1: BALLOONS AND FAMILY FUN TO PROMOTE FOSTERING
Hundreds of balloons will be released from Slough town centre to mark a special event to launch Slough’s new fostering Allowance Scheme.
Saturday, July 2 will encourage more people to consider becoming foster parents to local children and see the launch of a new fostering allowance of £400 per week.
Between noon and 4pm, the Town Square will be bustling with activities including face painting and balloon modelling. Football fans should be sure to bring a camera as a David Beckham look-a-like will be ready to pose for photos.
Janet Tomlinson, head of education and children’s services at Slough Borough Council, will make a short speech at 1pm before the balloon release.
Team members from Slough’s Family Placement Services will be giving out fostering information including the fostering freephone number, car stickers, bookmarks, keyrings, wristbands and balloons.
Janet Tomlinson said: "Fostering offers great challenges and great rewards. Even if you’ve never thought about it before, why not come down on July 2 to find out more?"
The freephone fostering number is 0800 073 0291.
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2. DISPATCHES: PROFITING FROM KIDS IN CARE
Channel 4, Thursday 25 November, 9pm
In 2004, caring for Britain's most vulnerable children is a multi-million pound industry. Children in care cost the taxpayer over £830 million pounds a year. That's an average of £2,500 per child, per week - more than four times what it would cost to send a child to Eton. Yet many homes are failing to provide children with even a basic standard of care.
In this programme, Dispatches goes undercover to investigate the consequences of the increased privatisation of residential children's homes. The investigation reveals how homes are run by private businessmen charging social services departments enormous and unethical mark-ups on services - many of which aren't even provided. Fees of £7,000 a week are not unusual yet Dispatches finds private children's homes which are failing the children in many respects. Homes often use untrained, and sometimes unvetted, agency staff to look after some of the UK's most at risk youngsters - many of whom have been the victims of abuse, prostitution and drugs.
The current system is failing thousands of children a year. According to a recent report, three in five kids leave care with no qualifications at all. One in five will be homeless after two years and one in three of the current prison population has previously been in care. Tragically, some don't make it at all, with approximately 60 youngsters dying in children's homes every year.
Information, advice and support for people who are in care, or have been in the past, can be found by checking out the following organisations and websites.
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3: COUNCIL MUST PAY £500,000 FOR WRONGLY TAKING GIRL INTO CARE
Clare Dyer, legal editor
The Guardian, Friday March 17 2006
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday March 23 2006
(The headline for the article below was misleading. As the story made clear, the £500,000 was the total cost to public funds. The council was ordered to pay the parents £200,000 legal aid costs and will have to meet its own costs. The child would also have been represented and payment of those costs will be met from public funds).
A couple had their family life torn apart when social workers wrongly took their nine-year-old daughter into emergency care without good reason and kept her from her parents for 14 months, a high court judge said yesterday.
Mr Justice McFarlane castigated the social workers for "multiple failings" and criticised the family court magistrates who had granted the emergency order. The costs of the case, payable from public funds, were £500,000, including the parents' legal aid costs of £200,000, which the judge ordered the local council to pay. The judge took the unusual step of making his judgment public after a hearing behind closed doors, although the family, the local authority and the magistrates court are all unnamed.
He laid down guidelines to prevent future miscarriages of justice which are certain to lead social services departments and magistrates courts to re-examine their practices. He said it gave him "absolutely no pleasure to have to record the multiple failings of the local authority in this case".
But to do so was "necessary not only in order to come to a conclusion on the issues in this case, but also in order that lessons may be learned for the future".
He said the girl's mother had sought the help of social services and child health services because her daughter, the couple's only child, was displaying some "modest behavioural difficulties".
Mother and daughter had been referred to the child guidance unit for psychotherapy and the girl had been put on the local child protection register.
The notes of a social services planning meeting read: "No neglect issues. Home and care good. Mother and child have good relationship. Detrimental to move."
But social workers suspected it was a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy - now called fabricated or induced illness (FII) -a rare form of child abuse in which a mother or carer makes a child ill or fakes illness to get attention. At the end of a case conference on the girl in November 2004, social services received a phone call from a nurse at the local hospital.
They were told that the mother had taken the girl there with stomach pains and was asking to see a doctor after the nurse found nothing wrong. Within hours and without any information from the doctor, social workers were at the magistrates court seeking an emergency protection order allowing the girl to be taken from her parents immediately.
They acted without telling the parents and without seeking any medical opinion to try to confirm their suspicions. The girl had had medical treatment before and no doctor had suggested fabricated illness.
The council's actions were described by the mother's counsel as "outrageous" and "inexcusable" leading, as it did, to "the destruction of this family's ordinary life".
Those descriptions "do not, in my view, overstate the quality of what took place on that day", the judge said. The social services team leader, who had no detailed knowledge of the case, made 13 assertions to the magistrates, of which every one was "misleading or incomplete or wrong".
He ruled that the council had no case to take the girl into care and made her a ward of court "to facilitate the child's return home".
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4: THE EXPERT AS JUDGE AND JURY
After a host of miscarriages of justice based on discredited expert witnesses, calls are growing for radical reform of their use in court, writes Lois Rogers
The Sunday Times, Nov 18 2007
Yet another woman was sent to prison last week, following expert evidence that she had shaken to death a baby in her care. Keran Henderson, a 42-year-old childminder, was said to have killed 11-month-old Maeve Sheppard, by shaking her so violently she was left blind and brain-damaged. The infant died in hospital a few days later.
The case has grim echoes of those of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel, all of whom were accused of killing their children only to be found innocent later. Clark, a solicitor, who was released from prison after serving three years, died last March as a result of psychological trauma and alcoholism caused by her ordeal.
At the Court of Appeal, two days after the judgment on Henderson, a retrial was ordered in the case of Barry George, the loner convicted of killing the television personality Jill Dando in 1999 with a single shot to the head. Expert testimony as to the significance of a particle of gunshot matter in his pocket is being challenged.
There has also been the recent conviction of the true killer of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed, 32 years after the event – and after Stefan Kiszko had served 16 years for the sexually motivated killing, even though medical evidence could have pointed out his infertility proved his innocence. Once again the review of the evidence threw a spotlight on the role of expert witnesses, whose testimony is often crucial in criminal cases but can be unreliable.
Our blind faith in scientific opinion makes us reluctant to question pronouncements by “experts”, but while the law requires everyone from plumbers to nurses to be trained, registered and checked, there is no such requirement for witnesses who may be pronouncing on matters of life and death in court.
A study by senior barrister Penny Cooper of City University in London, has shown that the majority of lawyers and judges do not bother to check the qualifications of experts they approach to bolster an aspect of their case. She also found a substantial number of the expert witnesses had undergone no training to understand their legal duty.
The disquiet this arouses has led to a clamour for legislation to require expert witnesses to be regulated. But how to do that without calling into question thousands of court decisions will not be an easy task.
There is already acute unease over the proliferation of parents convicted of causing cot deaths, shaking babies to death, or harming them by creating symptoms of fictitious illness.
Henderson, for instance, a mother of two herself, a long-term childminder and stalwart volunteer of her local Beaver Scout group, was sentenced to three years in prison for shaking baby Maeve so violently that she was left with fatal brain damage, despite the fact there was no evidence of any “grip marks” on the child, which would normally be expected to accompany such an action.
Her husband, a former police officer, has said she will appeal and hopes to create a campaign similar to that run by Sally Clark’s family, to try to prove his wife’s innocence.
Many character witnesses spoke up for Henderson in court and the family has dozens of supporters in their home village of Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire.
Some even believe her prosecution was only pursued because of the successful appeal by Roy Meadow, the expert paediatrician whose evidence led to the conviction of Sally Clark.
Following the Clark case, in which Meadow quoted a completely erroneous statistic suggesting the chances of Clark’s babies having died naturally were one in 73m, he was struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) for misconduct. The Court of Appeal agreed he had acted in good faith.
In the meantime, Alan Williams, the Home Office pathologist who conducted post-mortems on Clark’s two infant sons, was less lucky. His appeal against a GMC finding of serious professional misconduct was rejected. Williams was accused of tailoring his diagnoses of the nature of the babies’ deaths to fit the police case against Clark.
The GMC is currently hearing a claim of gross professional misconduct against paediatrician Dr David Southall. The council has received evidence alleging that Southall falsified his curriculum vitae.
Southall’s evidence has figured highly in at least 50 criminal cases and possibly hundreds of family court cases held in secret, which have led to children being removed from their parents.
Questions of how frequently babies really are shaken to death, and indeed if it is possible to do so, have divided medical opinion for some years. There have, however, been up to 200 convictions annually for related forms of violence against babies and young children.
After Clark, Cannings and Patel, another bizarre case was overturned. Ian and Angela Gay, who had been convicted of poisoning their three-year-old adopted son with salt, were cleared when it was revealed the boy was suffering from a rare, and fatal, congenital abnormality.
Recently, the attorney-general ordered a review of almost 300 criminal convictions and 30,000 family court proceedings where children were taken into care. Only four were referred to the Court of Appeal. This, according to critics, was a function of the way the review was done, with authorities being asked to review their own decisions.
Social workers say the crusade to root out dangerous adults is to some extent a reaction to a previous era of regular criticism of their profession when children were left to die at the hands of their parents. Although some acknowledge the pendulum may now have swung too far, others are furious: “Do people think we spend all our time trying to break up families for no good reason?” said John Coughlan, a joint-president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. “In comparison with the volume of cases, the number of errors is tiny. We never rely on expert witnesses alone.”
Others argue that the opinion of expert witnesses is often the decisive factor. And as we have seen most recently with Barry George, it is not just child murder cases that have turned on such evidence.
Last year the Home Office took the unprecedented step of holding a disciplinary tribunal against Michael Heath, one of its most senior forensic pathologists: 20 charges against him were upheld. One man was subsequently cleared of murder, and numerous other convictions have been called into question.
A spate of other convictions came from evidence supplied by Paula Lannas, another Home Office forensic specialist who was the subject of a long-delayed disciplinary hearing that collapsed because those investigating her said they had a conflict of interest. Not only has Lannas been deprived of an opportunity to clear her name, but dozens of prisoners who claim they were victims of her errors have been unable to get the evidence reviewed.
Police forensic scientist Peter Ablett, who is now chief executive of the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners, points out there are only three ways to prove a crime: a reliable eyewitness, a confession, or forensics. The advent of DNA technology and other advances in recent years has brought increasing reliance on forensics, yet only about 3,000 of the estimated 8,000 expert witnesses operating are members of the council and signed up to its code of practice.
He said many of those who are not are unaware that their duty is to give impartial evidence to the court, not to bolster the case of their paymaster.
City University’s Cooper, who is also a governor of the Expert Witness Institute, was concerned to discover during her research that not only have one in five experts undergone no training to understand this duty, but one in 10 was so arrogant they said they saw no need for it. “There should be a requirement for them to be trained, and there should be rules requiring judges and lawyers to consider their credentials before accepting them as expert witnesses,” she said.
Such a provision cannot come soon enough.
A review is still going on of 700 cases in which bogus forensic scientist Gene Morrison gave evidence. Morrison, 48, from Manchester who was sentenced to five years for fraud in February, admitted he pretended to be an expert witness and bought his qualifications on the internet because it “seemed easier” than getting real ones.
For many of the genuinely qualified experts, legal work isa lucrative sideline, and if they are perceived to be able to “tailor” their evidence convincingly, the commissions keep flowing in. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning about the misuse of medical evidence, says fees for a basic written opinion, based on reading through existing files, start at £4,000. If the expert concludes there is a case to answer, they attract court attendance fees as well.
“I have known experts get as much as £28,000 for one report,” said Hemming, who is lobbying for experts to be required to produce the scientific publications on which their opinion is based: “Unless we start using evidence-based evidence in court, we will get nowhere.”
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5: FIRMS CASH IN ON SHORTAGE OF FOSTER HOMES
Published: Sunday, 2 October, 2005, Evening Standard.
LONDON: Private agencies are making millions of pounds out of a critical shortage of foster homes for children. Firms are charging councils on average £800 per child per week, an EVENING STANDARD investigation revealed.
This amounts to £41,600 a year to find suitable homes for the most vulnerable children in society.
One head of social services said: “It is cheaper to send the children to Eton.”
London councils are so desperate to hold on to their foster parents that two are offering them free loft conversions - worth up to £30,000 - so they can take in more children. Britain’s largest independent agency Foster Care Associates had a £56mn turnover in 2003, the last year for which accounts are available.
Its eight directors - seven of them social workers who set up the company 10 years ago - paid themselves total fees of more than £2.2mn as well as sharing pre-tax profits of almost £900,000.
The directors awarded themselves on average £285,000 each - about 10 times the annual salary of a social worker.
There is an estimated shortage of 10,000 foster carers across the UK. This has driven up the prices charged by the 150 or so independent agencies.
It costs councils between £300 and £400 a week to place children with their own approved foster carers but they cannot meet the demand and have to turn to outside agencies. More difficult children can cost as much as £1,500 per week to place in foster homes.
The problem is especially acute in London, where out of 11,500 fostered children up to one-third are found homes through independent agencies. Many of them are ‘dumped’ in outlying towns around the capital. A total of 60,000 children are fostered nationally.
A spokesman at the department for education said: “We know there are too many children being placed outside of authorities. We commissioned a report last year looking at how we can reduce that number.”
Out of the 11,500 fostered children in London, half of them are teenagers, about 3,000 aged eight to 12 and 2,500 aged under eight.
Children are typically being sent from London boroughs to Kent, miles from their schools and friends. Some 330 problem children from London are being fostered in the Margate area.
This has prompted the Kent child protection committee to compile a report, sent to ministers, warning the town is now at a ‘tipping point’ and branding the situation ‘explosive’.
Paul Fallon, director of social services at Barnet council and spokesman for all London’s social services directors, said: “Every penny we spend on one child is a penny we can’t spend on another child. If I place a child with Barnet it is £400. But it costs me about double that to place a child in an independent placement.
“It is a sellers’ market and that will impact on prices. We are stuck. It is cheaper to send children to Eton.”
He estimated that in Barnet about 30 to 40 children - about 10% of the number needing foster care - are unaccompanied child refugees. They have helped to swell numbers of children needing placements, putting added pressure on social services.
A spokeswoman for Richmond council, where private places at £900 cost three times as much as council places, said: “In emergencies we will negotiate with another borough for a temporary foster place, but that’s very rare.”
The crisis has prompted Barnet council and Hammersmith and Fulham to offer grants of up to £30,000 to foster parents to build loft conversions to house more children. A spokeswoman for Hammersmith and Fulham said the outlay would pay itself back within one to two years even if it creates just one extra fostering place.
Defenders of private agencies point out councils often do not factor hidden staffing costs - such as administration and on-call social workers - into their weekly fees. Private agencies also point out they are often called upon to find placements for the most difficult children. They point out they also provide round-the-clock social worker support as well as educational support and therapy. Not all agencies are profit-making with fostering services carried out by charities such as Barnardo’s and NCH.
Marcelle Ibbetson, service development manager at NCH, which also typically charges £800 a week, said: “We don’t think local authorities have properly costed the real cost of foster care. Their behind the scenes costs are hidden. What we provide is private placements at the specialist end of the market.”
None of the directors of Foster Care Associates was available for comment. But in an interview last year Sally Melbourne, FCA’s director for the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region, said: “The majority of the fee we charge local authorities goes to the carer and on the welfare of the child. We are a business but we make very little profit, last year we made 5% profit.”
A spokesman for the company added: “The company specialises in children that are difficult to place. That is not necessarily behaviourally difficult children but it could be kids with five siblings that need to be kept together or from the ethnic minorities that needs to be placed in their own community. We offer a complete support structure including therapy and education, which is why the costing may look more expensive.” – LONDON - EVENING STANDARD.
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6: Written Parliamentary answers
Monday, 3 September 2007
Children, Schools and Families
Adoption: StandardsAll Written Answers on 3 Sep 2007
Tim Loughton MP (East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which local authorities have received payments from central Government for achieving adoption target levels; and how much each received in each of the last three years.
John Healey (Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government)
I have been asked to reply.
30 local authorities have been rewarded for successfully achieving adoption targets in their local public service agreements (LPSA). The better outcomes and amount of 'performance reward grant' (PRG) each has received over the three years 2004/05 to 2006/07 in relation to their performance in these targets is set out in the following table. In addition, 13 local authorities did not achieve the adoption targets in their local PSA and hence received no PRG for this target. One local authority is still to make a claim
Local PSAs—which are negotiated between local authorities and central Government policy departments, facilitated by the DCLG—have helped to incentivise local authorities and partners to provide better public services to their citizens around priorities for improvement locally. Evaluation shows they have been successful in doing this, with real benefits in improved outcomes for local people and communities.
Local PSA adoption and placement targets: payments made to date under local PSAs
Local authority Amount of 'reward grant' paid (£)
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council 210,173.00
Blackburn with Darwen 307,367.00
Bristol City Council 307,512.00
Buckinghamshire County Council 526,958.00
Bromley (LB) 499,440.00
Camden (LB) 318,916.50
Cheshire County Council 685,134.00
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council 578,333.00
Durham County Council 502,675.00
Enfield (LB) 244,963.00
Essex County Council 2,469,200.00
Gloucestershire County Council 612,209.00
Greenwich (LB) 580,996.00
Halton Borough Council 153,938.00
Hampshire 1,675,619.00
Hounslow (LB) 165,019.00
Kensington and Chelsea (LB) 339,117.00
Kent County Council 2,156,583.00
Lewisham (LB) 602,854.00
Liverpool City Council 347,404.00
Luton Borough Council 400,027.00
Manchester City Council 984,877.00
Merton Borough Council 358,708.00
Northamptonshire County Council 1,119,115.00
Sheffield City Council 1,025,000.00
Southwark (LB) 435,242.00
St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council 83,845.00
Wandsworth (LB) 387,627.00
Warwickshire County Council 231,061.00
York City Council 203,620.00
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Sally Keeble (Northampton North, Labour) Link to this | Hansard source
Harriet Harman
