After two decades of work in the criminal justice and prison system, Martin Narey was convinced being taken into care was the moment that it all went wrong for a child.
So many prisoners he met had spent time in care, it seemed to him that the split from the birth family was the single event that propelled a child into a life of crime and despair. It was 2006, and Mr Narey had just started his new job as chief executive of Barnardo’s, the children’s charity with a long history in the care system.
There was plenty of support for his view at that time that the care system was a disaster — so much so that the Labour Government asked him to lead a working group on how to reduce the numbers of children in it. But in the course of the work, he was forced to admit that he had got it entirely wrong. It wasn’t that care itself was the problem. It was the state that the children were in when they arrived in residential homes and foster families. Years of trying and failing to get their birth parents to mend their neglectful or abusive ways was the thing that was doing the damage.
“My view in the summer of 2006 was how appalling care was and how it failed children and that a reduction was incontrovertibly a good thing. Success was seen as eventually returning a child to their mother, even if they were flourishing in foster care. But the more people I spoke to, the more nervous I became about this. It was still some time before I appreciated that the reverse was true,” he recalls.
His work at Barnardo’s also led him to another new insight. Adoption had by far the best outcomes of any form of care, giving children stability and security. The outcomes for very young children were especially good. Why then were the numbers of children being adopted falling year after year?
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“It really was a mystery. Here we have a solution to healing the lives of some of the most disadvantaged children in the UK. In any other area of social policy, with the evidence so persuasive, it would be vigorously pursued. Instead it is dealt with at best marginally,” he said. “This is much less intractable than most of the problems in public services.” After a life spent at the sharp end of public service himself, Mr Narey knows what he is talking about. The son of a Labour councillor, he was brought up to believe that public service was “the proper thing to aspire to” although he said the move into prisons was “a complete accident”.
Married with one young son and in a challenging job in NHS management, he watched a ground-breaking documentary about Strangeways prison broadcast in 1981. “I was deeply shocked, fascinated and appalled. A few weeks later my wife passed me a newspaper ad inviting anyone who would like to be a prison governor to come and have a look inside a prison.
“I went to Lincoln prison on Christmas Eve 1981. It was appalling and disgusting. It stank of human waste, was hugely overcrowded with no one out of their cells. I left determined not to do anything else.”
Over the course of the next 23 years he ran a borstal, served in the Home Office under Michael Howard, was Director-General of the Prison Service and then Chief Executive of the National Offender Management Service. While at the Home Office he was asked by Mr Howard to conduct a review into judicial delays. That led to the “Narey reforms” which reduced the average time it took to plead a case in the criminal courts from 90 to 70 days.
When asked by The Times to conduct a review of the adoption system, he approached it in the same way. “Michael Howard said ‘just go and see what is going on’. I asked people and the ideas poured out. It was the same here.” And after numerous conversations with professionals, researchers and families involved in adoption, he is convinced that there is a major problem, not just with the processes and mechanisms, but with attitudes.
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“I am afraid some people just don’t like adoption. They think it is social engineering, allowing middle class people to bring up working class children. Where there are successes, professionals are apologetic about it, like it is some sort of tragedy. There are also efforts to try and change adoption to keep up the contact with the birth family through letterbox contact. That is a sloppy compromise.”
Mr Narey highlights three important further problems: “There is bad use of the research. There is the system itself — hopelessly slow — and there is some troubling confusion in both the legal system and among social workers about the Human Rights Act and how that affects the rights of parents and children.”
That legal confusion will be Mr Narey’s starting point when he is appointed Ministerial Adviser on Adoption this week. “On Day One I want to persuade Tim Loughton, Michael Gove and David Cameron to lay down the line that children’s interests have primacy when it comes to intervention, to make clear that the Children’s Act puts children first and the Human Rights Act does not undermine that,” he said.
He also wants civil servants and local authority social workers to be ambitious, not just set out to have one or two more children adopted each year. “I believe we can double the number over the next two or three years. I really believe that is achievable.”
His report contains 19 recommendations, ranging from performance league tables for local authorities to less emphasis on finding a member of the extended family to take on children removed from their parents — “often just another branch of the same dysfunctional family”, according to Mr Narey.
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Perhaps surprisingly, Mr Narey has not called for a revival of the targets that helped increase adoptions when Tony Blair introduced them. Nor does he want new legislation, for example, to prevent local authorities wasting time finding a perfect ethnic match. “Legislation means an 18-month delay. I would like to have a go myself, now, dealing with these things and seeing how far I can get. I think league tables, which I call for, can go quite a long way in embarrassing the poor performers. But clearly if it doesn’t work it will be something for ministers to think about.”
One of the more controversial recommendations is that adoption be offered more routinely as an option to pregnant women who do not want their child. Mr Narey is pro-choice, but he was surprised to find during the course of the research that few of the services that help women with unwanted pregnancies suggest adoption.
And he is furious that when women, or more likely teenagers, who are likely to struggle considerably to bring up a child, make contact with health or social services, the first thing they are told is “you’ll make a great mum”.
“For six months we are all over her telling her how well she is doing and then she is on her own. What we are doing is cowardly. Adoption should be a third option to abortion or keeping the child. It is an attitude that must be allowed to grow. In the US mothers who give up their children for adoption believe they are giving them a great start. Here it is viewed as a success if we talk them out of it.”
He has also been dismayed at how prospective adopters — the life-blood of the system — are viewed by professionals. “Instead of being given a genuine welcome, they seem to be seen as self-indulgent, viewed with suspicion and sometimes even resentment. Then at the end of the process, when they are taking a child with difficulties, they can’t get any support.”
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He acknowledges that there are major financial constraints and post-adoptive services such as child psychologists do not come cheap. However, social impact bonds, which are being piloted in prisoner rehabilitation, could be an answer. The upfront costs of, for example, six months with a child psychologist, are recouped years down the line with lower breakdown rates and better outcomes for the children.
“I don’t want to be dismissive about the financial problems. But using an instrument such as a social impact bond would mean in a few years’ time the cash will have been saved, and the voluntary sector which provides most of these services will be obliged to show what it is worth.”