16
Examination of witnesses
Lynn Perry, Abigail Gill and Jessica Ford.
Q1 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this public session of the Public Services Committee. Today, we have three witnesses before us who will talk about the children’s social care implementation strategy. The Committee has looked at this issue for at least a year. The department is at the stage of having responded to the various consultations and is beginning the implementation phase, so we are keen to see how you feel that is going. Can I ask you to introduce yourselves?
Jessica Ford: Hi, everyone. I am policy lead for children in care at Action for Children. I also have a slightly different but related role, which is that I support one of the care-experienced members of the National Implementation Board for DfE. Essentially, I support her to digest the papers ahead of the meetings, and to attend the meetings, because she does not have specialist policy expertise. It is a DfE requirement that I keep the hats slightly different.
Lynn Perry: Good afternoon, everybody. I am chief executive at Barnardo’s, the children’s charity.
Abigail Gill: Hi, everyone. I am associate head of policy and public affairs at the NSPCC.
Q2 The Chair: Welcome. I will start the questions. We were interested in what progress you felt there had been since the consultation was published in February. I realise that there were a lot of recommendations and it was a very big report, so if you feel that you just want to pick out the things that are most important to you that you think would be most helpful to us, that is fine. I do not expect you to go through all the recommendations.
Abigail Gill: Broadly, it is helpful to set out that we continue to feel that progress has been slow. There has been a continued lack of signalling at the most senior levels politically that this is a priority, and what the timelines and the timescales will actually look like.
What is most worrying from our perspective is that reform continues to feel quite piecemeal. The review and the strategy were billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset children’s social care, but, as you say, there are many proposals and recommendations, and they feel very piecemeal and gradual. We have pathfinders in just 12 local authorities, there is funding for family hubs in just 75 local authorities, and the department recently announced that 27 new areas would join the Staying Close pilots. Again, it is just small announcements gradually, rather than that big reform programme that we really wanted to see.
Of course, we understand the importance of testing reform: that is not in dispute. We want to ensure that local authorities are ready, prepared and able to come along on the journey with reform, but it is about the funding commitments to actually deliver that. Our charities, along with the Children’s Society and the National Children’s Bureau, commissioned Alma Economics to look at the funding that would be required to deliver reform, and we can provide all that data to the Committee.
Using the same methodology that the care review used to estimate the cost of reform, we found that delaying reform by just the two-year pathfinder period will cost an additional £1 billion over the next 10 years. That will be driven largely by an additional 10,000 children entering the care system, which, as we know, is costly both in finance but also in outcomes for children.
In a nutshell, those are the broad things that I would like to lay out first.
Lynn Perry: Barnardo’s is generally supportive of the direction of travel in the Government’s plan, but I echo the points that have been made about pace and the requirement for investment of resources. The strategy provides a welcome focus on early help for families and harnessing family networks, but the key to reforming the system is much more significant investment than has been committed to date. The timetable is of concern. We think that it is slow. The plan to date has pledged £200 million over a two-year period. The funding is for Families First for Children pathfinders and for regional care co-operatives, but it is a fraction of the £2.6 billion investment that was proposed in the independent review.
To introduce wide-scale national reform of the system, clearly, we need to move faster and to have a more significant investment. One of our concerns is that, currently, there is no legislative timetable for introducing reform, and no children’s social care Bill in the recent King’s Speech. A much more ambitious cross-government approach is needed to improve outcomes for children and young people, but we recognise that this cannot be the responsibility of children’s social care alone. It requires all government departments, including those for health and social care, criminal justice, and housing, to work together.
We welcome provisions like the new ministerial lead for care leavers. That is key to delivering this strategy, but fundamentally—to echo the point made by my colleague—we need a cross-government strategy for children and young people. We are calling for political parties to commit to a coalition of children’s charities in their manifestos ahead of the next general election.
Jessica Ford: To be honest, it is really difficult to answer your question, because we do not have the full picture of progress. As you say, there are so many different recommendations and commitments. That is translated into lots of different workstreams in the DfE children’s social care teams, which have lots of different working groups attached to them, some of which we are on and some of which we are not. If you are not on the working group, you do not know what is happening. As one of the big five children’s charities—as we term ourselves—we have regular meetings with DfE, and we have officials coming from each of those workstreams to give updates, but it is always an update by workstream: we never see the full piece at the strategic level.
Despite that, I think the officials are working really hard. There are a lot of very big and very complex reforms being led by very small teams in the Department for Education that are doing their best, but the resourcing is not there at the moment, despite the scale of the reform programme. That has led to the big-ticket items, the pathfinders, progressing, largely because they are the most public-facing aspect of the reform programme.
As things stand, we have the Wave 1 local authorities signed up for the early help and child protection pathfinder, and I think the Wave 2 local authorities are due to be announced in the new year. As I understand it, the chosen areas for the Regional Care Cooperative pathfinders are being selected next month. So those are certainly moving forward, albeit I have heard anecdotally from a colleague in Action for Children’s children’s services arm that the Early Help pathfinders are moving more slowly than DfE’s specified plan and that there are very early concerns about whether the funding will stretch far enough to deliver the requirements of the pathfinders.
My main concern on progress is on the lower order reforms.
The Chair: That is a good point.
Jessica Ford: There is a really mixed picture there. Some reforms are certainly in early-stage development, and we see signs of progress, but there are others where the status is completely unclear and, when we have asked for updates from the Department for Education, we have had a slightly vague response. I am not sure whether that is because there has been no progress, or whether it is more that we are not talking to the right people—as I said, there are a lot of different workstreams, and the reform programme is so detailed in many ways that it is difficult for all the officials to be on top of the progress of all the workstreams at all times.
There are a couple of the reforms that I would particularly like to flag which Action for Children is really concerned about at the moment. There is a commitment to ‘review and strengthen the role of independent reviewing officers and of regulation 44 visitors’, reforms that sit alongside the commitment to develop an opt-out, independent model of national advocacy. Those three reforms together serve as important checks and balances in the system for care experienced children. The Hesley report, which I am sure you are all aware of, flagged weaknesses in those functions and the fact that they had contributed to a lack of reactiveness in the response to what was going on in those homes. We would like to know from the Department for Education what is happening to those reforms. As I said, we have asked, but we have not had a clear response yet.
Q3 The Chair: Do I get the feeling from all three of you that progress is slower than you might have anticipated from the report? When the report was published by the DfE, the common complaint was that it is all too slow and there is not enough money, although the direction is right. Am I right in thinking that you think it is even slower than that and that, even in the context of the speed they were working, it is actually slow, or are you reiterating the complaint, or the observation, that many of us had when it was first published that there was not enough pace about it?
Jessica Ford: I would say it is the latter. The progress is a really mixed picture. My headline message is more that we do not have the full picture, and I would really like it if the Committee could seek that.
The Chair: Is there not an overall programme board that you have access to or representation on?
Jessica Ford: No. The National Implementation Board is the oversight mechanism for implementation. They have an RAG—red, amber, green—rating system, but it is not available to us.
The Chair: And you just happen not to be on it. Do you know who else is on it?
Jessica Ford: There are DCSs—directors of children’s services—and then three people who are termed ‘experts by experience’. There is, I think, the chief social worker for England, and the Association of the Directors of Children’s Services president. There is no third sector representation.
Abigail Gill: Part of the issue with speed is the fact that the consultation response and the strategy point to so many other moving parts: they signpost to family hubs, to things like integrating data with a consistent child identifier, to lots of things that are not in the Department for Education’s gift to deliver necessarily, which makes them very clunky and difficult to track. The complexity is also slowing down reform.
The Chair: Lynn, has all your contact been with the DfE—as Abi just said, responsibilities go across government—or have you been called into discussions with any of the other departments that also have a responsibility for delivery?
Lynn Perry: We have meetings with cross-government departments where we raise issues that are relevant and pertinent to the recommendations of the review. We consistently try to press for more integrated planning and action to deliver on the recommendations of the review. One issue with the pace of progress is the pilot nature of some of the activity. There is the selection of areas in which that activity will take place, and there is consultation on guidance in respect of things like advocacy and working together. It talks to the complexity and multiplicity of recommendations in the review that we have referenced here.
Q4 Lord Laming: That is most interesting. Thank you very much. If we had a Minister from the DfE here, I think they would explain that they have a section for schools, a section for higher education, a section for children in care, and they bring all these things together and work most closely with other departments in government. What I find very difficult to reconcile with that is that you, as experts in your field, do not feel as if you ever get the full picture of what is actually happening. Could you help us reconcile those things, please?
Jessica Ford: I think it is probably simply that they would like that to be the case, but, in reality, education overshadows children’s social care by some distance. It is pretty frustrating for us in the sector a lot of the time, because it avoids the reality of the impact of what goes on beyond the school gates on attainment. Children’s social care is critical to attainment. We recently did some research at Action for Children looking at the impact that contact with children’s social care has on GCSE attainment—not entering the care system, but at any point having a referral to children’s social care—and it is significant.
There is probably little public awareness of the fact that children’s social care sits in the Department for Education, and we are constantly battling that. We try to make that case quite often, particularly because none of these charities works on education, so we are always trying to make the case that children’s social care needs to be part of that picture. The new school attendance agenda could be quite helpful for that, but we are not quite there yet.
Q5 Lord Shipley: I would like to address the issue of regional care co-operatives, if I may. I think somebody said earlier that there is likely to be some kind of announcement about that next month. I think you also said that things are going too slowly, that there are not enough and so on, and that things should be speeded up.
The Minister, David Johnston, said this about applications opening in July for local authorities to set up regional care co-operatives: that they are ‘part of our commitment to establish pathfinders and support local areas to provide enough stable and loving homes for children in the right place at the right time’. Can Regional Care Cooperatives deliver the right number of stable and loving homes for children in the right place at the right time, or, given the slowness of the pathfinder approach, is there some other kind of commissioning or way of doing this better?
Abigail Gill: We know that local government itself has expressed quite a few concerns about Regional Care Cooperatives. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services set out an alternative model. Apologies, I am not across the detail of that, but they were clearly not happy with the proposed model and they highlighted a different approach.
In terms of providing the right care in the right place, there are some risks to creating regionalised commissioning, which depend on things like the size of the region. We have heard concerns about large regions where you might have urban areas and rural areas, and children could still be placed a considerable distance from their home town because the region is quite big. Again, that does not necessarily get away from the risks of placing children far from their home, their support networks and the places they are familiar with—their schools, their nurseries. So there remain concerns.
From the NSPCC’s perspective, we would want to lean quite heavily on what local government is saying about that, and its concerns and its ability to deliver and to draw on that expertise.
Lynn Perry: I think we are agreed that there needs to be reform to the commissioning. We know the high costs of children’s residential care. We know that children are often out of area and that placements do not always meet the complexity of presenting needs for children and young people. We know that spending on residential care has increased by almost two-thirds since 2010, so the case for doing something differently is clear.
The regional care co-operatives were put forward as the answer to fixing that problem. As has been noted, the expressions of interest for local authorities that want to take part in that pathfinder have gone out, and the approach will be tested in a couple of areas.
We have a number of concerns about those proposals. The first is the fragmentation of the care system. I have just talked about the need for joined-up, cross-departmental working in government, and that translates into agencies at a local level. There is the potential risk of fragmenting the care system by splitting those decisions in respect of the commissioning of placements from other services that children need to benefit from in the areas in which they receive care. We are concerned about the potential for that to become a hindrance to joined-up planning.
Sufficiency has been an issue in this space, and smaller providers may well exit this work in the context of regional care co-operatives. We also know, because we in Barnardo’s work in partnership with a lot of other organisations, that those small providers often have strong relationships with local authorities. They understand the areas and the population of children and young people in those areas, and they are often very well placed to have a richer sense of how best to meet need, but they do not necessarily have the corresponding capacity to cover those larger geographical areas, and the system may become more reliant on a smaller number of bigger providers.
There is perhaps an opportunity to further review the evidence on the regionalisation of adoption, which was a forerunner. Our experience, as an organisation that provides fostering and adoption services, is that separating adoption from other elements of children’s services has siloed adoption somewhat, and, ultimately, we have not seen an increase in numbers of children being placed, or indeed a retraction of waiting times.
So to your question about alternatives, I do not have the solution, but supporting local authorities to enable more effective commissioning is one thing that we could explore. More capital funding is often a barrier. Lack of access to upfront funding makes it difficult for charities or smaller providers of services to bid for those contracts, so more capital funding might enable more diversity within the framework, and greater support to help local authorities commission children’s social care services more broadly would ensure that we have consistency of approach and opportunities to share learning and to work to some consistent standards.
All that needs investment in a whole range of services, because the complexity of need that presents with many children and young people means that we also need to build provision in other services that wrap around those children and those families.
Jessica Ford: I agree with most of what has been said. On the question about alternative models, Abi mentioned the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. In the model that it suggested, areas would have some discretion as to which responsibilities sit at regional, sub-regional or local authority level according to the supply and demand issues they are seeing in the placement market within that government region. In the examples it gave, you would still retain corporate parenting responsibilities at local authority level, so that you do not end up with a disconnect where the corporate parenting responsibility goes to the regional body. They would still also be responsible for making the placement decision, which seems very sensible to me, given that it is the social workers who know the children and who then make the placement decision.
At the sub-regional level, you would have a lot of work on fostering recruitment and retention campaigns, and the commissioning of supported accommodation. The argument there is largely about the very high intake of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in lots of government areas. Lots of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are going into supported accommodation settings, so it would make sense if, at a sub-regional level, you could look across that part of the region to understand what those children need. At the regional level, you would have strategic oversight of all the supply and demand issues.
Having that discretion is much more palatable for local authorities as things stand. Ultimately, to have a workable commissioning arrangement, you need to take local authorities with you. ADCS is a critical voice in this and needs to be listened to.
More broadly, there is a lot of focus at the moment on what the model is and less on supporting local authorities with the conditions they are operating in. Some commitments in the Stable Homes strategy, which sits below the RCC proposal, are critical, and I am not sure that it is clear what progress has been made on them. I am thinking specifically about a commitment to national support for forecasting and procurement, and the financial oversight regime. There was a proposal for a voluntary regime that would shift towards a statutory one. Finally, as Lynn mentioned, there is capital funding. We had, I think, £260 million in the last spending review, which is now fully allocated, as I understand it. Off the top of my head, £80 million went to children’s homes, and the rest will go to the secure estate. It is not clear whether any other capital funding will become available outside of the regional care co-operative pathfinders, where a small amount is being made available through those.
Q6 Lord Shipley: On the issue of supply and demand, which clearly this is, I am not clear who is responsible for forecasting demand. Mission 2 of the strategy committed to delivering national support with forecasting the number of required care placements. This was going to be delivered to local authorities within 18 months, but then government said, ‘Initially, we’ll commission an external organisation to deliver the support, and over time the function could be’—not will be—'subsumed into the RCCs’. Who do you think should be responsible for forecasting demand?
Jessica Ford: It is local authorities at the moment. There are quite specialist skills involved in forecasting demand, and the LGA has been quite vocal about the loss of those skills in lots of local authorities. With the underfunding of children’s services, they have lost a lot of statisticians. We have seen a bit of an expertise drain of those skills, and there is recognition now from DfE that we need to re-inject the expertise, but its plan at the moment is for this to happen at the regional level.
That makes sense to me, in part because if you put all the data from all the local authority sufficiency strategies up at the regional level, you can look across and build a much better picture of where the gaps are and where you potentially have an excess supply of certain types of placements. It is all about working out exactly what type of placements you need to meet what needs at what point in time, and it is difficult for local authorities to do that when acting alone.
Q7 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: First, thank you very much for coming. I am finding it all very depressing, because as a Committee we felt we were on the way to making major changes to social care and the way we care for looked-after children, et cetera. One thing that we were concerned about, but were not against, was the idea of pathfinders being the route to success in a broader sense.
Could you tell me, please—I have not been able to find this, and I have been to my local authority to see whether it could answer the question—what are the criteria for success with the pathfinders? You cannot scale up what is happening with those unless you have a clear idea as to what success is and how it can be transferred elsewhere. What are the criteria for success, and have they been implemented with all pathfinders?
Lynn Perry: I cannot provide you today with details of the criteria for success. To the point that was raised earlier, the first three pathfinders have just been identified, and a further two are due for announcement in the new year. The question is very salient, given that absolute clarity about the measures of success will be really important for enabling us to understand what works for which children and families in which circumstances. The only way in which we will be able to extrapolate out from there is through that evidence base, but it takes time to establish evaluative evidence from pathfinder work. We have had quite a lot of reviews in recent times, and there is some evidence already of what works for children and families. Therefore, we should have an established blueprint and be measuring the right things in the right way.
Abigail Gill: I completely agree with Lynn. In terms of criteria for success, we know that there will be an evaluation of those pathfinders, which has been commissioned out by the department. I believe that the evaluation contract is due to run for four to five years, which is quite a long time. There are concerns about when we will start getting some evidence from the evaluation so that we can reflect on the implications for what can be rolled out. We obviously cannot wait four to five years for that evaluative information to come out.
The other point I would make that speaks to Lord Shipley’s question earlier is about the data we have about the children who interact with children’s social care. Stable Homes, Built on Love talked quite a lot about potentially implementing the consistent child identifier, ensuring that we can have join-up across all agencies at the local level and get a full picture of the needs of children who are interacting with this system. A report that was due to go to Parliament this summer supposed to reflect on whether a legislative commitment should be made to the CCI as part of the Health and Care Act 2022. That has now dropped off the radar. Essentially, we do not know the Government’s position on the consistent child identifier and whether they intend to roll it out, and, if they do, the logistics of doing that.
All that aside, it is essential that we join up data at the local level across agencies. This issue pre-dates the care review. We have talked about it in many reviews of children’s social care over the years, and we still have not cracked that conundrum, so it has to be a priority of this Government to get data sorted.
Q8 Lord Porter of Spalding: Without putting words into your mouths, would it be fair to say that you are sceptical that pathfinder pilots—or whatever we decide to call the thing that puts it into the long grass for another few years—are a way of not doing much of substance and of making it look like they are interested? This not a party political point, because we have lived through this with every Government we have ever had in this country. When somebody thinks that something is wrong but we are not sure how to fix it, we will do a pilot or a pathfinder, it will take a long time to evaluate what it does, and, no matter whether it was good or bad, we will not take any lessons from it and roll those out anyway. Are we in that space again, or is this really complicated and so will take five years to evaluate whether something is any good or not?
Abigail Gill: As Lynn indicated, there is a strong evidence base for a lot of the interventions that are being proposed. What is very difficult for us is the transparency about what pathfinders will actually do and deliver. Without knowing that, it is very difficult for us to know that there is a clear evidence base, and we just need to crack on and deliver it.
There is also the fact that the care review called for a double running of the system. We completely understand that there will probably be some interventions which require further evaluation, and that the way interventions are arranged and organised needs to be trialled through pathfinders, but the question is also how we shore up the existing system. For all the local authorities that are not pathfinders, which is the majority, it is business as usual, and they are continuing to struggle and we are continuing to fail children. The elephant in the room is the general election, and we have real concerns about the implications of that for the reform programme and whether it will lead to further delay.
The Chair: Going back to Lord Willis’s point, if you do not even have the objectives and the criteria for success of the pathfinders, you cannot feel very optimistic, can you?
Jessica Ford: As the others said, we have not seen the criteria, but I can make a good guess at what they might be, based on what the reform is proposing, and I am happy to do now if we have time. If the regional care co-operative model is functioning and effective, we would expect to see more children going into the right placement that meet their needs; that it is as close to their community as possible; that there is less time waiting for the right placement to become available; that there are fewer placement moves, partly because there is less waiting and because they have gone into the right placement in the first place; and reduced costs to local authorities for the placements. That is certainly what I think the pathfinder is trying to achieve.
On the Family Help model, there is a big focus on the idea of ensuring that services are co-developed with the community and that there is a very thorough assessment of community needs. As a consequence, the services you would see as part of each family help model would be slightly different in each area. You would see quicker assessment done by the right practitioner who has the specialism in the need that the family is presenting with, and quicker access to support provided by the right practitioner. You would then have more children remaining with their families and not entering care. That is what I assume we are driving at.
The Chair: I am sure that is right. There might be some shorter-term measurements to help you get there, but you have to feel as though you are going where you want to go eventually, I agree.
Q9 Lord Bach: Good afternoon. I have a couple of questions about the strategy itself. As professionals, how do you feel it is aligning with other relevant government strategies? That is a general question. The more detailed questions are: how well does the strategy serve young disabled people who are in the care system, and, if you have time, how does it serve children who are in residential care?
Abigail Gill: It does not align particularly well with other relevant strategies, because there is no overarching co-ordination. The Committee’s report identified this problem a few months ago. We need leadership at prime ministerial level. It needs to be centralised and it needs to be co-ordinated. The strategy references outwards to things that are being done elsewhere by other departments, but they do not speak to each other in conversation. There is stuff going on family hubs and things going on to bring the issue of the Supporting Families programme into the Department for Education, but there is no overarching vision. It speaks to our earlier point about cross-departmental join-up.
That also applies at the local level. We have had the Working Together guidance refresh, which is an opportunity to improve joint working at the local level. It remains to be seen what that will look like. The Government are due to publish the refreshed guidance in December, so we will wait and see. Children’s social care is still seen as a priority for the local authority and for DfE to deliver, but I do not get the sense that other agencies and other departments see it as their responsibility. Children across the board need to be seen as a priority and to be considered in the policy-making of all government departments. For that to happen effectively, we need leadership at the very heart of government.
The Chair: Presumably, that is reflected at local authority level as well in terms of which key people take this seriously.
Abigail Gill: Absolutely. It is helpful that the department is now looking at the role of education. For us, that is fundamental—there will be a consultation in the new year—not least because Education is most likely to see children day in, day out. That is the agency most likely to identify risks and refer into children’s social care. Currently, it is not a statutory safeguarding partner, but the argument has been won in terms of the fact that it should be. The department is now working through the logistics of that, which is really positive.
Lynn Perry: We learned a lot on that last point during the pandemic, when children were absent for periods of time from school and were not being referred to services, including for children who are not in receipt of statutory services, and the degree of unmet need.
I agree that there is a need for greater join-up with other strategies, including strategies relating to health, housing and criminal justice. We need to ensure there is understanding and expertise on working with vulnerable children with multiple and complex vulnerabilities and with families that is spread across government departments.
There have been a number of reviews aimed at improving our responses, and they are often with the same children, young people and families in scope—The Best Start for Life: A Vision for the 1001 Critical Days; the SEND Review: Right Support, Right Place, Right Time; and the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, to cite a few examples. The insight and scrutiny into all those areas and the recommendations for change are very much welcomed, but there are opportunities to join those things up and to integrate those aims, aspirations and plans across all areas of what we would call the children’s health education and social care system.
Longer term, we have referenced here that we think we need a cross-government strategy. That is why the commitment to extend corporate parenting principles to a greater range of public bodies would be key to effective implementation, but we are still awaiting proposals on what that might look like.
The role of the private sector is an important consideration in this—for example, helping to ensure that young people who grow up in care are not subsequently restricted in accessing employment, bank accounts, or any other services as a result of their care experience or status. We have recently been working with the Bank of England to improve access to financial education for young people who are care experienced. The care leaver covenant has been an important first step in achieving better recognition for this particular group across public, private and voluntary sectors, but implementation and reform need to build further on this progress.
There were a couple of specific questions about young disabled children. I am not confident that the current system for supporting disabled children considers the changing needs of children as they grow or takes account of care for this group in the way in which that crosses both health and social care disciplines. Some further consideration of what good-quality, integrated support—whole-system approach and consideration—looks like would be welcomed, because those children are cared for in the context of a multidisciplinary, multiskilled workforce across care, health and other partnerships. Also key to that, of course, is partnership with parents and carers for those children.
So there are some barriers that hamper the establishment of that multidisciplinary approach, and there is an opportunity for review in thinking about implementation of the reforms.
Q10 Baroness Bertin: Thinking about the strategies across government, as you will be aware, children are now victims in their own right; that was part of the Domestic Abuse Act. I wondered whether that was playing out in practice, whether that had changed anything, or whether it was just a line in a piece of legislation that has not made much difference.
Lynn Perry: This is anecdotal from the charity perspective, but we are seeing the commissioning of more specialist services that recognise the impact on children. There has been a shift in both recognition and response. We provide some services for children who are affected by domestic abuse in the context of a wider family support approach. Another area where there is potential here is thinking about the Victims and Prisoners Bill and recognising children as victims in the context of exploitative abuse. The provision of specific and specialist services for that group of children would also be of significant benefit.
Jessica Ford: On the strategies point, Stable Homes does quite a good job of referencing the strategy. Somebody has gone through it and thought, ‘Okay, we need to mention this there’. Whether that join up is there at the strategic level is a different question.
It is also useful to think outside of just strategies and think about whether there are different government workstreams pulling in different directions. A very extreme case is what the Illegal Migration Act is doing for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and whether that is undermining what Stable Homes is trying to do for them.
Better involvement of the voices of children, young people and families could really help the Government to improve integrated working, because it would really help them to see that humans and families are very complex. Needs are different in different families. Even within one family, one set of needs ebbs and flows over time; it is dynamic. So the support they need at one point in time will evolve and change and might become the responsibility of a different government workstream. At the moment, without doing that well, we go back to having everybody in boxes, and to the point about education and social care and the lack of synergy there.
Abigail Gill: We are in a holding pattern regarding disabled children and young people. We are still waiting for the Government’s response on the Hesley review and how they will take forward the recommendations there. We also have the Law Commission review, which is reviewing all the legislation for disabled children and young people, some which is 50 years old. The pathfinders and family help work will be critical to that, given that it will encapsulate Section 17 of the Children Act on children in need, many of whom may be disabled children and young people.
The Council for Disabled Children has been talking quite a lot about having a proportionate response for those children and families, not necessarily a child protection response, but what the response that those children and families need looks like and how we provide that response in a way that does not feel stigmatising or like a child protection response rather than a family help response. That is a key message for us.
Q11 Lord Prentis of Leeds: You have already touched on many parts of my question, which is about how far the strategy addresses the wider contextual environmental issues around young people who are in contact with the social care system.
Abigail Gill: We do not think it is particularly strong on recognising the contextual factors. Just to pull out one example, the care review was quite good at acknowledging the impact of poverty. We have an increasingly growing body of evidence that shows the impact poverty has on families and how that can overload them. There is a link between poverty and child abuse and neglect, not in a way that should be stigmatising families, but a recognition that economic structural factors increase pressure on families and exacerbate the barriers that may prevent them accessing help and support. If you Ctrl + F the strategy, there is not one mention of poverty. Particularly in the context of a cost-of-living crisis, it is remiss to acknowledge that economic structural impact on families.
We call for a poverty-aware system. Some academics have described poverty as the wallpaper of practice; it is absolutely everywhere now in families who social workers are supporting, to the point that they feel powerless and do not know how to tackle it. We need a strategy that is poverty-aware and provides social workers with the tools and guidance they need to be able to adequately support a family who is living in really challenging economic circumstances, and a recognition that that is playing a role in their ability to parent a child, despite their best efforts. Many parents are going above and beyond and are going without themselves so that they can provide for their children. When a system does not acknowledge that, that is very problematic and makes social workers’ jobs much more difficult.
Lynn Perry: I could not agree more on the point about poverty. We recently published a report called No Crib for a Bed. We surveyed 1,000 parents and carers and 1,000 children and young people between the ages of eight and 17, and found that one in 20 children and young people were sharing a bed or sleeping on the floor as a result of poverty. Families who are just about managing to provide the essentials are not able to provide for things like new mattresses if they are living in damp conditions and mattresses have become unsuitable or bed bases have broken. There is just not enough money. For a lot of the children and families who Barnardo’s is working with currently, the money is running out before the month does. At the same time as resources are diminishing, that is increasing demand on services.
There are other issues of concern such as groups in children in care, particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds or those with more complex needs, who may be particularly disadvantaged in the system. We know statistically about the overrepresentation of black children and young people in the care system. Seven per cent of the looked-after children’s population was black compared with 5% of the general population. Some recent research that we done has demonstrated that outcomes for this group are often particularly poor; nearly one in 10 black children in care have served a custodial sentence by the time they are 18, compared with 5% of white children in care.
We recently published another report called Double Discrimination, which drew on the lived experiences as expressed by children and young people who face discrimination, both on the grounds of their ethnic background and as a result of being in care. There is insufficient recognition of those issues, and there are no specific proposals aimed at improving outcomes for this group, so there are groups of children who are particularly disadvantaged whose needs need to be addressed by proposals that are focused and targeted at achieving change. Similarly, the plans to implement a national fostering campaign could include specific measures that might increase the numbers of high-quality carers in the UK who understand the needs of black children in the care system, so there are things that could be built in by design that would address those wider contextual factors.
I will not repeat what has already been said by my colleague, but there are also concerns about whether there is sufficient focus on addressing the challenges facing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the UK. There is a very high level of vulnerability among those children, many of whom have been living in unsuitable accommodation. The implementation plan could effectively address how to develop both short- and long-term plans to ensure that there is an adequately funded system that supports unaccompanied asylum-seeking children’s placements in social care, particularly specialist fostering provision.
Jessica Ford: The strategy does say something on this; it is not completely ignored. It emphasises the importance of poverty-aware and anti-discriminatory practice, and exploring ways to improve on current practice has been made a requirement of the family help pathfinders. So it is definitely not silent on the subject, and there are things in it on adjusting the inspection regime to take account of assessing whether local authorities are delivering on that adjusted practice.
For me, there are some things missing. There is something missing on how local authorities will be supported to do that and how they will be helped to understand the evidence base for delivering that type of practice and building capacity in local authorities for that to happen. That goes back to what we have said about them being underfunded and overburdened. There is the big issue here, across the whole strategy, of weak capacity for change in a lot of local authorities.
More specifically, there is definitely not enough on poverty in the context of kinship. The care charity Kinship shared an alarming statistic with me ahead of this session. Seventy-six per cent of children in kinship arrangements are living in deprived households. We do not yet have a commitment to providing the financial allowance for kinship carers on the same level as foster carers, despite the overrepresentation of older people, the unemployed and the underemployed among kinship carers.
There are acute problems of poverty among care leavers. We would really like to see an exemption from the under-25s rate in Universal Credit – for care leavers under 25 living independently to be entitled to the over-25s rate.
Lynn Perry: A young person spoke to me recently about the difficulties for young people in care, such as the lower rate of universal credit, which Jessica mentioned, and not being able to get a deposit for a house or a guarantor in order to get suitable accommodation; we have a report on this called No Bank of Mum and Dad. That is a really good example of where the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions could think about what an integrated plan to address those particular issues would look like.
Q12 The Chair: I do not know whether I am trying to finish the meeting on a positive note. It depends on what you say. After all these documents we have seen about the future progress in this area, how much more optimistic are you now than before the review started?
Jessica Ford: The officials are working really hard, and we see evidence of that every day, so I generally feel positive about that. The political will, the agenda, the overshadowing of the education agenda and all those issues are what is missing.
Lynn Perry: Inevitably, because we focused on some quite specific areas today, a perspective may have been gained.
The Chair: Yes, but we asked you to focus on specific areas.
Lynn Perry: I genuinely feel that there is a lot of hard work, effort and endeavour, and an opportunity here for real change that many people want to seize. We should not look at the recommendations in the review in isolation of some really good work done across agencies and organisations in our communities across the UK.
Abigail Gill: I very much agree with my colleagues here. The strategy sets out an ambitious vision, which, if realised, will make a real difference to children and families, but it is not done until it is done, and we feel a very long way away from that. All we can hope is that the Government can speed up reform and we will not have to wait four or five years to see the national rollout of what could be a brilliant programme.
The Chair: That is very helpful, because Governments need pushes and expert advice, and advice from people who are experienced at the delivery point of the system, so all that makes sense. We are very grateful to you. As I explained, this is just a one-session inquiry, because it is picking up on work that we have done in the past. As a Committee, we are very keen to revisit the reports that we have done so that we can play our part in pushing the policy along. We will do so in due course; we have not decided when. Meanwhile, thank you so much. You have very busy jobs, but you bring a lot of expertise to our discussions, and we are very grateful for your time.
