Neighbourhood Services: Government Support

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, may I speak briefly, for four minutes perhaps if I am permitted, in the break? I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for calling this important debate. In listening to what has been said, I reflect on the difficulties politically that we have been facing for quite some time now. We seem to be talking about a lack of stability and extremism, moving from “spend, spend, spend” to “cut, cut, cut”. We talk about the decision to stop building social housing and sell it off, and the consequences of that. I compare that to a country like Germany, for instance, which obviously has its own challenges, but it seems to have achieved a level of stability and continuity of policy over time. Looking at that from the point of view of children, young people and families, what they need above all is continuity and stability. Perhaps, therefore, the current crisis may be an opportunity to think about whether we might do politics a little differently in this country, being a bit more collaborative and consistent and a bit less confrontational and adversarial.

I will address three points briefly: housing, young people and the funding of strategic services. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, spoke eloquently about housing. Over the years, I have spoken with mothers in temporary accommodation, and it has been troubling to hear of their experience, most obviously of isolation. So often, because of the shortage of housing, they are placed a long way from their community—perhaps their ethnic community—and their family and friends, so they struggle because of that. They struggle with great uncertainty. I was speaking with a woman who had experienced domestic violence over many years. She had finally managed to escape from her husband, spent some time in a refuge and was then in temporary accommodation. She spoke of her great anxiety that she might be placed way outside London, where she had lived for many years and brought up her family. Obviously, this was impacting on her mental health, and brought with it the risk that her granddaughter, whom she was caring for, might be removed into local authority care. That is perhaps another reason for us to wish to remain in the European Union or to rejoin it. The housing issue, which people on the continent seem to address far better on the whole, is perhaps just one example of the success of the social contract there, which we seem to have been struggling with for many years. In the United States, which we seem now to be turning towards, they have a very shaky social contract.

On young people, the BBC recently produced a report on children and young people in Barrow-in-Furness. For many years, young people have been struggling there—there have been issues to do with drug and alcohol misuse—and the programme highlighted that younger and younger children are being drawn into evening activities around drinking, often turning up to school when they are unable to concentrate and falling asleep. We also have the continual worries about children and young people being involved in knife crime. Most of the victims of knife crime are young people themselves. I once worked in a hostel where I met a young black woman serving the food whose son had been knifed just recently, and we saw the impact that had on her.

I welcome the efforts that the Government are making to address that, but I worked for three years in various local authorities across London with children and young people—from 1982 to 1985, I think. I went with my gang of local young people to the local swimming pool and we made use of local parks. We need consistent investment in those assets for children and young people. We need to invest in youth services. I was sorry to hear that Pendle has lost half of its workforce. There are two key things if one wants to keep young people out of crime: you need to give them something to do, and you need to give them someone responsible and helpful to whom they can look up to do it with. In a sense, you are making a little gang of your own, you are doing something interesting together and they have a good person to do it with.

Finally—I may have spoken for too long already—is it reasonable to expect local taxpayers to fund strategic services, such as children’s services? Surely the Government need to invest more in children and family services from the national budget so that local taxpayers do not have to pay for children’s homes and the costly interventions that are a statutory duty on local authorities to deliver.