Health and Care Bill

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 26th January 2022 Lords Chamber

Finally, it is with humility that I propose amending the Children Act 1989. Internationally, it is highly respected and much copied. However, the intention of my amendments is to fulfil its key principles: the emphasis on prevention, on keeping children with their families wherever possible and on ensuring that help is available for parents who struggle to nurture their children or provide a safe and stable environment in which they can thrive. I commend these amendments to the Committee.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I lend my voice to this important group of amendments. I will explain very briefly why family hubs are so important to many of the big themes that we have been discussing in the Bill so far: prevention, early help and integration in particular.

Family hubs have a very important role to play in improving early intervention services and helping with integration and data sharing, as we discussed earlier, among public services and the voluntary sector. Importantly, as the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, explained, the range of services available in family hubs often includes important services such as children’s health services, which are better delivered in a community setting and integrated with other family health services, rather than delivered in a hospital or somewhere that has a much greater focus on acute care.

The Public Services Committee, on which I served until very recently, produced what I thought was a very important report on vulnerable children recently. It put a national rollout of family hubs at the very core of a national strategy for child vulnerability, proposing that the most deprived communities be prioritised in the early stages of any such expansion. In our report, we set out what fundamental characteristics we thought should be at the heart of every family hub, including employing full-time family co-ordinators, offering addiction and domestic violence services, providing support for parents with poor mental health and organising parenting classes. I say that, because I hope that it illustrates the point I made about integration between health services and broader family support services.

I had the privilege as a committee member—I think the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was with me—to visit Westminster family hub. I sat down and talked to a young mother with two young children who had a lot of very difficult issues that they were dealing with. The mother explained how the help and support she was getting through the family hub, both with her health issues and those of her children, as well as a wider range of issues, were helping her to keep her head above water. I was so impressed with that family hub and the help and support it was giving, and the way it was integrating statutory services and the voluntary sector.

I will make two other brief but important points. First, family hubs will be working with children from birth to 19. I see that as important, because families face challenges at any time, not just when children are very young, and focusing solely on early years and not helping families with older children does not have the same sort of holistic approach. So it is extremely helpful if, during early years, families build up these trusted relationships with people they meet in family support hubs of the type I have described, rather than sever that relationship when the child reaches the age of five. Parents can continue to contact a familiar team and access that trusted source of information and advice.

My final point to emphasise is the importance of family relationships and relationship support. One key thing about family hubs that is very important is the work they do to prioritise help with relationships—it might be couple relationships, parent-child relationships or even sibling relationships. By being able to deliver counselling and various other programmes to address some of the conflict and breakdown that often affects families in these difficult situations, they often help avoid the whole family reaching crisis point, particularly to the extent that parents have to access the courts to resolve disputes. For all these reasons, I very much support the amendments.