Vulnerable Children

Lord Suri Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, this debate speaks to a wider issue in our politics. Our politicians often willingly and unthinkingly use nebulous terms. When the time comes for serious legislative lifting, those terms that action has been predicated on are not useful. “Vulnerable” is one of those words—it is used regularly—and another is “support”. “Support” can mean financial payments, a statutory duty or subsidy—indeed any number of things—while “vulnerable” also appears to have no clear definition, or nothing that policymakers here and in another place can drill down into. Without a clear definition, we will find our objectives unending. Once we have attempted to solve one problem, another lobby will say we have not fixed another.

My party’s manifesto at the last election committed to supporting,

“vulnerable children for whom the state acts as a parent”.

That seems to be one clear indicator of what a vulnerable child is, namely that the state is a surrogate. But some children are in gangs, or have severe mental health difficulties. If the state is not involved in their lives, they may well slip through the gaps. I believe an easier solution can be found to maintain the promises made to vulnerable children and families in the manifesto. We ought to scrap the use of the word “vulnerable” and say what we mean when talking about specific groups. After all, every child is vulnerable, which the report correctly alludes to.

Reading the report, I got the impression of the authors trying to grasp a slippery rock. With 32 different categories, no one policy could hope to address all the problems facing the children discussed. This is a direct result of lazy thinking. To make the point, a politician may well promise to help vulnerable children, thinking of mentally unwell youths, but the people to whom they talk may take that to mean absent children or young carers.

Furthermore, the way that the machinery of government works is not compatible with the regular use of the word “vulnerable”. For the Department of Health, it may encompass children who have substance-abusing parents or who suffer from mental illness. For the Department for Work and Pensions, it may cover children aged 16 to 18 who are not in employment, education or training. I propose that we ask every department to come up with the children it has contact with whom it considers vulnerable. That would be a strategy led by policymakers, not one foisted on them by a nebulous term. After they have produced that work, they can develop their own strategies. Perhaps some would wish to attach that duty to one of their Ministers, as someone to take the lead on the strategy. Then we would be able to refer to a strategy to help teenage parents or a strategy to help care leavers or any other group and address the issues of vulnerable children overall.

The report alludes to the aim that,

“we as a society need to know who these children are, how many they are, and what their different outcomes are, if we are to have any hope of beginning to address their needs”.

There is no reason for departments not to come up with definitions and work together to help categories of vulnerable children while staying within that stated aim. Will the Minister consider this course of action?