ADCS criticises MP for telling parents suspected of abuse to go abroad

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) has hit out at a Liberal Democrat MP for suggesting that parents suspected of child abuse should “go abroad” rather than face justice in the family courts.

Speaking to the BBC’s Panorama for a programme to be shown tonight (13 January), John Hemming MP said: “All the cards are held by the local authority. It has large resources to fight the cases – it does all the assessments.

"My advice to people – if they can afford it – is just to go abroad. You can't get a fair trial here, because you can't rely on the evidence being fair. It's best simply to go if you can, at the right time, lawfully."

But ADCS President Andrew Webb warned that advising parents not to co-operate with statutory services could put children at risk, and undermined work carried out by children's services in conjunction with children and their families.

“By working together, families can receive the help and support that they need to ensure that children stay in the family home – the preferred outcome wherever possible,” he said.

Webb added: "In over 90% of final care hearings there is no dispute over whether the ‘significant harm’ test has been satisfied, the majority of disputes are over the final care plan for the child. It is insensitive and inappropriate to suggest that social workers are driven to place more children for adoption because of adoption targets.”

The ADCS President said that care plans and proceedings were made on the best option for the child, and adoption was only possible when all other options had been exhausted. This had been emphasised through a recent High Court judgment issued by the President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby.

Webb continued: “Whilst we must never condone poor practice, to suggest that individual instances of malpractice are indicative of systematic failure is unhelpful and ignores the vast amount of good practice being conducted in very difficult and complex circumstances. 

"As of March 2013, over 68,000 children were in the care of a local authority in England, and for the majority this will have been as a result of painstaking legal processes to secure their future.”

The ADCS President said that the majority of children came into the care of the local authority due to neglect or abuse, and the decision to separate them from their family would involve balancing the evidence of several conflicting factors with margins for error “that are too narrow for many of us to comprehend”.

He said: “The effect of that decision will only become apparent over time, but we must be clear that every social worker is bound by a duty to try to identify the best interests of each individual child and they are not driven by supposed adoption targets.”

Hemming’s comments came as Cafcass published the latest statistics for care applications. The service said it had received a total of 7,896 applications between April and December 2013, 4% lower than the total for the comparable months in 2012. There were 808 applications last month, compared to 864 in December 2012.

The total number of applications in 2011/12 was – at 11,107 – a record.