Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

May I make one comment on what my noble friend Lady Meacher said about bureaucracy? To my mind, trying to understand the history of social work and the history of social care, one asks why all these reams of bureaucracy have been introduced. One might say that it is because there have been tragedies to do with children, but why have there been such tragedies? Partly, it is because of the way in which the media responds, but it is also because of the gradual de-professionalisation of social workers. Who would want to be a social worker today? More people are wishing to be social workers because of some of the steps that the Government are taking, but it really has become an unattractive job. I welcome the fact that pay has been increased in recent years by the Government, but historically the pay that has been given to this job, where individuals are responsible for vulnerable and difficult families, has not reflected in any way the degree of responsibility that is entailed. I put it to my noble friend that this bureaucracy has arisen in part because of failures, which have been in turn the result of the failure to support and give a proper professional framework to social workers. It has happened in education that the more we develop that framework, the better our schools have become, the less we have needed to inspect them and the more we have moved toward them assessing their own performance. There is a way forward, and it fits with what my noble friend Lady Howarth said. If we concentrate on the professional expertise of front-line social workers, that will do so much to improve the circumstances that we are currently in and the outcome for children. That point is very much reflected in residential care in children’s homes. There, we have had terrible disasters with children, which have made the profession very unattractive. On the continent, in Denmark and Germany, 50 per cent of looked-after children are in residential care. In Denmark, 90 per cent of the staff in children’s homes have a degree-level qualification. Comparative research highlights the fact that staff there are so much freer to interact with the children. They can hug, they can kiss, they can go into the child’s bedroom at night; whereas we are bound by regulation after regulation because we put people with those children who were never equipped to work with those vulnerable children. Disasters have happened, and we have put down layers of administrative red tape. I hope that is a helpful observation.