Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): I welcome Mark McGuicken, director of disability and older people, and Kerry Loveland-Morrison, head of the adult safeguarding unit. You are both very welcome. Once you have had a drink of water, I will pass over to you to provide some brief opening remarks.

Mr Mark McGuicken (Department of Health): Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to update the Committee on the Adult Protection Bill. As you noted, I am joined by Kerry Loveland-Morrison. Kerry heads up the team that has led on drafting the Bill.

Our current position is that the Bill and accompanying explanatory and financial memorandum (EFM) were approved at the Executive meeting on 5 June. They were formally introduced in the Assembly on 17 June. Prior to that, the Attorney General for Northern Ireland confirmed that the Bill as drafted is within the legislative competence of the Assembly, and the business case has been approved by DOF. The business case was approved on the condition that the Bill would not be enacted until such time as the necessary funds are available. That means that the Bill will be introduced, but implementation will be delayed until the budget becomes available.

You will see in the paper that the implementation of the Bill will cost approximately £12 million in the first year and £120·8 million over the first 10 years of implementation. That is all new funding, and it is largely attributed to additional staffing costs associated with implementing the new powers. Other costs relate to the adult protection board, training and court fees for the new offences etc. It is unlikely that all the new staff will be recruited in one year. Therefore, although the business case identifies costs per annum, it is likely that the actual spend will be more graduated as a result of incremental recruitment. A business case dedicated to the implementation of the Bill will be developed in due course and will fully consider the affordability of implementation at that time.

As you are aware from our briefing last year, the Bill will introduce additional duties and powers to strengthen and improve the adult protection process and help to bring Northern Ireland into line with other parts of the UK, where such legislation already exists. The Republic of Ireland does not currently have specific legislation on adult safeguarding, but its Programme for Government for 2025 includes a commitment to:

It is expected that the finalised draft policy will be before the Government in the coming months and that the preparation of legislation will commence thereafter in the Republic. Our Bill team, which is headed by Kerry, regularly engages with the other four nations on safeguarding issues and legislation.

The Bill is based on seven key principles: prevention, autonomy, empowerment, dignity, proportionality, partnership and accountability. Those have been incorporated in the Bill and should be adhered to by everyone involved in adult safeguarding and protection. The Bill will introduce a duty to report and cooperate for a number of organisations, such as trusts, the police, the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA), the Probation Board, the Housing Executive, GPs and independent providers. The explanatory and financial memorandum states that they will have a statutory duty:

Subsequently, the trust in question will have a statutory duty to make enquiries in all cases that are brought to its attention.

The Bill will also introduce the power to access records, including financial records, and the power of entry and associated additional powers, such as assessment orders, removal orders and banning orders. Those powers will be used by specifically trained adult protection social workers. A number of conditions will need to be met before those powers can be used. For example, a Magistrates' Court approval will be required in all instances, and there must be a reasonable attempt to seek the consent of the adult involved. In addition, the Bill will introduce the statutory provision of independent advocates to assist adults at risk to be involved in and influence decisions taken about their care.

Furthermore, the Bill will empower the Department to establish an adult protection board for Northern Ireland and place that on a statutory footing. That board will have a number of core functions, including responsibility for carrying out and managing serious case reviews.

Finally, the Bill will see the introduction of new offences relating to ill treatment and wilful neglect, namely the care worker offence and the care provider offence, which are intended to cover instances of harm by care workers and care providers that may not be captured by existing offences in Northern Ireland. Those offences are similar to those already in place in England and Wales under the Care Act 2014.

As we noted previously, there is the outstanding issue of whether the Northern Ireland Prison Service should be included in clause 4, which is the duty to report. No final agreement has been reached with the Prison Service at this stage. Therefore, the Bill does not include the Prison Service in clause 4. We remain of the view that it should be included in that duty. Engagement continues with Prison Service colleagues on that issue. There is the potential for the clause to be amended at a later stage if we get agreement with the Prison Service for it to be included.

In closing, I place on record the Department's sincere thanks to the Office of the Legislative Counsel (OLC) and the Attorney General's office for their assistance in drafting the Bill. I also add our thanks to the Committee Clerk and staff for their assistance in walking us through the process of what the Bill will entail.

I am happy to take any questions from members. If we cannot answer them today, we are, as always, happy to come back in writing.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): The Department wants the Prison Service to be included in clause 4, but there is resistance from the Prison Service. Is that right?

Mr McGuicken: I would not say "resistance", Chair. We probably engaged a bit late with the Prison Service, although we have been engaging with it for over a year now. The Department of Justice was represented on the transformation board. I think that the Prison Service position is that it is still looking for more clarity on how some of the specific powers would impact on people in the prison estate, but those conversations are ongoing. Minister Long, in her response to our Minister's letter to Executive colleagues, was very supportive of the Bill, although she noted that further engagement was needed with the Prison Service, specifically on clause 4.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): Is it the Department's intention not to propose an amendment to include the Prison Service unless it is fully happy, or will you propose an amendment regardless of reaching agreement?

Mr McGuicken: We would like to get an agreement on that position, but our position is that we believe that prisons should be included in clause 4, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): Fair enough. You made a point about there being no funding for the implementation of the Bill. The Bill will be legislation, but, until the funding is found, there will be no implementation. Is that what you were saying?

Mr McGuicken: It is, Chair. The Department could have gone two ways: we could wait until the finance is available and then start the passage of the Bill, or we could bring the Bill to the statute book and then look for the funding. We can also look to implement through a staged approach, although we do not believe that a lot of the powers in the Bill could be brought in incrementally. We would not want a case to be taken to a certain stage where an additional power would be required and, if that power was not on the statute book, it would mean that the case would fall. We could potentially do things such as bringing forward the adult protection board. We could maybe think about doing something like that as the first step, because that is quite low-cost, and a lot of the cost, as was noted, is in the recruitment of additional social workers and other staff.

I will answer your question directly, Chair. Yes, the position is that we will bring the Bill to the statute book if we get it through the Assembly, and then we will seek to implement it at a later stage. Trusts have been clear that they will need some time. Even if we get it through to Royal Assent, trusts will need a period to do training and get a lot of the other processes in place before we implement. It is not that, even if we had the money, we could bring this forward on day 1 after Royal Assent. There will be a lead-in time for commencement of some of the powers in the Bill.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): As the Bill goes through its different stages, you will potentially see that implementation plan and the details of it. By the end of it, the Minister may even have found the money to implement it.

Mr McGuicken: It will certainly be a parallel approach. We are still developing statutory guidance as we go through the process. We can look at the implementation plan in parallel with bringing the Bill through the Assembly.

Miss McAllister: Thanks, Mark, for that presentation. It is great to finally get this up and running and start the first stages of getting it through the Assembly. The families of the vulnerable adults in Muckamore and from Dunmurry Manor care home will be particularly interested and will be delighted to see this get off the ground. We will, no doubt, continue to hear more from them, and we will have more specific questions during the Bill's Committee Stage.

I have a few questions now. The Chair asked about the financial commitments and being able to implement the Bill. When I was reading the briefing paper, I did not understand why the statutory duty to report could not be implemented in a cost-neutral way. Forgive my ignorance, but I do not understand how including a statutory duty to report would cost anything or need a financial tag attached to it. Do you think that it might be possible to implement that?

Mr McGuicken: Nuala, because there is a statutory duty to report, the trust will then have a statutory duty to investigate. A lot of the costs will be around ensuring that we have the necessary social work workforce to enable that investigation to be taken forward. That is what I was trying to say. If we implement certain powers in the Bill but not all the powers, you will get to a certain stage and then not be able to do anything to progress that right through. You are right: introducing a statutory duty to report to the trusts probably does not cost anything, but implementing and investigating are where the cost lies, because, as I say, you need the social workers and the other staff in place to carry out an investigation. You also need those other powers to make sure that you are able to take the investigation right through its course with regard to some of those other powers in the Bill.

Miss McAllister: My understanding — maybe I am wrong — is that these investigations have the potential to replace the ineffective investigations of what has needed to be reported, or will they duplicate those? Will you not be cutting out other areas where there were previous incidents that should have been investigated?

Mr McGuicken: At the minute, it is all done through a policy rather than a statutory power, so this is to strengthen what is currently in place.

We have had a lot of engagement throughout this, and the Office of Social Services has been involved in the transformation board taking this forward. Its view is clearly that we need additional social workers in place to be able to deliver this to the full extent of the Bill. I am not sure that we would say that the powers are "ineffective" at present. The Bill will certainly strengthen the powers that are there. There are already significant vacancies in the social work cadre in Northern Ireland that would take forward investigations.

Miss McAllister: I understand that completely. My worry is that we will have this Act, and, because of the funding situation, we will be unable to implement many parts of it. When we meet families, whether it is around serious adverse incident (SAI) procedures, internal investigations or Regulation and Quality Improvement (RQIA) investigations, there are already ones that exist. Perhaps, in exploring it a bit further at Committee Stage, we will ask what will be strengthened or replaced rather than duplicated so that we can get to a position where we can implement something.

Mr McGuicken: In clause 4, there is a duty on those named organisations to report and then a statutory duty on the trust to take it forward. That is a huge step forward, Nuala, in strengthening what is currently there. I am happy to come back with more detail as the Bill goes through its Assembly stages.

Miss McAllister: I understand that we do not need to go into all the detail now.

I have a query on another area — again, you do not have to provide the detail, but I would like to go into it in more depth — which is the Bill's use of the words "power of entry" and "financial or other records". It will be really important, as we come to Committee Stage, to elaborate further on the benefits and why that is necessary. I can see it from the work that I do with families, but others may not see it in the same way.

The only other question that I asked was about the regulations that could be made under the use of CCTV. Do you anticipate that those regulations will be drafted now or after the Bill gains Royal Assent, or do you think that there will be some sort of delay? Many organisations and families would ask questions about CCTV in care homes. Had it not been for CCTV at Muckamore, we would not have been able to uncover the scale of abuse there. Therefore, my concern is about a delay to the regulations. This will be the first Bill that some of us, the newer MLAs, have seen through a Committee Stage. When will the draft regulations happen for that aspect in particular?

Ms Kerry Loveland-Morrison (Department of Health): A piece of work needs to be done around CCTV generally. It was not included in our initial consultation on policy proposals. We therefore want to have a full public consultation on the content of the regulations. We have that piece of work to do first, and then we will bring forward the draft regulations.

Miss McAllister: Will that be after the Bill has passed?

Ms Loveland-Morrison: I think so, although the consultation may happen earlier. We would have to see where we got to with timing. We are also planning a public consultation on the statutory guidance. Therefore, two pieces of work need to be progressed.

Miss McAllister: That is certainly important. When I ask people who are in positions of responsibility, "Would you put your loved one in a care home that does not have CCTV?", no one has said yes. It is an important aspect. However, I appreciate that it was not included at the beginning, and it is positive that the Department has moved to include it now.

Mr McGuicken: On your wider point, Nuala, on the mandatory inclusion of CCTV, it was very clear that that was not possible: because of article 8, it was outwith the legislative competence of the Assembly to bring that in. However, I very much take the point that, without CCTV evidence, we probably would not have uncovered the extent of the abuse in Muckamore. We are very alive to that, and some members of the transformation board, particularly PSNI colleagues, would have been behind mandatory CCTV, but we simply were not able to introduce it in the Bill. To be fair, including mandatory CCTV would have made it mandatory in some individuals' own homes, particularly some of those supported through Supporting People and Supported Living. Including mandatory CCTV would make it mandatory in the private homes of people being supported at home in that way. We simply could not do it.

Miss McAllister: OK. Thank you very much. Those are all my questions for now.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): Mark, you talked about clause 4 in response to Nuala's question and the difference between and impact of the duty to report and the duty to investigate. There is no time frame in the Bill. If I report an incident on a Monday, there is no time frame to indicate when the duty to investigate needs to kick in. If you report something such as an adult being in a vulnerable situation, you expect the investigation to start immediately or very quickly. The Bill does not have a time frame . Someone might say that they will investigate, but it could take two weeks. Is that an omission?

Ms Loveland-Morrison: The statutory guidance will fill in the gaps and talk about what the process looks like. Cases might have different timelines that reflect the urgency of the situation. I expect the statutory guidance to cover that detail, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): Thank you.

Mrs Dillon: A bit like Nuala, I do not know how much detail to go into today. Clauses 2 and 3 define harm as physical, psychological and financial neglect etc, but there is no provision for a review or update mechanism for the definition in response to emerging harm types. Is the definition flexible enough to deal with emerging harm types, such as digital or online coercive control, that do not come under domestic abuse legislation?

Mr McGuicken: That is a very fair point, Linda.

Mrs Dillon: I will leave it with you, and you can take the point away. I am happy with that, because I do not expect you to be able to answer everything that I raise today.

Why is the title of the Bill "Adult Protection" rather than safeguarding?

Ms Loveland-Morrison: Safeguarding is seen as a wider umbrella that includes additional elements such as prevention. The Bill is focused specifically on protecting people and investigating where harm might be happening.

Mrs Dillon: The Bill does not contain the preventative elements.

Ms Loveland-Morrison: Yes.

Mrs Dillon: That is fair enough. Clauses 17 to 19 contain the powers of entry and the application for warrants. Some safeguards are mentioned, such as the need for consent unless there is a capacity issue or undue pressure, but the Bill does not reference an evidence base, examples of intended use or detail on how the stakeholder input shaped the powers. What is the evidence base?

Ms Loveland-Morrison: Moving away from the consent issue, if it was felt that someone did not have capacity or there was undue pressure, the trust would need to make the case to a magistrate for them to approve the use of that power.

Mr McGuicken: A lot of it will come down to the professional judgement of the social worker involved in the case. There will be significant training brought in for the social workers coming in, and we expect that it will be high-grade social workers who deal with those cases. It will not be social workers who are just out of university — I mean no disrespect — but experienced and senior social workers who will take those cases through the system.

Mrs Dillon: The Committee needs to get a sense of what the stakeholders feel about that. There are general duties to cooperate in clause 4 and to consult in clause 22. The direct participation by families, carers and service users in the governance of the adult protection board or guidance development is not mandated in the Bill. How will the Department ensure that all of those people are included in the whole process, not just the consultation?

Ms Loveland-Morrison: We have included a clause to make the trusts keep families and other interested people involved throughout the process: they must pay due regard to their opinions.

That came from our engagement with stakeholders and families themselves. They let us know how important it was that we have something in the Bill to guide that, because they feel that that does not always happen as much as it should. That part of the Bill comes from that engagement, and we hope that that will help to reassure families of the importance of their contribution to the process. We see that, as do the trusts, and the trusts were fully on board with that being brought into the Bill.

Mrs Dillon: I am concerned about the duties to report and cooperate. From being on the Policing Board, I am well aware of there being duties on the PSNI and trusts to cooperate before and of that cooperation falling down. I am a wee bit concerned about how we make sure that the accountability in the Bill is borne out as intended. We will probably get into that more as we go on.

The Chair has asked the other questions that I had, and they have been answered: thank you. I am sure that you will be sick of looking at us before this is out, but it is an important piece of work and it is good to have legislation for the Committee to scrutinise.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): Absolutely. We are all looking forward to it.

Mr Chambers: On the CCTV system part of the Bill, we have seen how important CCTV has been in the past. You said that you are still working on fine-tuning that and on the regulations that will come in, but a couple of things spring out at me. The Bill says that regulations may make provision:

In a residential situation in which there was a high turnover of residents, or people were there for only a short time, as in a respite situation, what would happen if one of those people decided to object, but 30 or 40 other people on the premises were quite happy to have CCTV? Would you think of setting a threshold of 10% of the people, or whatever?

You also talked about the use and maintenance of a CCTV system. Somebody might try to be clever by saying, "Our CCTV is out of order. We are getting it fixed". Do you foresee there being some sort of compulsion, with a timeline to get it fixed within 72 hours or something like that, so that people cannot hide behind the excuse of, "It's broken, but we're bringing down an engineer about it"? I do not know what regulations there were on the records in Muckamore, but I suspect that the footage was saved for quite some time. Would the regulations inform operators of how long they have to retain the footage?

Ms Loveland-Morrison: That is the kind of detail that we would expect to be in the regulations. To be totally honest, we have not got into that detail yet — we have not really started developing the regulations, but that is the kind of detail we would expect to see. I would certainly expect the regulations to go into details such as maintaining the CCTV, having it made operational in a reasonable time frame, who can operate it and all of that.

Mr Chambers: Yes —.

Mr McGuicken: We have had those sorts of conversation — sorry to interrupt, Alan — at the transformation board in discussions about what regulation there should be of CCTV, particularly with stakeholders such as the PSNI who are saying, "These are the things that we need to make sure that we have regulations on so that people cannot hide behind the excuse of, 'The system has been down for three weeks' or something like that". They were particularly insistent that we should have those regulations around CCTV.

Mr Chambers: Excuse my ignorance about how these things work. You said that, if the Bill passes, you will start to brainstorm the regulations and the fine-tuning, as you said. How do you work that into the Bill? Is there provision in the Bill to add those addendums?

Ms Loveland-Morrison: It comes through as secondary legislation and will be subject to the draft affirmative procedure. It will be laid before the Assembly as a draft and will have to be approved by the House and by this Committee.

Mr Chambers: Every day is a school day. Thank you.

Mr Donnelly: This is great to see. It is a new thing for me, and it is great to have legislation coming to us. That is fantastic. I know that we are going to become very familiar with this.

I have a couple of questions. We realise that the funding is not there yet. Is there a prioritised plan for a phased approach if only certain amounts of funding are available?

Mr McGuicken: At this stage, there is not, Danny. We will probably want to take advice from the Committee throughout the passage of the Bill, once we get into the detail of what its powers will be. We would like to have those conversations as part of the passage of the Bill to see whether there is a prioritisation that you believe we should take forward. From my perspective, it will be difficult to implement the powers incrementally. As I said before, we do not want to get to a certain point in a case and then not have the necessary powers to take it right through. It may well be that we could bring in the Adult Protection Board as an interim step. Again, it can still look at powers around serious case reviews and other issues there. That could be one of the first steps that we could look at, because it would be relatively inexpensive to bring that in.

There are an awful lot of other costs that are associated with training and so on. The majority of the costs are to do with the recruitment of additional social workers. This year, at this stage, we have had what is probably our highest ever intake of social workers. We have 340 commissioned places for September 2025 going through Ulster University and some more through the Open University. A lot of those additional places were secured through transformation funds, largely for social work provision in multidisciplinary teams (MDTs). We have already started to get those additional social workers in place. By the time the Bill has passed, we should be in a position where we have more social workers on the ground. Then we have can have those conversations about what the prioritisation might be.

Mr Donnelly: Thank you for that. That leads me to my next question. We have heard a lot about social work teams that have excessive numbers of vacancies and heavy workloads. We knew that the commissioned places were coming in, and the graduate social workers are going straight into them. Those social workers will be experienced —

Mr McGuicken: Yes.

Mr Donnelly: — and they will be the ones going for the training. Has an assessment been done of workforce issues — of workforce availability — in order to be able to make up those numbers?

Mr McGuicken: According to our latest figures, we have 255 vacancies across the trusts at the moment. We expect to bring in 240 new social workers between July and September. The Committee was previously aware that we are now using a fast-track recruitment process for social workers. All 240 of those new social workers will be in post in the trusts between July and September. We will put them in, and then we will have another 340 people starting the course in September. The baseline is around 285 Health-commissioned places each year. We have 340 going in this year and an additional 15 from Ulster University. There will be another five band 7 recruitment and retention coordinators going in this year as well. The Department is making good strides towards bolstering that workforce. By the time this goes through, the vacancies position should be different from what it is at the moment. I imagine that, by that time, we will have had another cohort of staff graduating from university. Again, that will mean more social workers coming into post in September 2026.

Mr Donnelly: You will also have a cohort that will have left at the other end.

Mr McGuicken: Yes. You have that natural churn as well. Invariably, the ones who are leaving are probably more experienced social workers. That is the point that I am trying to answer for you, Danny. We did not want to simply bring in something that would exacerbate the current social work staffing difficulties. The additional funding will allow us to have an amount of churn in the system so that we can continue to bring in more new social workers and allow the more experienced social workers to take on those other roles. That has all been factored into the Bill's costings.

Mr Donnelly: OK. This is very interesting. I am looking forward to getting my teeth into it. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): I have one final question. We talked about the Prison Service and you spoke about a potential amendment. Is there anything that you have in your heads that you may bring forward as an amendment?

Mr McGuicken: That is the only one, at this stage, that we would potentially bring forward.

The Chairperson (Mr McGuigan): That is fair enough. Thanks very much. We will probably be sick of the sight of each other before this process is over. Thank you.