Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Monday 9th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I was pleased and proud to add my name to this amendment. I do so having been pleased to support the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, in their past attempts to deal with this gap in the way that we deal with young people who may have been trafficked. Both the noble Lord and the noble and learned Baroness have done an immense amount to improve the lives of young people who have been trafficked and changes are being made. However, as both have said today, there is still this gap.

If we think of our own children, not having been trafficked or been the victims of slavery, but put into a similar situation in a foreign country, unable to understand the language and for whatever reason having to deal with a multiplicity of different agencies, they would not cope. Today we are talking about children who are not just vulnerable, but probably traumatised, who may have suffered degradation in some way, yet who are still supposed to deal with a multiplicity of agencies. It is deeply unfair to expect them to do so.

This amendment would ensure that these children had one person—a constant in an ever-changing world—who they could trust and to whom they could turn whenever they felt it necessary. On the day when we have been paying tribute to Nelson Mandela, a man who was full of compassion, this is a matter of compassion and of fulfilling our obligation to these children who have suffered. Yes, as the noble and learned Baroness pointed out, these are foreign children, but that fact does not matter. These are young human beings who, for whatever reason, are now in this country and we have an obligation to ensure that they are properly cared for. One of the means of doing that is to ensure that they have a person there who can be their advocate and their support.

As noble Lords have said, there are agencies, people in the voluntary and charitable sectors, who are willing and able to provide this service, and, as the noble and learned Baroness said, it is not a question of another bureaucratic tier. This is something that does not exist and needs to exist. Not only will it not cost a lot of money, in the end it could actually save money, because it means that these children will not fall through all the gaps and into crisis, as they might have done. This is a means of saving money. We have an obligation to do our best for these children and I am pleased and proud to support this amendment.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McColl, referred to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. In Grand Committee I picked up that reference and spoke briefly about what the Joint Committee had said about the Scottish experience of guardianship, which went broader but included trafficked children. In response, the Minister expressed a degree of scepticism, perhaps, about that experience. Once again, the chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights has followed up our debates with a letter to the noble Baroness. I shall read part of that letter. It stated:

“I would like to draw your attention to the recommendation made by my Committee in its First Report of this Session, on the Human Rights of unaccompanied migrant children and young people in the UK, (HL: Paper 9 and HC 196), which dealt with guardianship and on which the Committee had taken evidence. This states (at paragraph 175):

‘We welcome the findings from the Scottish Guardianship Service, which demonstrate the value that a guardian can add for unaccompanied asylum seeking and trafficked children. We recommend that the Government commission pilots in England and Wales that builds upon and adapts the model of guardianship trialled in Scotland. The guardian should provide support in relation to the asylum and immigration process, support services and future planning, help children develop wider social networks, and ensure that children's views are heard in all proceedings that affect them. The Government should evaluate the case for establishing a wider guardianship scheme throughout England and Wales once those pilot schemes are complete’”.

The letter from the chair to the Minister continues:

“In your contribution to the debate in the Lords you suggested that the Scottish scheme had had mixed results, that it had not 'cracked' the problems that it was intended to address, and that it would add another layer of complexity”—

other noble Lords have talked about this—

“ to how these things are currently handled.

The results of the guardianship scheme, however, were largely positive, as was evidenced fully by the independent report undertaken by Professors Heaven Crawley and Ravi Kohli (who both advised my Committee during its inquiry into unaccompanied migrant children). These positive results led the Scottish Government to endorse the Guardianship Service, and support it with funding for a further three years at £200,000 per year”.

I would add here that Aileen Campbell, the Minister for Children and Young People in the Scottish Government, has said:

“The Scottish Guardianship Service gives asylum seeking children a voice and makes sure every young person involved understands and participates in decisions that affect them”.

The letter goes on:

“There is of course no question that the issues surrounding guardianship are complex and that it took time for the Service in Scotland to bed down and achieve some enduring coherence for vulnerable children in difficult circumstances. However, the independent report, in large part, is very clear that Guardianship was a safeguard for unaccompanied migrant children, and its design and implementation were exemplary”.

The report throws some light on this question of an additional layer of complexity. It found:

“The young people saw Guardians as helping them to understand what others did, especially when there were ‘too many people’ in their lives. This is an important perception by the young people of a key element of the Service—namely that the Service played a key role not because there were too few professionals in their lives, but because sometimes there were too many. The noise generated by these constant engagements and expectations, where young people were required to repeat some form of their story to an endless queue of professionals”—

a point that the noble Lord, Lord McColl, made—

“needed to be reduced to a sound that young people could hear, sometimes in sequence, and sometimes in a harmonised way. The Guardians did this”

in a number of ways. The letter concludes:

“My Committee believes that the Government should look at this again”.

I really hope that the Government will look at this again. There have been some very powerful speeches in support of the amendment and I very much hope that noble Lords will not be fobbed off again.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, I support the first amendment for reasons of principle, about which the noble Lords have spoken. The principle of equality is very important. It seems to me that, in Committee, the Minister was unable to respond with any arguments at all based on principle. They were purely pragmatic arguments, which I do not think noble Lords found very convincing.

Amendment 84A, which I support, is very much in line with the recommendation of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which argued that,

“we consider that the Government should carry out a full review of pension provisions in relation to survivor pension benefit entitlements of same sex married couples and civil partners to ensure that there is no unjustifiable discrimination in pension scheme provisions”.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I have added my name to manuscript Amendment 84A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Alli, because we believe that this is the most sensible course of action at this stage. Like my noble friend, we want to ensure that there is no discrimination in the Bill and that there are not two tiers of marriage. I, too, am extremely grateful to the Minister for managing to arrange a meeting with the Pensions Minister yesterday.

We have always accepted that there would be some direct cost to private pension schemes. However, £18 million, which is the figure often quoted, is a drop in the ocean for schemes worth an estimated £76.4 billion. The Government have asserted that equalising pensions benefits for civil partners and married couples of the same sex after this Bill could leave the public sector liable for costs of up to £3 billion to £4 billion. However, they have been far more reluctant to explain where those costs might come from.

As my noble friend said, the Government have already acted to equalise survivor benefit entitlements for civil partners with those of widowers for public sector and contracted-out schemes. The £3 billion to £4 billion estimate is based on the assumption that the removal of the legal exemption for civil partners will leave the Government being forced to equalise the entitlements of widowers with widows, thus levelling everyone back to 1978. But why they believe this to be a significant risk remains unclear.

The 1978/1988 distinction between widowers and widows was based on the historic position of women as being largely dependent on their husbands for income. Indeed, the courts have only recently upheld this distinction in the case of R v Iain Cockburn and Secretary of State for Health, where the judge ruled that there was an “objective and reasonable justification” for this because there had been, as the Government argued, a progressive realisation of gender equality and the initial rules had been set up to recognise the weaker economic position of widows.

Without the provision within this Bill, female spouses of same-sex marriages would, we presume, simply be treated as widows for the purposes of survivor benefits and male survivors as widowers. But nothing in my noble friend’s Amendment 84 would affect the historic male/female distinction that the courts have so recently upheld. To argue against this on the basis of retrospectivity is also flawed as the Government violated this principle themselves when levelling civil partners back to the entitlements of widowers, as they quite rightly did for public service pensions and contracted-out schemes.

In some sense, it could be said that by creating a different entitlement for widows and widowers of same-sex marriages from those of opposite-sex couples the Government are actually weakening their case against future challenges to widow/widower distinction. However, despite agreeing with my noble friend that the Government’s argument here is extremely tenuous, we want to offer the Government an opportunity to remove this inequality in the most appropriate way, as noble Lords on the Benches opposite have also said, and that is why I have added my name to the manuscript amendment today.

By voting for Amendment 84A, noble Lords will be saying, “We are not happy about the provisions within the Bill as it stands so we are leaving them there in parenthesis, as it were, for now until the Government have come forward with firm proposals for how to deal with this clear inequality”. It is quite clear to us that, one way or another, the Government will have to sort this out. It is better to do this through a process that they can own rather than be forced by the courts to do it later, as undoubtedly they would have to do.

I urge the Minister to accept Amendment 84A. I realise that the Government may well have to come back with tweaks at Third Reading but we want to right this inequality and this is a very fine way forward. It gives the Government some space to reflect, to look, to review and then come back, using the order-making power, to get rid of this inequality. I trust that the Minister will be able to accept this amendment.

Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Monday 25th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, if I might intervene, there are several noble Lords in the Chamber who from a sedentary position keep saying that this is ridiculous. The only ridiculous part of the debate this evening is the fact that we are debating such a serious issue at 12.20 am, and we should be allowed to hear my noble friend in peace.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I thank my noble friend, particularly as I am quoting from a lone mother who is very upset. She says:

“The sanction is over a missed Thursday 9am appointment. My next appointment is 3pm on a Monday. My advisor is well aware that my son is at school for 8.50 am, it takes 25 minutes to get to WP, I collect my son at 3.15 pm yet I’m expected to attend at 3pm for 30 mins. So I’ll be taking him out of school at 2.30pm. I want to help him do well at school, attendance is a high priority of mine”.

Here we have the threat of sanctions demoralising a lone mother who is trying to do the right thing by her son. How making her feel useless and overwhelmed is going to help her in her jobseeking is a mystery to me.

As I have said, I have not been able to do full justice to the briefing that SPAN sent me. I therefore suggest that it be invited to submit evidence to the review established under Clause 2. Indeed, what provision will be made to enable outside organisations with experience of what is happening on the ground to feed evidence into the review?

Of course, the public sector equality duty is not just about lone parents. An international review of the evidence about the operation of sanctions within conditional benefit systems, conducted for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation a couple of years or so ago, warned that evidence suggests that the administration of sanctions is not rational and equitable. The studies conducted in the US have identified racial bias in the imposition of sanctions.

At Second Reading the Minister emphasised that,

“we are trying to design a much more flexible welfare system in which we individualise responses”.—[Official Report, 21/3/13; col. 753.]

It is difficult to quarrel with flexibility and individualisation, but the downside is that they leave greater scope for discrimination, in the negative sense of the term, and they can undermine rights. It is therefore all the more important that the sanctions review allows us to judge whether the administration of sanctions is indeed rational, equitable and consistent with the public sector equality duty.

The Government’s willingness to discuss the terms of reference of the sanctions review with the Opposition is, of course, welcome. I hope therefore that the Minister will accept Amendments 4 and 5, in the interests of ensuring that the review is as thorough and informative as it needs to be, and that the Government will express a willingness to take evidence from organisations on the ground.