Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service

HC Deb 23 October 2003 vol 411 cc323-58WH

[Relevant documents: Third Report from the Committee on the Lord Chancellor's Department, Session 2002–03, HC 614-I, and the Government's response thereto, Cm 6004]

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Margaret Hodge.]

2.30 pm

Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed)

I am glad to have the opportunity to open this debate, and to welcome the Minister to her new post. She can bear no responsibility for what has gone before, but we place on her a heavy responsibility to use her new position to see that things run a great deal better in future. We have high hopes.

The report on the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service was the first major inquiry undertaken by the relatively new Select Committee on the Lord Chancellor's Department, now the Constitutional Affairs Committee. It has been dramatic in its consequences, which have included the resignation of the chairman and the appointment of an independent person to conduct the fundamental review of the board that the Committee recommended. By coincidence, the person whom Ministers appointed to carry out that review was born in the same village as I was, lived just up the road from me and went to the same primary and secondary school as me—but we have not seen each other since we left school. I believe that Sir Clive Booth will do an excellent job very quickly. He has been set a timetable of just a few weeks to complete his work, so that the Minister can get on with the job of appointing a new board and chairman.

The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service was set up with high expectations and general support to serve the needs of children who were involved in care proceedings or affected by family breakdowns leading to divorce and access disputes in the courts. It drew together children's guardians, who were formerly the responsibility of the local authority's social services department, staff formerly employed by the probation service as children's reporters and some of the activities of the official solicitor.

When we decided to produce a report on CAFCASS, it was widely welcomed. We received a great deal of valuable evidence from those involved and their representatives. On behalf of the Committee, I should like to thank all those who gave evidence, both orally and in writing, and also those who arranged and participated in the visits that Committee members made to local CAFCASS offices. I express our gratitude to our specialist advisers, Professor Judith Masson and Professor Adrian James, who gave invaluable advice and assistance throughout our inquiry, and to the Clerk, Hugh Yardley, who is shortly to move on to other duties in the House and who served us with great distinction and skill. I am also grateful to my colleagues on the Committee for the effort that they put into the inquiry.

Before I move on to the Committee's findings, I should also say a word about those who actually do the work of representing and reporting in the family court system. The CAFCASS officer is engaged in a vital profession, and those who choose to take it up deserve encouragement and recognition for the work that they do. Throughout its difficult early period, CAFCASS has continued to be staffed by people who have worked hard to achieve the best outcomes possible for the children for whom they are responsible. Members of the Committee visited CAFCASS offices in their own regions, and I can vouch for the commitment shown by the front-line professionals whom I met. The Committee fully acknowledges the skill and devotion of staff throughout the organisation and their commitment to the children whom they serve. The criticisms that we make of the way that CAFCASS has handled the difficulties should not take away from that, and I am pleased that that was acknowledged in the responses from both the Government and CAFCASS.

Given the difficulties that CAFCASS already faces, I am concerned that some CAFCASS staff face harassment and threats from extremists claiming to speak on behalf of fathers who are aggrieved about denial of access to their children. Whatever the strength of people's grievances about the law or court decisions on access, which are often understandably distressing and frustrating, those parents cannot in any way justify or accuse attacks on officials whose job it is to assist and inform the legal process by ensuring that children's views, concerns and interests are at the centre of decision making. Such actions are unacceptable, and they undermine the position of those divorced and separated parents who are seeking to put their case through the legal and democratic processes, as they are fully entitled to do.

Like other hon. Members present, I am well aware of how frustrated some separated parents feel about those issues. Sometimes CAFCASS has been at fault for the amount of time that it has taken to resolve cases, and at other times the courts have been at fault.

A case has been going on since 2002 in which repeated adjournments have been sought by CAFCASS because of staff sickness. Cases are often adjourned for three months, then the manager allocates himself to the case because there is nobody else to do it, and he says that he wants indirect access to continue because it will be another three months before the officer who can really deal with the case can be made available. The court keeps adjourning the case to which I referred. The magistrates adjourned it again last week, because they had too many remand cases coming up before them. In that case, presents, letters and birthday cards were not delivered to the children concerned for five months. That is unacceptable.

Widespread concern about the performance of CAFCASS had been apparent ever since it was set up. A dispute with the self-employed guardians who made up the bulk of the pre-CAFCASS work force on the public law side of the new organisation led to a judicial review that CAFCASS lost, and to a loss of staff, which had a serious impact on the ability of CAFCASS to deliver core services. CAFCASS was unable to cope with increasing demand for those services, and significant delays in the allocation of children's guardians to public law cases persisted. As a result, many vulnerable children were left without full representation at crucial times. In some cases—in inner London, for example—delays in allocation reached unacceptable levels. One of the dreadful results of these delays is that vulnerable children are kept away from home, or denied access for long periods to parents, grandparents, and brothers and sisters, without being able to express their own views on the situation or influence the outcome.

The energy that management put into dealing with the dispute with the guardians was at the expense of other issues, which affected not only the guardians but all CAFCASS staff and their clients. There was too little development of the policies and procedures that a new organisation needed. Important issues involving the harmonisation of terms and conditions of staff were not addressed, and other fundamental matters such as training and professional development, research and IT, were neglected.

One area where CAFCASS was unable to make the significant improvement that had been hoped for was in support services for those involved in private law disputes. Much more could be done to support families experiencing relationship breakdown, but CAFCASS has so far been unable to make any significant progress towards ensuring that support is given where it is desperately needed. That is why there is an additional "S" in its title. The support concept was added during the passage of the legislation that established the organisation, but that role was largely abandoned in the increasingly desperate struggle to get it up and running.

The Committee found that many problems stemmed from serious failings in the establishment and management of the new service. Too little time was allowed for its establishment, leaving it at a disadvantage from the very start. There is no doubt that those presented with the task of meeting the challenge of establishing the new body did not make achieving it any easier by the way in which they approached it, but the Department left the board and senior management with an almost impossible task. In the consultation paper proposing the creation of CAFCASS, it was suggested that a unified service could not be established in less than three years, and that it could take up to five years. However, vesting day for the new body in 2001 came less than three years after the publication of the consultation paper, and less than two years after the announcement of the final decision to create the new service.

The decision to launch it on that date was principally determined by the Home Office timetable for the establishment of the national probation service on the same day. Notwithstanding the pressures on Ministers to proceed, we concluded that the decision to go ahead on that timetable was a serious misjudgment that called into question the Government's commitment to this very important service. I do not accept that that timetable had to be adhered to, as the Government argue in their response.

Governance is a key issue running through these early days. The CAFCASS board lacked experience and expertise in some key areas of the organisation's work, and proved unable to exercise effective oversight or provide strategic direction, but the board was hindered by confusion over lines of accountability and the respective roles of the board, the management team and the Lord Chancellor's Department. The dismissal of the original chief executive involved further disruption to the work of CAFCASS, while the Lord Chancellor's Department managed to create the impression that its prime interest in the new service was in keeping costs down. The evidence that the Committee received depicted an organisation, respected neither by all its staff nor by many of its partners and stakeholders, that was failing to provide its core services in a timely manner, and which had been unable to make progress in fulfilling the hopes expressed for it in providing new and co-ordinated support services for children and families.

As we make clear, there is a long way to go before CAFCASS can become the high-quality service, operating at the best professional standards, envisaged when it was first proposed. We made a number of recommendations aimed at enabling that to happen. The priority must be for CAFCASS to get to grips with its service delivery duties and clear the backlog of cases that has been allowed to build up. To assist it in doing that, we recommended a comprehensive work force planning exercise, aimed at ensuring that it knew what resources were needed.

We recommended that CAFCASS establish a dedicated training and professional development strand to enable the effective performance management of its front-line practitioners. We said that it should make plans for a fully-fledged case management system that would allow the collation of reliable information for management and research purposes and relieve some of the burden on hard-pressed front-line managers. CAFCASS had to set out clearly the role that it envisaged for itself in the provision of the support services I mentioned, and it needed to develop its research capacity so that it could establish what works for children who are experiencing family breakdown.

we also recognised that if the recommendations were to be implemented successfully, significant changes would he required at the very top of the organisation. CAFCASS, the Committee said, needed to demonstrate clearly and unambiguously that it was putting children and young people first in all it did. We recommended a fundamental review of the membership of the board, with the aim of bringing to it people of experience and stature who could deliver the strategy necessary to provide an effective child-centred service.

We hoped that the new board would take steps to ensure that it was able to carry out effectively its function of providing strategic direction and holding senior management to account. We recommended that we examine CAFCASS's management structure with a view to ensuring that it had a management style appropriate to the work it does. We said that the framework document should be rewritten so that it explicitly reflected the service's core tasks, and set out the proper constitutional relationship between CAFCASS as a non-departmental public body and its parent Department.

What is to happen now? The chairman has resigned, making clear in his letter to the Minister the need to address issues covered in our report, including those of resourcing and governance. The chairman made a honourable decision that cleared the way for the fundamental review. I must place on record that he has made a significant contribution to the welfare of vulnerable children, both in this and other, voluntary, spheres.

The Government and CAFCASS have issued their formal and full response to the report. It is clear from both responses, and from the chairman's resignation, that our report has been the catalyst for much-needed change. However, in the responses there is still too much defending the indefensible, such as the past failures, particularly those of the Lord Chancellor's Department. Both Departments must have contributed to the drafting of the response, and I can see where the LCD's hand must have been.

The most striking aspect of the response from CAFCASS is how candid it is on lack of resources. It says: We need to be certain that we are operating effectively and efficiently in meeting children's needs, but there comes a point where we cannot cope with the escalating and changing demands, which inexorably drives increased case costs. The problem is clear, without an adequate budget, we cannot reduce delays and improve the basic quality of our service.

Mr. Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre)

What credibility does the right hon. Gentleman attach to CAFCASS's protestations about its funding problems, when, in the wake of our report, which urged them not to implement further layers of management, it set about appointing three people, paid some £65,000 per annum, to manage what our Committee felt was in danger of becoming an over-managed and hierarchical service?

Mr. Beith

The hon. Gentleman, who made a valuable contribution to our work on the report, anticipates a point that I will make on that tier of management. On the direct question of what credibility we can attach to CAFCASS's protestations, the first sign is the fact that resources had to be increased so significantly from the amount given to CAFCASS. That was recognised even by the Lord Chancellor's Department. Secondly, increases are being driven by demand, which is in some ways common to a much of the rest of the LCD's budget. The LCD has no control over how many people come before the courts, or the legal aid expenditure that that generates. There is a similar element of demand-driving about the situation CAFCASS finds itself in.

The board concluded that CAFCASS needs a strategic review of its funding against its remit and performance objectives. I look to the Minister to make a commitment to carry out that review, and for an assurance that she will not repeat the mistakes of her predecessors in failing to secure from the Treasury the resources necessary for CAFCASS's proper functioning. CAFCASS performs a vital function for children in a critical time in their lives, and it cannot remain in a position in which, as it says in response to our report, it has to meet rising and changing demand, over which we have no control, with a still inadequate budget".

The Prime Minister appointed the Minister to this new post with direct responsibility for children. I take that as an explicit commitment by the Government to raise the profile of children's issues within Government. That gives the Minister a certain authority to go to the Treasury with new plans for CAFCASS, saying, "This is important and requires attention. I have the Prime Minister's backing to try to ensure that this service fully delivers what the children need."

We recommended that CAFCASS should aim to allocate a guardian within 48 hours of a request, or sooner in emergency cases. The CAFCASS response says: It will be difficult, however, to achieve allocation within two days in all cases … in the short to medium term … The Government has accepted that the reality is that the various parties will not be achieving Protocol standards in 2004–5. The Committee does not believe that it is acceptable for CAFCASS to resign itself even in the short term, let alone the medium term, to vulnerable children being expected to wait until a guardian becomes available. The allocation of guardians depends on various factors, not just funding. CAFCASS must show a great deal more ambition for itself than is demonstrated by its response to that recommendation. However, it will need the resources to do it—and the Minister must deal with that.

It is not acceptable to name guardians to meet the protocol requirement knowing that they are not in a position to undertake the work at that point. It is wholly unacceptable to just tick boxes to show that a target has been met, when children are being left and told, "No, there is no guardian for you, even though the box has been ticked." I hope the Minister will stamp on such an unacceptable response, because she should not be encouraging such practice.

Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West)

We are dealing either with children who are very young—let us say those under 10, for whom even a week is a lifetime—or teenagers who may be troubled by the consequences of their parents' circumstances.

Mr. Beith

The hon. Gentleman, who has worked hard on the Committee, is right. Such children are often bewildered by their situation, and almost feel guilty that their whole world has collapsed. They may be taken away from one parent, or both, are unable to exert influence and do not have the representation they require.

CAFCASS will need to step up its recruitment and training and try to bring back into the organisation some of the skilled people who left during a dispute with the self-employed guardians. There must be a clear commitment to the mixed economy of employed and self-employed professionals. CAFCASS accepts that in its response, but I do not think that those involved have yet seen the tangible evidence, or the commitment in practice, that there really will be a mixed economy in future. A weakness throughout CAFCASS's response is its failure to identify and target what will be achieved by when, and who will he responsible for ensuring that it is delivered.

The other main area besides funding that I think the Minister has special responsibility for is ensuring proper corporate governance. The Committee was pleased that its recommendation for a fundamental review of the CAFCASS board has been accepted. We look forward to the early outcome of Sir Clive Booth's review and to the appointment of people who will be capable of driving forward the improvements that are needed, together with colleagues who can collectively provide the experience and expertise that is needed. In our report we made much of the need for appropriate understanding among board members of CAFCASS's front-line work; that is certainly one vital element. However, a board that is to fulfil its functions properly must contain members who are willing not only to support, but—where appropriate—to challenge and scrutinise the work of the executive team. Board members who have done so in the past have not always found a culture in which such challenges are welcomed as a vital part of good governance, which they are.

I am also concerned that CAFCASS is still pursuing expensive and cumbersome additions to its bureaucracy, against our explicit recommendations—the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre raised that point earlier. The additional management tier that he mentioned was introduced when there were far more pressing demands on CAFCASS's resources.

The Minister also needs to consider the relations between her Department and CAFCASS. Ministers' responses on that point show a degree of complacency that does not appear to be shared by CAFCASS, which welcomed the opportunity afforded by the move to the Department for Education and Skills to clarify the boundaries and remit of CAFCASS with its sponsoring body. Certainly CAFCASS's framework document needs to be redrafted so that it explicitly reflects its core task of securing children's welfare.

The Minister must also ensure that the practice reflects the theory, and that the Department respects CAFCASS's position as a non-departmental public body. It appears that officials at the Lord Chancellor's Department were acting as if CAFCASS were an executive agency, or even part of the Department. Members of the executive team appear to have been instructed by the Department's officials without the knowledge of the chairman or the board. The whole culture and governance must change, and the new Minister needs to ensure that that happens.

The final point on which I consider the Minister's response to be lacking concerns CAFCASS's role in the provision of support services. We concluded that, unfortunately, CAFCASS could not give high priority to support services during the current difficulties. However, its failure to say clearly how it might develop that aspect of its remit was hindering other organisations in their development of such services. We recommended that the Minister consult with appropriate parties about a proposal that CAFCASS take a strategic co-ordinating role in the provision of those support services. The responses from Ministers and from the board leave CAFCASS's long-term role in support service provision unclear.

The Minister and CAFCASS need to talk openly with organisations such as National Children's Home, the National Youth Advisory Service, the Children's Society and a number of others to ensure that they are able to maximise their contribution to the welfare of children who are experiencing relationship breakdown.

Many of our recommendations cannot simply be addressed by a one-off response and this debate. Continued scrutiny will be required to ensure that the generally positive response that our report has generated is translated into action. CAFCASS's response has shown insufficient ambition, not only on the allocation of guardians, which I have mentioned, but on the development of IT systems, the creation of an appropriate management structure and training programmes. We are passing the file on CAFCASS to our colleagues on the Select Committee on Education and Skills. They have plenty to do in other fields, but we will give them a clear indication that the progress on such issues needs to be monitored soon. We hope that they will be able to include that issue in their scrutiny programme of the non-departmental public bodies that will now be within their remit.

From us collectively, it is farewell to CAFCASS. Individually, many of us will not forget the problems that have been involved, and we may occasionally ask questions on the subject to try to ensure that the things that I have mentioned are done. Meanwhile, CAFCASS needs to use, develop and build on the considerable skills among its personnel to make further steps towards becoming the quality organisation that it was originally intended to be.

Not only the Committee but many organisations that are involved in CAFCASS or that work in partnership with CAFCASS have made criticisms of that organisation and the Department. They have been severe and necessary criticisms, but now all of us need to get behind the organisation and give it the encouragement and the opportunity to make a fresh start. The children for whom it is responsible deserve no less.

2.54 pm

Mr. David Kidney (Stafford)

The report sets out the dedication and commitment of all the individual practitioners who work for CAFCASS, and praises their commitment to their work. I should like to reaffirm my personal thanks to them for the work that they have done in the great adversity of the last two years. I am not a member of the Select Committee, but my experience is in that area. Before I was elected to Parliament, I was a solicitor in private practice for 20 years. I focused on family work, and was eventually accredited by the Law Society as a solicitor in children's care proceedings. I directly represented children in care proceedings and worked alongside their guardians, who were also appointed to look after the children's interests. During my 20 years in politics, some of which overlapped with my work as a solicitor, I have continued to take an interest in children's and family policy. I am concerned about the subject, and about CAFCASS in particular.

The Select Committee could be said to be speaking about CAFCASS's difficulties with the benefit of hindsight, but many Members of Parliament said from the outset that things would go wrong. I was one of the Members who saw the Minister many times to warn about the speedy time scale for setting up the organisation, the damaging disputes with the self-employed guardians and the apparent focus on issues that are irrelevant to the welfare of children, which should be the service's first priority. I am not here today to say, "I told you so." I am here to commend the Committee on its thorough work and to emphasise the importance of following through on its recommendations. I shall briefly examine each of the areas.

Public law proceedings concern the liberty of children who have done nothing wrong but who have suffered at the hands of others. There are stories about terrible delays in those proceedings. When I was a practitioner, it was common in Staffordshire and the west midlands, where I worked, for the social services department to take the paperwork to the court to start the care proceedings, for the court to appoint both the guardian and the solicitor there and then and for everybody to turn up in court on the next day for the first hearing of the proceedings. If that was not possible it was regarded as a bad thing and proceedings were adjourned for seven days, after which everybody turned up in court.

The situation has not improved over the years. The report tells us about parts of the country where two-month delays in a guardian being appointed in proceedings are possible, which is anathema to me and is surely unacceptable. The section of the report that explains why delay is harmful to the development of young and vulnerable citizens is powerful.

The quality of the service has been lost because of the dispute with the self-employed guardians. Many guardians with whom I had worked professionally left the service because of their discontent with what was happening. CAFCASS's response to the Select Committee report states that it is writing to those people asking them to return to the service. I would not mind betting that most of them have got on with their lives and have new commitments, which will prevent them from answering that call. That is a loss to the service. It is essential that we urgently rectify the two questions about delay and quality of service.

CAFCASS Legal will perform the role previously filled by the official solicitor. In my 20 years' experience, I came across the official solicitor only occasionally, because they get involved only in particularly difficult, complex and challenging cases. When I came across them, I was always impressed by the thoroughness of the investigation and their ability to marshal the facts and to apply the law to those facts in court. The service was superb—it was the Rolls-Royce of children's representation. The Select Committee tells us that there are worries that the quality of the service might slip. We cannot afford the loss of excellence from that part of the service, which sets the standards for the rest of the organisation.

The Select Committee report explains how private law was the poor relation of the host organisations that took responsibility for private law court advisers before CAFCASS was appointed. There were often great delays, and the people who did the work varied in quality. The report could say that there has been no visible loss of quality because the quality was poor to begin with, but it would be dreadful if we allowed that situation to continue. I would like to think that CAFCASS will improve that service as soon as possible.

Mr. Beith

I would not want the hon. Gentleman's remark to be misinterpreted. Some years ago, probation officers routinely did private law work in such children's cases as an add-on to their normal work of dealing with young offenders. However, it must be recognised that a dedicated, specialised team within the probation service has now been built up to do such work. They are valued members of CAFCASS.

Mr. Kidney

I accept that, but the right hon. Gentleman will know that there were not many of them, and that there were great delays in appointing people to take that role in court proceedings. A delay of more than two months from start to finish of a case was not unusual. Improvements can be made.

If we were to consider new suggestions, we might even revolutionise the service in private law. The Guardian on Tuesday referred to projects in America involving early intervention schemes. The courts attempt to take control of disputes in private law cases right at the outset, with parenting classes and information and a much greater role from the start for parents who try to resolve or at least define their differences. The courts make it clear that people have the first responsibility to sort out the dispute for themselves, and that it will be costlier for them in more ways than one if they leave dispute resolution to the court. The evidence from court trials in America is that the result is a huge reduction in the number of times that courts are left to make the decisions.

There was an article in the same newspaper by Mrs. Justice Bracewell, who said that she and her fellow judges in the courts would like that approach to be tried in this country. They appeal to the Government and to CAFCASS to make that possible in the future. I very much hope that we will be able to consider such an initiative.

The Select Committee report makes much of the additional "S" in the title of CAFCASS for its support role. I urge on CAFCASS a narrow rather than a wide interpretation of what that support role means. To me, it means that CAFCASS should conduct the research that has been recommended by the Committee, that it should identify the best practice for dissemination and that it should use the results of the research and best practice to inform and influence existing services. If a service is needed but does not exist in parts of the country, CAFCASS should prompt creation of that service.

Mr. Dawson

I take my hon. Friend's point entirely. Would he further agree, particularly in the context of the Green Paper, that there is now every opportunity to develop integrated services at the local level that could provide precisely those support services without an organisation such as CAFCASS being directly involved?

Mr. Kidney

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because I am about to give an example from my own constituency that exactly illustrates his point, which I hope will be helpful.

In the spring, I held a conference in my constituency on positive parenting. It was very well attended, and a strong message came across that a universal support service should be available to all parents, including information, advice, parenting programmes and one- to-one support with relevant practitioners and experts if appropriate. I have taken that forward, and in Stafford we now have a steering group involving health, social services, education and the voluntary sector. All are determined to try to graft a universal service on to what has already been planned for early years and children's information services, so that we are not duplicating services but bringing everybody together. As my hon. Friend says, for that strategic reason CAFCASS is not wanted or needed in such work.

However, there is also a practical reason why CAFCASS should not go that far, and it relates to finances. It is obvious that there is not the money for CAFCASS to provide the services that it has said on paper that it intends to deliver, despite the fact that in just two years its budget has gone from £72 million to £95 million, which is the budget for the present year. That is a substantial increase, but the trouble is, no one knows—the Select Committee acknowledges this—what the right figure is for the service. That rather reminds me of the Crown Prosecution Service. It took 15 years of institutional underfunding before the Glidewell report set out what was required and the budget needed to meet that, and the problem was solved. We now get a very good-quality service from prosecutors, but not yet from CAFCASS, which needs the same treatment.

The Select Committee says that that can be done through a thoroughgoing review by the sponsoring Department and by CAFCASS. We shall see, but in the meantime the board's response makes very clear its view that it does not think that CAFCASS is properly funded. I do not know whether I am alone in having received a letter for this debate from the Solicitors Family Law Association. It, too, makes it clear that it does not think that the service is properly funded. A number of MPs have given the same warning. The message is loud and clear that we have not yet got to the bottom of funding for CAFCASS.

I appeal to other hon. Members not to lose sight of that from today. If CAFCASS provides the right strategic thinking, the report and the justification for the money, it is up to us to stand shoulder to shoulder with the organisation when it goes to the Minister and to the Treasury, and to see that it gets the money to which it is entitled.

That brings me to my last point, which the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) made, on the change of the sponsoring Department, and therefore the change in the Select Committee that takes an interest in CAFCASS. We have had a good-quality report from the Select Committee that from now on will be investigating the work of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, which will not be the sponsoring Department for CAFCASS. That will now be the Department for Education and Skills. That is a large Department with a very busy, active, good Select Committee to investigate its work, but that Committee has so much work that I am worried that it will not be able to give as much time to the future of CAFCASS as this Select Committee has given on this occasion. It is extremely important that Members of Parliament ensure that everything is put right that we have been told will be. I urge all my colleagues to keep a close eye on that in the future.

3.6 pm

Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West)

I want to add the name of the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) to those to whom he paid tribute. For the first serious inquiry by the Select Committee on the Lord Chancellor's Department, we have done a pretty fair job. The Government response and the response from CAFCASS are both worth reading as well. For those who do not want to lay out the £15 for our volume one and £8 for the Government and CAFCASS responses, I commend the internet, where our report can be found under Select Committees, with a link to the Government response.

Although the Government response is interesting, the CAFCASS response is even more so. The people who have had the responsibility of bringing matters back into line and who have been trying to do that since things went wrong are the staff and board of CAFCASS working with practitioners in the field. No one should take the view that because the Committee found elements to criticise, we discovered those for ourselves. They were known to people in the field and probably to people in CAFCASS. I suspect that the people who knew most about them were the board members. I pay tribute to them for holding loyally to their responsibilities, even if the way in which CAFCASS was set up was, as predicted, a mess.

One reason why things went wrong is that CAFCASS was on the fringe of the Department responsible for it. That has happened on a number of occasions. When the previous Government took office in 1979, some matters went wrong that were on the border between the Foreign Office and the Home Office, or between the Department of Education and Science and other Departments. That is merely a description of fact.

The level of resources needed is affected by the number of cases. I want to broaden the discussion for a moment—not for long—to say that there is social disadvantage, distress and handicap in this country on a scale not matched in similar countries. The number of children involved in proceedings affecting their parents' separations or divorces, or in court cases over their own future, is almost the highest in the world. That is a disgrace. I am not criticising any individual pair of parents, but we ought to set ourselves a target of halving the avoidable disadvantage, distress and handicap. Having been involved in parents' and care proceedings in courts, I suspect that much of that is avoidable.

I do not want to make this a criticism of any one individual, but I should like to see—in this as in other areas—a halving of the proportion of children who require an official decision or official help. I would like to see more help.

I was chairman of the Church of England Children's Society when family centres were being started by Bob Holman in Bristol; they then spread to other areas. We discovered that having a centre where parents could meet, often to do their washing—a sort of unofficial laundrette with a kettle for tea and coffee—led to the number of children taken into care on an out-of-town estate halving within two years. That is not because children's lives had necessarily changed, but because the authorities such as the social services, the police and the courts could have greater confidence that the child could be maintained at home without a care order.

I suspect that there are many other ways in which we can learn how solidarity—to use a slightly mainland European expression—community support and community lessons can help. We do not need star charts for parents; we need to help more parents to have the confidence and the competence to do a good enough job. That is what Margaret Harrison was doing when she started home start in Leicester. The home start expansion, and the Government's sure start programme, follows on from those lessons. My wife sometimes talks about streetwise grannies; there are a whole series of ways that one can get solidarity and support so that people can face their problems.

Often it is a question of how one deals with a problem rather than the caricature of marital disharmony where someone goes to a lawyer and the first point put to them is, "Tell me all the bad things that your so-called partner for life has done." If we are going to make those partnerships, whether marital or not, into ones intended to be for life, we all have to accept that no one can hang up a sign saying, "Everything all right here".

We have to raise the welfare chances of children. It is not just their chances that are spelt out in the report and the response, but their experiences. Where there has been failure of the CAFCASS system, we are talking about the experiences of children, as well as what happens to them after the court has come to a decision if one needs to be made.

To put that in context, let us remember that each week 2,400 male children commit a serious criminal offence for the first time. By the age of 30, a third of men could have been sent to jail for six months or more, and a quarter of men by the age of 21. When I last looked at them, those figures were slightly better than they had been, but they still are not good enough. For all I know, they may have deteriorated. Each week, 5,000 of our children take up smoking. They are making the same mistakes that we made, either because of peer pressure or because they are copying those close to them. It is a sign of avoidable disadvantage, distress and handicap.

A third example is that 6,000 people each week in this country contribute to a conception that ends in a termination. If we have 170,000 abortions a year in this country, even if some are accounted for by people who come here from countries where it is more difficult to get a legal termination, that is over 3,000 a week. It takes two to tango. Those figures are at least four times higher than those in the Netherlands, which is a country with similar wealth and background. A number of things are going wrong in what I call the family life cycle field.

Having said that, my ideas about effective family functioning are not what concern us today. We are concerned with the CAFCASS report, the response and the future of those services to children. We have to help CAFCASS and the sponsoring Department to get the Treasury to realise that it will need more money to catch up than it will to maintain the service after that. That will require pulling in practitioners on a relatively short-term basis to help get over the backlog. I do not think that we can expect the Department of Constitutional Affairs, which remains in charge of the Court Service, to stand back from making sure that the courts can process cases, especially when CAFCASS has provided a reporter to give the child's point of view.

The idea that our Committee, which has existed for a short time as the Lord Chancellor's Committee, can say goodbye to this subject is wrong. We have a responsibility either by ourselves or in tandem with the Education and Skills Committee, to ensure that the Court Service provides the opportunity for cases to be heard as soon as they are ready. For a child, the experience of being:involved in court proceedings that may affect the rest of their childhood is a major one. The fact that they are not getting the care and concern and the listening ears that they need to carry them forward to court makes it worse. A delay of days, let alone weeks, can be disastrous to their idea of having some kind of rock to hold on to at that troubled time.

3.15 pm

Julie Morgan (Cardiff, North)

I congratulate the Committee and its Chairman on an excellent and hard-hitting report, and on all their hard work. I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. Before I became a Member of Parliament, I worked for Barnardo's as an assistant director and one of my jobs was managing a team of employed guardians. The subject is close to my heart and I know many guardians who have been affected by the turmoil in CAFCASS.

When I worked for Barnardo's, CAFCASS was the guardian ad litem and reporting officer service. Provision of service at that time was mixed. As the Committee report says, there were some directly employed guardians, who were employed by voluntary bodies, some guardians who were employed by a consortium, and many more self-employed guardians. The turmoil that the self-employed guardians in particular faced after the setting up of CAFCASS was inexcusable, and I am glad that the Committee's report has pointed that out.

As the report says, bringing together 117 previous employers and setting up a new organisation was never going to be easy. However, the organisation seemed almost to go out of its way to alienate its most valuable asset: its staff. I know how much distress was caused at that time. I am pleased that the report pays tribute to the staff of CAFCASS, acknowledging in its conclusion the skill and devotion of the staff throughout the organisation and their commitment to the children they serve. We cannot emphasise that too much. We should praise the hard work done at the coal face. In particular, the job of children's guardians, who make recommendations to the court about the future of some of the most vulnerable children in society, is difficult, skilled and painstaking.

There are time limits, as has been mentioned several times. Children's lives pass quickly: a week is a long time in a child's life. The children's guardians need to be able to get on with the job quickly because the clock is ticking. I welcome the aim to appoint a children's guardian within 48 hours, because that has not been happening in many parts of the country. The report rightly criticises the long delays, which I believe are due mainly to the dispute with the self-employed guardians right at the beginning of CAFCASS, which led to many leaving the service. There has been a shortage of staff since. As we all know, and as the report says, there is a shortage of experienced social workers. I hope that some of the guardians will return, but it will be difficult to attract back some of the self-employed guardians who were treated so badly.

In Wales in September 79 public law cases were unallocated. Those cases were in particular areas of Wales such as Cardiff, Swansea, Bridgend, Tredegar and Newport—mainly industrial areas. There were no waiting lists in mid-Wales, north Wales and south-west Wales. However, sometimes the wait, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) has already mentioned, is eight to nine weeks. That means that a child could be away from home—even without family contact— while the court waits for a children's guardian to be appointed, for eight or nine weeks. That is a long time in a child's life, and they may not be able to recover from such a period of limbo.

The situation is deplorable. It was estimated that the setting-up and reorganisation of CAFCASS cost CAFCASS Cymru the equivalent of 11 and a half members of staff, who, it was estimated, would have been able to work with 195 cases. That was caused in the main by the loss of the hours worked by self-employed guardians, who had been able to work more flexibly, which allowed them to cope with putting in more hours.

There is, however, light in sight in Wales. The rate of allocation currently exceeds that of referrals, and because several new appointments have been made it is likely that the waiting list will be cleared by April 2004. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford asked about future demand. How will we predict the ups and downs of demand and how the service will develop? The CAFCASS budget is very difficult to predict and it will take a long time to determine what it should be.

The blame for the damage done to children who have been waiting must be firmly placed on those who were in charge of CAFCASS. I am glad that the Select Committee report has clearly pointed that out and that there have been resignations. I welcome the hard-hitting report and the consequent changes that have been made.

I am pleased that CAFCASS has moved to the Department for Education and Skills under my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children. I am sure that she will do her utmost to address the issues. It is more appropriate that the service comes under the Minister for Children than under the Lord Chancellor's Department: the move sends the signal that the child will be at the heart of the service. Everyone I have spoken to at CAFCASS—I am in contact mainly with those on the public law side—welcomes the move and hopes that it will mean a new type of service. It provides the opportunity for a fresh start and the chance to put the distressing past couple of years behind us, and it enables a reassessment of the relationship between CAFCASS and its responsible Government Department.

The move raises the issue of the service in Wales, of which I know that the Minister is aware. The Minister with responsibility for vulnerable children and for health and social services in Wales is in the Cabinet of the Welsh Assembly; that creates an anomaly in the new arrangements. However, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children is reviewing how best to serve the most vulnerable children in Wales. It is important to implement changes, if required, as quickly as possible.

Let me flag up some of the difficulties currently affecting organisation and funding of CAFCASS in Wales. Certain issues in Wales differ from those in the English regions, and they put pressure on the budget for CAFCASS in Wales, which is insufficient—I am sure it is in other regions as well. Those issues have not been highlighted in the Committee's report.

A major issue is the fulfilment of the requirements of the Welsh Language Act 1993. In the distressing situations that bring children to the attention of CAFCASS, it is essential that Welsh children and their families can use their first language to talk about their feelings and their emotions. In any case, the law requires that the service be provided. However, it is very difficult to fulfil that requirement in such a specialised service, so Welsh-speaking guardians must travel far more widely than would otherwise be necessary. The geography of Wales, the large rural areas and the difficult terrain in some areas place quite a burden on CAFCASS Cymru.

There are also budgeting problems with Welsh language training. At a corporate level, CAFCASS Cymru lacks an understanding of the Welsh language issue, and its commitment to the needs of Welsh-speaking children is patchy. The only additional money that CAFCASS Cymru has to cope with that issue is for a Welsh language office translator: that helps to get literature produced bilingually and may help with policy, but it cannot help with the actual delivery of the service. There must be Welsh-speaking children's guardians to deliver the service in Welsh. They must speak Welsh fluently because important, emotional issues have to be communicated fluently and properly understood. I do not know whether any of that was brought to the Committee's attention. The work of the official solicitor retained by CAFCASS Legal in London resulted in a complaint to the Welsh Language Board after the one case that was dealt with by CAFCASS Legal in Wales, because it was unable to deliver a service in Welsh.

The other issue in Wales is CAFCASS's relationship with the Welsh Assembly under the present set-up. Policies developed at a corporate level will have to reflect Welsh policies and the regulations and other secondary legislation that are passed by the Welsh Assembly Government, which may be different from those passed here. Regulations developed in Wales in relation to the Adoption and Children Act 2002 are likely to be significantly different from those in England, and only a small part of the children's Green Paper "Every Child Matters" applies to Wales. I know that the CAFCASS response contains many references to that Green Paper, but only a little of it applies to Wales. I have heard tales of members of CAFCASS in Wales travelling long distances for meetings—it is important that they do that, to be part of groups that plan policy—when the whole discussion has had no relevance to what is happening in Wales. Such important issues should be taken on board.

It is very important that the Welsh staff in CAFCASS respond to the consultation documents issued by the Welsh Assembly Government. They have a vital role to play in that consultation. They should take a holistic, integrated approach to children. There is no doubt that additional funding is required for the Welsh office under the present set-up.

The new plan for CAFCASS, which other hon. Members have already mentioned today, generates additional strain. It seems ironic that another tier of managers is now being created when what we want is more resources for the children and families who need them. The plan to have three divisions is problematic. Wales will be included in the east and west midlands and south-west region, so it is even less likely that particular Welsh issues will be recognised at corporate level. That is already difficult, but the change will make it even more so. A proposal to separate Wales was not taken up.

There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Wales, the nature of devolution and the nature of the issues that relate to Wales. While many organisations are creating Welsh offices and acknowledging post-devolution Wales, CAFCASS as a corporate body seems to be moving in the opposite direction. I understand that the organisation's first corporate plan said that it was a service covering two countries, but the second corporate plan dropped that reference and seemed not to recognise the differences between the two countries in terms of policies, regulations and guidance.

I wanted to use this debate to draw out the particular issues relating to CAFCASS in Wales, but I end by saying that the Committee has produced an excellent report. We know what a valuable service CAFCASS provides. I pay tribute to the guardians and others who have for so many years worked so hard for the benefit of children.

3.28 pm

Mr. Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre)

As a member of the Committee, I, too, commend the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) for his leadership, and commend all other members and our Clerk and professional advisers. The report is a good and substantial piece of work. I know a fair amount about these issues. Previously, I was a local authority social worker and I managed some social services, including those for children in care, and adoption and fostering services. I had a lot of contact with guardians. I was also a member of the Committee that dealt with the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, which introduced CAFCASS, and I recall the high hopes. At the time, there were one or two queries to which I shall return.

Along with my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) and Judith Timms from the National Youth Advocacy Service, I have attended meetings with Ministers, including the previous Minister, and the chief executive to express serious concerns about CAFCASS. I was delighted when the Select Committee agreed to take the matter on as its first inquiry because it is fundamentally important. The Committee has done a very good job indeed.

One of the best announcements that I have heard this year was that CAFCASS would come under the remit of the newly created Minister for Children. If one wanted to estimate the degree of neglect and misunderstanding that CAFCASS has suffered from the Lord Chancellor's Department, one need look only at aspects of the Government's response to the report. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed claims that he can see the fault lines between the Lord Chancellor's Department and the Department for Education and Skills. The Government response contains no definitive statement on tandem representation, fails to say anything at all about resources and, in its lack of reference to children in the framework document, fails to recognise the crucial role of CAFCASS in relation to children appearing in court. It frankly avoids the issues and simply provides circumlocutions; at times, it seems as if its author is auditioning to write another series of "Yes, Minister".

The Minister's response is wholly inadequate, and I cannot believe that it comes from the same Department that wrote the far-reaching and outstanding Green Paper that is so much under discussion at the moment. Any Select Committee report should receive a better response than that.

The CAFCASS response is, on the face of it, more reasoned, and tries to address the issues. However, on page 12 it states that CAFCASS will work with others to implement the Protocol for the Judicial Case Management in Public Law Children Act Cases". A few pages later, it says: It will be difficult, however, to achieve allocation within two days in all cases across CAFCASS, in the short to medium term. One wonders what is going on. We need a better response to a well-reasoned report on a very serious subject, possibly the most serious subject that has ever come before Ministers of this House. We are talking about the lives of children; children in this country have died during the difficult circumstances at CAFCASS. We need a much clearer response from Government, CAFCASS and other agencies to well-worked reports.

There is at least one clear statement in the report, namely that both sides accept that there needs to be a fundamental review of the membership of the board. I agree with that. Indeed, I was involved in the discussion of that point during the Select Committee sittings. The Select Committee's view is correct and damning. The board has failed so far to provide the necessary strategic direction and accountability that CAFCASS so desperately needs. The chairman has had the good grace to fall on his sword and he should be commended for that. However, I call on every member of the board to consider their positions when they receive such a review of their work.

We are discussing a serious situation. Before coming into the Room I was handed some information by a magistrate from London, who shall remain anonymous. Yesterday in Greater London there were 172 unallocated cases. Furthermore, it takes six to eight weeks to allocate priority cases and three months to allocate non-priority cases. That is outrageous and completely unacceptable.

My right hon. Friend the Minister for Children has taken on the greatest role in Government. She has the greatest task in Government ahead of her in transforming children's services and children's lives. In comparison, the task of fundamentally transforming CAFCASS and dealing with the scandalous position we are in is relatively small and achievable. My right hon. Friend has a grave responsibility on her shoulders, but she is more than capable of taking it on.

The first step in the process must be to change CAFCASS into a child-centred organisation. That was one of the criticisms voiced during the Committee stage of the Criminal Justice and Courts Services Act. There is nothing in the document we have received that says CAFCASS is a child-centred organisation, and nothing saying that this is a vital social work service for children. The members of the board must be steeped in the values of, and must be experienced with good practice in, social work with children. They must be utterly committed to the rights of children.

No one who was working with those values, who came from such a background and experience, or had stature in the world of social work with, or legal work for, children would be prepared to tolerate the current situation with CAFCASS. No one would be prepared to say, "We take on the task of allocating cases within 48 hours, but it is not achievable in the short to medium term. No one would say, "Yes, we agree with tandem representation in public law, but don't extend it to private law, and allow one of the senior officials to make strong statements to conferences suggesting that the organisation does not have a substantial commitment to the tandem representation of children."

The organisation says how committed it is to working with its staff; my goodness, it needs to be. It needs to re-engage with self-employed guardians and bring all staff together. I read that there would be a meeting on 21 October. Did it take place and, if so, what were the results? How are the dedicated professionals who have remained with CAFCASS, and those who have moved on to other careers and opportunities but are still desperately concerned about the organisation, being engaged in the future of that vital social work service for children? I would venture to suggest that this cry has never been heard in the history of debate in the House; we need child care social workers, and we need them right at the top of CAFCASS. We need CAFCASS to be a children's rights organisation.

We cannot divorce CAFCASS from the current crisis in social work. It is a very important if denigrated profession that has been completely undervalued. It is a vital occupation that protects thousands of children every day of the year, but it is demeaned, abused and taken to task outrageously when things go wrong. Social workers are not paid well enough for the important and stressful work that they undertake.

CAFCASS is operating at a time when there are many unallocated cases involving children in all social services departments. The Government are beginning to address that through their Green Paper, which gives children's social services the opportunity 10 raise esteem, bring more people into important work with children and work with other agencies in an integrated fashion to ensure that good practice with children is informed by the values of social work and the rights of children. As I say, we can and must get CAFCASS right. We can make a huge start on making progress in children's social services if we do that.

We have to tackle delays; that is the fundamental issue with CAFCASS. We have to ensure that children who are made vulnerable by family circumstances, are facing the prospect of being removed from home, are caught in the war between parents, or are facing the possibility, or reality, of being placed in secure accommodation—the most vulnerable children in our society—are supported. We must ensure also that their rights are protected, and that they have independent representation at one of the most vulnerable times of their lives. If we cannot get that right, we should not be here. It is essential that we make some real progress on this issue.

As an aid to that, I state that I share the views of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford. CAFCASS is trying to take on too many tasks, particularly as we have a Green Paper that is set on radically transforming and improving children's services at a local level by integrating them, and making the provision of a wide range of them part of the normal experience of children's lives. I do not see why an organisation such as CAFCASS need concern itself with the provision of services for children who are experiencing family breakdown, which, unfortunately, is fairly common.

What we need to ensure is that contact centres, and services for mediation and for supporting children in these circumstances, are made part of the ordinary, full range of services at local level. We should not be encouraging CAFCASS to build itself another child care silo, when other organisations are desperately trying to integrate their services.

We want to ensure that CAFCASS workers do their job; that they allocate skilled experienced staff within the 48-hour period to the children who need their services. That is what CAFCASS should be focusing on. That is what all the resources should be going into. I agree with the Committee that CAFCASS does not need a vast, hierarchical structure or huge layers of management to achieve that. I hark back to the days that my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford described, when excellent services were swiftly provided to children and we had nothing like the level of problems that we have now. I cannot see why a child-centred service cannot provide excellent services swiftly.

CAFCASS must have more money because it needs to recruit experienced and skilled people. There is a fear that CAFCASS is currently recruiting people who do not have the level of experience that new recruits had in the past. Representing children, working with the legal profession and ensuring that children's voices are heard at some of the most crucial periods of their lives is important work. Work that has already been done with those children must be understood, and it is necessary to have the stature and ability to question the work that has been undertaken, and to look at possible alternatives and a wider range of services, as well as at the family resources that might be available to those children. This is not the sort of work that should be done by people who took a social work qualifying course only a few years earlier. This vital work requires more experience than that.

I want to discuss an important development of the CAFCASS service that was introduced by the Adoption and Children Act 2002. Properly and rightly, section 122 of the Act introduces the possibility of separate representation for children involved in private law proceedings by adding section 8 proceedings, which include questions about residence in contact disputes. The list of proceedings specified in section 41 of the Children Act 1989 allows the court to appoint both a solicitor and a children's guardian to protect the rights and welfare of the child concerned.

Paragraph 1.5 of CAFCASS's response specifically states that it will implement the new arrangements in the 2002 Act on adoption and the direct representation of children in private law exceptional cases. CAFCASS states that one of its key aims is to implement new legislation and that it is preparing to do so. On the face of it, that is welcome, but can we believe that it will happen? Can we infer from CAFCASS's response that it supports early implementation of section 122? Will the Minister give a similar commitment? Without such a commitment, the rhetoric in the document is meaningless.

I have gone on at some length, but the subject is exceptionally important. We have an opportunity, which we must take, radically to improve the service. Frankly, the Government's credibility is at stake. This is a great Government for children, and work has been done in so many spheres, including addressing child poverty and improving education. The Green Paper is especially important, and specific legislation such as the Adoption and Children Act 2002 marks a great step forward for children in this country.

If the Government do not get CAFCASS right, they will be heavily criticised for failing children. The children's commissioner for England is another creation mooted in the children's Green Paper. If we do not get CAFCASS right, I forecast that the commissioner's first job will be to take to task everyone who has failed children in that regard. Let us hope that we can avoid that prospect by making some progress today. We must ensure that there is real change in CAFCASS to make things better for vulnerable children in our society.

3.53 pm

Dr. John Pugh (Southport)

I congratulate the Committee on its excellent report, which is a catalyst for change. I also congratulate all members of the Committee on their contributions both to the report and today's debate, which has been an education for me. They have performed a true public service. First, they identified an enormous problem affecting vulnerable children and distressed parents. However, they did not leave it at that: they also rigorously analysed and scrutinised the problem and suggested some solutions, which have commended themselves to both the Government and CAFCASS.

CAFCASS and the Government accept the bulk of the report's findings, which are also recognised by clients of the service and by practitioners who work within it. I do not need to reiterate the problems pertaining to the service, which have been pointed out by other Members. I simply want to examine the variety of responses from both the Government and CAFCASS.

There is an acceptance that we must improve the morale of the people who work in the service. When the service is criticised, they take the criticism personally to some extent, even if the problem is not their fault and even if it has occurred despite their most assiduous efforts. However, the issue for us is whether there is enough evidence that sufficient notice is being taken of the report to get a result. Will it substantially change things? To deal with that question, we must examine the responses of the Government and of CAFCASS and tease out what differences may exist between them and what problems may still be lurking in their detailed responses on particular points.

I shall not address the information in the responses about the Government's aspirational agenda. We all applaud aspects of the Green Paper, if not the totality. We all think that having a Minister for Children is entirely and inherently desirable. We all hope that there will be a new dawn and a better future, but we must first ask whether the practical, everyday difficulties that the service has so far experienced will be any fewer and whether all the problems dogging current cases will persist for some time, thereby affecting vulnerable children and desperate parents.

It should be acknowledged that some problems could be regarded as unrepeatable. The difficulties of setting up a new service alongside restructuring the probation service will not happen again, although we cannot assume—other hon. Members have alluded to it—that merging CAFCASS into the Department for Education and Skills will be effortless, seamless and without problems. One of the problems that the Committee highlighted is the failure to anticipate problems, and there will be problems ahead. It would have been useful had the Department responded more positively to recommendation 6 of the report, which asks for input from the National Audit Office. I shall discuss later why I think that that would be particularly helpful.

None the less, it is fair to acknowledge that the Government have accepted a range of good recommendations and acknowledged a need to review lines of accountability; a need to look at the personnel involved, particularly the membership of the board; a need for adequate and clear framework documents and proper involvement of stakeholders; and a need to carry out a clear examination of partnership arrangements. The Government have accepted all that without demur. Equally, CAFCASS accepts that it needs better stakeholder participation, improved governance, and improved work force training and flexibility to deal with some of its staffing problems. It says that it is keen to pilot new forms of conciliation. When one puts the two documents side by side, at first blush it appears that all is sweetness and light—a new golden age beckons.

However, the bottom line is whether there will still be significant delays in the process. The Government do not promise to eradicate delays entirely. For example, they say not that they will have fixed targets but that they will set targets in due course. They do not respond specifically to the Committee's recommendation 33 to increase funding further. If one sets that alongside the CAFCASS claim in its response that it has a wholly inadequate budget, one begins to see where future problems may lie.

CAFCASS talks of seeking resources for pilot projects, not of having them. It acknowledges that various parties, including the Government, will not achieve protocol standards by 2004–05. It says that it is unable to allocate cases as speedily as it would like and, ominously, that it works in a difficult professional recruitment market. That means that it has real concerns about finding the appropriate staff to hurry things on and get things done, as its clients would wish.

Despite the problems that CAFCASS identifies, it promises to put up fees to self-employed contractors and to increase the funding for the voluntary sector beyond the current £ 1 million-plus. It remains to be seen how it will square the circle and get a result without endlessly dipping into or calling on the Government's coffers. Strangely, I can understand the Government's not wishing to write CAFCASS a blank cheque. Whether CAFCASS has spent money as wisely as it could have is arguable. The history of its IT procurement is a cause for concern, and its top-heavy, hierarchical management structure has also been alluded to. I do not know a great deal about that, but it does not suggest that every penny has been spent as prudently as it could have been. The Government have a legitimate right to expect savings, which can be made not necessarily by CAFCASS reducing its efficiency, but by certain procedural changes and the better integration of the agencies involved.

Mr. Beith

Another example of the same problem is the extensive use of expensive agency and consultant resources. That is a direct consequence of not having managed resources to ensure that such services were in-house to start with.

Dr. Pugh

Yes, in any organisation there is a clear case for saying that there are savings 1.0 be made by making procedures smarter and more efficient. Other Members have mentioned, and I agree with them, that CAFCASS is a very hard service to cost. It provides a complex service through a network of different agencies.

The National Audit Office has a role to play examining how money has been and can be better spent. I say that without being a particular friend of the National Audit Office, which appears to be able to comment on all manner of Government affairs, whether or not they are, strictly speaking, concerned with auditing. Without the rigorous examination of how CAFCASS is run—as a prelude, I hope, to substantially increased resources—there is the scope for mutual recrimination, for a decade of further buck-passing and for the betrayal of the interests of the vulnerable children, whom we have come to the Chamber today to help.

4.2 pm

Mrs. Eleanor Laing (Epping Forest)

I commend the Select Committee for producing an excellent report. It is not often that we sit on a Thursday afternoon debating a Select Committee report that has already brought much-needed changes to the area into which it inquired.

I pay tribute to the Committee's excellent Chairman, who delivered his report to us extremely succinctly. Those of us who have not been involved in this matter for as long as hon. Members who have been steeped in it for several months appreciated the way in which the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) led us through the report.

I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley), who is temporarily out of the Chamber—I must tell him later that I paid tribute to him—and to my hon. Friends the Members for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) and for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) and all other Members who have spoken and who have put a lot of time and effort into the inquiry.

There have been fundamental problems but the report is brilliantly thorough and positive. The problem with many Select Committee reports that are presented to Parliament is that they pick at the faults. They identify what has gone wrong but they do nothing positive to improve matters. The issue is not party political. We want CAFCASS to work well. It is an important service. The issue has nothing to do with party political opinions, and everything to do with helping people who need help, when and where they need it, efficiently and properly. I therefore welcome almost all the remarks that I have heard this afternoon.

It is, however, sad that we have reached this situation and that an organisation that was set up with the best of intentions and hopes did not live up to expectations. I sincerely hope that, as a result of the work that has been done by the Committee, there will be further improvements to the service, in addition to those that have already been made. I therefore support the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed.

I take issue with the right hon. Gentleman on a tiny point. He said that cases involving children and courts are often difficult. I suggest that every single case that involves children coming before a court, or a court making a decision about children, whether it is a private law case or a public law case, is difficult and tragic. Every case involves a vulnerable child who needs help there and then—indeed, not just a child, but a family. However, let us concentrate on the children.

The right hon. Gentleman emphasised the penultimate letter of CAFCASS, and I agree with him. It is a support service, not just a court or advisory service. There are so many areas in which support is needed for children, as we have all been examining in the much heralded Green Paper. I am sure that there will be plenty of opportunity to discuss those wider issues in the near future. However, the fact that this is a service for children and families must not be overlooked. In that sense, it is pivotal in helping with children.

I had a meeting yesterday with a gentleman who is setting up a charity to help families—particularly, but not only, fathers—in which parental alienation as a result of divorce and separation is doing enormous damage. He gave me the details of a case that has gone as far as it can in the High Court. It involves children seeing or not seeing their father. All such cases are tragic, because children are suffering from parental alienation. One cannot help feeling that, had CAFCASS or a service like it been involved in that case and dealt with things properly—I am not blaming CAFCASS for this particular case—the problems those children are suffering would have been very much reduced.

The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed also mentioned the culture of box-ticking. That worries me tremendously. We often impose on our public services an obligation to achieve certain targets, by certain times, in a certain way and with a certain budget. In trying to achieve the target, and to protect their jobs, public servants are not able to do the job that they want to do professionally and properly. Were it not for the pressure of targets, the job could be done much better.

In a sensitive area such as children's services, I strongly suggest that we trust the professionalism of those involved, and not be so keen on box-ticking. Ticking a box does not necessarily mean that the job has been done; it means only that, for example, a guardian has been appointed. It does not mean that the guardian has as yet done anything. That is a perfect example of how targets and statistics can be used to obscure lack of action. I hope that the Minister will note that point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West made some excellent points, and now that he has returned I can mention to him that I have already paid tribute to the excellent work that he and his colleagues on the Committee have done. An essential point, which he made, is that the number of children affected by family breakdown, divorce and separation is enormous and growing. That is the situation right across the social spectrum and throughout the country. The report rightly identifies the different approach in private and public law cases. I appreciate that, but we should not forget that these services are needed in a wide range of cases. We are talking not only about the most vulnerable children, although particular regard must of course be paid to them.

The Minister for Children (Margaret Hodge)

indicated assent.

Mrs. Laing

I notice that the Minister agrees with me on that, not surprisingly. As a consequence of the increase in family breakdown, the separation of parents and divorce, we are breeding a generation of children a very large proportion of whom will develop problems because of their family situation. If those problems are not dealt with, they will grow larger as the children become adults. In other areas—I spend much time looking into special needs education—it is recognised that early intervention to provide help to a child who needs it is vital. If we nip a problem in the bud, or help a child over a particular hurdle, that problem ceases to be a problem and the child can go on to develop his or her educational and social abilities unhindered. However, if children carry around with them a problem that is difficult to solve, they are held back in every area of their life. It has perhaps not been properly recognised that the children with whom CAFCASS is or should be dealing are in exactly that position. I ask the Minister to note that early intervention and assistance in this field is vital, as it is in many other areas that we discuss.

The hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) mentioned delays. Clearly, that is one of the main problems. Delays are not always due only to budgeting, but they are very damaging. Others want to ask questions on that. I do not know whether the Minister has already consulted other stakeholders who assist children in this situation, such as the National Association of Guardians ad Litem. It has quite rightly asked how having to wait a long time affects children, and whether that is being monitored. That is particularly important because, as has already been said, a week is a very long time to a child. Children who are separated from parents, siblings and other family members suffer incalculable anxiety, and no one knows the effect that that may have on the children at the time and on their future development. Rather than spending resources on monitoring whether waiting is having an effect on children—it is reasonable to assume that delays by CAFCASS and the courts have a detrimental effect on them—we should be using the resources to get rid of delays. That is important.

I know that the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) still has many concerns, and I am sure that the Minister will note them. I particularly agree with him that the ethos of CAFCASS must be child centred, and that it must be seen to be so. It is part of the enormous bureaucracy of our courts and justice system, but I welcome the fact that the Minister for Children is now responsible for the service. I hope that that means that it will become more child centred.

The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) rightly said that it is not always budget issues that are at fault, and that it is not all about money. It is about where CAFCASS fits into the system. For that reason, I commend what the Government have done in moving the whole administration over to the Department for Education and Skills. I hope that the Minister for Children agrees with me, but I would not blame her if she did not, because it seems that her duties increase day by day, or week by week. We realise just how many functions of Government are targeted towards and concerned with the protection of and assistance for children, but this is an important one.

The enormous experience of the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) has been appreciated in the debate this afternoon. He was concerned that the whole issue may be swallowed up in the huge work load of the Department for Education and Skills. The Education and Skills Committee does excellent work, but there is concern that it has a much heavier work load than the Select Committee on the Lord Chancellor's Department and may not be able to concentrate on this specific issue to same extent. It is incumbent on us all to be vigilant and to carry on that Committee's good work in helping to improve the CAFCASS service. We cannot underestimate the importance of its work, and I hope that the fact that we are having this debate will help to highlight that.

I am sure that the Minister recognises the importance of CAFCASS's work and this debate. I realise that none of the shortcomings that have been discussed were the fault of the Minister for Children—it is unusual for me to say that—but the added work load is an enormous responsibility. I wish her well in taking forward the good work and the recommendations of the Select Committee, and I assure her that I shall be vigilant in continuing to ask questions about how CAFCASS is improving.

4.19 pm

The Minister for Children (Margaret Hodge)

I warmly congratulate the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) and his Committee on an excellent piece of work. It is a very comprehensive report, and was my learning document on CAFCASS when I was first appointed to this job. It seemed that the Committee might have known something that I did not—namely, that a Minister for Children with responsibility for young people and families was to transfer to the Department. It wanted to set me a challenging agenda, and it has done that very effectively. I concur with the view that the Education and Skills Committee should pursue some of the critical issues seriously as it monitors our Department's work.

Like all Members who have spoken in the debate, I acknowledge the commitment and knowledge of all the front-line CAFCASS court welfare officers and the work that they do in such a critical area. In any discussion on the organisation as a whole, everyone who has had a part to play in where we have got to has acknowledged that extremely good work.

It may be because I am married to a lawyer, but in the very early days of my appointment I got more representations on the service of CAFCASS than I did on many other areas. Many of the letters from friends and colleagues when I was first appointed asked me to improve the quality of service from CAFCASS. I take the matter extremely seriously. I accept what my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) said. We should have the interest of children at the heart of what we do, which is what the new directorate in our Department and my job are about. We should ensure that children at this most vulnerable part of their lives are given the necessary good-quality support swiftly—whether it is a public or private law case. That is an essential way of measuring whether we are doing what we ought to be doing.

When I first considered some c f the issues involved, I was quite shocked at how long the delays were, and the length of time taken by court proceedings in public law. A week is long time in a child's life, but a year is a heckish long time. The fact that the protocol on public law cases is now set at 40 weeks seems to me far too long for vulnerable children who are at a vulnerable stage of their lives. Although we shall work to that protocol, it is my ambition to re-examine it in order to see whether we can do more.

Mr. Kidney

I see that the Minister has only 65 minutes left to complete her summing up, so I shall be brief. On the crucial point about delay, what does she make of the response of CAFCASS that it will find it difficult to allocate cases within 48 hours?

Margaret Hodge

I shall not promise to resolve the matter overnight. The problems are complex, and I shall allude to some of them. We are attempting to recruit some highly qualified, highly experienced staff, with the appropriate experience to do the sensitive task that is required of them. Many of us are fishing in the same pool, so the challenge of making that pool larger will not be resolved overnight. I want to focus on that area, and put a lot of energy into it. In the Green Paper "Every Child Matters" we talk about investment in the work force, and the importance of recruiting, training, keeping and maintaining highly qualified social workers to work in the front line, in the voluntary sector and in all the new agencies that the Government have established, such as the youth offending teams. We have created a new set of environments in which social workers can support children's behaviour and attendance at school, and work has already been done. We cannot resolve the problem of staff growth overnight, but we are doing everything that we can to speed up the process. I can and will give immediate attention to providing high-quality staff.

I can assure the House that CAFCASS will be a child-centred organisation; its business is to protect children's interests and rights at the most vulnerable point in their lives, when they are facing huge change. The Department will give that priority. It is early days, and I am trying to settle into a new job. In my new role, I have identified that as an area on which I must focus.

This has been a good, non-confrontational debate, and I welcome that. Several hon. Members talked about the problems that were created. Looking back may not be helpful, although we must learn from past mistakes. The problem of staffing in the organisation and the dismissal of the chief executive was one thing, but not having enough time to launch it properly was another. The dispute with the self-employed guardians, which the hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) spent some time taking about, was a damaging period in CAFCASS's development.

There are other issues, such as poor accommodation, where children are often on the same premises as offenders. Such problems became part of CAFCASS's legacy and we must deal with them. Harmonising everything across 117 organisations into one body is a huge, awesome task, and we probably did not realise that it would be quite so difficult. I do not know whether the statistics I have seen are wrong or right—all I can do is use them in this debate. Everything in the garden was not desperately rosy before CAFCASS came into being. In the years leading up to its establishment, there were growing delays in turning around public law cases. In 1996, it took 46 weeks on average to complete a case. By 2000, the time had risen to 50 weeks. By 2002–03, the last year for which we have proper statistics, the average had come down a little to 48 weeks. That is far too long. Nevertheless, the legacy was not good.

The numbers of applications to the courts have also massively increased and are again increasing in this financial year. In 1996, there were 16,000 such applications, and by 2000 that had risen to 22,000. In the six months to March 2003 there was a 15 per cent. increase in care case requests—and those were the more complicated cases.

Mr. Dawson

As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed said, a number of hon. Members visited our local offices. The figures quoted on the increase in cases were reflected in my local office, although it was felt that a large factor in that was the revocation of care orders. This does not necessarily have anything to do with the problems. It could be about good practice.

Does not the first figure on the length of cases go beyond the influence of CAFCASS? Is it not to do with how court procedures operate? Nevertheless, that does not detract from the fact that a guardian should be appointed within 48 hours.

Margaret Hodge

I take that point entirely. Although we will make every endeavour to support the CAFCASS's board and executive in improving the quality and speed of its service, they do not operate alone. Part of the answer must lie—certainly in public law cases—in how social workers deal with care cases that need to go before the courts, and in the time that the courts give to hearing cases. Members have mentioned examples of delays in allocating a CAFCASS officer, but I have also heard of examples of horrendous delays in identifying sufficient court time to hear cases that CAFCASS has prepared. I hope that the Select Committee that monitors the work of the Department for Constitutional Affairs will continue to examine this aspect of its work. I work closely with my fellow Ministers in the Department so that we take an holistic approach, particularly to public law cases, which is where the delays are particularly difficult.

Things are getting better, although they are still not good enough. By July 2003, more than 96 per cent. of private law cases had been allocated 10 weeks before the case was filed. In public law cases, we still have a long way to go, and my hon. Friends the Members for Cardiff. North and for Lancaster and Wyre talked about examples of unacceptable delays in London and Wales. Currently, 69 per cent. of public law cases are allocated in seven days, which is below the current target of 80 per cent.

There are huge regional variations: I have no doubt that when the Committee examined this subject it noticed that. In public law cases, there is no delay in the south-west, but there is enormous delay in the north-east. We need to understand better why those regional variations in allocations occur, and try to address that.

Another and more difficult issue, which has not been mentioned this afternoon, is that there are huge regional variations in the number of hours that an individual court welfare officer spends on a case: in Surrey, the average is 182 hours per case, in south-east Wales it is 69 hours per case—that might interest the hon. Member for Cardiff, North—in Merseyside it is 76 hours, and in Devon it is 178 hours. There may be good reasons for these variations, but we need to do more work to investigate why resources are being used in different ways in different areas, and whether there is anything that will support our efforts to try to speed things up.

Mr. Dawson

In doing that work, I accept that it is legitimate to ask such questions. Can the Minister assure me that that will not be a top-down paper exercise, and that it will involve genuine discussion with the people who are doing the hard and sometimes very time-consuming and good-quality work on the ground?

Margaret Hodge

I completely agree that it would be appalling if that were a paper exercise. For us to be able to take any action in respect of those differences, we must have a proper understanding of what is happening in individual cases.

The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed and the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) also talked about that work not being a tick-box exercise. I strongly take that point on board. When there are targets, there is always a danger that people will feel impelled to meet them mechanistically, rather than in a way that reflects the quality of service that we want. As we advance, we must be careful that the allocation of cases does not become a tick-box exercise that merely shows well in terms of the statistics.

The quality of court welfare officers was raised by several Members, particularly by my hon. Friends the Members for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) and for Lancaster and Wyre. I agree that those social workers deal with children at one of the most vulnerable points in their lives. Therefore, ensuring that we have high-quality front-line officers must be a central part of my work as we try to improve the quality of service offered by CAFCASS.

The issue relates partly to pay—there has been a better pay deal—and partly to training. I welcome the work that CAFCASS has done in introducing a training programme for staff. Good progress has been made on some of the Select Committee recommendations on the training fund. Morale is another difficult issue that we must now confront. The morale of the organisation must be raised so that it can move forward. I accept that we need staff who are, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre said, steeped in an understanding of children and who have appropriate expertise.

Several Members mentioned funding. I find that a difficult issue. The predecessor bodies costed their services at £66.5 million. CAFCASS therefore appeared to be properly funded in its first year. I shall not delve into the history to determine whether it was, but we cannot move away from the fact that it started with a baseline budget of £71.7 million, which has risen to £95 million in 2003–04. That is a considerable increase, but frankly, it is too early for me to know whether the budget is sufficient for the organisation to undertake the job that we have entrusted to it. We will do more work on that. The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) said that we cannot write blank cheques. We are in a tight spending round, and I have a huge range of priorities in which to invest money for children, young people and families. We must be certain that CAFCASS's massive budget increase is being properly used.

We are holding discussions with CAFCASS. It faces real difficulties, which some hon. Members mentioned. For example, it does not control demand but is a demand-led organisation. When the service was dispersed among 117 different bodies, it was easy to subsume an extra case or two in a larger local authority social services department budget. It is much tougher for a stand-alone non-departmental public body to do that. We must think through the implications of the demand and determine what is happening. Equally, we must ensure that the money is properly spent. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford said, I must assure myself that I know what is really needed by the organisation. I am putting my mind to that.

Several Members spoke about corporate governance. I wish to put on record my thanks to Anthony Hewson for his work in very difficult circumstances as the first chairman of CAFCASS. I have known him for some time—he worked for Scope when I had responsibility for disability issues. He is a very honourable man who puts in a great deal of effort and who cares very much about children. He gave his best to the organisation in its early days.

We appointed Clive Booth, who was chairman of the Teacher Training Agency, to review the membership. He will report to me quickly, and I shall take swift action based on his report. The Select Committee suggested, and we endorse, that necessary aspect of moving the organisation forward.

Mr. Dawson

The website of The Guardian—a newspaper that I try never to read—reported yesterday that Sir Clive Booth has been appointed to look at how the board operates, it has nothing to do with families and children. Is the Minister able to disabuse The Guardian of that notion?

Margaret Hodge

I, too, noted that little item on the website—it was drawn to my attention; I did not identify it myself. I do not think that that is a valid criticism. Clive Booth has enormous experience of how organisations are run and what makes for good corporate governance. We do not look for detailed knowledge of the specific issues in the corporate governance of the organisation. We look for the appropriate skills and qualifications that will make for a good body. However, we are discussing a non-executive body; the executive is where a lot of experience is needed. I have full confidence in Clive Booth, and I think that he will do a good job for us. I hope that hon. Members present endorse the work that he is doing.

We will also review the framework document when those issues are transferred to my Department—I was unsure whether the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed understood that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, North raised some issues about CAFCASS in Wales. As she knows, we are reviewing the matter with the Secretary of State for Wales, his colleagues and colleagues at the Welsh Assembly. We will try to come to a swift decision on how to ensure that children's interests are protected. That is the prime objective in my mind as we move forward with the organisation. My hon. Friend also talked about the importance of a language Act; I understand that CAFCASS is developing a Welsh language scheme and has increased the number of Welsh-speaking front-line court welfare officers—I hope that she welcomes that. She also talked about the Adoption and Children Act 2002 and differences in how it will be implemented in England and Wales, and "Every Child Matters". I take the point entirely; we need to reflect those issues in the training that we give to court welfare officers working in Wales.

A number of hon. Members talked about support services; that was an interesting part of the debate. In these early days we need to focus CAFCASS firmly on its core business. However, one of the joys of bringing all the services that impact on a child's life together is that in time we will be able to use our experience and expertise to reflect more widely on issues surrounding contact, for example, and how best to support children as they go through the court processes. I talked to many of the non-statutory organisations referred to in the debate about those and other issues.

Mr. Dawson

One of the really welcome things in the report is the professed support that CAFCASS gives to the participation and involvement of children. However, could it not become involved with organisations such as A National Voice, the Who Cares? Trust and Voice for the Child in Care, which are already doing extremely valuable work in that area? CAFCASS does not need to reinvent the wheel and erect another structure.

Margaret Hodge

Yes, I completely take that point and will reflect on it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford talked about the early intervention schemes in Florida and referred us to the article by Mrs. Justice Bracewell in The Guardian yesterday, which I managed to read during the debate. I have looked at the scheme; it is extremely interesting and we are considering whether we can take it forward with Mrs. Justice Bracewell. As with all such things, it would cost money, even on a pilot basis. We have to see whether we can identify the appropriate resources.

Mr. Kidney

As the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) said earlier, some responsibilities are for other people to assume. For early interventions, parents need access to information as soon as an application is lodged. They also need access to specialist parenting programmes and to parenting mediators with special expertise and contacts. Those are the responsibilities of others, not CAFCASS, but we should link them together.

Margaret Hodge

Again, I completely take that point. Those who have heard me talking about the Green Paper in various contexts know how important I think parenting is to children's lives. That is a subject on which the Government need to do much more thinking and on which there should be a great deal more policy development. Much more appropriate support should be available to all parents. I was interested to hear about the positive parenting experiment that my hon. Friend is pursuing in Stafford, and would welcome a more detailed briefing from him.

I take also the point made by the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) that our ambition must be to reduce the number of children that go anywhere near the court system. I hope that, when the hon. Gentleman has read the Green Paper—perhaps he has already done so—he will see that, in evolving and developing services for children and young people, our emphasis is on trying to intervene earlier in their lives, to enable children to develop their potential and to stop them falling through the net and therefore into the court system. That involves the sort of programmes, such as sure start and home start, that the hon. Gentleman mentioned and that I think are extremely important. The aim is to identify problems early, so that we can intervene swiftly before a problem becomes a crisis as a child grows, develops and encounters certain issues.

Peter Bottomley

Will the Minister allow me to add a brief point? Most of what most people know comes from the ordinary media. The Minister may remember—we are probably about the same age—the time when the media gave practically no coverage to people's working lives, whereas now, business and what we do at work are given media coverage. Yet although there are television and radio programmes about gardening, cooking, housing, and antiques, we have no equivalent depicting the ups and downs and ins and outs of ordinary family life. The media should turn their undoubted talents not to the public service message but to some of the excitements of family life. We know how to fix a car, but we do not know how to fix a family or marriage, or care for children when their parents are in trouble.

Margaret Hodge

While the hon. Gentleman was speaking, I was thinking about the soaps and how all we see on television is things going horribly wrong and the rather vile aspects of family life.

Good parenting in the home has a greater positive impact on a child's life than the most wonderful teacher in the most excellent school. We all know that, and research confirms it. Armed with that knowledge, it behoves us all to think how we can best support parents in their most difficult task. When I came home with my first bundle of joy in my arms, I was completely at a loss. We are given lots of antenatal advice, but we are not given a huge amount of post-natal support, except—I should say before I am attacked for making that remark—the support provided by the valuable services of the health visitor.

This is a difficult area of public policy for politicians at central and local level, because they are quickly accused of interfering in private family life and the Government are quickly accused of running a nanny state. Equally, however, I think that it is an abrogation of our duty not to acknowledge the importance of parenting and provide opportunities for support. There is not enough of that in the public domain.

Mr. Kidney

On the media, it is not a question of Government nannying. Members of the all-party group on children had a presentation about Australia's "triple P"—positive parenting programme—during which we watched an edition of a magazine-style programme about children's issues. The one we saw was about preparing a five-year-old child for their first day at school. It was a super, natural and entertaining piece of television. That is the kind of thing that we should appeal to our media to take an interest in.

Margaret Hodge

I could not agree more. The transition points in children's lives are particularly important, but we find that that is what there is least support for parents in. We want to focus on the transition from hospital to home, home to nursery, nursery to primary school, primary school to secondary school and beyond that. I also completely concur with what the hon. Member for Epping Forest said about the need for early intervention.

I should say to my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre that we are planning to implement section 122 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 by the end of 2004. Apparently, I am shortly to receive the submission that will tell me all the details of implementation.

In discussing some of the difficulties that confront CAFCASS, we should not lose sight of the achievements, and I hope that all Members acknowledge them. We have terrific front-line practitioners, and we should celebrate that and acknowledge the extraordinarily good work that they do in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. We have more of them: CAFCASS has recruited 174 more practitioners just in the last financial year. The organisation should be commended on that. A comprehensive training programme is in place for front-line officers, which is good. There is a better response to an increase in referrals, and that, too, needs to be celebrated. Money is going to the support services. The new organisation can, because it is unified, focus on vulnerable children. It has a specific remit to promote the welfare of children through its services. We should celebrate all of that.

What are our aims? We want to get to a situation in which cases are speedily allocated and promptly dealt with by an extremely high-quality service. We want all those who work on the front line to enjoy the best training and support., and work through what is a difficult period of bringing together many disparate organisations harmoniously, with national standards of practice. We want to see how CAFCASS can better support children and their families at a time of greatest need. We want not only to ensure that we meet the requirements of the protocol that has just been signed by all the organisations that deal with public law cases, but move beyond that if we can.

As the right hon. M ember for Berwick-upon-Tweed said, we want to gel behind CAFCASS. With the transfer of responsibility, we have an opportunity to make a fresh start. I am determined to grasp that opportunity because, like all Members who have spoken in the debate, I believe that our children deserve nothing less.

4.54 pm

Mr. Beith

With the leave of the House, I would like to thank those hon. Members who have taken part in today's debate. They have brought to it a wealth of experience.

The hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) rightly emphasised the need For us and for others to revisit relatively soon the issues that we have discussed today to ensure that nothing is lost sight of. The hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) broadened the issue by referring to the background that is driving the increased number of cases that place such a heavy burden on CAFCASS.

The hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) raised several important issues specific to Wales, which the Committee did not consider, but which I have discussed quite a bit in the weeks since the report was published. Two questions I had to which I have not yet had an answer are: has the creation of the Children's Commissioner yet made a significant difference; and is there interaction between the Children's Commissioner and CAFCASS? There are questions for the future of CAFCASS Cymru relating to whether it should have more autonomy and therefore an ability to relate to the Welsh Assembly, which will determine the policy issues in its sphere.

The hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) was severely critical of the Government's response, both generally and specifically in respect of tandem representation. Perhaps that comes better and more effectively from him than it does from me. He was right to draw attention to those issues. Like the Committee, he levelled severe criticisms at the board. It is fair to say that board members have tried to challenge what was going on in the organisation, and that the board as a whole was handicapped from the start in the ways that I have described. I do not want to be unfair, but individual board members will obviously carry the burden of what they know, and I know that they have become increasingly aware of some of the things going wrong with CAFCASS.

The Minister finds herself in the happy position where Opposition Front Benchers are supportive and encouraging of what she needs to do. That applies to both my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who spoke on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, and to the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing), who spoke for the Conservatives. I was particularly grateful to the latter for her kind remarks.

The Minister diligently responded to a wide range of the issues raised. The way in which she spoke about resources suggested that she was asking how we had got into the present situation, given that everything was done at a much lower cost before. If I remember rightly, it was discovered at quite an early stage—once it was established just who was working for CAFCASS and how many people were involved—that the salaries bill almost exceeded the base budget set for the organisation. Quite how that happened is a mystery to me, but it illustrated that there was something seriously wrong in resourcing from the beginning.

The Minister will have to knock pretty hard on the Treasury's door, if only to tell it that something must be done to alleviate the situation immediately, which will require some resources. Hopefully, as the hon. Member for Worthing, West pointed out, there need not be a permanent shift in the balance, but there are immediate resourcing needs.

The Minister for Children let slip a little-known fact: CAFCASS is still formally the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, because a transfer order is needed. Technically, she should not be here at all, which is one of the absurdities of Government reorganisation; but that need not prevent the start of work to get the framework document rewritten and to establish a new culture in how the Department relates to the organisation. We need to create, through the appointment of a new board, an organisation that takes responsibility for its decisions and is allowed to get on with the job with the necessary resources, without having constantly to respond to ambiguous instruction from the parent Department.

The range of issues that the Minister considered perhaps took our gaze away for a moment from the most fundamental matters, and my final point is to reiterate those. The resources issue must be given careful consideration. There must be a culture change in governance and in the relationship with the Department. There must be effective use of the skills that are available to CAFCASS, or that could become available if it recruits, or brings back in, the people who are outside. Above all, the service must put the children first. It is on that note that I wish to end the debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at four minutes to Five o'clock.