Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

My Lords, I ask the leave of the House in speaking to this amendment, as I clearly have a vested interest in it. I thank the noble Lord for moving it—and your Lordships will not be surprised to know that I do not oppose it. I very much welcome the fact that it mentions both the courts and CAFCASS, because it is important for proper resources to be made available for all contact activities in the court, whether they are mediation services, contact centres, parenting education or other input such as perpetrator programmes and so on. I am too experienced a campaigner and chair of non-departmental bodies to ask for unlimited or even adequate funds, or even for very limited funds, without making a proper case. I am only too ready to admit the faults and shortcomings of CAFCASS in its early years. But I emphasise now that the CAFCASS board is committed to reforming and improving CAFCASS, and we do not want that aim to be jeopardised by a lack of small amounts, in the scheme of things, of extra money. We have not hesitated, even with major budget difficulties, to drive through a range of practice and productivity improvements that have included a drastic reduction in national office staffing levels, devolving more budgets to frontline services, controlling public law backlogs, despite increasing demand of up to 20 per cent in some regions. But that has been at the cost of being able to give the pay rises that our hard-worked staff deserved and at the cost, too, of seriously putting a brake on much-needed training programmes and upgrading of vital IT systems. So we are already at the limit and could not possibly deliver on the extra responsibilities placed on us without extra resources, unless the expectations of other organisations in the system change as we have always maintained that they must for us to deliver within existing resources. Our staff are ready and willing to change their private law practice—for example, on early intervention models instead of long reports; but we can do that only if the culture surrounding some courts changes. If resources are released in that way, we can redirect them. That requires a major culture change, however, and a change in the trend of cases to become ever more complex. That is a worry to us. We also face great competition for our workforce. As we heard today, local authorities are increasing their rates of pay, and we cannot compete with those. We are attempting to strengthen our infrastructure, which has always been needed, but it is a constant struggle, and the demands that we make of our staff endanger morale. The proposals in the Bill offer huge opportunities for a new way of working with children and families, but we cannot do that justice without proper resources. Moreover, I remind your Lordships that investment in families at a time of such great difficulties saves vast amounts of money later on, by lessening the impact of family breakdown on the children’s ability to achieve in later life. We must always bear that in mind whenever there is any discussion of resources.