Life Chances Strategy

Lord Lupton Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lupton (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to spend these few minutes concentrating on the vital need for early intervention in the lives of deeply troubled children, a topic I covered in both my maiden speech and an Oral Question. Before I do so, I shall try to put in context this Government’s attempts to transform the lives of the most disadvantaged people in Britain. In doing so, I want to make a point that probably only a newcomer to this House can make, which is that it seems unproductive to overlay the intractable social problem of poverty, which has been with us for centuries, and its causes and solutions with excessive party politicking.

The causes of poverty are not easily assuaged only by taxpayers’ money. It is a fact, rather than a party political point, that, according to Treasury figures, expenditure on tax credits and equivalents, when expressed as a percentage of GDP, have risen from around 0.6% through the mid- to late 1990s to around 1.5% in the early 2000s, peaking at 2% in the run-up to the 2010 election. In current terms, the difference from top to bottom is over £25 billion per annum, a truly staggering figure. Despite this massive increase in expenditure, there are few if any of us in the House who do not think that there is still a serious poverty issue to solve, however you define poverty, but opening the taps without an adequate plan is proven not to work.

So, in approaching the challenge of how best to tackle one of the biggest issues of our day—ingrained, seemingly permanent, poverty in a section of our society—I am still fresh enough in this House, bearing few battle scars, to express the hope that we could tackle such a complex social Rubik’s cube of a problem with a more collaborative mindset than I have seen to date. I suggest that, had your Lordships addressed some elements of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill in this spirit, there might have been a greater willingness to accept, for example, that definitions of poverty based only on income levels might have been doing as much damage as they were good, not least because they may have unintentionally created targets that could be met by infusions of taxpayers’ cash without addressing the underlying causes. They were like a thin sticking plaster seeking to cover a severed artery.

In January this year, the Prime Minister set out his bold vision on fighting poverty, following from the success of the coalition Government in the creation of 2 million jobs and bringing the dignity of work to so many previously permanently unemployed. In that speech, he was clear that we needed to move beyond just the economics of either what he described as,

“the leftist, statist view—built around increased welfare provision and more government intervention"—

he then reminded us that it was he who started the troubled families programme, so he is not averse to state intervention where appropriate—or the more free market approach, that the rising tide will lift all boats. He argued that we now need a more social approach—what he described as the “human dimension to poverty”. He went on to set out four key planks of a plan to extend life chances: first, the importance of the family as a unit, which I shall talk about; secondly, a good education; thirdly, equal opportunity; and, fourthly, the provision of the right treatment and support for those in crisis. In my last minute or two, I would like to emphasise the first of those planks: how vital I believe early intervention is when young lives are going off-track, often as a result of dysfunctional families.

In recent years, my wife and I have spent many hours talking to deeply troubled children in south London who, as young teenagers, get excluded from their schools in the morning and are pushed out on to the streets and turn to prostitution and drug-dealing. We have read the medical research, which suggests that a sustained increase in adrenalin as a response to repeated abuse may chemically affect the frontal lobe of the brain, which is thought to control temper.

Last autumn, we visited the Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire, which carefully, and at huge expense, reassembles the shattered spirits and souls of dreadfully abused children who have had no experience of what might even be termed family life. We have also talked to superheads while visiting their schools in Hackney and other parts of east London about the benefits of and need for early counselling both for troubled young children and their parent or parents. Sixty-five per cent of children aged 12 to 16 in disadvantaged households do not live with both birth parents—a figure which is 26% worse than for better-off households. We must all support the initiatives around strengthening families. Six hundred million pounds in total has now been committed to the troubled families programme, while—this touches on the excellent point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler—160,000 couples have taken up the preventive relationship support programme. As Labour MSP and former Scottish Health Minister Tom McCabe said while summarising six months of expert evidence presented to the Scottish Parliament’s Finance Committee:

“There is empirical evidence stacked from the floor to the sky that backs up our taking a different approach to preventive spending and investment in the early years”.

We must both listen to the bottom-up needs and be prepared to be granular in our interventions. For example, I suggested last autumn that we impose a higher duty on schools to ensure that school kids are properly looked after when excluded, rather than ending up on the street. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that reducing the number of workless households is not just about the economics of a pay cheque but about giving children a good role model for the benefits and dignity of work that will be crucial to creating their motivation to get on in life?

To finish with my first point, we need to recognise that this whole issue is of national importance. We must not allow party politics and dogma to slow down and hinder the development of solutions. The nation has every right to expect the expertise of so many noble Lords in this House—I certainly exclude myself from that description—to be deployed to maximum advantage.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Lord Lupton Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lupton (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to stand here as a Member of this House and to speak for the first time. I begin by expressing my thanks to noble Lords on all sides of the House for the warmth of the welcome I have received. The huge amount of support available to newcomers such as myself from your Lordships, the doorkeepers, the clerks, the Library, the IT support staff, the Pass Office, the dining rooms and all the members of staff have greatly eased the rites of passage, and I thank your Lordships and them warmly.

I should also like to thank my supporters for their advice and encouragement: the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, whom I first met three years ago when I joined the board of trustees of the British Museum—an arrival she immediately celebrated by announcing her departure—and my noble friend Lord Rose of Monewden, who has been a business friend for many years. I could have no finer supporters, spanning, as they do, my interests in business, the arts and the not-for-profit sector.

Finally, I give thanks to my noble friend Lord Borwick, who has approached his duties as mentor with exemplary zeal. Two weeks ago, I made the mistake of mentioning to my noble friend that I was about to spend an early Friday evening with my pass and a map familiarising myself with this building. Within minutes, I received an email from him listing six obscure rooms that I had to find—a very upmarket sort of treasure hunt.

I am glad to make my maiden speech on a subject so vital as the Welfare Reform and Work Bill. I support the Minister’s aims for the Bill, and in particular I want to highlight the work of the troubled families programme, which the Bill seeks to enhance. Based on my family’s active interest in the welfare of those children right at the bottom of the social pile in the UK, I feel that the troubled families programme is on the right track but still has a lot to do. I suggest that more focus be brought to the needs of the most troubled children in our society.

I should like to put my speech in context. My two brothers and I grew up in a beautiful part of north Lancashire, where my father ran our long-established textile engineering business from a dark, satanic mill in Accrington, until the de-industrialisation of our UK cotton industry put it, and its many employees, out of business some years after my father’s retirement. We were brought up in an environment where love and mutual respect were strong; where hard work was expected; where ambition and, yes, competition were encouraged; where knowledge was held precious; and where the concept of community service was regarded as the expected norm. We lacked for nothing but we were taught not to want everything. It was a perfect childhood, and it gave me the foundation and all the tools to make the best of my life. Would that every child in Britain should be so lucky.

That brings me back to the Bill. It is right to highlight that income may be important in measuring poverty, but it is not the only measure. The Centre for Social Justice report, Reforming the Child Poverty Act, highlights the five measures of worklessness, family breakdown, educational failure, addiction and serious personal debt as elements of an interconnected problem that income-only based definitions of poverty fail to cover. To end poverty in this country, we cannot afford to just play with statistics; we have to strike at its underlying causes.

That is what makes the work of the troubled families programme indispensable. This programme aims to identify families in difficulty who have complex needs at a local level, and to intervene to help them directly. Three years ago, the Prime Minister set local councils the challenge of joining up services to help 120,000 such families. By now, 116,000 such families have been helped, but we simply cannot stop here. In its 2012 report, the riots panel estimated that there are around 500,000 “forgotten families” experiencing multiple disadvantages that require intensive intervention. This is a major problem of our age and of our society.

I want to go further: I have a concern that there is a whole class of young—sometimes very young—damaged children effectively growing up alone, in that they are not even part of what we think of as a family. They are not in families at all. I have met teenagers with six siblings, each from a different father. I have met children who have been physically and emotionally abused by their mother’s boyfriends. I have met children who have been excluded from school aged 13 because they have never been given a concept of boundaries and acceptable behaviour, and children who have turned to committing sexual acts on the street at that young age to fund their mother’s heroin addiction.

Why would children as young as 12 or 13 be on the street alone? Because they may have been excluded from school for their almost feral misbehaviour, caused by their lack of any upbringing. The school will have complied with DfE guidance by notifying a parent of their exclusion, whether or not any mother, father or guardian was capable of picking them up, due to their own inadequacies. Surely, that is a case where the law is failing in practice in its primary duty of care to the child rather than the school.

One might consider such a child to be beyond hope. However, it is remarkable how the human spirit can overcome impossible obstacles in the desire to survive and thrive—given help. I saw this last Friday afternoon, when my wife and I visited the Mulberry Bush School near Oxford. I declare an interest, as our family charitable foundation has recently made a small initial grant to the school. We saw first-hand the inspirational help that that school gives to some of the most damaged children in the UK, from the ages of five to 13. These are children who, in the school’s own words, have,

“been so constantly deprived and frustrated that they are full of helpless rage, which one day will manifest as panic, violence and destruction, and we must find ways to intervene early to break this destructive cycle”.

I ended our visit to the school having a conversation about shifting continental tectonic plates with a lively 12 year-old boy who only two years ago could not read or write a word; nor could he express himself intelligibly.

A good upbringing is not available to all children because, as the CSJ says in its report:

“Many of these parents received poor parenting themselves when they were children so the cycle continues unless the right intervention is given”.

We have a moral, social and economic need to intervene.

The children I describe seem, through no fault of their own, to fall between the lack of statutory duties of the DfE after they are excluded from school and the DWP, because of their young age. That is why the troubled families programme is so vital. It specialises in a whole-family approach, it cuts through jurisdictions and statistics, and it helps people who need it most. It uses many different models to fill the gap that I describe.

My point is that the new reporting requirements for the troubled families programme as set out in the Bill are a useful step in the right direction. But there is so much more to develop, not least whether there are more relevant ways to measure success so that the payment-by-results approach can be applied to greater effect and children who somehow survive in what is anything but a family unit are scooped up into the care net.

We owe it to the legion of “lost families” and “lost children” to intervene. I applaud the direction of travel of the troubled families programme, especially the renewed investment of a further £200 million to add to the £448 million already invested in this programme. I finish by quoting what Confucius is credited with saying some 2,500 years ago:

“The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home”.

Some things, my Lords, do not change.