Baroness Spielman (Con)

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran. We have heard from a number of Members of the House about the changes that this part of the Bill is making. A fundamental rebalancing of responsibilities in social care is being carried through in the pilots. It is putting much more on to the shoulders of less-qualified staff. The reforms are intended to streamline the system and manage rising costs but, as my noble friend has pointed out, there are many concerns from experts such as Professor Eileen Munro and from many practitioners about the implications of inexperienced staff finding themselves doing child protection work, which, paradoxically, could lead to more Section 47 investigations, not fewer, which was one of the aims of the reforms. Taking one step back, the hypothesis behind the reforms was the idea that the social care system had become weighted too much towards individual children in isolation rather than children in the family context, and that more of the support available should be diverted to families rather than given to individual children. However, little account was taken of the profile of the children most likely to be in the care of a local authority. They include children with severe disabilities and special needs, often children who are most likely unavoidably to live in social care as adults. They are children whose parents simply do not have the capacity to manage at home, even with extensive support. Indeed, the strain of trying to manage a child’s needs has sometimes fractured parental and other family relationships. More family support and more kinship care is often simply not a solution. Then we have to acknowledge that there are some children who simply do not have a decent parent nor any other decent adult in their family and realistically never will have. It is horrible, but true, that there are children who simply do not have a family member able and willing to give them the care, attention and love that they need. We have somehow to recognise and face this. A substantial minority of looked-after children are unaccompanied migrant children, typically boys in their late teens. These children are not here because they have a dysfunctional family network that needs support and intervention by our social workers. They need help, but other kinds of help. There are, of course, risks to these children, and there are also risks to others from some of them. Together, these kinds of children account for a substantial proportion of the social care caseload, yet the reforms that are being pushed through do not acknowledge their particular needs. For all these reasons, considering all these kinds of children, Amendment 17 in particular, which would defer carrying through the full reforms until the full findings from the pilots and pathfinders are published, discussed and understood, and any necessary changes reflected, is important. It would be unsafe to proceed.