BBC World Service and British Council
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Alton on obtaining this important debate. I am particularly glad that he mentioned the wider context of the soft power role of the World Service and the British Council in promoting British values and interests. I declare an interest as a member of the recent Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence and as a member of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy.
My own practical experience of the BBC World Service was honed in Kenya and it became an affection when I was commanding a base on the remote border between Borneo and Indonesia during confrontation. My appreciation of the British Council was warmed four weeks ago when, with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Egypt, I visited Cairo. We were very impressed, first by the energy of the director of the British Council there, and secondly by the fact that he brought together some very interesting young students of English from Egypt who were able to explain to us the youth verdict on what was going on in Syria in a way in which we might not have otherwise realised.
I want to concentrate very briefly on three recommendations in the Select Committee’s report and say something about each of them. First, we stated:
“We are concerned that the Government are not currently doing enough to support the BBC World Service, and we urge the BBC and the Government to ensure between them that the BBC World Service’s budget is not reduced any further in real terms, and the opportunities for coordination across multiple platforms to deliver content are taken”.
The Government said that they disagreed with our recommendation but warmed us a bit by saying that they were currently working on a memorandum of understanding between the Government and the BBC.
Secondly, we stated:
“The Committee supports the use of DFID funding to assist the BBC's development work, and we urge further consideration of how this type of support can be expanded”.
We were very glad that the Government welcomed the support for DfID funding because that opens a much wider consideration of the way DfID funding is applied anyway.
Thirdly, on the British Council, we recommended:
“The Government must ensure that the British Council is properly resourced”.
The response we got was:
“The Government is firmly committed to the work of the British Council and recognises its significant contribution to the UK’s strategic interests through its work … and the Government will continue to work with the British Council on future funding”.
I took particular encouragement from the use of the words “United Kingdom’s strategies” because they suggest that soft power was being considered in wider terms than it had been before.
Reverting briefly to the committee, witnesses we had were effusive in their praise of both institutions. In particular I was very glad that the trust they both engendered was mentioned. I like to think that the tide is now flowing in favour of soft power and I am very glad that the momentum initiated by my noble friend’s debate today may be maintained both by the debate on the soft power report and in the national security strategy 2015 when that is produced.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendment 245 in particular. In doing so, I hope that the Committee will allow me to reflect on the comparisons between the commissioner and my own former position as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons.
Unlike the other inspectors of public sector organisations, the Chief Inspector of Prisons deliberately does not come from that service, in order to ensure complete objectivity and independence. The Chief Inspector of Constabulary is a policeman; the Chief Inspector of Probation has been a probation person, and so on. What was also interesting was that I was a Crown servant, not a civil servant, which gave me another degree of independence. I would like to see the Children’s Commissioner given exactly the same status in order to emphasise that point. It does not in any way lessen your responsibilities and it certainly does not lessen your access.
It is also important to realise that, again in parallel with the Chief Inspector of Prisons, you are the quality assurer. You are there to assure the quality of the delivery of children’s rights in this particular case. Quality assurance carries with it a certain amount of responsibility but it also carries a requirement to have sufficient resources to be able to do that. I have to say that, after talking to the Children’s Commissioner and looking at her responsibilities, I do not think that she is adequately resourced to be able to carry out effectively the role of quality assurer of children’s rights.
I have just come from taking part in the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, where we are talking about injunctions for children aged 10 and upwards, in addition to the anti-social behaviour orders for children aged 10 and upwards, and the importance of ensuring that there is no postcode lottery in that and that they are overseen fairly and consistently by local government around the country. Who is going to do that? It seems to me that the one person who is, and will have the responsibility to do so, is the Children’s Commissioner. I do not see why it could not be added to his or her responsibilities. Having seen some of the excellent reports that have come out recently from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner—in particular the one about the effects of acquired brain injury and neurodevelopment, which I think is a model; not to mention the very effective report on the work of mother and baby units in women’s prisons—I think it is very important that someone should look in greater detail than I think the Dunford report did at some of the peripherals that come with the responsibility for quality assurance.
I welcome the other amendments in this group, which seek to do that, but I am just a little nervous about the Children’s Commissioner having to report to too many separate committees in the other place. Yes, of course, human rights are involved but in dealing with children we are dealing not just with education but with health, justice and the Department for Work and Pensions because of various payments; we are also dealing with the Department for Communities and Local Government. It worries me that we should be specifying two particular committees out of many. I do not think we want to complicate the chain of reporting for the quality assurer on children’s rights. We ought to tease this out in this Committee, and possibly make recommendations about the clear chain that we see through to the Minister, to whom the commissioner will be reporting.
I am slightly concerned about the suggestion that the reporting annually to Parliament should not go through a Minister. The reason for that is that when the prisons inspectorate was set up there was a requirement for the Home Secretary to publish a reply to every list of recommendations made by the chief inspector. For the Children’s Commissioner to be properly effective, the Minister must reply so that one can see what is going to be done to maintain the momentum of improvements and observations that the commissioner makes.
The Countess of Mar
I support the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in his contention. We have a Minister for Children, and the Children’s Commissioner should report to that Minister.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
I shall speak to Amendment 106, to which I have added my name because of the word “monitors”, which I shall refer to on my Amendments 117 and 123. I shall also speak to my Amendment 115.
Regarding Amendment 115, I make no apology for continuing to major on speech, language and communication needs, despite the Minister’s welcome reassurance to me that they were climbing up the list of priorities. As I have said, bearing in mind that speech, language and communication needs are a growing 21st-century scourge, I would like to see them coupled with special educational needs in education, health and care plans, which are made for everyone—not just those with such needs. Amendment 115 is a probing amendment to ensure that children and young people with speech, language and communication needs who are not eligible for an EHC plan will not be overlooked by services available under local offers. In that connection, I am very glad to see that paragraph 11(a) of the schedule to the draft code of practice states that local offers must set out what speech language therapy provision is available. The Government should therefore also stipulate that local authorities’ local offers must be backed up by evidence-based research, on which I commend to the Government the Better Communications Research Programme, whose reports they published last year.
I move on to Amendment 117. Local offers, however well intentioned, are bound to end up as postcode lotteries if we are not careful—hence my call for a strategy. The Minister told the Committee that a strategy was in place for the period when a child was in school during its nought to 25 pathway, but it is not apparent for the periods before and after that, or indeed in linking those three periods together in what I call the child development strategy. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for his recent letter on teacher training but I am not wholly reassured. He referred to assessments and professional judgment but did not confirm whether child development is taught, compulsorily, during all teacher training to enable teachers to do what he describes in his letter. I would be grateful for confirmation that that is so.
The Better Communications Research Programme, which I mentioned, showed that too many children enter school without their speech, language and communication needs being satisfactorily addressed, or even identified. This is being addressed in the early years foundation stage. I have already drawn attention to the need for health visitors and others who carry out assessments to be trained by speech and language therapists to identify the indicators of speech, language and communication needs. In an overall strategy there would then be a “So what?”—remedial treatment designed to enable every child to engage with its teacher, and so with education, to the best of his or her ability. However, to ensure that this happens, local authorities must be held to account for their service provision, including their mechanisms for identifying needs. I believe that is best done by independent quality assurance by an inspector or regulator.
I have mentioned before the crucial role played by health and well-being boards, because they are the only organisations which are in touch with every individual from nought to 25. In this connection, I admit to being wary about Ofsted, which suggests that whatever method is selected for holding local authorities to account, it should preferably be independent of either education or health to ensure objective judgment. I give notice that when we come to Part 5 I shall be reflecting that the Children’s Commissioner might be ideally situated to take on this role.
Much has already been said about the need for information. The purpose of Amendment 123 is to ensure that a school’s special educational needs provision is consistent with local offers and that schools have to think about their provision of special educational needs as a whole. I hope that the amendment is designed also to ensure greater transparency for parents—an issue that has already been raised several times in this Committee. Therefore, I hope that the probing will result in due consideration being given to these proposals.
Baroness Northover
I am very happy for us to look right across the board. We need to focus on the individual child or young person and their experience throughout the system.
Coming to Amendment 109, we can assure the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, that the term, “finding employment” in the Bill goes wider than providing support for young people in looking for jobs—important though that obviously is. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, noted, the draft code of practice refers to the local offer including information about support available for job coaches, for example, who can support young people when they are working, and the financial support available, including accessing any benefits from the Department of Work and Pensions, both when looking for work and when employed.
Noble Lords pressed harder about support to stay in employment, which is extremely important. I assure them that we are well aware of that. Preparing for adulthood is an important element in the SEN reforms. Clause 30(2) requires local authorities to include in the local offer,
“provision to assist in preparing children and young people for adulthood and independent living”.
That term is defined in subsection (3) as,
“finding employment … obtaining accommodation … participation in society”.
Support for preparing for adulthood would include the kind of support that young people can expect when they are in employment. I hope that noble Lords find that reassuring as a very important point is being made there.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said that he was pressing the case again, rightly, on speech and language communication, and the provision for children and young people. No doubt we will continue to discuss this as it is a very important area. We recognise the importance of this, and the Government are supporting the work of the Communication Trust—I expect he knows that—including through a grant of £550,000 over two years to pilot an online speech, language and communication qualification for early years practitioners. That shows our commitment. We are also providing £1.5 million to the trust to identify gaps in provision and services, which will no doubt spark more amendments from the noble Lord, to promote and extend the What Works database of evidence-based interventions and to implement the reforms in Part 3. I hope that that is an indication of the seriousness with which we treat this.
Regulation 10 of Schedule 1 to the draft local offer regulations sets out the requirement to include:
“Speech and language and other therapies, including any criteria that must be satisfied before this provision can be provided”.
The noble Lord makes a very important point about how practitioners, from health visitors to those supporting children in school, need to work together. That is one of the reasons for the local offer: to try to bring all this together so that support for these children is delivered in a much more effective way.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, asked about child development and is expecting a letter from my noble friend Lord Nash. I think that that is in train, if it has not already come out. If it has not come out, I am sure that it will speed along.
Lord Ramsbotham
Perhaps I should explain to the Minister that there has indeed been a reply from the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I was saying that I am not wholly reassured by what he said. In the letter, he talks about assessments and judgments, but there is no confirmation that child development is on the syllabus of every teacher training course. That is what I want to discover.
Baroness Northover
I will refer that to the department for it to look at further. The department will know, as do I, how determined the noble Lord is, so I am sure that it will look at that very seriously.
I remember the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, dealing with Amendment 117. I assure him that Clause 27 already requires the local authority to keep its education and social care provision under review. I believe that we talked about that in earlier groups, but if I have not addressed the noble Lord’s questions adequately, or he wants more information, I am very happy to add to that. I am sure that we will be coming back to that in due course, by the looks of the groupings.
I hope that I have addressed most of the issues that noble Lords raised and that the noble Baroness will be happy to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, the amendment is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I shall speak also to Amendment 114, which is also in our two names and is in similar terms to Amendment 112 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones.
The amendments are about introducing a degree of accountability, consistency and quality control into the local offer. These ideas have already been broached but the amendments seek to take the discussion further and perhaps anchor it even more firmly. I imagine that I am not alone in having received extensive briefings from concerned parents, practitioners and policy experts from organisations such as the Special Educational Consortium emphasising the importance of accountability in the new system.
The local offer will provide a great deal of information for children, young people and their families to enable them to know what is available and help them to exercise choice, but we cannot expect those the information is intended to benefit effectively to police the system by assuring its quality and by providing the necessary checks that like is being compared with like, and so on. Of course local offers will not all be the same. I understand that the Minister will not want to overprescribe the form and content of local offers, thus removing the scope for innovative development and responsiveness at the local level.
However, in the introduction of new systems such as this, it would be rash not to build any element of accountability or quality control into the process. The amendment therefore seeks to have both Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission involved in reviewing local offers to make sure that they provide an accurate picture of the services available to young people and their families so that they have access to accurate and quality information. This would ensure that the services provided by all providers were described and assessed on a comparable basis. Under current arrangements there is no parity between providers, which all have different audit and inspection arrangements, thereby making it difficult for young people and their families to make like-for-like comparisons of services included in the local offer.
I shall not say any more about this but leave it to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to expand on the questions of accountability and inspection from all his vast experience of these matters, should he wish to do so. I am sure the Committee will be greatly benefitted if he does.
Amendment 114 is in similar terms to Amendment 112 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones. The amendments seek to establish a minimum level of provision that local offers should contain. This should not be seen as overprescriptive but simply as providing a measure of reassurance that local offers will be, as I said in relation to Amendments 101 and 102, robust, accessible and effective, and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, consistent. Accountability must be at the heart of these reforms and these characteristics are a precondition of accountability. I hope the Minister will agree that local offers can still be responsive to local needs while meeting minimum standards and exhibiting the qualities of robustness, accessibility, effectiveness and consistency.
It is noteworthy that the Education Committee in another place, in its pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, took the view that the local offer needed strengthening. It said:
“The weight of evidence received by our Committee clearly supported minimum standards and we recommend that the Pathfinders be used to inform what should constitute minimum standards for Local Offers, particularly to address the provision that will need to be made available in schools to support pupils with low to moderate SEN without EHCPs. We also recommend the establishment of a national framework for Local Offers to ensure consistency, together with accountability measures by which they can be evaluated”.
It seems that that committee is very much on the same page as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and me here.
In summary, these amendments are about ensuring two things: first, not only that parents and their children have access to information about the services available to them but also that there is a quality assurance mechanism in place that gives them a means of holding the local authority to account; and, secondly, that the local offer has some guaranteed substance that families can rely on. I beg to move.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I take up the offer made by my noble friend Lord Low to say a little a bit about the quality assurance I have in mind. Noble Lords may remember two extremely good safeguarding reports produced by the joint inspectorates involved in education, health and the criminal justice system, one in 1999 and the other in 2003. Those came about in the balmy days before the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Gordon Brown, axed what had been the Social Services Inspectorate and became the Commission for Social Care Inspection. The role of social care responsibility for children was then taken on by Ofsted and that of adult social care by the Care Quality Commission, which was instigated by the reforms that had to follow the axing of the Social Services Inspectorate. I have always regretted strongly that although this House was able to preserve Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons we were unable to preserve the Social Services Inspectorate. Frankly, we have been reaping the wind ever since.
My feeling about what we are talking about here is that we need something akin to the inspections for the safeguarding of children carried out by the joint inspectorates. They were led by someone with overall responsibility but able to call on the quality assurance addition of the inspectors of particular elements of the system. In this case, we have healthcare and education but also other things including the local offer, how that is made and so on. That is why I laid this false trail, as it were, to the Children’s Commissioner. I suggest to the Minister that in thinking about the quality of what we are proposing—and what the Government are very definitely interested in introducing—the assurance on that is carried out by those best able to do it working together, rather than giving it to any one person, because there are so many aspects to it. Quality assurance is absolutely essential and must be objective and consistent in every part of the country where local offers are handled.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 113 in my name and to Amendment 114 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Low. Amendment 113 is a probing amendment to seek clarity from the Government on whether they are willing to provide a national or common framework to support the development of local offers so that parents can easily identify how provision varies. Parents of children with sensory impairments support proposals to improve transparency. This amendment was suggested to some of us by the National Deaf Children’s Society, RNIB and Sense. Some parents have reported that under the current arrangements:
“We have fallen across possible choices and information quite often by chance”.
Another parent said:
“I got an information pack when my child was diagnosed, but half of it wasn’t relevant to deaf children and it didn’t include information on the local deaf school”.
The three charities I mentioned support the concept of the local offer, and it is very important to the 75% of deaf children and 57% of children with sight loss who do not have a statement of SEN. The draft code of practice and regulations set out what information is to be included as part of the local offer and are very detailed. However, they do not specify how information should be broken down, nor do they set out a template that local authorities should work to that would make that comparison easier. In the absence of a common format, I am not sure that I can believe that the local offer will genuinely improve transparency over what help is available to these children. The local offer will be helpful only if local authorities are required to publish information about support available for different types of SEN. The needs of children with SEN are very different; for example, sensory needs are very different from the needs of autistic children. If the Government are not minded to create a set template so that parents can easily compare provision between different areas, I hope they will discuss it with the Local Government Association so that it can create a common template, because it would ease local government’s passage into the new arrangements if there is one framework to follow.
Moving to Amendment 114, the overall accountability framework around the Bill looks somewhat weak. Noble Lords will have gathered that from my previous amendment. There seems to be very little to stop a local authority publishing a weak local offer that is poorly understood or inaccessible. Despite the Bill frequently referring to improving accountability, the available rights of recourse for parents are limited. It is good that parents have the right to leave comments on the local offer and that they will be published, but there is no obligation on the local authority to address any of the concerns raised. Parents have the right to seek a judicial review against the local authority for failing to meet the requirements set out in the Bill, but this is not an option that many parents will be able or willing to pursue.
As well as being limited, the framework relies almost entirely on parents to respond and take action. Many parents are busy being parents. As one parent told Sense at an event held to discuss the Bill:
“We’re forever chasing, and it’s a headache. I often don’t have enough time to be making phonecalls and people don’t always come back to you so you’re just chasing and forever trying to sort everything out. You’ve got to think all the time—which are the bits worth fighting about?”.
Many parents do not know what they do not know. They are not in a position to assess whether the quality of a teacher is as good as it should be, nor do they have the time to research whether provision in other areas is better.
The Government’s White Paper Open Public Services stresses the importance of ensuring the quality of provision in any move to create diversity of services and providers. It states that the Government,
“will ensure that providers of individual services who receive public money … are licensed or registered by the appropriate regulator”.
A significant amount of funding is spent on supporting children with high needs. More than £500 million has been allocated by the Department for Education for this year. Many are concerned that there is relatively weak oversight of how this funding is spent and of whether it leads to improved outcomes. As well as leading to doubts about whether SEN provision is effective, it also raises questions about value for money and scrutiny of expenditure. There needs to be a stronger external accountability around the local offer. As has been already outlined by the noble Lords, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Low, this could be taken up by Ofsted or the Children’s Commissioner.
In another place, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families stated that he was exploring with Ofsted how concerns about SEN provision could be covered under Ofsted’s existing programme for inspecting local authority school improvement functions. This statement was made in the spring of this year and, unfortunately, no update has been provided since. I am sure that there needs to be further certainty on the local offer and accountability before the Bill progresses to Report.
Lord Storey
I think we have heard some very wise words from a number of noble Lords. I was particularly taken with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, which I thought were spot on. However, my interpretation, or end result, is slightly different from hers.
I think that we are all trying to aim for the right result and that we are probably getting there. I have a number of fears, which were expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. First, there must be some sort of quality assurance. We must be assured about what is happening in the local offer. In a sense the clue is in the title: it is a local offer, not a national offer, and that is really important, so I am not sure that wielding the inspection stick is the right quality assurance. I think that it has to be more of a partnership assurance. I fear that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, there would be not so much a race to the bottom as a race to the minimum. Many local authorities would be in that position.
I am not involved in the Local Government Association, which is there not always to save money—it prefers to spend money. However, I was very taken with its wise words. It said that it does not support the introduction of minimum standards for the local offer as,
“we are concerned that central prescription could reduce councils’ flexibility to allow for local solutions, based on a conversation with parents and young people, to respond to individual and local needs”.
How true that is. It also rightly says:
“SEN also varies from one local authority area to another because of the nature of the local population. There are higher levels of need in some areas, which allows the local authority to provide more specialist services than other areas, which have less need for that specialist service or have different needs”.
I am sure the Minister will listen carefully to what it says. I was quite taken with the comment of my noble friend Lady Brinton about having, if you like, a common template. She was right on that and was right to say that if the Government do not do it, someone else will. We have to draw together the strands because we all want the same thing. If we want the local offer to work, parents will have to have confidence in it, and it will have to have the quality that would provide that confidence.
Lord Ramsbotham
Perhaps I may respond to the noble Lord, Lord Storey. This is precisely what I was saying: the best inspections—and I am talking about the safeguarding reports—were not inspections carried out by one organisation; they were partnership inspections. I call them inspections because they were carried out by inspectorates but they were partnerships of all the people involved. The theme always was looking for the Government saying “what” and leaving the “how” to the local authorities.
The other benefit of having that kind of partnership looking at these matters is that you can identify good practice somewhere, and you can spread it in the hope that it becomes common practice everywhere.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
“(5) Health care provision or social care provision which is provided for the purposes of education or training of a child or young person in addition to provisions included in subsections (3) and (4), if any, is to be treated as special educational provision.”
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 72, the wording of which, as the Committee will note, is similar to that used by my noble friend Lady Greengross in her Amendment 71. I apologise to the Committee if it, quite rightly, thinks that I am being a bit military in my approach to Part 3 of the Bill. I am doing so because, in my experience, things work much better if they are corralled into an overall strategy.
As I mentioned earlier in our proceedings, the Bill is, or ought to be, all about child development, the heart of that being Clause 19(d), which refers to, “the need to support” every child or young person,
“and his or her parent … in order to facilitate the development … and to help him or her achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes”.
The key word in this is “development”. The current absence of a Minister for child development was the reason for my earlier question to the Minister about who was responsible, and therefore accountable, for overseeing the development of every child in the country. This concern arises from my view that the only raw material that every nation has in common is its people, so woe betide it if it does not do everything that it can to identify, nurture and develop the talents of all its people. If it does not, it has only itself to blame if it fails.
The absence of any apparent child development strategy is doubly disappointing. A number of recent initiatives seemed to suggest that the development of every child was becoming the Government’s default aim. For example, the introduction of an early years foundation stage in every child’s life, concluding with an assessment, appears to be a sensible way to enable entry to a 0 to 25 pathway. During our work on the link between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs, the All-Party Group on Speech and Language Difficulties, which I chair, was shown four other sub-pathways that were being worked on by the Department for Education, the Department of Health and others. One covered pre-birth and the first few months of life, the second up to and including primary school, the third roughly secondary school and transition into adulthood, and the fourth was for those at risk of becoming involved with the criminal justice system. Those seemed entirely sensible and appropriate because they pulled in all the players in those processes. I should therefore be very grateful if the Minister would let me know what the current status of these four pathways is and their relationship to the 0 to 25 pathway proposed for those with special educational needs.
Logic suggests that the early years foundation stage assessments should be turned into individual health, education and care plans and 0 to 25 pathways for everyone. Default education, health and care plans for the 81.2% of children who do not need help along the way, unlike the 2.8% on statements and the 16% on school action or school action plus plans, could merely be progression through the educational system, but it would be a plan. However, the Bill as presented, instead of seizing a priceless opportunity to bring order and logic into a system that requires the co-operation and joint working of so many different ministries and agencies, by laying down a default position and then highlighting how individual necessary alternatives are to be identified and delivered, does not contain the necessary strategy and leaves a number of key requirements unresolved. These include further assessments at various stages along a pathway to identify changes of need and oversight of the whole process.
Amendment 72, about which I am extremely grateful for the detailed legal advice of David Wolfe QC, focuses on one important part of special educational provision, as well as trying to seal a potential crack in the presumed strategy. The importance of speech and language therapy was highlighted for me when, as Chief Inspector of Prisons, I was wondering what could be done with and for the more than 60% of young offenders who were found to have speech, language and communication needs. If only those needs had been identified and challenged earlier in their lives, they might never have truanted or been evicted from school, or ended up in young offender institutions. Luckily, Lady Helen Hamlyn funded a two-year trial of putting a speech and language therapist into each of two young offender institutions. The two governors of these institutions were saying, within a week of the therapists’ arrival, that they did not how they had managed before they came along.
To cut a long story short, everyone agreed how invaluable their contribution was, because at last all young offenders could communicate with education, healthcare and disciplinary staffs, which enabled individual plans to be made. Despite this, I could not persuade either the Home Secretary or the Secretary of State for Education to pay for them, because speech and language therapists belonged to the Department of Health, whose Secretary of State in turn refused to pay, on the grounds that all such funding was delegated to what were then called primary care trusts. The development of thousands of children has gone by default, and the same could happen to millions more if speech and language therapy is not enshrined in government child development plans.
Therefore, I welcome the Government’s apparent intention to maintain the existing position, confirmed in both case law and the current Special Educational Needs Code of Practice from 2001, which, in Chapter 8.49, says that,
“since communication is so fundamental in learning and progression, addressing speech and language impairment should normally be recorded as educational provision, unless there are exceptional reasons for not doing so”.
The new, separate definition of healthcare provision in the Bill creates a risk that speech and language therapists, because they are provided by the NHS to address this impairment, could be reclassified as healthcare provision, rather than, as currently, educational provision.
This raises two problems. First, parents could lose their right of appeal to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal. Secondly, healthcare provision does not have to be included in an educational health and care plan unless it is, to quote the Bill, “reasonably” required, which implies that it could be left out on cost grounds. Although Clause 21(5) mitigates the risk of reclassification, it does not remove it, and the rewording that I am proposing in Amendment 72 is designed to ensure unambiguously that the existing classification of speech and language therapy as educational provision is maintained. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, our Amendment 73 is in this group, and it has the same intent as that of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. We have just gone about it in a slightly different way. The issue is one of what should be classified as special educational provision. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, quite rightly pointed out, this is important because, by its nature, this determines what issues parents can take to appeal, and we should make that classification as broad as we possibly can.
We have debated before in Grand Committee how broad a definition we are going to apply to special educational needs, and that we believe that a whole tranche of disabled children are not classified and included in that. This issue touches on that somewhat as well. As we said at the time, it is important to get a standard classification of special educational needs and disability included throughout the Bill. We have not tabled amendments to this clause to take that on board; however, earlier clauses ought to clarify it more clearly.
Clause 21(5) sets out that healthcare provision and social care provision can be classified as special educational needs if they are,
“made wholly or mainly for the purposes of … education or training”.
However, according to many in the sector, backed up by the legal advice that we have received, there is a concern that the new definition of the phrase “wholly or mainly” sets a higher threshold than that which exists. We have heard from, among others, David Wolfe QC, the adviser mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. That is why our amendment would remove “wholly or mainly” from the clause.
The initial draft of the Bill did not include a requirement for educational provision to be wholly or mainly for educational purposes. It stated that anything provided by the health authority was health provision and that anything provided by social care was, similarly, social care provision and therefore not enforceable or appealable to the tribunal. The new wording was introduced as a result of opposition to the initial draft but we still do not feel that it deals with this problem. I think the Minister will be aware that there is considerable concern about this issue, particularly around therapies such as those for speech and language, which may be classed simply as health service provision under this clause and therefore, apart from anything else, not appealable.
In addition, we have also received the following legal advice:
“Following case law dating back to 1989 the general position has been that any provision which is directly related to an educational need can be classified as educational or medical and it is for the tribunal to decide. Guidance has been given that speech and language therapy will normally be considered educational because of its importance in communication, whereas other therapies such as occupational therapy vary according to the type of difficulty the child has and how far the therapy relates to an educational objective. Tribunals have consistently held that where a provision has a beneficial educational aspect, and is directly related to the child’s educational needs, it can be described as educational provision and specified in the statement. This aspect needs to be set out in the current bill if parents’ rights are not to be eroded. The current wording set a higher bar and reduces the rights of the child and parent”.
This issue was raised briefly in the Commons by the Conservative MP Robert Buckland. At the time, the Minister there replied that,
“the clause maintains the existing right of appeal to the tribunal for special educational provision so that parents will not lose their current protections”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children and Families Bill Committee, 19/3/13; col. 372.]
However, this is not what the experts are telling us, so it would be extremely helpful if the Minister could clarify this and work with us to find alternative wording which would ensure that we are not raising the bar and eroding parents’ rights. In his letter to us following Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord Nash, wrote that,
“the Government recognises the concerns and is looking for ways to address them”.
I would be really grateful if he could tell us how far he has got in looking at ways to address these concerns, and whether he would now be prepared to find an alternative form of wording to address this issue.
The Earl of Listowel (CB)
My Lords, before my noble friend does that, as I imagine that he may well do, I very much hesitate to speak in this debate. I have just been chairing a discussion on child development in schools. Attending it were head teachers, the former head of the TDA and a number of other experienced practitioners in the area that we have just been discussing. Unfortunately, I was four or five minutes late to this discussion so I hesitate to make any contribution to it. However, since the Minister referred to what is being done about the standards to ensure a better understanding of child development, which is very welcome, I should like to make two points.
First, in welcoming the effort by both the previous Government and this one in raising the status of teaching, and particularly in welcoming the advent of Teach First, we heard from the man responsible for Teach First in London. He said how successful the scheme is and that 30% of graduates were getting into the schools that needed their help most, so that really tough inner-city schools were getting these excellent graduates, particularly in science and maths. However, although he could speak only anecdotally, he said that he had met many of these teachers and they said they felt hopeless. They did not know how to manage the challenges presented by the young people they were working with. We need to get this right because otherwise we might lose the wonderful new crop of young teachers we are recruiting into the profession, who will make a huge difference to outcomes for young people.
The other point to arise from this meeting is that a generation of teachers has not learnt anything significant about child development. That means that head teachers and lead teachers today will not have learnt much about child development in their training. So, while I welcome what the Minister has said about the changes in the standards, the challenge presented by this issue should not be underestimated. I hope there will be ongoing discussions about what we can do in this area, which is vital for the educational outcomes that we want to see for our young people. We need to retain our new, young, enthusiastic teachers on the front line, help them to understand why children sometimes behave so challengingly and enable them to engage with them effectively. I apologise to the Grand Committee for intervening but I hope that it has been helpful.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that positive response and all those who have contributed to the debate. The fact that there is a strategy for schools proves my point because it is the strategy for the early years being hooked on to the strategy for schools which seems to be missing. The strategy for after-school transition up to the age of 25 is also missing. You have local government, healthcare, business initiatives and skills and others all joining in on this; it is not only schools. There is more to it and education is not only about what happens in school.
Accepting what the Minister has said, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss this issue. I suspect that not only will the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the Communication Trust and the people I am involved with wish to take part in this but so will other Members of the Committee because this is an extremely important issue. With that, I am happy to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
I am covering for my colleague here, so I am doing a double act.
Amendment 75 proposes a new clause, which very much picks up on the point that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, made in the debate about the importance of early identification. We believe that identifying and supporting children with SEN as early as possible is the most important factor in improving their outcomes, so our new clause would put early years area SENCOs on a statutory basis, like school SENCOs. It would require local authorities to employ enough of them to support all the identified needs locally. Clause 22 requires local authorities to seek to identify children and young people in their area who may have SEN. Our amendment would insert “as early as possible”, which again echoes the points we made in the earlier debate.
The professionals who work with children have a crucial role to play as the first educators with whom those children come into contact. A number of issues such as speech and communication problems, developmental delay, behavioural issues and literacy problems can be better addressed by having a good quality early years provider, meaning that children start school in a much better position than they otherwise would have. Fewer resources would then be required in later years, so the case is well made and cost effective.
However, the early years workforce is typically the least qualified in the education sector, while cuts to local authority budgets have meant that councils have cut their training budgets for early years staff by 40% since the election, resulting in many cutting back on the early years area SENCOs that they previously employed to provide advice and training in early years settings. Yet the support that they provide is now needed more than ever. A recent Communication Trust project, Talk of the Town, evidenced that, across a federation of schools, children and young people’s speech and language needs were underidentified by an average of 40%. The Communication Trust says that it,
“remains concerned over how the Bill will ensure that the mechanisms for identification will work in practice across all educational phases and also on local authorities’ ability to identify needs as early as possible, and to respond to these needs”.
The NDCS, the RNIB and Sense are also concerned that overall proposals do not place sufficient emphasis on the importance of early years support for children with sensory impairments and their families.
Labour tabled these amendments in the Commons. At the time, the Minister said that he would reflect on whether and, if so, how some of the good practice of area SENCOs could be reflected in the code of practice. As I have just hinted, I have only just acquired this brief this afternoon. I have looked at the code of practice and I am struggling to see where that might be. There is certainly reference to maintained nurseries having a role, but nothing that spells out the role that area SENCOs can have with the more diverse group of early years providers. I look forward very much to hearing what the Minister has to say about that, but I hope that we can agree that more can be done within the Bill and the code to emphasise the importance of these early years area SENCOs. I beg to move.
Lord Ramsbotham
I rise to support this amendment, and to speak to Amendments 79, 108, 116, 128 and 238. I am glad that the noble Baroness mentioned the importance of assessment and intervention as early as possible, particularly for this area. I was very struck last Wednesday, at a meeting with the Minister, when he confirmed that only just over 10 years ago, 80% of communication between young people was verbal and 20% electronic. That is now reversed, with 80% being electronic and only 20% verbal. We need verbal communication above all to enable us to engage not just with teachers but healthcare workers, family, friends and ultimately with employers and customers. If we are to enable our children to live in today’s world, it is crucial for them to communicate with each other and for those who have to engage with them to help.
Amendment 79 requires schools and registered early years settings to identify special educational needs while offering guidance on how to do so. This is very important because, as we discovered when doing the report, which I have mentioned several times, the health visitors who were doing the early assessment in Northern Ireland were extremely glad that they had been trained to do so by speech and language therapists—not that they could offer therapy, but at least they knew what signs to look for to alert them that somebody had a problem. This is very important, and it is a lesson that should be applied right across the country.
Amendment 108 extends local offers to include access to services for children who are educated in non-maintained early years settings. It should not be restricted only to those with EHC plans, which, for the vast majority of people who have children with speech, language and communication needs, do not make them eligible for any additional support. That is wrong. The people with speech, language and communication needs do need support to enable them to engage. It is not just for those on EHC plans, which, as we know, is a small proportion of the whole.
Amendment 116 requires local authorities to inform parents of what special educational needs and local office support is available to children educated in non-maintained early years settings. This is again something that should not be left to chance because, as we know, there is a vast variety of provision and a vast amount that parents do not know or understand and with which they need help. Somebody has to co-ordinate the giving out of that advice, which suggests that local authorities have a role to play.
Amendment 128 makes local authorities responsible for special educational needs provision to those who have them identified in private, voluntary and independent early years settings, and for establishing the necessary mechanisms to enable and ensure that both identification and provision are available. All those may seem very much the same, but what they are saying collectively is that there is a duty here for the local authorities to make certain that identification and provision are available for all children in the local authority area, whether they are in mainstream or PVI settings. We must not let that go by default.
Amendment 238 highlights something that else that is lacking and is not clear from the Bill. Schedule 4 to the Bill amends the Childcare Act 2006 to require the registration of childminder agencies and certain childcare providers on childcare registers. However, the Bill is currently unclear about the position regarding private, voluntary and independent providers. As nearly 80% of the early years providers come from the private, voluntary or independent sector, this seems to be a gap that needs to be filled. We must ensure that everyone is covered. I am not simply saying that there is a gap; I am trying to suggest that there may be a way out of this. I suggest that all childminder agencies should be required to employ a SENCO, and that all non-maintained providers—that is, all the PVI providers—should be required to register with one of these childminder agencies. In that way, the SENCO can relieve the PVI of what the Government have said that they do not want to do, which is to belabour it with too much bureaucratic work that it has to do. A SENCO with the same status as the others would be able to act as a bridge between these 80% of providers and the local authorities to ensure that every child is covered.
Again, this may sound complicated, but I say to the Minister that the Communication Trust and others, who have thought this through and drafted this amendment, which I am very pleased to put forward for them, are very happy to engage with officials to discuss how this might be provided for, and to make certain that the gap is covered. The Communication Trust includes those working in the area now, and we have contacts with the Local Government Association, which I know would be very happy to contribute.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, my concern in this whole topic is that I make a fair estimate that a lot of childminders are not trained or equipped to identify children with special needs. Surely the agency that ought to pick up special educational needs very early is the district nurse, who visits in the very early stages of a child’s life. One of the things that they are trained to do is to test for special needs. Is this not an opportunity, in this Bill that is trying so hard and so admirably to bring together all the different services, such as health services and educational services, to tie up the measurement, the testing and the observations that a good district nurse will make of a baby—and that I guess a midwife would make—to ensure that this is passed on to the childminders? Here we are very much occupied, rightly, in pointing out the things that need to be done when a child has been identified, but there is very little about how the identification takes place. I would be grateful if the Minister could make some reference to how this could be brought about. It is not asking for anything new; it is asking for exactly what the Bill tries to do, which is to bring the bits together.
The Countess of Mar
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness in their amendments. When my elder granddaughter came to visit us, we found it very difficult to understand what she was saying. When she got to the age of three and a half my husband, who was a schoolteacher, was saying, “Huh, huh, huh” or “Ber, ber, ber” to her to try to get her to pronounce things. My daughter got into a furious rage and took her home, but then realised that the child could not communicate and was getting very frustrated because we could not understand what she was saying. She took her to a speech therapist. On the health service, it would have been 14 or 15 months before she could get help, so she took her privately. My granddaughter was diagnosed as being quite severely dyspraxic. She struggled through school but got her A-levels and is now deliriously happy at university doing a course in fine arts, restoration and conservation, which is right up her street. She was caught early, which is so important. She will have a career; everyone wants someone who can conserve things. She has been to the House and visited the conservators.
It is important that we catch them early. My granddaughter started off being able to speak at the age of nine months, but then had an accident involving a head injury that was not picked up, so midwives or district nurses would not have seen that. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness have an important point.
Lord Ramsbotham
I just say to the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that I was referring to the assessment required now in the early years foundation stage, which must be carried out by health visitors. I was saying that that is a compulsory healthcare test. I was mentioning that the healthcare visitor to whom we spoke in Northern Ireland mentioned the value that she had had from being trained by the speech and language therapist to identify the particular triggers for speech and language difficulties, which I believe ought to be common practice everywhere.
Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, this debate has covered the important issue of SEN in early years settings, and noble Lords have been probing a perceived gap in the legislation in that regard. Clearly, as noble Lords have said, many of the duties in Part 3 apply only to maintained nursery schools, not to other early years providers, which has led to concerns that children in playgroups and independent nurseries or with childminders might not have their special educational needs met. We reassure noble Lords that that is not the case. Duties are in place throughout the Bill and through the Childcare Act 2006 which should ensure that special educational needs are identified and addressed in early years, wherever a child is.
I point the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, who I realise leapt in having not realised that she was about to deal with this amendment, to page 70 of the draft guidance, which is on the role of the SENCO in early years provision, so that she can have a look through that.
Amendments 116 and 108 seek to include early years provision within the local offer. We absolutely agree that this should be the case. Perhaps when I have explained some of these areas the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will be reassured and will want to see whether that meets most of the concerns of those who were advising him.
Schedule 1 to the draft Special Educational Needs (Local Offer) Regulations 2014 already makes clear that the local offer must include special educational provision from,
“providers of relevant early years education”.
These providers are explicitly referred to in paragraph 1(a) of that schedule. The regulations also require the local offer to include the arrangements that such providers have for “identifying … special educational needs”, in paragraph 4(a), and for,
“securing the services, provision and equipment required by children”,
with SEN, in paragraph 4(c).
Relevant early years education is defined as that childcare which is provided to meet the duties under Section 7 of the Childcare Act 2006. Noble Lords may be reassured that this would include all local authority-funded early education for two, three or four year-olds, whatever the status of the provider. It is not limited to maintained nurseries and 96% of three and four year-olds access such early education through local authority funding, so I hope the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is reassured that non-maintained early years providers are already included. We share his concern that children are identified as early as possible. This is particularly important in areas of disadvantage, where the current two year-old offer of 15 hours’ free childcare per week is targeted.
Amendment 128 would require the local authority to use its best endeavours to identify children with SEN in early years provision, and then to secure the relevant services for them. In relation to the concerns of my noble friend Lady Perry, I know from the Department of Health that this issue has been picked up there. I assure her that there is cross-government working in this regard. We recognise the importance of health service involvement in identifying very young children who may have SEN as soon as possible. That is why Clause 24, which my noble friend may want to look at, provides for health bodies to tell local authorities about young children under compulsory school age who may have SEN. It is also why we are training an additional 4,200 health visitors by 2015 to help improve early identification. I hope that my noble friend finds that reassuring.
The Government want to reassure noble Lords that local authorities must ensure that all providers that they fund in the maintained, private, voluntary and independent sectors effectively meet the needs of children with SEN and disabilities. Local authorities should remove barriers in access to early education and work with parents to give each child support to fulfil its potential. All early years providers, regardless of how they are funded, must follow the welfare requirements set out in the EYFS framework to have and to implement a policy and procedures for children with SEN and disabilities. This should include how the needs of these children will be met and how reasonable adjustments will be made. Providers are also required to assess children regularly and to keep parents informed. They must consider whether a child has a special educational need or disability which requires specialist support. They should link with families and help them to access relevant services from other agencies as appropriate. These requirements are reflected in the draft SEN code of practice, which also gives practical guidance to early years providers on responding to special educational needs. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will look carefully at that.
Amendment 238, again tabled by the noble Lord, seeks to place requirements on childminder agencies, including a requirement to appoint a SENCO with the prescribed qualifications, and a regulation-making power to set out requirements on how childminders registered with an agency should support children with SEN. I heard the reason he gave for taking that route, and I hope that to some extent what I have already said has reassured him that there is not quite the gap he is seeking to plug here. I also note what my noble friend Lord Storey said about this. The provision to create childminder agencies in Part 4 is an enabling one. We do not think it would be helpful to try to tie these providers into agencies. I am sure we will hear arguments to the contrary when we get to Part 4.
Returning to the key issue of early years childminders, we agree that childminders need also to look out for children in their care. Clearly, they need to be subject to the same duties and expectations whether they are registered with an agency or independently registered with Ofsted. The Government’s intention is that the agency-registered childminders should follow the same guidance on SEN as other types of early years providers, as part of that jigsaw of involvement with young children.
Page 70 of the draft code of practice, which I have just referred to, sets out guidance on the role of the SENCO in early years. It makes clear that the SENCO role may be shared between childminders in the network and suggests a similar approach be applied to agencies. For most early years settings, the SENCO is not required to have a particular qualification. Currently, and in the draft code, only SENCOs in schools and maintained nurseries must hold specific qualifications, including qualified teacher status. We feel that it would not be appropriate to impose additional burdens on childminder agencies over and above those in place for other early years settings. The framework provided by the early years foundation stage and the SEN code of practice makes this unnecessary.
Amendment 75, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, seeks to require local authorities to appoint sufficient area SENCOs to support early years providers, drawing attention to an important role. As my noble friend the Minister mentioned in a debate last week, page 70 of the draft SEN code of practice states that,
“local authorities should ensure that there is sufficient expertise and experience amongst local early years providers to support children with SEN”.
It goes on to outline the role of area SENCOs in the early years. By including the role in statutory guidance for the first time, we are recognising its importance and creating a clear expectation about the support that local authorities should provide for children in early education.
Turning to Amendment 79, we fully endorse the importance of early identification of SEN, which this amendment seeks to secure. One of the main aims of the reforms we are debating is to seek to ensure that children and young people have their needs identified earlier—whether through district nurses, as my noble friend Lady Perry indicated, or through others involved with young children—so that the right support is put in place quickly.
The education providers listed in Clause 29(2) have a duty under Clause 62 to use their,
“best endeavours to secure that the special educational provision called for by the pupil’s or student’s special educational needs is made”.
Actively identifying special educational needs is an integral part of this duty. The draft SEN code of practice makes this absolutely clear. Chapter 6 of the code requires schools to assess pupils on entry, make regular assessments of pupils progress and ensure that teachers are equipped to spot potential special educational needs quickly.
I have perhaps been too comprehensive. However, I hope that I have been sufficiently comprehensive to address the questions and needs of all those who are rightly concerned about this area. I hope that my response reassures noble Lords that effective duties are in place because we agree with what noble Lords say they are seeking to achieve. We will continue to work with the Communication Trust and other expert organisations to ensure that the SEN code of practice provides effective guidance on all these issues. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness will be happy to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments, 89 and 92 to 97, and add my support to Amendment 100, mainly because it becomes very relevant when we come to Clause 70, dealing with people in detention.
My other amendments are to do with something I find odd about Clause 26. Although on the face of it local authorities and partner health bodies are required to make, have regard to and keep under review joint commissioning arrangements, there is no obligation on them to operate any of those arrangements, let alone to reach agreement. That seems very peculiar. Even when they operate the arrangements and reach agreement, the resulting provision is limited to what they agree to be reasonably required.
I go back to my amendment to Clause 21(5), because, as I mentioned then, health bodies may well argue that their position is constrained by what they consider necessary. Given how many such bodies apparently give very low priority to speech, language and communication needs and the provision of speech and language therapists, that might mean that little or no speech language therapy would be provided for children or young people other than those who are on EHC plans. This brings us back to the problem of the vast majority of children with these needs who are not on those plans.
Clause 26 does not allow the assumption that children without plans will get what they require; nor does it mention any requirement to publicise what arrangements and agreements are available for parents or the people affected; and it does nothing to ensure that there is consultation on the joint commissioning arrangements. My amendments are designed to strengthen Clause 26 by making its tone “must” rather than “discuss”.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, this group of amendments relates to Clauses 25 and 26, which deal with promoting integration and joint commissioning. These provisions are at the centre of our reforms and I am grateful to noble Lords for their careful consideration of these issues. Children and young people with special educational needs need integrated services. Too often they have to tell their story over and again, and too often they or their parents struggle to navigate a system that makes no sense either to them or to the professionals who are supposed to be helping them. In this mini-debate we have had an echo of the discussions we had on both the Health Bill and the Care Bill, where noble Lords were very keen, as were the Government, to take forward better integration and working together across these areas. Noble Lords who have just come from the Care Bill will be extremely well aware of how the Government have sought to take this forward, addressing how people have so often fallen between the cracks. This, too, is part of the attempt to ensure that those with special educational needs are better supported and that the authorities responsible for them work more closely together.
These clauses seek to tackle those issues head on. The integration duty sits alongside duties for a local authority and its local partners to co-operate with each other. I remember extremely clearly, as other noble Lords no doubt will, how integration, as debated in the Health Bill, had to be part of the new arrangements for the health service. This echoes much of that. It links closely to the joint commissioning clause that provides the statutory framework to enable partners to work together effectively to deliver a better experience for the child or young person and their families, and support improved outcomes. Joint commissioning sets out the framework for key elements, such as the local offer, education, health and care plan assessments, and personal budgets. It seeks to improve both the working relationships between local authorities and health bodies, and the provision to children and young people with special educational needs. It requires the local authority and health bodies to establish clear procedures for making decisions and, in particular, to agree what support is needed locally and which agency will deliver it. Crucially, they must agree how they will resolve disputes between partners, as well as how they will deal collectively with complaints concerning education, health and care provision.
The new draft SEN code of practice’s chapter on joint commissioning has developed a great deal, and I hope it may help to reassure noble Lords to know that it puts great store on the importance of making decisions in joint commissioning arrangements—an issue to which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has just referred. It specifies that the arrangements should be robust enough to ensure that all partners are clear about who is responsible for what, who the decision-makers are across education, health and care and how partners will hold each other to account where there is a dispute. It recognises the importance of getting elected members and chief executives across education, health and social care on board, and recommends that the arrangements for children and young people with SEN should be specifically accountable to councillors and senior commissioners. It recognises that local accountability can take the form of a programme board, acting as a bridge between the local authority’s education and social care leadership and health partners.
It also reflects that health bodies must work with the local authority in commissioning integrated, personalised services and designing the local offer, including ensuring that relevant contracts with providers reflect the needs of the local population. Local authorities, clinical commissioning groups and NHS England should develop effective ways of harnessing the views of their local communities so that commissioning decisions on services for those with SEN are shaped by people’s experiences and aspirations. The dovetailing of the SEN reform clauses with the NHS reforms is central. The NHS mandate requires clinical commissioning groups to consider the needs of children and young people with SEN and disabilities, so we see immediately the crossover. The Health and Social Care Act reforms require local authorities and clinical commissioning groups to participate in the health and well-being board and to produce a joint strategic needs assessment and a joint health and well-being strategy that sets out how local needs will be met. So the needs are to be identified, and plans have to be put in place as to how they are met.
The health and well-being board has a duty—and I well remember it—to encourage integrated working. For the purpose of advancing the health and well-being of the people in its area, it must encourage people who arrange for the provision of health or social care services in the area to work in an integrated manner. As I said, the Care Bill has been taking that further forward and making it a reality. I hope that that context helps when looking at how we are trying to tackle the needs of these particularly vulnerable children.
I heard what my noble friend Lady Sharp said about the probing nature of her amendment. As ever, she probes extremely effectively. She is seeking to explore how these new arrangements will work in practice, and obviously she is absolutely right to do that.
My noble friend wondered whether SENCOs would have too much on their plate. Since 2009, the Government have funded more than 10,000 new SENCOs to study for the National Award for SEN Coordination. We will support a further 800 places in 2013-14 and this will help them in their important role in linking with other agencies, such as health and social care. I hope that that helps to take this matter forward.
Many of the amendments in this group reflect an apparent desire to puts lots of detail in the Bill. This is an argument with which everyone here will be very familiar—whether it is necessary to specify certain things in the Bill in order to make sure that certain things happen. I am sure that we are all seeking to go in the same direction, which is to achieve what the Bill sets out to do. From noble Lords’ probing as to whether it is going to be delivered by the Bill as it is, I certainly sense that there is agreement on that.
However, noble Lords will also be familiar with the fact that if you specify in great detail in a Bill, you can inadvertently exclude things that you have not included. That is why there is always discussion about what happens in guidance and secondary legislation and so on, and that is why I am so pleased that we have the SEN guidance. It is comprehensive and, I hope, addresses a number of issues that noble Lords are concerned about. From that guidance, your Lordships can see how the Bill translates into what we intend in practice.
As noble Lords will appreciate, we feel that there is a danger that if too much is specified in the Bill, that will then hinder the kind of flexibility that may also be required at a local level. Noble Lords who heard the pathfinder organisations, which came to address us the other day, probably share my feeling that the often very imaginative and creative ways in which they were going about their work and the way they were working with other organisations in their local areas to address the needs of the children were very impressive. One would not wish to do anything that stifled that. One would wish to support them in taking that forward. The aims of what one is seeking to achieve and the details being spelt out in the guidance—
Baroness Northover
I hear what the noble Baroness says, and she speaks from a great deal of experience. That is the kind of challenge that has led to us trying to move forward across the board on SEN to ensure that what is provided for children is more uniform and more joined up. If need be, I will write with more detail in response to her but, as I said, what the pathfinders were saying was encouraging. They said that they would link up with those who came after to try to spread best practice. As noble Lords have said, it is often what happens in practice on the ground that may be wanting.
That links up with an issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about how families might hold their local authority and CCGs to account for having arrangements for joint commissioning in place. Ultimately, families could take out a judicial review, but we believe that there are other, more effective ways to hold local bodies to account through local complaints procedures and through NHS England, which will review how CCGs are fulfilling their duties under the NHS mandate. I remind noble Lords that the NHS mandate refers specifically to children and young people with SEN. Therefore, there are those novel routes. That is a new lever.
As the services that result from joint commissioning arrangements will be reflected in the local offer through direct involvement in developing and reviewing it, we hope that that will bring about the opportunity to improve things in the way that both noble Baronesses seek.
Returning to my script, as opposed to my thoughts, Clause 26 requires local authorities and CCGs to keep the arrangements under review, so that service provision will evolve over time and continue to meet the needs of the community that it serves. I have spoken about the pluses and minuses of putting duties in the Bill.
I also note that service providers must take responsibility themselves for how they best use their resources to provide services for children and young people with SEN. I was struck by what the pathfinders said about how often that meant finding a cost-effective way to do that. It was not necessarily the case that working together was more costly. That was interesting to hear.
The final paragraph in Amendment 86 highlights the importance of key workers, which is something that we support and have specifically included in the code of practice. Chapter 3 makes clear that the kind of support that local authorities should offer children, their parents and young people should include key work and support, such as individual casework and informal advocacy, support in attending meetings or contributing to assessment and reviews, and participating in decisions about outcomes.
There was reference to how the NHS provides services and how that might mesh. The fundamental principle of the NHS is that provision should meet reasonably required needs. We have to be careful. There is a wide understanding, certainly among noble Lords, as to why that is the case and why, for example, the previous Government set up NICE to assess treatments and to work out what was effective. An NHS that was free at point of need, universal and comprehensive had to make sure that what it was providing to the population made sense and that clinicians would agree as to what was an effective treatment and so on. All of that is built into the way the NHS has always operated. We therefore have to be careful that we do not inadvertently seek to change that fundamental principle of provision to meet the reasonably required need.
The CCG has a statutory duty to provide services to meet the reasonable needs of those for whom it is responsible. We have a good understanding of that. We may challenge it around the edges, but we do have an understanding of it. It must act consistently with the NHS mandate—
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I am sorry to intervene but the point of raising my concern is that, in many areas, speech and language therapy has not traditionally been accorded the impetus that has been required by the NHS. I welcome the talk about health and well-being boards. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier in the debate, because they are the bodies that are in touch with all people from nought to 25, I hope that they will have a role and that it will evolve. Accepting the way in which the NHS operates, I hope that in future it will take account of speech and language therapy needs because of its increasing importance for our children today.
Baroness Northover
The noble Lord made a very cogent case before and my noble friend was sympathetic to what he said. It will always be the case that, at any one time, there will be debate as to what is essential, what ought to be provided and what will best help children or any member of the population, and, therefore, debate about what the NHS or any other provision ought to cover. As I said, the noble Lord made a cogent case and my noble friend responded sympathetically, so it is a matter of let us watch this space. As I have mentioned, the NHS mandate includes a specific objective that children and young people with SEN have access to the services set out in their care plans. I hope that is reassuring.
I have referred to pathfinders and the wording in the clause reflects the fact that the parties involved are expected to follow the arrangements made unless there is good reason to depart from them. Allowing that flexibility will enable partnerships to adapt to accommodate unique circumstances or changing priorities locally which the arrangements may not have anticipated.
Noble Lords may be anxious that this flexibility could mean that partners have to have only some of the arrangements in place before achieving any agreement. I hope I can reassure noble Lords that this is not the case and is certainly not the legal effect of these provisions. Clause 26(4) makes it clear that these partnerships have the clear function of securing the care that children with SEN need. Therefore they must be able to agree a clear course of action in every case. This point is backed up by the new draft SEN code of practice.
There may be other elements that I need to address. I turn to the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made about transparency. We certainly agree with her point about needing transparency for parents but we do not think that we should replicate other legislation in the Bill. I am sure she will be disappointed about that. The place to bring this together, we feel, is in the code of practice, and that is what we have sought to do. Again, that is something that comes up in legislation all the time: should we make reference to previous Acts or should we include it in the new Bill? We feel that the draft code of practice helps to bring everything together very clearly, and I hope that she will accept that.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, in noting the antics in the other place following the non-inclusion in the gracious Speech of a possible referendum on Europe, I am confident that they will not be repeated in this House if my contribution is devoted to the surprising absence of another issue. Before I come to that, as a vice-chairman of the Chagos Islands all-party group I agree with everything that will be said by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on the Chagossian return. As a former soldier, I express my surprise at the words in the Speech that,
“my Government ... will support ... the opening of a peace process in Afghanistan”.—[Official Report, 8/5/13; col. 3.]
That made me wonder what the Government think our Armed Forces have been doing in that troubled country since 2001. On the subject of Afghanistan, I associate myself completely with the sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, about interpreters.
However, the omission that most surprised me was the future of our nuclear deterrent, bearing in mind the alleged imminent publication of the Government’s Trident alternatives study. It is true that the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, when summing up my debate on nuclear disarmament on 24 January, told the House that the purpose of that study was to help the Liberal Democrats make the case for alternatives to the current continuous-at-sea deterrent, but I submit that far from merely being a matter of internal coalition politics, the question of whether a weapon system of the potency of Trident is the minimum credible deterrent that the nation requires to maintain ought to be discussed and debated in both Houses. That debate needs to be wide-ranging because of the number of questions about the ability of a system designed to meet yesterday’s criteria to satisfy those of today and tomorrow.
The need for such a debate was confirmed by a recent exchange of letters in the Times following the statement by the Prime Minister on 3 April that, in his judgment, North Korea’s unveiling of a long-range ballistic missile, with a nuclear warhead that it claimed could reach the whole of the United States, affected the whole of Europe, making it foolish to leave Britain defenceless against a continuous and growing nuclear threat. The very mention of the alleged threat from that North Korean missile reminded me of the 45-minute nonsense over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Immediately, General Sir Hugh Beach, a former Master-General of the Ordnance, wrote that no country on earth was less vulnerable to North Korean nuclear blackmail than the United Kingdom, and that, like it or not, the Trident missile, in British hands but supplied by America, was unusable without American support. His arguments were summarily dismissed by the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, on the grounds that the independence of our continuous-at-sea deterrent was not just technical but absolute, and that it would be reckless to abandon our ultimate insurance against threats that cannot be predicted from countries yet to be identified.
That prompted my noble and gallant friend, Lord Bramall, to write that the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord West, reminded him of the senior general who, after World War 1, said that there would always be a place for the horse on the battlefield, particularly if wellbred. Although the nuclear deterrent served both sides well in the Cold War, the reality today is that it does not, and cannot, deter any credible threats likely to be faced by this or any other European country; nor, in a highly globalised and interlocking world, could a weapon with the destructive power of Trident conceivably be used, even in retribution. For us, he said, nuclear weapons are superfluous and now redundant, and the sooner a Trident replacement is removed from the Treasury’s overload, the better.
My final quotations from that exchange are from two other retired admirals, with whom I fully agree. Vice-Admiral Jungius suggested that,
“whether or not the UK should continue to have a nuclear deterrent is primarily a political decision”.
Rear-Admiral Middleton wrote that,
“in the next few years a combination of smart delivery systems … together with cyberwarfare programmes ... will be able to provide a national deterrent that is demonstrable, effective, selective, non-lethal and cheap”.
In other words, the cost of our nuclear deterrent should not be borne by the defence budget, and our present deterrent is not only unusable but at best obsolescent when set against emerging technologies.
Two other aspects must be considered when determining whether a weapon system with the potency of Trident is the most appropriate minimum credible deterrent. The first is cyber, which presents a far greater threat to the economic, political and social life of a country than Trident, suggesting that cyberdefence should be at the top of any national defence priority list, and, to be credible, any proposed deterrent must be cyberproof, putting a question mark against Trident, as the noble Lord, Lord Reid, has advised. Secondly, not least on moral grounds, account must be taken of the devastating effects of the use of nuclear weapons on our climate.
All that is in the context of two other climates, both of which must be considered by those responsible for reaching a conclusion on an issue of such long-term national importance. The first is the continued efforts to achieve international multilateral disarmament, in line with President Obama’s commitment to ultimate zero. There is no time to discuss the present state of negotiations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, or the continually frustrated attempts to establish a weapons of mass destruction free-zone in the Middle East. Although I am glad that we are contributing to these negotiations, I fear that questions arising from our continued reliance on Cold War logic have unintended consequences on the credibility of that contribution.
First, does our proposed replacement of one unusable system, designed to take out Moscow by another with the same capability, increase or reduce our right to prevent other countries from advancing their nuclear ambitions? Secondly, does not the presumption that war was deterred and peace maintained during the Cold War by uncertainty over whether either side would use their nuclear weapons suggest that if the same logic was applied to the Middle East, war would be better deterred and peace better maintained by allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon to balance Israel’s?
Finally, of course, there is the current economic climate. Here I remind the House of the two definitions of affordability: can you afford something, or can you afford to give up what you have to give up in order to afford something? I submit that the latter must be applied ruthlessly when considering conventional shortfalls such as those mentioned by my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig and the noble Lord, Lord West, and when considering whether we can afford to buy more well bred nuclear horses, unsuitable for use on post-Cold War battlefields.
Inevitably, in eight minutes, one can only scratch the surface of an issue as important as this. Having expressed my surprise that this was not included in the gracious Speech, I sincerely hope that the Government will make that omission good by allowing noble Lords time to prepare and make their contributions to a full debate, in government time, after the publication of the Trident alternatives study.
Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
“Community supervision requirement for offenders aged 18 to 25
(1) In section 177 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, after paragraph (l) insert—
“(la) in a case where the offender is aged 18 or over and under 25, an intensive community supervision requirement,”.(2) The court if it makes a community order which imposes an activity requirement, may specify in relation to that requirement a number of days which is more than 90 but not more than 180.
(3) An activity requirement made under subsection (2) is referred to in this Part as an “intensive community supervision requirement”.
(4) A community order which imposes an intensive community supervision requirement must also impose—
(a) a supervision requirement, and(b) a curfew requirement (and accordingly, if so required, an electronic monitoring requirement).(5) A community order which imposes an intensive community supervision requirement (and other requirements in accordance with subsection (4)) is referred to in this Part as “a community order with intensive community supervision” (whether or not it also imposes any other requirement).”
Lord Ramsbotham
Since my noble friend Lord Adebowale is not in his place and as I have my name to the amendment, I hope that I may say what I was going to say anyway in support of it. This amendment and the two following amendments to which I shall be speaking, Amendments 177B and 177C, refer to a group of offenders who traditionally have been disregarded for too long, certainly as far as the Prison Service is concerned: namely, those who are over the age of 18, and therefore no longer children, and those in the young adult group who are aged either 21 or 25. That latter age occurs increasingly in people’s thoughts. My noble friend proposes that a community supervision requirement for offenders aged 18 to 25 should be earnestly considered.
In 1997, when I was Chief Inspector of Prisons, I conducted a thematic review, which I entitled Young Prisoners, because I was enormously concerned that prisoners in this age group were simply not being looked after, particularly in view of the arrival of the Youth Justice Board. The Youth Justice Board was successful because it laid down conditions for the treatment of children in custody and in the community. However, in custody, in what were called split sites, where there were people between the ages of 15 and 18 and 18 and 21, the facilities were not sufficient to provide adequate support for both groups. However, to honour the requirements of the contracts laid down by the Youth Justice Board, the Prison Service made the facilities available first for the use of children and then what was left was available for young offenders aged 18 to 21. Unfortunately, this meant that very little provision was left in many places—little educational and employment provision and little use of gym facilities. In particular, given the demands of the Children Act, staff were not available to do much with these prisoners and far too many of them spent all their time in their cells doing nothing.
I advocated three things in 1997. My report states:
“While there is a policy section, no one in the Prison Service has operational responsibility for young people: consequently there is an absence of overall vision and leadership in the development of regimes to challenge criminal attitudes and behaviour and prepare young offenders for a future free from offending”.
The report also states:
“Young adults should be separately managed by a reshaped organisation within the Prison Service which should be led and managed by a Director of Young Prisoners accountable to the Director General for all establishments or parts of establishments holding young adults”,
and that:
“Units holding young adult prisoners should have performance criteria related to specific outcomes for young prisoners, some of which should be shared with other Criminal Justice and community agencies”.
Unfortunately, absolutely nothing has happened. There is still a policy branch in NOMS, but there is no one responsible and accountable for these people. That applies in NOMS, and therefore, more worryingly, both to prison and probation. There is no one responsible and accountable for seeing that proper programmes are designed for this group.
Lord Ramsbotham
“( ) In section 16(1) of the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 (duty or power to refer certain young offenders to youth offender panels) for “18” substitute “21”.”
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 177C. These amendments are complementary to Amendment 177AA because they refer to the group called young adults. In this connection, I remind the House that on many occasions I have said in other debates that the trouble with the criminal justice system is that the Ministry of Justice simply does not know the cost of imprisonment or probation. That is not to say that it does not know how much money is given to it for prison and probation, but it does not know how much money is needed to do the things that it says it wants to do with and for offenders. Until it knows how much money it needs to do with and for, it cannot know how much it does not have and therefore what it cannot do, and therefore what it needs to ask for in order for it to be able to do more.
This is something that always amazed me from the moment I went into the Home Office in 1995 because every year in the Ministry of Defence we used to go through what was called a basket-weaving exercise. We would be asked to cost the White Paper or whatever targets we had been given. We did that. Inevitably it came up that more money was needed to do what we had to do than we have been given, so the Ministers were asked to go and try to get more money out of the Treasury. They never did, so we then had to go through what we called a basket-weaving exercise, where you put what you had to do into “desirable”, “essential” and “nice to have” baskets. Then you went to the Ministers and said, “Look, here are the implications of not having enough money. What are we not to do?”, and then it was up to the Ministers to make the decision.
I thought, naively, when I went into the Home Office in 1995 and heard people saying there was not enough money, that this is what would have happened and the Ministers would therefore know what they could not do and what they needed to ask for. Nobody knew—nobody knows now. There is all this talk about not having enough resources—we do not actually know how many resources we have got to apply to which because we have not done the total sum. This is something that needs to be done in order to get discipline into the system. But that is by the way.
I welcome the reforms in Clause 73 that give flexibility to the courts in their response to individual offences and encourage specific support needed to reform a child’s behaviour. But that is talking about children. The purpose of these amendments is to extend this approach to young adults by requiring the Probation Service to replicate the work of youth offending teams with children in what are called referral orders. The figures suggest that these referral orders for children, which encompass a restorative justice approach within a community setting and have been available to sentencers since 2002, have the lowest reoffending rates of all juvenile court-imposed sentences. One-half of those given a custodial sentence reoffend within one year, and two-thirds within two, but the rate for referral orders is 37 per cent—not great, but a great deal less than that for custodial sentences.
The Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 made provision for referral orders except for offences so serious that they merited custodial sentences or so minor that they merited only a fine or an absolute discharge. This ruling was amended by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, which laid down that referral orders must be imposed when children aged 10 to 17 plead guilty to an offence that is punishable with imprisonment but have not been previously been convicted of an offence. That refers to first-time offenders as children. Orders may also be imposed when an offender who is pleading guilty has already been convicted of another offence, or where a youth offending team recommends that a second referral order may be beneficial. That provided some flexibility in the system.
Courts determine the length of orders, which may be between three and 12 months, extendable for a further three, and under them children are referred to a youth offending panel of two volunteers representing the local community and an experienced youth offending team worker. The panel reviews offences and their consequences with the offender and his or her parents. Following that, the offender signs a contract, which can be varied according to circumstances but which has two core elements: first, reparation or restoration to the victim or the wider community; secondly, a programme of interventions that are designed to address the risk of reoffending.
The panel monitors the compliance of the offender and if at the end of the referral period the contract has been successfully completed, the conviction is declared spent. If, however, offenders are unwilling to agree a contract, or fail to comply with it, they are referred back to the court, which may revoke the order and impose an alternative sentence. Youth offending teams are required to provide regular reports on the operation of referral orders to judges, magistrates and their legal advisers. That process underlies some of the other things about which we have been talking because they provide flexibility and the ability to relate what is going on to the needs and problems of the particular offender.
Along with many others, I believe that the time is now right to build on this proven success and to extend referral orders to 18 to 20 year-olds or possibly even 18 to 25 year-olds in line with what my noble friend Lord Adebowale has just proposed. If this is accepted, a decision will have to be made as to who is to lead the panels. At present, the remit of youth offending teams covers children only up to the age of 18. Speaking to the chairman of the Youth Justice Board, I know that she would not be happy for the remit to be extended to the older group because the youth offending teams have to look after children down to the age of 10. Therefore, it seems absolutely natural that this responsibility should be passed to the probation service, which takes on the responsibility at the age of 18, and probation trusts, which is what I favour because they are the people who have the financial responsibility for this age group.
However, given the very high reoffending rates in this group, I believe that there are very strong grounds for requiring the probation service—I mean requiring it—to deliver more targeted interventions for young adult offenders and referral orders seem to be a very strong model to follow. Until now, the probation service has not had a strong portfolio of programmes suited to this group, which is one of the contributors to its very high reoffending rate. I beg to move.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I thank all those who have contributed. The noble Baroness has encouraged remembrance of a phrase that I have ringing in my brain, though I cannot remember from how long ago: “There is no such word as can’t”. I feel that that there is no such word in this connection. I hope in raising this amendment that I have accentuated the need to look at this age group. I deliberately said that I saw no reason why it could not be extended to 18 to 25 as opposed to 18 to 21 because there has been a debate about this for a long time. It is time that that was ended.
Young adults ought to be categorised, stopping at either 21 or 25, but not going on with the lack of clarity which means that no arrangements are made for the group that really needs help, either as adults or as young adults. That is why I go back to the fact that until and unless someone is made responsible for doing that, nothing will happen. I appeal to the Minister to think very closely about appointing somebody to do it. I hope that they will then lead a debate in which I know that all noble Lords who have spoken here and many others would be very willing to co-operate. This is too serious an issue to allow to go by default. I hope that we may have a discussion about this before Report. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Dholakia
My Lords, I am delighted to lend my support to this amendment. I am in good and powerful company: the amendment is promoted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, and has the blessing of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool. Let me not exclude my noble friend Lord McNally; he and I have had numerous discussions on this matter and he has left me in no doubt that restorative justice is an essential element of the criminal justice system. The question is what procedure we adopt.
The case for restorative justice is on the Government’s agenda and its success cannot be disputed. We now need to provide the machinery which will enable retrospective justice to be set up on a clear statutory footing and give criminal justice agencies the impetus to refer cases. This is the clearest finding of the evaluation project undertaken by the University of Sheffield for the Government. We also know that victim participation rates were extremely high, with up to 77 per cent of victim participation cases involving adult offenders and up to 89 per cent of cases involving young offenders. The Government have often proclaimed that victims must be at the centre of the restorative justice process, and that is precisely what happens.
My noble friend Lord McNally has been very sympathetic in various meetings with groups operating in the criminal justice field. We now have a former Lord Chief Justice and a former Home Secretary, with their vast experience in such matters, getting together to amend the Bill by introducing a provision to enable criminal justice agencies to offer restorative justice to victims pre-sentence when the offender pleads guilty at the first appearance. The process allows victims to participate in face-to-face meetings with offenders, thus bringing closure to their fears and trauma. Victims show satisfaction but, most importantly, the frequency of reoffending is reduced.
Let me declare an interest: I said earlier that I chaired the Magistrates’ Association commission on the future of summary justice, and our report will be out soon. We took evidence from across many parts of the country, and participants included offenders and victims. In almost all cases, victim satisfaction was highlighted. The chairman of the Magistrates’ Association, John Fassenfelt, said that he has seen impressive evidence of victim satisfaction with restorative justice when it is organised to a high-quality standard and the insights it gives to offenders into the consequences of their offending. He said that if Parliament approves the amendment, the magistrates will be able to rely on probation to propose the most suitable cases, but the courts will only make the final decision to proceed if they are satisfied that it is in the interests of justice and in accordance with the wishes of the victim.
Research studies point to the international dimension, and cases in Australia and the United States, like those in Britain, delivered very high victim satisfaction accompanied by a reduction in reoffending.
Using the Ministry of Justice’s own data, there are potential cost savings, based on 70,000 cases, of £185 million over two years. In the present economic climate, this is something that we cannot ignore. It is value for money, as it saves £9 for every £1 spent. I fully support the amendment.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I support these amendments but have one cautionary tale for the Government. Before that, I echo the words of my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf towards the end of his speech, when he said that restorative justice is not for everyone. This I remember being made very clear to me some 15 years ago when I was introduced to restorative justice by Sir Charles Pollard, then the chief constable of Thames Valley Police, to whom all those interested in restorative justice owe a huge debt of gratitude for the determination with which he has followed it.
Not long ago, he asked me whether I would like to attend a restorative justice conference at HMP Pentonville, which was extremely ably chaired by a young policeman. The case involved three young women whose flat had been burgled by a young and chaotic man to fuel his heroin habit. During the early part of the conference it was discovered that this young man had been born of a teenage mother and had three young children himself by teenage mothers. He could not read and had an alcohol problem. The girls explained why they felt so strongly about their flat being burgled and everyone was in tears. The agreement was that the young man should be put through a drug treatment course, taught to read and put on an Alcoholics Anonymous course. As he left, and there was a spirit of hope in the room, one of the young women said to him, “Furthermore, will you write to us every month to tell us how you’re getting on?”, which I thought was an extremely good addition. They left in a spirit of hope and I then said to the governor of Pentonville, who was there, “How much of that can you deliver?”. He said, “None”. I said, “How dare you let those people go? Unless you can support what is being recommended, all the hope engendered by this process is dead”.
Therefore, if, as I hope, the Government accept these amendments, I hope they will add the rider that those who are responsible for staging the conferences and seeing that they happen must make certain that what is agreed actually happens, so that the whole process is not undermined.
Lord Carlile of Berriew
My Lords, bearing in mind the cautionary tale of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, I nevertheless, like him, strongly support these amendments. First, these amendments seem to suggest practical effectiveness. Most of the crimes that we are concerned with in this general purview are committed by immature young men. The evidence for restorative justice is that it gives them a sharp wake-up call and makes a dramatic contribution to their growing-up process, which is a very good reason to use restorative justice techniques.
Secondly, restorative justice of the type that has been discussed is cost-effective. From my experience of practice, I can imagine many marginal custody situations of a kind that come before magistrates’ courts and the Crown Court every day of the week—common burglary, criminal damage, lower-level assaults and other offences at a similar level—in which effective restorative justice conferences might mean the difference between custody and a community penalty, and result in a substantial saving of money to the state.
Thirdly, I strongly support the view of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that this should be put into statutory form. I have a feeling that we might hear that it is not necessary to do so because it is, after all, open to judges and magistrates to adjourn cases for good reasons in any event. However, placing this in statutory form will have a number of effects. Although judges try very hard not to make law whenever possible, they try even harder to respond to the law that has been given to them. If they see this kind of provision in statutory form, it will have certain—and I mean certain—repercussions. One is that the training of magistrates, from which the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, gave us some graphic illustrations earlier, will undoubtedly place greater focus on restorative justice.
Those of us who from time to time attend what used to be called the Judicial Studies Board, which is now called the Judicial College, know that immediately the Judicial College, in its search for new and interesting courses, introduces new modules on restorative justice because it is included in statute, there will not be a judge in England and Wales—magistrate or judge at every level—who does not begin to focus on the potential of restorative justice conferences and opportunities. It seems to me that the key to this measure in many ways is putting it into statutory form, as that would highlight its potential throughout the judiciary. I hope that we will hear my noble friend the Minister responding in a way that not only is positive about restorative justice—we know that he will be positive—but that recognises the advantages of putting it into the statutory form suggested.
Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 3 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, Amendment 176ZZA deals with hate crime. Hate crime is abhorrent and the criminal justice system should be seen to treat it severely. We want to ensure that offenders should be in no doubt that they will face more serious penalties for this type of crime. The effect of this government amendment is to add “transgender identity” to Section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which provides for the sentence to be aggravated where the offender demonstrates hostility towards the victim on the basis of a specified personal characteristic. Currently, Section 146 applies to hostility based on the victim’s,
“sexual orientation (or presumed sexual orientation) … or … disability (or presumed disability)”.
Section 145 makes similar provision in relation to hostility based on the victim’s race or religion. In addition, the amendment adds references to transgender identity and disability to paragraph 5 of Schedule 21, so that murders aggravated on the basis of hostility towards the victim on those grounds will attract a 30-year starting point.
The amendments are straightforward but I should be clear that “transgender” is an umbrella term that includes, but is not restricted to, being transsexual. It will be for the courts to determine in individual cases whether or not the words or behaviour of the offender constitute hostility based on the victim’s transgender identity or presumed transgender identity.
The Government consider that all five monitored strands of hate crime should be treated equally under these particular provisions. This sends a strong message and should, I hope, give more confidence to victims in reporting these dreadful crimes. I beg to move.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, some of the saddest cases that I found in prisons when I was inspecting them were of people suffering from gender dysphoria, who were hoping to be able to change their gender while in prison. This imposed great difficulties on the prisons in which these people were because the facilities were not there to cope with them while they were going through that change. At the same time they faced considerable hostility; indeed, the hate crime that is mentioned in this amendment applies also to the attitude that other prisoners use towards these people in prison. If this is enacted as part of the Bill, will adjustments be made to prison regulations to allow action to be taken against those who show such hatred towards people suffering from gender dysphoria while in prison?
Lord Judd
My Lords, I am very glad to have been able to add my name to these amendments, and would like to say how much I admire the work of the noble Baroness. It is not simply the utterly sensible amendments that she brings to our deliberations, but all the work she does to follow up what she is arguing for in this House. Of course, that is a two-way process, because it also means that when we listen to her, we listen not just to the voice of theory but to the voice of experience and practical engagement. That is a special asset to have in our deliberations.
Punishment is the easy bit. Of course crime must be punished—there is no argument about that—but in a sane society in which reason prevails, the greater challenge is how lives are rebuilt and how, as I said in argument on a previous amendment, we can enable people to become positive citizens contributing to the well-being of society, as distinct from indulging in delinquent behaviour. That is the real challenge. If that is to be done well, it means that those individuals have to be looked at as individuals.
I remember talking to a chief superintendent of police who was just about to retire when I was president of the YMCA and he was a prominent and active member of the YMCA in Britain. It was a private conversation, so I hope that he will not mind my relaying what he said. He said: “You know, it is a very lonely moment when you are sentenced. Some people respond with more bravado, but the overwhelming majority at that moment feel very lonely. I have always felt that where we get it wrong in our penal policy is that that is the very moment when someone should be there at the elbow of the person concerned saying, ‘Isn’t this a terrible mess? How are we going to sort it out and try to make some sense of this situation?’”.
What the noble Baroness said was not only emotionally powerful—there is no harm in emotion of the kind she was displaying in her remarks today; it is very healthy, and the passion which she feels for these issues is a great challenge to us all—but so important. So many of the people with whom the penal system is dealing have not had proper relationships, have not had people who cared, have not had families able to cope with or relate to them in their situation. There is a desperate need, as I have said in other debates in this House, for someone to take the hand of the person concerned and walk with them through the experience back into full rehabilitation in society, back into the job to which the noble Baroness referred, which is so central.
If that is the case, if we are asking magistrates and others to function on our behalf to tackle those issues, it is imperative that we do everything we can to ensure that magistrates know of all the possibilities which can be considered for the individual in front of them. To have a limited range of possibilities, or not to be very much aware of the range of possibilities, is disastrous because it means that we are not taking seriously the issue of rehabilitation.
On the issue of short sentences, I remember on a visit to a prison—in fact, it has happened more than once in conversation with prison officers—the prison officers themselves saying what nonsense it was and asking: “What on earth are we expected to achieve with these young people? How on earth is this helping them? They are going through a more disruptive experience. They are being taken further away from society and the chance to start rebuilding their lives in detention. What are we doing? What are we expected to be administering on behalf of society?”. If it is a matter to be dealt with by some by awarding a short sentence, there must be other means available which are more constructive and intelligent.
I conclude what I want to say in support of the noble Baroness by repeating something which has been said in debates before but which it is not possible to repeat too often. On the door of every cell should be “Rehabilitation?”—with a question mark after it—because, if we are not achieving rehabilitation, what are we doing? We are losing an individual, and we are almost inevitably ensuring future costs for society not only in terms of reoffending but in terms of the cost of dealing with the consequences of that reoffending, with further spells in prison or whatever. I believe that in the whole culture of our penal system and in the culture of the professions that administer our penal system there should be a passionate commitment to achieving at all costs, wherever possible, the rehabilitation of offenders. That is why these amendments tabled by the noble Baroness are so right. They make economic and social sense, and I hope that they also make sense when we think about what the values of a decent and civilised society should be. I hope that we care about the individual.
This morning in my old constituency of Portsmouth, where Dickens was born, I attended a ceremony to mark his 200th birthday. During the service in the great St Mary’s Church in Portsmouth, which was part of the ceremony, I was startled to hear a piece by Dickens himself on the application of Christian values. I had not read it before, to my shame, but I commend it to Members of this House. With his social commitment and understanding, and his brilliance in setting out the issues with which society is confronted, as well as its responsibilities to put them right, Dickens speaks directly about the whole principle that, if we call ourselves Christians, we must commit ourselves to caring not simply for the victim—although of course the victim matters—but for the offender, with a commitment to enabling the offender to sort out his or her life.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I, too, have added my name to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater. At the outset, I echo the tributes paid to her by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and at the same time I pay tribute to the noble Lord for the passion and compassion that he always brings to debates on these subjects.
On Amendment 176ZAA, I have long thought that the provision of sentences with prospectuses of what the prison and probation services can and cannot do for offenders would serve a very useful purpose for the whole of the management system, and therefore I should like to widen the amendment slightly to include the Prison Service. While the noble Baroness was speaking, I could not help reflecting that for the first 100 years of its existence the probation service worked very closely with the courts and the police. It is only in recent years that it has been made subordinate to prisons, and that, to my mind, has given the wrong emphasis.
Everything that the noble Baroness said about Rethinking Crime and Punishment I share, because I had the great privilege of being a member of the initiative’s steering group. I entirely endorse everything that she said about the place of the community sentence. However, perhaps I may refer to the prospectuses. First and most obviously, they tell sentencers what is or is not possible and how long that might take to be achieved, because there is no point in somebody embarking on a course which cannot be completed during the sentence.
Of course, there is a danger that, as a result, some sentencers might award sentences that are longer than normal in order to complete a behaviour programme. I believe that that is a fault in the right direction, not least because the present practice of awarding sentences that are too short for the completion of any meaningful remedial action is wasteful of both time and money. As a side-effect, the provision of such a practice might also encourage the adoption of what happens in some Scandinavian countries where, at the time of sentence, the sentencer lays down what course of programmes a prisoner has to complete during that sentence. If these are satisfactorily completed before the end of the period of the sentence, the governor of the prison can take the prisoner back to the sentencer and ask for earlier release on the grounds that the conditions laid down have been met. Prisoners can then be released on licence, which saves prison time, space and money.
The second side-effect would be to force the prison and probation services to cost and plan all their offending behaviour and other courses. Knowing how many courses and programmes are required to meet the need of sentencers would for the first time give some indication of the actual shortfall in the current provision. What is more, it would allow individual prisons to be made responsible for conducting certain courses in particular geographical areas rather than the current inefficient system in which individual governors are not bound to carry on from where their predecessors left off—remarkably, and expensively, they are left to decide how they will satisfy particular targets and performance indicators, which may have no relation to overall need and involve the cancellation of programmes initiated by their predecessors. In other words, knowing what has to be done and by when would at last allow some certainty and stability to be applied to the role of each and every prison. I do not want to say more, or to say more about short sentences, except to echo everything that the noble Baroness said. The figures prove how much cheaper community sentences are.
Actually, there is another side-effect because if it was accepted that community sentences were to be the norm—the default position—and the short sentence the opposite, improvements on the provision of the community sentence would be forced, in order to give the public confidence that that is worth while. That links with Amendment 176A because I believe that the prospectus of what can be done in those community sentences is just as important as what is done in custody.
Lord Ramsbotham
“(c) omit sub-paragraph (c)”
Lord Ramsbotham
I shall be very brief. Sub-paragraph (1)(c) of Paragraph 9 of Schedule 8 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003, to which these two amendments refer, allows a court to sentence an offender to custody for breach of a community order even though the original sentence was non-imprisonable. Figures published in 2009 show that 3,996 people were received into prison for a breach of such a community sentence—
Lord Bach
This is an important point that the noble Lord is making, but I wonder whether he is right in saying that sub-paragraph (1)(c) refers to being in breach of a community order. It refers to a person who,
“has wilfully and persistently failed to comply”.
It is the difference between those two that is quite important here. I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord so early in what he has to say.
Lord Ramsbotham
I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach. I am speaking about the breach, and I will come to my conclusion if I may. I am not talking about inconsiderable numbers. There is nothing meaningful that can be done in prison to prevent a person from breaching a community order, so what such people are doing merely exacerbates the main problem facing our prisons at considerable expense and to no good effect.
I am very conscious of the problems facing the magistrates. Those problems were very ably set out by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. I refer particularly to the effects of this on the Prison Service ever since the 2003 Act and the increased numbers of people in prison merely for breaching a community order. I personally welcome the flexibility that Clause 63 allows, in that a court dealing with breaches now has new options of taking no action or fining. However, the clause does not provide enough protection for the Prison Service, which is why I am tabling the two amendments, deleting the sub-paragraph and inviting the Minister to consider that the powers to resentence someone to custody for breach should be awarded only if the original sentence was an imprisonable one. I beg to move.
Lord Bach
My Lords, in many of his amendments I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and I hope to do so later this evening, but on my understanding of his argument here I find it difficult to accept the amendment on behalf of the Opposition.
I shall make a general point. This is not a government amendment—but when there are government amendments dealing with a different Act, as in the case of this Bill, where we are amending the Criminal Justice Act 2003, Keeling schedules, which set out what the amended 2003 Act would look like if we passed this legislation, are incredibly helpful. Indeed, when we were in government, the opposition on all sides used to ask us where the Keeling schedules were—and they were often there. In this Bill, later on tonight or whenever we reach the 17th group, there are very helpful Keeling schedules in important government amendments. But they do not exist elsewhere, as far as I can see, although the Minister has been helpful in writing to noble Lords about government amendments. There is a value in having Keeling schedules in that the House can understand what is being amended.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 states:
“If it is proved to the satisfaction of a magistrates' court before which an offender appears or is brought under paragraph 7 that he has failed without reasonable excuse to comply with any of the requirements of the community order, the court must deal with him in respect of the failure in any one of the following ways”.
The Bill changes that “must” to “may”. The following ways include,
“amending the terms of the community order so as to impose more onerous requirements”,
and,
“where the community order was made by a magistrates' court, by dealing with him, for the offence in respect of which the order was made, in any way in which the court could deal with him if he had just been convicted by it of the offence”.
I know that the noble Lord has no objection to those provisions, as amended by this Bill. It is sub-paragraph (1)(c) that his complaint is with. That sub-paragraph is not just about a breach. It refers to,
“where—
(i) the community order was made by a magistrates’ court,
(ii) the offence in respect of which the order was made was not an offence punishable by imprisonment”—
that is the noble Lord’s point. It goes on to refer to,
“(iii) the offender is aged 18 or over, and
(iv) the offender”—
and these are the crucial words—
“has wilfully and persistently failed to comply with the requirements of the order … by dealing with him, in respect of that offence, by imposing a sentence of imprisonment for a term not exceeding”,
six months.
Provided that the Bill reads “may” rather than “must”, I can see nothing wrong with that. The danger is that someone who is given a community service order for an offence for which there is no imprisonment can get away for ever in breaching community service orders to the extent that he wilfully and persistently fails to comply, and the court will never have the power to deprive that person of their liberty. I agree with the Minister’s point from earlier that if community orders are to succeed—we want them to succeed because they are vital—they must be, in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, “robust” community orders. There must be something there, eventually, if someone wilfully and persistently fails to comply with them. It is not just a breach in sub-paragraph (1)(c), but a wilful and persistent failure to comply, which is a step beyond a breach. Clearly, it is more than one breach; one breach would not be enough. Two might be—three might well be. In those circumstances, my case—I may be wrong about this—is that if we agree to these amendments, the result would be that someone who was given a community order for an offence that was not in itself subject to imprisonment could never be sent to prison, however wilfully and persistently he failed to comply with it. On this issue, which I concede is not a major one, I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham.
Baroness Northover
In answer to my noble friend, I expect that it will be necessary that this is in legislation, whereas the implementing would not require further legislation. This is therefore a time to tidy up something which was left untidy.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that response and intrigued with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bach. I am grateful to him for those and for the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. As I rather suspected, this simple amendment has disclosed that there is a need to examine the clarity of the legislation regarding breach, while absolutely accepting the problems faced by magistrates. I very deliberately did not include “wilfully and persistently” regarding a breach, because that was not what I was after. Wilful and persistent was covered deliberately by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, in her contribution.
There is merit in doing this, though; as I said, we are talking about the sentences but we must also consider what is going to happen to the person who has committed the breach and what the impact will be on the prison service. In our overcrowded prisons, there are currently vast numbers of people serving sentences for a breach since the 2003 Act. It was a small number before but it has become large, and there is nothing meaningful that can be done with them. That really is a waste of time and money, accepting that the magistrates have to do something. This should be thought through, which I hope is what the Minister will take away from this short debate. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I put my name to the stand part debate for exactly the reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has outlined. In his letter to us of 12 December, the Minister said that a curfew can be an effective tool in punishing offenders, preventing reoffending and giving respite to victims. At the same time, the National Audit Office said in a report that such curfews were a problem for employment and could pose real barriers to people finding work. That seems to be the antithesis of preventing reoffending through helping people to live purposeful lives.
I have two comments, one about Clause 67 and one about Clause 75. There is a particular problem with women who are disproportionately affected by such increases, especially if they have children. I cannot believe that this has been thought through.
The other people I am particularly concerned about are those with mental health problems. They certainly do not need to be locked up under virtual house arrest—they need the stimulus of company and everything that goes with it. Again, I do not think that extending such a curfew for a year would serve any useful purpose.
I will always remember visiting young offender institutions where the youngsters were locked up all day, and watching what happened when they were let out for an hour at about 6 pm. They were just like puppies, all over each other. The prison staff, who did not know how to handle this, called it assault. It was not—it was the letting off of the adolescent steam which is a normal part of growing up. Locking up youngsters who come from a dysfunctional family, living in a small number of rooms, surrounded by others, for 16 hours a day for a year, is not a civilised way of coping with the problem. It is punishment, punishment, punishment, to the exclusion of civilisation.
The present system, which has a 12-hour curfew lasting six months, is in many ways causing the problems which the National Audit Office has commented on. Therefore, an extension would make things worse. As the noble Baroness said, we are setting these people up to breach the curfew, and then all we will do is make the problem worse. So I beg the Minister seriously to consider this extension and preferably to omit these clauses from the Bill.
Baroness Stern
I support the proposal that the clauses should not stand part of the Bill and the comments of the previous two speakers. Liberty has sent me a very helpful brief which I will be using. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Civil Liberties Trust.
Liberty points out in its brief that the Green Paper which led to this Bill envisaged that if there were tougher community sentences, prison would be used less because those sentences would be used instead. This is indeed a worthy idea, but I point out to the Minister that it is supported by absolutely no evidence whatever. Making community sentences tougher instead of making them more positive, rehabilitative and socially useful, simply adds to the number of such sentences and leads to more failure and imprisonment.
On the extension of curfews, it is hard to envisage a beneficial effect on the normal life of a curfewed person. How can a curfewed person become interested in going to work or jobseeking? How can they become involved in caring for a relative or in some activity which will take them away from crime? A curfew is a very blunt instrument with very little penal value. Has thought been given to the effect on the rest of the family? What will the effect be on the other siblings who may be on the straight and narrow and have to spend all their time in the house with the one member of the family who has been deemed not to be on the straight and narrow? What will be the effect on the family if it is the father who has to stay at home for 16 hours for 12 months? That person may spend his time at home drinking, so what happens to his wife and children? These points apply especially to the impact of curfews on children. Surely this measure will be a real hindrance to normal teenage development. It is hard to envisage anything else.
What is the objective of these clauses in terms of ensuring a more effective criminal justice system? In the other place, the Minister said that they would give courts more flexibility. But the flexibility to increase a curfew from 12 hours to 16 or six months to 12 seems more like punitiveness. If it is to give an impression of toughness, I would counsel the Minister against this. The public will not register the difference between 12 and 16 hours and six and 12 months. As a result, more people will fail and the public will then say, “There you are—he should have gone to prison. These non-custodial sentences never work”.
Finally, it might also be worth bearing in mind the cost. These proposals come with a price tag. In terms of change, rehabilitation, giving up drugs and alcohol and developing a social conscience, they add nothing. There are many better ways of spending money.
Health and Social Care Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Warner
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 79 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who unfortunately cannot be here today, my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. Our purpose is to focus clinical commissioning groups on the needs of the 18 million of our fellow citizens with long-term conditions.
We spend an awful lot of time and money in our healthcare system preoccupied with acute hospital care. Indeed, 50 per cent of NHS expenditure goes on acute hospitals. However, day in, day out, week in, week out, the bulk of NHS activity—some 75 per cent of it—goes on good, bad and indifferent treatments for people with long-term conditions. Of course, some of these people have acute episodes, often because their routine care has been neglected. For example, 10 per cent of NHS expenditure goes on people with diabetes. The number of people being treated with diabetes is rising. We know how best to look after people who suffer with diabetes but too often we neglect basic, routine care and maintenance of the condition, seemingly waiting for the inevitable crisis to occur.
The scale of long-term conditions is, in my view and that of the colleagues who signed this amendment, sufficient to draw particular attention to their needs in the Bill. That is what the first part of Amendment 79 does by adding the words,
“especially persons with long-term conditions”,
to Clause 11 at line 12 on page 7. However, we want to go further. A very high proportion of those with long-term conditions need help, both from the NHS and from adult social care services. That is why the second part of that amendment specifically requires clinical commissioning groups to pay attention to their need to secure improvement in the integration of health and social care in the delivery of services. Of course, we have already had one discussion on integrating health and social care services at the point of delivery, including specifying a definition and I suspect that we shall come back to integration on a number of occasions as the Bill progresses. I shall certainly return to this issue on Report.
In the mean time, I hope we will receive a more constructive response from the Minister to this amendment, placing a clear responsibility on clinical commissioning groups from the outset to focus on securing improvement in the integration of health and social care in the commissioning of services. We need to move from the rhetoric of integration to requiring it to happen in legislation. I beg to move.
Lord Ramsbotham
I wish to speak to Amendment 80. I wonder how many noble Lords are aware of the historic nature of the proposed insertion into the 2006 Act of new Section 3B(1)(c). It is the first time that mention has been made in a Bill of the requirement on the Secretary of State for Health to provide services or facilities for those detained in a prison or in other accommodation of a prescribed description.
When I was appointed Chief Inspector of Prisons in December 1995, I had to give up the chairmanship of Hillingdon Hospital National Health Service Trust because I could not guarantee the time required, but during my chairmanship I was particularly grateful that my extremely able director of mental health insisted that I trained as a lay assessor so that, in his words, I could be of some use to the hospital. What neither of us realised at the time was that he was enabling me to appreciate, at once, the full and avoidable horror of the situation that I found during my first prison inspection of Holloway, during my second week in post. He educated me about both the complex requirements of those suffering from mental health problems and what it was possible to provide for them.
That understanding fuelled my fury at finding that none of what I had been accustomed to at Hillingdon was present in the largest female prison in England in 1995, despite the appalling numbers of women with varying degrees of mental health problems. When I remonstrated about that, I was told that uniquely in the country, prison healthcare was not, and never had been, the responsibility of the NHS but had been retained by the Prison Service. I was then told that the director of prison health, a doctor, was not responsible for the provision of healthcare, merely for advising the prison’s board, which was actually responsible. When I asked how many of the prison’s board had medical experience or qualifications, I was told none.
So I set about trying to change this nonsense, writing a thematic review of the situation in 1996, entitled Patient or Prisoner?, in which I recommended that the NHS takes over responsibility as soon as possible. I quoted the vast well of psychiatric morbidity, exacerbated by the treatment of and conditions for prisoners being wholly unsuitable for those suffering from mental health problems, which invariably made them worse. I simply could not understand how this situation had been allowed to continue since 1947, not least the continued failure to include the needs of the 500 or so prisoners whose transfer to high or medium-secure hospital accommodation was recommended each year in National Health Service estimates. That meant that provision was always a matter of chance because of competition with funded community needs. Years of lack of NHS budgetary provision for any aspect of prison healthcare, including the additional expense that released prisoners add in the community, remain a millstone around the NHS neck.
It seemed abundantly clear to me that prison health was a public health issue, because every single prisoner except, for the very small number, sentenced to natural life was going to come out and the state of their mental and physical health when they did so was a matter of public interest. Not only was offender health not regarded as a matter of public health, but GPs had to fight to get information from prisons about any medical treatment a prisoner had received. That was of doubtful quality, because we found that only 10 per cent of prison medical officers were qualified to act as GPs in the NHS. In other words, not only did anyone going into prison disappear from the NHS radar screen, but the authorities seemed to disregard the fact that imprisonment—paid for by the taxpayer—presented a priceless opportunity to identify and initiate, or pick up and continue, essential mental and physical health treatment. This could then be continued on release to the benefit not just of the prisoner but also of the community into which he or she returned. It all seemed unbelievably short-sighted and, frankly, stupid.
In the event, the NHS was made responsible for prison healthcare in 2003—seven years later, or longer than World War Two; so much for the speed of governmental decision-making. Since then, there has been considerable improvement, particularly when good primary care trusts have taken very seriously their primary care contract responsibilities with individual prisons. The same has not been so true of mental health contracts, largely because provision has in no way been able to match demand. I shall never forget speaking to members of the first mental health in-reach team to go into Wandsworth. They had expected to have to deal with a few very serious cases; instead they found that they were swamped by the 70 per cent of the prison population who were suffering from one or more identifiable personality disorders. It did not make them sectionable, but suggested that there was something affecting their behaviour that, if identified, could be mitigated. However, as the resources to carry out the identification were, and are, lacking, mitigation was, and is, denied—a process that should be of public concern.
My reasons for spelling all this out are to explain why my proposed amendment is an appeal to the Minister to withdraw the words, “other accommodation of a prescribed description”, and substitute detailed descriptions of that accommodation. I say that because the Secretary of State is required to commission services for a number of entirely different places of detention with very different requirements. Public and privately run prisons require primary, secondary and mental health contracts appropriate for their population type, whether man, woman or child. Privately run secure training centres and local authority-run secure homes require child-centred services. Privately run immigration and removal centres, about whose healthcare provision there have been many complaints, require a range of services, including specialist knowledge of tropical diseases. In addition, if the Government adopt the diversion schemes recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, there must be appropriate psychiatric and nursing provision in both police and court cells, in which people may have to be held until moved to appropriate NHS accommodation.
The Department of Health is very fortunate to have an able director of offender health, Mr Richard Bradshaw, who can provide the necessary descriptions very quickly because he is well acquainted with the differing needs. I therefore ask the Minister to accept this amendment in the spirit in which it is meant, which includes trying to ensure that the dreadful situation that I have described is never allowed to reoccur in any prescribed place of detention.
Lord Ramsbotham
“( ) providing services to improve communication skills in children and adults;”
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I was hoping to speak in support of my noble friend Lord Northbourne, who introduced a whole cluster of amendments which had at their heart not just parenting but the development of our children. I do not want to bore the House but my interest in this subject goes back to an occasion when I visited a young offender institution in Scotland. When I was walking round with the governor of the prison he said to me that if he had to get rid of all his staff, the last one out of the gate would be his speech and language therapist. I asked why and he said, “Because none of the children can communicate, either with each other or with us, and unless they can communicate there is absolutely nothing that we can do with them, or for them, and that includes their education, their discipline, their healthcare and indeed their general well-being”. Therefore this group of amendments—Amendments 72A, 81A, 200A, 201ZA, 327B, 327C, 329A, 331C, 333B and 91A—is all to do with getting speech and language communication needs for our children, which is the most common disability shared by children and adults in this country, put properly into the context of the Bill.
I think it is recognised that communication skills are the key life skill and the single most important factor in determining a child’s life chances. They are the means by which people form relationships and make choices and by which people access education, employment and society in general. Over the past few years—ever since I first became aware of this problem—I have been worried that nobody seems to be grasping the fact that every child’s communication ability must be assessed properly and as early as possible in life so that they can be given the best possible chance.
Following that experience in the young offender institution I was responsible for a two-year pilot with speech and language therapists in two young offender institutions. This pilot proved conclusively that if an assessment had been carried out much earlier those offenders may well have not ended up in the institution and that a very large number of them would not have been excluded or evicted from education because they would have been able to engage with their teachers. I have therefore been trying to interject in various education and justice Bills over the past six years the need for such an assessment to be built in to the education of this country. It is interesting that Northern Ireland has listened—now every child there is assessed for their communication skills at the age of two. That might be very early but, on the other hand, it also identifies potential problems. The amelioration of those problems can then begin early enough for the children to be able to engage in education.
Unfortunately, although that need has been accepted in education and justice Bills, nothing has happened because neither the education nor the justice department is responsible for funding those who have to make the assessment. Indeed, in 2005, when this pilot scheme came to an end, the Minister—Mr Paul Goggins—was invited to examine the funding of the possible provision of assessment. He could not work it out because neither the Ministry of Justice nor the Department for Education was willing to fund. When it came down to it, we found that individual speech and language assessors were the responsibility of individual primary care trusts around the country. Some of them decided that the assessors were essential and some of them did not and, therefore, it became a postcode lottery.
If we accept that communication difficulties severely limit an individual’s participation in education, in the world of work and in their family and community life then it stands to reason that unidentified speech and language problems can pose a secondary challenge, as they lead to diminished social skills, poor educational outcomes, anti-social behaviour, unemployment and mental health problems. In other words, all the factors that arise from a failure to assess communication skills and to enable people to communicate as well as possible can become a public health issue. I believe that it should be regarded as such, which is why these amendments mention the need for those who are responsible to have an integrated approach in order to ensure that all the relevant healthcare professionals liaise with each other and make certain that every child is given the proper start in life to enable them to engage with all the things that follow. This will require liaison with education and other authorities. I am not going to list all the various things that speech and language therapists can do, but one of the problems at the moment is that the assessment in many places is left, for example, to district nurses who have been trained by speech and language therapists. That is fine, except that we are told that the funding for speech and language therapists is to be cut and therefore it may be that their ability to train those who carry out these assessments will be inhibited.
I ask the Minister to ensure that this issue is examined properly and that the various authorities should be instructed to make these assessments in order to make certain that all our children can access that vital education and the other factors that will make their lives either possible or a failure. I beg to move.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 97. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the need for communication skills, but this set of amendments is really all about improving services for children. It is interesting to note that so much has been said during our debates on the Bill about the importance of the co-ordination of services of all sorts, but I would suggest that nowhere should services be better co-ordinated than those for children. That is absolutely crucial to success. I was interested to read the letter sent by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, after our previous sittings. He kindly circulated a series of paragraphs which stated on children’s issues that:
“We are determined to build in children’s health explicitly and clearly throughout the new system, including through the mandate … We want the NHS to play its full part in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and we expect the NHS to continue to improve processes for protecting children”.
I welcome those words, but I will seek further reassurances from him on their validity.
In amending Clause 20, I want to ensure that the Secretary of State will publish an annual mandate specifying the objectives that the NHS Commissioning Board must seek to achieve. This amendment would require that the mandate includes objectives related to improving services for children.
Children and young people are significant players in NHS services. Children account for around 40 per cent of the workload of GPs while making up 19 per cent of the population. Around 26 per cent of those attending A&E departments are children. Every year, about one in 11 children receives specialist out-patient care in hospital, while one in 10 to 15 is admitted for in-patient care. All these are key statistics. However, I suspect that while children and young people make significant use of NHS services, they and their families are often let down by a health system that is incoherent and affords only a low priority to child health services. I want to see this improved. Noble Lords may remember that Sir Ian Kennedy, when reviewing child health services, concluded that there was a,
“varying quality of services … with a large number in need of significant improvement”.
He also said that children were given a low priority when compared with adults, that they often received inappropriate or poor quality treatment or had to travel long distances. He identified a lack of co-ordination between the NHS and other services such as education provision. The question of co-ordination between services is something which comes up all the time. He also pointed out the low investment in services for the early years and a failure to provide safe environments within NHS settings.
I realise that there are particular challenges for children and young people with complex needs. Often little attention is given to how the system delivers for disabled children and young people, but I shall leave it to my noble friend Lady Wilkins to address that. The support group, Every Disabled Child Matters, highlights the range of challenges faced by disabled children and their families in securing good healthcare, but again I shall leave the detail to my noble friend.
The NHS mandate must include priorities for child health. This would ensure that tacking these issues is made a priority within the health service. It is appropriate to include objectives for children's health, because child health services operate on a separate system to those of adults, with separate structures and relevant partners. For example, children receive support from a wide range of child-specific professionals, such as health visitors, community paediatricians, children's nursing services and specialist treatment centres. So again the issue of co-ordinating according to age comes up strongly.
The difference between child and adult health structures is very much demonstrated when disabled young people make the transition from child to adult services, as indeed when other children make the transition to adult services. Without specific objectives for the issues in the system for children's health, there is a concern that the mandate will be ineffective in achieving change for children and young people. So I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively to this. I suggest that the Government should amend Clause 20 to ensure that the NHS mandate sets out priorities for improving services for children and young people. They should also publish a policy statement setting out how it envisages the revised reforms will deliver improvements for children’s health in general.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I will have to write to the noble Baroness on that question, and indeed some of the other questions that she posed in her speech. I hope she will allow that. As regards speech and language therapy, rather than give the noble Baroness an answer that may turn out to be incorrect, I may have to drop her a note. I will write to her.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his habitually thorough and sympathetic summing up. I think we can look forward to further work on this subject. I also thank all those who have taken part in this debate, and particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, for her words. I must apologise to the House for saying that it was district nurses who did the work; of course, it is health visitors.
I have two concerns, one of which the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, has just mentioned, which is the question of confirmation that this is a public health issue. My second concern is, in the words of the Minister, that this should be left to be a local issue. I am concerned about the number of issues that are being devolved to local government for it to have to decide differing priorities. That is an unfair burden in this particular issue, which I do not believe should ever be left to be a postcode lottery for the children of this country. In that spirit and bearing in mind that I shall look very carefully at what the Minister said, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Children: Parenting for Success in School
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Northbourne on obtaining this important debate and I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Eden, and others who have paid tribute to the tremendous work that he has done and continues to do in the cause of parenting. I absolutely agree with him on his two main points: first, inviting the Government to consider the addition of foundation years education to the current educational structure; and, secondly, concentrating on teaching life and parenting skills in schools and thereafter to potential parents.
I have to admit that my anger at and my interest in the current situation was stimulated in a young offender institution where I was introduced to a 17 year-old boy whose history was that he had been excluded from playgroup at the age of four and was never allowed to attend primary or secondary school. That seemed to me to be utterly idiotic. All that was again stimulated when I read the report by Graham Allen MP, which has already been mentioned. It showed the bleak truth that decades of expensive late intervention have failed. It is self-evident that costs are paid back by early intervention.
The best place that I know to examine what the failure of early intervention and parenting means is the statistics on those wretched children who are currently in custody. I should like to quote some of those statistics because I hope that they will resonate with those who have responsibility for doing something about the current situation. Of those children in custody, 71 per cent were involved with or in the care of the social services before entering custody; 75 per cent had lived with someone other than a parent at some time, compared with 1.5 per cent in the general population; 76 per cent had an absent father; 33 per cent had an absent mother; 39 per cent were on the child protection register or experienced neglect or abuse; 40 per cent were previously homeless; 40 per cent of girls and 25 per cent of boys reported suffering violence at home; 33 per cent of girls and 5 per cent of boys were sexually abused; 1,148 of the 2,010 children in custody in September 2010 were assessed as vulnerable; and 30 per cent of the young men in prison and 49 per cent of the young women received no visits.
In addition, the education of these children is terrible. Of these children, 46 per cent are rated as underachieving; 38 per cent are below level 1 in numeracy; 90 per cent of young men and 75 per cent of young women have been excluded from school; 40 per cent of boys and 53 per cent of girls said that they last attended school before they were aged 14; and 81 per cent have a variety of mental health problems. To take this one stage further, 41 per cent of adult prisoners report having observed violence in the home as a child. The cost goes on and on.
What can we do about it? Of course, we all know about early intervention, but I should like to make one practical suggestion, which I have made many times in this House already. It picks up on the word “communication”, which was used by the noble Lord, Lord Eden. The inability to communicate is the scourge of the 21st century. It starts with parents not talking to their children and then it continues. I discovered, when I found someone wise enough to put a speech and language therapist to assess young people in a young offender institution, that they had done so because they knew that, until and unless you enable a child to communicate with you, you do not know what to do with and for them.
Very sensibly, Northern Ireland has picked this up. Every child in Northern Ireland is assessed by a speech and language therapist at the age of two. I believe that that should be picked up and replicated here. I do not think that this can be done early enough. The figures that we produced in prisons from the age of 15 onwards showed that, if people had been assessed before they started primary school, they would have had a chance to engage with the teacher; until and unless a child can engage with a teacher, they cannot even begin down the education pathway. If I have one plea for the Minister, it is that, in order to enable all the things that people have talked about in this House to happen, this vital ability to enable children to engage is picked up and run with now.