Care policy condemns children to broken lives: Government needs to commit resources to create stable, long-term residential care for the children in the system
Sir,
Your leading article (April 20) on the damning indictment by the Commons Children, Schools and Families Select Committee of this countrys care for looked-after children is not before time. In 2001 I sat on a committee of the Cabinet social exclusion unit regarding children in care and pointed out that without a radical reversal to use of long-term residential care the system would continue to fail tens of thousands of children.
Again in 2007 I presented a Channel 4 programme, Bring Back Orphanages, in which I outlined the chronic situation facing children in care and the horrendous outcomes including homelessness, mental health problems and imprisonment. I called for the re-creation of the traditional residential homes and pointed to the huge relative success of the German system, which is overwhelmingly residential.
Lord Laming was wheeled out to defend the Governments actions as adequate to the task. Now, once again faced with the evidence of atrocious and often tragic outcomes, we see Lord Laming and the Government arguing that improvements have been made. They might as well say one fewer bomb exploded in Iraq this year.
A fostering system that condemns many children to thirty moves and families in ten years, to destruction of their schooling, their friendships and potentially their mental health is not an improvement and has nothing to do with giving children a family. It has everything to do with treating these young people like so many pieces of broken glass to be pushed under the carpet. It is a system of utterly cruel neglect no better than the neglect that these young people are supposed to have been protected from.
There is a place for fostering in the care system but Lord Lamings ridiculous notion that fosterers and children can be matched up like so many differently coloured Smarties is an erroneous starting point. It condemns thousands of young people to drifting from one placement to the next as often as three times a year, and on average every two years.
Residential care has been treated by government for 50 years as a last resort because the financial outlays are greater. Consequently Labour has followed the cut-price approach used in the United States, which has had equally devastating and often fatal consequences for the lives of children in care.
Germany and Denmark show that, despite its failings, residential care can generate far better outcomes and hence far better financial returns to society. The system needs to be young-person- centred but instead is centred on the short-term budgetary demands of those in government. They play a trick on the taxpayer because saving money by not investing in these young people now means a heavy future price for taxpayers. Twenty-five per cent of the prison population have been in care. Each child failed by the care system who goes on to spend a lifetime in the criminal justice system will cost the taxpayer more than 1 million for imprisonment.
Government must be prepared to commit the resources required to create sufficient long-term residential care to ensure stability and better outcomes for the children in its care.
A powerful lobby is needed. Otherwise, after its handwringing and witch-hunting over Baby P, the Government will remain set on a course of systematic neglect of children placed in its parental care.
Phil Frampton (Ex-Barnardos boy and
broadcaster)
22 April 20009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article6143007.ece
