10
Examination of witness
Andrew Reece.
Q70 Chair: Welcome back to this afternoon’s session of the Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry on the human rights of children in social care. We have heard from Yvette Stanley of Ofsted, and we are now going to hear from Mr Andrew Reece, who is the strategic lead for Wales and England at the British Association of Social Workers. Before joining the BASW, Andrew qualified as a social worker in 1996 after spending 10 years working in children’s homes in England.
Mr Reece, let me set the ball rolling by asking you to what extent social workers working with children in social care are required to take human rights into account in carrying out their role? After you have answered that question, I am going to turn to my colleague Sir Desmond Swayne.
Andrew Reece: Thank you for inviting me. It is worth explaining that the evidence I am giving today is based on what our members are telling us. We have 22,000 social worker members across the UK, which is about a fifth of the total number of social workers in the UK. To put this into context, it is worth noting that none of the social work education frameworks, which are devised by the four social work regulators in the UK, specifically mentions human rights; the only one that does is our own professional capabilities framework. The Department for Education recently published early career standards for child and family social workers; that does not mention human rights. Yesterday, I looked at Ofsted’s ILACS—inspecting local authority children’s services—framework; human rights are mentioned twice. First, in paragraph 156, it says that human rights should be considered; secondly, in paragraph 312, it asks whether an unlawful placement breaches someone’s human rights. It is also worth reflecting that the Children Act predates the Human Rights Act, so it was not drafted from a rights-informed perspective.
Within our association, we query whether the Children Act and age-based legislation is inherently discriminatory and inherently breaches people’s rights. We regularly come across young people who go into crisis because at 18 they are forced to move from a successful children’s home placement into an adult placement simply because the regime states that you cannot stay in a children’s placement as an adult. That creates chaos and the placement often breaks down. There are good reasons why you would not want very old adults mixing with children, but there is an assumption that age is chronological alone; we think it is really detrimental to young people that their level of maturity is not also taken into account.
We would encourage the committee to think about what could be done across the system for a more maturity-based provision, where we can say to a child when they are 18, “You can stay here for another six months, another year, two years because this placement, this provision, suits your needs”, rather than forcing that move. Similarly for adult social care legislation, sometimes a provision that is suitable for adults might be the right provision for a young person who is 17 and a half, for example.
Chair: That point about maturity is an interesting one, and it is certainly worth consideration by the committee. It would be helpful if you could write to us with anecdotal examples; if you have an estimate of the numbers that might be involved that would also be useful, although I realise that may be more difficult.
Andrew Reece: There is a useful phrase that applies particularly to disabled young people: the transition cliff edge. Parents would be able to give you strong examples of how their children and young people have been forced to move provision. It is not always about residential care, they might be forced to stop attending a play provision or stop using short breaks for disabled young people.
Chair: Some examples would be very helpful for the purpose of our report.
Q71 Sir Desmond Swayne: To what extent are there concerns about human rights in children’s care homes? Are there specific human rights concerns with respect to child asylum seekers?
Andrew Reece: Our main human rights concern in children’s care homes is the placement of children a long way from home. That is a particular issue for us. You have also touched on unregulated care homes; we would see unregulated care homes as a symptom rather than the cause of a failing system. They have come into being because there are not enough placements; the demand for placements is going up because preventative types of support that need to be in place are not there.
Our members would say that one of the really important solutions, or part of the solution, is making sure that every local authority has its own managed children’s care homes so that, particularly when there is an emergency, they can place somebody for a short period of time. That allows breathing space to review what is going on rather than having to make an immediate placement often a long way from home. Placing a young person a long way from home often exacerbates the situation; rather than solving the crisis, it makes it worse.
Provision of good-quality local provision and local residential care, managed by the local authority, is vital so that you do not get the provider saying, “Yes, you can have a placement but it is going to cost you £6,000 a week”. It means you already have a response to prevent that deterioration that often happens from the point at which you remove a child from their local environment.
Q72 Lord Sewell of Sanderstead: The Children’s Commissioner has looked into the criminalisation of children in care and found a significant overrepresentation of children in care in the criminal justice system. What do you believe are the underlying reasons, and how do we tackle this issue?
Andrew Reece: The experience of our members is that being removed from your family and your home and being placed in care is traumatising in itself. We then need to consider the trauma that has already been experienced by these children; they are coming into care because of adverse childhood events that produce lifelong trauma. Our failure to address this trauma often leads to risky and self-destructive behaviours. Because these children are traumatised in crisis they feel unsafe, they do not trust adults, and they move in potentially unsafe circles: they get drawn into gangs, they get drawn into grooming, et cetera. There is an inability to provide a preventative service in the first place, or to consider the young people’s needs from that trauma-informed perspective. The NHS has a really important part to play in making sure that the mental health support that young people in the care system particularly need is readily available and easy to access, and that it supports young people to deal with their trauma and consider their behaviours.
Lord Sewell of Sanderstead: There is this whole idea of the socialisation of crime; in other words, children preying on other children. Do you see that a lot? It is a probably a hard one for you to answer.
Andrew Reece: We know that, within children’s homes, there are children who will victimise or encourage each other or be part of a system that is grooming other young people. We should be making sure that we have enough provision of foster care and that we support kinship care appropriately so that children do not have to go into systems that expose them to these risks; that is very much part of the solution.
You are absolutely right that this happens more with young people who are being othered by the system, such as people from minority backgrounds and unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
Q73 Afzal Khan: Last December, the Law Commission provided oral evidence to us and shared its recommendations for changes to the disabled children’s social care legal framework. Are there particular concerns you share with the Law Commission in this field, and any recommendations you support or disagree with?
Andrew Reece: We were very pleased to be extensively involved with the Law Commission in helping pull those recommendations together. We are broadly supportive of all its recommendations, and we would clearly want to be involved in how those recommendations are taken forward by the Department for Education. We particularly support the recommendation to keep the social care law for disabled children under the Children Act and under Section 17 because we want the child to be seen as a whole child and not just a disabled child. We made quite a few recommendations in terms of how to make the system work better. You will know about the SEND review; social care is only one part of a three-part system, which includes education and health. All three parts are needed in order to offer appropriate support to disabled children. The co-ordination of that system needs to be better, and resourcing across the system needs to be better; many of the gaps in provision happen because the resources are not there or cannot be afforded.
The rights of parents within this system are often neglected. Parents are having to give up work in order to care for disabled children, which ends up with families going into poverty. Should parents of disabled children have a right to work and to continue in employment?
Another strong recommendation for us is about training and development for all the professionals working in that system. Supporting disabled children is a very specialist role, and the complexity of having to work within that tripartite system makes it much more challenging; specialist skills are required in order to co-ordinate and make sure all those parts of the system work effectively together.
We are very supportive of the move to a national eligibility criteria but, picking up on your discussion earlier, we think that criteria has to be based on need and not diagnosis. One of the biggest problems with the current system is that it is too dependent on diagnosis. You can wait years for your diagnosis and then you get support; our view is that the system should allow you to get support while waiting for diagnosis. A social work assessment does not depend on diagnosis; it looks at the needs someone has. Do they need support with X, Y or Z? You can do that without knowing the diagnosis. If you suspect a child is autistic and is likely to have that diagnosis in two years, what is stopping you from putting the support in right away?
Chair: Thank you, that is very helpful. It adds to what was said to us in the previous session but again, anecdotally, if you were able to give us examples in writing in due course, that would help us make the case for uniformity and to highlight the discrepancies that exist in this postcode lottery. Diagnostics themselves can be very erratic in some parts of the country compared with others, even though they should not be the criteria; the more we can highlight that, the more helpful it would be.
Andrew Reece: Diagnosis can help us fine-tune the type of support we offer, but it should not be the gateway to support.
Q74 Alex Sobel: A theme that has come through in this inquiry is the adultification of looked-after children, particularly in institutional settings. What human rights issues do you think adultification could give rise to? Do you feel that looked-after children, particularly in institutional settings, are treated more like adults? Obviously, children in the social care system are under the care of their local authority until they are 25; do you feel there is an advancing of adulthood for those children?
Andrew Reece: For us, adultification is about the othering of young people: the view that they are not like us, they are not like our children, they are manipulative, and they are exploiting or playing the system. These negative stereotypes can be placed on lots of different parts of the system for children in care, but also unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. There is a prejudiced view that young men coming from other parts of the world are only here to exploit our system and that we desperately need to prove they are 18, rather than think of them as young people who have been significantly traumatised and need our support to settle down and fit in locally and find the support mechanisms they need.
If you adultify a young person, expecting them to behave like an adult and not putting support in place, that risks a negative spiral. They are more likely to go into crisis, they are more likely to go down negative pathways rather than be supported to live more positive and fulfilling lives. That societal attitude is sometimes played out within social care systems, but particularly within criminal justice systems, as we have seen in issues with grooming gangs et cetera.
Chair: That is an issue the committee has looked at previously, and you will not be surprised that we came to many of those same conclusions.
Q75 Lord Rook: Andrew, earlier on this week I had a meeting with colleagues and heard about the brilliant work that the YMCA is doing with care leavers. It was very exciting to see how it was helping care leavers to springboard into adulthood and to think about how they could flourish and thrive in the future.
What is the statutory support that is available to young people at this point? Clearly it could be a very exciting stage of development, but it is also open to vulnerability and exploitation. What support will young people get in that post-18 phase in terms of their development and growth?
Andrew Reece: Local authorities provide a leaving care offer but, in common with a lot of other organisations, we would like to see care leaver becoming a protected characteristic. That would have some practical implications in requiring the public sector system as a whole to consider what reasonable adjustments need to be made for these young people.
Local authorities have a really important part to play in the development of leaving care offers, and that will be expanded through the upcoming Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which we really support. However, there is also access to the way the police and criminal justice system deal with care leavers, and access to education. How can we support more young people to get to university through making reasonable adjustments to the access criteria? How can we make sure young people are housed appropriately and have access to employment and jobs through using that protected characteristic? It is about making sure reasonable adjustments are made to enable care-experienced young people to access those systems in a way that many of their peers already can without additional support. Often these young people have additional needs, not only because of the trauma they have lived through but because there has been disruption to their education that means they are less likely to get into university or higher education without additional support. It is really important that they find the jobs they need in order to have successful lives.
On top of that, they also need the emotional support we all give our children when they leave home: they can come home if they are at university, they have someone to go and talk to, if there is a crisis they have someone to borrow a bit of money from, et cetera. Those other systems are really important to ensure care leavers have successful future lives.
Lord Rook: In your experience, are young people at that stage aware of their rights or is there more work to be done? Likewise, are there particular human rights breaches or risks that concern you?
Andrew Reece: Young people are aware of their rights but they do not know how to enforce them. You touched on the complaint system earlier. One of the things our members tell us, including parents of disabled children and parents of children in the care system—experts by experience as we call them—is that the complaint systems do not work; they are toothless. If you make a complaint, how is it enforced? There are various different reasons for that. Local authorities used to be motivated by what would be in the local press; there would be a complaint about the local authority and the local press would say, “They failed this young person”.
The local press does not exist any more so that accountability for local authorities is gone. The Local Government Ombudsman can make a judgment against them, but it has no teeth to enforce it. Parents, particularly the parents of disabled children, are telling us that the ombudsman has said, “This must happen”, and it is still not happening.
Chair: Thank you. We are very interested in the points that Lord Rook has just made and your answer about complaints and the inadequacy of the system. When you come to write to us, if you could give us some anecdotal examples of people who have been passed from pillar to post and the toothlessness of the local government procedures, that would be helpful. The point you just made about the absence of local newspapers now and the difference that makes is also worth making.
Andrew Reece: Are you able to send me a list of these things you would like me to follow up?
Chair: We will make sure you get a list. Baroness Hamwee has a question for you.
Q76 Baroness Hamwee: You have just been talking about protected characteristics, which is part of English law. But with regard to international law, if the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was incorporated into English law, how would it affect the protection of children and young people’s human rights in the social care system?
Andrew Reece: Incorporating that into the law would be a really positive step for our members. It would articulate children’s rights more fully; it would be more likely to ensure that their participation, protection and development becomes enforceable rather than just aspirational. But there are other requirements that sit behind that. Without an effective complaints system, it is still aspirational and unenforceable. We think it is a really positive step, but it has to be a part of an overhaul of systems. We particularly want to see a much greater focus on human rights in social work education; we want to see a greater focus on human rights in social care inspection and statutory guidance around social work. If you were to ask how many social workers have specifically had training on human rights and how they should be implementing or ensuring human rights in their practice, it would be a very low proportion. I suspect the number of local authorities whose systems and procedure manuals reference human rights and give clear guidance on how those human rights are implemented is very low.
We would also suggest that local authority governance needs to have a much more explicit focus on human rights. We would like to see someone at director level who is reporting on human rights, and a cabinet member within local authorities who is reporting on and holding their offices to account on how well they are supporting young people generally to achieve their human rights.
Baroness Hamwee: That is quite a menu.
Chair: It is quite a menu but a very good answer to a very good question. Thank you for that, Mr Reece. We are going to have a supplementary note from Mr Sobel and then we are going to turn to the issue of kinship caring. My colleague Dr Peter Swallow has been pursuing this issue throughout our inquiry and I know he wants to ask you about that.
Alex Sobel: Andrew, it was very interesting that you talked about the need for accountability and an executive member to look at human rights in this context. When we went to York that best practice certainly existed there, but maybe not more widely.
Baroness Hamwee mentioned protected characteristics. When we went to Leeds as part of our visit, we met two young women with lived experience of the care system who were very strong in their beliefs that being care- experienced should be a protected characteristic; it was in fact immutable to them because it was their lived experience. From a social work point of view, do you think having care experience as a protected characteristic would be helpful?
Andrew Reece: Yes, absolutely we do; I thought I had partly answered that. Before moving to BASW I worked in a council that had made care experience a protected characteristic within its local context. It started to make a difference, particularly in access to housing, support to get into employment and education, and culturally just in the fact that the cabinet and politicians locally had taken that decision and shown that it was important to them and important in their system. It sent a really strong message.
Alex Sobel: Which local authority was that?
Andrew Reece: Camden.
Chair: Thank you very much. Now let us go to Dr Peter Swallow and then we are going to hear from Lord Murray, who is going to ask the ultimate question of the proceedings about recommendations.
Lord Murray of Blidworth: It is ultimate in the sense that it is final.
Q77 Peter Swallow: I want to ask about kinship care; I am sure you are familiar with the fact that it is often the forgotten part of the social care system. Are there any human rights concerns that arise from the current situation we have with kinship care, both formal and informal?
Andrew Reece: Before answering that question, I want to go off on a slight tangent and think about the role that poverty plays in children’s social care, and the very strong evidence that poverty creates crisis within families. It is hard enough being a parent, let alone a parent in poverty; it precipitates involvement in social care that can be avoided if you are not living in poverty.
We are very supportive of the removal of the two-child benefit cap, for example, but we want to see a much clearer strategy around child poverty and how we deal with it. We think that will almost certainly take a lot of pressure from the social care system and reduce the number of families who are being forced into receiving support that they might not have needed otherwise. That issue plays out very strongly in kinship care; kinship carers are often forced into poverty. They have to give up work, there are stressors in the system, they do not get the support they might get if they were foster carers, et cetera.
There are a lot of issues that could be improved, and we are very supportive of the recently announced pilot. We assume it is a pilot because the Government cannot afford to go wider; we suspect that the pilot will show that it is a good idea and we would like to see it roll out quicker and roll out nationally. It will make a huge difference to people in kinship care, and to kinship carers, and will encourage more people to come forward to be kinship carers.
We have been talking about how traumatising it is for young people to go into care; the more kinship carers we can encourage, the more we can reduce that trauma and reduce the lifelong harm that is caused to young people by the care system. We might not mean to cause harm but that is what happens.
Peter Swallow: You are referring there to the pilot for paying kinship carers?
Andrew Reece: Yes.
Peter Swallow: I want to draw you back to this distinction between so-called formal and so-called informal kinship carers; as well as receiving less support than foster carers, there is also a discrepancy in the amount of support within kinship care.
Andrew Reece: I am not well informed on that but it does not sound good.
Peter Swallow: Fair enough; no worries.
Andrew Reece: The main point is that if we can offer appropriate support to kinship carers, we can make a massive difference to the life chances of young people. We obviously have to do safeguarding checks in terms of their appropriateness but, on the whole, we support the extra support that is going into kinship care and would like to see more.
Peter Swallow: Off the back of what you have just said—without wanting to be unfair to you on a question that I recognise is very complex—do you feel that most social workers are aware of the five different legal positions that kinship carers can be in when they are engaging with them and trying to offer them support, and the complications that can lead to?
Andrew Reece: It is not in my briefing and it is not something I am aware of. I suspect it is something we need to know more about and therefore social workers generally will struggle to articulate that differential.
Chair: We are very interested in this and if, after the meeting, you could just ask around colleagues and come back to us; we will put it on the list we will send you. We would welcome that because we want to talk about it in our report.
Andrew Reece: I can definitely come back to you on that.
Chair: Thank you. Let us have the last question from Lord Murray.
Q78 Lord Murray of Blidworth: The ultimate question is an easy one; what are the top three recommendations you want to come from the committee? Before we get there, I just want to go back to the question that Mr Sobel asked you a moment ago about maturity-based provision. We both met some excellent, very impressive, care leavers in Leeds; one of them told me that when she turned 18 and was going to university, her foster carer resigned from fostering so that she—the child in care—and her sister could carry on living with her. It was a selfless act but one that you would not expect to see, and it was a situation that would not arise if you had maturity-based provision.
With that little sideline I will now return to the ultimate question: what are your top three recommendations?
Andrew Reece: It might be four. First, we would like to see the full incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into British law.
Secondly, maturity-based provision is something that is really important but looking at that 17-18 cliff edge is a Whitehall issue. When you hear the phrase “cliff edge”, a lot of people think it is about getting to the cliff and falling off. We see it more as getting to the bottom of the cliff, looking up and thinking, “I’m expected to climb up there in just one day”. There is a gradual process of becoming an adult that we support our own children to go through; that is a really important thing that Whitehall in general needs to look at, involving the Department of Health, DfE, et cetera. How can we modify the current law, the Children Act, the Care Act, and inspection frameworks in particular? Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission are required to put age-related criteria on their provision; how do we make that more flexible so that it is based on maturity criteria?
Thirdly, we recommend a more systemic inclusion of human rights across the social work and social work care system. As I have said, it needs to be in social work education, it needs to be in statutory guidance, it needs to be in the ILACS inspection system, and in particular it needs to be in the DfE’s performance frameworks. Also, as we mentioned before, having a lead member and lead officer accountability in local authorities would be a really important step.
Finally—this is something we have not touched on—the complaint system needs to be rectified. There should be an appropriate system of advocacy to help young people, particularly those who are disabled, to achieve their rights, stand up for their rights and ensure that their voices are being heard. That lack of advocacy is a real barrier for young people.
Chair: Thank you very much. Lady Hamwee said earlier on that it was a long menu; it has been a rich one as well. On behalf of the whole committee, I would like to thank you for sharing your knowledge and for your practical outlook on many of these questions, which is informed by years of experience on the ground and working in this field. It is good that you have been able to come to Parliament today and you can see how seriously we are taking this issue. We are trying to come forward with what I hope will be not just a good report, but a report that is informed with recommendations that the Government and others can act upon. I hope you will take it back to the British Association of Social Workers and that it will feel it has been a useful contribution to the debate.
Andrew Reece: We are very pleased to have been invited and to have this chance to give evidence, so thank you all very much.
Chair: That brings to a conclusion the fourth oral evidence session in this inquiry. With those words, let me close our proceedings.
