Young People in Care

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Jim Shannon

Tuesday 27th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

First, I thank the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) for introducing the debate and the report. I also thank all those involved in producing it, because it contains many good and helpful points. It has been a pleasure to listen to all the Members who have spoken so far. They have all spoken with passion, interest and a real, earnest endeavour on behalf of young people, and it is good to hear the House united in that.

Ensuring that our young people, particularly those who are vulnerable, have somewhere to call home—somewhere that is important to them—is vital. I have no doubt in my mind that every child is entitled to a hot meal, a warm home and, most importantly, a loving home—that seems natural and fair. In fact, to me it is a basic human right. As the report states, not every child has that, and we need to work extra hard to give those children who, for whatever reason, do not have a permanent home with their parents a home they can call their own. That is why I am pleased to make a contribution here. A number of charities actively help to do just that, including Action for Children, Citizens Advice and Bridging the Gap, to name just a few.

Young people leaving care are among the most vulnerable groups in society, so it is little wonder that there needs to be adequate provision in place, not just for when young people are in care, but to help them when they leave. Each Member who has spoken, particularly the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), has made that point clearly.

Some of the statistics about young people in care are truly worrying. They are three times more likely to be cautioned or convicted of an offence; they are four times more likely to have a mental health disorder; they are five times less likely to achieve five good GCSEs; they are eight times more likely to be excluded from school and less likely to go to university; and finally, one in five homeless people are care leavers. Those horrifying statistics make us think about those in society whom we have a responsibility to assist.

The fact that one in five care leavers end up living on the streets is undoubtedly a direct result of academic underachievement, criminal records and/or mental health conditions, all of which stem from a disrupted upbringing. That is why we need to do more to create stable home environments as quickly as possible after problems arise. Our main aim is to ensure that young people have a roof over their head. We do not want them to be continually moving around as if they were playing a game of musical chairs or as if they were just a piece of the furniture. We must promote stability, although I do understand that that is not always possible. We must also do our absolute best to work with the charities and other organisations to get young people into care and long-term homes. When the Minister responds to this debate, perhaps he could tell me what discussions he has had with the charities that work at the coalface, as they understand the issues involved.

The options available to young people in care include fostering, adoption, family short breaks and residential care, all of which ensure that young people have some form of accommodation. The greatest issue facing young people is not necessarily while they are in care, but after they leave care. That concern has been expressed in every contribution so far.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way and to the Education Committee for producing this important report. It is more than a decade since I worked with Hammersmith and Fulham council to phase out the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for vulnerable 16 and 17-year-olds, including care leavers. Given our special and unique responsibility to these young people who rely on the state to keep them safe, and the fact that councils such as Hammersmith and Fulham showed over a decade ago that it could be done, surely the time has come to outlaw the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for these young people. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that such accommodation is entirely unsuitable?

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Lady for her contribution. Earlier, I said that I was surprised that she was not here at the start of the debate, because I know that she has a real, deep interest in this subject. I am pleased to see her here now, and I agree wholeheartedly with what she said, and I am sure that that applies to everyone else in the Chamber. It is always good to exchange ideas.

In Northern Ireland, a public consultation was held in 2012 to decipher the best way forward for young adults living in supported accommodation. Ten key principles were developed and they are now used by charities and organisations in Northern Ireland for those in care and those leaving care. They are dignity and respect, independence, rights, equality and diversity, choice, fulfilment, safeguarding, privacy, confidentiality and partnership. A variety of options are available for those who leave care, and they include supported lodgings and private rented or social housing.

Young people may wish to remain with foster families or return to their birth parents, but the options available to those over 18 who want to move on can be limited. Has the Minister had any discussion with John O’Dowd, the Minister for Education in the Northern Ireland Assembly, about the report we compiled in Northern Ireland? The figures for young people in care working and having adequate academic achievements need to be better. Supported lodgings are an option for young people but, depending on where they live, they may not be available to them. The option that is used the most in Northern Ireland is social housing, but that young person can fall between two stools. No one seems to grasp the problem, and it becomes very frustrating.

Although charities such as Action for Children do fantastic work and try to give young people in care and those who leave care the best opportunities and homes available, we need to do more. We must do all we can to reduce the number of people living on the streets, and to help young people in care to reach their academic potential. That means that they would be in a better position to get jobs and set up homes in the future. We should consider setting up some sort of support system in schools and further education colleges aimed specifically at helping young people in care to get the skills and qualifications that they need for the future.

I strongly believe that family is the cornerstone of society. I am not necessarily talking about birth family. Family means providing care, support and love. It comes in many forms and it is up to us to ensure that young people in care, our most vulnerable young people, get the support and stability they need at home, which will give them the best possible chance to reach their academic potential.

Finally, I say well done to the Education Committee for producing this report, which highlights all the issues. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

Transparency and Public Trust in Business

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Jim Shannon

Tuesday 8th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

Six years after the peak of the global financial crisis there should surely no longer be disagreement among any of us that businesses are bound by the same ethical and social responsibilities that bind us all. As the financial crash showed, business transparency is absolutely essential to society. The lack of it in the financial sector in recent years continues to have huge repercussions for people in my town of Wigan, in the UK, and across the world.

We saw in the recent horsemeat scandal that lack of transparency can have major implications for consumers in the UK, but it can have even greater implications for the lives of people across the world, as in the horrific loss of life in Bangladesh with the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex. As business has become increasingly complex, it is very hard for consumers to know, first, whether they can trust the product they are buying, and secondly, whether the business they are supporting is operating ethically. Little wonder, then, that there is increasing public appetite for action. I was surprised to hear recently that the Edelman Trust Barometer found that the public want greater regulation of business by a margin of 4:1.

But it is not just the public who want action; companies and business leaders are also behind the call for higher business standards. The Minister will be aware of the B Team, an alliance of thinkers and business leaders, including Richard Branson and Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, who are calling for a plan B that, in their words, puts

“people and planet alongside profit”.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, they called for companies to implement the highest standards in their core operations and across their supply chains, including greater transparency as a matter of course and as good business practice.

There is good reason for this. Business needs to command the support of the public, of investors and of shareholders in order to survive and to grow. However, public trust is low. Last year, an Ipsos MORI poll found that only 34% of the people questioned trusted business leaders to tell the truth. We need to see this in context; I would hate to think what they had to say about politicians. Research by Goldman Sachs and KPMG has shown that companies that have implemented responsible business practices such as transparency throughout their operations often lead on stock market performance and attract a wider and more loyal investor base from investors who are increasingly looking at these issues and want to invest in companies that have a long-term, not a short-term, outlook.

There are many examples of business leading the way in this field. As chairperson of the all-party parliamentary group on corporate responsibility, I have been pleased to meet and work with many such business leaders over the past four years. However, the Government need to play their part too, because, as many of these business leaders have told me, operating transparently is not always easy. They do so in the glare of public attention, they sometimes get it wrong, and it is incredibly complicated. Companies are often involved in extremely complex supply chains. That was brought home to me and to the wider public after the Rana Plaza disaster, where some of the multinational companies involved did not even realise at first that they had been contracting from suppliers who were based in the complex. It was only after campaigners and the media got involved that they realised they had been doing so.

Some companies are making efforts to operate to the highest ethical standards in terms of human rights and the environment—and to be open about it—but their problem is that they are in competition with businesses that do not do that. Many such businesses are based in the UK and listed on the London stock exchange, but they face no penalties whatsoever for breaching the standards the Government say they want them to meet. Like so many others, I believe it is time that the playing field was tilted in favour of those that are operating to high ethical standards, not against them.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I asked the hon. Lady beforehand for permission to intervene on her. Does she agree that greater transparency of who owns and controls companies is necessary and that, in addition to addressing the issues she has mentioned, any new measures must address tax evasion, money laundering and the financing of terror?

[Lisa Nandy]

That is absolutely right. This goes to the heart of public trust in business, which is about transparency and a commitment to tackling such issues.

The business and human rights action plan was published jointly last September by the Foreign Office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The UK was one of the first countries to breathe life into the United Nations’ guiding principles on business and human rights. I am proud of that and congratulate Ministers for taking a lead on it. “Good Business” sets out the standards it expects companies to uphold, but so far it does nothing to demand those standards of them. We have had a decade of voluntary corporate social responsibility. Given the experience of the past year and previously—when John Ruggie set out the guiding principles, which were unanimously endorsed by the UN—it is time for the Government to take a more proactive approach.

First, I have been deeply concerned by reports from non-governmental organisations and others that companies have been given conflicting messages by different parts of Government. Although the Foreign Office has consistently warned about the dangers for UK-based companies in knowingly or unknowingly breaching human rights overseas, it appears from anecdotal evidence that BIS has been acting in direct conflict with the commitments made in the action plan.

I want to draw the Minister’s attention to one concrete example where there is evidence of that happening. The Kiobel case was brought by a group of Nigerian activists who claimed that Shell had helped the Nigerian military to systematically torture and kill environmentalists in the 1990s. The cases against Shell were filed under the US alien tort statute, which applies extraterritorially, so it enables non-US plaintiffs to bring claims against foreign companies in the US courts for acts that occur in a third country. Shell challenged that use of the alien tort statute and the UK Government intervened to support the company’s position. The court then ruled in Shell’s favour, which limits the ability of communities in developing countries to challenge corporate malpractice in the US courts in future. The Government’s intervention ran contrary to the commitment made by the Prime Minister to implement the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, which were unanimously endorsed by Governments in 2011.

Will the Minister give an assurance that her Department is completely committed to upholding the principles in the action plan, without qualification, and that it will commit to the same openness in its dealings with business as the Government say they want to see from business itself? In particular, will she ensure that businesses receiving export credit support or development partnership funding have to show that they are meeting the standards of the UN guiding principles?

Secondly, the entire action plan is predicated on the principle of transparency—none of it can be monitored or enforced without it. Nowhere is that more true than in one of the central pillars of John Ruggie’s principles, namely the access to remedy. Without transparency, people whose lives and communities have been destroyed have no effective way of getting justice. As we saw with the South African miners who took a case against Cape plc, companies will often seek to cover the impact of their actions, creating enormous difficulties for communities and their lawyers in gaining the evidence they need to put before the courts.

I must tell the Minister that without transparency requirements, there is no way to prevent such injustices. I recently met representatives of the Afro-Colombian Community Council of Opoca in Colombia. After an 11-year struggle to acquire a collective land title, it was finally granted the right to 73,000 hectares of collective land titles in September 2011, which affected about 17,500 people. They had an 11-year struggle only to discover that a mining concession, covering approximately 55,000 hectares of their ancestral territory, had been granted to AngloGold Ashanti, which is a company registered on the British stock exchange. A proactive duty on companies to disclose information would prevent such harm, while a greater commitment to transparency and—crucially—penalties for those who do not comply is the only way to enable people to access justice.

Finally, I want to tell the Minister:

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”

That principle in Magna Carta has formed the basis of law, liberty and rights in this country for centuries. In this area at least, we are falling well short. Will the Minister commit to improving transparency and access to justice for communities harmed by the actions of British businesses abroad? At present, I and many other hon. Members in the Chamber are approached by so many people who have such a different story to tell. This is an issue of morality, good business and consumer confidence, but above all of national reputation. We should promote not the worst but the best of British business to the world. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Public Transport (Disabled Access)

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Jim Shannon

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Nandy]

I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. The example he gives highlights exactly the indignity and humiliation that far too many people must face when they try to do something that the rest of us take for granted. I am grateful to him for raising that point.

On the buses, people seem to fare little better. Half of all disabled people say that buses are a concern for them. Even something as simple as boarding the bus presents a problem. Many buses still do not have ramps and, even when they do, a common story emerges from all the reports that I have been sent from across the country of drivers refusing to stop because it would take too long to allow somebody to board, or because the space allocated for a wheelchair is taken up by a pushchair. I want to be absolutely clear on this point: I am not advocating that there should not be space for pushchairs; it is simply unacceptable that there is not room for everybody.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. This is an issue that concerns the whole of the United Kingdom, although this debate obviously relates to the UK mainland. In my previous job as a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, I sat on a Committee that was responsible for bringing forward legislative change that enabled public transport, both bus and rail, to ensure access for disabled people in wheelchairs in particular, but for visually disabled people, too. That is starting to roll off the Assembly line, to use a pun, in Northern Ireland. Does the hon. Lady feel that the Government might take that as an example of how legislation could be introduced and delivered, in conjunction with local councils and other responsible bodies, to ensure disabled access for those who are wheelchair bound or visually disabled, not just to public transport—bus and rail—but to taxis as well?

[Jim Shannon]

I appreciate that.

[Lisa Nandy]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because he gives me the opportunity to pay tribute to some of the public transport companies that have worked hard to make real strides forward on this issue. All those examples show that it can be done if there is a will for it to be done. It is up to all of us here in the Chamber to ensure that we push as hard as we can to make this happen.

Seat belts on buses are not routinely provided for wheelchair users. I have been sent some absolutely appalling stories of the indignity that people suffer when the bus drives off too fast and their wheelchair is not properly secured. Blind people have told me of their particular difficulties in identifying which bus is arriving, and knowing when to get off. Those issues could be rectified by introducing talking buses, by introducing seat belts, by introducing more space for buggies and wheelchairs, and training for drivers.