Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness King of Bow

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

[Baroness King of Bow (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not wish to detain the House on this amendment—I will detain the House on a later amendment instead—but I want to sincerely thank the Minister for the excellent news that he has brought. As the noble Baroness said, it is only a small number of British children, but they are British children. As an adoptive parent, however you adopt your child and wherever your child comes from, you expect them to have the same life chances in Britain, because that is, I hope, what Britain is about.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, my Amendment 29 seeks to use Clause 8 to mitigate the possible impact of provisions elsewhere in the Bill on a group of children described by the phrase,

“there being no person who has parental responsibility for the child”—

in other words, looked-after children. I refer in particular to looked-after children in custody, of whom the noble Lord, Lord Laming, in his report, estimated that there were approximately 400 at any one time, 100 of whom were on remand. Although this is not in itself a large number, it adds up to slightly less than half the numbers of children currently in custody. This ratio accentuates the need to consider their position.

Currently, all children remanded into custody are automatically granted looked-after status for the duration of their time on remand. Children in care retain this status throughout their custody. However, in Grand Committee the Minister suggested that this could be removed by other clauses in the Bill. Looked-after children in custody show greater levels of mental health needs than other incarcerated children, need greater levels of emotional and practical support, and respond less well to behavioural incentive schemes and resettlement planning. As a group, they already face problems in engaging local authority support, and it would appear to be at best counterproductive to enable local authorities to opt out of their duty to support those looked-after children who happen to be in custody. This is yet another cross-government matter, and I wonder whether the Department for Education has discussed the possible effect of this with the Ministry of Justice, which aims to reduce reoffending.