Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I shall speak briefly on this important amendment. I very much support the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. I am very worried about these pilots, which seem to be set up to succeed in a sense, even though they may not be the right way forward. I would question very seriously whether they are the right way forward. On reading the report by Professor Le Grand and other things, it seems that there are four issues that these social work practices might presume to resolve. The first issue is staff turnover and the second is the rather strange division of responsibilities within social services departments so that children have to move through at least four teams—therefore, four different social workers—even before you start worrying about changes of social workers. The system creates four social workers, then there are the changes on top of that. The third issue is the excessive caseloads, form filling, bureaucracy and all that. The fourth issue is, partly because of that, that managerial decision making has taken over completely from professional decision making. Will social work practices resolve these four problems? The first two do not need this new, separate stand-alone unit of social workers. Certainly, as regards staff turnover, good social work managements already have massively improved staff recruitment and retention. It can be done: we just need good regulatory authorities to make sure that it is done. We do not need social work practices for that. On the divisions of responsibilities, again, good regulatory authorities should come in and say, ““Come on, you have to organise yourselves so that children have continuity””. All the evidence tells us that children need continuity. It is so obvious and does not need social work practices. Julian Le Grand points to the elimination of a third set of problems as the big plus for these social work practices. He argues that the big advantage of these practices would be the absence of the need to report continuously to a managerial hierarchy and the other bureaucratic demands of a large organisation. But on page 24, Le Grand recognises that social work practices would not escape the bureaucratic demands of the system. How then can he claim that social work practices will have little or no hierarchy and that decisions would remain firmly at the social worker level? This is the essence of the loss of rationale for these pilots. It is set out that these pilots will get rid of this bureaucracy, but they will not. Even Julian Le Grand, who I know well as a good friend and who is a very able man, admits that it cannot do that and that it will not do that. Of course, these pilots cannot do that because of the Government regulations and guidance that we are all so familiar with, which have arisen understandably as a result of Victoria Climbié and earlier tragedies. The reality is that whether the bureaucracy shifts into the social work practices or remains in the local authorities, it will be there. The difficulty for the Government—I really sympathise with them on this because it is terribly difficult—is whether they bite the bullet and say, ““We have got to move away from zero risk or something very close to zero risk. We will take away a lot of this bureaucracy, a lot of these forms and lot of this stuff. We will take away managerial decision making and return the decision making to social workers, so that they can feel professional again, can have job satisfaction again and will really be able to deal with the interests and needs of the child again””, which they used to do rather more effectively. Of course, there may then be something like a 2 per cent greater risk of another tragedy. There will always be a risk, but dare you risk increasing that risk by, say, 2 per cent? That is a very difficult issue for the Government. But, rather than addressing the real issue of whether the balance is right, the Government are throwing, or perhaps grasping, these social work practice pilots as something that will look as though they may resolve the problem. I honestly think that all of us in this room know that it does not feel very likely that they will. So this is where we are. Dare a Government bite this bullet or is it really just all too difficult? A London borough recently contracted out its elder services. Shortly after that an elderly person was mistreated by a carer in a stand-alone unit. It was very embarrassing and there was a big to-do in the local press. But if a social worker in a social work practice mistreated a child, it would be in all the national press, and yet the local authority may have difficulty dealing with that contracted-out service. However, if we hold on to all the bureaucracy that we have now, it would be able to deal with it. That is the dilemma with which we are stuck. One of Laming’s main findings was that one of the most significant causes of breakdown and tragedy was the difficulty of communicating across different organisations involved with a child. That was one of his main findings. Is it a good idea to create more separate organisations and therefore increase the likelihood of communication problems, which Laming says is the one big thing we have to avoid? Will the Minister consider commissioning a piece of work to examine the impact on the services and the costs of government regulations and guidance affecting social work with looked-after children? Would he be willing to commission a piece of work to look at what we are doing with all this bureaucracy, regulations and guidance? What is it doing to the services on the ground? If we really understood that, it would be very helpful. I put that to the Minister. My second point to the Minister, which is a little similar to that made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is whether he would consider piloting and evaluating within a group of local authorities all the administrative changes envisaged for social work practices but within the social services department so that one could see whether, with the additional pump-priming funding, a real focus on some of the administrative issues and getting the decision-making where it needs to be, one could generate the improvements that we all, including Ministers—I absolutely know that is the case—want to see. I hope that we all speak from the same side on this. We all know where we want to go. I will welcome hearing the Minister’s comments on that.