Deborah Orr: So many good intentions squandered

If everyone knows so clearly what needs to be done, then why is the problem so intractable?

Bloody Blair. One remains unmoved by his bafflingly lauded conference speech, with its Brian Rix jokes about the bloke next door, and its invade-my-own-privacy-when-it-suits-me yarns about family canvassing.

One despairs as his government seeks special dispensation to find desperate crevices in which to stuff the flotsam of the failure of his promise to be tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime. And one marvels at his obduracy as he blithely continues to self-delude over Iraq.

Then, after all these years, one finds oneself ambushed by hope in the face of bitter experience, and embarrassingly, mysteriously, in the "missing you already" camp.

Yesterday, in Downing Street, Blair chaired a seminar to launch the long-awaited Green Paper on looked-after children, in which he was so straightforwardly engaged, so concernedly human, and so calmly positive about "the task ahead", that one could almost believe that with a "corporate parent" like this one, Britain's 61,000 "looked-after children" could not be in better hands.

In part, the air of optimism was fostered by the astounding degree of practical consensus among the various "corporate parents" (awful newspeak jargon for those who are involved with children whose parental relationships break down) around the table. MPs, local authority workers, charity co-ordinators, education specialists, social workers and "care survivors" all had their turn to speak, drawn in by a PM hanging on to their every word. All of them had clear ideas about what needed to be done, and many had what seemed like easily attainable plans about how to do it. All seemed minded to accept that the contents of the Green Paper were an extremely sound basis for progress.

Who could quibble with the idea that "looked-after children need stability as they grow up, a gradual transition from care to independent life, and proper support after leaving care? Who could disagree that one way of helping to ensure this might be to instigate a statutory obligation to care for children until they are 18, or even 21, when a quarter of them still find themselves adrift at sweet 16, ending up homeless (80 per cent of The Big Issue sellers have been in care), in prison (60 per cent of young offenders and 27 per cent of adult prisoners have been looked after), or in prostitution (which anecdote rather than accurate counting attests to)?

Who could deny that education is of key importance when 59 per cent of children in local-authority care are not entered for any GCSEs at all, 9.4 per cent get five A to C in comparison with 54 per cent of "the mainstream population", and only one per cent make it to university? The Green Paper suggests looked-after children should be given special priority in achieving a place at the best school available to them because, at the moment, they are usually placed in the worst.

Who could disagree, either, with the idea that looked-after children desperately need to experience "stability" and "continuity of care", with their life decisions guided by a person who has known them and related to them over the long term, instead of through the sometimes fragmented workings of "multi-disciplinary" and "multi-agency" approaches that are sometimes just deeply bureaucratic expressions of a dyspraxic body politic?

A foster parent spoke movingly of how children she and her husband had cared for were moved back to birth parents. They were never given the option of having them back again when the experiment broke down. A nursery teacher complained that she sometimes identified looked-after children in her care simply because she recognised the neediness, even when the school had not been informed of the situation their pupils were in.

There was warmth around the table too, in acknowledgement of what has been achieved. Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Education, was eager to pre-empt his critics by pointing out that many would ask why all this hadn't been tackled during these past nine years.

Yet plenty of people did acknowledge progress. Lee McDavie experienced care herself, and now works with looked-after children in Lewisham, a local authority that has made many innovations that may come to be considered best practice.

McDavie praised the Government's Leaving Care Act 2000, which places an obligation on local authorities to provide "pathway plans" for children before they leave care, and financial support for them until they are 18, or until they are 24 if in full-time education. University was not an option for her, said this clever and capable woman. Instead, she said, she was told at 16: "Here's a flat, here's the keys, here's £300, and here's a number for the Samaritans if you need it."

Likewise, there was support for Labour's innovations in social-work training - which could not be studied to degree level until post-1997 reforms, and did not even have a workable code of conduct prior to recent efforts to foster professional standards.

There was agreement that the contents of the Every Child Matters initiative, forged after Lord Laming's report into the death of Victoria Climbie, had triggered real change, and agreement too that Blair's support for the earliest possible intervention in the upbringing of vulnerable children - most visibly apparent in the SureStart programme - was of critical political importance.

Nevertheless, even consensus can be suspect. If everyone knows so clearly what needs to be done, then why is the problem so intractable? Again and again it was stressed that a huge part of the problem -despite reform so far - was the parlous shortage of social workers, with vacancies running at a national average of 11 per cent. The particular disaster of this supply-and-demand no-brainer is that social workers are constantly under incentive to move on, typically fleeing the worst local authorities as soon as they have some experience, and moving to those where their work is better supported.

Ultimately, who could deny that what looked-after children lack is an adult asking: "Is this good enough for my child?" - one cannot help but see that the problems they face are nothing less than the sine qua non of a more widespread failure in social provision.

Poor schools, poor housing, lack of access to mental health care, the labyrinthine and depersonalised bureaucracy that typifies attempts to access many local-authority services - all these impinge on the lives of people far removed from looked-after childhood, and sometimes defeat people in theory well-equipped to navigate them. Which brings us back to the beginning of the Blairite experiment, and the crushing sense that good intentions, and golden opportunities, have been squandered.

d.orr@independent.co.uk