Chamber and committees

Scrutiny of the bill at stage 1 highlighted some concerns about inconsistency in access, funding pressures and the need for clear expectations around availability of services. My amendment 102 would place a duty on local authorities to ensure that any eligible child—who is defined as one who is

“at risk of becoming looked after”

or is otherwise specified in regulations—in their area is able to access such services if it is appropriate for them to do so. Right now, prevention is not a statutory duty and, as a result, local authority children’s social work spending is increasingly skewed towards care services, with a significant proportion of resources being absorbed by servicing the demands of the care system itself.

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A social worker may recommend that a child can be taken into care but has no authority over budgets for alternative services that might keep a child safely within their family home or the wider kinship network. Taking a child into care can entail costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds, whereas preventative support is often treated as an unaffordable expense. That dynamic transfers scarce resource out of poorer families and communities and increasingly into private provision. The reality means that, if there is a condition of a CPO or compulsory supervision order for a child to go into care, resources are made available. For complex residential placements, that can be hundreds of thousands of pounds, which is paid to mostly to private providers.

Mr Whitfield is right. We hear time and again that it is about getting it right for every child, and every child is different and every family circumstance is unique. If we have a one-size-fits-all solution, we are failing everyone.

I want to make prevention a priority, as does the Parents Advocacy and Rights group that came to me. We want to reduce family breakdown, stem unnecessary entry to care for children and, when care is necessary, make sure that it does not do more harm than good.

My amendment would insert a principles clause at the front of the bill that sets out, in plain terms and in plain language, what Parliament expects of the children’s care system. It would firmly place prevention and early support services at the heart of the bill, and help to ensure that children do not enter care simply because no alternative support is available.

We must have the child’s welfare at the heart of the bill. Any interventions that take the child away must be evidence based and proportionate. We want to promote upbringing by families, with the presumption that the child’s welfare is best protected by remaining with parents and siblings, even when residential arrangements are in place.

It is about prevention first for children who are at risk of becoming looked after, and reunification support at every stage for children who are looked after. It is about a duty on public bodies to give effect to those principles. I also want steps taken to be recorded in the child’s plan. After all, the purpose of my amendment, and this bill, is to align with the Promise’s emphasis on early help and whole-family support. The evidence that the committee took at stage 1 shows that stakeholders want that clarity of purpose and a shared framework that guides practice and resourcing.

I move amendment 87.

Surely, for the sake of transparency and accountability, all the preventative measures that are considered should be documented somewhere, so that there is a record. People sometimes feel that things are being done to them. No matter how old the young people are, surely having a record of what has been considered and of the measures that may or may not have been taken would only be due diligence and is only right for the child.

It is nice to be back here in committee room 1 on a Wednesday morning.

My amendment 87 seeks to place prevention, minimum intervention and family reunification at the heart of the bill; to require robust consideration of the alternatives before young people are removed; to ensure access to services that keep families together; and to strengthen the evidential standards in child protection orders.

As I am sure that we will be reminded later on, many times, this bill is part of the Promise, which aims to keep families together, wherever that is safe.

I have been working, albeit later on, with the Parents Advocacy and Rights group, which came to me with compelling evidence that I was taken with. That is why I have lodged my amendments to the bill.

I lodged them primarily because the independent review of children’s care led to a commitment to implement the Promise, recognising that the outcomes for children who are looked after have been unacceptably poor. The core principle of the Promise is that children should not be removed from their families unless it is absolutely necessary. Despite that commitment, the number of children entering care has continued to rise, with many entering care at or shortly after birth.

Child protection orders are the key mechanisms through which children are removed from their parents, usually their mothers. Those decisions are often taken in urgent circumstances, and yet they have immediate and life-changing consequences for so many children and their families. The bill, as currently drafted, represents a missed opportunity to refocus children’s services on prevention.

A whole host of things could come under the banner of preventative measures. However, far too often, those preventative measures are not fully funded. We will come to amendments on that later, but it is often easier or more convenient to take the child and put them in care than it is to provide the wraparound support that a family may need in the home. I have perhaps been broad in the language, but the intention is the same. There are many things that could be used to prevent a child from being taken into care, should local authorities see fit to do so.

I will keep my remarks brief, because I know that we have lots to do.

I am curious to know where the minister thinks that information about preventative measures should be held. Given that so much of that information is already catered for in our legislative landscape in Scotland, perhaps it should not be a challenge for committee members to support my amendment 87. I am going to press the amendment, but should it fail, I will seek to work with the minister to find a way, perhaps at stage 3, to be successful in including the broader principles that I have laid out.

West Lothian Council has the same standing charges as the City of Edinburgh Council, but people pay different rates to charge on the public networks. That is where I was going. Someone can sit on a charger in West Lothian for far longer and return more quickly than they can in Edinburgh. That variability in standards is what I was trying to get at.

You mentioned the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, but I want to move on to the issue of confidence. People turn up at local authority-run public charging networks looking for 50kW chargers, but only one in five of them is working. What can the Scottish Government do to ensure that, when someone taking their £12,000 electric vehicle from Perth to Inverness on the A9—they will not get there in one go; they will need to pull over at Pitlochry—every single charger will be working when they pitch up, or will they have to wait an hour before they can get on?

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I can assure you that, as a second EV owner, I have had many poor charging experiences in Scotland.

I will carry on with the theme of electric vehicles. Cabinet secretary, you spoke a lot about confidence in the EV charging network. Before I come on to reliability, I will speak about variability in charging. Often, local authorities determine how much people pay on local chargers, whether it is a 7KW, a 22KW or a 50KW charger. We also have the private companies that are investing in this area. There are a million and one different apps—I certainly have one on my phone—to figure out charging, and you do not know what you will be paying until you turn up. That does not help with the equity element.

What are you doing to encourage the local authority consortiums to have a much more standard rate, for example, and to allow people to charge for 90 minutes and then return the same day? At the moment in Edinburgh, you cannot go to a 50KW charger and charge for 90 minutes and then come back.

That is fine—I said that it was a short question, convener.