Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I offer my strongest support to the amendment and have attached my name to it. I was grateful to the noble Baroness for tabling it. It goes to the heart of the concerns of the Government and of us all about ensuring continuity of care, which we have failed to do in the past. High turnover of staff is a continually expressed concern of young people in care who visit Parliament. It is a bane also for families of children with disabilities. Those families are often most concerned that their child should continue to receive adequate services as they reach the age of 18 and move into the sphere of adult services. Their social worker should be their child’s strongest and most effective advocate for services. Often, however, their child will have a number of different social workers, whose effectiveness is distinctly compromised as they are insufficiently familiar with the case in question. I strongly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, that children in public care are often traumatised because of their problematic relationships with the significant adults in their lives. For some of them, changes in social worker will be profoundly painful and may cause them further harm, possibly undermining their ability to make the intimate relationships that could be helpful to their recovery from their early experiences. I re-emphasise how important are good supervision, supported reflection and manageable workloads to retaining social workers. I hope that any review of the kind proposed in the amendment would look carefully at the professional framework in which the child’s social worker operates. How is turnover of social workers monitored? What figures on individual local authorities can the Minister provide? Does he find widely varying rates of turnover between similar local authorities? What action can be taken when that is the case? I would understand it if he preferred to write to me than to reply to those questions at this time.