we have a system—that is under pressure and hence this
review which will report at some stage next year.
Q4 Chair: We will
come back because I think CAFCASS has been helped by the system.
But if I look at paragraph 22, page 9, that seems to
suggest that the problems were there and that what happened with
the Baby Peter case was that it simply was the last straw. It
was the last straw and it ended up in complete chaos. I think
blaming it on that—trying to say that this is all resulted
from an increased workload; it was all there before, so maybe
we should have had this report in 2008 before Baby Peter. I am
not sure the report would have been any better before 2009, when
there was the publicity.
David Bell: November
2008, yes.
Chair: That was when the
case went into the public domain. If we'd had a report from the
National Audit Office mid-2009, I think we would be sitting here
saying more or less the same things.
David Bell: I think
in relation to staff morale, organisational cohesiveness and so
on, that was part of what was being dealt with, worked on, and
Anthony might say more about that in a moment. I think as the
first recommendation of the NAO report points out, and, in a sense,
as my Accounting Officer report pointed out in 2009, there was
clearly a change fatigue in the organisation which was manifesting
itself in negative attitude; it was manifesting itself in sickness
absences, as you have pointed out, and it has taken time to bring
about those sorts of changes. There have been a very large number
of performance disciplinary cases against staff to take action
where performance is poor. The sickness absence has been improved.
Q5 Chair: We want
to deal with the staffing issues separately. I just want to come
back to my very first question. CAFCASS is your organisation.
Is it fit for purpose?
David Bell: Yes,
it is. It is, Madam Chair, fit for purpose, but we recognise—and
I think the previous Government recognised and current Government
recognised by maintaining the family justice review—that
the system is under pressure, and it's not just as a result of
the immediate aftermath of Baby P. The kinds of numbers of cases
that are coming into the system are maintaining at a very high
level. For that reason, CAFCASS is doing the best job it can
in these circumstances, but I think we do have to look into the
future to see what the system will be like in the future.
Q6 Chair: Are you
saying that in a time of financial constraints the only way that
you can make an effective, efficient, valueformoney
organisation is by giving it more money?
David Bell: No,
and in fact actually if you looked—the NAO report touches
on this—the Accounting Officer report of 2009 highlighted
that there were a number of productivity improvements to be made,
a number of business process improvements to be made, dealing
with sickness absence and dealing with poor performance. All of
those are about making better use of the people that you've got.
We are under no illusions about the spending review that we are
about to enter; we cannot make assumptions about the CAFCASS budget
expanding massively. We have of course, as you know, put extra
money in to address some of the demand pressures since 2008, and
the Department has also put in an additional £10 million
to assist the change and transformation programme.
Q7 Chair: I'm going
to let other people come in. I'm just going to say one
other thing to you before I go to Anthony Douglas. If you look
at page 18, the two figures there, it's just gobsmacking, honestly,
to find that CAFCASS was not even collecting the data before April
2009 either on care cases or private cases. It's gobsmacking.
Whatever happened to workloads or caseloads, they didn't even
know. That's the sort of thing that makes me think, if you are
running an organisation, and your organisation is about dealing
with cases, and you are not even collecting the ruddy stats, how
on earth can you know? What have you got to say about that?
David Bell: Well,
we have detail about aspects of what CAFCASS is doing; but again
I think we absolutely recognise that not in every case or against
every measure was the data complete. That's why we have agreed
with CAFCASS to set up performance measures which are referred
to in the report to provide that data. So the data was incomplete.
There is no denial of that.
Q8 Chair: It was
not just incomplete; it was outrageously awful. You didn't know
how many care cases you were having. You didn't know many private
cases. If you had known—there is another trend graph somewhere—you
would have seen that the trend was upwards, Baby P or not.
David Bell: Madam
Chair, we did know in a sense. We expected the growth to be on
a fairly even trajectory. We knew that in the aftermath of any
major case you would get about a 3% or 4% increase. What we didn't
anticipate, of course, was what was coming. Madam Chair, if you
are happy, perhaps Mr Douglas might want to deal with specific
points about the data that you have just raised there.
Chair: We will in a minute,
but Stephen come in; you were just going to say something.
Q9 Stephen Barclay:
Paragraph 1.13 backs that up—does it not?—where it
says, "Poor data validity compromised the usefulness of some
of the performance indicators".
David Bell: I'm
sorry, Mr Barclay, I didn't catch the latter point of the question.
Stephen Barclay: Page
15, paragraph 1.13, "Poor data validity compromised the usefulness
of some of the performance indicators".
David Bell: Yes.
Stephen Barclay: And indeed
the Department's performance indicators seem to be changing year
on year as well.
David Bell: On
the first point, we accept that, and in fact again I can point
to improvements in data quality, given the reference in the report
to improvements in data quality in certain areas. In relation
to the key performance indicators, I think one of the issues that
arose from our Accounting Officer's report and before was trying
to get the right measures to be able to tell us what we really
needed to know. So we've now got these seven key performance indicators,
which are designed to give us exactly the kind of information
that we require. Behind that, of course—that is the Department's
key performance indicators and measures for CAFCASS—will
be other data that CAFCASS itself will hold, but these are the
headline measures which are our KPIs.
Q10 Stephen Barclay:
This year, you have got seven performance indicators; last year,
you had four; the year before, you had eight—so it's a moving
feast. Can I come back to another comment that you just made?
You said things are rosier now because there is improvement on
the sickness front. Do we actually have enough data in order to
make that conclusion? Is it possible that those improvements
are seasonal?
David Bell: Could
I ask Mr Douglas? I can answer the data numbers, but for your
specific question, if the Chair agrees, perhaps Mr Douglas can
touch on that one.
Anthony Douglas:
Yes, on sickness, our current data is 7.7%; that is seasonally
adjusted. It's 2% below the public sector average, and the number
of days by our practitioners, which is the most important measure,
has come down from 16 to 13 days.
Q11 Chair: That's
not—that's way above the public sector average, way above.
Anthony Douglas:
For Children's Services, which is notoriously higher because of
some of the stresses of the role.
Q12 Chair: Can we
have help from the NAO? Do we know what public sector averages
are? Do you know either of you? I think it's something like
five days a year and private sector is about two or three.
Angela Hands: It's
just under 10—9.7.
Anthony Douglas:
And we're at 7.7 at the moment.
Stephen Barclay: In the
family courts?
Angela Hands: No,
that's a public sector average.
Q13 Stephen Barclay:
And that's for what period of time?
Anthony Douglas:
That's our current snapshot at August. Most of the figures that
I'll be giving you are from last August to this August, so they
will be up to date, compared to a year ago. So there won't be
any seasonal adjustment. We have done a lot of work particularly
to crack down on long-term sickness, which was the age-related
problem. But 35% of our sickness is stress, anxiety and depression.
The rest is necks, backs, and other—cancers—that affect
a working group whose average age is above 50, but the primary
one to get a grip of is stress-related, and particularly related
to the pressures of front-line work.
Q14 Stephen Barclay:
Sure, and are these pressures not going to increase post-September,
when the President's Guidance is removed and in certain localised
areas the scope to use the duty allocation drops away?
Anthony Douglas:
We've worked very hard to get a replacement for the President's
Interim Guidance, and I am confident that before the end of September
we will jointly announce an extension of local schemes. So the
current local agreements—we have 42 around the country—will
continue for a further year in all likelihood, so the impact of
the family justice review and the comprehensive spending review
can be properly taken into account. So we do need another transitional
year, and I am confident that the progress we have made will be
consolidated into a new set of agreements.
Q15 Chair: That is
pretty shocking in itself, because the concerns expressed by the
president, as I understand it, of the risks involved with the
interim procedures and guidance will therefore continue to the
detriment to children for a further year, because you're still
in a mess.
Anthony Douglas:
Well, all our indicators are in the right direction, apart from
the stocks and flows in the public law system. We have now 150
unallocated public law cases; it was a 1,000 a year ago now. That
is 150 too many, but the guidance has helped in both public and
private law to help the system get a greater grip of a record
increase in demand.
Q16 Chair: The average
time for private law cases—the average—is now 58 weeks,
which is over a third increase in the length of time. So you allocate
them; you have too big a workload; and you don't get on with the
work. So, from the point of view of the kids, that is an average—over
a year in the life of a child on average, before you have provided
the reports that will start enabling the courts to take a decision
on the child's future. That's dreadful.
Anthony Douglas:
But the context of that is this time scale reflects the residual
group of the most complicated and intractable private law cases.
Chair: No, it's an average.
The average is 58 weeks. Some will be undoubtedly three or four
years.
Anthony Douglas:
But the President's Guidance has restricted the number of reports
we write very successfully. The cases that we are left with are
the most complicated and the work goes on over about a year, as
it does in a public law case, culminating in a report. These are
not simple cases to report.
Chair: I'm sorry Mr Douglas;
it's an average, an average of 58 weeks. That means your most
complicated must be three or four years. It's an average, which
is an outrageous time. Not every case is complicated; some will
be, and if you had said to me, "We've got 20 up there at
a high level", fine. This is an average and it's a 33% increase.
Anthony Douglas:
What I could say, Madam Chairman, is this year we do have, through
the President's Guidance, four different types of work in private
law cases. We have seen the timescales drop considerably since
we've been narrowing the issues on cases with judges, and we're
trying to do the same now in public law cases. So the President's
Guidance, which was Stephen Barclay's original point, has made
a positive difference.
Q17 Stephen Barclay:
It was only a temporary measure though, wasn't it?
Anthony Douglas:
It was, and it will be extended as another temporary measure.
We do need permanent, sustainable measures in the family justice
system.
Q18 Stephen Barclay:
If you go to figure 8, if you want to go on that line, you see
the brown line going up to a record high in June; so duty allocation
is at a historic record high, which correlates with the green
line going down, which suggests that the way the numbers are being
managed is by using the duty allocation. One of the problems with
that is that people—the guardians—are making a judgment
just on a paper reading of the file, and then when someone actually
looks at it in detail, they're often giving different judgments,
which is one of the problems the courts are facing, is it not?
Anthony Douglas:
The major shift in the figures over the last year, particularly
in the last few months, is that duty allocations have stayed the
same at around 1,000. Substantive allocations to children's guardians
have come down from waiting 40 days on average, which is far too
high, to 27. The numbers of unallocated cases have gone down.
So we've seen an increase in allocated work and a decrease in
unallocated work, with duty work remaining much the same. It is
really only now a feature in London, which has half of the duty
cases, and South Yorkshire, where the leading judges in South
Yorkshire are very fond of that system and it works very well,
but in the bulk of the country we're ending the majority of duty
systems and replacing them with permanent allocations.
Q19 Stephen Barclay: You're
saying, in essence, "We're putting things in place. It's
going to be okay moving forward." Could I just take you back
to what you said in the past? On 18 October 2005, when
you launched your consultation paper, "Every Day Matters",
you were saying then, and this was a year into your tenure as
a CEO, "Every child referred to CAFCASS through the family
courts will have a social-work qualified practitioner allocated
to their case within two days". Has that ever happened?
Anthony Douglas:
Yes, as Madam Chairman said, in 2004 we had an organisation with
record numbers of unallocated cases. We had to put an organisation
together; we had to retrofit an organisation. For the first few
years—it's a long time ago—but certainly we had to
put an infrastructure together and it did take us two to three
years. By 2006, we had no unallocated public law cases.[1]
1 Note by Witness: I should have said that it was
by 2008 that we had very few unallocated public law cases. In
May 2008, 98.8% of all public law cases were allocated. During
the same period the allocation for section 31 care and supervision
cases were: 79.0% allocated within two days; 94.6% allocated within
seven days; and 98.5% allocated within 28 days. Back
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