Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their thoughtful contributions today, and I echo other speakers in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, for her leadership of the committee. As your Lordships have reflected, the real test of any society is how it treats those who are most vulnerable within it, and I welcome the committee’s report for shining a light on some of the challenges that we face. On a personal note, I am extremely grateful for the generosity of the noble Baroness opposite, and for her kind words.

Before I turn to many of the individual points made, I want to start by saying that, as our response showed, the Government do not agree with every recommendation on how we should take things forward, but our direction of travel on what we should be trying to achieve is, we believe, strongly aligned. One of the elements of “how” has come up a lot in the House tonight; namely, co-production with vulnerable children and their families. That is something which perhaps we need to talk a bit more about because it is present in a number of the policies that the Government are pursuing. I thank the Children’s Commissioner for the work that she is leading in this area, and the example that she is setting.

I turn to the committee’s recommendation on having a single, cross-government strategy for vulnerable children. As the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, described, we have concerns about whether this would be a manageable approach and whether it would have sufficient focus to deliver. We also prefer to delegate authority in these matters to local areas, as the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, pointed out. Since the inquiry reported, the special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision Green Paper, the schools White Paper and the independent care review have all set out an enormous agenda that touches on these areas, one which seeks to deliver a coherent education, health and care system that works in the interests of all children, but in particular for those who are especially vulnerable. We are working at pace to take those reviews forward and we have committed to setting up an implementation panel in relation to the care review which will report at the end of this year.

Whatever language we want to use to describe it, we are thinking strategically about a range of policies in this area. We are introducing as much independent scrutiny and challenge as possible, with the care review but also with the consultation on the Green Paper. That will build on strong governance across all departments and plans for particular aspects of vulnerability that affect children. To share a few examples of this, we have announced a new child protection ministerial group to make sure that safeguarding is championed at the very highest levels; we have cross-government strategies or plans in relation to serious violence, mental health and domestic abuse; and programmes such as Supporting Families and the family hubs show how we join up services locally, which I hope responds a little to the challenge from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. We also have departmental outcome delivery plans. Our plan in the Department for Education includes a priority to:

“Support the most … vulnerable children … through high-quality local services so that no one is left behind”,


so we are working very closely to deliver on that.

I turn to the calls in the report for ring-fenced funding for early interventions to return to 2010 levels. We absolutely accept that local government funding has faced pressure in recent years, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Pinnock, pointed out. This year, local authorities have access to £54 billion of core spending to deliver their services, which is an increase of £3.7 billion from 2021-22. I can say in response to the noble Baroness’s points that the most deprived areas of England will receive 14% more per dwelling than the least deprived, so we remain cautious about the concept of ring-fencing and prefer to leave discretion to local areas.

We have been encouraging more focus on vulnerable children and early intervention via a step change in funding levels at the spending review, with over £1 billion for government programmes to improve support, advice and early help services from birth through to adulthood, including, as your Lordships have referred to, family hubs and Start for Life services, but also the Supporting Families programme and the holiday activities and food programme. This funding will help to improve access, and we aim to put relationships at the heart of family support for all the reasons that your Lordships described so eloquently. Those who gave evidence to the committee articulated the anxiety that I think any of us might feel when seeking help.

On the issues about working with the voluntary sector, I absolutely support the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester about the important role that the sector plays. The Government work very actively with the voluntary sector across many areas, including addressing some of the causes of vulnerabilities, such as alcohol misuse and domestic abuse, and working with the sector to prevent children being drawn into crime. We have also renewed a £560 million commitment for youth services, and many of our partners in the holiday activities and food programme are also from the voluntary sector.

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his reference to loneliness among young people. It was genuinely an incredible honour to be the Minister for Loneliness—a post that was set up in memory of the late Jo Cox—particularly during the pandemic, when loneliness was so prevalent and terrible. I talked to many young people about that in that role.

While talking about some of the underlying issues, my noble friend Lady Wyld asked for an update on our commitment to improving capacity in mental health services, particularly for young people. She will be aware that we have committed to increasing the investment in mental health services by £2.3 billion by 2023-24, and we believe that this will allow access to services for an additional 345,000 young people. We are also increasing the number of mental health support teams in schools and colleges to around 400, which will support approximately 3 million students in England by 2023.

Moving beyond the role of the voluntary sector to the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, on local and central government collaboration, I say that obviously the committee was keen to see a new duty on local authorities to collaborate to improve long-term outcomes. Local partners already have a duty to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, and local authorities to promote co-operation to improve the well-being of children. Of course, as we have heard tonight, the challenge is to make these work in practice.

The reforms from the independent care review and the SEND Green Paper have an important role to play in driving collaboration. The care review has a real focus on improving multi-agency working, and the Green Paper proposes requiring local areas to develop a co-produced inclusion plan; I hope that is a helpful example of co-production in practice. This will build on existing mechanisms to evaluate the effectiveness of joint working; for example, the joint targeted area inspections of multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. We are strengthening these including via thematic deep dives, such as “The effectiveness of early intervention”.

On effective data-sharing, as your Lordships reflected, the sharing of information for safeguarding purposes is already supported by legislation, but the data reform Bill will change the law to make it even clearer that there is no barrier to sharing data where child safety is concerned. We will also report to Parliament on our plans for information sharing, including the feasibility of a common child identifier, which the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, mentioned. I can reassure her that work has started on that; there was a launch event last week.

We also have an ambitious digital transformation agenda for health, with the rollout of electronic patient records and the development of digital red books, which my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower referred to. As regards the scale-up and development of this, we are keen to start with infants and early years—very young children—and will make sure that this works well before going any further.

The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, asked about why we still need MASHs. I lost many years of my life trying to set up multi-agency information-sharing arrangements around the country, so perhaps he and I need a cup of tea to discuss this in more detail. However, the serious point is that information sharing itself does not make children any safer; what makes them safer is people taking actions, having shared the information and understood the situation fully. Genuinely, that is why people still need to meet.

On family hubs, we absolutely share the committee’s interest in earlier intervention which is better joined up. As part of the £1 billion of government programmes which I have already referred to, we are investing £300 million to transform Start4Life and family support services in 75 local authorities across England. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, asked when we would get to the 20%; our commitment in the first stage is half of all local authorities in England. We are making good progress too on delivery; we have announced the areas that will benefit, and obviously the focus there has been on areas with the greatest deprivation levels. We are expecting the programme guide to be finalised soon, and local authorities will sign up for the programme later this year, paving the way for family hubs to be up and running from next year.

My noble friend Lady Wyld asked about the evaluation of the programme. We have committed £2.5 million to the family hubs evaluation innovation fund, which is a three-year commitment, and that will also cover funding for the National Centre for Family Hubs. Our aim is to capture and learn iteratively through this process. The evaluations will focus on three areas: first, process, service implementation and performance; secondly, outcomes and impact; and, finally, an economic evaluation, which will look at value for money.

In closing, as I set out at the start of my speech, there is a lot of common ground in our aspiration for vulnerable children. We are ambitious in the reforms we want to implement, and making sure that our delivery is effective is a vital prerequisite to any future scaling. We thank all those who served on the committee and those who gave evidence. I know that those of your Lordships who were on the committee felt strongly that you wanted to make sure that the voices of those who gave evidence were heard in the House, and we can all reassure you that that was the case. I am deeply grateful to the committee for its contribution.