Councils paying ‘lip service’ to human rights, warns BASW England
Local authorities should be inspected for their adherence to human rights, BASW England has told the UK government.
Councils are currently not required to provide detailed assurance of service compliance with the Human Rights Act, even though the legal framework for working with families and individuals is underpinned by it.
As a result, fundamental rights too often get little more than “lip service”, the association has warned.
It’s calling for Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission to add a new judgement to their inspection frameworks to assess local authorities for their performance against the act.
Giving oral evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights at Westminster, BASW’s strategic director for Wales and England, Andrew Reece, said: “We recommend a more systemic inclusion of human rights across the social work and social work care system. “… it needs to be in social work education, it needs to be in statutory guidance, it needs
to be in the (OFSTED and CQC) inspection systems, and in particular it needs to be in
the performance frameworks.”
Reece said he suspected the number of local authorities that give guidance on human rights implementation is “very low”.
He added: “We would also suggest that local authority governance needs to have a
much more explicit focus on human rights. We would like to see someone at director level who is reporting on human rights, and a cabinet member within local authorities who is holding their offices to account on how well they are supporting young people generally to achieve their human rights.”
Reece spoke of the care “cliff edge” when children in care move from children’s services to adults at aged 18 as an example of a violation of rights.
“We regularly come across young people who go into crisis because at 18 they are forced to move from a successful children’s home placement into an adult placement simply because the regime states that you cannot stay in a children’s placement as an adult.
“That creates chaos and the placement often breaks down. There are good reasons why you would not want very old adults mixing with young people, but there is an assumption that age is chronological alone; we think it is really detrimental to young people that their level of maturity is not also taken into account.”
Other examples of breaches are placing looked after children far from their community and a lack of mental health support for children in care, Reece observed.,
He said incorporating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into English law would be a “really positive step”.
“It would articulate children’s rights more fully; this would be more likely to ensure that their participation, protection and development becomes enforceable rather than just aspirational.”