My Lords, I declare my interests. I, too, was a member of the Adoption Legislation Select Committee. I have what feels like a lifelong involvement with Action for Children, which certainly goes back to when I was very small and collecting money for the National Children’s Home, which has changed its name a few times. I think I am now an ambassador for it. I also had some experience of supervising adoptions when I was a social worker, but that was a very long time ago so I am not sure that it is really a relevant interest because the legislation and everything else was very different.
One of the things that were different in those days was that most children who were placed for adoption were babies. When I hear the rhetoric about adoption from the Government at the moment, I sometimes suspect that they still think that that is the case. The reality is that most children being placed for adoption now, before the changes, are not babies, and that if the Bill as it stands becomes law, that will be even more true.
I have worked with and still know several people who are both foster parents and adopters; some are just foster parents and some are just adopters, while others have done both. They perform a remarkable job. Far too often we take for granted the work, the commitment and emotional support that they put in and the trauma that their lives and their families are put through, and it is very important that we do not do that.
I have concerns about this issue. Even when I was a social work student, I did an adoption supervision and took it to court. I was very impressed with, and supported, the judgment and the words of the presiding judge. I know that you really have to get the law right. You have to ensure that the family understand their rights, and that the adoptive family understand not only their rights but the rights of the parents who are placing their children for adoption.
We are talking here about going to a further stage, where the parents are not placing the children for adoption but the local authority will decide that there should be permanence, and therefore fostering for adoption should be considered. That is legally a new situation. I need convincing by the Minister that the Government have done the work to ensure that the family court will not then come back and say, “Actually, we are not convinced that the rights of this child and its natural family were properly considered in your decision around permanence and therefore around placing for fostering up to adoption”. That means that when the case gets to court for adoption, the judge may then be tempted to say, “I’m not convinced that this is in the interests of the child or that the process has ensured that the rights of the child, which are expressed very clearly in all sorts of places, including the UN convention, have actually had due attention
paid to them”. We would then be putting social workers and local authorities in an invidious position, and we really have to take account of that.
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Now, all of us would want children and young people to have permanence and to be sure—certainly more sure than they have been in the past—about their opportunities in the future. My experience in working with adolescents—I happened to specialise in that when I was working—was that they always wanted you to explain. They wanted to know why it had gone wrong; they wanted to know why they could not live back at home; they wanted to know who their father was; they wanted to understand it. When I was talking to social workers in either Germany or Denmark—I cannot remember which—about care, they said that they involved natural parents much more in the care experience. I would go into a children’s home in the morning and there would be parents at breakfast. The social workers would say, “We are not pretending to be the children’s parents”. I think we need to rethink our relationship with children in care, particularly young people in care. They would say, “We are not there in loco parentis; we are there to help them understand what has happened from where they were at home to where they are now and help them to plot how they could carry on from there”.
When we know that many of the children coming into care, for whatever reason, are now older and likely to be much more diverse in what brings them into care than in the past, we have the responsibility—as other noble Lords have said—to be clear about the evidence of how they will react and what the outcomes will be of whatever interventions we are legislating for. That is what we are asking for in the amendments to Clause 1. That clause changes the legal relationship in ways that we have not had in this country before. That is very important: I believe that we should have the confidence to intervene at the earliest point. I spent some of my ministerial career introducing evidence-based early intervention programmes such as the Nurse Family Partnership. As the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, said, we demand very difficult decisions from the professionals working with the families. We have the responsibility to make sure that those professionals are confident in the legislation, confident in the process and confident that when they get to the end of that process, they will not be criticised for not having done what the judge or the UN convention—or whatever it might be—demands of our approach to this. We have a responsibility to be much clearer than the clause currently is.
I massively support kinship care. I recommend that the Minister read the recent book by my right honourable friend Alan Johnson about the strength of kinship care. We have the responsibility to make sure that that can happen. We might sometimes have to say, “No, it cannot happen”, but we have the responsibility to examine it. There is a real fear that the Bill’s provisions will mean that it is less examined than it is at the moment, and we know that far too often it is not examined well.
I also caution the Minister: I know very well that one of the things he is trying to do is, in a sense, bring local authorities to heel by threatening them with
really draconian legislation. I was Local Government Minister for four years, and I would just say: be cautious and deal with local authorities as partners, not as people you threaten to get them in line. As we always say about working with young people, treat them in such a way that you get the best out of them. From bitter experience, that is how I think you ought to work with local government, too.
The last thing that I want to say is that I really object to this Bill being run at the same time as the Care Bill is on the Floor of the House. There are issues in the two Bills that the Government should see as coming together. This is not a matter for the usual channels, and I say that as an ex-Chief Whip; you cannot go back to the usual channels and say, “That’s what they wanted”. This should be a matter of government determination. These two Bills should be seen as complementary and, therefore, the people who have a commitment to them and an interest in them should be able to contribute and to vote. They are not able to do so at the moment, and I hope that the Minister will take that away and come back with a better answer than we have had to date as to why the two are coinciding in their passage through this House.