Queen’s Speech

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests which are set out in the register. I am a trustee of the Brent Centre for Young People, a mental health service for young adolescents, and two other mental health and child welfare charities. I welcome in particular what the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, said in his opening remarks about the forthcoming Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health. It is encouraging to see the work being done on all sides to raise the profile of mental health in recent years and I know that the whole sector is grateful to those members of the Royal Family who have chosen to champion a number of charities that are working with young people with mental health issues. We can see the consequences of this as more and more grant-procuring bodies are choosing to fund this kind of work, and that does make a difference.

I want to ask the Minister about looked-after children and care leavers. The Government have done much good work over the previous years, but the concern is that given the current changes going on, some of the forward momentum in this area might be lost. I seek a reassurance from him on those matters in the form of a letter or perhaps a meeting which his colleague the noble Lord, Lord Nash, might arrange along with Robert Goodwill, the new Minister of State, and interested Peers in order to talk about the issues relating to looked-after children and care leavers.

The Government have been funding the family drug and alcohol court, an innovative system where judges oversee a family over the course of a year. They work with social workers to ensure that parents stay off drugs and alcohol. If the parents succeed in doing so, their children can remain with them rather than being taken into care. The President of the Family Division has recently alerted us to the fact that there is a crisis in terms of the number of children coming into care since the death of Baby Peter. The numbers are continuing to increase so this is very important work. I look forward to receiving a reassurance about the future of the FDAC.

When we were considering the then Children and Social Work Bill the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, who is the chair of CAFCASS, persuaded the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, that we needed to look at the assessments, particularly the mental health assessments, of young people being taken into care. The Minister undertook to commission six pilots in local authorities to look at different ways of assessing the health needs of young people entering care. Again, a letter and a meeting would be helpful as a reassurance that the work is going forward.

The Government have produced a helpful report of Sir Martin Narey’s review of children’s homes. Unfortunately, I still have some concerns about the care and indeed the safety of children in residential care, and that is another topic I would be grateful to hear about, although it ought to be more a subject of conversation with the Minister.

Out-of-authority placements have always been a difficult issue. This is when a foster child or a child in residential care is placed in another local authority. The danger is that the child may be out of sight and therefore out of mind. Recently a designated nurse for looked-after children raised a concern that young people from her local authority were being placed in another local authority. I shall pull out of the air the names of two authorities, Lambeth and Southwark. Lambeth has a boy who is placed in Southwark. That boy will not have the same rights to mental health and other services which looked-after children from Southwark may have. It is likely that another boy from Southwark will have access to better services. We need clearer guidance on what local authorities should be doing in this area to ensure that children who are given an out-of-authority placement are entitled to the same services as those who are not.

We heard earlier today about the importance of apprenticeships and of opportunity. A young person, Fatima, talked to Peers three months ago about her difficulties. She was in an excellent City apprenticeship with an accountancy firm but was struggling with her housing, which she was just holding on to. She also has a disability. She is very bright. English is not her first language. She was doing well. I heard her speak at a conference. She could not hold on to her housing and lost her apprenticeship. This is the case for many young people leaving care in London and the south-east. They are placed in private rented accommodation and are caught in a trap. If they start working, their housing benefit begins to reduce and they cannot therefore hold on to their accommodation. Edward Timpson listened to these concerns when he was an MP. I want to be sure that consideration is given to that issue. It is another issue for a letter and perhaps for discussion in the meeting. I say in passing how much I regret that Edward Timpson is no longer Children’s Minister having lost his seat at the last election. I had the privilege of working with him when he was chair of the parliamentary group for young people in care. Even at that time, he took great interest in the education of looked-after children. He produced a report on which many of the changes he introduced as Minister were based; for instance, the introduction of virtual school heads. I think that we are all grateful to him for his outstanding work as Minister of State for Children, and I hope that he will return to Parliament soon and be able to continue that work.

My noble friend Lord Kinnoull referred to his colleagues’ report on improving social mobility. Nick Chambers, chief executive of the charity, Education and Employers Taskforce, said that,

“young people’s perceptions … are formed at an early age, even at primary, and they rule out all sorts of routes. It is really important that young people have a wide experience of the world of work”.

I first visited France at the age of 12—a colleague talked earlier about being placed in Germany at the age of 14. As we move out of the European Union, it becomes even more important that we provide opportunities for young people to travel back and forth, particularly between the UK and Germany and France. Germany and France do a much better job of that at the moment. I hope that the Minister and perhaps Mr Goodwill in particular, given his experience as an MEP and a speaker of French and German, might look at what can be done to encourage more such exchanges and ease any safeguarding worries that might inhibit them. I look forward to the Minister’s response.