Vulnerable Teenagers

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

That this House takes note of the report by the Commission on Young Lives, Hidden in Plain Sight, published on 4 November 2022, and the life chances and educational prospects of vulnerable teenagers.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, at the end of last year, the Commission on Young Lives, chaired by the former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, published its final report. The commission and Anne are to be congratulated on this important piece of work, which challenges us all. The commission was launched in 2021 to devise a new and affordable national system of support to prevent crisis and improve the life chances of young people at risk of criminal exploitation, serious violence or getting into trouble with the law. The panel of commissioners included experts in the education system, children’s mental health, youth work, policing and crime, charities and organisations that work closely with children at risk of harm. They were people who know about these things and know how to get things done.

Many thousands of children in our country are falling through gaps in the education, care and mental health systems. They are then exploited by gangs, organised criminals or abusers. These children are at risk of unthinkable violence and harm, are being groomed into crime and have hugely reduced life chances as a result. As the commission’s report sets out very clearly, our response as a country to helping these children avoid this fate is often so inadequate. We are poor at identifying who they are, at sharing information and at communication, and we are almost always unco-ordinated.

And as the Lords Public Services Committee argued in our report published last year, the investment we have put into protecting and supporting vulnerable young people has fallen dramatically since 2010. At the same time, the organised criminals and groomers who exploit vulnerable teenagers are well co-ordinated. Their business model relies on young people, and they will use coercion, control and manipulation to push them into criminal activity. They are highly skilled at identifying and entrapping young people, who often become too scared to walk away.

The commission’s final report is called Hidden in Plain Sight for a reason. This is a national problem that is hidden by the nature of its ties to criminal activity, but, in many ways, it goes on in plain sight. It is an open secret among professionals who work with vulnerable children, and our public services also know that this is going on. Police spend a huge amount of time and resource stepping in to cover for other, struggling services, by finding vulnerable children who have gone missing from the care system, for example, or dealing with safeguarding issues. Schools are having to do so much more beyond simply teaching. Some feel that they are almost becoming a branch of social services. NHS staff working in trauma units tell stories of treating teenagers arriving with knife or gunshot wounds. Social workers and others working in children’s social care often work with children who are taken into care for their own protection from serious violence, but who are then placed in accommodation miles from home with little support, only leaving them even more vulnerable to the exploiters who go looking for them.

We see the gruesome headlines of young people around the country being knifed and killed. The report opens with a story of a gang on a housing state. The gang members were involved in delivering drugs 80 miles away, using scooters and cars stolen from takeaway food delivery drivers. The boys in the gang were all around 14 years old, and all of them had been excluded from school and sent to a local pupil referral unit, although none of them seemed to attend.

Local families were terrified. Those teenagers carry knives and other weapons, which, in turn, was encouraging other young people in the area to carry knives for protection. Younger children were now starting to follow the group around and mimic their behaviour. As the commission’s final report says, this sounds

“like an extreme example, but it is far from unique.”

The report warns:

“There are parts of our country where the state is completely failing in its duty to protect vulnerable children … often these are … the most marginalised”


and poorest families, and, disproportionately, they are from black and minority-ethnic communities. However, it is not a problem that is

“limited to the most deprived parts of inner-city Britain”,

as I know from the small town in the west of Durham that I called home for a long time. Young people from ordinary, decent families were groomed by predators working somewhere where nobody expected them and where agencies were slow to react. These problems stretch right across the country, from our biggest cities to small rural villages. We know that organised criminal networks are exporting illegal drugs into different areas using dedicated mobile phone lines, social media and so on. We also know that their success relies on finding and exploiting children through coercion, intimidation and violence.

As the commission sets out,

“there are hundreds of thousands of young people in England who are growing up in very vulnerable situations”

who become easy pickings. Some are living in very challenging families; many will have poor mental health; and many will have special education needs. Others encounter risks outside the family. Some will have fallen through the gaps in the different systems: they will be excluded or missing from school, or in vulnerable care settings, not receiving support for their special educational needs or not meeting the very high thresholds for current mental health services.

The numbers are not small. In 2021-22, there were over 16,000 instances in England where child sexual exploitation was identified by local authorities as a factor in assessments by social workers. There were 11,600 instances where gangs were a factor and 10,140 instances where child criminal exploitation was a factor. We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg, because those involved in gang activity and criminal exploitation are disproportionately young, vulnerable and often unknown to services. It has been estimated that there could be as many as 200,000 children aged 11 to 17 in England who are vulnerable to serious violence due to levels of crime and/or income deprivation in their community. A recent report by the Youth Endowment Fund revealed almost four in 10 children said they had been

“directly affected by violence in the last 12 months (either as victims or witnesses).”

We should view the failure to keep at-risk teenagers safe, and to support them to succeed, as a threat to our country’s prosperity and security. It is a waste of talent and potential, and it is costing us billions in social and economic failure, through the criminal justice system, poor educational outcomes and poor health in adulthood. As the commission argues, government is not yet rising to those challenges with the scale of urgency required. We are spending billions, but so often on sticking plasters and far more than we ever spend on helping vulnerable children avoid harm in the first place through early intervention.

A recent NAO study concludes that government has still not developed a full understanding of the challenges involved in supporting vulnerable adolescents. It argues that the lack of a strategic approach means that government cannot yet say whether its current spending plans will effectively address the needs of families, vulnerable adolescents and children in the most effective way. I know that the Government are trying much more to collaborate across departments to keep better information on programmes and initiatives, but there is still no strategic purpose, goal or assessment of whether vulnerable adolescents’ needs are being addressed.

The Commission on Young Lives’ final report makes the same case. Too often the report finds systems and services that are not trusted, overstretched and simply unable to meet the needs of many vulnerable children and to stop them falling through the gaps and into danger. Many of our schools are not inclusive, exclusions are not always a last resort, and not every child with SEND gets the help they need to succeed. Added to all this are the impacts of Covid: an increased lack of readiness for school; speech and language development problems; a rise in child mental health conditions; and increased poverty.

But the commission’s final report is a call to action. It acknowledges that the Government have taken some positive steps. For example, the serious violence duty is important. There has also been some progress over the past few years to tackle child criminal exploitation and serious violence, including through the violence reduction units. There is also some funding for improving youth clubs in a “youth promise”. It recognises too that committed people and organisations are already making an enormous difference, turning around young people’s lives. Often that is through local charities, but too often they are surviving on short-term funding and have no confidence in their ability to survive the financial pressure.

The report proposes a new, joined-up, national programme to protect and support teenagers at risk, as well as their families. It also makes the case for changes that boost the life chances and educational prospects of vulnerable teenagers. At the heart of its recommendations is a call to identify and stick with vulnerable children by building long-term, trusted, culturally sensitive, sustainable and impactful relationships with them and their families. The commission identifies four key areas for reform, as part of a joined-up government plan: the education system, children’s social care, family support, and children’s mental health services. It does more in calling on the Government really to recognise this as a national threat and for the Prime Minister to take it seriously. There was a serious violence task force under Theresa May, but it never met after she resigned.

The commission argues that the Department for Education should reflect the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world-class education system and should be responsible for the co-ordination of all issues impacting on vulnerable children across Whitehall. The commission calls for a new Sure Start-plus programme—Sure Start for teenagers—with a network of intervention and support that reduces the risks that vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. The commission calls for a drive to eliminate child poverty and to stop exclusions from school, so that children are not put somewhere where the predators know where they are and know how to find them.

There is lots more which I do not have time to talk about, but I served along with another colleague as part of a parliamentary advisory group to the commission. The recommendations and action plan really would make a difference, if only the Government would take it on. It will need all the engines of government fully behind it. The commission asks a pointed question: why are gangs and criminals so much better than our systems and services at identifying and scooping up vulnerable children? The report also puts forward a plan to turn the tables. I urge the Government to look at it carefully and, importantly, to implement it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates—and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong for tabling it—where, as you listen to it, you think, “Yep, we’ve been here before. We’ve done this before and heard it before.” What you have not heard is the current context. County lines and the emphasis on knife crime are the new twist. Anyone surprised that gangs are full of 14 year-olds has not been paying attention. If you go into any prison, you will find that the scholars are the ones who stayed in the education system until the age of 14; most were out of the system way before that. That has been a depressing fact for a long time.

I do not think there is anything radical in the report, but bringing it all together is the important point. A tick-box culture of support—saying, “Yes, we’ve done this”, “Is this the job of the education sector or should it be somewhere else?” or “Which bit of the education sector system has done what at what time?”—leads to the discovery that the person we excluded from school has decided they do not like the alternative provision at the pupil referral unit and has disappeared, and now our criminals have realised that that person is an excellent delivery system for narcotics. That is not too far off the Artful Dodger, for God’s sake.

We have to try to have a more coherent attitude to this issue. We as the political class have to say that the current Government seem to have acknowledged that the problem is there and are moving away from “Let’s be tough”. Every time that anyone in any department says, “We’re going to be tough and do something about this”, I get a cold shudder down my back because they usually then create a new problem. If you send people to prison, as the current Government have realised, either you end up having several bouts of offending before they come get of it, usually because they are getting too old and it tends to be a younger person’s game, or they stay in because they have committed more serious offences. Unless we can start to break that cycle by having a more coherent attitude across the piece, we are going to continue having the same problems.

I do not know if society is incapable of removing the problem altogether but we can certainly reduce it. There are a variety of actions that have been identified that help here. By supporting and helping voluntary organisations and activities—youth clubs and so on—the state can create the right environment. I must declare one of my little interests here: sport is the ultimate voluntary activity. When someone starts participating in a particular sport, they join a tribe, not a gang, which will embrace them with its own ways and bizarre rituals. I must declare that I am a Rugby Union player, but all sports have that element.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

We all have our problems.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry, the noble Baroness was not here at the beginning of the debate, so it is not appropriate for her to intervene. She can certainly write to the Minister, who will respond in writing. Thank you.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to thank everyone for their contribution today. I am sort of feeling guilty, because I somehow manage to get a slot each time at the end of the business of the week, and people are not able to get back to where they want to get back to—so I apologise for that. I think it has been a really interesting debate. My noble friend Lord McConnell reminded us that this has been going on a long time. I was working with adolescents well over 50 years ago, and working professionally with them for a significant amount of time, too. But we are in different times, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, acknowledged. There are specific things going on now which I never had to deal with when I was doing detached youth work, or even before then working as a social worker.

This commission was set up at the end of Covid. We know that many children had been very lonely and stuck in their rooms on social media, which was corrosive and damaging, and through which predators were able to reach out to them. Some of them did not have any opportunity to engage in things such as the sports the noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about. For those nobody had noticed as a potential problem, they and their families were suddenly facing problems they had never imagined. We still do not know what has happened to thousands of the children who went missing because they were not in school or accounted for anywhere. When I was working, in those days, we did not have to worry about what they were seeing and what was being organised on social media.

Yes, there are problems that adolescents have always faced. My social work tutor used to say to me that the problem was that I had a very peaceful and happy adolescence, and maybe it would have been better if I had had a few more of the problems of the young people I was trying to work with. I was always quite grateful that I had not. We know that young people have always faced problems, but at the moment there are problems we really do not know how properly to tackle. Not being at school and not getting the resilience support and training—which, for me, is how we end up with real losses in terms of mental health—they do not know where to go or who to get it from. When I was starting, there were lots of people around who could be their youth worker, their mentor or their friend, but that has been hollowed out.

I know that this Minister thinks about and works on these things very carefully. The reality is that we all need to do that across the board and look for ways we can identify what is going on in our communities. We never thought there would be this sort of problem in many communities, and there is. As the report says, very often these young people are hidden in plain sight, and these problems are there. We have a responsibility not to give up on these kids and to make sure they have a future, and that their future family have a future in which the care and the relationship is there for as long as it takes.

Motion agreed.