Children and Families: Early Years Interventions

Baroness Newlove Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, I also thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester for this important debate. However, it also saddens me that yet again we are talking about young lives. Over the past 12 years, for 10 of which I have been in your Lordships’ House, including just recently over the weekend, my girls and I have gone through turmoil and upset at the lack of confidence in government departments, policies and systems that we all genuinely and honestly believed would provide support when it was truly needed. Yet the system itself retraumatises and breaks you once again.

This debate shines a light on systems which for some are simply no longer available, or else the severity of the case does not match the threshold set by agencies. Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood from birth to 17. They include violence and abuse to a family member, committing or attempting to commit suicide, substance misuse, parental separation, chronic health problems and mental ill health, and, again, substance misuse in adulthood, all leading to a negative impact on education and job opportunities.

I do not stand on ceremony. I am not a policy person and I do not do scripts very well. But while I do not wish to undermine the role of my noble friend Lady Berridge, who I have great support for, the time has come to take all political parties out of this loop. This is about tiny, small children who are undernourished and undereducated and have such a dreadful start from birth onwards—be that substance misuse, domestic abuse, or simply that we now have a generation of young, vulnerable and mentally ill people having babies.

As a mother of three daughters, I am very proud of my working-class background. I do not say that to show that I have the profile of someone who understands what it is like; I say it because my working-class parents worked so very hard for my sister and me. They had a day job as well as a night job, always providing to make sure that we had a happier and healthier lifestyle, always saying education was very important but also providing a warm home and food to instil in my sister and me that you have to work hard in life to get what you want—and we also knew that we had the support of our parents.

Parenting is not the easiest of jobs. I am definitely not Mother Teresa and Gary was not the Pope and we were not a family who lived on a mountain like the Waltons. Parenting is very, very hard, whether you come from a good family or a bad family. There are worrying issues of health, as my parents had with me because, unbeknown to them, I was born with a hole in my lung. I had really bad health, and still do, so at times it shook them. Also, my parents did not have the best upbringing—they suffered hardship and parental separation—but they ensured that my sister and I had the best. So I am proud to stand here to say that I am stood here today because of them. They made me the person that I am and they made me understand that we should have morals and manners and we should respect one another. We will only get that if everybody who has spoken in this debate—hence my notes look like something out of the Beano, with blots everywhere—understands that it is not easy for the system if the system does not understand the hardship on the ground.

I have worked with many communities to find out what is going wrong in cycles. What I find further insulting is that we hear about young lives battling to survive daily struggles, as well as peer pressure which leads them into bad behaviour in our schools. Then that system moves them into pupil referral units, and in turn that system makes their vulnerabilities bait for those who feed them and give them love, only to turn that into the power to corrupt so they end up within our criminal justice system. And then we blame that system, but is that not putting the cart before the horse?

The real issues have been spoken about again and again in this Chamber, but now we are seeing young people become young parents, those children now scavenging in bins for food, washing uniforms at schools because they have no other uniform and no washing facilities at home, children not wanting school holidays because they are scared to be at home. We have children unable to speak who get frustrated because they cannot communicate, which then sadly manifests itself in mental health problems further down the line. That leads to behavioural and social problems and we no longer flicker so much as an eyelid when we read about this or watch it on TV. We label young people with exclusions and yet it is their very home environment that makes them behave in the way they do. So, unless we change, we are feeding that carousel even more.

I have had the pleasure of working with the Wise Owl Trust with children as young as three, talking to them about their character traits and emotions, having weekly missions with them where they have to use resilience. I love the resilience programme because it is a pipe where the rain goes down, which brings a nursery rhyme with a spider. If they cannot get the spider out, they have to carry on, because they get angry until that spider appears. That is an innocent childhood nursery rhyme. But I am fed up with seeing people pushing prams and their babies have got iPads—people who cannot take the time to have conversations with their children because the mother or the father is on their mobile phone. And, more importantly, I am sick and tired of sitting at tables, hearing about the lack of health visitors, of midwives, of GPs and of GP surgeries when we have families living in poverty, children being carers to mentally ill parents, going to school and to bed in the same clothes, and children in nappies at five because they know no other thing to do.

Surely it is a sad occasion when we stand here today. There is one thing that I know. The character build for respect is called resilience. It stands for “Resilience: I can do it”, Empathy: “I know how you feel”, Self-awareness: “I understand”, Positivity: “I believe in that”, Excellence: “I will do my best”, Communication: “I will share”, and, moreover, “I will work with others”. We have three-year-olds doing that, but we need to act soon before we have a generation who will not do that.