Careless

Teresa Thornhill’s father – a difficult presence in her “emotionally chaotic” early years – was appalled when she rang to tell him that she had decided to become a lawyer: the law, in his view, was a “filthy profession”. In the course of her training she became involved in various left-leaning causes, such as campaigning in support of nationalist women prisoners in Northern Ireland. More attuned than many of her privately educated fellow barristers to the hardships that beset the less fortunate members of society, she was drawn into working within the care system, and In Harm’s Way is the product of more than three decades in the Family Court of England and Wales and its precursors. It’s an invaluable guide to how the system functions – or, rather, doesn’t function. The tightly focused anger is what gives this book its power.

As Thornhill says, Britain has become a country of grotesque economic inequalities, and poverty has poisoned the lives of most of the people she has represented. Many are caught in a cycle of deprivation from which it can be impossible to escape. (The characters in this book are semi-fictional, but their predicaments and sufferings are not.) Thornhill demonstrates that since the 2008 financial crisis there simply has not been enough money to sustain a humane and effective regime of care for the children of the most underprivileged. Sure Start and other support programmes have been dismantled. Local authorities tend to be overly prompt to propose adoption as a supposedly clear-cut solution, but in many cases therapy for the troubled mother would be preferable.

Underfunding is ruinous. A judge agrees to order a “welfare check” for a distressed young woman whose children have just been taken from her – but that involves nothing more than a police officer calling at her home, once, to check that she’s still alive. The number of cases rises each year, but the court lists have become so congested that a judge may have to reach a life-changing decision based not on evidence presented to the court, but merely on the submissions of the lawyers representing the various parties. A case that should be allowed a full day in court is instead granted only a couple of hours.

Counterproductive haste has become endemic to the system since the Children and Families Act of 2014 imposed an obligation to resolve care cases within twenty-six weeks – an obligation that must be viewed “in the political context of austerity”. Sometimes, of course, urgency is imperative for the welfare of the child. When a small child has bruises that a paediatrician regards as “strongly suggestive of non-accidental injury”, Thornhill has to act quickly – several high-profile cases of violent abuse have shown how terrible the consequences of delay can be. In an episode illustrative of a typically fraught single shift on the front line, she gets an urgent email requesting an Emergency Protection Order (EPO) for a five-week-old baby in intensive care whose intoxicated mother is demanding to be allowed to take her home; soon after, another EPO is needed for a small child who has suffered sexual assault by her father; a third EPO request follows almost immediately.

But the assumption underlying the “timescale of the child” is that delay is never in the child’s best interests. Rather than being allowed time in which issues of behaviour or addiction might be addressed, to the long-term benefit of child and parents alike, social workers and courts are rushed into decisions that too often pull families apart. With the Covid pandemic, which created huge problems for a system in which face-to-face discussion is of paramount importance, many local authorities found it impossible to abide by the twenty-six-week rule. Last year, however, it was announced that the time limit would now be strictly enforced again, and that a maximum of three hearings would be permitted for any one case. Thornhill decided to quit soon after.

Social workers’ caseloads, meanwhile, have increased in tandem with irksome assessments, endless form-filling and other procedures imported from corporate culture. Nowadays there is “nothing creative” about social work, Thornhill is told by an experienced and respected guardian. Councils are finding it hard to recruit child protection lawyers because “nobody wants to do the job”. In the latter stages of her career Thornhill works for a department where few social workers stay in post for more than two months. People of limited experience and expertise are now expected to shoulder the burden of dozens of cases simultaneously, with almost no support.

Children who have been in care are much likelier than others to be unemployed, homeless or imprisoned. They often struggle in education and their life expectancy is lower than average. Many of those who have suffered abuse will go on to be abusers. To improve the life chances of these neglected children, nuanced and extensive interventions are necessary, but such interventions cost money. One comes away from In Harm’s Way feeling that nothing in Britain is more broken than the system that purports to be taking care of its most vulnerable people.

Jonathan Buckley’s Tell, the joint winner of the Novel prize, was published in March

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