My Lords, I will also speak to the Clause 13 stand part. Amendment 33A would require the Secretary of State to take steps to ensure that the process for making decisions about matching children with prospective adopters is conducted so that the decision-maker is blind as to which body—be that the local authority, the regional adoption agency, or a voluntary adoption agency—approved the prospective adopter. This would ensure that personal bias and other irrelevant factors are absent from decision-making and that instead, decisions are focused solely on considering the best match for the child. This would reduce unnecessary delays in the matching process by ensuring that a wider pool of prospective adopters are given full consideration from the earliest possible point, preventing the sequential decision-making that currently happens.
The Department for Education’s Regionalising Adoption consultation document—I am not sure whether it will be pleased that I am mentioning it for the third group in a row—contained some telling statistics, not least from Professor Elaine Farmer’s research. This found that some local authorities tended to seek to place their children with adopters approved “in-house” before considering adopters approved by other local authorities and then voluntary adoption agencies. This results in what is termed, as I mentioned earlier, sequential decision-making, which means that some children wait longer than they should to be adopted and the average is eight months between placement order and match.
Professor Farmer’s investigation revealed that in 30% of cases delay was associated with an unwillingness to seek an adoptive family outwith a local authority’s own group of approved adopters. Clearly, that kind of behaviour is unacceptable.
The aim of Amendment 33A is to ensure that regional adoption agencies are not allowed to discriminate in terms of financial considerations when deciding where to place an adoptive child. There should be an assumption of them being blind to provenance, otherwise the interests of the child are not being put first. Unfortunately, an assumption—even where given by a regional adoption agency to the Department for Education—will not be enough. It needs to be guaranteed by being on the face of the Bill.
Currently there is an interagency fee of £27,000 per child placed with adoptive parents and it is welcome that the Department for Education has given £30 million in one- off funding. I heard what the noble Baroness just said in reply to the previous group. I had understood that that was simply in general terms to enable local authorities for whom the interagency fee, or at least the extent of those fees, was preventing them matching children, and that the £30 million was to break the logjam. If it is specifically, as the Minister said, for harder to place children, that is interesting, but perhaps she can clarify that in her reply.
What happens in the future after that £30 million has been spent? If local authorities need to save costs—we know that they will—they may well cut the voluntary adoption agencies out of the process, as I suggested earlier, and place a child with another authority to which, by agreement, they do not need to pay each other the interagency fee? That situation must not be allowed to develop. The fact that the voluntary adoption agencies are already fearing that it might do so ought to provide the Minister with the confidence to accept this amendment.
Turning to the clause in general, I have to say that it is worthy of support, as far as it goes. The trouble is that it does not go far enough. Will the Minister say why this clause focuses only on adoption? Why did the Government not think more creatively, more substantially and bring forward something called, perhaps, an emerging from care Bill rather than just a clause, with all types of settlement included? The adoption reforms in the Bill relate only to the 5% of children in care who are placed for adoption. It is wrong for adoption to be singled out for preferential treatment in relation to other forms of permanence.
Of course, where adoption is in the child’s best interests, an adoption order must be made, and the placement commenced in a timely fashion. That said, for other children, adoption is not necessarily in their best interests. Foster care, kinship care or special guardianship may be more appropriate for a range of reasons, so care should be taken in advocating increasing the number of children to be adopted. What is clear is that the number of children being placed for adoption is falling, whereas the number of children going into care is rising. It stands to reason, therefore, that there is a hold-up in the system. Certainly—I think we all agree—the process needs to be made more efficient.
It is also not helpful, to put it mildly, when the Prime Minister uses language such as appeared in his press release of 2 November, when he said:
“It is a tragedy that there are still too many children waiting to be placed with a loving family—we have made real progress but it remains a problem”.
That comment is both inaccurate and misleading. Many children in excellent foster homes are not waiting to be placed with a loving family; they are with a loving family who are meeting their needs, caring for them, helping them recover from trauma and offering stability and continuity. The same is true for children placed with relatives. The Government’s suggestion that adoption is the primary focus and that other options are somehow lesser is at best unhelpful and at worst insulting to those who give so much for children in other forms of care.
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Because adoption accounts for just 5% of children in care, it is inappropriate to measure local authorities’ success in terms of adoption numbers. They surely need to be measured in terms of outcomes for all children and young people entering care, and how they are doing in achieving permanence in all its forms. Adoption is just one option. A special guardianship order with committed grandparents or uncles and aunts is another. The current focus on adoption ignores the 95% of children in the care system for whom adoption is either inappropriate or unavailable. The Prime Minister’s rhetoric is implicitly critical of foster care and kinship care in its efforts to promote adoption. I do not think that is helpful. The Government should examine the permanency order available in Scotland. It legally recognises that long-term foster care is an excellent permanency option for many children in care, and one that should be valued, protected and supported. Perhaps it might usefully be brought into operation—or at least examined—in England.
Achieving the best outcomes for vulnerable children is not a competition between adopters, foster carers, extended family members and residential care; it is an endeavour in which each play their part. Unfortunately, the Bill does not recognise that fact. There are other reasons why the Bill should have been much more adventurous in its scope. If Ministers are wondering why we have not submitted amendments to make it more adventurous, we did but they were blocked by the clerks, who told us that such amendments were outwith the scope of the Bill.
I note that the Prime Minister, in the press release to which I referred earlier, also stated:
“The government is actively considering changes to adoption law, to make sure decisions are being made in the child’s best interests. Ministers will look at proposals so that where adoption is the right thing for children, social workers and courts pursue this”.
So we learn that the Government have plans to legislate further on adoption yet still have nothing to say on other forms of pathways to permanence, such as long-term fostering or kinship care, although in that same press release the Prime Minister did suggest that special guardianship orders would be the subject of new regulations. I do not know what that involves; perhaps
the Minister can enlighten us. But again, why the singling out of adoption? Why should this be the focus of resourcing and legislation—and, it seems, further legislation? Surely it would be more sensible to look at things in the round and consider how to ensure that the system delivers the right support for all children in care. It would be helpful if the Minister could explain the rationale, as well as give us an idea of what further legislation is in the pipeline.
In a wider sense, it is hard to escape the conclusion that what the Government are really intent on achieving here—and I do not doubt the sincerity of their determination to improve adoption rates and timescales—is a further reduction in the powers of local authorities by limiting their ability to provide services. There certainly appears to be a move by the DfE towards adoption functions becoming independent of local authority control to some extent, and there are parallels with the academisation of schools. Under the regional adoption agency structure proposed, local authorities will be merely board members, with regional adoption agencies accountable to the DfE. If that gives noble Lords a sense of déjà vu, it would not be surprising because it forms a remarkable parallel with regional schools commissioners. The key concern here is about accountability and ensuring that the new system results in meaningful improvements for vulnerable children, especially the harder-to-place ones, as we have already discussed.
I will make one final point. At first sight, the benefits of regional adoption agencies may appear to be advantageous. But the Government need to be aware of unintended consequences. I mentioned voluntary adoption agencies earlier. But another aspect which it seems the Government have not considered is the implication of the physical separation of children’s social workers in local authorities from the same authorities’ adoption social workers, who will be located at a regional adoption agency “hub”. This will almost certainly mean that the benefits of a close peer group working relationship leading to the maximum efficiency in determining a plan of adoption—where that is appropriate—and the subsequent matching and placing of children in adoptive families may be lost, and the net effect of the proposals may reduce the efficiency of the adoption process rather than increase it. I hope that is not the case but it is at least a possibility.
I finish where I started. By focusing solely on adoption, this clause does not go far enough. I hope the Minister will tell us why that is the case and what the Government intend to do—although she may regard it as outwith the scope of the clause—for the overwhelming majority of children in care who are not covered by it. I beg to move.