My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this wide-ranging debate today. It bodes well for the energy and expertise that will be brought to bear as we scrutinise the Bill in its future stages.
As my noble friend Lady Hughes has made clear, we support reform and the opportunity to improve standards for children in care, children with special educational needs and family justice. The Every Child Matters framework introduced by the previous Government remains an essential guiding principle and helped to transform the lives of many young people, but more can and needs to be done. The Bill provides a welcome opportunity to push forward and demand more of all the agencies impacting on the lives of children.
There is a great deal in the Bill that we support, but there are also glaring omissions and several fundamental differences on policy, which we will explore in detail. Our starting, middle and end point is the need to put the interests of the child first. We have the most concerns where we believe that the Bill veers away from these principles. That message has echoed around the Chamber today. I also agree with my noble friends Lady Morris and Lord Judd that the issue is not just about the wording on the face of the Bill; the dedication of staff, their willingness to collaborate across boundaries and the cultural climate in which they operate all have an important impact on the delivery of services and change.
In that context, what changes would we like to see in the Bill? First, I think we all agree that it is unacceptable that it takes on average two and a half years to be placed for adoption. This has to change, and we are pleased with the progress already being made by those involved to cut the unnecessary delays. We have already seen that by concerted and co-ordinated action, local authorities and courts have been able to act voluntarily to speed up the process without legislation.
Returning to our original theme, we are concerned that the new policy emphasis on the speed of adoption will not always be in the best interests of the child, nor is it a realistic option for many children, particularly older ones, which is why we feel that other forms of permanency including kinship care and long-term fostering should have equal weight and be the first consideration where options are being weighed up. I was very pleased to hear the Minister confirm that this was a concern that he was prepared to address.
We also see a danger that early fostering for adoption can create unrealistic expectations among potential adopters and children, with greater stress and pain should the placement not last. This is why it is important that children should not be placed for adoption unless a formal decision about their future has been made. It is also important that their continued connection and relationship with their siblings post-adoption is planned at the outset of proceedings. Importantly, we also share the concerns of the Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation, particularly about the removal of the need to consider ethnicity in adoption. These concerns have been echoed by a number of noble Lords today. The answer surely has to be that it should be included in the statutory welfare checklist so that it becomes one of several factors considered, but not the overriding one.
The Bill gives far-reaching powers to the Secretary of State to outsource local authority adoption services. We share the concerns that have been raised today by a number of noble Lords about how these powers might be used. We will be seeking to define, qualify and add a process of parliamentary scrutiny for those decisions before we are prepared to see those recommendations going forward.
With regard to family courts, again we are concerned that the dogmatic time limits might jeopardise the interests of the child. Of course we share the desire to speed up care proceedings, but we are concerned that the rigid application of 26 weeks might result in complex issues in a child’s background being overlooked.
More fundamentally, we are concerned at the emphasis on shared parenting being introduced as a presumption in separation or divorce, and this point has been well made by a number of other noble Lords. Obviously it is desirable to maintain the involvement of both parents but this should not be at the expense of a child’s welfare, and there is a danger that this paramount principle will be compromised in the new formulation. We look forward to exploring and improving this wording as we progress in the Bill.
We will also be seeking to ensure that continued access to siblings remains a central consideration of any care order, and we hope that noble Lords will support us on this. We will be seeking measures to better support young and vulnerable witnesses in court to ensure that their voice can be heard without adding to their trauma.
On the issue of special educational needs, we will again ensure that the interests of the child are at the heart of our proposals. We have heard many powerful speeches today, and many examples of families struggling to access support. It should not be the case that those with the sharpest elbows or an encyclopaedic knowledge of the system get the best provision for their child, but all too often this has been the case. We welcome the Government’s aspiration to transform the service.
We have heard some divergent views today about whether or not this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for reform; I suppose that the jury is out on that. Either way, we intend to ensure that the wording in the Bill is unambiguous and comprehensive so that the rights make sense and everybody can understand them. That is why we are concerned that much of the detail, such as the new code of practice, will be set out in
secondary legislation and subject to the negative resolution procedure, which by any standards is not a sufficient level of parliamentary scrutiny.
Noble Lords have raised a range of important issues on special educational needs this afternoon and it is not possible to comment on them all. However, I will give noble Lords a flavour of some of the issues that we will be addressing in Committee. Services should be streamlined and integrated, which is why we will argue for the definition of SEN to include all children with disabilities, whether or not they are judged to have an immediate educational need. We will aim to ensure that local authorities have a duty to secure social care provision within the overall duty to provide education, health and care plans. We will want to explore what can replace the more graduated approach of school action and school action plus provision, which has provided substantial care in the past for so many young people.
We will argue for a single point of appeal for parents if services are deemed to be inadequate or failing, a case well made by my noble friend Lord Touhig. On the local offer, we will require Local authorities to be specific about services available and will expect them to meet a minimum standard. We also support the case, made passionately by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, that the barriers that prevent disabled children from choosing mainstream education should be removed.
While we welcome the concept of personal budgets, we share the concern raised by several noble Lords that the pathfinder pilots are simply in too early a stage for us to draw substantial conclusions. Again, we would like to learn far more about the results of those projects before we specify too much detail in the ongoing legislation.
While we welcome the increase in age provision to 25, we will address the loopholes that might allow some young people to fall through the net, such as those in young offender institutions—an issue which that already been flagged up by the Minister—those moving into higher education, and young adults with complex needs transitioning into adult services, a problem described eloquently by my noble friend Lord Patel of Bradford.
On childminder agencies and early years provision, we remain sceptical of the Government’s commitment. Despite the known long-term advantages of early years investment, we have seen a 40% cut in the early intervention grant compared to 2010 and a massively unpopular attempt to increase child/staff nursery and childminder ratios. This is why we will be tabling amendments to protect the current ratios; although the Government have rolled back on that proposal, we do not trust them not to come back with similarly ill thought-through proposals that could damage the interests of young people. We will also want to allow further consultation before childminder agencies can be introduced so that the full implications can be considered and the issue of improved inspection addressed. My noble friend Lady Massey made a powerful case for the importance of PSHE. We will use this opportunity to push for the inclusion of PSHE education in all key stages of the national curriculum, to provide a better understanding of relationships and improved child safety in future.
We welcome the Government’s plan to improve parental leave and extend requests for flexible working. My noble friend Lord Stevenson rightly made the case that shared parenting is normally, and obviously, to the benefit of children. We will want to explore the application of these changes to ensure that they can be universally taken up, and my noble friend Lady Lister made a strong case for further scrutiny on that. We see those changes as a further step forward, building on the family-friendly achievements of the previous Labour Government. However, we also agree with my noble friend Lady Gibson that it is important to ensure that existing employment rights are not diluted in this process. We will also want to explore what further help can be given to young carers. That is an important issue raised by noble Lords around the Chamber, and we look forward to debating the details of the new rights for young carers in the Bill.
The Bill covers a wide mandate and several departments. It is inevitable that some noble Lords will want to concentrate on specific sections of the Bill but, whatever the focus, there remains a common thread running through the clauses. As I said at the outset, our yardstick will be what is in the best interests of the child and how we can achieve better outcomes for all young people. In listening to the debate today, it is clear that there is an emerging consensus about the improvements that we would like to see in the Bill and on which we can focus in Committee. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that there will be genuine dialogue and, unlike his colleagues in the Commons, a genuine welcome for amendments that meet our shared objectives. On this basis, we look forward to working on a cross-party basis and with the ministerial team to improve the Bill.
10.27 pm