ACRCG says the law does not work for adult care leavers asking for their care records.

We have made a submission to the Law Commission’s 14th Programme highlighting the need to change the present law.

The Law Commission will decide what to include in its programme in early 2022

Our submissions is available on our Resources Page here

The Law Commission is an independent body which reviews current law and make recommendations for improvements and reform to Parliament. It is considering whether to include in its 14th programme a review of the law about identity and the barriers people experience when trying to find out about their origins and family connections.

We are deeply sad to announce that Darren Coyne, an irreplaceable founder member of the ACRCG, has unexpectedly died on 25 May 2021.

Darren was a fearless activist and passionate about improving the rights of adult care leavers to know about their time in care and their family connections. He worked tirelessly to identify and overcome the deficits, barriers and ‘carelessness’ of the system and its impact on persons asking to see their care records.

He was passionate in speaking out about the misuse and misunderstandings of data protection laws to deny people their right to know their family connections There are many care leavers who will have known Darren because of the support he gave them when, sometimes in very difficult and challenging circumstances, they had asked to see their care files, working with them to make ‘narrative sense’ of their time in care.

Darren spoke passionately and lucidly to everyone about the impact that being denied knowledge and memories of time in the care system had on his own and other people’s life journeys. He spoke persuasively to policy and law makers, academics, prison governors, local authority and voluntary sector case workers preparing files: he spoke at conferences, he worked with colleagues in research projects, he organised seminars and workshops, he went to where people needed his assistance, his advocacy and his knowledge. He went way beyond doing this work as a
‘job’: it was his mission. And, central to his mission, was the principle of working in partnership with all care leavers, giving emotional and mentoring support.  The Care Leavers Association has lost a valuable colleague.

Recently, Darren made a podcast with John-George Nicholson for Research in Practice: we uploaded it to our website. Please take time to listen to Darren and John-George: it tells us so much about the experiences of care leavers reading their case records so succinctly.

We owe it now to Darren to keep steady in our advocacy work with care leavers to establish a much fairer framework of their rights to their family story.  That is what Darren would expect us to do: to go forward fearlessly.

We offer our condolences to his daughter, his family and friends and to care leavers who have lost a true supporter and advocate and to his colleagues at Care Leavers Association and colleagues in the various projects Darren was involved with.

Darren Coyne of the Care Leavers Association and a member of our Campaign Group and John-george Nicholson share their personal stories of accessing their care files as adults. Both Darren and John-george were actively involved as research participants in the MIRRA project at UCL.

In these two podcasts, they talk about the emotional impact of receiving care files, the importance of child-centred recording, and provide suggestions of how practitioners can implement good recording.

The podcasts enable social workers and data governance officers to reflect on:

• What it means emotionally to access your care file.
• The experience of reading your care file, and its emotional impact.
• The significance of redaction and not hearing your voice within your care records.
• What child-centred record keeping would look like and why it is so important.
• The power and use of language within records, and recording positive ‘joyous moments’, and times of celebration not just negatives.

The second podcast sets out recommendations to take forward in your organisation or team, the importance of involving the child and young person in the process of creating records which will be central to their knowledge of their lives when they are adults.

Follow the link below to listen to the podcast.

https://www.researchinpractice.org.uk/children/content-pages/podcasts/reflections-on-accessing-care-records-and-supporting-good-recording/

The government wants to know about care leavers’ experiences of living
in accommodation such as B&B, cheap hotels or hostels, where there are
no clear rules about the standard of the accommodation and the supports
for people placed there by the local authority. A number of key groups
working with adult care leavers and young people in care are demanding
that the government takes steps to make improvements to this unregulated
sector. The link below to the Article 39 website has more information
about this to enable you to contribute to the consultation. ACRCG
supports the groups working on this consultation and Care Leavers
Association is leading this work.

ACRCG supports the many groups working to challenge the Government’s
action to suspend key fundamental rights and protections for children
and young people and adult care leavers.

The Government claims that the social care sector was demanding these changes to deal with the impact of the Corvid -19 pandemic as a matter of urgency. However, many groups representing children, young people, their families and adult care leavers were not consulted. There was no scrutiny or debate in Parliament about the changes. The Government has said that the changes will be in place until 25 September 2020 but it is possible that they could be extended.  These significant changes erode and remove key
rights and protections. We join with the groups, including Care Leavers
Association, to demand that the Government withdraws the Regulation
which made these changes.

Since the Data Protection Act 2018 was made law in May 2019, it has been necessary to publish guidance as to how its terms should be implemented, and, for instance how discretion ought to be exercised in order to provide good practise to the Data Subject. Our interest, of course, is limited to those who are, or were previously, in care, whereas the proposed guidance is of wider application to all.

The Information Commissioner’s Office issued a consultation for views on what form the guidance on access to records should take. One can read the consultation by clicking here

Although the guidance was going to be of general effect and not especially related to Care Records with their peculiar issues, we, as a Group, wanted to ensure that it took account of the special issues which those in care, and care leavers face when trying to access their records.

To read our response to the Guidance, you can read our whole response document by clicking the link below. In particular we made the following bullet points as well as provding detailed comments on the specific sections:-

“The issues that these people face include:

• defensive redaction of information particularly third-party information, often information which is already known to them
• defensive exercises of what should be an enabling discretion to provide third party information – both in decision making about getting consent from the third party and sharing that information without consent
• failure to understand what information on care records is not ‘protected’ information
• an overuse of the ‘serious harm’ test to withhold information, sometimes not properly informed by professional health advice about the individual’s current health and circumstances
• lack of sensitivity about explaining language, terms or professional jargon used in  documents in their case file: this is particularly so for older adult carer leavers who are distressed by terms used
• lack of support to the individual during the SAR process and after their care records have been shared.”

Click here to read our response of a PDF File.