Support for Care Leavers

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Department for Work and Pensions’ support for care leavers.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Gillan. I am extremely glad to have the opportunity to debate this important subject in Parliament. I have been interested in the care system, and the young people who grow up in it and move out of it into adult life, for the past 10 years. When I first came to Westminster, my main interest was in education, but I quickly became aware of the large number of young people in our society—approximately 70,000 of them—who are in care because life at home has gone wrong. Without a stable foundation, so many opportunities are diminished and hindered.

The Minister will be pleased to hear that I believe that the most important work with young people in care, which is ultimately for the benefit of care leavers, is done in other Departments. Perhaps some of the most significant spends that are required are on matters that she can address with her colleagues and that fall within their budgets, such as early intervention for parents or children suffering from poor mental health or addiction problems. I am sure she has such conversations with her colleagues in the Department for Education, the Department of Health and the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Too often, we give the impression that the care system in our country is irretrievably broken. I do not believe it is. Some 60% of care leavers do not become NEET—not in education, employment or training—on leaving school, which is a sign that the care system has worked for them and has provided them with opportunities they might not have received if they had stayed at home. However, that is not to say that the system cannot be improved; it can be, and I believe it has been over the past 10 years. The Munro review of child protection and Martin Narey’s reviews of residential care and fostering for the DFE have contributed to the quality of care that young people in our country receive.

Obviously, the care system is extraordinarily varied. It is often said that England has not one care system, but 150—one for each of the local authorities that take in children. Those systems and the legal framework in which they operate remind us that young people in care are our children. Because the state has decided to take them away from their families and try to create a new family environment for them, the responsibility for their wellbeing, opportunities and success lies strongly with central and local government. We should always remember that when we consider the policy interventions we can make to improve their lives.

With that in mind, what can the Department for Work and Pensions do to help young people as they embark on adult life and look for the opportunities that everyone wants, such as a stable family, a job, a chance to prosper and decent accommodation? On work and training, one wonderful initiative in the past few years has been a bursary of about £2,000 for young care leavers to go to university. I know from having spoken to care leavers that it has created opportunity where there was none before. Young people also get help with accommodation and on-site help at their universities.

That is a great start, but relatively few care leavers go to university; the majority go straight into the world of work. Modern apprenticeships, which provide a new route into employment for our young people, have been a very successful Government initiative that is growing year on year, but they do not offer care leavers the same advantages as young people living at home with their families. Indeed, the system rather assumes that apprentices have a family home to live in. Having talked to care leavers who have to manage their household bills and finances on the very low initial income that new apprentices receive—about £3.50 an hour—I ask the Government to look again at the issue.

I know that the apprenticeships programme falls within the DFE’s purview, but it is also in the DWP’s interest to ensure that young people do not become unemployed. We know that young people who become long-term unemployed when they leave school are much more likely to be long-term unemployed later in life, so it is crucial for the system to help them to avoid that pitfall. I suggest to the Minister that a little upstream investment could save a lot of money in subsequent benefit payments. A few years ago, the DWP part-funded ThinkForward, a very interesting initiative to identify young people at risk of becoming NEET and support them with long-term mentoring in the years before they left school. It dramatically reduced the number of NEETs in the target group. The DWP has a good track record with this work, and I encourage it to do more.

Many care leavers start adult life on welfare, receiving help with their bills and the necessary support to have somewhere to live. It is important that we ensure that our welfare system is adapted to their needs, especially with respect to up-front accommodation costs. As hon. Members know, the shared accommodation rate gives young people in the benefits system money for a room rather than a flat, under the assumption that they live with others, but care leavers are subject to an exemption until the age of 22. That exemption is a good Government policy, but charities I have spoken to—including the Children’s Society, which gave me some very good advice before the debate—point out that it would be better to extend it to the age of 25, when a different benefit payment rate kicks in. I strongly encourage the Minister to consider such an extension, which would ensure that care leavers have no hiatus in pay to overcome. The Children’s Society estimates that it would cost about £5 million—a small cost that would be far outweighed by the good it would do.

When I was director of strategy at the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, I spent a lot of my time going around the country to talk to local authorities that had excellent care-leaving units. Some areas, particularly Trafford, had a very detailed local strategy to ensure that the personal advisers who helped care leavers worked with their colleagues in the local jobcentre. That is important for various reasons. First, a decent personal adviser will be there to give advice on how the complexities of all the new systems work. However, it should also be a two-way conversation. If a young person has left care and falls into trouble—and is perhaps trying to get their head around meeting appointments or making sure that they do the right things to be able to claim their benefits—their personal adviser will be there to walk them through the system. We have a good generation of new work coaches who are extremely helpful when someone gets into the jobcentre, but it is important for some care leavers to have advice outside of the jobcentre to make sure that they can follow the system without falling into difficulties and becoming sanctioned. They need to know what they are entitled to.

I know there is good practice going on in the country, but I also know it is not standardised. I welcome any attempt by DWP and DFE to bring together directors of children’s services and regional heads of jobcentres so that conversations can be held at a high managerial level and cascaded down to other parts of the country.

The Centre for Social Justice, for which I used to work, contacted me before this debate about a little glitch in the welfare system for care leavers taking apprenticeships. They have to wait a month for their first payment, and the CSJ suggested that those care leavers be enabled to retain their benefits for that month. Again, that bridges a gap so as to prevent young people from falling into debt when they have made the correct decision to get an apprenticeship, build their skills and move into work. Similarly, we should allow care leavers to retain housing benefit at the existing level when they move into an apprenticeship, again reducing the risk of their acquiring arrears and getting into debt.

As I wrap up, I want us to think about data. DWP, DFE and the Ministry of Justice have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, plugging their different enormous datasets together. That means it is increasingly possible to see how children from certain backgrounds and with certain experiences go on to achieve certain outcomes. The value of that is obviously enormous. This country has very good national datasets, which means we will be able to identify which young people become long-term unemployed and what their experiences have been at school, in the care system and in childhood before that. Similarly, it will enable us to identify the young people who had poor experiences and who then went on to be successful. If we do that, we can dig down into what made the crucial difference for those people: what children’s services department, what charity, and what intervention helped change their lives. Then we can seek to extend that good practice to other areas, truly creating a wonderful learning environment.

Finally, I encourage the Minister to let her data analysts roam free over the extraordinary wealth of knowledge that is sitting in Government Departments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Burghart]

I thank the Minister for her very interesting statement, and I thank all hon. Members who took the time to participate in this important debate. It is a real pleasure to speak in a debate in which there is a lot of cross-party agreement both about the challenges that young people face and about some of the solutions. I welcome that.

To our friends in the Public Gallery who are listening, I want to say that there are a lot of other Members who wanted to be part of this debate, but a debate in the main Chamber on welfare ran over. I am very grateful to the hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) for coming. I am also grateful to the hon. Member for Birmingham in general—the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe)—and the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) for joining in.

I am particularly thankful to the hon. Member for Stockton North for acknowledging that Governments of all stripes have helped to improve the system as the years have gone by. He did not mention—neither did I—the important reform that Edward Timpson introduced, Staying Put, but we were put right by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). I am also grateful to the Minister for detailing some more of the exemptions, opportunities and reforms that DWP has introduced to improve outcomes for care leavers.

There is, of course, more to do. I was very interested to hear the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) about how we can help to prevent homelessness. I urge the Minister to look at the shared accommodation rate. I was pleased that she said that it is now possible for young people to set up their claim before they leave the care system. I hope that support is being given to work coaches and personal advisers to ensure that young people are aware of that opportunity and that they can get through it.

We have also had an interesting debate about how we help people in jobcentres to identify young people’s needs early on. One of the ways of doing that may be to ensure better engagement by personal advisers and to set up meetings between the people who run the jobcentres and those who run the local children’s services. As a number of Members said, that is being done well in Trafford.

I very much like the idea suggested by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak that councils should publish whether they are offering council tax exemptions for care leavers. That would be a good way of nudging some councils into doing the right thing, and it would also give councils that have already made the change the credit they deserve.

Lastly, I am delighted to hear that the DFE and the DWP are looking together at the issue of apprenticeships, with which we started the debate. I know not only that they are a great route into employment but, as the hon. Member for Stockton North said, that there is enormous potential in our care leavers. The care leavers I meet are fizzing with ideas. I see in them future businesspeople, entrepreneurs, doctors, teachers and the like, but we must ensure that they fulfil that potential. I hope that this debate has brought to the fore a number of the ways in which DWP can play its part in ensuring that those young people get the best out of life.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Department for Work and Pensions’ support for care leavers.