Immigration Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, although I share some of the misgivings already expressed, including that of the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, particularly in relation to the role of volunteers in this important matter, I find myself at present very much in support of the amendment. However, I wonder whether I could be given clarification in respect of proposed new subsection (8)(b). Clearly—or at least it seems clear to me—the intention is that the child trafficking guardian ceases to occupy that role if the child ceases to be domiciled in the United Kingdom. The subsection says something much fuzzier and possibly open to mischievous interpretation with its wording,

“if … the child leaves the United Kingdom”.

Perhaps in responding to others who will be asking questions for clarification, the proposers could take that small point on board.

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, I am not an expert in this field but I have encountered this situation in the context of the enormous number of unaccompanied children who arrive at the port of Dover. As a citizen of Dover and Kent, I declare an interest as a taxpayer there.

The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, raised the very important issue of the enormous overload of work and pressures under which social workers operate in most, if not all, areas. I want to ask a question of someone, although I do not know whether it should be the Government. Who is going to pay for all this? My question is not so much, “Who is going to pay the guardians?”, because they might do it as volunteers, but if a child is moved from one local authority to another, the cost of caring for that child will move from one local authority to another, and, not unnaturally, local authorities whose services are already under huge pressure are not going to encourage that. How is it all going to work?

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment with great enthusiasm and want to comment briefly on an interesting point made by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and possibly by others as well. I serve on a committee of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly and towards the end of last autumn we produced a report on people trafficking. We covered all the jurisdictions—that is, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and indeed the Republic of Ireland—and one thing that came through very clearly was that children who are taken into care because they appear to have been trafficked too often disappear from their local authority care home. Nothing seems to be done about that. It may be that the numbers are small, and I very much hope that they are, but surely it is extremely serious if a child in such a vulnerable position is taken into what seems to be a safe environment and then disappears, presumably—we can only suspect this—because the traffickers have discovered where the child is and have persuaded, induced or compelled him or her to abscond. There appears to be no system—I may be wrong but my committee could not discover one—whereby local authorities are diligent enough to try to find out what is happening to these children. They may have done so from time to time but there seems to be a gap in what is going on. Therefore I look to the amendment in the realistic hope that a child trafficking guardian would use influence to lessen the likelihood of children disappearing from local authority care homes.

On the noble Lord’s point about the cost implication if a child is moved from one local authority to another, I do not understand why a child in the care of a local authority, with no obvious parents to care for him or her, would be moved from one local authority care home to another, although it might happen. Nor can I see a good reason why a child should leave the country, as has also been suggested. If a child is vulnerable and in care, surely everything must be done to ensure that the child’s well-being is looked after totally and that the child would be enabled to leave the country only if there were a proper basis for him or her to be looked after elsewhere; otherwise we are simply saying, “We are washing our hands of this child and never mind what happens to it”. Surely we would never dream of doing that.

I look at the amendment to see to what extent it will meet the need that I have just described. I think that, by and large, it would. It does not quite spell it out as clearly as I would like, but if we had a child trafficking guardian and the child was in a local authority care home, the guardian would know that the child was there and keep an eye on him. If the child were to disappear, the guardian would surely be among the first to ask, “What has happened? All steps must be taken to find the child”. Above all, it would help the local authority care home and the social workers to develop a better system so that children could not easily be induced or compelled away, or whatever happens to them. Even if the numbers are small, we are dealing with a serious problem. We always thought that once a child was in a care home the child was safe. I hope that this amendment, if passed, will make such children a little safer.

Immigration Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Monday 3rd March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I always say that childhood lasts a lifetime, and all children need the best start in life. These amendments will give these children the best possible start and I congratulate the Government on putting them forward. I want to raise just one point on behalf of Barnardo’s—I speak as a vice-president of that organisation. I congratulate Barnardo’s on having made an important effort to make sure that all children are taken care of if they happen to come to this country in unfortunate circumstances. Although Barnardo’s welcomes the 28-day reflection period being enshrined in the law, it is concerned about the drafting of the clause, as it would allow one parent to be returned within the 28-day period as long as there is another parent to care for the child. This in effect allows any family to be split and for the child to be separated from one of their parents, with no restrictions on the circumstances in which it should happen. Barnardo’s believes that a child should be separated from their parent against their will only if it is in the best interest of the child; for example, if there are safeguarding concerns such as domestic violence. It wants appropriate safeguards to be put in place to prevent children being separated from their parents and traumatised in any way. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on this issue.

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, I am not entirely sure that this is an appropriate intervention; if not, I apologise and I shall be very brief. I happen to live near Dover. My wife has chaired a considerably large housing association in the area. It received a frantic call one day from the county council, saying, “We simply can’t cope. We’ve got all these unaccompanied minors arriving”. Those children came and it got to know them and so on. The majority of them were absolutely intentionally unaccompanied immigrants. Having been put on a boat in Calais and told to throw their passport into the water as they went across, they came into this country and there was nothing that we could do to change it. Is that situation still the same and, if so, can the Minister perhaps comment on that aspect of it also?

[Lord Rosser]

We welcome the Government’s amendments, which lay down requirements in the Bill in relation to the removal of families with children and also unaccompanied children. We will consider the objectives of the Government’s amendments, which the Minister gave in moving Amendment 3. No doubt we will do so in more detail in response to the questions and points that have been raised today.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

It is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, particularly after his comments about the reduction in the number of young people in the youth justice system and his call for a similar system for women—a women’s justice board—to focus on their needs. Not only have they had the experiences that he describes, but many of them have been in the care of the state, which has often not provided them with the care that they needed. I support the call of my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham for further work on the Corston recommendations. It is so disruptive to children’s lives when they are taken into the secure estate.

I rise to speak to a matter omitted from the Queen’s Speech. I want to share my concerns with Her Majesty's Government about the lack of professional capacity in our children’s homes. I take this opportunity to encourage the Secretary of State, the right honourable Michael Gove MP, to give thought to developing a strategy for the professionalisation of staff in children’s homes. Professionals who come into contact with children’s home staff are unanimous that the quality of staff is highly variable and that staff often show little understanding of children’s needs. That is the view of the social workers and child mental health professionals to whom I speak.

The front page of the Times on Wednesday last week read as follows:

“A nation’s shame: Nine men are found guilty of sex grooming crimes against vulnerable young girls after a trial that has exposed the shocking scandal in Britain’s children’s homes”.

Andrew Norfolk, the journalist, goes on to write:

“Hundreds of girls in children’s homes are being sexually abused by organised networks of men, The Times reveals today. England’s children’s homes, which care for 1,800 girls, have recorded 631 incidents of girls being sold for sex during the past five years, including 187 in the past ten months”.

I am most grateful to Mr Norfolk and the Times for the extensive and careful coverage that they have given to the horrific exploitation of these vulnerable children. On page six of that day’s Times, Jenny Pearce, Professor of Young People and Public Policy at the University of Bedfordshire, said:

“You’re talking about poorly trained, poorly supported staff working with some of our most vulnerable children and young people. That combination is an ideal setting for an abuser to exploit”.

It seems clear that the Times successfully identified a systemic problem with our children’s homes, which needs to be remedied as soon as possible. We need to move to a professional cadre for our children’s homes as soon as possible if we are to minimise future risk of harm, sexual and other, to these our most vulnerable children.

In his report of the 1990s on children living away from home, Sir William Utting wrote that the best safeguard for children is an environment of overall excellence. I am concerned that we may be failing in our duty to these children by forgetting his words.

Why do these children need such care? These are often children who have experienced multiple failures of foster placements. They have therefore generally experienced abuse in the family and then been further harmed by being passed from pillar to post. They are normally the older children with longer histories of neglect, who are physically more difficult to manage. The Office for National Statistics in its 2004 survey found that 69% of children in residential care had a mental disorder and that the majority of these disorders were conduct disorders, which are particularly hard to manage for carers. That compared with about 40% of disorders in foster care and 10% in the general children’s population. A head of a child mental health service department put it to me that the profile of these children in these children’s homes is very little different from that of children in psychiatric units. In the latter, children are cared for by nurses who are managed by doctors; in the former, they are cared for by staff qualified to national vocational qualification level 3, who are managed by those qualified to be level 4 managers. There is a world of difference in the capacity of those staff.

On the continent, residential care is a far more popular option, with about half the children in care in residential settings. Staff are also generally more highly qualified. In Denmark, 90% of staff have a degree-level qualification. The continentals choose to have the most highly skilled qualified staff caring for their vulnerable children. In this country we have made the opposite decision. Because our children’s homes cater for only about 8 per cent of the children in local authority care, the needs of our children in residential care are significantly higher than those of such children in France, Germany or Denmark, yet our care staff are much less well qualified. We choose to place our most vulnerable children with our least qualified workers.

[Lord Northbourne]

I am most grateful to the noble Earl for giving way. Does he agree that a considerable number of children’s homes do not fit the description he has given, and that their qualified staff look after the children extremely well?

[The Earl of Listowel]

I agree with my noble friend on that point. For instance, there are some exceptionally good therapeutic communities in this country and some very good examples of practice. The difficulty is that the quality is so variable. These vulnerable children deserve a consistently excellent quality of care from their carers.

Gangs of men meet former residents of children’s homes and use those girls or young women to “hook into” the young women in those homes. It is very hard for staff to resist that. We need to have the very best staff in children’s homes to prevent these cunning, wily gangs of men gaining access to these children; and not only gangs are involved.

There has been progress in skilling-up staff. Ofsted inspections report improved performance. There are some very good homes and therapeutic communities and many residential care staff work the hardest they can in the interests of these children. I agree with my noble friend in that regard. Regulations have been tightened and there is the prospect of further strengthening of regulations over the next year, yet I fear that a fundamental problem will not be addressed unless a clear strategy for professionalising staff in our children’s homes is introduced as soon as possible. Therefore, I beg the Government to give consideration to developing such a strategy to bring this about. There is great expertise in this area in this Chamber. I look forward to the Minister’s response.