Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I start by saying how sad I was not to be present for Second Reading; I was obliged to be elsewhere. I very much support the concept of the Bill. In principle, I support the amendments. We need to have a specific requirement, where appropriate, for family conferencing or family intervention. One can always deal with it by saying, ““where appropriate””, to cover the situation that my noble friend Lady Howarth, has rightly raised. Of course, to bring some families into the same room is a recipe for the police. My experience as a family judge trying care cases—I am certain that my noble friend Lord Elystan-Morgan will have had exactly the same experience—is that halfway through the case, you find that the parents say that they were never given the chance to take part. In some cases, that was true; in others it was not. Perhaps more importantly, that required the judge to ask social services whether they had looked at the wider family. I have to tell the Committee that, during I cannot remember how many years as a family judge, there were numerous examples where social services had gone rushing ahead and had never looked for the aunt, the cousin or the grandparent who was the obvious person to have the child. My feeling is that if we do not have a specific requirement, whether in primary legislation, in a statutory instrument or in guidance backed by a requirement, unless the local authority is told that it must consider a family conferencing early intervention, that is a recipe, I am sorry to say, for a large number of local authorities not to do it. Somewhere, either in legislation or in guidance, there must be that requirement. It is very important that that is part of the Bill, in whichever form is thought appropriate. It is very important that parents are not given the opportunity to tell the judge or the magistrates that they were not consulted and that the wider family is considered with a great deal of care before we put the child into a wholly new family. Over the years that I have been doing these cases there have been many where there would have been a cost implication of enormous value to a local authority, and therefore to the state, in getting hold of a family member early so that there are not the long, drawn-out and extremely expensive care proceedings, bitterly fought to the end, in which the child is in limbo for 12 to 18 months—and probably moved four or five times or more under short-term arrangements. The family really must be looked at. I am interested in Clause 27 on the need for intensive family therapy. The Cassel Hospital is west London is a unique family therapy unit. It is not only unique, it is outstanding—and it is expensive. It is in grave danger of having to close. Since a decision of the House of Lords Judicial Committee, it has basically been unnecessary for a local authority to send a child there for assessment if the assessment includes therapy. If we recognised that intensive family therapy at a very early stage would probably send a child back to the family in a certain percentage of cases, we would save the cost of the foster parent for the next 10 or 12 years. This splendid Bill has behind it intentions such as local authorities continuing to pay for these families through university education, so we are talking far beyond 10 or 12 years. I strongly support intensive family therapy. Tied to that, please do not let the Cassel fail and shut down. If we do, the best place in the country will be gone and there will be nowhere else quite as good.