Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Debate between Baroness Wyld and Baroness Pinnock

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate, with many issues raised, questions asked and challenges given. I am sure that the Minister will be able to respond with her usual careful consideration.

This important report starts by reminding us that over 1 million children are growing up with reduced life chances. This stark reality has negative implications for us all, not just those children and their families. For the children concerned, it may lead to lower educational attainment, with a knock-on impact on their life chances in employment, for example. When policymakers focus on skill levels that are not meeting our current needs, as they often do, they should be required to consider the evidence in this ground-breaking report. It demonstrates that too many of our nation’s children are raised in family circumstances that restrict their development. The sad fact is that intervention by the state is too little and far too late for many of these children. Worse still, the evidence gathered by the report points to the colossal waste of public funding in the failure to intervene early in these children’s lives.

I record my thanks to the chair of the committee, on which I was lucky enough to serve, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, for her leadership and her persistence in following the evidence and then finally gathering us all together to agree—which was not always easy—in the production of this report, which I sincerely believe is invaluable.

I will focus my contribution this evening on funding issues. This is where I will disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, because I think funding, and the lack of it, is at the heart of this report. Lots of other issues are very important and have been raised, including data sharing.

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

I do not think I said that funding was not important. I said that some witnesses had pointed to problems that I thought were not necessarily directly related to funding; they were about communication issues and join-up. Indeed, at times I have called for extra funding for early years myself.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness for putting that on the record and I withdraw any criticism that I have wrongly made.

The numbers of children likely to benefit from external support from local services are staggeringly high. We heard that 1.6 million children—that is an awful lot of children—were helped by local authority children’s services in the six years between 2012 and 2018. In addition, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner estimated that as many as 750,000 were known to social services but “received no support”. Further, as we have heard in other contributions this evening, an additional 800,000 children were deemed “completely ‘invisible’ to services”, although likely to “need help” because of the circumstances in which they were living.

The committee was mindful of the wise words of Martin Lennon of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, who said:

“Not all vulnerable children are poor, and not all poor children are vulnerable.”


However, he then went on to make clear that there was a definite “correlation between poverty” and children being, and becoming, “vulnerable”. Since the report was completed, families are now having to contend with the cost of living crisis. Those families who are just managing now will have very considerable additional costs for basic essentials. All commentators expect that there will be even more children living in poverty with the consequences enumerated by this report. The challenge for the Government is to determine the most effective and cost-efficient ways of supporting vulnerable children for their, and our, benefit.

The committee heard from many witnesses that the key to cost-effective support is to provide help “as early as possible” in a child’s life. Obviously, that means that funding for early intervention is critical. However, early intervention funding is not statutory. Admitting children into the care of the local authority is a statutory reaction in response to a family in crisis. This is done at very considerable cost to the public purse: for example, foster care rates are between £140 and £200 a week, depending on the age of the child. This is for local authority foster care; it is considerably higher for agency foster care.

As the report concludes: early intervention is a key to enabling better lives for vulnerable children. Unfortunately, local authorities saw a £1.7 billion yearly reduction in early intervention programmes since 2010. Those communities in highest need experienced the largest cuts to these services: councils with the highest levels of deprivation saw reductions of over 50% in real-terms spending—therefore, a per-child average of £141 where poverty is highest. From 2010 to 2019, those with the lowest levels of poverty had budget cuts of only £182 million per annum.

Early intervention is based on supporting a family in their own home; later interventions—such as foster or residential care, as I explained—are much more expensive. Yet the report found that, while there was a 48% reduction in early intervention services, there was a 34% increase to “higher-intensity” late interventions, which, as the evidence from Barnardo’s showed, despite being vastly more expensive, had worse outcomes for children.

One statistic clearly shows this failure of public policy. The number of children looked after in England has risen from 65,520 in 2011 to over 80,000 now. Andrea Leadsom’s review of child health inequalities quoted research by the LSE which showed that £16 billion of public money was spent in a single year on children and young people who have serious problems, all of which could be traced back to their early experiences. Her review said that

“you can certainly argue that you will save a good portion of that by investing earlier.”

The Government have made some welcome moves towards the provision of early intervention in the creation of family hubs, but much more needs to be done. As the report recommends at paragraph 60:

“To underpin a strategy on child vulnerability and its ambitions for ‘levelling up’, the Government should restore ringfenced funding for early intervention to its 2010 levels.”


I agree.

Other noble Lords have highlighted the other key recommendations in the report such as listening to the voice of the user—what a powerful experience that was. It was a privilege, actually, to hear the voices of the users. How great their contribution could have been to improving the quality of the services they need and to the Government having an effective strategy. It is appalling that there is no strategy. It is apparent that there is no strategy for helping 1 million of our children and, from all the evidence that we have heard, saving lots of money at the same time. Why do we not get it done? Finally, there is the importance of the professionals working with the users and the voluntary sector to the benefit of children. I just hope that this excellent report has the impact on decision-makers that its quality deserves.