Children and Families Bill

Lord Smith of Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Leigh]

My Lords, we are in the local government part of this debate, and like the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, I must declare my interests. I am leader of Wigan Council, a vice-president of the LGA and chairman of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. It will be no surprise that I will take a local authority perspective on this.

As the noble Baroness said, one of the most important roles of local councils is as corporate parents. As corporate parents, they have responsibility for the protection of children, making sure they are brought up well and preparing them for the future. As local councils, we try to ensure that that happens. We are not always successful. We have to admit that. We know that outcomes for children in care are still not good enough, and I am sure we want to use this Bill to strengthen that.

Although I did not realise it at the time, the poet Lemn Sissay was a looked-after child in my authority. Noble Lords may well want to ask how a child of African parents got into Wigan. He has done an interesting study called “A Child of the State”. I recommend that all noble Lords look at the video available on the internet. He talks about his experiences—I know they were a few years ago now—in local authority care. It is an eye-opener. It was an eye-opener for me, and I was supposed to be responsible for that.

Local authorities share the Government’s basic objective in this Bill to make outcomes better for children, but like the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, I have a few concerns about Parts 1 and 2. Before we get to the adoption part of the Bill, I want to reflect on the fact that far too many public services are designed to cope with the symptoms of problems rather than to tackle their causes. This is true particularly for family services. In designing our community budgets in Greater Manchester, we began to quote the case of a family in Salford, who within 12 months had consumed over £250,000 of public spending from various public services—police, local housing and others—but who at the end of the year were no different from the way they were at the beginning of the year. We had spent that public money and achieved nothing, so we need to think about this.

We need to think about the point made by the noble Lord that we are dealing with families with complex, often intergenerational, issues. They do not have role models to help them to know how to perform better. Change cannot come—I wish it could—from command. We cannot send a team of social workers into one of our more difficult estates and tell people to improve their lives. They really do not understand and are not able to do that. We need a holistic, sustained and trusted relationship.

I came across such an approach offered through the Life programme, which is run by an inspirational third-sector organisation called Participle. It had been working in Swindon when I heard that it was looking to expand the programme to see whether its success was transportable to other areas, so I invited it to come and work in Wigan. It has been in Wigan for less than two years, but we are already seeing how the lives of the families whom the project is working with in our most deprived areas are being dramatically turned around.

One example concerns a guy who was a drug addict, who had four children and a very chaotic life style, as noble Lords might imagine. With the support of the Life programme he is off drugs and coping very well. His four children are going to school regularly, and they do not truant or cause anti-social behaviour in the area as they did before. The project has not only saved us from the likelihood of having to take four children into very expensive care, but because of the way in which those children are now being brought up we might be able to break that cycle of deprivation and make sure that those kids think about their responsibilities as parents in a different way. That is important. While I applaud the Prime Minister’s recognition of the problem of troubled families, and obviously welcome the recent injection of more money from last week’s spending review, I do not think we are going to get really sustained improvement simply by hoping that we are going to work on a numbers game. We need a holistic, long-term approach, as demonstrated by Participle.

The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, mentioned many of the points that I wished to raise, so I will not repeat everything that she said. However, I am concerned about the impact of the bedroom tax in my area on fostering, which is the stage before adoption. The changes that the Government made for one bedroom may be welcome, but I am not sure that it is enough. We ought to ask the Government to see how they think the bedroom tax, or the under-occupation rules as they regard it, is impacting on fostering. I sincerely think that it is having an impact in our area.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, that Clause 3 is really quite unnecessary. It seems a power too far. We already have substantial powers for that. There is a danger of upsetting the market for the provision of adoption, which could be even more disastrous for young children.

On SEN, first, I agree with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, who is not in her place, about the importance of encouraging young people into mainstream education. In addition to the reasons she gave, I give one example. A mother came to me who had just transferred her child into mainstream education. It was life-changing for that child, and she said that children came around to knock on the door to see whether he wanted to come out to play. Think about that: before that, he had just been trapped in the house and nobody in the neighbourhood knew him because he was off to school in other parts of the borough. Then, because he was at a local school, he was part of the community.

Finally, I pick up the point made by my noble friend Lady Wilkins, which the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, also mentioned, about the financial situation in local authorities. We must recognise that lots of the things in this Bill will be desirable, but if they increase local expenditure when last week there was another 10% cut to local authority budgets, we will be in danger of promising things that cannot be delivered by local authorities if there is insufficient funding. Once we have performed the scrutiny which your Lordships’ House will do very adequately, I hope the Minister will ensure that we re-examine the implications of the Bill to check that any additional costs are fully and properly funded. Otherwise we will be giving parents and young people false promises.