Young Adults: Public Service Funding

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a fascinating debate. It is interesting that very few of us have concentrated on young adults—I am sure the Minister is a little frustrated by that—but that is because we know that problems for young adults come because services at a much earlier age have been diminished. One or two speakers here were involved in the last Labour Government, which specifically made difficult choices to come together across departments, in the way my noble friend Lady Morris talked about, to combine efforts to develop, for example, the Sure Start programme.

Sure Start involved a range of departments across government. It was for anyone, but we always wanted to make sure that the general approach did not miss out the most disadvantaged. One thing I did when I was at the Cabinet Office, and had a more wide-ranging portfolio, was to insist that education could not say that it was okay if there was no nurse or health worker in a Sure Start centre; by then I was determined to make sure that there was a comprehensive approach. In government, there are always pressures on money. We were trying to make sure that we invested in early invention to ensure that we prevented problems down the line. We did early intervention not because it was trendy and fancy and all the rest, but because we knew that the scale of problems as children grew older was such that we needed to make sure that families and communities got that very early support. My noble friend Lady Massey is back in her place; I pay tribute to her because she has worked on this for as long as I have known her, and that is a fair amount of time.

Yes, early intervention is more difficult. I remember some extremely difficult discussions with the Treasury. It asked how I could show that it would work, so we scoured the world for good, evidence-based early intervention programmes. I used to drive colleagues mad by ranting about the importance of evidence-based programmes, and I will come back to them.

I thank the organisations that have given us briefings, including Action for Children, which is the organisation I mentioned. I have had a lifelong relationship with it. I am currently an ambassador—I think that is what it calls it. I also pay tribute to the Children’s Commissioner. The way she has given us data and brought it together is really important, because it had not been done before. She has now brought together all the 90-odd different datasets across government—more than central government. It is very powerful information. I really recommend that those who did not see her report last week have a look at it.

Other people, including my noble friend Lady Massey, have given some of the figures, so I will not repeat them, but they are really stark. As Action for Children says in its recent report Choose Childhood, published only last week, for hundreds of thousands of children in the UK, childhood hurts, because they are not getting proper support and intervention. Action for Children asks the Government to develop a cross-government national childhood strategy, led by the Prime Minister, to address the scale and nature of the challenges that children face. It also asks that spending decisions start to prioritise children and childhood, including closing the £3.35 billion funding gap identified in local government and by the Children’s Commissioner, but also to rebalance public policy to promote early help for families, supporting children and parents by intervening before problems reach crisis point.

That brings me to the first real point I want the Minister to think about. Cutbacks in spending have meant that instead of trying to intervene early and prevent problems arising later, money has instead gone to late intervention, when there is an emergency or crisis. This is tragic. We do not know yet exactly what the longer-term effect of this will be, but we have a fair idea from some of the problems we see around: rising youth crime, rising mental ill-health and all those other things that are consequences of late, rather than early, intervention.

Lots of the early intervention programmes I started talking about, such as Sure Start, the Nurse-Family Partnership and other evidence-based programmes, have been undermined. Some have virtually disappeared. Even when the party opposite was first elected in 2010 it was a very enthusiastic expander of things such as the Nurse-Family Partnership. However, it is not good enough that we have resorted to the most expensive form of intervention—when it is a crisis and we have to intervene because otherwise there will be a proper tragedy. The Children’s Commissioner shows in charts how much we have to spend on the most expensive areas where we fail most with children and how much cheaper it is, in some senses, to intervene at an earlier stage and avoid that. Of course, local government has to spend on crisis, but the irony is that the loss of mainstream services, which my noble friend Lady Morris talked about, and the loss of early intervention all lead to us spending more on crisis than we should have to.

Central government will have to set its new priorities in the next few months. I am sure the Minister is looking forward to unravelling some of them. But my second point is that these cutbacks, in mainstream services and early intervention, have not been even across the country. The differential impact is highly significant.

As Members here will know, I have talked for a long time about the north-east but it is true that northern authorities and Midlands authorities, particularly those in urban areas where the highest proportion of people needs support, are also those that have had the highest cutbacks in local government. Just to make sure that I do not keep any interests quiet, I am on the board of the Lloyds Bank Foundation, which has produced a really interesting piece of work, A Quiet Crisis: Local Government Spending on Disadvantage in England. This shows that almost all the reduction in spending—97%—has occurred in the most deprived fifth of local areas. It therefore re-emphasises the tragedy of what we are living through, and the real challenge that government will have to get us out of this mess and begin to give people opportunities.

We are spending on the high end because we have no option; we are also spending less on the children who need it most in areas of high deprivation. This is almost a perfect storm and I am almost sick of standing up here and talking about these sorts of crises. However, there are ways forward. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we had to take decisions, but we did so by making sure that public spending actually improved opportunities rather than denying them. That is the real challenge to the Government: how will they turn things around so that they open up opportunities, rather than just reacting to the latest crisis?