all-party parliamentary group for runaway and … · 2014-07-18 · all-party parliamentary group...

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ALL-PARTY PARLIAMENTARY GROUP

FOR RUNAWAY AND MISSING CHILDREN AND ADULTS

AND

ALL-PARTY PARLIAMENTARY GROUP

FOR LOOKED AFTER CHILDREN AND CARE LEAVERS

A JOINT INQUIRY INTO CHILDREN WHO GO MISSING FROM CARE

PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY SESSION 4 – PART ONE

Held in

Committee Room Thirteen in the House of Commons

Thursday 10th May 2012

10.00-11.00

Panellists

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair Earl of Listowel, Chair Alex Cunningham, MP Craig Whittaker, MP

Shan Nicholas, Chief Executive of The Children’s Society

(From the Shorthand Notes of Davina Hyde, Carmel Legal

Telephone Number: 01737 830013 Email: [email protected]

www.carmellegal.co.uk)

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Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: Can I welcome everyone to this our fourth session of our

inquiry into children missing from care. We have had a number of witnesses come and give

evidence to us, and our aim is to try and identify what is happening with children missing

from care, being very aware of the problems and difficulties they get into when they go

missing, and ultimately what interventions are needed to be made to ensure that local

agencies, local services, and the care and support of these children is improved so they are

not exposed to the risk they are currently exposed to through missing episodes. I know

there has been a lot of connection between missing and risk of sexual exploitation - and I

think everyone has seen the latest press coverage this week, and the high profile trial and

convictions that went on in Liverpool - but we also should not lose sight of the fact that not

all children that go missing are sexually exploited, but all children that go missing are

exposed to some harm when they go missing, and we want to focus on this wider aspect of

missing as well.

Can I welcome Tim Loughton, the Children’s Minister, who I know is very committed to this

area, very passionate about improving lives for children in our care system, and ensuring

better outcomes for them, and David Simmonds from the Local Government Association

(LGA). We will be hearing no doubt about the problems children’s services are experiencing

up and down the country in how they manage risk. Children’s services are always in the

front line when something goes wrong. I wonder, Tim, if you could just give us a brief

outline of where you think we are up to with the initiatives that have gone on and other

things you might want to bring to our attention initially.

Tim Loughton MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education:

Thank you very much. First, congratulations on holding this inquiry, these sort of all-party

group inquiries which I have been involved in previously produce quite valuable evidence,

and recently you have got rather more publicity than stuff we have been doing very

comprehensively for some time. It is a good initiative, and you have had some pretty

impressive witnesses so far. The missing strategy - I am not trying to pass the buck - is the

primary responsibility of the Home Office, but clearly we have a very strong interest in it.

What we are doing - just very briefly then I will take questions - is we are revising the

statutory guidance on children who run away or go missing from home or from care, we

have been speaking to a lot of people about that, CEOP, ACPO, the Children’s Society and

other interested parties. I have given an undertaking that we will wait on your report

before we actually produce the revised guidance - as long as it doesn’t take too long, but I

think you are due to publish it in June, as I want to be able to produce our revised guidance

before the summer recess, so hopefully the timing will work. So your report will feed into

any changes we need to make on the guidance, so this is not just a token exercise by any

means. We are very keen to hear what you have got to say, and your witnesses have got to

say.

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The second point – you are absolutely right – we have had lots of tangential conversations

around missing children and runaway children, and the child sexual exploitation action plan

- that obviously has been the most high profile part of our work - you kindly helped us with

it last November, we will very shortly - in a matter of weeks I hope - be producing our

progress report on where we have got to on the child sex exploitation action plan. That will

have references to the work that is being progressed around runaway and missing children

as well. Maybe later this month - in the light of this week’s events maybe it will take a few

weeks longer - I don’t know, but it is a six months on report from when we produced it in

November, so that again I think will be quite a useful exercise in keeping this in the

headlines and there is real momentum there, I am quite encouraged by the work that is

going on.

I am also waiting to hear about good practices on issues from local authorities now taking

initiatives, and there are some examples of good practice going on in certain parts of the

country, certain initiatives LSCBs (Local Safeguarding Children Boards) are doing,

particularly the work around trafficked children. There is a Ministerial group on trafficking

which Damian Green at the Home Office chairs, where I represent the DfE (Department for

Education) on that group. Some very good joined up work has been happening there. We

have been talking about trafficked children, in the light of the Olympics as well.

Finally, because the events of this week have thrown a spotlight on residential care - and I

am sure it will come up in questioning - I don’t want this to be blown up out of all

proportion. It is not every child who happens to be in a children’s home is fair game to be

sexually exploited by any means. I am aware that we are doing a lot of work on adoption,

doing a lot of work around fostering, and other permanent solutions. We have done a lot of

work - still a lot more to come - round residential children’s homes as well. For example, we

are producing a charter shortly - hopefully at the end of this month - a charter on residential

home care. We have done one on adoption, one on foster care, the two more I want to

complete the set, one on residential home care, and one on children leaving care as well -

which will complete the set, hopefully before the summer. Again that will produce some

further progress on what we are doing around residential children’s homes. As to what

further work we may now need to do in the light of the events of the weekend, I am sure

that will come up in questioning.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: Thank you very much. If I could just initially ask both of you

to respond to this, because it is an issue on data. Obviously the question that we need to

know, especially at local level, is how many children go missing, how many times do they go

missing, what risks are they exposed to when they go missing, if we are to put in place

effective local strategies to prevent harm. There is an ongoing issue about reconciliation of

the data. Phil Shakescheff gave evidence to us on which he had done a lot of work, and it is

quite clear the data the police collate on children missing from care is very different from

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the data that is returned to the Department for Education. We do understand it is different

data, but even so there are great discrepancies and that seems to us to be a problem. It

would be interesting for us to know what you think about this, and how you think it can be

resolved, and how you think the collection of data can be made better, so at least we are all

starting from the same base, and tangential to that is the question which has also been

raised about one local authority notifying another local authority when they place a child in

their area, and sometimes the receiving local authority not being aware that a very troubled

youngster has moved into the area, and they are not able to plan preventative strategies.

Again it is a question of finding out from both of you how you think this system might be

improved.

David Simmonds, Deputy Leader, London Borough of Hillingdon, and Chair, Local

Government Association’s Children and Young People Board: Thank you very much, I will

open on responding to that. I know Craig Whittaker, having held a role at Children’s

Services, will be quite familiar as I am with the statistical fog that exists around this issue. At

a local level a council has clear legal and parental responsibility for children in its care, but

the statistics which I know you have heard evidence about from the police and others, they

are gathered by a number of agencies in different ways and can measure quite different

things. Generally speaking, using the ACPO definition of what a missing child is, that would

be a case when a child is missing - in Madeleine McCann sense missing - where we don’t

know what the whereabouts are for a quite a long period of time. In the case of a children’s

home, the care regulations specify if a child is in breach of a curfew, then a missing person

report must be filed, even if the child’s whereabouts and welfare are known and

established. A typical situation I hear from a social worker is a seventeen and a half year old

has had a difficult day at school, ‘phones at 9.00pm when he is supposed to be back at

8.30pm, and says “I have decided to go round to my mum’s tonight, I am not coming back”.

A social worker goes round and establishes the child is at his mum’s house, and even if that

is not where he is supposed to be, the home is still required to say to the Police we have a

missing child, because he is not back in his room at the time he is supposed to be there, so

that means there will be a significant number of false positive reports of missing children

going to police. In some cases - I am told by my staff - you may have a child who is

responsible for thirty of those reports in a month, because it is the same individual child.

There are then requirements from Ofsted who gather statistics on children who have been

missing for twenty four hours or more whose whereabouts are not known, so that is clearly

a different measure from the one which would apply to children’s homes, and those are the

ones which are reported by local authorities to the DfE. The third complication is one - I

think we are aware of at national level - which is the Police gather statistics via their police

authority area, whereas councils are required to report on children who are in the care of

that particular council. So one like mine, which is a large outer London authority, has a large

number of children placed within it by other councils, because of the availability of foster

homes, children’s homes etc. So the children that might go missing from these homes, but

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are placed by Liverpool City Council, Birmingham, Hounslow, wherever it may be, are not on

the statistics that Hillingdon provide. In terms of improving that situation, there are a

couple of things we can do. Firstly an agreed and shared sense of what it is we are trying to

measure, because children who go missing are everything from the adolescent who has said

“Yes, for the fourth time this week I have gone round to my dad’s house, and I am not going

to the children’s home”, through to a child who has been trafficked into this country for

sexual exploitation, has maybe been sent by the UK Borders Agency into the care of a social

worker, has jumped out of the car at the first set of traffic lights and legged it, and has

disappeared to who knows where. So I think we do need to have a shared understanding of

what it is we are trying to measure in order to assess the scale of the problem. We are

working closely with DfE to try and reach this stage. It will then be much easier for us to

analyse who are the children most at risk as distinct from those who are exhibiting fairly

normal adolescent behaviour.

Tim Loughton MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education: I

completely agree with everything David has said. This is an area of concern, and an area of

confusion. There are two aspects to it, “Are we collecting the right data”, and “Are we

collecting the same data”. Answers to both those questions are “No”, and we need to get to

a position where we can say “Yes” to both of those. Secondly, there is an additional issue

“Are we sharing information about children’s homes”, particularly the police and Ofsted and

the local authority, which is an ongoing bugbear which I am trying to tackle as well. The

point here is we do not know the extent of the problem, and we need to raise the profile of

the problem in the same way we are successfully - albeit for the wrong reasons in some

cases - with child sex exploitation, because these cases are now coming to light. This is a

much under-reported issue and the scale of it is under-reported. Whenever I go to my

constituency in Worthing, whether it is because I am Children Minister, the Police always

say one of their biggest problems is the amount of time they are spending going to

children’s homes because they have a report of someone missing, but they know full well

that child is going to turn up - because he or she has always done so - and they think that is

a real waste of police time.

We have a problem with my constituency in particular - as do a lot of seaside resorts -

where we have a number of children’s homes all in a confined space, with a lot of children

from quite a long way away. They are small, and there is a question mark over how well

some of them are managed. I think the position has got better, but my police inspector is

constantly complaining to me that it takes up a disproportionate amount of time his officers

have to spend dealing with what they see as low priority stuff with kids who are not really

missing. It is in everybody’s interests if we sort out exactly what missing is, what aspect of

missing we need to take much more seriously than just going along, filling in a form, and

then filing it, and we need to make sure what is required by Ofsted and what is required by

my Department is complementary to what the police respond to. It will probably turn out

to be a bigger ask than it should be on paper, but that is what I want to try and achieve. The

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second part is there seems to be a reluctance - which I don’t quite understand - between

Ofsted and the Police about sharing details like the location of the children’s homes as well,

and it seems to me sensible good practice that everyone knows what we are dealing with

officially. I think it is a burden saving measure if we can do that. One thing that may help as

well, and we have mentioned this before, is joint inspectorates working together rather

better. One thing we have achieved progress in, which I am amazed never happened in the

past, is we got five or six different inspectorates, not just Ofsted, the Police, the Probation

Service, Health and others, who all go and do their separate inspections often on just the

same things, so we now have agreement for joint inspections, so Ofsted could go along with

the Police in some cases. First of all they have got to ask the right questions, appropriate

questions. But if you have the police asking one set of questions relating to one set of data,

and at the same time Ofsted asking one set of questions relating to a similar set of data but

with different questions, that is clearly absurd, so if we can get some joint reporting there,

that might help focus people on the same things, so we know what we need to be asking.

That is another measure which might accelerate the whole thing.

You mentioned the receiving local authority issue, and absolutely that has been a bugbear

of mine for a long time, and again I have got it from my own constituency experience where

the regulations quite clearly state that the responsible authority which places a child out of

area, and can only do subject to certain criteria - about trying to keep children as close to

home as possible - where the capacity to keep a proper eye on them is questionable, and

much more resource intensive to do it, so they are supposed to go through a whole series of

criteria before they place a child there. I am concerned still too many of them are not

fulfilling the criteria before children are going out of area. It is a particular problem with

London authorities placing with South East coastal towns. I wrote to every London authority

and I wrote to the Mayor, and I am going to repeat that exercise as well, because I am

aware it is still happening. It is also the responsibility of those authorities to notify the host

authority that they have a child in their area - from a London borough or whatever - which is

the responsibility of that borough, but when something goes wrong, it is usually the local

police or the local children services who are expected to step in and clean up that problem.

That is not fair on the local police and children services department, but that is what the law

says. This is still a problem and I am determined to clamp down on it as I thought we had,

but it is still not being achieved in practice.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: What is the point of the DfE collecting the kind of

information they collect on the - I think it is - SS903 returns which is basically they have to

report numbers of children that have gone missing? What does the department do with it?

What is the point of it?


You may well ask that. We have had conversations about this before. If we are asking for

data which is one questionable in its accuracy, two questionable in what it achieves, then

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why are we collecting this data? I have found my department collecting all sorts of data

which was questionable. Why we are collecting it in the first place? You are absolutely

right. That is why I need to make sure we are getting the right data and that we are using

that to inform, improving the regulations and guidance, and that is part of the Review. I

take that criticism and it is historic, and we need to show why we need that data, and what

it is actually achieving.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: Does anyone want to pursue this particular....?

Alex Cunningham, MP: Yes please, we all accept we want the correct data, we want

the same data, we want useful data, and we don’t really know where that is. What do you

see as the pathway determining what data we do actually need? How are we going to, have

you got a timescale for that? Do you see a series of tiers of data, from the child who legs it

at the traffic lights through to the regular daily absconder? How do we get there to this set

of information we do need that is actually going to help us provide a more robust service for

children?


Government Association’s Children and Young People Board: The purpose of the data

should inform the answer to that question.....

Alex Cunningham, MP: Do we know the purpose?


Government Association’s Children and Young People Board: Touching on the previous

question, the reason the Department gather it - what they use it for I don’t know - but the

reason they gather it is to try and get a sense of how effective the care system is across the

country at keeping track of children in its care, and at some point a statistician in the

department decided a good way of measuring that would be to ask each local authority who

had gone missing for more than 24 hours when they don’t know where they are or what has

happened to them. There was a view taken at the time that was an appropriate way of

measuring risk. To me that is the answer to any measure we are seeking to arrive at, and to

an extent I think there is going to be a need to trust the judgement of those near the front

line who are trying to assess that. One of the problems we have had in the care system, as

illustrated by the disconnect through the care regulations, Ofsted assessments, and the way

the Police count missing children, is it is very much focused on a box ticking approach.

Mums and dads whose teenage sons and daughters who ‘phone at 9.30 pm and say “I had a

tough day at school, I am going to stay at my friend’s house till 10.00pm” when it was

supposed to be 9.00pm, would not immediately telephone the police and say “My child is

missing, go and kick the door down and drag them home”, but the expectation that is laid

down on Children’s homes is that is the approach they will take. Where we are trying to get

to is there is a differential risk between the regular absconder and the child who is missing

for a long period of time and I think if we can agree - I suspect there will be tension about

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that because the Police don’t want to waste their time in these kind of situations, the

Department has a view with its responsibility to inspect a regular care system, and the

councils have that parental responsibility at local level - between all three key players we

could arrive at a period of time. My personal view - based on how I use the information in

my own authority - is that 24 hours is quite a useful measure, provided it is backed up by

qualitative information that tells me within that, are we talking about 90% of those are

trafficked children coming through Heathrow who leg it as soon as they are outside the

custody of the UK Border Agency, or are they children who are going missing from our

children’s homes and are disappearing and we don’t know what has happened to them. I

say from personal experience because this is not a new issue. The Milly Dowler case which

was very much in the media, the perpetrator was a resident in my borough and there was a

stage when he was sitting in his car outside our children’s homes, and it was known who he

was - because of various other things he has been associated with - and staff have said to

me it is incredibly difficult in a situation like that. “We are not allowed to keep our children

locked up, we don’t have any powers to do that”, but knowing one of our girls from the

children’s home gets in that car every day, was enough for them to telephone the social

worker and say we need to find somewhere else for this child to go. I think it is a risk based

approach with an agreed statistical measure, the 24 hour missing is by and large quite a

good indicator of where there are problems in the system for the purpose of looking at the

whole system.


To add to that, the data is so raw and erratic at the moment as to not really know how

meaningfully one can use it. The first port of call must be the local authority need to get a

handle on the relevant data in their own area, so they should be liaising with police,

education, whatever, to see how they deal with their problem in their area. So it is really

important that the local authorities are taking this much more seriously. That is the duty of

the children services department, local children safeguarding boards - these young people

come under categories of people LSCBs should be very conscious of and making sure they

have been properly safeguarded - and we have a patchy picture of those LSCBs where this is

very much on the radar or its not, in just the same way child sexual exploitation has been.

We need to make sure the data they are collecting is good quality data, and it needs proper

analysis. As David says, in his authority with its proximity to Heathrow Airport, there may be

lots of children go missing for different circumstances, from children who have been taken

into care because of their parents situation - who are a bit wild and who go out for

sleepovers, missing curfews - which is a problem, some of those children may end up being

sexually exploited, others hung over and missing school, they all need to be dealt with but in

a different way.

If the Borough of Hillingdon appeared to have a lot of children going missing, it may be they

are doing rather a good job of looking after those really vulnerable ones, and part of what

they are doing is out of control, because the children are legging it from the cars, or foster

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care. Children go missing not just from children’s homes, they go missing from families,

foster care, children’s homes and everything else as well. Just to produce an analogy, we

will be producing soon the adoption scorecards for each authority and we announced we

were going to do this some time ago. What I am keen not to do with adoption - it is not just

a question of numbers we think more people will benefit from adoption; it is not just a

question of setting all sorts of targets, I am absolutely against that – it is to get all the data

out there and contextualised as well. So we can see factors as well as numbers as well as

more problematic children, sibling groups, who are not getting adopted as fast as others,

and we need that same quality of data evidence to be able to assess - that will then be the

job of the department - that actually Hillingdon appear to be doing a very poor job - I am

sure the reverse is true - despite the fact they have got a particular group of vulnerable

young people.

I would much rather have that sort of evidence, and I could then say we need to be able to

see better results and Ofsted needs to take a closer interest at that authority, that LSCB

needs to be much more on the case than it is, and then for me as a Department to be able

to say there are certain areas that do not appear to be cutting the mustard here, whereas

other authorities appear to be taking this much more seriously, then I think we would have

valuable data that we can make sure we intervene on appropriately and achieve some

proper results from it.

Alex Cunningham, MP: With all the agencies working together, do you have a point

where you think you can have a defined set of data?


can’t and won’t give you a date. The first step is the new guidance. Some complimentary

steps are joint inspectorates here, joint discussions going on between us and the Home

Office - obviously the Police is their responsibility - children services department data

coming to us is our responsibility, so there are a series of conversations and bits of work

going on. If we can get them all pointing the right direction and coming together and I think

we can now say this is what we are going to be asking for, and this is what meaningfully will

come out . How long it is going to take, I don’t know. It has taken many years to get the

inspectors to sit round the same table in my department, but we achieved that, and they

have constructively come up with working again and that’s real progress.

Craig Whittaker, MP: Can I just bring you back to the children themselves. One of

the key things with the children who we speak to, particularly with runaways is they don’t

know who to contact, so I wondered if there was anything in the pipeline to perhaps look at

a single point of contact for children, a bit like ChildLine, something that is very high profile,

people know when they are in trouble they can ring for advice or help.

The second question is linked because for a lot of these children the reason they run away is

because their placements are quite often inappropriate, some that we have spoken to have

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had six or seven placements. I just want to highlight to you my local authority last year had

101 applicants to be foster carers but they took on one couple, using excuses like the people

were too fat, smoked, a whole range of bizarre hoops and bars that people have to erase,

and I wondered what we can do to take the nonsense out of this process and speed up the

process, so that we can get more appropriate places for these children.


Two very important points. The first about a single point of contact. I haven’t got a plan to

set up a new dedicated hotline just for people thinking of running away. ChildLine can serve

that purpose well anyway. It is up to local authorities to have their own direct contact

service whatever way they deem fit. In terms of children who are in care, absolutely their

first point of contact should be their responsible social worker, and/or their IRO

(Independent Reviewing Officer) and I think the IROs in particular have a very important role

to play here, and one of the areas I am looking at closely as part of the whole work around

children in care, is the exact role of IROs. I believe IROs have a greater, more powerful role

to play. Again it is an area where some authorities are doing it really well, and some

authorities are not doing it well. I get very mixed reactions from kids in care that come and

see me - those young people that come and see me on a regular basis - a mixed picture of

how good the IRO is. For that reason last year I spent several days shadowing IROs up in

Leeds, as I shadowed the social workers the year before. The IRO worked really well, and I

met a lot of children who absolutely knew who their IRO was, what they were there for, and

would have no problem if they were being troubled by multiple placements - or they might

be getting bullied, or getting low or maybe wanting to run away. I was quite confident that

IROs would be their first ports of call, and it would work. I could go to another local

authority, and I would not have that confidence. What we need to do is make sure IROs are

all doing the job we need IROs to do, and there is an inconsistency of quality there, but

certainly IROs have a major role to play in all of that.

In terms of your second point, and I would labour on about this until I am blue in the face

and will continue to do so, because we launched a big recruitment exercise last year with a

“Give a Child a Home” website, aimed at both prospective adopters and prospective foster

carers. We have done a lot to speed up the whole assessment process, and on the

welcoming process - and foster care fortnight which starts next week, there will be lots of

high profile events to encourage people to come forward as possible carers - and yet again

to bust all of these myths that would exclude you or me from being prospective foster

parents that there are no centralised regulations. If you are overweight, if you smoke, if you

are of a certain age, if you are too middle class or whatever in any way vetoes you from

being considered as a prospective adopter. If you think you can offer a safe, loving, stable

home to a child, you should knock on the door of the Town Hall and the Town Hall should

say “Great, let’s see what it is all about”, and if you are still up for it and if you would make a

good foster carer - and we will still continue to bang on about that message - but there are

still a load of myths out there of people thinking just because they are a smoker, they could

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not be possibly considered. That is nonsense, and we are continuing to put messages out

about that, and we are revamping the recruitment website and the adoption register and

things like that to try and get more people to register.

Earl of Listowel, Chair: Can I join the Chair in thanking you, Minister, for your

championing of child and family social work and ensuring there is a high quality consistent

service to children and families across the country. I wanted to ask you about children’s

homes if I may, particularly of the possibility perhaps of an inquiry into the functioning of

children’s homes? I think you might agree the key factors in terms of stopping children

running away from children’s homes is a) managing a relationship between the carers and

the home and the child, working with that relationship, and b) good behaviour management

training for the carers in that establishment.

As you know, in the Office for National Statistics, Mental Health of Children and Young

People in Great Britain, 2004, 69% of children in children’s homes were found to have a

mental health disorder, a high percentage of those conduct disorders - often very

challenging children - only 40% of those children in foster care. We know also the recession

has reduced housing price rises, so that children’s homes have become a less viable

business; the yield has reduced. Most children’s homes are there also to make a profit, that

is fine as long as they invest in the training and development of the staff, and there must be

pressure on establishments not to do so given that circumstance. We have heard evidence

that a small minority of children’s homes are falling down in their view quite badly, and

even in just a few hours a child out can get involved in criminality, can face serious

problems, and of course you will recall the boy that committed suicide in a young offenders

institution some while ago, following being caught in a criminal gang activity after a short

time away from his children’s home. I really do appreciate the fact you are going to look

more closely at the issue of children’s homes, and would you consider keeping an open

mind to the idea of perhaps having an inquiry to look at the detail in this particular area?


am entirely open minded on this, and I am aware we have done a lot on fostering and a lot

on adoption, and we have done a lot, but not as necessarily as high profile, on children’s

homes. I think there is something like 14% of looked-after children in children’s homes, so

we are still talking about a large number of fundable children, and you are absolutely right

about the high instance of mental health and other vulnerabilities around those children. I

think the quality of those children’s homes now is greatly improved from a few years ago. I

think it had been a rather neglected area, it is an area where some new players have moved

into that market, and the quality of the care was inconsistent. You are absolutely right, new

guidance was issued, not the be all and end all, but it sent out some strong signals of what

was expected from those children’s homes, and also what is expected of the responsible

authorities who have placed children in those children’s homes as well, and all those good

reasons why they have to go through a checklist of things to make sure that was the right

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placement for a child if they are away from their area. I am absolutely open minded - we

need to update, strengthen, change that guidance, and certainly the events that have hit

the headlines in the last week may be cause for doing that. Specifically on the case of the

Rochdale gangs, the Secretary of State announced yesterday that the Review that the

Children’s Commissioner is already conducting, (and is very much complementary to the

child sexual exploitation plan - and Sue Berelowitz, Deputy Children’s Commissioner, has

been part of that action plan) the Secretary of State has asked the Children’s Commissioner

to accelerate part of her Review to report back to the Department within the next month as

to whether there are specific things arising from this case that now require more urgent

action so that we will then need to change the guidance, or the law or whatever. Now a lot

of this we are already on to because of the child sexual exploitation action plan, and all the

partners who are working together there to feed back their experiences. I know from

talking to Sue Berelowitz and having informed progress reports from her, the horrendous

abuse she is uncovering is quite eye watering, and I am afraid I am not surprised by that,

because we already admitted when we published the action plan the extent of this has been

underestimated and under-reported by everyone for a long time, and it is something

everyone has to get involved with.

I spoke recently to the Independent Children’s Homes Association, I have spoken at their

Conference twice now, and there is a real determination there to make sure they are

improving their quality. They absolutely are committed to improving the quality of the

people working there, and the training of the people there, so they can get some

recognition as a quality provider. Occasionally we seem to view residential children’s homes

as a last resort, a dumping ground if all else has failed, and in some cases that may be what

has happened to some children in the past, but in many cases the residential children’s

homes may be the most appropriate places for them. They tend to be older children who go

there, they tend to be children who have had a number of different placements which

haven’t worked, and there are a lot of very specialist homes dealing with kids with very

particular physical disabilities or learning difficulties, that require very intensive care in any

case. We are not all talking about kids who are susceptible to being groomed or getting

involved in some of these missing activities.

We have also been piloting some other types of children’s homes. The Department has been

funding some other types of children’s homes; the Department has been funding

pedagogue style children’s homes - I visited one in Wiltshire last year - which is trying to

replicate the experience on the Continent in Scandinavia, and as you know I visited

residential children’s homes in Finland and in Denmark where they are a much bigger part

of the care component over there, and they do it really rather well, with their pedagogue

social workers, who have a much more empathetic relationship with the children. Whereas

here in too many cases the job of the person working there is almost to constrain the child

who happened to be placed there, rather than a much more empathetic relationship - how

can they make the most out of this particular placement. I think it is a very mixed picture

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and I think we need to do more to make sure all children’s homes are focused on improving

their quality, many of them have done already, but we need to make sure that we have a

greater consistency so that a children’s home is a place of first choice where it is the most

appropriate place, and it is not something that ends up as a last resort because everything

else has failed, as it can be seen as in the past.

Earl of Listowel, Chair: Just very briefly, how closely connected has child and

adolescent mental health services been to children’s homes in the past, I know there have

been significant improvements, but it is not still not universal that there is a close link with

staff and a mental health official on an ongoing basis, as was recommended in the Warner

Report in the 1990s?


That is a very good point, and our experience on mental health legislation underlines the

strong link between children in care and propensity for mental health problems. The two

points I would mention there is the government’s strategy on mental health “No health

without mental health” absolutely focuses on children, and within that has a section on

mental health of children in care, so it has absolutely been flagged up, of a subset of

children who are much more vulnerable to this. So this is absolutely right, and something I

have been calling for many years as Shadow Spokesman on Mental Health. Secondly, I

would say in some cases independent children’s homes handle it rather better. People

often complain about the cost of independent children’s homes and they can be quite

expensive, but in many cases it is because they will commission their own mental health

diagnosis and therapy, rather than wait for six months, nine months or more to get it –

because there is a long waiting list – with the National Health provider. So in some cases,

but again it is inconsistent, some independent children’s homes will get better quality

access quicker for kids with mental health problems as part of the offer of care.


Government Association’s Children and Young People Board: My experience has been

getting the absolute minimum out of those services can be a real challenge, and many PCTs

do not see it as a priority at all, and for many children who come to a nursing home, a not

untypical case is where you have a very challenging seventeen and a half year old who

already has a drug habit and a record of violence, and a number of criminal convictions, it

can be incredibly difficult to find a loving foster home who opens their arms and says yes

that’s a child we can easily accommodate. So there is a tendency for children who are the

most difficult to find a placement for, to end up staying in a children’s home of variable

quality, and then to find out that NHS Services which could turn their lives around are just

not available.


just wanted to add it seems we are just focusing on children’s homes as a source of all the

problems of children going missing from, and they are not. A lot of children go missing from

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foster care or their own homes, and get involved in child sexual exploitation, and

interestingly the group of kids I have from residential children’s homes who come and see

me on a quarterly basis, who are the most gobby of all the groups I have got, many of them

have got some really good things to say about their children’s homes. Others have got some

quite worrying things to say about their children’s homes to the extent almost they are in

secure homes. Kids will do slightly crazy things, and do runners and not comply with the

rules from all sorts of backgrounds, but are we really saying we need to confine and control

children so they don’t have the opportunity to do any of this stuff, in which case we are

talking about secure children’s homes. Are we really talking about 9,000 kids in a different

sort of environment which are there for a particular purpose for particularly vulnerable

children for whom either welfare, or in some cases criminal reasons, they need to be in a

secure environment. If we establish a better rapport and relationships working

constructively with the police and their schools and everyone else, then they can be very

happy positive places for those children to be.

Shan Nicholas, Chief Executive of The Children’s Society: I have a couple of

questions please. David, I wondered whether you had examples of good practice of inter-

agency working, because inter-agency working is one of the things has come up in some of

the other discussions we have had, and how that has broken down in many respects. My

second question goes back to risk assessment, what some of the challenges are in terms of

making sure that you do adequately assess risk, particularly if what we are talking about is a

situation where data collection is poor, if inter-agency working is not that effective, what

does that mean in terms of how we risk assess some of these children, and do that in a way

that we are not just focusing on children who are at risk of sexual exploitation, because

there are all kinds of other risk?


Government Association’s Children and Young People Board: The Minister has made

reference to the work that is going on nationally, most councils have well-established

protocols with the local police and the Health Service, to try and make sure that where

there are particularly vulnerable children that the services are in place. I think it is pretty

clear when we look at what happens, there tend to be certain crisis points that we can

identify where the risk management is particularly poor, for example, what happens when a

child is moved out of area. You may have a situation where a child has come into the care

system because of a problematic situation at home with their family, they are in a children’s

home in Hillingdon, and before you know it Dad is knocking on the door with an axe saying I

am going to break this down unless you bring my daughter home, in that case the Council’s

reaction would be to move them to another location. At that stage there is a process that

has to be gone through, but at that time of relocation that children is substantially more

vulnerable than they would be and previous to that, or once they have settled into that new

environment. When we look at children trafficked, often their most vulnerable period is

when they have arrived in the UK, but before they have any opportunity to settle in the care

15

system, for example, UK Border Agency telephone and say come and collect this child, but

before they have arrived at the children’s residential home, had a chance to talk to

someone perhaps in their own language - if they don’t speak English - about what their new

situation is. So I think the risk management approach is quite fundamental to that and it

may be coming back to your question about how statistics are gathered, part of that is

about saying how many children are the ones that go missing at the point of entry to the

system before the system has had the chance to do anything about it. On your question

about good practice, I am sure we will be able to provide you with some examples of where

you have councils, police, charities and health service working together, and rather than

trying to go into that now we can provide that to you separately.

Craig Whittaker, MP: Just a quick question from me. The Eileen Munro One Year On

Review, can we have your commitment to publish that report once you have got it?


came to this meeting straight from a meeting with Professor Eileen Munro. We have her

report, it is a very good progress report, I want to publish it as soon as possible. It is simply

a matter of finding a gap in the diary in the next few weeks when we are not publishing

other things, quite literally. Hopefully it is going to be this month. In any case I am before

your Select Committee on I think 12th June, and I want to have it in the public domain, as no

doubt you will want to ask lots of questions about it, so I will be publishing it imminently as

soon as I get a slot to do it.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: Thank you both for coming and giving very comprehensive

evidence, and I know you are both very focused on the issue, but it is very clear to us that

there is a lot of work to be done to get a proper risk assessment in place and looking at the

ability to analyse missing episodes to see which are the ones we need to be worried about,

and which are the ones we aren’t, and until we get to that stage we are not going to be able

to be in a position to prevent harm coming to children. Thank you very much for coming.

Thank you Debbie for coming. Have you any comments to make about what you

have heard from your perspective before we start asking questions?

Debbie Jones, President, The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS),

and Director of Children Services, Lambeth: I am speaking to you as a serving Director of

Lambeth, but I am here as the President of The Association of Directors of Children’s

Services, and I am also speaking to you as someone who has worked in this sector for very

many years, as Director of four authorities, and seen the outcome and impact of various

reviews there have been over a number of years on precisely the issues you are looking at

today. So it is with that perspective that any of my comments probably should be taken.

What the Minister was saying resonates largely with the information I am sharing with you.

The interesting thing when you look at some of the statistics, having been around for a

while now, is actually there has been an improvement in the way in which we have dealt

16

with missing children over the years. It is right the profile has been raised; it is right there is

a greater forensic approach with how we deal with the issues. The various systems and

safeguards and multi-agency risk assessments that have been put into place over a number

of years have shown some improvement. You asked specifically about children’s homes. I

can recall when the situation was atrocious, and the kind of experience we heard about

yesterday in the media, was essentially commonplace. There are a lot more safeguards in

the system now. They are not as robust as we would like them to be always, and it is a

question of consistency of implementation and also a policy of services and communication,

and that really is what you are interested in and where there can be improvements, and

various reports looking around these issues whether - it is around trafficked children - are

particularly important, and we welcome that. That is all that I wanted to say by way of

introduction, and I am happy to answer your questions.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: One of the issues that comes up again and again is the

notification. What do you think are the barriers that prevent one children services

department notifying another children services department that they have placed a child in

their area? What is the problem with this?

Debbie Jones, President, The Association of Directors of Children’s Services, and

Director of Children Services, Lambeth: The system is very clear and well embedded. There

is an absolute requirement for us to notify. Most local authorities receive bundles of those

notifications. I suspect it is less of a problem with notification, and more of a problem with

follow through. There is no excuse for the actual notification, the system is well rehearsed

and well known, and the system for the receiving authority is also well known and well

rehearsed. The issues will arise when young people who have been placed by one authority

into the receiving authority go missing, and what happens then. Are the systems sufficiently

sensitive and flexible to pick up? That is probably where more work is needed particularly

with London. There was a report produced a couple of years ago, and rereading that, it is

clear that there were recommendations around improving the systems we had whether it

was boroughs reporting in clusters or a more sophisticated data system, and I would suggest

that is probably an area that does need more work.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: Cross boundary placements. There is some evidence to

suggest that children who are placed far away from their homes are more difficult to

support by the placement authorities because of distance. Would you say that continues to

be an issue, particularly when a child might be placed somewhere else, who goes missing

quite a lot. I understand social workers are required to discuss with a children’s home what

are the overall welfare implications of that, and obviously distance can be a problem and of

course the previous government brought in this requirement which doesn’t much mean

anything because there is a get out clause. Is it your impression this continues to be a

problem?

17


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: I think the pressure on local authorities to actually

place children nearer home is one that everyone does recognise, it is looked at very much in

the inspection process. There is no question the further you place the child away from their

home, the more difficult it is for the young person. Although in a small number cases I

would say there would be good reason, and it is the quality of the provision and the quality

of the assessment that leads to the placement that is more important. Yes distance is an

issue, for us in terms of improving outcomes, and ensuring you get the best ever deal for a

young person. It is the quality of the placement, quality of the support with that placement

which is of crucial importance. I would agree, if you have a placement placed away and the

placement is not going well, i.e. all the risk indicators are there, increasing their likelihood to

run or be at risk of other issues, it is more difficult. Going back to the first question on

notifications, it is not so much the notifications, but the follow through, and whilst there are

through local safeguarding children boards, and through the various partnership

arrangements the system of multi-agency partnership, which is a lot more robust than it

used to be - I think there are holes in the system. Holes in the system cannot just be filled in

by improved data.

Craig Whittaker, MP: Can I just say I take my hat off to you because I have always

maintained, with my association with DCS’s, the job is far too big for one person, and also to

chair the National Association of Directors of Children Services, you must be super woman!

The question I have is around cross boundary placements. Would it not be better if we had

a system where a local authority placed a child far away, that they would almost pay a

premium to the host local authority to take full responsibility for that child?


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: I think it is incredibly important - I have spent most

of my career saying how important it is - as a corporate parent that the child is owned - it is

different when it is a permanent placement. We have to differentiate. I think one would

have to look at that issue incredibly carefully. Of course there are cross boundary

arrangements, as there are for children on children protection plans, but I believe very

strongly it is very important that the home local authority, which has the corporate parental

responsibility, retains that. In a sense I would be wary about giving that get out clause, even

if it costs more money. It is not an issue that I have particularly consulted my colleagues on,

but from my experience of how hard we have worked over the years to strengthen that

corporate parenting function. In the past we used to place children quite far from home

and they were abandoned, but this is not the case since the corporate county requirements

were introduced. Having said that we do need to strengthen the mechanisms. There are

obviously illustrations of where it works extremely well. Partly because we are placing less

children a long way from home, partly because the mechanisms introduced through the

common assessment framework, the improved systems we have introduced over the last

few years has made a difference in terms of communication. There is no longer a

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requirement to have the same system, and that introduces a different challenge, and that is

something we need to be very mindful of.

Craig Whittaker, MP: As the national leader as such, are you convinced we have

now got strong corporate parenting responsibilities. I know the responsibilities are there,

but we do act on them, which is always the challenge?


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: What I would say is there is a complete

understanding across all 152 local authorities they have a corporate parenting responsibility.

However, the extent to which that is carried out to the highest possible standard will vary,

and that is reflected in all the inspection reports that have been published. The test of the

system is what the young people tell us. The Minister was telling you that, and we believe

that to be the case, the users of the system. I would suggest where it works well you have

got all the safeguards in place etc. Where the system is inconsistent and patchy, that is

where young people slip through the nets. That is what is most important to me about the

systems we have in place. The establishment in most authorities of corporate parenting

committees are a tremendous opportunity for members to be held to account for their

responsibilities, so I agree with you - the system will be understood - but clearly there will

be inconsistency in parts, but I think it is a whole lot better than it used to be.

Alex Cunningham, MP: There was an earlier evidence session when we talked

about the need for placing the trafficked children much further away from home, yet there

is an inconsistency of quality of service. I wonder if you have some comments on what

could be done to improve universal services in relation to such children? The other thing is

following on from long distance places. On Teesside we don’t recognise this very much, we

are a much lower population, smaller authorities, there is actually not much movement. It

is extremely rare for me to be told that a child had moved into our area, it just didn’t

happen. I wonder what needs to happen nationally to try and reduce the number of long

distance placements. Doesn’t more need to be done by government local authorities in

order to minimise that disruption and therefore protect the service young people can get

from local authorities?


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: I was formerly the Director of Social Services in

Durham so I am quite familiar with the area.

Alex Cunningham, MP: We are neighbours.


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: We are indeed, and I am familiar with the issues.

To deal with the trafficking issue first, we have seen a great improvement - both a reduction

in the number - and also again I know you have had all sorts of evidence - and I think it is fair

19

to say the system is much better than it used to be. When I worked in Luton we had a

number of children come through the airport there, the systems became very tight and very

good both between the national and local systems there. I believe and I am advised by my

colleagues - certainly among my own staff - the problem is once the trafficked child is

identified and comes into the system.

In relation to reducing long distance placements I have already said there are mechanisms in

place that should enable that to happen, and I think the changes that are gradually being

introduced - and I welcome the fresh look at adoption, we are heavily involved with

government on that - but one of the things we are seeing now is an increased diversity of

provision both locally and further afield. In other words you can’t do it all yourself. Even if

you are a big dispersed authority like County Durham, I know that there is a lot more joint

commissioning of specialised placements, because one thing we are now much better at -

but need to get better at yet - is ensuring the right child gets placed in the right placement

with the right level of support at the right time. Even if you are a big authority it is not

economic to try and do it all themselves. So developing the right spread with all providers,

and that requires much smarter commissioning, we know a lot about what works, about

making the assessments more robust, ensuring as local authorities we are getting best

value, but more money does not always pay for better quality. I agree there is an issue

there, better smarter joint commissioning is where the action should be.

Shan Nicholas, Chief Executive of The Children’s Society: I wonder if you actually

had any thoughts to yourself in terms of models of good practice in relation to data

collection and data sharing. Also in relation to the point you were just making about

commissioning - indeed it may well be you can’t share them with us here - but whether you

can share them with the inquiry? Particularly in relation to your last point about joint

commissioning?


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: In terms of models of good practice in

commissioning, I haven’t got them with me, there is no problem about sharing them with

the inquiry, there are plenty of illustrations where there is good joint commissioning. I can

tell you a little bit about what is happening in London. In North London there are good

commissioning practices where a number of boroughs are working together and that is

already producing huge dividends, both in quality places, because you are looking to place in

only good or outstanding placements, and the price you get to pay because of economies of

scale. There are plenty of regional illustrations. We can send you some examples of that.

Data sharing, I think there are always improvements that can be made, and now with the

absence ofContactpoint , since Contactpoint is no longer there, work does need to be done

to facilitate improved data sharing across professional groups. We are contributing as an

Association to some work the Department of Health has commissioned around a child

protection data sharing project. Dame Fiona Caldicott has also initiated a review of

20

information sharing, which we welcome, and is trying to simplify and streamline the

process. We accept and agree, as I said earlier, there are risks that young people slip

through the system, bearing in mind Ministers recently decommissioned the national eCAF

system, the electronic Assessment Framework - basically we need to look at different means

by which we can ensure that our systems are in place. We absolutely support that. There is

another issue I would like to raise round data sharing. With an increased diversity, provision

and commissioners, particularly when you think about missing children who are not in care,

one of the issues that is of concern to us is around the academy position, where academies

do not have to share information, and it is really important as we move towards an

increasingly diverse, and increasingly autonomous provision within schools that we develop

more sophisticated systems.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: The real way to sort this out is probably to get local agencies

working together. There has always been barriers between social care and other agencies

because of their particular child protection issues. What do you think is the biggest barrier

to local authorities, local agencies, working together, sharing information, because unless

that happens we are not going to come up with a risk assessment which is needed to

prevent harm coming to some of these young people? It is a swirling around of information

that helps assess risk properly. What stops the swirling around?


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: Good communication systems don’t necessarily by

definition produce good communication....

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: That is deeply depressing.


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: That is something I am afraid I have learnt over a

period of time. You can spend a lot of time as we have done, improving our systems, our

protocols on a multi-agency basis, the introduction of the common assessment framework,

team around the child, the implementation of Eileen Munro’s Review. There are ample

structures in place to ensure communication is robust. More obviously needs to be done -

and I have already said that - for mobile families, families across boundaries - particularly

when children are not in care. I think that the kind of barriers that are in place, they are the

obvious barriers around confidentiality, and that is why we welcome all the various reviews

around information sharing - because cracking that one - there is also ensuring that

communication works at every level in the organisation. That is absolutely vital. It is all very

well for people like me, I sit round the safeguarding board, the children’s trust, the meetings

that I have regularly, and for us to share information, we need to make sure that is shared

from the top to the bottom of organisations. To give you a good illustration - it is

fundamental - a basic tool of my trade, and a lot of my colleagues do it, we spend a bit of

time on the front line to understand what those barriers are, and that’s as basic as going out

with a social worker on a child protection visit to understand what goes on. You get more

21

from that than reading the files. That doesn’t answer your problem but I think the point I

am making is the systems are in place. Where the systems are not robust there actually is

no excuse for it, both in terms of regulatory terms, in terms of statutory, the systems are

there. It is the people that operate those systems - that might sound depressing.

Alex Cunningham, MP: I may have detected - maybe wrongly detected - a slight

weariness in the way you shook your head when you mentioned the words the safeguarding

board and the children’s trust. I attended the safeguarding board and everybody in senior

roles were round those tables, and I wonder whether they are missing a trick – I nearly used

the word fail – are they missing a trick to use those very good communication systems in

order to drive them through?


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: I think there is always an opportunity. Eileen

Munro’s work has provided very useful - yes she has made comments and strengthened the

role of the safeguarding boards which we welcome - but ensuring the systems of

accountability - who is accountable for what. You were wrong to detect weariness around

that....

Alex Cunningham, MP: I apologise.


Director of Children Services, Lambeth: Weariness because I have seen these kind of

discussions over very many years, if there is weariness it is because of that. I actually think

LSCBs and the children’s trusts are well placed with the right people. Having the right

people of the right seniority is of crucial importance, and that applies to health and

wellbeing boards, and I am really pleased that the establishment of the health and wellbeing

boards, whether you have a children’s trust - and a lot of places continue to have them, and

I support that personally - is ensuring that there are more health professionals, the diversity

of the world of safeguarding is now better recognised. Certainly in my LSCBs we are having

more conversations now about missing children generally, which I think is a good thing.

There is always a temptation to concentrate on that which is at the top of the list, i.e. the

most vulnerable, and what we have to concentrate on is preventing children getting to the

top of the list, because by that time it is too late.

Ann Coffey, MP, Chair: Thank you very much for your time and your evidence, it is

very interesting to have that kind of overview.

(From the Shorthand Notes of Davina Hyde, Carmel Legal

Telephone Number: 01737 830013

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Email: [email protected] www.carmellegal.co.uk)

all-party parliamentary group for runaway and … · 2014-07-18 · all-party parliamentary group...

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