Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Wyld Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

My Lords, it has become customary to say it is a pleasure to follow the previous speaker, but it is a real pleasure and honour to follow the right reverend Prelate. There were so many interesting insights but also challenges to the committee, so I thank him for that. I need to draw attention to my interests as set out in the register, in particular my current interest as a non-exec at Ofsted; I recused myself where necessary during the inquiry.

I start by paying tribute to the chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. I miss serving on her committee, as it was a natural move for me to go over to the committee on the review of the Children and Families Act 2014, so ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield. I want to take a moment to say that the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, chaired this inquiry with real verve and sensitivity. She and I disagreed from time to time, but she never got into political point-scoring, although some may say that she has now got plenty of opportunity. I have observed her throughout the pandemic and beyond; she is somebody who has continued to work tirelessly for vulnerable children and women in the most horrendous circumstances. I thank her wholeheartedly.

I hesitated but I feel that I need to say a few words about the wider context for tonight’s debate. I am very glad that my noble friend the Minister is the person to respond to it. I am not sure how she feels about it, but she too has dedicated a lot of her life to helping those in need. She certainly needs no lectures from me about how frustrating it is for many of us to debate this in the current circumstances, but we must plough on because we owe it to those people that we have heard about who gave evidence to the committee, sometimes in private and with exceptional bravery. We need to ensure that their voices are heard.

As we have heard, one of the most disturbing realisations highlighted by many of the witnesses was the fact that the pandemic silenced many of those most in need of attention. We have heard again about the number of vulnerable children who became invisible to services, which is why there was such a sense of urgency in the committee’s recommendations. I pay tribute to the millions of public servants and voluntary workers doing sterling work up and down the country. We were lucky to hear from many of them first hand, but we also heard of structural or systemic issues that mean services too often are piecemeal or almost impossible to navigate.

What really struck me and, I am sure, other members of the committee when we took evidence from people who had needed to access public services in times of crisis was the number of times that the system had broken down due to poor communication or data-sharing issues. I take all the challenges on funding and agreed with some of them but, interestingly for me, a lot of the witnesses did not come forward and say it was about funding. They said that something which seems very simple, such as changing GP practice, can then have a domino effect. We heard of one example that really stuck with me, in the treatment of postnatal depression, where something that should have been handled quite simply—and could have been avoided—then had ramifications not only for the mother but for the whole family, at the heart of which sits the child.

I lost count of the number of times on this inquiry, and during the one we did before on public services in Covid, when we heard from people who had faced awful situations. It was not people who had made mistakes or could have tried harder but because of situations that anyone in this Chamber would, I am sure, have found it incredibly difficult to deal with. They said, “I had to tell my story over and over again”, because the system was so disjointed. It was bad enough when you heard adults telling you this but when you hear young people and children say it, that is terrible. Despite the fact that we were hearing that, still the voices are not heard when the services are created, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, and others have said.

I note that the Government “partially accepted” recommendation 10 of the report on co-production and co-design. There were some promising examples on parent and carer panels. Can the Minister set out how we are going to know whether these are effective? What metrics are in place for them and the other examples that the Government gave?

Others have talked about family hubs. I was going to go through them but have listened to every word, so I do not want to replicate. I will just give my observation: the Government are doing a lot of good work here and I thought there was a genuine acceptance that this was a good solution. I liked the fact that Minister Quince came with a great passion and said that he saw them as “Sure Start-plus-plus-plus”. All that was there. I accept the need for evidence-based policy-making, obviously, but I had a nagging feeling the whole way through that there was not quite enough urgency around implementation and delivery. The Government recognised that there were problems in rollout but did not say what steps were being taken to cut through the complexity, which is the job of governing. Again, I have cut short the points I was going to make, but I would be grateful if my noble friend could provide an update to the House. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, raised that point as well.

I want to talk briefly about mental health again, because I expressed my concerns during the committee—and years before that, actually, with many others, including the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, who have been talking about the fact that this has been a neglected area for so many years. Again, the Government have done some good work here and taken a thoughtful approach over the years. I have seen, first hand, some brilliant examples of mental health services delivered in schools by charities and I am a huge champion of early intervention, which was one of the core themes of the committee, but some children need further specialist support. Not everything is solved at that earlier stage, and I do not think we heard from anybody, and I do not know anybody, working with children in a professional capacity who is not hugely worried about the pressure on CAMHS. I probed this at the committee and did not think we got a particularly strong answer from Ministers, but maybe I am being unfair.

I want to talk briefly about the fact that I know some commentators feel we are in danger of medicalising what are normal anxious or low feelings. I agree that there is a balancing act in early years when you talk about emotions, mental health and mental well-being, but I am talking about young people who are self-harming or those who have eating disorders or suicidal thoughts. There are awful situations with thresholds, where their parents are told that they do not meet them. The system seems very painful and difficult to navigate in the worst circumstances. Can my noble friend kindly update the House on what assessment the Government have made, or whether she thinks I am overstating it, of the immediate requirements for CAMHS? What steps are being taken to address this in terms of both the crisis and immediate response, some of which can be blamed on the pandemic, and longer-term workforce planning?

To sum up, as we have heard, all children faced a huge burden during the pandemic. but many or most of them will be able to move on. They will recover without needing the support of public services beyond what anyone might expect. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, said: for those who cannot, for whatever reason, we have one chance to help them urgently, so please do not let us miss it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate, with many issues raised, questions asked and challenges given. I am sure that the Minister will be able to respond with her usual careful consideration.

This important report starts by reminding us that over 1 million children are growing up with reduced life chances. This stark reality has negative implications for us all, not just those children and their families. For the children concerned, it may lead to lower educational attainment, with a knock-on impact on their life chances in employment, for example. When policymakers focus on skill levels that are not meeting our current needs, as they often do, they should be required to consider the evidence in this ground-breaking report. It demonstrates that too many of our nation’s children are raised in family circumstances that restrict their development. The sad fact is that intervention by the state is too little and far too late for many of these children. Worse still, the evidence gathered by the report points to the colossal waste of public funding in the failure to intervene early in these children’s lives.

I record my thanks to the chair of the committee, on which I was lucky enough to serve, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, for her leadership and her persistence in following the evidence and then finally gathering us all together to agree—which was not always easy—in the production of this report, which I sincerely believe is invaluable.

I will focus my contribution this evening on funding issues. This is where I will disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, because I think funding, and the lack of it, is at the heart of this report. Lots of other issues are very important and have been raised, including data sharing.

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

I do not think I said that funding was not important. I said that some witnesses had pointed to problems that I thought were not necessarily directly related to funding; they were about communication issues and join-up. Indeed, at times I have called for extra funding for early years myself.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness for putting that on the record and I withdraw any criticism that I have wrongly made.

The numbers of children likely to benefit from external support from local services are staggeringly high. We heard that 1.6 million children—that is an awful lot of children—were helped by local authority children’s services in the six years between 2012 and 2018. In addition, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner estimated that as many as 750,000 were known to social services but “received no support”. Further, as we have heard in other contributions this evening, an additional 800,000 children were deemed “completely ‘invisible’ to services”, although likely to “need help” because of the circumstances in which they were living.

The committee was mindful of the wise words of Martin Lennon of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, who said:

“Not all vulnerable children are poor, and not all poor children are vulnerable.”


However, he then went on to make clear that there was a definite “correlation between poverty” and children being, and becoming, “vulnerable”. Since the report was completed, families are now having to contend with the cost of living crisis. Those families who are just managing now will have very considerable additional costs for basic essentials. All commentators expect that there will be even more children living in poverty with the consequences enumerated by this report. The challenge for the Government is to determine the most effective and cost-efficient ways of supporting vulnerable children for their, and our, benefit.

The committee heard from many witnesses that the key to cost-effective support is to provide help “as early as possible” in a child’s life. Obviously, that means that funding for early intervention is critical. However, early intervention funding is not statutory. Admitting children into the care of the local authority is a statutory reaction in response to a family in crisis. This is done at very considerable cost to the public purse: for example, foster care rates are between £140 and £200 a week, depending on the age of the child. This is for local authority foster care; it is considerably higher for agency foster care.

As the report concludes: early intervention is a key to enabling better lives for vulnerable children. Unfortunately, local authorities saw a £1.7 billion yearly reduction in early intervention programmes since 2010. Those communities in highest need experienced the largest cuts to these services: councils with the highest levels of deprivation saw reductions of over 50% in real-terms spending—therefore, a per-child average of £141 where poverty is highest. From 2010 to 2019, those with the lowest levels of poverty had budget cuts of only £182 million per annum.

Early intervention is based on supporting a family in their own home; later interventions—such as foster or residential care, as I explained—are much more expensive. Yet the report found that, while there was a 48% reduction in early intervention services, there was a 34% increase to “higher-intensity” late interventions, which, as the evidence from Barnardo’s showed, despite being vastly more expensive, had worse outcomes for children.

One statistic clearly shows this failure of public policy. The number of children looked after in England has risen from 65,520 in 2011 to over 80,000 now. Andrea Leadsom’s review of child health inequalities quoted research by the LSE which showed that £16 billion of public money was spent in a single year on children and young people who have serious problems, all of which could be traced back to their early experiences. Her review said that

“you can certainly argue that you will save a good portion of that by investing earlier.”

The Government have made some welcome moves towards the provision of early intervention in the creation of family hubs, but much more needs to be done. As the report recommends at paragraph 60:

“To underpin a strategy on child vulnerability and its ambitions for ‘levelling up’, the Government should restore ringfenced funding for early intervention to its 2010 levels.”


I agree.

Other noble Lords have highlighted the other key recommendations in the report such as listening to the voice of the user—what a powerful experience that was. It was a privilege, actually, to hear the voices of the users. How great their contribution could have been to improving the quality of the services they need and to the Government having an effective strategy. It is appalling that there is no strategy. It is apparent that there is no strategy for helping 1 million of our children and, from all the evidence that we have heard, saving lots of money at the same time. Why do we not get it done? Finally, there is the importance of the professionals working with the users and the voluntary sector to the benefit of children. I just hope that this excellent report has the impact on decision-makers that its quality deserves.