Laws on Looked-after Children

6.52.07pm BST (GMT +0100) Fri 24th Jul 2009

• [Jul 03] David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat): ' . . THE striking conclusion of the report . . is important enough to be read into the record: "Despite the dedication and perseverance of social workers and carers, the outcomes and experiences of young people who have been 'looked after' remain poor. Far from compensating for their often extremely difficult pre-care experiences, certain features of the care system itself in fact make it harder for young people to succeed: they are moved frequently and often suddenly, miss too much schooling, and are left to fend for themselves at too early an age."

I appreciate that many hon. Members wish to contribute to the debate, so I will try not to make my comments too extended in what is nevertheless an extremely important debate.

I would like to start by congratulating the Select Committee on a thorough and thoughtful report. I also congratulate the Select Committee Chairman, Mr. Sheerman on setting out so clearly the principal issues that the Committee identified and addressed. He mentioned at the beginning of his speech that Select Committee reports are sometimes very influential and sometimes perhaps overlooked by Ministers. I hope that this will be one of the reports that Ministers take very seriously, even in the areas where the Government's own response to the report is weaker than some of us would like.

We take some cheer from the evidence of the Government's ultimate response to one of the Committee's earlier reports on testing and assessment, when the Government's initial response was overturned very rapidly in an announcement by Ministers a couple of months ago, which accepted many of the report's principal conclusions.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield rightly started his comments by indicating that it should be no surprise to us that the outcomes for this group of young children are so poor in terms of education and most of the other proxies that we would use to measure the progress and achievements of young people. It would be astonishing if those taken into care and away from their parents were not by definition some of the most vulnerable young people in society, so we should expect their out-turns to be poorer than average. (HC Deb, 2 July 2009, c522)

Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative): I am sure that the hon. Gentleman did not mean to suggest that current standards were acceptable, because they most certainly are not. I want to challenge him on what he has just said, because the Danish example and others show significant and massive improvement in outcomes, in comparison with those in this country, for children in precisely the same socially disadvantaged and difficult circumstances. Things do not have to be this way. (HC Deb, 2 July 2009, c523)

• David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat): I wonder whether I gave way to the hon. Gentleman too early; my generosity overcame me. I should have asked him to hold off for a few seconds while I made another couple of points that were highlighted by the Select Committee's report.

Although, by definition, it would be astonishing if the performance of these young people was better than the average for the rest of the population, the principal issue we need to address is whether the outcomes are good enough, and whether more could be done for them. The striking conclusion of the report, placed prominently at the beginning of the summary, is important enough to be read into the record:

"Despite the dedication and perseverance of social workers and carers, the outcomes and experiences of young people who have been 'looked after' remain poor. Far from compensating for their often extremely difficult pre-care experiences, certain features of the care system itself in fact make it harder for young people to succeed: they are moved frequently and often suddenly, miss too much schooling, and are left to fend for themselves at too early an age."

Those are the legitimate concerns that the hon. Gentleman rightly raises, and I believe that we could and should be doing far better as a country in addressing those young people's needs.

My experience as a constituency MP with this segment of the population-the 60,000 young people, a large number of whom are in care-tally very much with the report's conclusions and with the principal areas of concern that the hon. Gentleman set out in his speech a few moments ago. Those are the issues that I would like to touch on today. My concerns fall into four categories.

The first relates to judgments about when and in what circumstances young people should go into care-an issue of some controversy to which I shall return, and I expect that my hon. Friend John Hemming will want to comment on it later if he catches your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am concerned about whether we always make the right judgments about when young people should be removed from what are often very chaotic home environments and taken into care.

The second category relates to the quality of the care provided. The Select Committee has highlighted some weaknesses in our existing system and some experiences in other countries that we could learn from. Too often there is a shortage of placements or their quality is not good. Thirdly, there are concerns about the services available-educational and those provided by our social services departments-to young people in care.

Finally, there are crucial issues, which the hon. Member for Huddersfield raised towards the end of his speech, about the support provided for young people beyond the age of 16, 18 or even 21. His comments obviously tally very much with what is in the report, but also with my experience of the problems experienced by this cohort of youngsters when they leave care-long-term drug and mental health problems, housing difficulties and problems gaining employment, for example. I shall touch briefly on all those issues.

I appreciate that no simple conclusion can be derived about the tendency to be either reluctant or very precipitate about when people should be taken into care. It is clear that experiences vary significantly across the country and that different judgments are made in different areas. The hon. Member for Huddersfield was concerned about the significantly different approaches to the thresholds used to take people into care in different parts of the country. Another concluding point in the report was:

"Large variations in care populations around the country seem to indicate that there is no consensus about the role of care in services for vulnerable children. We are convinced that in some respects the potential of the care system to make a positive difference to children's lives is dismissed too readily, but we are also concerned by how widely the quality of children's experiences in care varies, and how uneven are the experiences".

My own experiences as a constituency MP have confirmed the understandable reluctance to take young people away from their parents and into care; we all recognise that. Sometimes, however, there is a failure to appreciate the truly chaotic, frightening and neglectful circumstances that many young people experience in the home environment. We would all like to keep as many young people as possible with their parents-that will always be true for the overwhelming majority-but sadly, some young people are brought up in deeply uncaring and unloving circumstances. That is sometimes because their own parents were brought up in the same environment, do not have parenting skills and did not receive a good example of how to discharge parental responsibilities from their own parents. The more serious cases involve direct abuse rather than simply neglect.

What is needed is a willingness to acknowledge that, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield pointed out, for this minority of young people a high-quality care system -if we can create it-may well be a better option than any of the options that tend to be available in a home environment. As the Select Committee has observed, there is a reluctance to put young people into care, not just because of a shortage of places, but sometimes because of the financial consequences, or even because of an almost ideological belief that the best possible outcome is for children to remain with their parents. I think the most important point made in the Committee's report is that the home environment is not always the best environment for young people.

The second issue that I want to raise is the quality of care and placements. As the hon. Member for Huddersfield said, placements with individuals who have a real commitment to and passion for young people, and who are willing to provide them with security for many years, are in very short supply. Many of the placements available are not of the quality that we would want to see. When we meet people who were in care as children, we tend to find that they experienced a large number of placements and a great deal of instability during a period when the state, or local authorities, should have been responsible for their care. It is not surprising that some individuals are reluctant to place young people in care if they fear that it will not provide the love and stability that those young people need if they are to thrive.

We must be more imaginative. We must study the experiences of those in other countries in order to establish whether we can create settings that provide the stability described by the hon. Member for Huddersfield. They may have to contain a number of other youngsters, although I was surprised by the hon. Gentleman's reference to the large number of young people in settings in countries such as Denmark-11, 12, 14 or 15. I should have thought that the number of children in multiple settings ought to be very much lower.

We must ensure that the quality of the social workers who support young people and their families is high, and that they experience consistency and stability. The hon. Member for Huddersfield spoke of a rapid turnover of social workers and of multiple contacts. It is not surprising that young people who may have had very unpleasant experiences in the home environment before being taken into care, and who feel unloved and unsupported, will also feel that society is not resolving their problems and giving them the stability that they need if a multiplicity of individuals are responsible for their care in the new home setting, or if a multiplicity of social workers causes relationships to be repeatedly forged and then broken. Those who experience a multiplicity of both social workers and home environments will feel that no one remains committed to them as individuals, and that no one can create the confidence and belief in their own importance and value that they will need if they are to thrive in society.

The third issue that concerns me-the hon. Member for Huddersfield mentioned it as well-is education. In general, the educational performance of children in care has been, and still is, extremely poor. Although it has improved slightly over the past five to 10 years, it is still well below average. We need a better system of funding to target disadvantage throughout the education system.

I was pleased to see in the education White Paper the other day a reference to our proposal for a pupil premium to direct additional money towards youngsters with high levels of disadvantage and deprivation. The children whom we are discussing would clearly have the strongest claim of almost any group of youngsters for a particularly high premium to ensure that the educational establishments that they attend have the necessary resources to deliver not only the additional educational support and catch-up that they may require, but the wider support that will enable them to thrive in a school environment. I hope that if the Government seriously intend to pursue the idea of a pupil premium, they will consider that idea carefully as the review of the funding formula concludes early in 2010, and before they announce their final decisions.

There have been some useful experiences recently in an attempt to tackle one of the problems mentioned by the hon. Member for Huddersfield: the fact that young people are frequently moved between different local authority areas, and also-although the hon. Gentleman did not mention this explicitly-between different educational establishments. That can prove extremely disruptive. A number of local authorities have pursued effectively the idea of a "virtual head teacher" with overarching responsibility for children in care, who would follow their progress to ensure that their educational needs were met and that their support remained consistent even when, regrettably, they had to move from one local authority area to another.

A particularly crucial question, and one that it is easy to neglect, is what happens to youngsters after they leave their care settings, often at the age of 16, but sometimes later. I share the surprise and dissatisfaction expressed by the hon. Member for Huddersfield at the frequent absence of a follow-through system of care. I am amazed at the lack of support for young people: the failure to secure appropriate housing, the lack of ongoing support for those with mental health and drug abuse problems, and the lack of assistance for those who wish to become employed.

As the hon. Member for Huddersfield said, one reason for our problems with children in care is that many enter the system late in the day. Not all of them have been in care and receiving support for a decade or more; some have experienced a chaotic and unstable set of circumstances, and have not gone into care until their mid or late teens. The assumption that they will be in a position to fend for themselves, to secure employment and to manage their own housing arrangements simply because they have reached the age of adulthood-whether that is deemed to be 16 or 18-is deeply flawed. In theory the system is supposed to provide an additional measure of support beyond the age of 16 or 18, but in practice that happens all too rarely.

Let me end by saying that I have welcomed the opportunity to debate the Select Committee's report. (HC Deb, 2 July 2009, c523)

Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative): Will the hon. Gentleman give way? (HC Deb, 2 July 2009, c526)

• David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat): I will give way one last time. (HC Deb, 2 July 2009, c526)

Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative): I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and I apologise for intervening as he was winding up his speech. I wanted to ask him about the transition from being in care to being outside it. Does he agree with the hon. Member for Huddersfield that support should remain available until these young people reach the age of 25? Is that a suitable age? Last week or the week before, we met a group of social workers from around London who told us that it was not uncommon for councils effectively to withdraw support from people as young as 15. If 15-year-olds from chaotic backgrounds are being left without support by councils, we need to do something about it. (HC Deb, 2 July 2009, c526)

• David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat): My response to that important question is that, to a large extent, the support needs to be designed around the needs of those youngsters. Some who have been in care since an early age, or have been cared for very effectively, may not need the service to continue until they are 25, but I should have thought that most children in care would need it to continue-in a real and effective way-until they reach a greater age than is covered by the present arrangements. Obviously, individuals who become adults-whatever age we use to define that state-will have ongoing needs and there would be an expectation that if those needs were identified, they would continue to be met whether or not those youngsters had been in care or not. I suggest that there should be a younger threshold age, but that the youngsters who still have problems at that age-to whom Mr. Stuart was alluding-should be able to access services. There should be a proper bridge into those services regardless of the age that the youngsters have reached.

This has been an important debate on an excellent report. I look forward to hearing the response of the Minister, who, I hope, will assure us-not just on the points addressed in the Government's response but in some other areas where the response was weaker or more ambiguous-that the Government are intent on dealing with the issues raised by the Select Committee.

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