Authority figures
After years of austerity, poor pay and huge pressure to protect the most vulnerable in society, Dan Bindman speaks to CILEX members about why working as a local authority lawyer in childcare work is still a rewarding career
Local government can be a stressful environment to work in, particularly for those local authority lawyers handling cases involving children. This is made worse by funding shortages, an often poor profile in the media, and inadequate pay. Despite the challenges, these CILEX practitioners are doing important work that is fulfilling and are, without a doubt, helping the people who need it most in direct and tangible ways.
In cases involving children, the council has to act to provide them with statutory protections, creating pressures for CILEX members specialising in this area. They are working in an environment made especially difficult by the widespread low esteem in which the public holds everyone working in social care, fuelled by critical newspaper campaigns. On top of this, comparatively low pay compared to salaries available in private practice, compounds the problem for legal managers.
Local authorities, which are run by locally elected representatives, face a range of legal obligations, including child protection, elderly protection, social housing and social care. These are expensive and necessary, yet councillors prefer to spend scarce resources on visible ‘nice-to-haves’ like making sure there are flowers on roundabouts and that grass verges are neat, rather than largely invisible ‘need-to-haves’ like secure accommodation for vulnerable children.
This can be frustrating for legal departments charged with helping social services protect children. The lack of therapeutic care within a restrictive environment nationally was recognised recently in the High Court by a Family Division judge. Mr Justice Macdonald in Blackpool Borough Council v HT (A Minor) & Ors [2022] EWHC 1480 (Fam) strongly condemned the shortfall. The case involved a 17-year-old girl who was the subject of a deprivation of liberty safeguard order made following an application by the council.
Scarce resources
Andrew Lee, a Chartered Legal Executive and strategic lawyer at Wigan Council in Lancashire, manages a total staff of 35, including a number of Chartered Legal Executives. Groupings under his control include two social care teams, respectively covering children and adults. The latter group are people such as vulnerable adults who lack capacity and need help managing finances and so on. Many local authorities link these two teams together into one social care team.
Mr Lee, who is an experienced childcare lawyer, says a big headache is finding accommodation and mental health treatment for children in abusive families. Around 600 children in his authority are in care, a number that fluctuates. “Each year we issue in the region of 130 to 150 cases, which can be to bring children into care,” he says. Within this caseload, a “massive growth area” has been depriving children of liberty, “basically putting them in a restricted placement, which can include locking windows and doors and not letting them out”.
These are particularly challenging when young people with “really acute mental health problems” present with “the most extreme behaviours of harm to themselves or to others, who need to be in some sort of a secure setting”, he explains. However, there is a terrible shortage of beds available for children in this situation. “The number of children chasing the beds is ridiculous. [Recently] it was somewhere in the region of 46 children nationally for one bed.”
Local authorities have a legal obligation to safeguard children regardless. Section 22G of the Children Act 1989 requires them to take steps that secure, so far as reasonably practicable, sufficient accommodation within the authority’s area which meets the needs of children that the local authority is looking after, and whose circumstances are such that it would be consistent with their welfare for them to be provided with accommodation that is in the local authority’s area (‘the sufficiency duty’).
Mr Lee is aware of situations where this duty has led to extreme solutions where children are placed in unregistered placements, sometimes on their own, with 24-hour supervision from a care provider.
A major problem, Mr Lee says, is that the NHS’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) service refuses to accept children with mental health problems if it deems that “their presentation is related to environmental factors… as opposed to a disorder of the brain”.
Exacerbating the problem in Wigan is that, common to most local authorities, there is no in-house service for these children. This is because it would be so expensive to run: “You might have only one child who needs it in any given month, but then the following year you have none.” Such cases are referred to independent providers and the cost of this is “staggering”.
Zero applicants
Probably the biggest difficulty he faces in his job, Mr Lee says, is recruitment and retention of staff. A decade of government austerity has eroded the salaries he used to be able to pay compared to private practice. A local authority job actually paid more than private practice in a predominantly legally aided family law firm, but years of pay freezes and below inflation rises has led to salaries falling by 20% compared to their keeping pace with inflation.
“Lawyers’ jobs have grown harder over the years, in part because social work managers have become more risk averse when it comes to bringing sensitive proceedings”
“In highly specialist areas, such as adult social care law, you advertise posts and you get zero applicants, not even from newly qualified lawyers. Whereas private practices have increased their salaries.” Because children’s and adult social care safeguarding work is a statutory obligation, it must be done whether or not there is a lawyer to do it. “The locum market, which we have to turn to if we are unable to recruit, is overheated. As a result, we have lost good staff because they can double their salary overnight by moving to a locum position at another local authority.”
One Chartered Legal Executive who has gone from authority work to private practice is Anne Goodenough, who worked in both Birmingham and Swindon councils for 12 years altogether until 2019, when she left Swindon as a principal childcare lawyer. She still represents councils in court, as well as advising families and professionals involved in complex care proceedings.
Ms Goodenough tells the Journal that she left the local authority because, after being promoted into a management position, she was no longer doing the court work she enjoyed. When she left Birmingham for Swindon – she first joined the Midlands authority as a locum, expecting to be there for two weeks but stayed for two and a half years – budgets were not so tight further south. But when she left Swindon a decade later, spending pressures had grown.
She reports that lawyers’ jobs have grown harder over the years, in part because social work managers have become more risk averse when it comes to bringing sensitive proceedings. The lawyers and the social workers might be in agreement about the best way to proceed but they do not necessarily have the support of managers. This had led to social workers leaving the job with the consequences that “we've got lots of locum social workers now and the lack of continuity doesn't make life any easier for local authority lawyering in child protection”.
Lack of investment
Another senior Chartered Legal Executive who manages local authority legal teams is Matt Foster, the interim head of legal, democratic and registration services at Wrexham County Borough Council. He was chair of the CILEX professional board and CILEX President in 2019-20. Before spending more than 16 years at Wrexham, he worked for nearly five years at Cheshire County Council.
Mr Foster heads up both the childcare and adult safeguarding legal teams, as well as those dealing with property and contentious matters. He has 10 full-time-equivalent qualified lawyers altogether under him, plus a number of paralegals and trainees. Most of their legal work derives from child protection.
Like Mr Lee, his biggest difficulty is recruitment and retention. Pay is generally low and in recent years the government policy of economic austerity has had a major impact. “I think there has been an absolute lack of investment in those roles. Over the years, in real terms it feels like there's been a pay cut.” Posts fall vacant, nobody is recruited and in a “vicious circle” in which there is no investment in the wages, he has to buy in temporary workers, which actually costs the authority more money.
Mr Foster also describes experiencing first-hand the persistent confusion in some authorities about the status of Chartered Legal Executives in relation to solicitors. In many councils, lawyer roles tend to carry the name ‘solicitor’. In Wrexham, he has been endeavouring to move towards the generic title of ‘lawyer’.
Soon after he took over the running of all legal teams in October 2021, he attended a council meeting. Despite being a past president of CILEX and having worked there as a lawyer for 16 years, one of the councillors complained that he was not properly legally qualified. He received an immediate apology from the councillor when horrified colleagues objected.
Not for the faint-hearted
Thankfully, having to endure such personal insults is rare. Nevertheless, working in child – and adult – protection is not for the faint-hearted. The subject matter is often distressing and the circumstances rarely uplifting. Experienced social care lawyers say separating your work and home life is essential to maintain mental equilibrium.
Ms Goodenough says: “There are cases that stick in the mind of every child protection lawyer who's dealt with a serious case, with photographs, flashbacks, details of cases that you have had. What you have to do is make a particular effort not only to make sure that you turn off your computer and stop working, but also that you don’t take it home with you.
“Separating your work and home life is essential to maintain mental equilibrium”
“My partner says to me: ‘The children will still be there tomorrow. You actually need to sleep and eat, otherwise you won't be any good to them’.”
She knows lawyers that have gone on long-term sick leave because they could not handle it. “If you don't have an outlet to just escape from it then it will have a severe impact on your mental health. Everyone recognises it, including the managers. So there is a camaraderie between all representatives in childcare. Because we all know that we're going through the same stress. It’s important to meet up and vent; do something nice, even if it is just getting out for a drink.”
Mr Lee highlighted the stress involved in dealing, as lawyers, with cases of children who have been abused and neglected, in the context of “everyone hating you”, which he says can be a “thankless task”.
The media also often paints everybody in social care as being incompetent, he complains: “Safeguarding professionals and local government lawyers don’t get praise for the 400 families they worked with that year, many of whom are helped to resolve complex problems without the need to go to court. Unfortunately, the media will only report on the mistakes and failures that can sometimes lead to tragic outcomes. They also don’t report on the reflection which is undertaken and the genuine attempt to learn when things go wrong. In all, that constant barrage can get you down even though, on the whole, you are doing really good work.”
Fulfilling work
Notwithstanding the daily woes of being a CILEX practitioner working for local authority, the senior lawyers are unanimous that the work provides a level of personal reward that private practice cannot touch. In an age when more and more young people say they want to exchange better-paid yet soulless work for lesser-paid, more fulfilling work, there can be no better place than local authorities’ central position within communities to find it, the experts agree.
Mr Foster says: “Without sounding cliched or sanctimonious, you hope and you feel as though you're making a difference. No disrespect to my private practice colleagues but it's not like doing a piece of work and sending out a bill or reaching a target. It's about outcomes for people, a lot of whom are vulnerable in our society.”
Ms Goodenough adds: “Children work takes a huge amount of energy. It's almost a vocation rather than anything else and you have to be a certain type to want to do it. But you're not going to find anything more interesting or diverse.” No one day is going to be the same and she says most of the trainees she has managed in local authorities and in private practice went on to specialise in public law children work afterwards.
Mr Lee agrees: “The highlight of the job is you actually get to make an actual difference to real people. Because you are genuinely safeguarding children and adults who might otherwise have had much worse impacts upon their life and their wellbeing. You also get to really contribute to your local community.”