Queen’s Speech

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I want to focus on what was not in the gracious Speech and should have been. That is probably what is known technically as a target-rich environment, but I have had to narrow down my remarks for the purpose of the seven-minute time guideline. I want to focus today on children and families.

I spent seven months recently sitting on the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, something which anyone who has spoken to me for more than five seconds in the past six months will know all too much about. We produced our final report at the end of March and I commend it to the House. There will, I hope, be a Question for Short Debate on it soon, so I shall not dwell on the generalities. However, I shall focus on something which may be particularly relevant today.

I was struck by one set of statistics produced by the panel, showing that about a quarter of the convicted rioters were under 18 and that about three-quarters were under 25. Forty-six per cent of the under-18s were living in poverty; 66% had special educational needs; and 30% were persistently absent from school. These were young people who had already had challenges, so what happened in the riots was not simply happening to a random selection of our young people.

Many people and agencies were responsible for that, which the report goes into in detail. We found that too many families were not getting the support that they needed to raise children. In the wake of the riots, people were very quick to blame parents. Everywhere we went, we asked communities who was responsible. They identified a range of people, with parents always coming high up in the list. However, when we talked to parents, they would often say that they could not get the help that they needed. One worker described very movingly working with a woman who had had terrible problems with her children. She had said, “You know, people keep telling me I need to sort things out, but nobody tells me how. Please will somebody help me to do that?”. A lot of money is already going into working with vulnerable families with children, but there is a real question as to whether it is going to the right place and doing the right things.

The Government have their 120,000 problem families, and I commend that work, but that is essentially crisis intervention. It is going to help a very small number of people who have a significant need which has already manifested itself. That still leaves a significant problem. We estimated that at least half a million forgotten families are bumping along the bottom. They never quite hit the now very high threshold required to get them the help they need to get off it. That is a problem. We asked the Government to look afresh at how they direct support to vulnerable families. I ask the Minister to think about that today.

We set out a few principles. I will highlight a couple of them. First and most obvious, that kind of intervention needs to be evidence based. Where there is evidence that it works, such as the Family Nurse Partnership Programme in which the Government have invested, it should be rolled out quickly and not simply focus on small numbers of people. Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, pointed out so well, interventions need to be timely. Ideally, the issues should be pre-empted or identified and dealt with as soon as possible to stop them becoming acute. The costs of not doing that are enormous and yet we consistently fail to do it. I know that money is tight, but that is true in the health service and we do not simply say, “Sorry, we will not do vaccination programmes this year because they are quite expensive”. We recognise that the costs of not doing that are significant, even if some of the people vaccinated may not have got mumps anyway. None the less, we invest the money in it. Yet, we systematically fail to learn that in other forms of intervention.

Thirdly, there needs to be a whole-family view. Too often, we came across cases where no individual member of the family quite hit the threshold for getting help yet taken as a whole the family was, frankly, dysfunctional. That is a real problem in the way that the different bits of the state which engage with families are either not joining up or are not meeting at the point where the family has a problem. They experience the problems as a family, not in separate units. Trying to get the state’s support to address that would be helpful.

I offer the Government a couple of thoughts for their children and families Bill. First, could they use the Bill to give a clear pledge to identify children with problems early? The noble Lord, Lord Hill, is in his place. Would he consider giving schools a clear responsibility for identifying children who are vulnerable for a range of reasons? The child may be a young carer, have special needs or face parental neglect or abuse. There should be a specific responsibility to identify that and resources to help bring together the people needed to address those problems before they get any worse. Secondly, could the Government show the way forward in early intervention by leading by example and extending the Family Nurse Partnership Programme to all teenage mothers at once? That would not be a huge sum of money and would show that, where a programme is effective and evaluated as such, the Government are willing to put the money behind it.

Intervention for vulnerable families is one of those happy issues on which the heart and the head come together. We all know the evidence of the head. The evidence of Graham Allen MP is the most recent example of the money saved by early intervention. The human case is also overpowering. Over the last few months, I have met too many young people whose futures look very bleak at a frankly depressingly early age. I have gone into prisons, young offender institutions and communities where I have met young people. If they were your own children, you would cry that things had come to this point for them so early. Yet so often, things could have been spotted sooner. As a country, if we come across those people it is incredibly sad to think of the lives wasted and the contribution that they could have made. What is really heart-breaking is to think that we had a chance to stop it and did not. I hope that the Government will look at this.