Armed Forces: Capability

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Robertson for his excellent introduction to this debate. I also take another opportunity to thank him for his particularly distinguished and longstanding service to this country and the international community in the roles he has fulfilled. If we are paying tributes, it is also right to take the opportunity of this debate to put on record, without qualification, our appreciation and gratitude to all our service men and women and their families.

I have never been persuaded that percentages are a good estimate of what is necessary and how things ought to be done. It seems to me that we have to analyse very toughly what the real threats and dangers are in the uncertain future ahead, and then ask ourselves what we must do for ourselves in that situation and for the collective effort—the UN, NATO and the rest. That analysis is the starting point. What are the real threats, dangers and issues we face and what is necessary to meet them? We then have to face up to the issue of cost. Of course, a stable, secure and inclusive society in Britain is very much part of our longstanding defence.

I suppose I have to declare an interest in that, way back in the 1970s, I was Minister for the Navy, and I take a particular interest in it. I am totally persuaded that in the uncertain future ahead, the ability to deploy widely across the world with independent operating platforms is essential. Such platforms need the equipment and personnel to operate from them. What is perhaps a challenge is that the immense costs of our two carriers as currently planned could end up as a trap, because we could become so inflexible that we are not able to respond quickly and adequately to the real issues that confront us. Hence, the saga with the Type 45 destroyers is absolutely deplorable, because of course they are essential to the defence effort.

I will just say this as well. We have been talking about the essential availability of personnel and equipment, and it is irresponsible and wicked to send our service men and women into action unless we are confident about the ability to provide the necessary quantity of personnel and equipment. We also have a special duty of care and responsibility to look to the young people we recruit. We know that a disproportionate number of the young people going into the armed services are going into the infantry and that the attrition level in the infantry is higher than in any other part of the services. We must take that point very seriously indeed. We have spent hours in this House debating the care of children and our responsibility to them, and these people are very often little more than children. We have a duty of care and a responsibility to them, just as great as to anyone in society as a whole.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased that what has come to the fore in this debate has been the concern of this House for the qualitative impact on our universities. I look at the world as someone who has done international work all my life, and what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said, was very important. He underlined that the day that Brexit comes into effect, we become more dependent on our relationships with the world than we have ever been. It is not just a matter of what markets we will get; in every dimension of our security and well-being, we are inescapably linked to the world community.

I do not understand how a university can be a relevant centre of learning and higher education in the modern world unless it represents, in its character and being, the world of which it is a part. It is essential in virtually every discipline. On Monday, we emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary studies. It becomes even more important within those studies to include the reality of what the world is. I just hope that any reporting that may be introduced will take those wider dimensions into account, not just the quantitative dimension.

As a young MP way back in the 1960s, in the first debate in which I cut my teeth, I was up against the Secretary of State, the almost irreplaceable Anthony Crosland. It was about overseas student fees increasing. I remember thinking then what a pity it was that the vice-chancellors put so much emphasis on the impact of fees on their income. Of course that is crucial, but I wondered why they were not making the important point that the quality of their education itself was desperately dependent on that international reality.

I thank those noble Lords who have made this debate possible. I am glad to hear from those who know him better than I do that the Minister is on our side. I sincerely hope that he is, because we shall damage the quality of our education—academic freedom and the autonomy of universities—which we took so seriously for many hours of debate on Monday. Why? Because we wanted to preserve that quality. How can we have that unless it is international in character?

I add just one point, which is anecdotal, so far as I can make out—it is not established in statistics—but I think it needs to be taken to heart. Already there are indications of overseas academics being offered an enhanced future in their profession but unwilling to take it because they are not sure that Britain is a place in which they want to live and work. That is a tragedy of the first order. There is already anecdotal evidence that sensitive, imaginative students at undergraduate level across the world are saying, “Hang on a moment. Is this hostile Britain really the place we want to go to pursue our learning and higher education?”. There is a fundamental issue at stake here, and we need to get it right very fast indeed.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, at the risk of lowering the tone after my noble friend Lord Judd’s speech, I say that I support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Not only are we cutting ourselves off from the intellectual, social and international contribution from the students we are refusing or discouraging, we are behaving with staggering ungraciousness to those students who have already made an enormous financial contribution to the welfare of our universities. It would serve us right if they stopped doing so. Anyone who, like me, has been instrumental in raising money for universities knows how we can depend on the generosity of foreign students educated here to support our universities. I cannot bear it that we are treating them with such ungraciousness.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I join those who like Amendment 65, as my noble friend Lord Willetts predicted I would. I join him in saying that I do not share the fears expressed in Amendment 2. To take the example of BPP, which is the company that trained me as an accountant, it has been going a long time. It is the first among equals of a group of companies that have grown up providing professional training services to some very demanding customers. It has therefore developed an ethos of providing very good courses. It also sponsors women’s football, which I am grateful for. It has a broad and very encouraging ethos, which thoroughly justifies its status.

We have to be very careful about the quality of what is provided to students. Noble Lords will no doubt remember Ian Livingstone’s Next Gen report on training for the computer games industry. It found that 85% of courses provided by British universities were not up to scratch. We need to do a lot in the Bill and otherwise to provide students with better information about the quality of their courses, but the people who can demonstrate the best track record in this, who have the best sets of information and who have the most demanding customers are these commercial training companies and those who have come up by that route. We should not be frightened in any way by the fact that they are for profit. Despite that, they have proved that they can provide excellent education.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems absolutely logical that if we believe that the considerations in the amendments before us are vital to the carat gold, the quality and the value of our higher education system, let alone its international standing and reputation, someone somewhere has to have specific responsibility for ensuring that everything done is to protect that role. We have seen in recent weeks a very interesting comparison. Our system of judges came under disgraceful and unprecedented attack in the media. Largely everybody in this House felt that it is a duty of Ministers to protect that system to the hilt. It is therefore absolutely self-evident that, to guarantee that what we want to happen will be protected, the responsibility of the Minister must be spelled out in the Bill.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interest as master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. I support the amendment. We get the opportunity to legislate on higher education once every couple of decades. It is therefore really important that we get it right. It seems really sensible to put into the Bill a definition of what we are talking about. That is especially important because one thing the Bill does is give a fast-track procedure for new universities to be created. We ought therefore to be framing as part of that legislation a definition of what a new university should be committed to.

I have to say that I am taken by one or two of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, about the precise wording of parts of the amendment. I think he has fastened on the one point where the amendment is weak; that is, in allying the word “must” with the extensive range of subjects. Actually, it is right to put “must” in the Bill in relation to the commitment of a university to academic freedom. If Oxford University were to abandon the principles of academic freedom, it would rightly be up in front of the court of public opinion or a court of law.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

On this specific point, I have read the amendment carefully and it does not say that a university must provide a range; it says that “universities must”. This is a very important and somewhat subtle point which needs to be taken seriously.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

I take the point from the noble Lord, Lord Judd. However, I think that it would be important for the avoidance of doubt to ensure that there can be no doubt about the ability of a very focused university, concentrating on a particular range of subjects or type of subject, none the less to stand tall and clear as an accepted university. Laying aside the point about “must” and “extensive range”, the whole thrust of this amendment and the principles behind it are absolutely in the right direction. For heaven’s sake, let us put this into the Bill and then set about making one or two adjustments at a subsequent stage of our discussions to get it specifically right. The broad principles enshrined in the amendment are absolutely the right ones that we need to focus on. I make two observations in relation to that.

First, academic freedom and autonomy is not a luxury for a university; it is part and parcel of what a university is. It is rightly said that a university does not teach people what to think but how to think, and that happens through debate, discourse, discussion, research and the contestability of ideas. It arises from a clash of minds and, above all, from no one in a university being told by anyone—government or anyone else—what to think. Secondly, in the ghastly jargon of the age, we are, I fear, living in a post-truth society. Universities, par excellence, are about truth and evidence. They are about making sure that we pay attention to knowledge and reality. I particularly like the phrase in Amendment 1 about,

“the pursuit, dissemination, and application of knowledge”,

because a university absolutely has to do that: pursue knowledge and research, attend to it and discuss it, test it, then disseminate and apply it. It has a duty to its students, to itself as a research community and to wider society. This amendment gets it broadly right. It does not have every single word right, but let us put it in the Bill and then make it even better when we come to further stages of discussion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

Following on from the noble Lord’s comments, if the Minister is minded to reject the amendment and go and think about it, could he think in particular about the many institutions that sometimes appear in different parts of the world under the title of university, which may not be universities that this Bill is designed to promote or protect, nor institutions where we would want many of our young people to seek their education? I have in mind not merely the well-known Hamburger University, which has a rather limited set of subjects on the menu, but also those universities that are in fact annexes or derivatives of respectable universities which set themselves up in other parts of the world and which would be most attracted to setting themselves up in a place where students have access to funding for their tuition. Those places offer a very narrow, minimal and perhaps not very demanding set of subjects.

The Minister told us at Second Reading that the big problem currently is that the legislation is needed to update the regulation of universities. I accept the point, but it would be much more helpful to know which specific mischiefs the Government hope to remedy with this piece of legislation. There are specific mischiefs—the noble Lord, Lord Myners, mentioned one of them; there are places where too little teaching is done. But I am very certain that, if the Bill goes through unamended, there will be many more universities, so-called, where very little teaching is done. It is quite ordinary for institutions to compete not to be the best or to have the best offerings but to make the greatest profit and to do it in the most cheap, cheerful and economical way. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, as we move through a technological revolution, of which MOOCs will be a serious part, we need to think very hard about what is not a university. That may be rather easier than defining what is a university.

[Lord Judd]

First, I declare an interest. I am an emeritus governor of the LSE and a life member of court of Newcastle University as well as being a fellow and life member of court of Lancaster University.

My experience in those quarters has left me in no doubt that this new clause is definitely needed, and this has been an interesting debate about what its exact shape should be. It should be looked at in relation to Amendment 65, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and Amendments 165 and 166 in the name of my noble friend Lord Stevenson. They make the crucial point that this legislation should state that the Secretary of State has an inescapable responsibility to uphold academic freedom and freedom of thought. That first principle should be there, right at the beginning of the Bill. I am very glad that my noble friend has tabled those amendments, but it would have been better if their proposals had been included in this new clause.

There are some pressing issues which make this more urgent than ever, and colleagues in the House have spoken about them. The post-truth society is being talked about: there is a desperate need to rebuild and regenerate a commitment of some weight to the search for truth and excellence. That is crucial. I have sometimes reflected that the real test of a good university is the strength of its departments of ethics and philosophy. There is not much ethics these days in most universities. More than this, there is a terrible confusion growing in society about the difference between education and training. If we are to operate our society effectively, of course we need very good training. Some will be vocational training which is sometimes terribly impressive in its quality and its leadership. We also need increasingly to be able to see issues in a multidisciplinary context. It is trite, but it can be said that these days it is a matter of knowing more and more about less and less. We have to have somewhere where things are being brought together and views challenged from different perspectives.

This new clause is very important; we need to make sure that all these ideas are taken on board, as I am sure my noble friend would be the first to agree. His opening speech was very conciliatory and invited suggestions about how the situation could be improved. I hope he meant that because it is important—I am glad and relieved to see him nod his head.

This has been an excellent debate and it would be very unwise not to take these ideas fully on board. Coming back to my first point, we must not, with all our preoccupations, miss the opportunity to leave future Secretaries of State in any doubt about their personal, direct, ministerial responsibility to uphold the principles of academic freedom and autonomy in every way that they can.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as I was a governor of the LSE for 30 years and am now an emeritus governor and I serve on the courts of Lancaster University and Newcastle University. At the end of this month, Professor Chris Brink, who has been the vice-chancellor of Newcastle University, will complete his period of service. He has made an outstanding contribution to that university and, indeed, to Newcastle and the north. This will be recognised in a civic farewell which is being organised for him this week. He came to Newcastle from Stellenbosch, where, as vice-chancellor he played a key part in leading that university from being the high redoubt of Afrikaner nationalist education to being a successful multiracial university. He is worth listening to.

I have been reading some of his reflections, which I shall share with the House. First, I was heartened to see him referring to Socrates saying that a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers—and he was writing as a mathematician. His own reflection is:

“Universities … have never accepted that they are bound by some overall governing body which sets universal rules of performance. Nor should they. For universities, it should never be the case that the rules define the entity. It should always be the case that the entity defines the rules. The strength of universities lies in institutional autonomy and academic freedom. The moment universities start playing the rankings game they tacitly accept the authority of the rankers to define the game. That is a dangerous thing to do. As we have seen, when universities become complicit in rankings they reinforce a public perception that ranking reflects reality, and once there is such a perception, politicians and the market are eager to shape the higher education sector towards complying with that perception”.

Those words are very relevant to our considerations this evening and are worth thinking about.

In whatever lies ahead, Britain desperately needs a first-class higher education system in all its dimensions—that is obvious. But what, within that system, is the role of a university? In an inescapably interdependent nation, and an equally inescapably interdependent world, it should surely be a socially and internationally inclusive, and convincingly representative, community of scholars —staff, academics, teachers, researchers and students. How right the noble Baroness, Lady Eccles, was to re-emphasise that we should be calling them, and they should be calling themselves, “students”. The way in which “customer” has crept into the system is utterly demeaning. It undermines the whole concept of higher education and scholarship.

So it should be a community of that kind, in which the quality of teaching and of research are recognised as interdependent and in which universities, across the country, form a matrix of the humanities—not least ethics and philosophy—the physical sciences and the social sciences. All this together will make their strength and will provide their guarantees for the future.

Originality, integrity, a wholesome caution about an overdependence on sponsorship in research and applied research, vision, endless searching and challenge should be the lodestars of our universities and what they are about. To guarantee all this, there must be a relentless commitment to autonomy and to academic freedom. These are the fundamentals of what has achieved the standing of British universities, and what will be their strength in the times ahead. It is against all these issues that we shall have to very carefully scrutinise the relevance, validity and, I fear, invalidity of what is presented in this far from convincing Bill.

I will end by taking up a point made by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. If we are a decent society and if the values of our universities that I am speaking about have real effects, we really must ensure in our society at the present moment, and into the foreseeable future, that we give all possible support, not least financial, to the young people who are resident in this country and who, having been through hell in their lives, find themselves as refugees, displaced people and asylum seekers. Like any other youngster, they should have the opportunity of a university education.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Lord Judd Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 23rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment and very much regret that the Government have failed in their promise to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that action would be initiated across Whitehall before this Third Reading to consult on how the public duty to have regard to the UNCRC, which is what our amendment asks for, would affect the work of government and the well-being of children. We were promised that that work would start, with particular regard to the possibility of introducing either the Scottish or Welsh model of protecting children’s rights, before today. As far as we have been informed, it has not. That is why we are justified in bringing this amendment back at Third Reading. We still need clarification on whether and when the Government intend to keep that promise and how Parliament will be informed of their progress.

When in doubt, I always return to the convention itself. It may be informative to remind your Lordships of what we have been bound by the convention to do for the past 25 years. Article 4, on the protection of rights, states that the Government,

“shall undertake all appropriate legislative, administrative, and other measures for the implementation of the rights recognized in the present Convention. With regard to economic, social and cultural rights, States Parties shall undertake such measures to the maximum extent of their available resources”.

That is not unreasonable. Article 20 states:

“A child temporarily or permanently deprived of his or her family environment”—

the children we are talking about in the Bill—

“or in whose … best interests cannot be allowed to remain in that environment, shall be entitled to special protection and assistance provided by the State”.

That is another very relevant article. We feel it is very important to the scope of the Bill to put a duty into primary legislation to ensure the delivery of these rights.

In Scotland they have a very specific procedure, which I have read, to make sure there are impact assessments at every level to ensure that these rights are delivered. We have not got that in England yet. That is why the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, in its report in June this year, in general comment number 9, recommended that we:

“(a) Introduce a statutory obligation at national and devolved levels to systematically conduct a child rights impact assessment when developing laws and policies affecting children, including in international development cooperation”,

and,

“(b) Publish the results”.

As to its general comment number 14 in its 2013 report on the right of the child to have his or her best interests taken as a primary consideration, the committee recommended this year that we should, first, ensure that this right is appropriately integrated and consistently interpreted and applied in all legislative, administrative and judicial proceedings and decisions as well as in all policies, programmes and projects that are relevant to and have an impact on children; and, secondly, develop procedures and criteria to provide guidance to all relevant persons, and so on.

The case is made by the convention under the UN committee for our amendment. We signed up to that convention 25 years ago and, although we have made some progress, there is a great deal further to go, especially in relation to children who are particularly vulnerable because they are in care or have recently left care.

If the Government will not accept this amendment and insist on pursuing a non-legislative approach to children’s rights, will the Minister commit to introducing a child rights framework across government and assure us that the impact of such a framework will have the same effect as the due regard duty?

Three hours ago I received a short statement—one paragraph—from the Minister, Edward Timpson, referring to his commitment to the convention. It says:

“The possibility of extending this to legislation is still under review. No decisions have been taken about this and officials are continuing to explore the pros and cons”.

He went a little further in a letter to Harriet Harman—a copy of which I have received and which has been mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—and said:

“We are now planning a programme of action which will build awareness and lead to greater consistency in the way in which children’s voices and views are heard, and policy developed across Whitehall”.

Will the Minister set out how and, importantly, when this framework will be introduced to ensure that children’s rights are not kicked into the long grass once the opportunity presented by this Bill has passed? I hope the Minister can give this specific information about the Government’s actions and plans.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I warmly support the amendment. I declare an interest—I am half English and half Scottish. The Scottish half of me is delighted and proud that this is on record in the legislation of Scotland. I am unhappy—I have an internal conflict—in the English half that we have not yet reached that point of enlightenment. I would like that internal conflict reconciled as quickly as possible.

However, there are other issues of a more profound nature. In this House, of all places, we take the rights and interests of children extremely seriously. Many noble Lords are personally caught up in work associated with the well-being of children. Any convention, of itself, cannot provide what is necessary, which is an operational and real culture that self-evidently demonstrates at every level of society and in all its actions that children have the rights and priority needs to which the convention refers. The convention is there to underpin what should be a culture. Of itself, the convention cannot be a substitute for the culture. It provides an important underpinning of the culture and is a strong ally of those who want to build up that culture, rather than having it as an additional burden to be taken into account by people who are doing their job. It should be central to their work and it is well expressed in the convention.

There is another reason that motivates me to speak to the amendment. I find it reassuring that we have repeatedly been told that in the context of Brexit the British Government are determined that we should continue to be an international player in the world’s society. Everyone knows that Britain played an active and imaginative part in ensuring that the convention came about. Our credibility in international affairs lies not just with the rhetoric that is undertaken at the diplomatic level on these matters, but in the degree to which what is achieved in those diplomatic circles is reflected in action and commitment in our society as a whole. We undermine our role in international affairs if we become a sort of representative of the speakeasy club where people say nice things and make nice conventions but do not do anything about them in terms of their implementation.

I am not suggesting that we do not do anything because that would be ridiculous. A great deal of good work goes on in government circles. However, the amendment is extremely helpful and pertinent, and I can only say to the Minister that looking at it from the point of view of those outside the Government, if they do not endorse the convention when it has been incorporated in, for example, Scottish law, it is inevitable that there will be a suspicion that for some reason they find it difficult to do and about which they have reservations in terms of the challenges we face. If that is the case we ought to have it out in the open, but I hope that it is not. I therefore hope that the Minister can meet the spirit of what is being argued for in this amendment.

Brexit: Impact on Universities and Scientific Research

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an emeritus governor of the LSE, and I am glad to be a life member of court at both Lancaster and Newcastle Universities. In relation to those universities, I emphasise the importance of what my noble friend Lord Liddle said. Universities in the north are vital to the regeneration and future well-being of a largely deprived community. If we allow this situation to deteriorate, we shall never be forgiven. This is a grave and serious matter on which we need urgent reassurances.

I have sat as a lay man listening to this debate and have a sense of rapidly advancing disaster ahead. I do not say “disaster” lightly. Universities and higher education are fundamentally important, to not just the survival but the well-being of the United Kingdom. They need to be cherished, encouraged and supported in every way. If I were to say nothing else about the messages that I have heard today, what worries me is that the effectiveness of universities, their spirit and the quality of their work are related to their morale. It is upsetting to hear the accumulated evidence of plummeting morale in universities as uncertainty prevails.

We are discussing this issue in the context of not just Brexit but the higher education Bill, which is rapidly coming towards us. We will all need to keep going back to the fundamental point of asking: what are universities for? They are of course there to provide the resources of knowledge, expertise and the rest that are essential to the running of any community. However, they are about not just that but originality, challenging and the ability to put forward vision, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, said so well. How much I should like to have back the Britain that he wants to get back to in terms of values and attitudes.

It is impossible to have a relevant university in the modern world—which is, above all, highly interdependent—if it is not by definition an international community. It is not just about the different experiences that people bring in their own academic work; it is the social and psychological reality of students and staff approaching their work and lives together in the context of feeling every day that they belong to a global community. It is there in their university. Unless that is preserved as a high priority, our universities will quickly wither and become irrelevant.

The important point, above all, is vision. In some ways we are facing, in the context of this debate, the consequences of a trend that has been developing too fast—a tendency to see universities simply in their utilitarian contribution to the well-being of society. Our past strength and future is and has been related to people being prepared to challenge and think outside the established routine, and to look ahead. How on earth is that to happen if we do not have the richness of the international community in our midst? This is an urgent debate and we need evidence—I do not see any—that the Government are giving it the priority it deserves.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Lord Judd Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 18th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I too begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for his amendment on mental health and the corporate parenting principle. I tabled an amendment on this issue in Committee and I am pleased to see that our concerns are being addressed. Ensuring that the mental and physical health of children in care reaches a point of parity is a welcome amendment. It represents an important statement of principle and I am pleased to see steps being taken towards achieving the ambitions set out in the Government’s Future in Mind strategy.

Principles are important, but so too are actions. I should like to use the remainder of my time to speak in support of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. There are currently more than 70,000 children in care in England—70,000 children who no longer live in their family home and who are reliant on the support of the state for all their needs. We have a duty to care for their physical safety, but we have a fundamental responsibility to care for their emotional well-being as well. It is not enough to remove a child from their family home and hope that this will be enough to change their lives. We must aim higher than this. We must aim to provide them with homes that are far better than the family homes they have just left.

It is vital that we find proactive ways of supporting children in care. The first step in this process is to identify the types of support from which a child in care would benefit most. To do this, we need to introduce mental health assessments for children entering care and throughout their time in the care system. The point at which they enter care is crucial, as other noble Lords have said. If a child’s first experiences of life in care are positive—if it becomes a space through which their mental health and emotional needs are attended to—then they will be so much more likely to thrive and have the confidence to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them. If problems are left unidentified, this can have particularly grave consequences for looked-after children.

The research report, Achieving Emotional Wellbeing for Looked After Children, published by the NSPCC last year, highlighted how children are particularly vulnerable when they experience poor emotional well-being while in care. This report illustrated the way in which poor mental health can lead to placement instability which, in turn, leads to a further decline in emotional well-being.

A teenage girl called Emily told the NSPCC about the impact that placement instability was having on her emotional well-being. She said:

“I can’t cope any more. I have been in care my whole life and have been pushed around between foster families and adopted families. I feel so let down, broken hearted and like I don’t belong anywhere. No one wants me to be here so maybe I should do them a favour”.

What a horrible thought to come from anybody, let alone a child of that age.

Sadly, many children who enter care come from chaotic circumstances. Often they have never known what it was like to live in a safe, stable and secure family home. Entering care should be about giving them this stability but, sadly, this is not the experience of many looked-after children. Having the right support in place to help children make sense of their experiences from before they entered care is crucial. If we can find ways to help them manage their emotions in a safe way, many of the challenging behaviours that often lead to placement breakdown could be avoided. We can, and surely must, do better by these children. This strikes me as an eminently sensible place from which to start.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I too support very strongly this group of amendments. I am very glad that issues about emotional stability, and that dimension of life, have been stressed in this debate. They were stressed particularly powerfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin.

I have always thought that structures and systems themselves never achieve anything. They can be very effective in supporting and providing the right context, but what matters are the values, principles and sensitivity of the people working within the system. This again emphasises the importance of the emotional dimension. I was very glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, had the strength to be prepared to use the word love again. It is a word we should discuss more often in our considerations of these matters, because the tragedy is that so many of these children have never encountered love. The other terribly important thing is that they should be able to form stable, lasting, enduring relationships. Ideally, such relationships are there in the family. But if you are dependent upon a system, they are not obviously there, and therefore continuity of relationships is terribly important.

I want to make one point which is not in any way to argue against what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said so powerfully. We should be careful about exonerating the formal educational system from its responsibilities. It is often in the context of formal education that things begin to be noticed. There therefore needs to be an excellent working relationship between the formal educational system and social services. There should be a natural opportunity for people to share notes and responsibility for how the situation might be resolved. When our approach to education emphasises achievement all the time, I sometimes worry that the community dimension of education is being obscured. What matters is that there are space and resources within the education system to make allowances for children who have special needs. Again, that depends on a close working relationship between social services and the formal educational system. In a comprehensive school near where I live in Cumbria excellent work is done in this area. What I really admire about it is that this has become the concern of the whole staff. All the staff are involved. When children have special needs the staff ask what the school is doing to meet that situation, provide care, love and relationships within the school and enable other students to take their share of responsibility. We need a very close working relationship between the formal educational system and social services.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill (LD)]

My Lords, I did not take part in earlier stages of the Bill and it may be that the question I am going to ask was answered earlier, in which case I apologise. I would like the Minister to explain why the Bill contains no statement that, in his opinion, the Bill is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. My understanding is that that is what the Human Rights Act requires. It may be that there is a very good technical explanation.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being here sooner, but I was the last person standing to chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children this afternoon. That is where I have been, and it is always revealing. I support the amendment because I have raised this issue on a number of occasions. I hope the Minister will look at this, though he knows well that I do not like long amendments; lists in Bills are not helpful.

I cannot understand why, from the moment when the child is identified as an unaccompanied minor in a school, we do not start not only to stabilise the child’s status but to look at their mental health issues. We know of the trauma they have been through. I know that mental health services are poor across the country—we have heard that repeatedly—but these children have very particular needs. I am appalled when I learn that often schools do not even know the status of these children. I have met a number of youngsters who realise their immigration status only when they are about to go to university and discover that they cannot. Instead, they spend a year on appeal, appealing being deported to countries about which they know nothing. One young man I met had been here from the age of six. He had been in a foster home and suddenly discovered that this was his status.

I am sure that that is not the way this Government wish to treat children. These children happen to be in this situation only by chance. There might be another child next door who happened to have come in to the country, or be part of a family, on a very different basis. We must treat these children equally.

I am not against returning children home when that is the appropriate answer. We know that there have been very successful programmes of returning children to their country of origin with the right support and understanding; but we have to start sooner than we are starting now, get the position of the child right, make continuous assessment and not leave it until their 18th birthday, when it becomes a crisis.

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend. His experience and commitment in this sphere are well known in this House. I wish his talks with the Minister more success tomorrow. It seems essential that the Government take what my noble friend proposes very seriously. Others have stressed, and I underline it, that the trauma through which these youngsters have been is almost indescribable. It is more than distressing; it is deplorable. They need to be helped to build future lives. An action plan of this kind will help, and it is very important. Yet no action plan will be better than the culture of those who are operating it. From that standpoint, all of us in politics have a responsibility to set the tone for what is expected. We have a duty of care and responsibility to these children. We say that in our post-EU future we want to be prominent members of the international community. There is no better way that we could establish a reputation to help us in that future than by becoming leaders in answering this challenge, and the commitment with which it is answered.

In our vocabulary, in the speeches of Ministers and opposition spokesmen and all the rest, it is therefore terribly important to bring home that if we mean anything at all when we talk about our civilisation, our values and so on, this responsibility to children must be there. For those who are to operate any scheme, it is terribly important that what the children need is stability of relationships and a feeling that there are genuine, reliable friends looking after them—not just a system but real friends on whose shoulders they can lean and cry from time to time, and from whom they can get reliable counselling and advice on the way forward. What they need is human relationships in their future. This framework will therefore have to be filled by the culture which we and all others are generating about responsibility.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for tabling this amendment. I join in supporting, as have all noble Lords, what he proposes: a national action plan for the welfare of unaccompanied children. I have to reflect for one moment that the current changes, with the separation of the UK from the European Union, must limit to some extent the important international activity that can reach out to countries such as Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa, and support them to promote stability. The EU is less able to do that without us and we are less able to do it without the EU, so more of these children may come to this country in future because of the decision that was recently taken. I regret that.

I was grateful to the Minister for what he said in his letter on the Committee stage, which I received this morning. In it, he talked about Section 10 of the Children Act 2004. At that time, we very much regretted that that Act did not include a duty on the Immigration Service to promote outcomes for vulnerable children. It does for various other services, as the letter lays out, but I hope we can look at including in the Bill a duty on the Immigration Service to work with local authorities to promote outcomes for these children. Perhaps they should train social workers, for instance, to understand immigration issues and ensure that children get the right advice early on. In the past, there was a champion for children within the Immigration Service. In anticipation of our meeting tomorrow, can the Minister tell us who that champion is currently and what he is doing to promote children’s welfare? I support this amendment and I look forward to the Minister’s response to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Dubs]

I am grateful to the Minister. I want to read what he has said, because he has given us quite a lot of information. I hope I am right in thinking that, although he does not like the idea of a national action plan, the Government are by and large giving effect to the elements within it. We may not call it a national action plan but, if the work is being done, then so much the better. I repeat that I want to read his speech because he has said quite a lot and I want to think about it. I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate and given unanimous support for such action. I am also grateful to Liberty and other organisations, which were very helpful to me as I prepared for this debate by providing background information and so on.

I want to say two things. First, I went to Calais some time ago and saw for myself what at least some unaccompanied child refugees are going through and have gone through. I saw that from meeting some of them. In fact, I sent the Home Office their details in case they met the criteria for the scheme under the amendment to the Immigration Bill. I have seen that for myself.

Secondly, I believe there is a lot of public support for a positive approach to unaccompanied child refugees. That is evidenced by the mass of emails I have had, almost all of which are in favour of it. My general feeling from going to local areas and speaking at meetings is that there seems to be a lot of support for it. It is quite a popular issue. If handled properly and well, we will find that these young people go on to make a positive contribution to the future of this country.

[Lord Judd]

Does my noble friend agree that all we have said in debating his amendment would be much more optimistic if we could see some hard evidence of accelerated progress in the rate at which this country accepts unaccompanied children into its programme?

[Lord Dubs]

I agree entirely with my noble friend. That is why I have said that if as many children as possible could come to Britain in time for the beginning of the school term, they would not lose another school year—many of them have lost one or two school years in the course of their journeys, being in refugee camps and so on. So I am not saying all in the garden is lovely; I was trying to be nice to the Minister.

I will make one last comment. I mentioned that I am having a meeting with the Immigration Minister tomorrow. I am not sure whether I should have said that, but I cannot see any reason why I should not have done so. I thought it was only fair to say that that was under way. Had this debate taken place after my meeting with him, I might have fed into it some of what I had learned. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Lord Judd Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, at the outset of my remarks I will take up what I thought was a very important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. He was really rather laying into the universities for their total failure to play the part they should be playing in ensuring the opportunities they should be ensuring in society. I am sure that he will agree that what universities are all suffering from is a neurosis about league tables and allowing nothing to detract from the job of getting the good academic records that are necessary to enable them to survive and secure the resources they need.

Part of their remit should be to address social issues and to help build an inclusive society. Therefore, they should make sure that they are being brave in their selection methods and that, within their operation, once those from disadvantaged or vulnerable backgrounds have been selected, there are arrangements in place to ensure that they do not fail and, as it were, compound the disaster. It is essential that they do all that. I think that it is absolutely deplorable that the universities are not, in all their deliberations between themselves and the rest, agonising about this issue and thinking about how they can tackle it, rather than, as they are at the moment, seeing it as a difficulty and an obstacle to achieving the excellence which they see as their overriding culture.

The noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, entreated us to avoid inadvertently generating a negative spin around what is a hopeful Bill. I agree with her: I see the Bill as a glass half full, not one that is half empty, but it will be quite a challenge to all of us in this House to fill the glass. In order to fill the glass it is very important to see the situation against which the Bill must be measured. It is not just a bit of legislation that can be looked at theoretically, academically and intellectually; it is a matter of looking at the needs and challenges all the time, as my noble friend Lady Lister just said clearly, and making sure that what is proposed meets people’s real, existing needs.

If we are going to do that, it seems to me that it is terribly important to listen to the agencies in our own society that carry so much of the responsibility and do the work—the front-line agencies. There is, of course, the very interesting Children’s Rights Alliance that brings together a number of charities and voluntary organisations which are carrying heavy burdens in this respect and doing exemplary pioneer work. I was very struck by a communiqué that it sent out in the last few days which drew our attention to the work of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. We should not sigh at the mention of that body as we were right in the front line of arguing for the creation of this mutual concern at the UN and the machinery to deal with it and monitor the situation around the world. So when the committee makes reports, it behoves us to heed them and see what they say.

The Children’s Rights Alliance points out that the UN report published last Thursday made 150 specific observations about the inadequacy of the situation within the United Kingdom—that is, people from outside constructively looking at the situation and what needs to be addressed. The UN body says that the situation has improved since 2008 when it last reported, which is to the credit of the Government. But it makes some very clear observations. That is not easy for some people to accept.

The UN committee makes the point that,

“fiscal policies and allocation of resources”,

are,

“disproportionately affecting children in disadvantaged situations”.

It also points out that,

“when developing laws and policies affecting children”,

it is essential to look at the real needs which that legislation is designed to address, as I said a moment ago. The UN committee also says that it is very important for the Government to develop a comprehensive action plan in which all relevant government departments are involved and not simply to confine the responsibility to a limited area, as all government departments dealing with society have a responsibility in this regard.

I will draw attention quickly to some of the committee’s other observations. It says that we must urgently,

“get to grips with the shocking numbers of children suffering mental health problems by developing a comprehensive strategy to make sure these children’s needs are not ignored and they can access vital services”.

I know that a lot of thought is being given to this, but we are now being encouraged by the international community to take that seriously. The document also says that we should:

“‘Strictly implement’ the ban on placing children and families in temporary accommodation, including B&Bs, for longer than the six week legal limit. The UN highlighted the damaging long term impact on children’s health”,

that such accommodation can have if it is “dirty, unsafe and overcrowded”. It is very firm on the point that the number of children in custody must be reduced, and that we need to tackle the,

“disproportionate number of … children from care in the youth justice system”.

Of course, there has been a good deal of comment on that point in this debate. The committee also says that we should,

“make immediate improvements to the treatment of children in custody, including stopping the use of solitary confinement and abolishing the use of deliberately painful restraint on children”.

Here we come to a point that has been raised. I understand the arguments made on the other side—namely, that it is important to get all the people involved in taking the necessary action to take their responsibilities as seriously as they should. But I am afraid that I come down on the other side. What the children we are talking about have so often lacked in life is any stability. They have lived in chaos and have no experience of sustained, continuing friendship, partnership and support. One needs people to work with those children over a prolonged period to help them to find their way through all the arrangements, the legislation and the rest. That is very important indeed.

The UN committee also makes the point that our asylum policy needs to speed up and streamline action to ensure that,

“unaccompanied and separated children reunite with their family from both within and outside the UK”.

That plea comes from people in voluntary agencies and NGOs across the country who carry this real responsibility.

I will finish with this point. What examples are there of specific action that can be taken? I urge noble Lords to look at the brief that was sent out by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, because it underlines a terribly important priority. It makes the point that communication difficulties are very often central to all that goes wrong, and that not enough is being done—and not enough can be done in so many ways—to ensure that all through the system people are helped with communication. This means, of course, speech therapy and the rest, but it means a lot more in that context. I urge colleagues on all sides of the House to look at that very succinct and interesting brief.

Finally, I will share with noble Lords the view that so often the crises with which we are dealing are a challenge to the prevailing values in our society—for example, the blame culture in the media, which makes me wonder sometimes how there is any morale left in the social work profession. We should send a message of solidarity and admiration from our debates to the social work profession. If you make greed the central driving force in society, there will inevitably be many casualties. We have to re-examine our own values.