Clause 18
Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]
12:45 pm
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 15, in clause 18, page 14, line 27, at end insert—
‘(2A) In each of subsections (1) and (2), after ‘responsible authority’ insert ‘within one working day.’.
We now come to the subject of out-of-area placements, which has arisen already during the Committee, and reflects a concern which I and the my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster mentioned previously—what happens with children who are placed out of area in terms of notification of responsible agencies in that area
A child would typically be placed in a children’s home and somewhere around 11 to 13 per cent. of children in the care system are in a residential home, but it also involves care homes, independent hospitals, NHS hospitals or residential schools, including maintained boarding schools, non-maintained specialist schools, independent boarding schools and colleges, as set out in the guidance. What this amendment is seeking to do is tighten up the notification process.
What happens at the moment is that if Stoke, for example, places a child in a residential home in my own authority of West Sussex, for example—I have already mentioned some 700 children in my county are estimated to be there having been placed by an outside authority—then good guidance, reinforced by Lord Warner some years ago when he was the responsible Minister, is that the authority where that child is placed should be notified that that child is placed there. That must be good practice on the basis that there is a child with particular needs who finds him or herself out of a familiar area.
In Worthing we now have at least 10 independent children’s homes, many including children who are from completely different environments and from quite a long way away. I have to say that things are getting better and inspection regimes for some of these children’s homes are improving, but if something goes wrong, it is usually the local children’s services department who gets put in the frame, even though that child is not their responsibility, or the local police have to pick up the pieces, or the local magistrates then deal with a child who has committed some offence if it has gone really wrong.
I think I cited earlier in the Committee today, and on Second Reading, the response from the probation service union, giving an extraordinary figure of something like over 80 per cent. of children who had appeared in the magistrates court had been in the care system but placed out of authority area, and the first the probation service union had heard about it was when the probation service officers were in court.
That cannot be any good for all of the local agencies involved who then have to come forward and step into the breach for somebody who is not strictly speaking their responsibility. It is not good for people living in the vicinity of some of these residential homes when things go wrong, as happened to us in Worthing but, ultimately, it is not good for the child as well. The child is being let down.
The purpose of amendment No. 15 is to tighten up the reporting mechanisms so that when a child is placed in an authority area outside the placing authority, there is a strict, defined duty of the placing authority to notify the authority area in which that child is placed—nominally, the director of children’s services would be the contact point—that that child has been placed there and we have suggested that it should be within one working day.