Criminal Justice System

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I, too, thank to the noble Lord for calling this timely and important debate today. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, regrets withdrawing from the debate. She is attending a funeral today.

I shall follow the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, and talk about how to keep young people looked after by local authorities out of the criminal justice system—how to avoid unnecessarily criminalising young people in local authority care. I highlight one critical point. We need to ensure that all children's homes have good-quality consultancy from an appropriate mental health professional. That is one thing that the Government could address and it would make an important difference to the number of young people from care entering prison. I hope soon to discuss that point with the Minister’s colleague, Mr Tim Loughton, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education. I declare my interests, which are in the register.

Twenty-four per cent of adults in the criminal justice system and 40 per cent of children in custody have experience of local authority care. We need to do more to avoid young people entering custody from care. However, the vast majority of young people entering care do not go into custody, and many are very successful. Only 0.3 per cent of young people entering care have any experience of offending. The vast majority— 60 per cent—have experienced neglect or abuse, and a further 10 per cent have experienced family dysfunction, so the vast majority are there for their own protection. So is the fault that of the care system? Research on similar cohorts of children taken into care and not taken into care indicates that those taken into care will have better outcomes than those who have had no intervention, which suggests that it is not.

The previous Government made a significant investment in the care system. A number of initiatives, such as Quality Protects, were very welcome, and over the past 10 years there has been a 900 per cent increase in the number of children leaving care and going to university—a ninefold increase. The previous Government can be very proud of achieving that. There have been good investments, and the system is improving, but we are starting from a very low base.

In particular, there has to be concern about children’s homes. From memory, there are, very approximately, 6,000 children in children’s homes, which is about 10 per cent of the looked-after population. According to the 2004 report by the Office for National Statistics, 68 per cent of these children have a recognised mental disorder and in the region of 40 per cent of them have a conduct disorder that may involve a compulsion to thieve or other actions. They have a very high level of need. I say this not to stigmatise them, but to stress that it needs to be identified. These homes have improved. There are now minimum standards where there were none before. The training of staff has improved. The previous Administration introduced the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Childcare, which is a good step forward. However, we still have the “inverse care” law: our most vulnerable children are often being cared for by our poorest paid, most poorly supported staff. Many wonderful and committed carers are working in difficult circumstances. In recent years, the market in children’s homes has changed. Now it is dominated by private providers. While in the past there was a good yield on capital investment in children’s homes, that has dropped, so the larger providers have largely departed from the scene, which has left many owners who have worked in the residential care system and are committed to the welfare of their children finding that in a climate of recession with a lack of resources they are struggling to meet the needs of these children.

What needs to be done? Two things are essential. First, the specialist mental health services for children looked after by local authorities that have developed in some areas over the past 10 years need to be preserved. They are expensive to run, but the investment there saves money many times on later costs, and they need to be expanded. Secondly, the recommendation by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in his report on children’s homes in the mid-1990s, Choosing with Care, needs to be implemented. He looked to the continent for the model to follow and found that children’s homes there consistently have an ongoing relationship with a mental health professional—a psychiatrist, a child psychotherapist or a clinical psychologist—who meets regularly with the manger and the staff to help them reflect on their work with their children. The noble Lord strongly recommended this, and I know that he regrets that it has not been fully implemented. I hope to speak to the Minister’s colleague, Mr Loughton, about these matters. Perhaps the Minister will acknowledge in this debate that we need to stop criminalising young people in care or coming out of care.

I warmly welcome the principle behind the review of short sentences and acknowledge the huge cost that they entail and the disruption to the lives of those being taken into custody, particularly women. However, I have some concerns, particularly about the credibility of any attempt to make a change and the light the Government and those who support the thrust of such a policy will be seen in. Iain Duncan Smith, the Centre for Social Justice, the Good Childhood inquiry which was instituted by the Anglican Church, and UNICEF’s report into child welfare put the UK lowest in the league in the developed world in terms of child welfare.

Many of our children are living in poverty, not only financial poverty but emotional and educational poverty. Experts such as DW Winnicott and Anna Freud pointed out that where there is insufficient caring in the home and an insufficient educational system, behaviours in adolescents and young people outside in society can be very disruptive. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, and her colleagues made very clear in previous debates on anti-social behaviour orders that young people’s behaviour can blight some communities, such as Durham or Nottinghamshire, where many families have generational issues of unemployment.

My concern is that we do not get this right and do not ensure sufficient investment. My noble friend Lord Low of Dalston referred to Germany and France. One important difference between them and us is that they have the professionals and the social workers. Social work is a high-status profession in France. They have what they would call éducateurs socials in France or pädagogen in Germany, who are specialist professionals who work with children and young people. We do not, I think, have that infrastructure. Any move has to be very well considered and gradual, and there needs to be investment in professionals to make it work, otherwise the approach may make the Government and those who wish for change lose credibility and there may be a backlash in which there will be a push for even more imprisonment. I hope that the Minister will answer that concern in his reply, which I look forward to.