New Clause 12
Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]
1:30 pm
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
I entirely take the Minister’s point and I am not suggesting that there was a conspiracy. However, the evidence supplied by social workers closest to the case will weigh heavily in court and, without there having to be any sort of conspiracy, if a claim is being made by an employee of the local authority and that authority stands to benefit from a performance reward grant, clearly there is the potential for that employee to over-egg the claim when otherwise they might not have done so. That situation does not require a conspiracy.
Part of the problem is the pressure on the courts at the moment. I have sat in family courts where the judge will tell me that there have been changes in social workers and the paperwork is enormous—we will go on to talk about transparency in family courts when we discuss another amendment very shortly—so I know that the scrutiny of some of these cases is not as tight as it might be. On that basis, some of these numbers, hypothetically, could be raised higher than we would like.
The point is that, ultimately, the overall adoption figures have not risen recently and we need them to rise; in particular, we need them to rise more for older children than for babies. That is a real problem that we need to face. However, I hope that when the Minister endeavours to tackle it again—I realise that all sorts of things are happening that are ongoing—he will not revert to coming up with some sort of financial incentive that is based on numerical targets, because that will only give rise to further suspicions that children are being inappropriately adopted at an early age who would otherwise not necessarily justify being adopted.
I do not wish to put this matter to a vote. On that basis, I am grateful for the debate that we have had and I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.