Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Bird Excerpts(2 days, 12 hours ago)
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Baroness Benjamin (LD)
My Lords, I support two amendments in this group, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, Amendment 99, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, Amendment 100, both of which I have put my name to.
With more than 80,000 children in care, the highest figure on record, this Bill represents an opportunity to strengthen support for all care leavers. One in three care leavers becomes homeless in the first two years after leaving care. Many become drug users and end up with a criminal record.
Some of the most affected care-experienced children are those from diverse backgrounds, who suffer double discrimination. Research by Barnardo’s found that nearly one in 10 black children in care has received a custodial sentence by the time they turn 18. When many finally leave care, they find themselves in prison or with a criminal record, which makes it difficult to find a home or employment, or develop a secure, happy life and any hope of a prosperous existence. They find themselves being part of a gang, which becomes a family substitute but leads to even more disaster.
As the Minister said in reference to the earlier group of amendments, there is an urgent need to improve understanding across agencies and departments of the needs of children in care and care-experienced young people, as well as providing training on how to better address these needs. For example, the Department for Education could extend corporate parenting principles to all bodies involved with care-experienced young people.
As we have heard, many young people can depend on their parents to support them long after they leave school or university, both financially and with a roof over their head. But support for care leavers across the country is piecemeal—a postcode lottery. Ashley John-Baptiste’s book, Looked After: A Childhood in Care, which I highly recommend, illustrates graphically just how difficult it is for young people to navigate their life after leaving care without support, especially if they want to go to university. It is potluck and almost an impossible task. Therefore, we should be doing more to ensure that care leavers are supported into adulthood, which I why I support Amendment 99 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.
Through Amendment 100, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, seeks to increase protection for care leavers facing homelessness. I welcome this amendment and fully support it. We need to support care leavers and give them the opportunity to forge a happy, secure and hopeful life. It is our duty to do this and I hope that the Minister will agree with me and other Peers, and support these amendments.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, on Amendment 100, from the noble Lord, Lord Young, I will offer a bit of Big Issue news. We did a survey in the early part of this century in which we surveyed 150 to 200 Big Issue vendors. Some 80% of them had been through the care system; most of them had been in care for a period of at least 10 years. I wrote an article about this which upset a lot of people, because I said that, in order to produce a Big Issue vendor, you had to spend over £1 million. To me, that is one of most frightening things: how expensive it is to keep people poor.
It costs £70,000 to keep somebody in foster care, but it costs almost £200,000 to keep somebody in care. We need to look at this problem. In spite of all the moral outrage, we need to look at this as a bit of fiscal bad news. We have to start shifting our resources towards moving children into foster care as much as possible. I am going to talk about this later, but I wanted to give noble Lords the news that Big Issue vendors are very, very expensive.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 98 in this group asks the same question I asked in the two previous groups: can we get local authorities to publicise what they are doing each year, to give them a benchmark to improve on each year?
Lord Bird (CB)
I second the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Young. I am very interested in foster caring, largely because when I was in care as a young child, it was largely because I did not really have a family. I had a mother and a father, and I had brothers who were taken away in one direction. My parents were not very grown up; they had not really got used to the idea of having six children when they could probably afford only one.
I find this amendment so interesting because it backs up my experience as a young boy. When our family finally reconnected in Fulham in south-west London, the place was littered with foster-children. It was very interesting. I got to know people who went to my school, and they were fostered. They were not blood brothers or sisters or related to their family. I found that so interesting because most of those children, dare I say—I do not want to appear as a classist—ended up being quite middle class. They ended up getting the education of a lot of us who passed through care. It was interesting that, in this area of Fulham, there was this great mixture of very working-class children with a bit of a middle-class aspect, yet the children who really excelled were the ones who had the all-round relationships.
I would love to see a strategy that got behind those circa 130,000 people who want to foster. I would like to see a shrinking of the numbers of local authority homes, having been in a Catholic one, which was not an awful lot different from any other kind. The idea of institutionally raising children is not good news. The idea of raising children who were separated from their loved ones—as I was—is bad news. Therefore, I suggest we follow the example from the noble Lord, Lord Young, and create a proper strategy so that we can share out the loving relationships that we need to to our children, who are in desperate need, especially at the time when their own kith and kin cannot provide them with what they really need.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I support Amendments 134, 143 and 178. Fostering is critical to the provision of good care for all children who need it, and it is a really tough job.
In Committee so far, not very much has been said about the very large proportion of looked-after children who have significant special needs—it is more than 90% of all children in children’s homes, and it is over 70% of all looked-after children. Many of those are problems that have arisen as a result of post-birth experience, but there are quite a lot of instances where these are problems that children were born with and will be with them for life. Some children are in foster care precisely because their birth parents have not been able to cope with their significant needs, so we ask a tremendous amount of foster carers.
The measures in the amendment to improve on the current position are very welcome. But the Government could go further in some very practical ways, which is why I support my noble friend’s amendments. Room sharing is not always appropriate, but for some children it will be suitable. Similarly, foster carers need more authority to make more of the decisions and do more of the often everyday things that parents do.
I support the comments made about the need for streamlined recruitment processes and a foster care strategy that really thinks about the support services, training, respite and wider services that help foster carers to do it well, to feel that they have the capacity and that they can sustain the tremendous effort of foster caring through the whole period that any given child needs it. There is an opportunity here.
Lord Bird (CB)
I just wanted to remind us of a little bit of history. Napoleon said that a battle plan strategy was the most useless thing on earth but that you were lost without it.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
That is good, because I was about to say—although I think he called it a battle plan, not a battle strategy—that the Government will set out our plans for foster care in due course, bringing together the range of activities that is already happening and taking on board the need to go further in the way that noble Lords have rightly pushed us to today.
Amendment 105, introduced by my noble friend Lord Watson, is on the introduction of a national foster care register. As he outlined, fostering services currently maintain local registers of foster carers alongside records relating to prospective foster carers. A national foster care register would insert central government into the systems and processes of foster care oversight, which are currently deployed locally. But as he said, and as I think my honourable friend in the other place outlined in Committee there, we are considering the possible benefits and costs of a national register of foster carers as part of our wider reforms.
There are a range of proposals for such a register. It will require some careful consideration. Specifically, I am sure we all recognise the need to ensure that a national foster care register would also meet local needs and avoid unforeseen negative consequences, and that it would overcome some of the risks surrounding the security of sensitive data, as well as imposing additional bureaucracy on the sector. But we want to engage with fostering stakeholders on this issue to determine next steps, and we can see some of the advantages of the national register that my noble friend outlined.
Amendment 134, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is on the sharing of bedrooms for foster children to enable foster carers to look after more children in their home. She identified that one of the pushes for this comes back to one of the fundamental issues that we will discuss on upcoming clauses and which lies very much at the heart of the Government’s reforms: the insufficiency of high-quality places, fostering or otherwise, for the children who need them. I completely understand the belief that changing standards in this way might enable us to increase capacity.
I have already identified that the Government will invest money, for example, in allowing extensions and other ways that foster carers might alter their homes to provide more space and capacity for children. But it is also the case that our national minimum standards already allow foster children aged three or over to share a bedroom, subject to conditions being met, which are in place to safeguard and protect children. That means that fostered children, such as siblings, can share a bedroom where it is in the best interests of the child, provided that each child has their own area of the room.
We can update those national minimum standards at any time. We do not require a change to Section 23 of the Care Standards Act, as suggested in this amendment, to do so. The language in this amendment would change the tone of the national minimum standards. I am not averse to the point that is being made here; we just need to be careful about the balance that we are setting. It would shift the default position to present room sharing both as appropriate and, in fact, standard practice, rather than the current tone, where room sharing should be considered where it is not possible for each child to have their own room.
I think we all agree that children in foster care deserve to be treated as a good parent would treat their own children and to have the opportunity for as full an experience of family life and childhood as possible. I know that there are many good parents who will have children who share bedrooms, especially at a younger age, but I also know that for many children, fostered or otherwise, and for many parents, the gold standard would for them to have their own room. If we add to that the fact that children often enter foster care after experiencing neglect or abuse, including sexual abuse, and may have a greater need for their own personal space and for privacy, we can see the need to be careful about shifting the position to promoting sharing.
We recognise that room sharing in foster care may be suitable, as I have said, particularly for siblings, and we think it is right that flexibilities are already in place, but we are reluctant to suggest that room sharing should be promoted as standard practice. Importantly, we have seen no evidence from children and young people themselves to suggest that they want room sharing to become standard practice in foster care.
State Schools: Creative Education
Lord Bird Excerpts(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)
We will hear from the Conservative Benches.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right. It is important for those of us in the Department for Education to work across government with DCMS colleagues in this area, and I assure him that that is already happening. We are making sure that, as he will know, the £444 million being invested in arts by this Government and the Arts Council is used to the best potential. He will also know that 79% of the national portfolio supported by that money is already delivering activities specifically for children and young people. We need to ensure that schools and children are able to benefit from that.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord makes an important point about the benefits to children’s learning of being able to see the development and design of ideas; I wholeheartedly agree with him. That will be an important part of our thinking on how we support existing initiatives, so that children can benefit, and so that, through the curriculum, those opportunities are not only available but supported, particularly for disadvantaged children, who have too often missed out.
Lord Bird (CB)
Can we also include, while we are at it, young people in the custodial system? I am here only because I did art and creative things when I was in a juvenile detention centre. Unfortunately, a lot of those opportunities have disappeared in our custodial system for young people.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I have no doubt that a broad education, which also enables children and young people to engage in creative activities, is one of the things that protects against some of the circumstances the noble Lord identifies. As I have my noble friend Lord Timpson sitting alongside me on the Front Bench—
Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]
Lord Bird ExcerptsFriday 18th October 2024
(7 months, 3 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL] 2024-26 View all Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Bird (CB)
Democracy, the rule of law, freedom, individual worth and respect for the environment —I can honestly say that I was not born into that world, I did not live in that world, and it took me a long time to get into that world. I would like your Lordships to imagine a boy who is in a prison cell at the age of 14. He is offered dinner. He does not want it. He is given the dinner but, instead of eating it, he puts it on the door so that it falls all over the next person to come in—a police officer or somebody else who has been charged. That person was a person who was outside democracy. That person was a person who was outside the rule of law. That person was all sorts of things.
We are coming at this the wrong way. We are talking about education. Education is a great changer, but we have another problem. The same boy goes to school at the age of five, and his Irish mother says to him, “Get in there and behave yourself”—not “Get in there and learn things”, not “Get in there and become a different person”, not “Get in there and get away from the poverty that you were born into”. He is the same boy as me. I was blessed, as I keep telling everybody, by the restorative justice of a prison system that looked after young people and give them the chance to earn and learn and get educated while they were banged up because they missed it when they were in civilian life.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, makes the point about populism. We all are worried about populism. People stir it up, but populism largely comes from economic indecision and economic fear. It comes through the loss of jobs, the growth of a powerful China where all the jobs were exported from America —creating a situation where people did not know where the next loaf of bread was coming from. Unless this House and that House wake up to the dominance of poverty in everything, we are not going anywhere. Unfortunately, we now have a Government who follow the same lines as the previous scattergun Government, who talked about ending poverty but never did it in a convergent way that could make poverty history.
King’s Speech
Lord Bird Excerpts(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
I welcome the new Government. It is a great relief, I have to say. We all need a change, and we hope the change will lead to the kind of delivery that we need socially in this country.
But I have a problem. My problem is that over the years I have dealt with many Governments who have come in with many promises, and most of them leave not as new brooms but as old brooms. Therefore, I worry and will really engage in trying to guide the new Government into doing things that people do not normally do when there is a crisis.
In 1940 we had a crisis. We did not know whether Great Britain was going to survive, but at that very moment in the beginning and the middle of the crisis, Beveridge was dug out of retirement and laid the foundations for the 1942 report that led to the creation of the welfare state in 1948. While we were in a crisis, we did not just work on the basis of responding to the crisis.
There is a crisis around children. We know that many children are in poverty and are inheriting poverty from their family. There is the crisis of our prisons. On Monday this week the Guardian announced this enormous crisis in prisons, and the new Government did not know it was going to be so bad. I do not blame them, but that crisis in the prisons is largely because 90% of those people in prisons failed at school and 90% of them inherited poverty. So when are we going to address poverty? When will we move away from a situation in which the NHS spends 50% of its money on people suffering from food poverty? When will we stop leaving police officers to sort out poverty, because they largely deal with people who come from poverty? When will we move away from teachers having to cope with poverty? All we are doing is weighing down government departments that have no skills or ability to tackle poverty.
I do not think anybody in government really knows. It is not just this Government; it is the previous Government and the Government before. They do not know because they do not converge their energies around poverty. They do not concatenate and bring together. Eight government departments deal with poverty. That is why the NHS, the DWP and the Prison Service all suffer from the weight of poverty which they are not trained to address. If you go to a doctor and say, “I’m very ill”, the doctor is not going to say, “You’re suffering from poverty, so I’m going to get you out of poverty”. That is not the doctor’s job. I hope that the Government will look carefully at my Private Member’s Bill, which is about a ministry of poverty prevention. Let us bring together all the examples of people who have broken through poverty and the government departments that actually do some interesting work. Let us have an audit of what works. Let us have a government department that will help us dismantle poverty in the same way as in 1940 we said, “We are in the middle of a crisis, but we are not going to simply keep dealing with the effects. We are not going to deal with the crisis continuously; we are going to try to turn the tap off”. In my opinion, that is the best thing that this Government could do. It may mean standing back and saying, “We’re not quite sure what to do”, but that is not a bad place to be because then they can start to create the thinking that will bring about change.