A Manifesto to Strengthen Families

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I start by welcoming the Minister to the House of Lords and congratulate him on his meteoric rise to the Government Front Bench. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for a very interesting debate and extremely important manifesto. There are so many policy areas that could be improved in order to redress the magnitude of family breakdown in this country that it is hard to know where to start. However, I plan to mention adoptive families, the benefits of family hubs, what can be done to keep offenders in touch with their families to reduce reoffending and the importance of teaching children about relationships in school.

I start with adoptive families—not mentioned by anybody except the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford—since I have a particular interest in them. I was recently contacted by a couple who are both psychologists and are adoptive parents. I took very seriously the points they were making, which were about burnout of adoptive parents and the lack of support for them. They reminded me that adoptive parents take on some of the most needy and challenging children in our society—traumatised children whose mental and physical health has been damaged by their life experiences. The people who take on these children are heroes and their attempts to give them a stable and loving family in which to recover from their previous trauma should be applauded and supported. However, these adoptive parents often have to deal with violence directed at them or other siblings, self-harm, incontinence, inappropriate or dangerous sexual behaviour, anger, school refusal and many sorts of mental health problems. Adoptive parents cannot take sick leave, resign or ask for a transfer to another department. Unlike foster parents, they do not get much help. Indeed, if they adopt after fostering, whatever help they had before often just stops.

Adoption UK thinks that as many as a quarter of all adoptive parents are in crisis and in need of professional help to keep the family together. But local authority post-adoption services vary tremendously; despite the fact that adopters save local authorities a massive amount of money, some are less than helpful when asked for help. Can the Minister say what is being done to ensure that an appropriate level of support for adoptive families is offered everywhere? If we do not do this, the NHS will be saddled with the cost of the mental health issues of the parents as well as their children.

Mental health has been mentioned by several noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord Farmer, Lord Shinkwin and Lord Alton, among others. This brings me to the subject of teaching relationship and sex education in schools and the ability of schools to identify and signpost mental health problems. The best way to deal with mental health is of course to prevent the problems arising in the first place—the noble Lord, Lord Bird, mentioned prevention. Many of the issues that children face arise from family break-up or from violence or poor relationships in the family. Many children do not have a good model of healthy and respectful relationships at home. It is therefore often the job of the school to pick up the pieces and help build up children’s resilience. There is a major role for relationship and sex education in this, so I welcomed the Children and Social Work Act earlier this year, which should ensure that all children get it in an age-appropriate manner as part of their PSHE curriculum.

I have become aware, however, that the regulations to mandate schools to prepare and publish their RSE policy have not yet been made. Can the Minister say why this is and when it will be done? I welcomed the Prime Minister’s initiative on mental health first aid training in schools and wonder if the Minister can update us on how that is progressing. Such work can help children to ride out the worst effects of family unhappiness or even breakdown.

We live in a very unequal country, and an interesting statistic in the briefings we have received caught my eye. It showed that poor families break up more frequently than more affluent ones. As the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, said, almost half of five year-olds in poorer families are in broken families, compared with 16% in wealthier ones. This did not surprise me. It is widely known that a high percentage of parents are worried about money, and that money is frequently the cause of family arguments, so what is being done to improve the finances of families with children? I am afraid that the marriage tax allowance, which the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, mentioned, brings in less than £5 a week, even if the family applies for it, so that is not going to make much difference. By the way, I am not suggesting that it be improved, as I do not approve of it in the first place. I do not think it is the role of the state to support particular kinds of families.

Benefit cuts and the six-week wait for universal credit have sent far too many families into debt, and to food banks. If the Government are really concerned to keep families together, which, of course, is a laudable aim, they need to do everything possible to ensure that parents can feed their children and pay the bills. We hear about the record number of people in work, but the fact is that many jobs are very low paid and a high percentage of poor people are in work and eligible for benefits, which makes a nonsense of the Government’s constant claim that the best way out of poverty is through work. I would say it depends what sort of work, and how well it is paid. Can the Minister say what plans the Government have to make what they choose to call the living wage into something people can actually live on?

Many families need a range of services to help them survive, stay together and bring up their children successfully, and it is desirable that these services be easily accessible and linked together. That is why I, like the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and others, support the idea of family hubs, which can be based on children’s centres or Sure Start centres. I hope they will not become what the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, called the shiny new thing that disappears before long, as they would offer a wide range of services for parents as well as children. This is not a new idea. Several years ago, I visited the Coram Centre, where all kinds of services such as debt advice, immigration advice, English lessons and help to find a job and a home were offered to the parents of children in the nursery. It was a great example of what can be done in response to the particular needs of the families in the locality. Therefore, can the Minister say whether the Government support family hubs and whether extra funding will be made available, given the savings to many other services that they could provide in the future?

I will say a few words about prisoners and their families. There is an important role for families to keep in touch with offenders while they are in prison in the interests of their relationships with their spouses and children, and of reducing reoffending. However, in many cases, the prison system does not make it easy for families to visit. There is some very good practice, such as Skype conversations, but in some cases it is hard to see the logic of where offenders are placed. For example, there is a large, brand new prison in Wrexham, near where I live in north Wales. I recently learned that only 10% of the inmates come from Wales and that many come from a very long way away in England. In addition, the prison is located on an industrial estate miles from the nearest railway station. It cannot be easy for families without their own car to visit in those circumstances, so what is being done to ensure that families who want to keep up their relationship with the offender are helped to do so?

Finally, from experience, I issue a warning about impact assessments. During the coalition Government, my then honourable friend Sarah Teather said that policies would have a child rights impact assessment. I am not aware that that is being done. Therefore, if we are to have a family impact assessment, I hope that it really happens.