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Baroness Howarth of Breckland: My Lords, I do not want to repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, has said. I also have to ask for the leave of the House as deputy chair—I clearly have a vested interest.
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I begin by thanking the Government for the money that they have already put into the system. When the noble Baroness and I were invited to see whether CAFCASS was viable, which it certainly is—I think that is what we were really asked to do, rather than get it going—we had to see whether the budget met the needs, because no one actually knew. Now we know that it is not really adequate to meet the baseline service. Most of the services that you are involved in will put somewhere near 3 per cent of their budget into training, although it depends how you add that up. At the moment, we have hardly any training budget. We train by our staff putting in, and by conferences that other people are putting in, and by helping each other to improve the service.
We need to improve all that. To do that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, said, we have halved the staff at headquarters, significantly reduced the senior staff and devolved our services. That is a modernisation programme in a year that many organisations would give their eye teeth to have achieved. It is a substantial achievement.
We do not need the megabucks that we have already been given to make the difference. We need enough to make the service work, to have decent training and to have basic IT for our case-recording service, which will save time and money if we can only get it up. I know there are particular funds for IT. If only we could get some of that money. We need enough to ensure that, as has been said several times here, we can pay a decent staff a decent wage to do a decent job.
Every day matters. Every day, we have to ensure that children are not waiting to have their reports; that they are not waiting to be seen or to be heard. That is our commitment, but we need help and support in order to achieve it, as well as for the surrounding services and CAFCASS to be involved in the development of contact centres and the kind of work that it is doing extraneous to the day-to-day work in court. We have been helped considerably by the Government. We are grateful for that. To complete the job we need that help to continue.
The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, perhaps I can quote from the report that we have been discussing. Under "Overall assessment" the report says:
"a system to improve the standard of practice overall has not been implemented and accountability for service delivery is deficient throughout CAFCASS. There is a disconcerting culture of rush and hurry in CAFCASS but practitioners do not make best use of the time available . . . The nature of domestic abuse is not sufficiently understood by most CAFCASS practitioners; the routine approaches used by CAFCASS do not assess risk and some are dangerous. There is a worrying lack of attention to safety planning throughout CAFCASS".
The problem is not just one of funding. There is much work to do. I know that my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, are working extremely hard to take the system forward. I understand that the toolkit that they have introduced on assessments for domestic violence is a welcome innovation and meets some of the concerns in the
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report. However, we need to give the organisation all the support that we can—financially and in other ways.
I refer to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, about representation of the voice of the child in such proceedings. A concern was raised in the recent Joint Chief Inspectors' report, Safeguarding Children, involving children in court proceedings. That has to be done in an extremely sensitive manner, as was pointed out in the longitudinal report with which the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, provided me. Younger children can find themselves being caught between a rock and a hard place, if they feel that they are put in the position of having to choose between one parent and the other, but older children want to be part of the process and want to give their views on it. Professional work needs to be carried out. I thank my noble friend for tabling the amendment.
Lord Adonis: My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley, to the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, and to their senior management team at CAFCASS for the remarkable work that they have done in the past year in turning round the organisation. The figures given by my noble friend on the efficiencies that have been procured and the redeployment of resources to the front line speak for themselves in the effect that they are making on the organisation. We greatly appreciate the work that they have been doing. We recognise the pressure under which their staff work, and we are committed to seeing that they are properly resourced.
All the way through the passage of the Bill, concerns have been expressed that the resourcing should be adequate to the tasks that Parliament wants to impose on various departments and agencies concerned with taking forward the agenda. I shall repeat what I have said at every stage of the debates: we are mindful of those new responsibilities, and we regard it as a duty on us to see that the resourcing is adequate. However, I cannot enter into spending commitments for future years because I am simply not in a position to do so, although I can say to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that funding decisions for CAFCASS for next year, 2006–07, have not yet been made. My department is monitoring the current financial position of CAFCASS, and there are ongoing discussions about budget pressures with the chair, the chief executive and my department. I thought that she was very fair-minded in her comments, and she pointed out, in a remarkable display of efficiency by the DfES, that she received a written reply through her honourable friend in three days—that must be almost without precedent in the history of the DfES.
The figures for investment in CAFCASS over the past four years have risen significantly, as the noble Baroness said. They rose from £80.8 million in 2001 to £95 million in 2003–04 up to £107 million in 2004–05, which included £12 million extra to improve training and to remove the backlog of cases. We have sustained that funding for this year, which needs to be seen against the backdrop of the significant increase in funding over the previous three years.
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I know that my noble friend will immediately say that further resources are needed, so I shall not push the point too far, but I believe that our good faith has been demonstrated, as it has in the funding of mediation services, to which my noble friend Lady Ashton referred, where again there was a significant increase in funding. On the funding for supervised contact centres, which is a cause dear to the heart of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, we have had significant increases—£3.5 million for contact centres next year, rising to £4.5 million in 2007–08. However, I appreciate the additional pressures and burdens that will be imposed on the various services and the increased demands that there will be in future years. All I can say, as I say on every occasion that we debate the matter, is that we are mindful of the pressures when we allocate funding in future years. We would not be before the House today proposing this legislation if we did not regard it as important that those additional services were provided. I hope that we can meet the concerns that have been expressed in the House to the satisfaction of noble Lords when we announce funding settlements for future years.
9 pm
Lord Northbourne: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate and to the Minister for that helpful and broadly encouraging reply. I know that the process of government is different from business, but would any managing director come before his board and say, "Gentlemen, we are proposing all these wonderful changes, but we do not know how we are going to pay for them"? That is not for real. I wish that the Government had a system—I do not suppose that governments ever have had or ever will have such a system—whereby they could approach the Treasury before coming forward with ideas of this kind, so that when they come to Parliament they know that they will be able to implement them. At the moment, whatever we pass or do not pass today or at Third Reading, we will not know whether it will be possible to implement it because we do not know whether the right honourable gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer will cough up the funds when the time comes. It is a highly unsatisfactory situation. However, we are doing our best.
I am most grateful to the Ministers, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I know that they are deeply committed to this objective. I wish them good luck in their negotiations with the Treasury. We should support them in every way that we can. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
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