Children in Need: Adulthood

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Buck. I congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) on securing the debate. It is a pleasure to serve with him on the Work and Pensions Committee; I know he cares deeply about the matters it deals with. I am particularly delighted that we are discussing this subject.

A few years ago, having worked in child protection for a number of years, I became acutely aware of the needs and problems of children who were not in care but were on the edge of it—children who never quite reached the threshold to be taken away from their parents, but who nevertheless faced considerable problems in their lives. As more research was done on children whose needs were assessed under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, it became clear that a large proportion of those children faced the same terrible outcomes as children in care—indeed, some would suffer worse outcomes. That stands to reason: the children who were taken into care were taken out of the disruptive, abusive, neglectful family environment, and put into long-term, stable foster care, or adopted, so their lives were changed, whereas children who did not reach that threshold often stayed under the observation of children’s social services but did not receive services adequate to improve their condition.

I take my hat off to Social Finance UK, which in Newcastle a few years ago did a seminal piece of work ago that exposed just how poor the outcomes were. It identified that children in need or in care formed a small but substantial proportion of young people in Newcastle, but went on in the long term to form the majority of those not in education, employment or training in the city. That is why it is excellent that the Department, under the current Minister, took up that work and ran it on a national scale. The report published earlier this year showed that children who were in care or in need at some point during their childhood accounted for about 10% of the youth population, but went on to account for 51% of all long-term NEETs in young adulthood. Such disruption to family life has long-term consequences.

It is always a pleasure to speak after my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who spoke so eloquently about the need to mend broken families.

[Fiona Bruce]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. I saw a statistic yesterday that highlighted to me the need to focus much more on prevention than we do. Family breakdown costs about £50 billion per annum—various figures are quoted, but that has been quoted recently in many places. However, for every £100 spent on that, the Government spend only £1.50 on trying to prevent the breakdown of families. Something is wrong when it costs £50 billion to mend that brokenness.

[Alex Burghart]

Yes, my hon. Friend eloquently sets out the problem. We need to reconsider our approaches to prevention, early intervention and recovery. The problem faced by children in need is not, I believe, a marginal one, although it has been treated marginally for many years. There are about 380,000 children in need at any one time; the number of children in need at some point during any given year is considerably higher—many hundreds of thousands higher. So it was wonderful that the Children’s Commissioner for England, for whom I used to work, and the Conservative party, took on the cause. I was pleased to see that in our 2017 manifesto we committed to the review of outcomes for children in need that the Minister is currently undertaking. I know everyone in the Chamber awaits the findings of that review with eager anticipation. We need to know exactly what is going on behind the scenes that leads to those young people having such poor educational and employment outcomes. I suspect that the findings will not necessarily come as any great surprise to us, but they will have the “kitemark” seal of the Department behind them.

For too long, we have looked at the symptoms, rather than the causes of the problems that these young people face. We talk about neglect, abuse and family dysfunction, and those are obviously important, but we do not always talk about why that neglect, abuse or family dysfunction occurs in the first place. The causes are painfully predictable: poor mental health, long-term unemployment, addiction, family breakdown and the rest. Only when we turn our attention to fixing those root-cause problems will we start preventing the next generation of problems and helping to rebuild the family lives of those children already in the system.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman and I are both on the all-party parliamentary group on adverse childhood experiences, which is very much about the issue we are debating. I fully agree that prevention is the way to go, but in my constituency councils are so cash-strapped that they can deal only with the absolute minimum statutory obligations; they do not have the money for prevention. Is not it time that we looked around to release money for councils to do the preventive work that is necessary?

[Alex Burghart]

As the hon. Lady says, we are both in the all-party parliamentary group on adverse childhood experiences, which I co-chair. There is no doubt that we need to work out how we can shift intervention to prevent problems from escalating. We know that there is limited money around, but I feel that there is a number of things we can do, and perhaps do better.

The Government have a major opportunity with the end of the current phase of the troubled families programme in 2020. I—like, I am sure, everyone in the Chamber—am keen to see those contracts reinvigorated for another phase, but the end of the current phase is the time to take stock of the considerable successes of the programme, as well as to consider whether we want to put a particular focus on that money in future. To my mind, the vast majority of children in need are by definition in troubled families. I know how many local authorities already spend the money, and data from the troubled families programme show that when it is spent well, it is excellent at tackling the root-cause problems and stabilising families so that they form a foundation on which young people can rest as they go into adult life. I rehearse all that because I think the best thing we can do to help children in need to move into adult life is to stabilise their childhoods. For some children, that will not be possible and they will need additional, ongoing support, but our first priority must be to make sure that young people do not need further help from us in the future because we have fixed the problems that they face.

An initiative I was glad to look at when I worked at the Centre for Social Justice works by giving children in need long-term mentoring at school. That gives them a stable adult in their lives who can give them the sort of advice that a parent might in a normal family. It is extremely successful in Tower Hamlets and in Hackney, and if we are to find the money for the sort of initiative proposed by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak—a form of pupil premium for children in need; perhaps any child who has been in need in the past six years—that is the sort of thing that schools should spend that money on. I am conscious of the time, so I will rest my remarks there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Buck. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) for securing this important debate on supporting children in need in adulthood. His excellent speech showed us yet again the valuable knowledge and expertise he has regarding children in need.

Yesterday, I reminded the Minister of the dire state of children’s social care thanks to his Government’s lack of cohesive strategic direction and swingeing cuts to local authorities. Early intervention grants have been slashed by up to £600 million, there is a predicted £2 billion gap in local authorities’ budgets for children’s social care by 2020 and, according to the National Children’s Bureau, more than one in three councillors are warning that those cuts have left them with insufficient resources to support children. It was recently revealed that 41% of children’s services are unable to fulfil even their statutory duties. The troubled families programme, which saw the demise of dedicated child in need teams, has spent more than £1.3 billion and had no measurable impact on families. Wider support services, youth services, family support workers—the services that children in need relied on—have fallen prey to the Government’s austerity programme and are disappearing.

In that environment, in any organisation, the roles and responsibilities that have the weight of legislation behind them—the things that absolutely must be done—are always the ones that take prominence. There is no legal requirement for local authorities to continue to support children in need when they turn 18, so it should come as no surprise that those children, on the cusp of adulthood, fall into the abyss. Looking at the current figures for 16 and 17-year-olds classed as children in need, that means that approximately 58,000 children are being cast adrift.

The referral rate to children’s services for those aged 16 to 17 years old is the same as for children of other ages, but they are less likely to be accepted for services and help as children in need. If they are, they are less likely to be subject to future support under a child protection plan than younger children. I do not know about other hon. Members, but at 18 years old, I do not feel that I was ready to make important decisions or to make my own way in the world. I still needed support, and I was damn lucky that I had it, but these children in need often do not. They are grappling with multiple intersecting challenges that many adults would not be able to cope with—and many are grappling with those issues alone.

Department for Education figures show that such children are more likely to go missing or be victims of sexual exploitation and criminal exploitation. They are more likely to have mental health issues or substance misuse issues, and more likely to be homeless or not in education or training. Those serious issues are not fleeting; they can leave enduring and deeply painful physical and emotional scars that last throughout people’s lives.

Similarly, children in need are not given prominence in terms of access to child and adolescent mental health support, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) mentioned. That is not surprising, because cuts to CAMHS have reached more than £50 million and some children are waiting 18 months for treatment. Despite half of mental health problems being present by the age of 14, across England, only 8% of mental health funding goes to services for children and young people.

According to the Children’s Society, 16 and 17-year-old children in need are three times more likely to cite child sexual exploitation as a factor in their assessment than nought to 15-year-olds. Sexual exploitation is vastly underreported, and it is likely that even that is an underestimate. In a report that looked at 16 and 17-year-olds, the Children’s Society found that 50% do not feel that it is worth reporting something to the police. That is for a good reason: 75% of reported cases of sexual offences against 16 and 17-year-olds result in no police action. Again, that is no surprise when up to 43 police forces have pleaded with the Government about cuts that are leading to impossible workloads and delays in investigating complex child sexual exploitation cases.

[Alex Burghart]

The hon. Lady is raising important points. How much money would a future Labour Government commit to children’s services, and specifically to the issues that she has raised? How would that money be raised, given that it did not feature in “Funding Britain’s Future”, the document that Labour published in advance of last year’s general election?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I ask the hon. Gentleman to go and read our manifesto again, because threaded through our manifesto were things to help children, such as investment in mental health and in school counselling. Unlike his own party’s manifesto, it was all fully costed. I would have another look if I were him.

As referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak, the Children’s Society estimates that 12,000 children who approach local authorities at risk of homelessness are sent away without an assessment even taking place. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 does not address the vulnerability of 16 and 17-year-olds, who are often sent back to their families, which are the source of the issues that they face such as domestic violence or substance abuse. It is no wonder that those children in need are more likely to go missing, or that they become another statistic in the ever-burgeoning rough sleeping stats.

All those factors make it even more disappointing that the Government’s long-awaited child in need review is narrow in focus, and will look only at the educational outcomes of children in need. Of course, I acknowledge that children in need have poorer educational outcomes than their peers, and I wholeheartedly echo the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth), but focusing only on educational outcomes—there are approximately 390,000 children in need—and ignoring the other difficulties they are suffering that we have discussed is a little short-sighted.

Respectfully, the Minister should take note of his Department’s figures, because they show stable numbers of children in need, but a high rate of re-referrals. In short, people are not getting the service they need first time round, and things are reaching a crisis point. The Children’s Society found that one in three 16 and 17-year-olds who were referred to children’s services were re-referrals from within one or two years. The reasons for those re-referrals were that their needs did not previously meet the threshold but their situation had now escalated, or that their initial referral did not resolve the issues. Sadly, at that stage, there is no time available to address those now acute issues, because when they turn 18, their case will be closed.

This cohort of young people are in desperate need of a Government who care about their future. The Minister has an opportunity today to prove that they do. He could commit to exploring changes to legislation and/or guidance that would allow properly resourced transitional plans to be put in place for children in need who are approaching 18, similar to those for children who have been looked after—a suggestion that has been advocated by my hon. Friends. He could commit to letting us know what cross-departmental pressure he will put on his colleagues to address the gaping holes in mental health provision and policing, and, vitally, to properly fund children’s social care.

It will simply not be enough, nor will it be acceptable, to say that those children’s needs will be addressed by adult services, should they need them. We all know that that just will not happen. I cannot think of any other scenario where people are identified as being in desperate need of help but they are deemed no longer worthy of that support and their case is closed, purely because of their age. I sincerely hope the Minister will not let us down in his response and, more importantly, I hope he will not let these children down.