Vulnerable Children

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde]

That this House takes note of the report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, On measuring the number of vulnerable children in England, published in July.

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the House for not speaking from my usual place. Unfortunately, my back and the rest of me are not getting on very well together at the moment, although it is only temporary. I thank Black Rod’s office, our marvellous attendants and the usual offices for enabling me to introduce this debate from a sedentary position.

As a former trade union general secretary in the printing industry and the one face to face with Rupert Murdoch at the time of what was known then as the Wapping dispute, I became used to the harsh things that newspapers said about me over the years, especially at that time. I sometimes used strong words against them, too. So I found myself somewhat embarrassed when I told a journalist at the London Evening Standard that his series of reports on the Children’s Commissioner’s report on the number of vulnerable children had reduced me to tears. It was to the credit of the Standard that the report was given front page coverage and, following that, every night of the week brought to the attention of readers what is happening to the lives of so many of our children in England.

David Cohen’s penetrating journalism brought out so clearly this current disgraceful problem—not only in London but throughout England—the commissioner’s remit and the ghastly failure of our society today. It equates with the kind of investigative journalism into similar social failure that Charles Dickens pioneered. I hope that David Cohen’s profession acknowledges that. It is a timely reminder that, in the era of instant tweets and fake news, the pen can still be mightier than the sword. The Standard coverage and today’s debate are a good demonstration of that.

The commissioner’s report was published in July—but with little impact so far as I can ascertain—to galvanise government into action. Today gives us the opportunity to question the Minister on what the Government are doing to engage with the issues that this huge piece of research identifies and to address them. Let us hope that the Government are not so fixated and overwhelmed with Brexit that the welfare of our children does not get the attention and resource that it needs and deserves.

The Children’s Commissioner’s report draws together for the first time the numbers of vulnerable children in England. It has done this by using 12 experts, working solidly for four months, to research the numbers of children reported by the whole spectrum of all government departments, voluntary agencies and others, and for the first time bringing the numbers together to form one picture. Until this report we had separate individual figures from each government department on the number of vulnerable children in its care only. It was a fragmented, incomplete picture. Now there is no excuse and the total figures are horrific.

The detail is in the numbers, but we must not forget that every single number is a child—a child who should be able to enjoy their early years, feel safe, have a home, be free of abuse in all its forms and not have their childhood stolen from them. Yet this is happening to so many children and one cannot escape the fact that it is what the commissioner’s report reflects. It is a sad indictment of our society today.

My objective for this debate is to secure an undertaking from the Government for urgent action in at least three areas. No doubt noble Lords will have others. The first, so clearly demonstrated to be needed, is what some might call “joined-up thinking”—a common phrase but so hard to deliver in national and local government, although many have tried. It needs more than that. It needs a high-level response—the highest, from the Prime Minister. It is only by Mrs May expressing her determination that this scandal—for that is what it is—will now be solved that government departments will work together, pooling ideas and resources. Is there any chance that progress will be made? These children deserve it and they have the right to expect it.

Secondly, we know that local authorities are struggling financially, but is it widely known that the Local Government Association has produced its own analysis indicating that by 2020, there will be an annual shortfall of £2 billion in funding for children’s social care services? What does that mean? It means that the reduced funding will go on crisis interventions—emergencies rather than the earlier intervention that would help. The Children’s Society has found that between 2010 and 2016 local authority early intervention funding was reduced by 40%, with a projected further reduction of 29% by 2020. The impact of these cutbacks is already coming through, with more children in need and more being referred to social services, some 52% of them for abuse or neglect.

The most common assessment is domestic violence, at just under 50%. It is a dreadful picture of so many young lives being brutally damaged and carrying the impact throughout their adult lives. The figures are horrendous. More than 500,000 youngsters in our country are so vulnerable that the state has had to intervene. Some 670,000 children in England alone are growing up right now in what are deemed to be high-risk family situations. Sadly, many more children are just not being seen—although the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, and her team tell me that they are certainly out there.

The report contains many more figures like that, but it is the individual cases, described so well by David Cohen in his series of articles published in London’s evening paper, that bring home what the daily grind and living reality are for individual children. Noble Lords taking part in this debate have great experience and expertise in this area—far more than me—and will cover different aspects, but I should like to address two of them in the time available. The first is that of children who are carers and the second is children who are homeless or living in temporary accommodation. The commissioner’s report cites an enormous figure of 171,000 children between the ages of five and 17 who are unpaid carers. What does that mean for each of those children? It means taking daily responsibility for shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as often ensuring that the adult they are caring for both gets and takes their medicine when they should. These young people’s childhoods are slipping away.

Young Beau is an eight year-old boy living in Richmond. He has the job of looking after his seriously ill mother because the local council has not succeeded in getting an adult carer for her. Quite apart from his domestic responsibilities, what impact is that having on Beau’s life at school and his future life? Although he is only eight years of age, he is not the youngest. The Honeypot is a charity that does great work giving respite every year for 2,500 child carers between the ages of five and 12 in one of its two homes in the New Forest and Wales. It has an outreach programme visiting children in their home, yet it gets no government funding at all for its work.

The second group I want to refer to specifically is the 119,000 children who are homeless or living in temporary accommodation. An example is a little girl of eight called Hannah. She lives with her mother and younger sister. Their father, who has an alcohol problem, has left the family, but when he was drunk he sometimes returned. When he did, Hannah knew that her responsibility was to take her younger sister upstairs to the bedroom and hide under the bed. However, that did nothing to protect them from hearing the beating their mother was getting from their father downstairs. When it was over, the little girls would see their mother’s face pouring blood. This is not drama but real life for Hannah. The police were called and eventually the mother and children were told that they would have to move, so they went to a homeless refuge. That was not the end of their nightmare; in many respects, it was just the start. Hannah’s problems increased. First, she had to change school, so she lost the teacher she knew and the friends she had made. She was not allowed to give out the new address where she was living, nor could she invite any new friends she made at school home for tea.

All too often in that situation, when a child appears different to others, the bullying starts. So we have a child who has been exposed to domestic violence, at eight years of age; she has lost her home; she has had to change school in difficult circumstances and without any preparation; and now she might be bullied. That is what the commissioner’s report is bringing into the open. It is putting the issue before the decision-makers. We are part of this process: all of us have a responsibility to do what we can in our own way.

I cannot leave Hannah just yet. I am told that the maximum stay in a domestic abuse centre is six months. At the end of six months, with her mother and sister, Hannah had to leave—or more correctly, “present again as homeless”, probably to be moved to another area, another hostel, another short-stay accommodation, another school and another scarring of her childhood experience and life chances. If the family do not accept the short-stay accommodation they are offered, they have technically “made themselves homeless” and are treated as such. Is this what we are prepared to put up with in our “civilised” society? It makes me ashamed—and I suspect it makes noble Lords ashamed, too.

I put one further question for the Minister to respond to in this debate. Will he undertake to go back to the Prime Minister and urge—plead for, if necessary—increased government efforts and resources for our children where they are needed, to ensure that local authorities work with families in homeless centres while they are there to find them alternative accommodation, rather than leave the process until the end of their permitted stay?

Sadly, these human life true stories go on. Marvellous charities are doing all they can and I am not saying that local authorities are lacking in compassion. They are not; the problem is that they do not have the resources to cope—only national government does. This is a Dickensian situation in 2017 with which we must come to terms and to which we must respond in a more considered and profound way than we have done until now.

I am indebted to noble Lords who have put their names down for the debate; they are far more experienced than me and I very much look forward to their contributions. I hope that together we can make a substantial impression and have an impact on the Government to do more than they are doing at the moment. This issue affects us as a nation; it is up to us as a nation, not just as a single party, to address the appalling circumstances of so many of our nation’s children. I am sure that the House and all Members, whatever side they sit on, will agree that it is an embarrassing disgrace to our nation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde]

I thank the Minister for that reply. He has been a Member of the House for such a short time that I must congratulate him on quickly learning the ability to sidestep questions that Members put in debates, but I think a little longer will prove that Members are also pretty experienced at making sure that that does not last and that they come back in on those issues, as I am sure we will.

One of the key questions that the Minister did not answer was in regard to ensuring that this will be given very senior attention—that of the Prime Minister herself. I asked whether the Minister would make a submission to her requesting that. Since the Minister was not able to reply in the debate, will he write to me? It was not just from me but from a number of Members of this House.

I thank all Members who took part in the debate. I have missed the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth of Breckland, dearly. She is not with us because of ill health. She has spent a lifetime working for children’s welfare, and it was a loss that she was not with us for this debate. I hope that she will be here next time we raise this issue—because it is not going to go away; the lack of assurances that the Minister was able to give us will make sure of that. I thank everyone who took part.

The Children’s Commissioner’s report is going to become an annual one, so we will be able to watch and comment rather forensically on just how well, or not, we as a nation are doing, through our Government, for the children of England who desperately need help in so many areas. In the meantime, I close by thanking everyone.

Motion agreed.