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Interview with Susan Bindman, the former head of Nagalro.

“I was brought up on the McCarthy trials,” says Susan Bindman, the former head of the national association of children’s guardians (Nagalro). Growing up in a politically active family from the US east coast during the 1950s “reds under the beds” era, it was inevitable she would find herself involved in meaty political issues at some point in her life, writes Derren Hayes.
The grilling that Joseph McCarthy and his henchmen gave the Hollywood community during their investigations into alleged communist links may have been at the back of Bindman’s mind when she was asked to give evidence to the committee of the Lord Chancellor’s department – now the department of constitutional affairs – during its investigations into the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass).

The inquiry was set up after a series of high-profile problems with Cafcass – an amalgamation of the probation and child welfare services – began to raise fears among MPs that poor performance and funding difficulties were putting children’s safety at risk. This culminated in the deaths of two children awaiting the allocation of a guardian.
Bindman’s appearance before the committee in May coincided with her stepping down as the chairperson of Nagalro after four years. It proved a fitting end to that period of her career.
“Cafcass is something that has defined my four years in the job,” she says. “It started off in 1999 setting up task force teams and stakeholder groups and aiming to be inclusive and involved. However, they hardly used any of that work. What sticks in everyone’s minds is that it was a lot of wasted time, energy and money [it cost £9m].”
She says the transition from separate government agencies to a unified service could have been easier if more time had been taken over it. The fact that the government wanted to set up Cafcass quickly has resulted in major disruptions to the service in some parts of the country.
Delays in appointing guardians to children under local authority care orders have dogged the organisation since it launched  just over two years ago. The delays became progressively worse last year to the point where some children were waiting three months for a guardian to be appointed.
For Bindman that is unforgivable – “I get angry when people muck about with the lives of vulnerable kids” – and a problem of Cafcass’s own making.
Bindman first locked horns with Cafcass in early 2001 over a dispute about the employment terms and conditions that the new organisation was offering to self-employed guardians. These independent guardians are the mainstay of Nagalro, and the public law system Cafcass took control of. Before Cafcass, many guardians worked freelance with several employers. This changed when Cafcass reneged on an understanding that it would have a “mixed economy” workforce, and demanded all guardians become salaried employees because of changes in tax status.
Despite a high court ruling that Cafcass had acted unlawfully, hundreds of guardians felt disillusioned and left the service, creating a void that remains today.
Bindman believes the tax issue was an excuse for the Court Welfare Service to drive through its plans for an “employed and managed service”. “Cafcass believed it would be liable for paying back tax for some self-employed guardians, but the Inland Revenue never gave a ruling on that.”
Although many did sign full-time contracts with Cafcass, Bindman says many of her colleagues were “driven back to the security of local authority employment”. She believes that until Cafcass proves its commitment to a mixed workforce “through actions not just words” the organisation will continue to struggle.
“Independent guardians are not picking up the extra work because the will has been lost. Whereas before they may have given 100 per cent of their time to Cafcass, they are now giving less,” she says. A recent Nagalro survey showed that the number of guardians spending 80 per cent of their time on Cafcass work has dropped by 50 per cent in the past two years.
Bindman blames this on Cafcass “trying to impose structures on guardians”, and the fact that its chief executive, Jonathan Tross, “does not regard the initiatives he gets from us as fitting with his vision for the future”.

She admits she still has a “difficult time” working with Tross in particular and with Cafcass in general, adding: “I’m not sure they know how to use our help.”
Like most frontline practitioners, Bindman has a straight-talking style and hates bureaucracy. She criticises Cafcass for being management heavy, an issue the Lord Chancellor’s department inquiry also picked up on.
“One thing we’ve found difficult to cope with is the more leisurely pace with which Cafcass appears to work. There’s little continuity of those working there and if someone is on holiday nothing gets done until they return,” says Bindman. That’s an alien concept for professionals who must think and act quickly. It also says much about Bindman’s own style of leadership.
By her own admission, her strengths are motivating others, keeping people involved and sharing concerns. These are attributes she links to her mother – a former teacher with a keen interest in US politics – and lawyer father, who was also a philanthropist who hired Madison Square Garden for functions.
After teaching in New York, newly married Bindman moved to London in 1964. She qualified as a social worker in 1973 and became a guardian in 1984.
During her time as chairperson of Nagalro, the organisation’s profile has risen and it has become more involved in policy initiatives. She says she is “direct but not rude” and takes umbrage at suggestions she could be seen as an aggressive negotiator. “I don’t believe in conflict. I tease people more than anything else.”
However, her New Yorker’s instincts for fighting her corner have had to be curbed during the tricky discussions over Cafcass. “I’ve had to learn how to speak in the subjective. I always accepted US politics as being rough and ready, but I have been really surprised that in a much more subtle way the same machinations are here – it is far more Byzantine though,” she adds.
Despite stepping down, Bindman remains passionate about the guardian service and the need for it to retain professional autonomy in a climate of “government mistrust of health and social care professionals”.
“People still recognise that Nagalro represents a certain professional standard. Guardians continue to be quality assurance for critical and robust analysis of interviews and observations in relation to specific children. In those local authorities where social workers come and go regularly, the guardian may be the only person to hold the threads of the case,” she says.
Cafcass has started to step up its recruitment of family court advisers to work in public and private law cases fulfilling the roles of children’s guardian and family court reporter. Bindman says Nagalro is not opposed to this, but feels the three days’ training provided is insufficient.
“The issue is about having experience of child welfare and understanding the functioning of social services departments,” she says. “We have to be reflective practitioners. Without that it is easy to make mistakes and lose the ability to analyse issues with the necessary care.”
Bindman, at 61, still has a busy caseload and, although she is not “thinking and worrying about Nagalro morning and night”, she still feels “enormous responsibility to them”.
The LCD select committee report on Cafcass is due out next week. Bindman thought the inquiry “extremely robust”. However, unlike the McCarthy trials, she hopes it will “make those that matter think about what needs to change”.