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The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, the clergy in their pastoral ministry often come across cases of domestic violence and, sadly, child abuse. In that regard, all of us on these Benches welcome the amendments. However, in my experience as a bishop I have come across complications relating specifically to risk assessment, where the precise qualifications of the risk assessor concerned have subsequently been questioned by a solicitor. In responding on these amendments, will the Minister reiterate and give further assurances about the ways in which the people who are to undertake risk assessment can be properly trained and the information about them made available to those whose job it is to decide on risk assessment? Particularly in my profession, we sometimes have to find people to do these risk assessments before an issue has come before the courts. Therefore, in that preventive area, it is extremely important for us, and any guidance the Minister can give on making secure these risk assessments would be most welcome.
Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I support this amendment, to which I have put my name, because it does what I had hoped we would be able to do during this Bill—strengthening and making more consistent the processes by which children's safety is looked after by the courts.
I have been influenced considerably during our deliberations by the valuable report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Court Administration. It contains some conceptual leaps, but it is a very useful document. It makes a number of recommendations that line up very well with the amendment. Recommendation 2 says that CAFCASS should,
"ensure that all cases, including conciliation at court are subject to risk assessment and liaison with other agencies".
Recommendation 3 says that it should,
These are all recommendations to CAFCASS.
"to improve services to children and families CAFCASS should provide training . . . in assessment and risk assessment skills",
picking up the point just made by the right reverend Prelate. Recommendation 8 is to,
"take steps to ensure an appropriate balance is maintained between safety and service delivery through the use of robust risk assessment procedures".
Finally, Recommendation 11 suggests that HMCS should,
"provide appropriate training to assist staff in gaining a greater understanding of domestic violence and its impact on survivors".
All those recommendations lead us to one such as has just been described by the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton. However, a poor risk assessment could be much worse than no risk
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assessment at all, so training is very important indeed. If the Government are minded to accept the amendment, they must put the resources where their intentions are and provide the resources for that training and for the manpower—and woman power—that is to brought to bear to carry out the assessments, so that we can be assured that they will be of high quality.
I am aware that CAFCASS is not in a position to match the golden handshakes or enhanced salaries that many local authority social services are now offering to social workers to come and work for them because of the great crisis that we have had in recruitment and retention of social workers. CAFCASS has simply not been given the means to match those incentives and, unless it is, it will not get the best quality social workers coming to work there. That is what we need to support the amendment. However, I very strongly recommend it to the House and very much thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Gould of Potternewton and Lady Thornton, for their persistence in coming to something that I hope the Government will be able to accept.
Baroness Thornton: My Lords, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in urging the acceptance of the amendment, which is everything that we have been pushing for over many years. I put on record how thankful I am for the support that Members throughout the House have given on the issue through many Bills over the past few years. As my noble friend Lady Gould has said, we believe that it is a reasonable start that everybody should be able to support. The Minister has also taken an important step in his amendments in recognising the issue—and I welcome that also.
Baroness Pitkeathley: My Lords, I support the amendments, especially that of my noble friends and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. The noble Baroness mentioned the HMICA report, which has been mentioned several times in our deliberations today. Noble Lords will know that CAFCASS takes very seriously the recommendations in that report and has already implemented many of them, including producing its excellent toolkit, which I hope has been seen by many noble Lords throughout the House. If not, I can certainly provide them with copies.
CAFCASS is concerned about resources, but that does not in any way diminish our enthusiasm for taking on the role of risk assessment. We believe that it will help to focus our practice when under great pressure to broker agreements between warring parents. Sometimes the drive to reach an agreement about contact can mask underlying child protection concerns; at the moment, we have an inadequate statutory base for exploring those concerns. Making risk assessment mandatory will be an alert not just for CAFCASS practitioners but for those agencies from which we ask checks—courts and judges and all agencies in the family justice system. We should never forget that everybody has a responsibility for making sure that contact is safe. I am very glad to say that there
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is a clear consensus among all groups concerned for children to ensure that contact is safe, and that with all cases in which we are alerted to concerns, invariably in a court application by one party, we must carry out a formal risk assessment. We have clear procedures for that, and the amendment will lead directly to the protection of many children who are at the moment subject to an ambiguous legal framework.
I share the concerns that have been raised about how necessary it is to have adequate training, with the right level of staff. No doubt we shall come to that when discussing another amendment later tonight.
The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. I greatly admire the single-minded attention to the matter that the noble Baronesses, Lady Gould and Lady Thornton, have given on this occasion and in the past. I also remember how passionately Earl Russell felt about this issue.
I first wish to refer back to when, due to a failure on my part, I did not ask the noble Earl, Lord Howe, about his response to an earlier amendment. In referring to the report, he said that he believed that the failure was in assessment. Clearly, the amendment will work towards addressing the concern that he has, having read the report, that the assessment process was at fault. I wanted to ask him whether he recognised that that assessment failure will take a long time to remedy. It is not just about developing the new training programme; the courts need to be trained in it, as do the social workers. There is a culture in CAFCASS, which the report points to, of being hurried and not giving enough time to things, which is partly to do with resources, as noble Lords have said, and is partly to do with retraining. All those things take time to change.
I would not wish your Lordships to believe that, simply because we now have a welcome start in ensuring the safety of children involved in these processes, we can therefore move forward with the other measures that we decided not to include earlier this afternoon. That is the main point that I wish to make.
Lord Adonis: My Lords, we seem to have almost a unanimity of opinion in the House this afternoon, which I hope that we can retain for the rest of our proceedings. Amendments Nos. 27 and 34 have been tabled by my noble friends Lady Gould and Lady Thornton, to whom I pay tribute for the huge time that they have spent pursuing these issues, long before my arrival in the House, in successive Bills. The Government are happy to accept those amendments, as we believe that they are a very constructive step forward in ensuring that issues of domestic violence and child abuse are properly addressed as soon as they are raised and before decisions about contact are made, or at any other point in private law Children Act proceedings when they would be relevant.
(4)The right reverend Prelate raised the important issue of training officers who are to undertake risk assessments and how a risk assessment that is poorly undertaken can have calamitous consequences for
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those concerned. I entirely agree with him and know that the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service takes extremely seriously the training of those who undertake the assessments. He will have heard what my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley said on the subject. We believe that it is an important step forward. CAFCASS is already highly experienced in making these risk assessments and already undertakes them when it believes that they are appropriate, but putting it on a statutory basis will be a step forward and will address many of the concerns that have been raised in various stages of the debate on this Bill that the interests of the child should be paramount. That includes assessing as expeditiously as possible concerns about domestic violence and child abuse.
I am glad that the amendments have had such a warm welcome from CAFCASS. We believe that they will need to be properly resourced, and we will provide the resources necessary. We see this as an important step forward and are happy to support the amendments.
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