Family Law London Blog

Children's charity, the NSPCC, has warned that reports to its helpline about neglect have doubled over the past two years to reach record levels, and that this increase is placing additional pressure on already stretched children's services.

The rise in reports of neglect to the NSPCC comes as local children's services face unprecedented pressures, with more children being taken into care, and more families needing help at a time of significant funding cuts.

Last year over 21,000 children in the UK were subject to child protection plans because they were at risk of harm from neglect - up 7.5% on the previous year. And recent statistics from CAFCASS, the organisation that represents children in care cases, revealed that in 2011/12 the total number of care applications for all reasons topped 10,000 for the first time.

Dr Ruth Gardner, head of the NSPCC's neglect programme, said: "More people than ever are contacting the NSPCC about child neglect. Some of this will be down to the public being more willing to speak out - and this can only be a positive thing - but there is clearly a worrying trend, not just in our figures, but from a range of agencies and bodies. More research is needed on why this sharp increase has occurred.

"Professor Eileen Munro highlighted in her review of social work the importance of acting quickly to tackle neglect, before problems spiral out of control. But social workers tell us they need better tools and training to help them identify and tackle neglect earlier. And parents need access to support to help them to change their neglectful behaviour. If we are to tackle this growing problem, these two issues must be addressed."

Commenting on new research from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) that claims that local authorities are acting more quickly to process care applications, Sue Kent, professional officer, British Association of Social Workers (BASW), said:

“It is welcome that Guardians feel local authorities are making more timely and appropriate interventions, and the fact that more serious neglect cases are being picked up is clearly vitally important for improving the life chances of vulnerable children. The rise in neglect cases reaching court perhaps could be seen as the impact of the ever worsening economic climate on many families who are struggling to cope.

“However, increasing demand must be matched by resources on the ground, to protect the integrity and professionalism of all children’s social workers, regardless of the field they work in. Although the child’s main professional relationship is with their local authority social worker, BASW members within Cafcass have previously reported that as children’s guardians, the restricted timescale, coupled with ever increasing workloads, often compromises their ability to practice ethically, as they have less time to develop relationships with children to represent their best interests in court cases, and ensure the local authority care plan is the right one for them.

“It is notable that the Cafcass report emphasises that family court work ‘does not detract from the importance of family support services to parents, aimed at preventing, as far as is possible, family breakdown and neglect’, since this area of work  – offering a genuine alternative to care proceedings is currently stretched beyond what is acceptable.

“This has to be a concern for the future, how are these families going be supported, and how will social workers cope with this ever increasing rise in their work while cuts to resources continue.”

The care system is facing major challenges as the number of looked after children rises and retiring foster carers are not replaced fast enough, Children’s Minister Tim Loughton has warned.

He has urged fostering services not to be blinkered when considering who has the capacity to foster and to reach out to a wider pool of potential carers – able to help the increasingly challenging needs of children coming in care.

The Minister has argued that there will be a rising turnover of foster carers over coming years, caused in part by an aging workforce – the vast majority are already in their late forties to mid-50s. He said without younger and skilled foster carers coming forward, the current shortfall of carers will only grow.

Announcing measures to strengthen foster carers’ recruitment and retention, he has called on more fostering services to target those in caring professions, like nursing, teaching and social work, as potential foster carers.

Three quarters of the 65,000 children in care at any one time are in foster care – with as many as 91,000 spending some time in the care system over the course of a year.

Single parent charity Gingerbread has welcomed the new Report from the Public Accounts Committee published on cuts to the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. 

The Report shows how plans to slash the budget of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission by £117 million risk undermining plans for a new effective child maintenance service which delivers for children, says Gingerbread.

The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission has as its primary goal to maximise the number of children in separated families who are receiving regular child maintenance. Yet the Public Accounts Committee Report draws attention to the way cost considerations are taking first priority, leaving many children at greater risk of poverty.

Commenting on the Public Account Committee’s report, Gingerbread’s CEO Fiona Weir said:

“The Commission is under such pressure to achieve cost savings, the worry is that it will move too soon to start closing down existing CSA cases, hoping that fewer parents will choose to apply to the new system, thus saving it money.  Yet parents need the new system and cannot afford for it to fail.” 

Recent figures released by the Department of Education have revealed that hundreds of children are forced to wait an average of 20 months from entering care to moving in with their adoptive parents – six months slower than the timetable set out in national guidance, according to official figures published today.

The local authority adoption scorecards show that while 80 local authority areas have met the interim thresholds (of 21 months from entering care to adoption and matching a child to a family within seven months of a court order being made), the remaining 72 have failed to meet one or both of these key measures.

The scorecards are a key plank of the Government’s tougher approach to addressing underperformance in the adoption system – set out in the radical Action Plan for Adoption published in March. A new assessment process will reduce bureaucracy and the delays which put off potential adopters and slow down the finding of loving homes for children.

Children’s Minister Tim Loughton said:

"Adoption can give vulnerable children the greatest possible chance of a stable, loving and permanent home.

"Hundreds of children are being let down by unacceptable delays right across the country and throughout the adoption process. Every month a child waits to be placed, there is less chance of finding a permanent, stable and loving home. This cannot go on.”

The Government has announced its intention to introduce legislation to speed up the family justice system and reduce delays in the adoption system.

The planned Children and Families Bill would also strengthen the powers of the Children’s Commissioner – to champion children’s rights and hold government to account for legislation and policy.

The key measures affecting the family justice system under the Bill include:

• Creating a time limit of six months by which care cases must be completed.
• Making it explicit that case management decisions should be made only after impacts on the child, their needs and timetable have been considered.
• Focussing the court on those issues which are essential to deciding whether to make a care order.
• Getting rid of unnecessary processes in family proceedings by removing the requirement for interim care and supervision orders to be renewed every month by the judge and instead allowing the judge to set the length and renewal requirements of interim orders for a period which he or she considers appropriate, up to the expected time limit.
• Requiring courts to have regard to the impact of delay on the child when commissioning expert evidence and whether the court can obtain information from parties already involved.
• Requiring parents in dispute to consider mediation as a means of settling that dispute rather than litigation by making attendance at a Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting a statutory prerequisite to starting court proceedings.
• Freeing up judicial time by allowing legal advisers to process uncontested divorce applications.

A recent study by the NSPCC has found that hundreds of children currently going into care will be put at risk of further abuse if they are returned home without the support needed to keep them safe from harm.

According to the NSPCC, around half of the abused or neglected children who enter care each year are abused or neglected again when they return home.

The NSPCC’s work shows that local authorities face a range of difficulties including:

• A lack of evidence used in making decisions about whether a child should return home, resulting in children who face significant risks of harm.
• Poor support for parents to tackle issues such as drug or alcohol abuse, and mental health difficulties. Many children return home before problems which led to them entering care are addressed.
• Inadequate monitoring for the child returning home, with cases closed quickly after a child’s return despite the risk of problems reoccurring.

The NSPCC is calling on the Government to:

• Publish full data on the outcomes of looked after children who are returned home to increase transparency and accountability.
• Revise the care planning guidance to cover children returning home from care, ensuring that placement decisions are based on the child’s needs, and that the necessary support is provided to children and their families.
• Improve the support to families to tackle problems such as substance misuse, domestic violence, mental health issues and poor parenting before and during reunification.

New research from Oxford University has challenged concerns raised by the Family Justice Review that the use of independent social work (ISW) assessments can hinder family court proceedings by causing duplication and delay.

The research argues that far from detracting from the proposed programme of reform in family justice, ISWs could be of considerable assistance in helping Courts and parties to meet new targets, whilst maintaining the quality of assessments.

The findings to date demonstrate that:

• There was no evidence that ISW reports cause delay to court hearings.
• They produce high quality reports to deadlines.
• ISWs have “added value”: they are independent, highly skilled and experienced.
• They are child focused and successful in engaging parents with a history of non cooperation with local authorities.
• There was no evidence of routine duplication with a current local authority core assessment.
• Appointment of ISWs do not result solely from parents seeking second opinion evidence based on human rights claims.
• Parents were involved in most instructions but most were joint, involving the local authority and the child/children's guardian.

The Confederation of Independent Social Work Agencies, the British Association of Social Workers, Nagalro, the professional association for ISWs and Children's Guardians and many children's organisations are supporting the research. They believe that restricting access to ISWs will lead to poor decision making with more children being exposed to further risk of abuse or being removed unnecessarily from their families.

The Fostering Network has called on the Government to make further investment in foster care as a matter of urgency. The call comes after the latest figures from Cafcass show that care applications have exceeded 10,000 over the last twelve months for the first time.

Vicki Swain, campaigns manager at the Fostering Network, said: “As the vast majority of children in care are fostered, this rise in applications will put even more pressure on a fostering system already feeling the strain.

“Fostering services have been struggling with a shortage of foster carers for the last few years. This has made it difficult to make sure children and foster carers are well matched, meaning children end up living a long way from home or being repeatedly moved around the system as placements break down.

“We are therefore calling on the Government to provide more funding so that fostering services are able to properly pay and support their foster carers and have the resources to encourage more people to foster. Without this, the system is going to struggle to cope and will fail this very vulnerable group of children.”

Ofsted has recently published a report into the causes of delay in the adoption system. The report find that the most significant cause of delay for children needing adoption is the length of time it takes for cases to be completed in court. The average time taken to complete care proceedings in the cases inspectors examined was almost 14 months.

Not intervening early enough, and cases being left to ‘drift’ prior to care proceedings, were also key factors that hindered successful adoption in the cases reviewed. The report found that some children had been known to children’s social care for a considerable length of time prior to care proceedings being initiated.

Typically, these cases were characterised by long-standing concerns about either neglect or emotional abuse, or both. Delays jeopardised good outcomes for children. The children were older when they entered care, and their life experiences had resulted in some significant behavioural challenges for potential adopters.

The report also found many good examples of practice where local authorities worked to minimise delays. Overall, there was good parallel planning when children were taken into care or about to be placed for adoption. Most of the cases tracked showed a clear commitment to early planning for adoption at the same time as rehabilitation was being pursued. This ensured that if children could not go back to their birth family then the process for adoption was already in place.

Of those adopters that were interviewed, the majority were happy with the overall service that they received. Most did not feel that they had experienced significant delay, although nearly all considered that there had been some kind of delay, however minor. Nearly all adopters felt they had received a welcoming and sensitive response when they first enquired about adoption, and that assessment was necessarily thorough.

The report found that processes for matching children with adoptive placements were generally robust and of the authorities surveyed, there was little evidence of delay caused by an unrealistic search for a ‘perfect’ ethnic match.

The Government has published an Action Plan for Adoption to overhaul the system for prospective adopters and strengthen the performance regime for local authorities.

The current system is too bureaucratic and takes too long for both potential adopters and children who need a stable, loving home.

The numbers of children adopted from care has been decreasing in recent years. Just 3,050 children found new homes through adoption last year, the lowest since 2001. A recent survey showed that one third of adopters were not satisfied with their experience of the adoption system. Research has shown that with every year that a child waits their chances of being adopted decreased by 20%.

The new action plan will include proposals for:

• New adoption scorecards, to hold local authorities to account. The first scorecards will be published in the coming weeks.
• A revised approval process for new adopters, cutting it to six months.
• A national gateway for adoption, providing a first point of contact for anyone interested in adoption.

Children’s Rights Director Roger Morgan has published the annual Children’s care monitor, which gives nearly 2,000 children’s views through an online survey.

This year, the monitor survey included a new focus on children’s experiences of placement change in care. Just over half (55%) of the children in care in the 2011 survey said they were only given a week or less notice before they were last moved to live in a different placement. Twenty-three per cent reported that they were given no notice at all of their last move and were told on the same day they were moved.

As in previous years, the 2011 survey found a high level of separation of siblings in care. Nearly three quarters (73%) of children in care who also had a sibling in care reported that they had been separated in different placements.

Children in children’s homes were found to be more likely than children in foster homes to be separated from siblings in care. In fact, 96% of children surveyed in children’s homes who also had siblings in the care system had been separated from brothers or sisters.

Up to the time of the survey, the average number of times children responding had moved placements had risen from 4 in 2010 to 5 in 2011. Well over half (57%) of children in care surveyed said they had no choice of placement the last time they were moved.

The Bar Council and Family Law Bar Association (FLBA) have urged the Government to take a considered and practical approach to reforming family law and not to rush to legislate, as it published its response to the Family Justice Review.

Commenting on particular areas of the Government’s response, Nicholas Cusworth QC, Chairman of the FLBA, said:

“There are parts of the Government’s response, which we welcome, such as strengthening the Court’s enforcement rules, for which we have called for some time. Current rules are piecemeal and ineffective, and a cohesive approach to revising them would be a positive step.

“However, there are a number of elements of the Government’s response where question marks remain. On shared parenthood, we agree with the Family Justice Review’s finding that, learning lessons from the Australian experience, legislating on this issue risks creating the perception that there is a right to substantially shared or equal time, for both parents. It is already widely understood and applied by the courts that children benefit from having a relationship with both parents and legislation would be unnecessary and may do more harm than good. The Government must consider this with the greatest of care.

“The Government continues to place great emphasis on mediation. Mediation in private law cases is supported and encouraged, but there will always remain a significant minority of cases that do have to go to court. The extent to which the size of that minority diminishes after the introduction of compulsory mediation is not yet clear. Particularly given the likely increase in the numbers of litigants in person anticipated when the LASPO Bill becomes law, there may be very little reduction (if any) in the numbers of private law cases requiring court intervention.”

The Ministry of Justice has published statistics on activity in the county, family, magistrates’ and Crown courts of England and Wales. The figures give a summary overview of the volume of cases dealt with by these courts over time, with statistics also broken down for the main types of case involved.

Family cases deal with issues such as parental disputes, child protection cases, divorce and separation, and cases of domestic violence. Volumes of many types of family cases have shown a fairly steady trend in recent years.

Key statistics include:

• There were 30,400 decrees absolute granted for the dissolution of marriage in the third quarter of 2011; a decrease of 1% compared to the third quarter of 2010.
• There were 5,500 domestic violence orders made in the third quarter of 2011; a drop of 14% on the 6,500 in the same period in the previous year. Domestic violence applications decreased 15% to 5,500 in the third quarter of 2011, compared with the corresponding quarter in 2010.
• On matters affecting children, there were 7,700 children involved in public law applications made in the third quarter of 2011, a 28% increase on the same period for 2010.
• There were 30,200 children involved in private law applications made in the third quarter of 2011; a 5% decrease on the third quarter of 2010. The trend in the number of children involved in private law applications has been downward since late 2009.

Resolution, the association of family lawyers, has issued a warning over the consequences of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Bill. 

A survey of members undertaken by Resolution found that, according to the vast majority (87%), LASPO would mean that less than 25% of people they currently help would still qualify for legal aid.

The social implications would be considerable: the survey also found that 57% believe a parent risks losing contact with their child in at least half of their cases. Based on the surveyed lawyers alone, this represents well over 4,000 children.

LASPO would also withdraw legal aid from many parents trying to get back children who have been abducted within the UK, even though 91% of those surveyed believe there is a risk of abduction in at least some of their cases.

“It is clear that the Government’s proposed legal aid cuts could bring devastating consequences. Many of those currently eligible for legal aid would seriously struggle to obtain the legal advice and support that could ensure that they continue to see their children after a difficult separation”, said David Allison, Chair of Resolution.

“The changes also risk increasing the nation’s benefits bill. Many of our members say that the majority of their clients would not know what financial settlement they are entitled to, which could see them left dependent on the welfare state and benefits.

“Resolution is committed to the constructive resolution of issues arising from separation, through options such as mediation, and the organisation welcomes the Government’s desire to see fewer family cases going through the court system. However, there needs to be support for those for whom mediation is inappropriate, which, according to the survey, could be in as many as 40% of cases.

“We are concerned that, by focusing so heavily on mediation, the Government will punish those for whom it simply won’t work through no fault of their own – for example, if they have an abusive or uncooperative partner.”

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) has published a position statement setting out potential changes to the adoption system in response to criticism that it takes too long for a child in care to be permanently adopted.

A woman in Ohio has lost custody of her overweight son after social care workers were concerned that his weight level was putting his health at risk, reports Fox11online.com.

Fostering requires a lot of skill, and foster carers must be trusted and given the support they need to do their job properly, England’s children’s minister Tim Loughton has said.

The charity Families Need Fathers, which provides support on shared parenting issues arising from family breakdown, has claimed that the Family Justice Review report fails to provide for children maintaining meaningful relationships with both parents and their wider family following family breakdown.

The Child Support Agency has recently released figures which show that around 876,000 children were benefiting from child maintenance payments at the end October, an increase of 7,400 on the previous quarter.