Education and Employment Opportunities

Baroness Newlove Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott on bringing this debate to the House. I had some reservations as to how I could support my colleague on the subject of education and employment opportunities in the United Kingdom—so I shall speak wearing several hats today, and I hope that my words will have a place in this debate.

There are many things I could say about the value of work. Much has been written by greater minds than mine about its importance to individuals, to communities and to the economy. But for me personally, it was Barack Obama who summarised what it meant when he said,

“The best way not to feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope”.

Following the murder of my late husband Garry Newlove in 2007, and the ordeal of watching my three young daughters appear as witnesses at a trial, I felt angry, frustrated and traumatised. But I had to think about my three daughters and their future. I had to think of a way of providing for them financially and in terms of health, but I was also determined that they would grow up, as Garry would have wanted them to, as healthy, happy young women whose lives would not be entirely defined by their loss of their father on that night. So I took hold of my anger, frustration and outrage and put it to work.

In October 2010 I was proud and honoured to become the government champion for safer communities, and more so in December 2012, when I became the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales. Although I would not go so far as to say that work saved my life, I know that Mr Obama was right when he said that the best way not to feel hopeless is to get up and do something. That is the rule I live by, and the rule that I have instilled in my three daughters.

Employment needs to be accessible to everyone, and we should develop policies to bring this about. Everyone should have the ability to reach their potential and to find work that is meaningful, secure and satisfying. Some people may need help to achieve this. In his recent conference speech, the Secretary of State for Justice spoke about the importance of work for prisoners. I agree with this. It is not good for prisoners to sit idly in their cells. Learning the skills and discipline of working life is important, because, we hope, it will help them go out and live a law-abiding life.

However, what is harder to accept is that victims of crime do not seem to be given the same help and support. Once the offender has been sentenced, victims of crime often feel left with nowhere to go and very lonely lives, which they have to pull themselves up from.

Believe you me, the impact of a crime can last for many years; indeed, it never leaves you for the rest of your life. We are all different, and crime affects us all in different ways. It can impact on a young person’s ability to attend school. It can affect their concentration or ability to retain information. More than anything, it crushes their self-confidence and destroys their belief that they are capable of doing or achieving anything. I am standing here because I have seen my three young daughters struggle to retain the very abilities they were brought up with—their self-confidence and their belief in life gone. Lack of access to appropriate psychological support meant that my daughters never felt part of society—yet society had let them down.

My eldest daughter had been an A* student. She had a place at university, but felt unable to carry through her academic achievements and do what she had walked into that university with her father to do. Her confidence had been destroyed. My youngest daughter really struggled, at 12, to get up to go to school, and was living in a bubble, thinking that no one ever really cared about her, or could understand her mood swings. My middle daughter’s GCSEs had gone for ever: she could not get over what had happened to her—because nobody sat and spoke to her to ask how she felt, or about the trauma she was going through. More importantly, they were all grieving for their father at that early age.

What saddens me is that I meet many victims of crime throughout the country, all saying the same thing. We are all too familiar with the numbers of children who have suffered lengthy and systematic abuse. We are more aware than ever of how domestic abuse physically and mentally destroys the victim, and we know about the lasting damage that it causes children who witness such acts.

More recently, we have learned about the horror of those forced into years of sexual and physical slavery after being trafficked into this country. Many of these people will need a wide range of psychological and practical help. Without it, they are unlikely to recover sufficiently to take up and enjoy the benefits of regular employment or education. It is therefore essential that all departments work together to provide whatever a victim needs to help them recover. In some cases, victims of domestic abuse and sexual abuse will have turned to drink and drugs. Many victims can find themselves without a stable place to live, and many will not have acquired or retained the skills that enable them to compete in the job market. When the Government develop their many training, apprenticeship and employment schemes, they need to consider that these opportunities can be accessed by some victims of crime only if they have first received help in other areas of their life.

At the risk of saying the obvious, most people can hold down a job only if they have somewhere safe to live, are free from debilitating addictions and have a healthy body and mind. So I encourage the Government to ensure that their plans for promoting employment consider how their programmes can be accessed by all potential applicants. This means thinking not just about what employment plans should be produced by the Department for Work and Pensions, but about how the Home Office, health, education and justice departments can come together to ensure that barriers to education and employment are reduced or removed. Of course, that will not be easy. Bringing agencies together to make education or employment a realistic prospect for those who have been damaged and traumatised will be hard work, but the best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

I stand here wearing many hats, but I speak as somebody who has lost a husband and who is now the only supporting parent of three beautiful young women. When victims are handed reports by the criminal justice system saying that offenders are now getting education programmes and employment and skills programmes because they were damaged in their early lives, please think about—the time has come for the Government to think about—what it really feels like for victims whose lives have been damaged and traumatised not by their own hand, but by somebody else. We need better support for victims and to give young people the education and employment support they need for a healthy future.