We strongly welcome the Government’s recognition that additional support and information needs to be available so that all parents are empowered to participate in child welfare processes and are supported to have their views heard in decisions relating to their children.
Family Rights Group has significant expertise in this field. Our free, independent, specialist advice service is the only service of its kind in England. We advise families when they are involved with children’s services or need their help. We provide advice for parents, grandparents, relatives, and friends including kinship carers in England. Our expert advisers are all experienced lawyers, social workers, or family advocates. They help families to understand the law and child welfare processes and their rights and options. The most recent evaluation demonstrates that by safely averting more children entering care, our advice service has saved the public purse nearly £15m over the last two years.
Family Rights Group has pioneered professional family advocacy service in the child protection arena, delivered by highly qualified lawyers, social workers or advocates with comparable experience. We have also provided indirect and self-advocacy (via written, telephone and online support) to families. In our submission, we share learning about the positive impact of this work for the families involved.
We are very alert to how challenging the environment is to secure funding to run direct advice, advocacy, or representation services. The legal aid rates mean almost no legal practice will attend child protection conferences. Direct advocacy services commissioned by local authorities have been forced to close due to funding cuts.
In addition to advocacy service provision, parents whose children are subject to child protection processes need to have access to independent legal advice. Unfortunately, the current legal aid regime fails to meet this need and we set out in detail how this needs to change. Financial constraints also mean our advice service is currently only able to answer four in ten callers.
Any recognition of the importance of parental advice and representation in the child welfare arena needs to be backed up by funding.
We urge the Government to work closely with families who have direct experience and knowledge of the child protection process to consider and understand the range of different perspectives of how parental representation might work in practice.
We recently brought together parents with experience of the child welfare system, children’s service leaders, and organisations with expertise in representing parents at child protection conferences to start developing a set of inclusive principles and standards for child protection parental representation services.