Taking Children into Care Inquiry
Item 3 concerns our inquiry into decision making on whether to take children into care. We are in the middle of a series of informal fact-finding visits to help us to build up evidence on the issue. The clerks have prepared a report on the two meetings that we have had; more meetings are planned. We now have an opportunity to discuss the two visits.
The first meeting, which most members attended and which was held in Edinburgh, was with chairs of child protection committees. The meeting was particularly useful and a number of points came out of it.
A strong message from the chairs was that the child protection system is generally working pretty well, although there are wider issues that relate to children who are not on the child protection register. An issue was clarified for me about children who are and who are not on the register. There is a clear difference, and children who are not on the register could be suffering from neglect of various sorts. That issue was helpful to understand.
The need for services to be joined up and for better working across services was also clearly recognised, as was the need for services to be much more child focused and child friendly and to consider what young people and children need from the services.
A number of other issues arose. Before I mention them all, I throw open the discussion to comments from members about the meeting with chairs of child protection committees. Do members have comments on the paper and the meeting?
The paper represents a good summation of the discussion. The issues that are highlighted are accurate in that they are the correct concerns.
The children who are already looked after but who are not classified as being at risk seem to form a large number of children who are not covered by information sharing—that point stood out from the meeting. If professionals cannot share information about such children, it must be difficult for them to do their jobs properly. I wonder how we can explore that further in our inquiry.
I missed the meeting with the chairs, so the note was helpful in catching me up on the issues that were raised, some of which are not particularly surprising.
I recognise that the paper notes concerns that were expressed and not necessarily views that are being taken, but I was slightly concerned by the reference on page 4 to the effect of the “increasing involvement of solicitors”. I can see why that might prove a challenge in some circumstances, but the right to advocacy, whether that is by an independent advocate or by a solicitor, needs to be protected. We want outcomes that are in the child’s best interests, but we need to be careful not to go down a route that removes the right of parents or carers to advocacy and representation.
The note of the second meeting is an accurate reflection.
I think that you are right. The “increasing involvement of solicitors” was particularly noteworthy and, as was stated, middle-class parents are using solicitors to strengthen their ability to advocate on behalf of their children.
On that particular point, coincidentally I have recently been getting feedback that solicitors are now more or less ambulance chasing for these cases. Clearly they see that there is money to be made. All too often now, solicitors are arguing on legal points within those hearings and it is causing problems. I have heard anecdotally that in some cases the best outcome for the child is not achieved—the legal points are winning through. I am not sure that the system was intended to work as a mini-court when it was set up.
I apologise for mentioning another paper but I notice that Enable Scotland is asking for easier access to lawyers, which is exactly what seems to be causing the problem.
I take Colin’s point and I suspect that there is probably a limited amount that we can do. The challenge for us is to ensure that the law is as clear as it can be and that the scope for exploiting loopholes is minimised to the greatest degree possible, rather than complain that lawyers are going about representing their clients, which is what they will always do.
Part of this process is to ensure that the papers—the notes from those meetings—are in the public domain. They will be put on the Parliament website so, after today, they will be available for various groups to examine. The papers will also form part of the evidence that we take forward in the inquiry.
With that in mind, I move on to the paper on the second meeting. Do members have any brief comments on it? Unfortunately, I was unable to attend at short notice. I apologise for that but I know that Clare Adamson, Neil Bibby, Liam McArthur and Liz Smith were all there. Do they want to make any comments on that meeting in particular?
I think that the paper is an accurate reflection of the discussion that we had at the second meeting. It differed from the previous meeting in that a large part of the discussion was around how, with appropriate support, those with learning difficulties are perfectly capable of looking after their children and bringing them up very well indeed. The message was that, too often, that support is not there at all; is there but is then removed; or is patchy in the main.
Whereas the message from the first meeting was about being perhaps overoptimistic about a parent’s ability to meet the needs of their child, the strong message from the second meeting was that there are parents who are very committed to looking after their children but who recognise that there are support needs that have to be met in order for them to be able to do that.
For me, two main points came out of the second meeting. One is the difficulty related to the fact that social work involvement involves a social worker quite often for the child but only sometimes for the parent. There was an argument that people should be looked at as a family unit to assess the real support needs that are required, which does not currently seem to be part of the process at all.
The second point was a level of disappointment because, although a lot of good work has been done, the guidance is there and easy-read formats of documents are available, the professionals seem to be unaware of that, so the documents are not being used as effectively as perhaps they could be.
I was not at that meeting, but on that point I had a meeting recently with an organisation that assists agencies in putting documents into easy-read formats. It was interesting to hear the organisation describe how its system works. It uses models who are relevant to the people who will be reading the documents, so for example it uses young people with Down’s syndrome to exemplify a point.
The organisation showed examples of good and bad practice. For example, a local authority had tried to do the same thing with instructions on how to make an emergency call, or something like that, by using a picture of a young woman with Down’s syndrome on the telephone. The local authority thought that it was doing the right thing but, for each instruction, the same picture was used, so the clients thought that they were being asked to do the same thing three times. If a different picture had been used for each stage with the same model, the instructions would have been much more easily understandable.
I have raised that issue in the Parliament, because it was illuminating for me to see that system compared with just writing in plain English. For some people, plain English is no good. We need to rethink that sort of stuff, not just in this area but across society. It might be worth while for the committee to speak to that organisation at some point.
Both meetings and the notes of them have been helpful. The evidence that we received beforehand from the People First (Scotland) parents group was illuminating and interesting. Many issues arise, but one was that the group would like consistency in children’s panel members. People rarely see the same panel member twice. We have heard that from other groups but, in this particular case, the issue might be more relevant and consistency might be more appropriate.
We can debate and discuss all those issues as we proceed with the inquiry. I thank the clerks for preparing the notes and I thank members for attending the meetings. No doubt, the process will assist our future discussions.