Clause 38 - Power to establish registration scheme in England
Children Bill [Lords]
3:00 pm
Mr Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre, Labour)
I would be much less defensive than the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole because I cannot honestly believe that the Government are proposing such an inadequate scheme as that expressed in clause 37 and introducing the possibility of a registration scheme only in a sunset clause. No one in this country has the first clue how many privately fostered children there are. In 2001, the Department of Health estimated that there were 10,000 privately fostered children in the country and that 50 per cent. of them had not been notified to the local authorities. Goodness knows where it got that statistic from, because there is no basis on which they could estimate the number not known to the local authorities.
Victoria Climbie was privately fostered with a great aunt—that would go beyond the definition of a close relative. The Children Act 1989 states that a child is privately fostered if they stay for more than 28 days with someone who does not have parental responsibility or is not a relative. That is a very long time indeed.
The Government are aware of the experience of introducing regulations on child minding. People who cared for children in their own homes for more than two hours a day had to stop doing that in an unofficial capacity and become registered, a condition that has swiftly achieved the broadest acceptance in our society. Now, if parents need a child minder, a list is readily available of people who are police checked, approved and inspected and who can provide a decent service for their children.
Worryingly, private fostering is a cultural phenomenon. It is part of the culture in west African countries, especially Nigeria. Many people from west Africa come to this country to work or study, and they seek a private fostering arrangement for their children. Many of the people with whom they wish to leave their
children will not be known to them, or they may be aware of them through the extended family or through a network back home.
Surely, Victoria Climbie's extremely responsible and sensitive parents should have been able, if they had needed their child to be looked after, to check whether the local authority had a list of people prepared to take on private fostering arrangements. If they decided that they wanted to place their child with a particular person, they should have been able to ensure that that person had been thoroughly checked out by the local authority.
I do not know why the Government are so resistant to taking the sensible action urged on them by a previous chief inspector of social services, Sir William Utting. One wishes he had urged them to take that action while he was still in post. He suggested that legislation be introduced to require local authorities to maintain a register of private foster carers in their area who are approved as suitable; that it should be an offence to foster a child privately if the carer is unregistered or to place a child with an unregistered carer; and that standards should be published with the criteria against which private foster carers should be assessed for registration. The standards would be based on the current ones for child minders and would include elements of national standards for foster care.
I do not understand why the Government are not prepared to introduce such simple legislation now, rather than waiting for the future or perhaps, God help us, for another tragedy to occur in the meantime. We have debated this issue before in considering Bills; we tried to amend the Care Standards Bill in 2000. However, the Government are reluctant to take the issue on, which is extremely puzzling.
What I am urging is sensible, straightforward and profoundly in the interests of children and parents. It would ensure child safety. Thousands of children, including, perhaps, some of those from whom we never hear again after they pass through the hands of the immigration authorities at our ports, would become known to us. The measure would support Government policies aimed at defeating the sexual exploitation of children trafficked into this country and the exploitation of children coming into the country for domestic servitude. I suspect that that is a much greater problem than we fully understand. We would see progress on all those matters.
A short while ago, there was a meeting of Africans Unite Against Child Abuse. That excellent organisation is rooted in the African community in this country. As part of a week of events that AFRUCA was undertaking, I went to a discussion about child care in the back room of an African restaurant in Dalston. One lady stood up and exhorted everyone present to acknowledge that many people from the community living in London seek, after they have come to this country, worked and acquired some money and standing, to bring a child into the country on a private fostering basis, even though the child will not be looked after properly as a member of the
household. The child is used as a domestic servant to support the work of the household and to look after the children. The people of AFRUCA are extremely brave in raising such issues at national level. The Government should forget all about amendments to this useless notification scheme, which puts children at risk, and install a proper registration scheme now.