Value for Money?

Do we get value for money?

• Well this is what the BBC had to say: Can children in care avoid prison? – Wednesday 15th MAY 2002 – David Akinsanya was raised by the state and in a special BBC Two documentary he asks why so many kids leaving the care system end up in prison.
• Research found that 42 per cent of young prostitutes had been in careat some point – The “INDEPENDENT” 14 December 2006The Government’s own research highlights how the care system is not simply a negligent parent, but at times probably more dangerous than the family from which some children have been taken. A study commissioned by the Home Office has looked at the link between hard drug use, sex work and various vulnerability factors. The results are astonishing, if not heartbreaking.Less than 1 per cent of the child population is looked after by the state, but the research found that 42 per cent of young women prostitutes interviewed had been in care at some point in their lives. “This is an extraordinary figure, which demonstrates that looked after children are very vulnerable to involvement in drug use and sexual abuse through prostitution,” the report concluded.
• 2 children in care die of neglect each week– The People, 22 June 2008 – By David CollinsChildren placed in care are three times more likely to die than others, a shock report has revealed. In one year, 16 in 10,000 vulnerable youngsters died in care. The national death rate for children was five in every 10,000. The study by the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed that 800 youngsters have died in care over the last ten years – an average of two a week.Malnutrition and diseases were the main causes of death. Last year 12,000 kids in care had no immunisations, 9,600 had no health check ups and 8,400 never saw a dentist. By law children should get checks within two weeks of going into care. In some local authority areas, less than 50 per cent do. A Children and Young Persons Bill, which should improve matters, goes before MPs tomorrow. Tim Loughton, Shadow Minister for Children, said: “Despite the efforts of beleaguered social workers, the system is failing.”

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Extract from the Telegraph:-

Official figures show that only six per cent of the 60,000 children in care gain five or more A* to C GCSEs and more than a third are not entered for a single GCSE.

Conviction rates for young people in care are three times the rate for other juveniles. One in four girls leaving care is pregnant or already a mother. A recent case which caused outrage involved a 12-year-old living in a children’s home in Blackburn who became pregnant while working as a prostitute.

WHY, WHY, WHY, when social workers and worse still judges decide healthy happy children are “at risk” from their own parents do they not compare that risk with the horrific risks children run when put into the care system?

Leaving school with no qualifications,ending up in prison, or working as prostitutes (often pregnant from unknown fathers), or worse still dying violently either in care or soon after leaving it!

Even if they survive all the above horrors and settle down to form a new family with a loving and attentive partner the “SS” will rarely leave them alone!

Time and again the fact that the mother has been brought up in care is taken as proof that she is not capable of looking after her own children! The unfortunate mother is usually put into an assessment process and more often than not ends up losing her children to adoption by strangers!In other words children are removed from parents deemed unsuitable by “experts” and then themselves deemed unsuitable to raise their own children such is the appalling standard of care inflicted on children hoping one day to be parents by an unfeeling state !

Dismal outcomes are the norm despite the £2.5 billion a year spent looking after them. It costs £100,000 a year to keep a child in a children’s home, more than four times the fees at top private schools such as Eton or Winchester.

Fostering can cost up to £30,000 a year, compared with the £7,500 a year that state boarding schools charge parents for accommodation, with the £5,000 cost of education covered by the local authorities.

Harriet Harman (Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs) | Hansard source My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point, which she has put to me in a written question, so I know what the answer is. Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy. The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts, and with the important intervention of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, to open them up so that they act in the public interest while maintaining personal privacy.

Only in the SECRET family courts are punishments (losing their children to long term fostercare or worse still adoption by strangers) imposed on persons (parents) who have neither committed a crime nor even been accused of committing any crime! THERE IS NO OTHER CASE IN UK LAW WHERE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

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