Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I, too, support Amendments 61A and 71A in particular and draw the Minister’s attention to a Select Committee report produced by your Lordships’ House on post-legislative scrutiny of adoption legislation. Somewhere in the Department for Education archives, there will no doubt be copies of that report and the oral evidence given to the committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, was on it, and, I think, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong.

Among those who gave oral evidence was a remarkable judge, Nicholas Crichton, from one of the London family courts. He was so fed up with a procession of the same young women coming before the family court and having their children taken away. The women would reappear 12, 15 or 18 months later and would continue through their 20s with the same judges in the same court taking away their children and putting them into care. He got so fed up with that that he found some charitable funding to produce some support for the young mothers to whom it was happening because he was trying to stop this escalator of producing more children to be taken into local authority care.

That judge was doing the job that we could argue is the responsibility of the local authority because the great majority of these young women had been in care. We had a bizarre situation where an energetic and innovative judge was trying to do the job of a local authority that was not able to provide these kinds of services to young women who had been in care and who had repeat pregnancies. I would ask the Minister to look at that before he rejects fully these amendments, because there is a lot to be said, in the public interest as well as the interests of these young women, for moving down this path.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for being unavoidably unable to come to the first day of Committee. I should like to add some comments in support of Amendments 61A and 71A. We should see these amendments as being very much about early intervention and prevention. The Bill, welcome though it is, is a little light on early intervention and prevention. The amendments point to situations from the point of view of the babies born to young people who have been in care. Unless there is specific early intervention with a great deal of support provided, we may not be preventing those babies at some point coming into care or being subject to serious difficulties.

I say that for two reasons. We know from the statistics that, generally, babies of young parents—right across the board, not just those who been in care—do not fare as well on any number of developmental indicators, despite the ability of some individual young parents to be outstanding. Those babies suffer a series of stresses from that situation that impair their development, in many instances irrevocably. The vulnerabilities suffered by a young parent who has been in care can only add further stress and difficulty to that situation. It is really important from the point of view of early intervention and prevention for children born to young people who have been in care that there is a specific focus that points the statutory services to make sure that they intervene early and prevent adverse consequences further down the line to another generation of children. I hope the Minister will take these amendments seriously.

[Baroness Pinnock]

My Lords, we have had a very interesting and informative debate on this subject. I do not wish to add anything because everything I might say has already largely been said. All I would say is that this is focused on the principle that I and others raised at Second Reading and earlier today: the fundamental importance of early intervention and prevention if we are to break the cycle of children going into care and the consequent implications for the rest of their lives, and for the costs on local authorities and the state. Everything we know points to the fact that a focus on funding for early intervention and prevention does more than address the issues once children and young people are in the care system. I very much welcome this informative debate and thoroughly support the amendments.