My Lords, may I welcome the Minister to the first meeting of his first Bill Committee? I thank him for the opportunity to discuss some of these issues in advance. I hope that all of us together can build on the commitments that we made at Second Reading to make these provisions as good as possible because they affect some of the most vulnerable children.
Part 1, as we know, concerns adoption. Clause 1 would enable agencies, as the Minister said, to place a child in a fostering for adoption placement. This would apply to any child coming into care for whom a family placement is not possible and before any decision to move towards adoption has been approved by the adoption panel or the court through a placement order. We certainly share the Government’s concern
that where adoption is the best option for a child, any delay in matching and placing the child should be reduced to a minimum. We share the Government’s overall intention. I am also pleased that the Government have listened to the debate on kinship care and brought forward Amendment 1 today, which addresses that issue.
In introducing the amendments from the Opposition Front Bench, I would point out that some of the amendments were placed in respect of the original Clause 1. Those are Amendments 4, 6, 8 and 9. Since then, we have seen the Government’s Amendment 1 and we have tabled further amendments, Amendments 2, 3 and 10. It is to those more recent amendments that I am predominantly speaking at the moment.
While welcoming the Government’s amendment, I still think there needs to be further improvement to the measures proposed in two important respects. The first is kinship care, by which I mean care by a relative, friend or other person connected with the child, as defined by Section 22C(6)(a) of the Children Act 1989. The requirement in government Amendment 1 to consider kinship care as a first step appears to be—I will listen carefully to what the Minister says about this—a weaker prescription than that in subsection (7) of the current legislation, which requires local authorities not just to consider, but to give preference to, kinship placements where they are possible. Furthermore, Amendment 1 still disapplies subsections (7) to (9) in their entirety. These are requirements in the current legislation to place the child near their home, not to disrupt education or training, to enable siblings to live together, to accommodate any disability the child has and to be within the local authority’s area. We think that those are all sensible requirements that enhance the stability of the placement for the child. Therefore, our Amendment 3 simultaneously requires that stronger requirement on kinship care to take preference and retains those other criteria for placement, including keeping siblings together.
However, even with the current legislation, many people share a strong belief that local authorities could do more to explore the potential for kinship care, so Amendment 10 proposes the introduction of pre-proceedings work and family group conferences, designed to ensure that, at an early stage and in a systematic way, the family is encouraged to identify possibilities for the child within the wider family network.
It is easy to understand why family members might not initially come forward at an early stage to suggest options without such structures and support. They might be concerned not to upset the parents who are—obviously, by definition—their relatives. Many often feel, certainly, that they have to wait for the decision of the court as to whether the child is free for adoption, but by then it is too late. Therefore, Amendment 10 would build into the process an early examination under professional guidance of kinship care possibilities.
Our second concern about the clause, as it would be if amended by government Amendment 1, is about the extension of fostering for adoption placements potentially for all children coming into care through whatever route. As currently formulated, Amendment 1 would
require the local authority to consider a fostering for adoption placement for every child for whom kinship care was not possible.
I am very much in favour, as we all are, of reducing delay in achieving quality alternative permanent placements for children who need them. I have supported the development of concurrent planning adoption, which is the template for fostering for adoption placements. Concurrent placement has undoubtedly been beneficial for the children placed early on with foster carers approved to adopt. However, we need to be clear that concurrent planning has so far been used only for babies under two born into families where it is already well known that the parents have serious and chronic problems, such as long-standing drug addiction, which interfere with their ability to parent, and who have often already had to relinquish previous children.
In the pilot run by Thomas Coram that the Minister mentioned, 61% of the children were referred for concurrent planning placement at or at about birth and 95% were under one year old, so this is a very special group. In the 11 years of that pilot, only 59 children were placed by this method, so carefully selected are the children for very good reasons. Of those 59, two were returned to the birth family and 57 were adopted, with their original foster carers having been approved for adoption, and they had very good outcomes. However, opening up to the whole diverse range of children coming into care a model conceived specifically for a very small and tightly drawn group of babies seems to be dubious, not least because there is no evidence base as to the possible outcomes for children and families with different characteristics, particularly for older children.
Most particularly, the requirement to consider a fostering for adoption placement would apply also to children placed into care voluntarily by their parents under Section 29 of the Children Act. By definition, these parents have not relinquished their children for adoption, nor have the local authorities applied for a care order. I do not think it is appropriate even to consider placing such children on a pathway to adoption without the fully informed and independently witnessed consent of the parents, as is required by current legislation. That is why our Amendment 2 would make it clear that the requirement to consider a fostering for adoption placement would apply only to children for whom the local authority had a care order. Indeed, I think that the unintended consequences of not exempting from this requirement children who come into care voluntarily may be to deter parents in the future from approaching local authorities with a view to voluntarily placing a child into care when they are in difficulty.
Briefly, there are a number of other issues on which we should like to hear the Minister’s views before deciding whether the Bill might need further amendment on Report. The main issue is that there is still a lack of clarity, including in the draft guidance that the Minister helpfully issued last week, as to when in the process a local authority may be judged to be considering adoption. We welcome the intention outlined in the guidance to require the director of children’s services to approve a decision to use a fostering for adoption placement and to inform parents and prospective adopters in writing.
However, as the draft guidance makes very clear, the local authority will be required to consider a fostering for adoption placement even when the first priority for that child is to be rehabilitated with the birth parents. I think that that is very questionable. When will considering adoption come into play? The guidance says that this will vary from case to case. That is not nearly tight enough and a defined trigger may be needed, possibly as suggested in the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee.
Secondly, there is very little emphasis in the guidance on matching. Thinking about fostering for adoption placements, that is a very important issue. It is worth noting that under the current arrangements it is very often during the fostering phase that detailed knowledge about the child comes to light with professional and expert foster carers. They may learn additional things about a child’s disability or behavioural problems, or the child may disclose experiences to the foster carers that were not previously known, and all this goes into the matching process to try to ensure that the adoptive placement, when it occurs, is as secure as possible. I am concerned that in a fostering for adoption placement, outside of the narrow range of the babies I talked about, of whom knowledge is probably pretty full, issues may come to light during that placement that deter those potential adopters currently fostering a child from proceeding with the placement any further because of the nature of the issues that come to light.
Finally, there is an important issue of timely planning for permanency across all alternative permanent options and I regret that the Bill as it stands does not say very much about those other options. However, we look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on these issues. I beg to move
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