UK Covid-19 Inquiry – day 2 hearing
In today’s second hearing dedicated to children and young people, the Inquiry heard from Dr Carol Homden, Chief Executive of the children’s charity Coram, and Charlie Taylor, Chief Inspector of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons. It also heard from Alice Ferguson from the children’s rights organisation Playing Out, and Professor Catherine Davies in respect of babies and young children.
Below we provide extracts from Dr Carol Homden’s and Charlie Taylor’s evidence. The full official transcript for today’s evidence hearing can be found here.
Dr Carol Homden, Chief Executive, Coram
“Children’s timescales are different. So, for us, [at] different stages of our adult life, six months may not seem a very long time. If you are six months old, it is your entire life.”
- When asked what could be in place for first assessing the impact on children of decision-making, Dr Homden said: “… we should have a systematic approach to child impact assessments. We potentially could do that without the adoption of the United Nations Convention [on the Rights of the Child] in English law, but certainly that would have the effect of dictating and amplifying that commitment. So we certainly should do so. Consultation with the office of the Children’s Commissioner is an absolute requirement for future pandemics, but we have also made some other key recommendations, one of which is that there could be a dedicated Cabinet Minister for Children. And I reflect upon the fact that had there been such a Cabinet Minister, the questions would get asked at a different level and more systematically across all aspects of multi-governmental decision making … if we’re to do better next time, then greater forward planning, greater use of structural bodies to anticipate that planning, and greater mobilisation, a much clearer path anyway to the impact assessment of those scenarios, which would be enshrined by the incorporation of the UNCRC and a Cabinet Minister to hold government to account for the children in our society whose democratic voices are otherwise not heard”.
- Dr Homden was asked to elaborate on evidence in her witness statement to the Inquiry, that more children were entering care before the pandemic. She said: “… the providers of children’s social care, and these are our local authority colleagues, and I commend them for their work as the front lime – almost A&E service – for our children, [they] were experiencing profound pressures. They were facing the tension between increasing demand and constrained resources, and also workforce challenges depending on where children were in the country, of course, their experiences would be different. So one of the things that, again, we need to note was already the case before the pandemic took hold, was that children’s chances in life already depended on where they lived and who they lived with. And there’s a significant variation, which indeed the Department for Education flagged up as one of the key circumstances that it needed to address as the pandemic took hold. The great variation between performance, access and quality and sufficiency between one local authority area and another. So that was a double-whammy, a conundrum of growing demand, and reduced access to resources, that makes it difficult for them to respond in a timely way”.
- Dr Homden was asked questions about numbers and delays in the adoption process for children before and during the pandemic, and the position today. She was specifically asked to outline what she means when referring to children ‘ageing out’ of the adoption process. She said: “The vast majority of children who are adopted in this country are adopted under the age of five. And it becomes increasingly challenging to find the potential adoptive home for children as they enter their school age years. That is partly, it’s a longstanding issue and trend, partly because, of course, adopters will want to be in the lives of their child, what will become their child, for as long as possible. And we also want children who have often been taken into care in infancy and received an adoption placement order in infancy not to be waiting for a long period before they get that permanent stability. And of course, we have to remember, in these circumstances, that the alternative to achieving that placement will be long-term foster care and potentially many moves, which is not good for children’s neurological attachment and development. So what this literally means is that if there’s a six months delay then a child will have less chance. It’s not more complicated than that. The adoption activity days [run by Coram, some of which were cancelled during the pandemic] I would describe as a child’s best last chance, because those tend to be focused on the children who have been waiting the longest, where our agency colleagues in local authorities have not yet managed to find an adopter and they are wishing to work with us to see whether, across different geographical boundaries, they are able to find adopters before the child runs out of age chances and they have to make other plans”.
- Describing the position for children in need of Education, Health and Care Plans before the pandemic, Dr Homden explained: “There was already a significant growth in the number of cases being brought to the tribunal where children had waited a very long time and then actually their case was, in a very substantial number – percentage of cases – was actually upheld. And for me, that is a particular indicator of a shortfall within our society to meet those children’s needs in a timely way because those rulings were saying that those were cases of merit and one would expect that our local authority colleagues would have been able to anticipate that. So, before the pandemic, that was already a critical issue”.
- When asked about the 14-day isolation unaccompanied children arriving into the UK were forced to endure, Dr Homden stated: “No child should be unseen or alone. The idea that a child could spend 14 days alone, even if they are in the older age of childhood, that is a burden we would all seek to prevent and avoid, and it is most likely, in my mind, that preventing and avoiding it could have been perhaps problem solved if we had thought about this issue more clearly”.
- On the hundreds of unaccompanied children who went missing from Home Office hotels (when they should have been looked after and protected in care), Dr Homden explained: “any child who goes missing is a problem for us in the fulfilment of our duties, but in this circumstance, we had much less ability to, or capacity and capability, to actually identify where those children have gone. So, there are still children we don’t know where they are, what happened to them. Their risks of criminal and sexual exploitation are already understood to be significantly higher from their vulnerability and the nature of their accommodation, and so I don’t think we’ve even begun, really, to understand what has happened to those children … this is hundreds of children, this isn’t one or two, this is hundreds of children who went missing. Have we understood how that could occur, and have we understood how it could be prevented? One of the things that leads children to go missing is because they have no-one that they can talk to, depend upon or trust. They have no familiarity with their support needs in terms of their emotional and cultural support. So they may run away in order to seek to find that with some form of extended community or diaspora, but the fear is that they are being lured away, and having to remain under the sway or to become under the sway of those who are seeking to exploit them”.
- Surprisingly, Dr Homden described the deletion and dilution of children’s social care duties (which Article 39 legally challenged) as “almost certainly necessary” though also highlighted delays in social worker assessments: “Our concerns were always whether children’s experiences and needs were being met and prioritised … And so delays in access to social workers or assessments weakens the way in which we can ensure that children have the support that they need. Having said that, the changes were almost certainly necessary in order to, overall, manage the challenges of the pandemic and of workforce availability, and these were part of the difficult decisions that government needed to make … but I think that it was almost certainly inevitable that there were such delays and as I’ve said before, delays weaken our accountability to children”.
Charlie Taylor, Chief Inspector of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons
“Lots of talk [from government] about ambition … but very little in terms of action, in terms of actual change.”
- On the backgrounds of children in prison, Mr Taylor explained: “we know that children who end up in prison are overrepresented in certain ways, particularly involvement with the care system. So we think about a third, roughly, have experienced the care system in some shape or another. We know that there are high levels of learning difficulties. Many of them have had a very chequered educational past. Many have been brought up in homes where there is substance misuse, family breakdown, poverty, and often their time, both in school and at home, their housing arrangements have been very disrupted throughout their childhoods”.
- There were many longstanding concerns about child prisons before the pandemic: “… for many years, the Inspectorate has been very concerned about the treatment of children in prison, particularly the lack of time that they spent out of their cells, the poor quality of education that was on offer for them, and the levels of violence to which they and also staff members were often subjected, the limitations on things like visits, fresh air, and the opportunities for genuinely rehabilitative activity”.
- Mr Taylor was asked about the changed regime following central prison service guidance, which was the same for children and adults: “we visited the first three establishments holding children in April 2020, and what we were finding already, then, was that there were very high levels of lock-up for children. So, they were behind their doors for up to 23 hours a day; that the amount of time they were getting outside was very limited. They weren’t getting to education, they weren’t able to socialise in any way, and any purposeful rehabilitative exercises weren’t happening. So, they were basically locked in their cells”.
- On the prison practice of ‘reverse cohorting’, Mr Taylor stated: “The real issue was the lack of imagination, I suppose, when it came to what were called reverse cohorting operations. So the idea was that when a new child came into the prison, that they would be isolated for a period of time to test whether they had the virus, and then they could be introduced more widely into the prison community. But what we found at Rainsbrook [secure training centre] was that rather than being a little bit more creative about this, as they were in some of the YOIs – which was young offender institutions – which was to, when three or four children arrived, to then put them into a bubble together and at least then allow those children, allow them to socialise. What was going on at Rainsbrook was children were coming into the jail, they were being locked behind their door for initially two weeks having very little human interaction and in some cases barely getting out of their cell at all”.
- When asked whether the situation had changed for children locked up in Rainsbrook secure training centre at the next inspection, Mr Taylor replied: “Astonishingly, our expectations around the reverse cohorting and those arrangements had barely changed at all, and this was despite us having raised this with the prison service, having raised this with the centre itself, and also the prison service having its own monitors on site within the centre. So, for whatever reason, that work simply wasn’t done and children were continuing to be locked up for far too long”.
- Lady Hallett, Chair of the Inquiry, asked Mr Taylor if the Inspectorate had been given an explanation for why their previously expressed concerns had been ignored: “It was astonishing. It was almost as if no-one was really checking. It was very early when, when I’d just started at the Inspectorate and we’d just assumed that going in there writing the initial report that we’d written saying that, for goodness sake, you know, there are ways of doing things a more creative – we know that it’s difficult, but there are ways of doing this more creatively. And it was just really astonishing that monitors, leaders, the Youth Custody Service, none of these people had picked it up”.
- Mr Taylor was asked to reflect on why education provision during the pandemic for children in G4S-run Parc prison in South Wales was considerably better than for children in three public-sector prisons in England (Wetherby, Feltham and Cookham Wood). He outlined: “The first [reason] was that Parc was operating effectively, was operating more effectively, before Covid … The second thing, [the] advantage that Parc had, was that the education service within the YOI was also run by G4S, the provider. So, there was no negotiation to be done between the provider and the jail itself. The third thing, I think, was the leadership within the jail. There was a very experienced leader … Janet Wallsgrove who had been determined, and had always been determined, to keep services as positive as they could for children. And, finally then, I think, what we thought probably was the way in which they couched the question to Public Health Wales, which was rather than how do we stop Covid having an effect on the jail, it was how can we continue to run services while keeping our staff and prisoners safe from the effects of Covid? And, I think, as a result of management determination, the general culture of the place, the contracting arrangements and the way in which they worked with Public Health Wales, very quickly they got to a much better situation than what we found in England”.
- Asked further about children’s education, Mr Taylor stated: “First of all, as I understand it, the trade union for the education providers had decided to withdraw members from those prisons, but it was also the directive, as we saw often during the pandemic, was that directives were about prisoners generally and the needs of children were an afterthought very often here. And you’ll see some of the correspondence from my predecessor, Peter Clarke, about that but the result was that a guillotine was put on education and attempts to reopen education quite quickly. And nothing really got going until we were going back in the summer, later on in the summer”.
- On being asked about education packs provided to children in their cells from March 2020, Mr Taylor responded: “Look, these are kids who haven’t been in school much, you know, they’re not massively motivated by the idea of someone shoving a folder under their door with some learning in that they might get marked a day or two later. So, I think, the effect of those education packs – I mean some of them contain things like word searches which help to pass the time – but in terms of actual learning, in terms of any meaningful progress with children’s learning, I think it was pretty negligible”.
- Mr Taylor was asked about children’s contact with their families and other loved ones: “Well, there was some advances in that telephone credit was extended to children, and they were able to to make more phone calls than they were previously. They also had in-cell telephony as well, which meant that they were able to to make calls. But not being able to see family members face-to-face between March and June that year was incredibly concerning, from our point of view, particularly where you’ve got young children who are vulnerable, whose relationships with their parents are absolutely essential to their progression within the jail, that those weren’t going ahead, was a real concern for us. We understood early on, because those were the regulations that we were all subjected to but over the course of time it seemed that, as ever with the prison service and Covid, that the restrictions in the prison service took far longer than they did to be lifted in the community”.