My Lords, this amendment is about child protection and ensuring appropriate government responsibility for the regulation and quality of care offered by outsourced social work providers. Although most local authorities do their best to uphold standards, this important area cannot be left entirely to them, with very occasional inspections from Ofsted—as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has just said.
Local authorities have stated that it is,
“important to ensure there is a proper, external to the local authority, registration process to enable a local authority to be confident in using the services provided by the SWP”—
that is, the social work provider. The government proposal is that the external providers of social work services will not be inspected in their own right by Ofsted, nor will they be registered as providers in the way that children’s homes and adoption societies are, so there is already an anomaly here. There will be no overview of their activities across local authorities where they hold contracts and no visible assurances for the public about their financial viability, quality or working practices.
In June 2013, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee criticised the Government’s proposals to remove regulation of social work providers. It stated:
“Registration … would allow the imposition of national minimum standards and requirements as to the fitness of providers, and would also provide a mechanism for removing providers who were failing to meet standards”.
The Government subsequently retained separate registration, but not inspection, for external providers through the Providers of Social Work Services (England)
Regulations 2013, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has already referred. The discussions are less than 14 months old, and now the Government seek to remove even that provision of registration. This is in the context of there having been no empirical review of the 2013 regulations to see how they are working. Our amendment asks for a pause for the review to be conducted to satisfy ourselves that the most vulnerable children in our society have some protection.
Finally, social workers, whether working for the public or private sector, have a difficult if not impossible task with a heavy if not impossible workload. They take decisions every day which could mean life or death. Yet the only time that they receive publicity is when things go wrong. I believe that it is the duty of Government to ensure that standards across the profession are of good quality and that local authorities are not left high and dry on this issue. I hope that noble Lords will see fit to support this amendment.
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