Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, as the final Back-Bench speaker, I wonder whether there is anything left for me to say. I hope your Lordships will allow me to touch on two issues, and I hope I will not repeat a lot of what others have already said, much of which I agreed with.

First, I say to the Minister that I support the Bill. However, as others have said, he would do a great service to the people concerned if he would share the information that has been expressed in today’s debate, particularly with Ministers in other government departments, because one of the weaknesses of government in its generic form is that it tends to think in silos and, if I may respectfully say so to my noble friend, none more so than the Treasury. If Ministers would just take concerns away from debates and share them with other Ministers, we might have what often is referred to as joined-up thinking in government. That would definitely be to the benefit of the way in which we legislate and its effect on the recipients of legislation that comes through this House.

I totally support the points that have been made on child trust funds. We also have had excellent briefing from Action for Children and Barnardo’s about the special case that is needed for looked-after children. I do not want to repeat too much of what has been said, much of which I support. I was particularly taken by the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about the 18 year-old threshold. If you make a will, however much or little you have to leave to your descendants, solicitors will always advise you to write in the age of 25 and not 18. They say that for very good reasons—and I hope that my own children are not listening to this. I am the mother of two middle-aged men, so it is a long time since they were 18 years old, but I would have been very nervous even for small sums of money to have been at their disposal at the age of 18, with them having total discretion as to what they spent it on. It is not that I am a bit of a killjoy of a mother.

There is a need to look, as I hope my noble friend will, at the case made for looked-after children and to take into account how any such money might be discharged. I hope that my noble friend will know that I am speaking in a very positive way about how money “will” be discharged. I feel that there is an imperative here today to make sure that that message goes from this House and that the case for the looked-after children is made.

When I was a Member of Parliament—I am sure that others in your Lordships' House will have shared this experience—I often had to intervene in the transition period for looked-after children when they came out of care and transferred into employment, education or sometimes absolutely nothing at all. It is a salutary experience to see not just the financial challenges that those young people face, but, if I have interpreted correctly a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, there is still an ongoing need for emotional and welfare support, over and above the finances. If we as a nation are to be in loco parentis—goodness knows, if those in this Chamber and in the Chamber in another place think about where the buck stops when decisions are made on just how that is delivered, surely the buck stops with us—we have to take this seriously.

Again I say to my noble friend that these are the sorts of issues that, if policy is changed in a Bill that comes through the Treasury, read across other government departments. I hope that he will not just take from this House the message about looked-after children to those with responsibility for local government finance, the Department of Health, the Department for Work and Pensions, and others, but that he will take it with enthusiasm to ensure that the message that has clearly gone from all sides of this House today is translated into something of which we can all be proud.

In January 2008, I had the great privilege to serve on the Health and Social Care Bill Public Bill Committee in another place, which led to the legislation that brought the health in pregnancy grant into being. When we came to the vote then, I opposed it and I support the Government’s decision to abolish it for the following reason. There was a lot of confusion around this legislation. When the previous Government started to talk about the purpose of introducing this grant, it had a focus.

As a reminder, I should like to share with your Lordships information that we took in evidence on this Bill before we started Committee—something which I would commend to almost all Bill committees. We took evidence from Rosemary Dodds from the National Childbirth Trust. Her first question was about this one-off payment of £190. She said:

“The important thing is the intention of the payment. Originally, there was a lot of discussion about impact on birth weight and prematurity, but the intention of the payment has not been made clear. In order to answer the question about what the impact would be, we need to know the intention of the grant”.

Right at the beginning, even in Committee, there was confusion about what the Government had said prior to printing the Bill and what actually happened when we got to Committee. She went on:

“If the impact is desired on birth weight and on prematurity”—

which quite clearly it was when the Government first started to talk about it—

“my understanding is that even 25 weeks is too late, from the evidence base, to have much impact”.—[Official Report, Commons, Health and Social Care Bill Committee, 10/1/08; col. 85.]

The Government’s intentions right at the beginning were extremely noble. They wanted to have an impact on prematurity and low birth-weights, which many of us could have supported, but they then discovered that if you do not set a higher threshold you bring into grants people who subsequently either elect to have an abortion or who unfortunately have a miscarriage. The threshold was therefore set much higher, so high in fact that the impact of early nutrition—both before conception and in the very early months of pregnancy, which were deemed to be the critical time if you were to avoid low birth-weights and premature babies—went out of the window. The alternative suggestion—of well-being and a general fund to help mothers in pregnancy—was therefore substituted for the original intention. I hope that my noble friend—again, this is not a Treasury matter—will convey this issue to the Department of Health.

I support the Government’s announcement of more health visitors, because clearly more health visitors on the ground could have an impact here. So, too, could more training in nutrition. Many years ago—a lifetime ago now—I trained as a home economist. I studied nutrition. Many people who are involved in the welfare and care of pregnant mothers, including some midwives, have very little real knowledge of nutrition; very few actually know the importance of the correlation between calcium and phosphorus in the early laying-down in pregnancy of healthy bones and teeth et cetera.

My noble friend is right to get rid of this fund, but I hope he will talk to the Department of Health about how we can help in other ways to mitigate the problem that we have in this country: the tragic problem for many individual people of low birth-weights and premature babies.