Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, this group of amendments concerns children, particularly their social care. We have laid these amendments because we could find nothing in the Bill that mentions this. Children’s services will be commissioned potentially by six different groups. The Commissioning Board at national and at sub-national level, particularly through health visitors, will be responsible for the public health of children under five—until 2015 when that will transfer to local authorities—and also for primary care. That is often the first point of contact for problems in children which require a great deal of social care intervention integrated with healthcare provision. Public Health England is responsible for public health campaigns and health protection. The clinical commissioning groups will again be involved potentially at two levels; supra-locally and locally. The sixth area is the local authorities with the healthy child programmes for those aged five to 18, school nurses and child health for the nought to five year-olds after 2015, which is when the health visitors transfer. However, all these different aspects of healthcare interrelate very closely with children’s social care. There are concerns over accountability, how the services will keep track of complex provision and who will be responsible for children’s health and welfare, particularly as regards obese children and those who have been bereaved. There is concern about children’s reaction to grief and the impact that this has on social behaviours, and how the public health services which deal with the prevention of childhood obesity can be evaluated and held to account. Health visitors are the eyes and ears of the child aspects of primary care. However, there is concern about how they will relate to the primary care and accident and emergency sectors and social workers when they transfer to local authorities. How will the information on the at-risk register be transferred and how will access to primary care records be speeded up? Will the IT systems be compatible to enable effective information transfer between child and adult services, particularly when children who have multiple social problems reach an age when they will be transferred to adult services? There is particular concern about children with severe learning difficulties and developmental delays who require a great deal of social care input. They cannot be their own advocates and are extremely dependent on others. Therefore, it is important that the relevant information is successfully transferred. We know from previous tragic child abuse cases that information which has to be moved from one sector to another often gets lost, drops through the gaps and children suffer as a result. There must be a smooth transition from one carer to another, particularly where children’s and adult social services are provided by different providers. It is important that adult social services should be satisfied that the children’s social services have done their job properly and thoroughly because if they have not, the patient will suffer and adult social services may be faced with an unfair cost incurred as a result of a deficiency in the services provided by the children’s social services. Our amendments do not propose a radical solution to the problem. We are fairly confident that the Government will not accept them as they will not want further major complications in what is already a very complicated Bill. They are simply designed to provide that at some time in the future Monitor will be given the power to check that all providers of children’s social care are doing their job properly, and that when they transfer a child to adult social care there is a smooth and sensitive transfer of responsibility and a complete transfer of information so that there are no gaps through which these children can fall. We look forward to hearing what the Government’s solution is to this problem. We rather hope that the Minister might offer us some discussions outside the Committee to try to address some of the real problems that arise when children, including those aged nought to five, transfer from children’s services into adult services, given the gaps in information provision which can occur at the transition point. I beg to move.