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Baroness Beverley Hughes, Shadow Education Minister Speech at Lords Second Reading of The Children and Families Bill 2nd July 2013
My Lords, I thank the Noble Lord the Minister for his introduction to this important Children and Families Bill. I also welcome him to the dispatch box for his first major task as a Minister; steering this Bill through your Lordships House. I look forward to debating with him during our proceedings. My Lords, it is good finally to have a Bill on aspects of childrens wellbeing from a Secretary of State who so far has shown little interest in childrens lives outside the classroom. Indeed, he has presided over the decimation of many childrens services including early years and Sure Start centres and youth services- all much needed by vulnerable children. I am sure Members on this side, at least, will be commenting also on the disastrous impact on vulnerable children and young people of the Governments wider policies on welfare, employment and cuts, with falling incomes and higher prices stretching family budgets to the limit. Real hardship for ordinary families that will see child poverty rise again by 2015. There is nothing, sadly, in this Bill that will alleviate those hardships. My Lords, I followed the debate on this Bill in the Other Place with interest. There was much agreement on all sides on many welcome measures in this Bill. I am sure we will conduct the debate in your Lordships House in a similar vein. What was very noticeable, however, was that apart from two welcome Government amendments, the Government resisted any of the sensible proposals put forward, including many from Mr. Robert Buckland, the Conservative Chair of the APPG on Autism. I give the Minister notice that we will return to those amendments that we think are essential to address shortcomings in the Bill and I hope he will be more prepared to work with colleagues across the House as we seek to improve it. The Minister has outlined the key measures and Ill begin with those we can broadly support. The provisions in Parts 6, 7 and 8 for shared parental leave, time off work for antenatal appointments and flexible working all build on the progressive record of the Labour Government and we welcome these next steps. However, we would like to widen access to leave for parents, especially for fathers because these measures are, in fact, highly restrictive with only 2% of eligible fathers expected to be able to take up new changes. Coupled with recent data from the TUC, which shows that less than 1% of fathers have taken up additional paternity leave that was established in 2011, we need a step change for fathers. Part 5 strengthens the role of the Childrens Commissioner, also established by the Labour Government and we welcome these proposals too. However, the existing functions of the Childrens Rights Director which are to be incorporated into the Commissioners remit, include the power to take up individual complaints from children and we will want to ensure this safeguard is not lost. The proposals in Part 4 for new Childminder Agencies will need careful examination and there are two obvious concerns here. First, childminders in an agency will no longer be inspected at all by Ofsted. Instead, the agency will be inspected on its quality assurance processes. My Lords, we know what happened in Haringey when Ofsted undertook these arms-length desktop inspections. Ofsted gave Haringey a satisfactory rating shortly before Baby Peter Connolly died.

Second, the Childcare Minister said last week that the agencies would be responsible for the training and development of their childminders but there would be no new money. She envisaged the cost would be passed to parents, when parents already find high childcare costs hard to meet. Whilst the vexed issue of childcare ratios is not on the face of the Bill, we will want to ensure that no Government in future can attempt to change these important ratios without recourse to Parliament. We also believe Local Authorities have an essential economic and social role in assessing the sufficiency of childcare and we do not want to see this repealed as the Government proposes. We welcome measures in Part 2 of the Bill to improve and streamline family justice. However, whilst strongly supporting the continued involvement of both parents, the childs interests must remain paramount. We will be want to probe the practical implications of that to ensure that plans in clause 11 for shared parenting do not in any way dilute this paramouncy principle. We would not want to see any apportionment of childrens time for shared parenting. We agree that the 26 time limit is important to make sure court proceedings are carried out as quickly as possible. However, we want to see safeguards to ensure that complex issues are not overlooked and siblings are not needlessly separated. I come now to the parts of the Bill about which we have substantial concerns. Part 1 builds on reforms introduced by the Labour Government to improve the adoption system. And My Lords, it is unacceptable that on average it still takes two and a half years for a child in the care system to be placed for adoption. This has to change. We welcome attempts to reduce unnecessary delay in adoptions. But the interests of the child must come above all other considerations. We are concerned that the Minister in the Other Place envisaged that a child could be placed in a fostering for adoption placement as soon as she enters care. That seems to us to be counter to careful assessment and good quality decisions. We also feel that the Government is wrong to imply that adoption is the only solution for children. Most are not adopted and there is very little in this Bill to improve outcomes for them. Fostering gets very little mention and there is disappointingly little on improving the lot of children in the care system; including the many who return home, usually with very little continuing support. We would like to see more emphasis on the importance of contact between adopted children and their birth families. In particular, we want local authorities to consider the possibility of kinship care as the first option in every case and give priority to contact between sisters and brothers. Finally there are concerns across your Lordships House about the changes to consideration of ethnicity and we agree with the Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation that these should be part of the welfare checklist. And so we come to the reform of the Special Educational Needs system in Part 3 with the establishment of integrated education, health and care assessments and plans and the publication of the local offer of services in every area. My Lords, the aspirations of the Green Paper to improve the system across the board for all disabled children were widely commended. However, the Bill as drafted cannot hope to meet those aspirations. Those are not my words, but the words of the Special Education Consortium and the Every Disabled Child Matters Alliance and indeed all the childrens organisations. It is a conclusion we share. Let me outline why.

First the measures in the Bill do not apply to all disabled children. Those who do not have a special educational need, or who are detained in youth custody, will be excluded. What can possibly be the justification for this? Children with a major physical disability, visual impairment or a complex health problem such as cancer or diabetes, for example, have just as much need for services integrated across education, health and care as children with SEN. The barriers to their educational progress can be just as serious. Second, while the EHC plans and assessments will be a step forward, albeit for a small minority of children, and we welcome the Governments change of heart in making health as well as education enforceable parts of a plan, there clearly needs to be a parallel statutory duty on the third element, local authority social care services. The right of children and parents to request an assessment is a positive change as is the continuation of plans through further education and apprenticeships. However, parents need a single route of appeal on all elements of a plan. As drafted, parents would have to go down 3 separate appeal routes simultaneously and that is not acceptable. But the draft Code of Practice makes clear that this new system, welcome as it may be, will apply only to tiny minority even of the population of children with SEN, comparable to the 13% of SEN children statemented currently. Other SEN children, some 1.4 million, together with all those disabled and seriously ill children who do not have an SEN, will have to depend only on the Local Offer to get support. And for these children and families: there will be no practitioner to forge the integration of health, education and care despite the fact that many will need this. parents will have to do it themselves- yet this is one of the major problems with the current system that the Green Paper promised would be addressed; the Local Offer gives no guarantee of services, it is only a list of what might be available and is not enforceable the Government is refusing to specify what should be in the LO so parents face the same postcode lottery as now. My Lords, these are the headlines. There are other concerns too including the abolition of SA and SA+ without any clarity as to what will replace them. This is a major change, described as regressive by some childrens organisations, because it will erode many current entitlements for the majority of children who will not be eligible for an EHC plan. Similarly, the limiting of health provision in EHC plans to assist only the SEN and the failure to continue EHC plans through higher education are issues we will be keen to debate. Finally My Lords, there is widespread support across both Houses for Young Carers and the parents of disabled children to be given the same entitlements included in the Care Bill for adult carers of disabled adults. The Minister in the Other Place agreed to examine how this could be achieved in this Bill and I am sure the whole House would appreciate an indication of progress when the Minister winds up. My Lords, the issues in this Bill are of the greatest importance to some of the most vulnerable children and families. The Bill is a tremendous opportunity to improve substantially their experiences, their life chances and their outcomes. I know that right across the House, Members will want to secure the best interests of these children and we look forward to working with colleagues and with the Minister to make this Bill the best it can possibly be. ENDS