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16 Jan 2008 : Column GC509
16 Jan 2008 : Column GC509
16 Jan 2008 : Column GC509
Wednesday, 16 January 2008.
The Committee met at quarter to four.
[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (BARONESS McINTOSH OF HUDNALL) in the Chair.]
Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]
(Third Day)
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall): Before we start, I remind the Committee that if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, the Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bell sounds and will resume after 10 minutes.
Clause 8 [Provision of accommodation in its area for children looked after by a local authority]:
The Earl of Listowel moved Amendment No. 28:
The noble Earl said: My intention in proposing to remove this subsection is to allow a general debate on the implications of the requirement on local authorities to place children locally, save in exceptional circumstances. I hope that it will be helpful if I raise two matters. First, as I indicated at Second Reading, I am concerned that the imprudent application of this clause might result in the loss of vital good-quality specialist provision. Secondly, I am anxious that good-quality foster placements near to a child’s home but in a neighbouring local authority should not be lost.
In the past, efforts to encourage local authorities to place more children in borough appear to have resulted in disruption to placements. The policy is right in principle, but it is the practice that matters. Guidance on this clause needs to be carefully drawn and its implementation must be carefully monitored. I understand that in Wales, where requirements to this effect are in place, there has been disruption to proximate out-of-authority placements. I am awaiting detailed information on that and will forward it to the Minister as soon as I receive it. I was grateful for the Minister’s reply at Second Reading, but further reassurance would be welcome.
Three years ago, a letter was sent from the DfES, as it was then, to local authorities requiring them to place children within a 20-mile radius of their home, unless it was against the interests of a child to do so. I paraphrase the letter, but it was explicit that local authorities should avoid disrupting out-of-authority placements. None the less, some local authorities appear to have interpreted it as meaning that they should pull the plug on out-of-authority placements.
A questionnaire from the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care found that 24 per cent of respondents had experienced such premature removals. Fifty per cent of commissioners and 79 per
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This occurrence adds all the more weight to the request by my noble friend Lord Laming that local authorities should be obliged to produce a commissioning strategy for their looked-after children. Local authorities need to be proactive rather than crudely reactive. I welcome what the Minister said on an earlier day in Committee about the improvements being planned for commissioning and those that have already been undertaken. I look forward to meeting some of his advisers during the passage of the Bill to discuss this further.
Specialist provision can be more costly in the short term. Children are often prematurely withdrawn from such services. A child appears to be better, and the local authority therefore removes him. In fact, the removal of the symptoms may be only the first stage of addressing the fundamental needs of a traumatised child. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children service for young abusers in north London, albeit a non-residential service, has often had such experiences.
The Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire provides residential care for the most troubled children. I have visited the school, which has very good Ofsted reports. A documentary to be broadcast later this year shows children arriving who kick, punch and spit at staff. They often need to be restrained by more than two staff members. The programme shows how, over time, the children’s behaviour changes. There is a particularly touching scene of a child’s bedtime, when his carer holds him tenderly. The Mulberry Bush is so well respected that I doubt whether this clause would impact on its clients commissioning its services. However, the institution illustrates the value of highly specialist residential provision.
If local authorities avoid using out-of-authority specialist residential provision in future, there is the danger that some children will experience increased levels of multiple placement breakdown, something about which we are all most concerned. Will the Minister seek to monitor this by introducing a mechanism to check how many children have more than five, 10 and 12 placements each year? I welcome the Government’s PSA target on ensuring that children have no more than three placements a year, but as I understand it there is no lever on local authorities. It does not really matter much to the child how many more times over the limit they are placed, whether it is four, five, six or seven times. If the limit of three is exceeded, there does not appear to be any mechanism to prevent the child from being shifted around. It would be helpful to know how this is monitored. I welcome the reduction in the number of children who experience more than three placements a year and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply. I beg to move.
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees: I should inform the Committee that, if this amendment is agreed to, I cannot call Amendments Nos. 29 to 33 by reason of pre-emption.
Baroness Morris of Bolton: I should like to speak to Amendments Nos. 29 and 31 in my name. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for supporting them.
We very much welcome the aspect of this Bill that attempts to keep children in care close to home. It is encouraging to see the Government recognising the importance of keeping a child in their local area as a way of increasing stability and continuity of care. It can only be a double blow to the child to be put into care and then to be removed from the only stable things in their life. The familiarity of surroundings, friendships and ties to the local community can soften the blow of being taken into care and make it easier for a child to handle the difficult transition with more confidence.
However, we have some concerns. First, as it stands, the threshold for determining when a child must be kept in a local area is weak. The Bill states that care should be within the local area unless the authority is “satisfied” that there is no local accommodation. We feel that, if the Government are serious about keeping children close to home, they need to make a more robust statement of this purpose in the Bill. Our Amendment No. 29 would tighten the language and remove the possibility of local authorities wriggling out of their duties; it would ensure that children are kept in the area unless that is inconsistent with their welfare.
We are also concerned that, as drafted, this clause could be interpreted to keep a child locally when their best interests would be better served away from home. We are particularly anxious about children and young people with severe and complex disabilities, who require extremely specialist care that many local authorities simply cannot provide. Of course it would be wonderful if every local authority could provide every specialist need, but that is sadly not the case. I think that the Committee will agree that we need the clause to cover exceptional circumstances. A child should not be denied access to the care that they need because of geography. I am sure that the Minister will point out that that is not the point of this clause at all, but we want to ensure that need, not cost, is driving provision.
I have so far spoken only about the welfare of a child and, in particular, the need for an exception for disabled children. In Amendment No. 31, we have included safety as well. There are a host of reasons—gang pressure, abuse, traumatic family environments and trafficking—where keeping a child in the local area would be dangerous. We want to ensure that there is provision for children to be placed out of local areas when there are situations that would make it genuinely unsafe for a child to stay there.
Before I finish, I should like to touch on the plight of trafficked children. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, spoke about them earlier this week, but I want to talk about them in a slightly different context. I want to talk about children who are trafficked
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Baroness Butler-Sloss: I believe that the figure given by the noble Baroness came from the Government. I am not sure that it is 180—it may have been 160—but the Government have certainly said that something in the region of that number of trafficked children have gone missing in the past year to 18 months. It is an extremely serious matter. I must declare an interest. I belong to the All-Party Group on the Trafficking of Women and Children, so I very much endorse what the noble Baroness has just said.
Perhaps I can make a separate point about accommodation outside the area. Another group of children who are particularly difficult to place are those who have been sexually abused over a long period. Sometimes they are very young children. I have a vivid recollection of a little girl of five, whose case I dealt with. She went to see a child psychiatrist who was not an enthusiast about child sexual abuse—he was not at all sure that it really happened very much. The girl ran in and sat on his lap, although she had never met him before. She then lay down, opened her legs and said, “Would you like to see what daddy did to me?”. He was converted in an instant. The point is that she could not go to any ordinary foster family because she would be a danger to the father and to the boys in the family. One has to bear in mind that, in exceptional circumstances, highly sexualised children must have very careful treatment, which may well have to take place outside the area.
Baroness Walmsley: I have some amendments in this group: Amendments Nos. 32, 33, 34 and 46. Despite physical appearances today, there is not a yawning chasm between me and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, but that is a matter that I shall redress in the correct forum.
My Amendment No. 32 is a different way of approaching the issue covered by Amendment No. 29 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and my Amendment No. 33 is a different way of approaching the issue covered by Amendment No. 31, also in her name. On Amendment No. 33, we would simply like a recognition that there may be cases involving specific safety concerns, as have just been outlined, which make a placement within a local authority not in the child’s best interests. That is why we propose the addition of safety as a criterion in Clause 8.
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Amendments Nos. 34 and 46 define what we mean by welfare. Kevin Brennan MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Young People and Families, speaking on 9 October 2007, made it clear that the Bill would not prevent access to specialist services for children with complex and acute needs. He said that,
- “the needs of each individual child must come first. We will ensure that out of authority restriction is not absolute, as we recognise that some young people will have needs that require them to be placed at a distance”.
Although we recognise that and welcome the Bill’s focus on ensuring that local authorities provide appropriate placements that are consistent with the child’s welfare, we would like more clarity on what we mean by “welfare”. In some cases, out-of-authority placements may be the most appropriate. As drafted, the Bill states that the Secretary of State will define the requirements with which local authorities must comply before placing a child out of their area. We believe that further clarification is required in the Bill, which is why we have provided our own definition of welfare. Noble Lords will note that it includes physical and mental health as well as appropriate educational outcomes; support for the child’s social, emotional and behavioural needs; safeguarding requirements; and the stability of the care placement.
We would place a similar definition of welfare in Clause 9, because we are concerned that a lack of flexibility and understanding of the circumstances of children with complex needs could result in a decision to place a child in an inappropriate placement, simply because it is near to the school, which is the subject covered by Clause 9. That might be the school where they are currently registered. It is of course easier to leave them there—whether or not they are actually attending, which might also be an issue—regardless of whether the school is able to provide the specialist support that the child needs. That is why we propose the same definition of “welfare” in Amendment No. 46 as in Amendment No. 34.
4 pm
Lord Judd: These amendments overlap and support one another, which re-emphasises the significance of the issue. What attracted me to them, having myself been part of a Government in the distant past, is that I have always worried a little that, whatever the good intentions, how the policy is to be fulfilled and what its specifics are need to be looked at in some detail. Sometimes there is a certain amount of frustration among those delivering in the field. They do not doubt the good intentions and positive attitude of the Government, but they do not believe that what needs to be done in terms of action and specific circumstances has always been clearly thought through. I am therefore always tempted to support amendments that try to be specific in their implications. I hope that my noble friend will feel able to look seriously at what is being argued.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I, too, support these amendments, whose provisions vary across several clauses and have been referred to in previous debates.
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- “are ... to be performed only in so far as their performance is ... consistent with the welfare of the child”.
That is surely what we want, not,
particularly given all the needs that we have heard about and the difficulty of placing individual children for more than understandable reasons. I very much support all the amendments because of what we have heard, and continue to hear, about the details of some of these appalling cases. We are all horrified by the number of missing children, whatever it is. It is quite beyond belief.
Lord Hylton: Clause 8 and this group of amendments enable us to discuss two important issues. I suggest that it will be important to keep them separate in our minds. The first, from the child’s point of view, is continuity of friends and relatives when he or she is being placed, either in the same local authority area or close to it. The second is the stability of the placement itself.
In London and other large conurbations, a much better and more satisfactory placement may well be available just over the edge of the boundary of the particular local authority. I am sure that the Minister has that in mind and I hope that he will continue to keep it there.
At Second Reading I said that stable placements of children were worth their weight in gold, which is why I welcome paragraphs (d) and (e) in Amendments Nos. 34 and 46. They emphasise the long-term stability of the potential care placement and the consequent mental and physical health of the child. I am sure that we all agree that long, stable placements provide the environment in which the child’s mental and physical health can be cared for, preserved, maintained and improved. On those grounds, I support what my noble friend Lord Listowel said about a possible mechanism for looking at placements that have failed to last and have broken down for one reason or another. Perhaps the mechanism could look into the causes of the breakdown as well as simply the administration of it.
Lord Northbourne: I support the two points made by my noble friend Lord Hylton; namely, the stability and continuity of placement. There is another reason, which has not yet been mentioned, for sometimes not placing a child near to home. I speak particularly of teenage children. If they have become involved with a gang or a group to which in lieu of a family they have dedicated their loyalty, unless they are moved away,
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Children, Schools and Families (Lord Adonis): I am mortified that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, regretted only the growing chasm between herself and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I thought that she would be far more concerned about the growing chasm between herself and me. I greatly regret that she is so far away and I wish that she was closer. However, her words carry equal force wherever she delivers them from within the Grand Committee.
Greater stability and continuity are our objectives, which are clearly shared by all noble Lords who have spoken in the Committee today. In respect of the noble Earl’s Amendment No. 28, we are committed to reducing the number of inappropriate out-of-authority placements and to encouraging provision of a range and choice of suitable-quality accommodation within each local authority area that is capable of meeting the needs of the children that it looks after.
The noble Earl asked about data on placement stability and whether we could publish data on those who are moved five, 10 or 15 times a year. We currently have national indicators on three or more placement moves and long-term placement stability and we publish those statistics. However, national data collection captures information on every placement move, and the extremely high levels of placement disruption to which he referred are counted. I shall write to him with the information that we have in a form that may be useful to him.
The latest figures show that 34 per cent of children are placed outside their local authority area. This rate has increased in recent years. Because of this high level—we believe it to be unacceptably high—we think it right to strengthen the duties on local authorities to help to reduce the current reliance on distant placements, both outside the local authority or at some distance within it. Children have told us that they can feel isolated in distant placements and miss contact with their friends and local communities. Local authorities find it harder to be attentive corporate parents to children who are in distant placements and they have less leverage over the relevant services in that area.
In general, children placed out of area do less well than those placed closer to home. We know that children placed out of their local authority area are more likely to achieve poor outcomes and to be in very expensive placements, which are spot-purchased and do not always justify their costs. For all those reasons, we have the provisions set out in Clause 8.
However, there will always be children for whom a placement outside their local authority area is the right placement; that is, children with needs that can be met only in very specialist placements or those who may need to be moved away from their home area for their own protection or for the reasons set out by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. Some of these children are the most vulnerable looked-after
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To ensure that local authorities exercise this discretion appropriately, we shall use the power in new subsection (7B) to set out a process in regulations to scrutinise the decision to place out of area, to ensure that the authority has properly considered all the local options and whether out-of-area placement would meet the child’s assessed needs, and to ensure that arrangements have been made to deliver the services that the child needs. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked whether we would allow Members of the Committee to see a draft of the guidance on the placing of children before Report. I am afraid that I cannot help him in that regard. As we have already said publicly, our commitment in respect of the revised Children Act 1989 guidance is to produce it by 2009, so it will not be available shortly and certainly not by Report.
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