Child Development

Lord Eames Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Eames]

My Lords, a disadvantage of coming at the end of a long list of speakers is that you can run behind the scene saying, “Everything that is worth saying has been said”. Today that is true. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester and I do not envy the Minister in having to respond to this debate because we have covered so many things at great speed. I know that the Minister has taken this occasion very seriously and, therefore, we look forward to her response.

Among the reports that have been mentioned today, one has received scant mention. That is a report of Reg Bailey, which had the wonderful title, Letting Children be Children. As I have listened to the debate, I have become convinced that that title says so much about what we have been saying to each other. The tragedy of so much of what we have discussed today is that children cannot be children; society does not allow them to be children. Society puts pressures and demands on them, and a lack of opportunity prevents them experiencing the idealistic childhood that so many of us have enjoyed.

When the coalition announced that the bedrock of society would be the stable family, we all rejoiced. Those of us who, in our careers, have been involved with families and with society’s problems down the years welcome that. Unfortunately, for many of us the conditions under which the coalition has had to address the economic ills of our society has meant that some of the glint has disappeared. It has been eroded for one simple reason: so often we have wonderful ways of expressing the vision of what needs to be done by the Government, by Parliament and by those with a responsibility to address a situation such as our present economic one, but we lose sight of the fact that we are not talking about principles or society in general but about individuals.

Many of the measures that we now know will be implemented to try to meet our economic situation will have a knock-on effect on those who are least prepared to face them. Among that category are those about whom we are talking rather scantily in this debate. Not everyone in our society has enjoyed a stable home; not everyone in our society has enjoyed the strength of caring parents. I think of my own experience when, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, my clergy brought to me, time and time again, their worries about what was happening to the young people in that society. I am certain of one conviction: in a society such as mine, it will take a generation to understand the depth of the scars that have been forced on young people. I am not highlighting this as characteristic of the United Kingdom—of course I am not—but I am saying that some of the lessons that we have learnt apply to those who have been displaced by society, those who have been denied by society and many of those who have been mentioned in this debate, who have been denied the stability of that family that I picture.

One example that I can give in the time allowed to me today is this: do we honestly understand, not the opportunity, not the burden, not the difficulty, but the privilege of childhood? As a society, have we yet realised that, even if there is a knock-on effect in what we have to do in the economic area, that the most vulnerable in this picture are children? It will be another generation before we can honestly understand the scars that we are allowing to be placed on them. That is why this debate has been essential. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester for introducing it.