Baroness Eaton
Main Page: Baroness Eaton (Conservative - Life peer)
Baroness Eaton
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to help young care leavers not able to “stay put” in foster care to make a successful transition to independence.
Baroness Eaton (Con)
My Lords, I am deeply gratified by the level of interest your Lordships and other colleagues have shown in this subject—gratified but not surprised as I know that there are many tireless campaigners for vulnerable children on all the Benches of this House. As the last days of this Parliament rush by, it is important to pause and reflect on some of its major achievements. The “staying put” clauses in the Children and Families Act 2014 represent a seismic shift in provision for care leavers by allowing them to stay with their foster parents until the age of 21.
Previously there was no guarantee that young people studying hard for their A-levels or battling to hold down an apprenticeship or their first job would be able to stay with supportive foster parents. The strong bonds of affection that had formed through the rollercoaster ride of the teenage years would hold no sway if a local authority was not minded—or able—to be flexible. Now, however, the importance of these relationships, where they exist, is enshrined in legislation, with the effect, as the Department for Education has affirmed, of ensuring that some care leavers experience the stability and security of family life enjoyed by their peers into early adulthood.
I believe that in this area we are seeing the early and promising signs of what Dr Samantha Callan, an associate director at the Centre for Social Justice, refers to as the “relational turn” in UK social policy. Encouragingly, this emphasis on relationships is an area of cross-party consensus that goes wide and deep, and crosses national borders. Scotland has led on the importance of children’s nurture in the early years and, of great relevance to this debate, Northern Ireland has much to teach us about how some authorities ensure that adults with whom care leavers have some good history are drafted in as their official personal advisers. In England, however, a system operates where young people are allocated a complete stranger, whose case load can be as high as 49 young people, undermining any chance of a meaningful relationship.
I ask the Minister to note that the Children’s Minister, Edward Timpson, has gone on record as saying that local authority personnel may not fulfil this role as well as non-local authority personnel, and to reflect on how, more fundamentally, it is deeply questionable whether introducing a new professional into a young person’s life shortly before they leave care is the most sensible approach.
I am slightly jumping ahead of myself, because my purpose in securing this debate is to draw attention to those care leavers who have not had placement stability and are ineligible for staying put. Perhaps they came into care very late and were adamant that they did not want foster parents because they felt deeply loyal to their birth families. We heard this week that the police are being called into homes where young people are out of control. The safety of the whole family may mean that they are taken into care but, if they wholly reject the idea of a “substitute” family placement, fostering will be inappropriate.
Staying put is not available to the 9% of looked-after children who are in residential children’s homes, yet almost two-thirds of them have clinically significant mental health difficulties. For that reason, if for no other, we simply cannot continue to show those young people the door at 18. It is encouraging that funding from the innovation programme has been secured to test a model of staying put for those in residential care in North Yorkshire, under its No Wrong Door project. It is crucial that the urgency behind the initiative is not lost. One swallow does not make a summer, and one pilot does not mean that we have embedded the ability of young people to stay until they are ready to fly the nest. But even if staying put were further extended it would not help many of the most vulnerable care leavers, many of whom see themselves as “tough” and “independent” due to poor attachments. They may long to leave the system even if they are not ready, especially if they feel that it has let them down. For these young people, we must think more creatively.
From my own experience as a councillor in Bradford, I know just how important it is to take a whole-person approach to this issue, asking not just what children in care need to survive but what they need to thrive in adult life. I am talking whole-person and whole-government. The Care Leaver Strategy driven by the Social Justice Cabinet Committee has brought departments such as the DWP and BIS to the table to add their contribution, but more must be done.
The recent report from the Centre for Social Justice, Finding Their Feet, powerfully illustrates how relationships are utterly pivotal for a successful transition to adulthood for care leavers, and how policy can be built on that insight. Three-quarters of the care leavers that it surveyed said that they had struggled with loneliness after leaving care. That is undoubtedly what lies behind so many of the dreadful statistics. If you do not have someone to turn to for help with bills, you may end up in debt and even be evicted. If you are in an abusive relationship and there is no one to confirm that, yes, the way you are being treated is wholly unacceptable and help you make a safe exit, it can be incredibly hard to escape. This is a very real problem. Barn and Mantovani’s research shows that the impact of rejection and poor-quality relationships with carers can mean that,
“distinguishing between a loving relationship and a sexual relationship can be difficult”,
for children in care and care leavers. They are heartbreakingly susceptible to sexual exploitation, as many cases around the country have shown.
There are examples of innovative practice initiated by individuals in support of young care leavers. The pilot scheme by my noble friend Lord Freud through CSV which offers grandparent-style mentors to teenagers is a useful contribution in the field.
Another major issue that I would like to flag up for this debate is the centrality of employment for care leavers to be able to reach their potential. Specifically, they are unable to benefit from the investment that this Government have put into apprenticeships because, without family support, they cannot afford to take them up. Wages can be as low as £2.73 an hour. Moreover, while the Department for Education gives bursaries of £2,000 for higher education, there is no comparable support for care leavers taking up apprenticeships, sending the signal that the education path is the only one valued by government. I ask the Minister to take back to the department the idea of bursaries for such apprenticeships. If 10% of care leavers took them up, it would cost a modest £1.8 million.
Local government should also help, but the Centre for Social Justice found that almost two-thirds of local authorities do not provide specific additional financial support for care leavers taking up an apprenticeship. In Bradford we established a scheme to ensure that care leavers were incentivised to take up a traineeship or apprenticeship by topping up their income to £100 and giving them a bus pass if they were working full time. They also get a £10 training incentive. The aim is to ensure that they have £50 of disposable income and are financially better off in work than being NEET and wholly dependent on the state.
The imbalance in support for apprentices brings me to a final theme. It will be no surprise to the House that, as a former chair of the LGA, I am in favour of localism. Where the system works well, councillors are able to take on a direct responsibility as corporate parents and drive improvement. However, in this area there is enormous inconsistency across local authorities. For example, in terms of the number of children who go missing from care every year and for how long, a freedom of information request showed that last year more than 250 were missing for more than a month.
Ofsted has introduced more comprehensive integrated inspections of children’s services, but I suggest that improvement would follow also from more comprehensive data collection so that we know what is happening on the ground. Examples of new data to be collected would be long-term unemployment of care leavers and placement moves. Following on from adoption scorecards, corporate parenting scorecards, which we could introduce, would ensure that conscientious councillors were equipped to drive improvement in their local authorities, and those not pulling their weight would have nowhere to hide.
In conclusion, I reiterate my concern for care leavers’ mental health. The Times has just launched a campaign to highlight the crisis in children’s and young people’s mental health and the subject is rapidly rising up the political agenda. Preventing poor mental health is tightly bound up with ensuring that children grow up with consistent and loving relationships, even when their parents have not been able to provide them. Preserving instead of discarding these when children leave the formal care system has to be a priority.