Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
Main Page: Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on initiating this debate. However, as she said, it is one of several debates taking place today and some of us have had to choose the one in which we wish to speak.
This is a very important issue. I declare my interest as chairman of Changing Lives, which is a national organisation, although it is based in the north-east. It started as an organisation for the homeless, working almost exclusively, but not quite, with men. Now it is a very different organisation working with clients with complex needs, the majority of whom are women. That has presented the organisation with lots of challenges but has also energised it and, importantly, has brought about new thinking and new ways of working.
I, too, have read the document produced by the Lankelly Chase Foundation which will be important in guiding those organisations looking to work with women with complex needs across the board. I was also involved in some of the early meetings at St Mungo’s which led to its Rebuilding Shattered Lives report, which is a significant piece of work.
When I was Social Exclusion Minister, my department studied what causes people to end up with such enormous problems with which the state hardly comes to grips. We did a scoping study in a north London borough, looking at the people who turned up in police cells, at mental health projects, A&E and housing departments, and found—surprise, surprise—that the same people turned up at the different agencies on different days. They did not turn up at agencies where they had recently upset someone; they went somewhere else. They were looking for assistance but no one was getting hold of the underlying issue. That is one of the things that I want the Minister to think about. These women were frequently labelled as being addicts, having mental health problems, being homeless or whatever, but we need to ascertain who will work with them in a locality to understand what their problems are and to find practical ways to deal with them.
I helped set up one of the very first women’s refuges in Sunderland 40-odd years ago. However, even I underestimated the impact of domestic violence on some women’s lives. It has affected many more women’s lives than we ever imagined. I have read the Troubled Families Programme case studies and they are deeply shocking. Every single case study talks about the prevalence and acceptance of violence. That violence is also seen and experienced by the children in these families. One never actually changes the experience of those families, to which the children are exposed as they grow up.
One of the best things I ever did as a Minister was bring to this country what was called in America the Nurse Family Partnership. We rebranded it the Family Nurse Partnership. The results were staggering. The personnel involved in the partnership work with young women when they first become pregnant on the issues that they will face as new young mothers, and tackle their addictions and alcohol problems. I urge the Minister to go out with some of the nurses. In the second session, they look at the image of the brain and go through what happens. Surprise, surprise, the young women realise that if they change their behaviour with support, the outcomes for them and their children are going to be better. When the child is 15, the outcomes for the mother and the child are phenomenal. I encourage people to look at that. I congratulate the Government on having expanded what the previous Government did on this.
As we do more work with women, we are becoming more convinced that these early intervention programmes are very important and that we need to look at them much more carefully. We have a lot of addiction services and try to work with women in women’s centres in a holistic way, but we have one project that I want to tell the Minister and noble Lords about. It is a residential project for women with their children. They are there for about six months and follow very intensive parenting programmes. They are women who have lost one or more children into care or are danger of doing so if they do not sort out their problems and their addiction. Last week, we had a shocking report about the number of women who continually show up in court, with their child going to be taken into care because of their addiction, behaviour problems and multiple complex needs.
We are demonstrating that you can change behaviour and opportunities. At one level, it is ridiculous because the NHS said it wanted this programme and paid for it. It is now jointly done between the NHS and the local authorities. It started by the NHS not being able to refer people because we work on the abstinence model only, and the NHS kept upping the methadone, which made it impossible for the women to undergo the programme. We think we have now sorted that, and the local authority, without bidding, now talks to visitors looking at the programme and the work that is being done about how much money it is saving and how much better the outcomes are. There are programmes out there. I urge the Government to look at them with more care and to work together—rather than have the rows that I know sometimes go on across government—to begin to change opportunities for these women.