Judges are only meant to speak in court, and they may not pronounce on government policy. So it’s a rare day when a judge turns whistleblower. It’s practically unknown for two senior judges to state publicly, in terms, that there’s a crisis in our care system which is damaging children and families across the land. But Andrew McFarlane, the incoming president of the high court’s family division, this week agreed with his predecessor James Munby, who warned in 2016 that the “seemingly relentless” rise in the number of care applications has resulted in a burgeoning children’s services disaster. This is, according to McFarlane, “untenable” for the courts and care system.
The new president of the family court was speaking at the launch of the Care Crisis review, which was prompted by Munby’s alarm call. The seven-month process, facilitated by the charity Family Rights Group, listened to over 2,000 people including social workers, local authorities, Ofsted, women who have lost their children, adopters, and children who have been in care.
With the number of children in state care now at a high of 73,000, up from 60,000 a decade ago, vulnerable children are being removed from their families at an unprecedented rate, and families are being destroyed in ways they will never recover from. As the children’s commissioner reported this week, half of the country’s entire public spending on children is going on those 73,000 children. And this highlights the fact that councils are staring down an abyss: they cannot ignore the plight of children in acute crisis, or some will die and others will be terribly damaged; but intervening when catastrophe has already engulfed a family unit is punishingly expensive.
It is also throwing good money after bad, because councils end up spending vast amounts with extremely poor results. Yes, they might save a life, but what about the child who has to cope with the harm they’ve suffered? Without a fundamental change this cycle will spiral out of control, because it’s likely that these children will grow up to parent poorly, and their own children will need lots of expensive state intervention.
What is clear from the Care Crisis report is that the shredding of the social safety net of preventative services such as Sure Start, and many other council-funded and community initiatives, is leading directly to more children becoming at risk in families unable to withstand the multiple poverty-linked crises that assail them. “Frustration, despair and anger” about the impact of austerity on the lives and life chances of these increasingly fragile families was a pervasive theme running through the review’s listening sessions. With councils now amputating their own limbs in response to government cuts, it seems the only resource left that can help children is families themselves.
As things stand, parents under scrutiny feel terrified of social services, which they know have little useful help to offer them. Social workers, in turn, are petrified of children dying on their watch and the vilification that follows, so end up demanding that the courts remove more children. Every family judge I know says the courts are struggling desperately to cope with the numbers of care cases coming through their doors. Family lawyers too have ridiculous workloads. So where is this going to end?
If things carry on as they are, this will end with ever more damaged children in foster care, which will bust councils’ budgets. The resulting human misery will be off the scale as the care system seizes up. Sibling groups will be split up even more often than they are now as available foster-care places become more scattered, and brothers and sisters will grow up not knowing each other; those vital sustaining relationships that help buffer people throughout their adult lives will be lost.
Children will also end up being looked after farther away from their community, will have to move school, lose their friendships, and their teacher relationships, resulting in even worse educational outcomes. It is a shocking indictment of the care system that still only 6% of children who have been in care go to university.
From the other side of the fence, dedicated social workers will burn out, and more will flee the profession. Recruitment crises will worsen, and finally the family court system will implode because the capacity simply does not exist to hear vastly increased numbers of care applications from less experienced social workers. Meanwhile, despite everyone’s best efforts, there will be less robust decisions made for children, as family judges’ lists fill up and up.
All this means that there needs to be a complete reset of attitudes in children’s social care, away from removing children and towards supporting families and their relatives and friends to care safely for them. You cannot protect children without supporting families. Children’s services need to always consider the destruction of relationships that happens as a result of removing children, and the immense strain that a family has to bear when involved in court cases that can drag on for months and sometimes years.
The vast majority of parents who struggle are sad rather than bad. Almost all families will have strengths that can be built on. So in the current funding crisis, where directors of children’s services are predicting a shortfall of £2bn in children’s social care by 2020, they must direct whatever slender resources they have left to the building up of families’ own capacities.
The Care Crisis review suggests that government pumps a ring-fenced sum of money to each local authority to help improve services to children. Good luck with that. In the meantime, working with families, rather than spending tens of millions fighting parents in the family courts, is the only realistic game in town.
Louise Tickle writes on family law, social affairs and education
