Summary

The Children and Families Act 2014 was envisaged as a landmark piece of legislation, giving greater protection to vulnerable children, better support for children whose parents are separating, a new system to help children with special educational needs and disabilities, and help for parents to balance work and family life. Our inquiry has shown us that this could have been the case, had any real focus been on implementing and monitoring the impact of the Act. Instead, it was a missed opportunity.

The Government passed the Act with the aim of improving the lives of children, young people and their families. Its intentions were admirable and many of its reforms were the right ones to make. However, the Act has struggled to achieve its goals given the sheer breadth of the areas covered and a lack of due concern given to implementation. Many people have worked hard to bring about the Act’s reforms and improve the lives of children and young people, but they are often hindered by lack of cohesion in the very systems they work in.

The Children and Families Act 2014 has ultimately failed in meaningfully improving the lives of children and young people. Instead, it has largely sat on the shelf, a piece of legislation which has languished as a result of a lack of implementation, inadequate scrutiny and incessant churn amongst Ministers and officials. All this has been allowed to occur while children and young people continue to suffer through public service failures including poor SEND services, increasing mental health referrals waitlists and creeping delays in family courts.

It was not until our inquiry was established that the Government gave any thought to a comprehensive post-legislative review of the whole Act, eight years after it received Royal Assent. Eight years is a long time in the crucial early years of these children. The evidence we received from the Government showed that in some cases, such as delays to family justice cases, the Government was well aware of its failings but had not taken any action to address them. In other areas, such as fostering to adopt, the Government’s data were insufficient to allow it to truly measure impact. Most worryingly, in some cases such as assessing the needs of young carers, departments held no data and appeared uninterested in making any attempt at evaluation whatsoever. This implementation failure is symptomatic of an inability of Government to innovate and learn lessons from its own practices.

Post-legislative scrutiny, whether by Parliament or the Government itself, is vital to ensuring legislation is achieving its goals, providing value for money, and improving people’s lives. We are not the first inquiry to draw attention to the failures facing children, young people and their families, but time and time again little is done to address the problems identified. In this report, we urge the Government to improve its systems for monitoring and assessing the implementation of legislation, particularly by building robust systems for data collection and sharing. We call on the Government to take implementation of legislation seriously, beginning by ensuring continuity of Ministers and senior officials.

When the systems we looked at, including education, family justice and social care, fail to provide adequate support, it is children and their families who bear the burden. Nowhere was this clearer to us than in the current crisis facing children and young people’s mental health services. Children and young people with poor mental health face long waiting lists for referrals and treatment. All the while, their mental health continues to decline, increasing their need and making the need for crisis support more likely. In failing to give due concern to children’s mental health when constructing the Act and allowing waiting lists to grow to unsustainable levels, the Government has failed a generation of children and young people.

A key theme of our inquiry was the value of early intervention. It is clear to us that investing in early intervention results in better outcomes for children and young people. It can head off crises before they emerge, reducing the need for high-cost interventions later in the cycle. Despite the clear value of early intervention, it remained absent across many of the areas we looked at, threatening the stability of families and the health of children and young people. We are calling on the Government to prioritise early interventions including legal advice appointments for separating couples and improved post-adoption support.

Given the wide breadth of the Act, it was not possible for us to cover it in its entirety. Unfortunately, we have been unable to give some parts of the Act—including on childcare and children’s welfare—the attention we would have liked. However, ranging across policy areas has allowed us to reflect on overarching themes. We focussed on the areas which we felt would be most likely to benefit from further scrutiny, principally: adoption, family justice and employment rights. Part 3 of the Act on SEND both had already received post-legislative scrutiny by the Education Committee and was the subject of a major consultation which would close halfway through our inquiry. As a result, we spent a more limited time on it than would otherwise have befitted its importance. To ensure the valuable evidence we received was communicated to policymakers when it could make the most difference, we responded to the Government’s consultation on SEND, making clear the changes needed to improve outcomes for children and young people with SEND.

This report makes recommendations on how the Government can finally realise its ambitions as initially set out in the Act across adoption, family justice and employment rights. They include:

• establishing an outcome focussed task force, accountable to the Secretary of State, dedicated to addressing ethnic and racial disparities in the adoption system;
• improving post-placement support for adopters and kinship carers;
• developing a safe and modern digital contact system for post adoption contact;
• addressing the creeping delays in public family law cases through top-level leadership and investigation by the Family Justice Board;
• producing an impartial advice website for separating couples, providing clear information on the family justice system;
• replacing MIAMs and the mediation voucher schemes with a universal voucher scheme for a general advice appointment;
• reviewing the current approach to empowering the voice of the child in family law proceedings;
• creating an ambition for a move towards a new dedicated 12 week parental leave allowance; and
• making flexible working a day one right to request and encouraging businesses to advertise jobs flexibly from the outset.

Throughout our inquiry, we have sought to hear directly from children, young people and their families. We are grateful for their time and insight, as they shared with us the challenges they face and how they feel let down by the very systems designed to support them. The welfare of children and young people should be the Government’s paramount concern when developing policies in this area. We urge them not to allow another eight years to pass before they make the improvements which are so demonstrably necessary.