I thank the convener and committee members for inviting us here today. The petitions are on serious matters, and they have implications for the whole of Scotland, particularly for our children. First, I record my great thanks to the committee clerk, who has guided me through the process during an extremely difficult personal and political situation.
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I will introduce my supporters. To my right is Anne Speak, who has worked with children and adults with learning difficulties and disabilities for well over 40 years. For 20 years, she was project manager of a specific project for those types of individuals in Moray. That project finished because of a lack of funding. For the past 25 to 30 years, she has also been a volunteer with the charity Enable. On behalf of Enable, she picked up the Queen’s award for services to the voluntary sector last year.
To my left is Maggie Mellon, who is a social worker by training and profession. She has had many roles in her life. She is the former director of Children 1st. For a number of years, she was vice-chair of the British Association of Social Workers. She has communicated with the Scottish Government on many of the aspects of our petitions that we hope to cover today. She was also invited to give advice to the Isle of Man Government when it was drawing up new legislation on child protection.
I left school with six O-levels six weeks after my 16th birthday. I moved from rural Moray down to lodgings in a deprived ex-mining village in Clackmannanshire—an area where I lived for 45 years. During that time, I was a professional criminal and civil law investigator and enforcer for 43 years. I was also a researcher for a member of the Scottish Parliament in the very first session of Parliament. Through working for him, I got involved in helping families with autistic adults in psychiatric services and in helping families with children wrongly diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Like most people in the country, I realised that child protection existed and that there were children who needed to go into care. I think that the three of us still agree that, in certain circumstances, children need to be taken into care for their welfare. However, from my experience, both professionally and as a grandfather—the oldest of my grandchildren is eight—I feel that there are great deficiencies in the whole system at the moment. With the committee’s permission, I would like to look at what the aim of child protection is from a political point of view, look at some statistics that show what is actually happening and explain what the whole child protection system is.
I got involved in child protection when my grandchildren were removed from my house at half past 11 on a Friday night. I got a phone call with two hours’ notice that that was going to happen. People have been referred to me because of my personal experience of the system and my personal background. I have spoken to at least two dozen families that have gone through the system, and there is a consistency in their experiences. The purpose of child protection is to protect children but, in reality, the statistics on children taken into care show that the system is not working and that children in care are at great risk.
Government statistics show that 1.1 per cent of all children in Scotland are in care and have been taken away from home, although there might be a bit of movement regarding that figure, depending on how people discuss it. Based on that figure, the cost of having children in care to the Government and the public is between £400 million and £850 million per year.
Everyone looks at outcomes, and one striking figure is that 20 per cent of children who have been in care will not see their 25th birthday. In addition, 25 per cent of females who have been in care will be pregnant by the age of 19, 25 per cent of those who have been in care will have police convictions by the age of 25, 25 per cent are homeless between the ages of 16 and 25 and a similar percentage are unemployed. If children are being taken away from their parents and taken into care and we end up with those figures, something is far wrong with the system. Other figures show that parents with a learning difficulty are 50 times more likely to have their children taken into care.
Then there is—excuse me for stopping, but this has been a very emotional and stressful time.
The inference in the official statistics is that, over the past three, four or five years, the number of children being taken into care or reported through children’s panel hearings has remained steady. The headline figure of referrals has maybe been stable, but the number of children who are referred and stay with their parents is diving whereas the number of children who are going into care, away from their home, is accelerating. That is where the big difference is. At the same time, a higher percentage of children are being adopted against the wishes of the parent.
From my experience of my family and from speaking to others, the system is geared towards pillorying the mother. The mother is blamed for everything, but abusive fathers and partners stand on a pedestal. I know that it is difficult to understand—it took me a long time to understand it—but the whole system works like that.
A number of organisations are involved in child protection: social workers, the police, charities, schools and different parts of the national health service, including health visitors, general practitioner services, hospitals and accident and emergency.
There is no doubt that children who are abused, such as through physical assault, need to be taken into care. However, our experience says that a very high percentage of children are taken away from their parents and into care before any serious investigation is done, if one is done at all.
I will give you a couple of examples so you can see where we are coming from. An 11-year-old child, whose school notes showed that he was believed to be autistic, stood up during a classroom discussion and said, “Last night, my mother took me by the arm and put me to bed.” The next thing to happen was that a social worker and a police officer were called. The child was interviewed on his own, away from everybody else. His mother got a phone call at half past 3 in the afternoon saying, “Your son has made a serious complaint against you. We are seriously worried about his safety and wellbeing in your house. He will not be coming home tonight. Where can he go?” It was arranged that he would go to a relative’s house, but the mother was told that she could not phone or speak to her son. That happened a year past June. No social worker or police officer has ever gone to the house to interview the mother, but after a day the child was let home.
On 1 March this year, the Supreme Court in London judged that West Lothian Council had taken actions on child protection that were purely based on opinion. I, as well as colleagues and other professionals who are interested in the issues, would extend that and say that the majority of proceedings in child protection—especially in cases where children are taken into care or put on compulsory supervision orders—are based purely, or 95 per cent, on opinion, speculation and supposition.