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Mr. Mark Oaten (Winchester): Can the Minister confirm that the indicators will be made public? Will they be independently monitored--for example, by the Audit Commission as part of its systems charter work?
Mr. Hutton: The indicators certainly will be public information, and the Audit Commission will have an important role to play in the initiative.
I can announce today that targets will be set for the maximum time between entry into care and adoption. Those will be monitored by the social services inspectorate and the Audit Commission as part of the new performance assessment framework. Poor performance will not be tolerated.
The "Quality Protects" grant follows the production and evaluation of plans whose objectives include reducing delay and avoiding children drifting in the care system. Management action plans produced as part of the "Quality Protects" programme to deal with those issues are encouraging. Many authorities are making improvements to their management information systems, which will enable them to tackle more effectively the key indicators of delay and monitoring of children in care.
The development of placement choice is the largest single component attracting "Quality Protects" funding. With that money, local authorities intend to appoint specialist social work staff to recruit more adopters and foster carers, including families from ethnic minority communities, which will make available a wider choice of suitable placements. Other specialist staff will be appointed to progress children through the administrative and legal procedures to secure placements without undue delay.
I can tell the House today that under the "Quality Protects" initiative, £30 million will be spent this year on developing better placement choice, which will include adoption. We expect significant further additional expenditure in this area in the next two years.
Hon. Members will be aware that the Government's White Paper entitled "Modernising Social Services," which was published last November, included a proposal to establish commissions for care standards, which will have responsibility, for example, for regulating and inspecting foster care services and residential homes.
I am pleased to have this opportunity of announcing to the House that we intend that the new commissions should have responsibility for the inspection and regulation of all adoption services, including those operated by local authorities. In this way, adoption will be aligned with foster care services. It will also provide the basis for improving standards generally within the adoption service. We hope to introduce legislation to establish these new care commissions at the earliest possible opportunity.
In addition, through "Quality Protects", we will work with local authorities and the voluntary sector to improve the adoption service. We will monitor performance, improve statistics, promote new consortiums that can help to deal with the problem of inter-agency fees, improve planning, commission research and develop training. Through the social services inspectorate we shall examine closely the progress being made.
This summer, the social services inspectorate will launch a survey of every local authority, beginning in July, to establish progress in implementing the action recommended in the circular to which the hon. Member for Canterbury referred. That inspection will be followed by a supplementary data collection exercise and an inspection of some local authorities. The exercise will provide us with a general picture of the progress that local authorities are making in taking action on the circular and turning their "Quality Protects" action plans into reality.
Mr. Brazier:
I am grateful to the Minister. All the announcements that he has made are extremely welcome. As he will need legislation to introduce such a broad range of clear performance criteria, will he consider incorporating in that legislation a reserve power to enforce it in the case of recalcitrant local authorities that do not respond voluntarily?
Mr. Hutton:
The performance indicators that I described do not require primary legislation. We are already developing a performance assessment framework for social services. We are also developing the objectives of the "Quality Protects" programme as we go along. The hon. Gentleman's point about adoption services and a reserve power on the part of the Secretary of State will be addressed at some time in the future in legislation on the best value agenda. The best value programme will apply to local social services, and through that process there will be opportunities to explore issues such as those that the hon. Gentleman raises.
Gillian Merron (Lincoln):
I am sure that the House will welcome the tremendous improvements that will become apparent in the quality of adoption services. However, can we look forward to greater openness about the criteria that are used to find the right adoptive parents for children and about how decisions are reached? Decisions must be made in the best interests of children, using the pool of would-be adoptive parents to the best advantage.
Mr. Hutton:
Yes, there should be openness at all stages of the process. None of the criteria that are currently used are hidden or obscured from vision. We want people who are willing to adopt children to come forward. We do not want the system to deter or
Mrs. Llin Golding (Newcastle-under-Lyme):
This is a very important debate. Will my hon. Friend also look at the initial cost of applying and registering for adoption? It seems to vary from circumstance to circumstance, and I know that it deters people from putting themselves forward as adoptive parents even when there is a big cry for people to adopt.
Mr. Hutton:
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I pay tribute to her role in all these matters. I am happy to look at the issue that she has raised, and if she or any other hon. Members have any specific proposals, I shall be happy to discuss them at any point in the future, either individually or with the all-party group on adoption.
The hon. Member for Canterbury also raised one important specific point: he called for work to be done to establish a national adoption register of children who might be available for adoption. I am not sure how the details would look, but I am happy to discuss the issue with the hon. Gentleman in more detail. We shall look forward to having that discussion with him.
I congratulate all hon. Members who have spoken in this debate today because it is clear that we all share a desire to see adoption brought back into the mainstream of children's services. That is certainly the Government's view. In that way, we can help to make sure that more children in the public care system than at present benefit from the security and protection that family life can bring.
I want to make it clear to the House that we shall continue the drive to improve access to adoption. I am sure that a lot remains to be done, but we have made a positive start in the right direction. We shall keep both the practice and the law under constant review, and shall not hesitate to take the necessary action in the future to ensure that looked-after children do not become the innocent victims of misplaced theory or ideology.
Adoption will often provide the best solution for a child being looked after by a local authority. We shall work with everyone of good will who shares our ambition to achieve better outcomes for those vulnerable children. Adoption can play a hugely beneficial role in that process, which is why we are absolutely determined to ensure that adoption practices are improved quickly throughout the country.
Mr. Tony Worthington (Clydebank and Milngavie):
I hope that this debate will be welcomed in the context of the G7 summit, which will take place this weekend when the world leaders will meet. I am pleased that towards the top of their agenda will be a subject that should concern them greatly--the financial relationship between the richest and the poorest nations.
In previous years, that has been characterised in terms of aid--the rich giving to the poor. However, that is an inadequate picture of the interrelationship, because debt repayments or terms of trade have frequently been heavily skewed against the poorer countries. In the period from 1980 to 1994, the rich north paid Africa $278 billion less for its coffee, copper and other commodities than it would have paid had prices remained stable. In the same period, Africa's debt increased from $84 billion to $217 billion. Thus the rich north paid the poor south less and then lent it money to pay for those losses.
Also during that period, we saw a pattern of falling aid contributions--that certainly applied to this country--so that the United Nations target of 0.7 per cent. of gross domestic product became increasingly distant. We need to aim at what the Chancellor calls "the virtuous circle"--not just the reduction of debt, but increased aid flows and fairer trade policies.
It is gratifying to see that the British Government are now leading the way. Over the years, charities such as Oxfam have been critical of the British Government, and it gave me great joy recently to read in one of its publications that the best proposal on the table for relief of debt was from Britain. That is a change from the past.
The creation of the Department for International Development and the concerted action by the development and finance arms of the Government are making a real impact. Two Cabinet Ministers now work together on the issue and it is really making a difference. The work of the Select Committee on International Development in providing a focus on development issues in the House is also important. Our latest report is on the issue of debt. I commend it to the House and hope that it will influence the decisions that come out of the Cologne summit. I also hope that in future there will be a much greater concerted action between the Treasury, DFID and the Department of Trade and Industry to ensure that the debt, aid and trade aspects of government are linked.
I approve of much that has occurred. I applaud the proposal to sell off International Monetary Fund gold to finance debt cancellation. I applaud the proposals to review and improve the extremely inadequate HIPC--heavily indebted poor countries--scheme, which I shall discuss in more detail later. I applaud the Chancellor's drive to create $50 billion in debt relief and, as part of that commitment, to use unspent parts of the European development fund to finance debt relief. The Chancellor's proposal for a new millennium trust fund to finance additional aspects of HIPC are welcome. His drive to set up a millennium giving scheme so that the whole nation can be involved in debt relief is another good measure.
12.53 pm
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