Earl of Listowel
Main Page: Earl of Listowel (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
The Earl of Listowel (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of the Brent Centre for Young People, a mental health service for adolescents which works in the youth justice system and in various other services. I am also involved in the Michael Sieff Foundation, a child welfare organisation with a long history of working around the youth and criminal justice system.
I join your Lordships in thanking the noble Baroness for introducing this strategy and for giving us the opportunity to debate it today. It seems to me that the strategy is a complex answer to a complex problem, and we really need to avoid seeing it as a simple problem with a simple solution. That is what I most welcome about the strategy.
I listened with the greatest interest to the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. She has great personal experience and is a champion and campaigner in this area. It is tragic to think of the lives that have been lost to these crimes. While listening to her, I particularly remembered Damilola Taylor, the young boy in Peckham who seemed to have a life of promise in front of him. He was wounded in the leg and lost his life as a result, and I remember the grief of his family. The risk is that you become so emotional about these things that you do not think in making a response but, rather, have an emotional reaction, and I welcome the thoughtfulness of the Government’s response.
In listening to the debate, I have been thinking about the complexity and the various experiences of your Lordships, and I see what I think is a general reflection on our politics. I might be quite wrong about this and am probably overstretching myself, but my reflection is that somehow politics in this country does not rise to the challenges posed by an increasingly complex country; instead—laying no responsibility with any particular party—it tends to produce rather simple answers to complex questions.
In March last year I visited Germany, for the first time in many years, with a parliamentary group and I was impressed by what was going on in the Bundestag. I was most impressed by the fact that on Sundays shops still do not open and that businesses are not allowed to send emails to their employees after 8 o’clock at night. It is still the custom that you stop working at six and if you are working after six you are being inefficient. The Germans have balance in their lives. They can spend time with their families, children and friends, if they wish to, or do other things. We somehow have lost our way and have become unbalanced.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for the wonderful work he is doing in championing and supporting families. The statistics in the OECD report of 2011 on family formation showed that at that time 15% of German children were growing up without a father in the home; we were 20% or 21%, and the United States 25%. The troubling prediction in that thorough report was that we were set to outstrip the United States in terms of children growing up without a father in the home by a significant degree over the next two decades.
This is an important issue. It is not about blaming families but about supporting couples and families to stay together in every way we can. We have heard about many of the ways in which we can support families to stay together. In my own family experience, when I wonder what is the right thing to do next, I often think about what my father would do, and that gives me the direction in which to go. Often when I do wrong it is because I do not remember the good example set by my father. My sister was absolutely besotted with my father; he was hugely important to her. We have spoken a great deal about boys growing up without fathers but it is important that many girls are growing up without fathers. Part of the reason for the sexual exploitation of vulnerable teenagers is that many of these young women have not grown up with a positive man in their lives, and that big gap may be filled by unpleasant characters who wish to exploit them.
The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, referred to the training of social workers. I was pleased to see in the welcome report on children’s homes by Martin Narey, the former chief executive of Barnardo’s, a recommendation that social workers should have a mandatory placement in a children’s home as part of their training. Children’s homes are wonderful places to learn about working with troubled and troubling adolescents. I could not agree more with him and I hope that that particular recommendation of his report is implemented.
I welcome the fact that the Government have talked about a criminal justice response and the many other responses that need to be made. There needs to be a criminal justice response. About 18 years ago there was an outcry about the level of mobile phone thefts. Something had to be done and sanctions were toughened. One of the victims of this was a troubled young man called Joseph Scholes, who was a self-harmer. On his first day at a children’s home he was drawn into a crowd of young people, one of whom perpetrated mobile phone thefts and Joseph Scholes was drawn into this. We have to be tough on these people but, in the course of the trial, the prosecutor said that at no time was Joseph Scholes a physical threat to anyone. However, he was imprisoned. There was a shortage of suitable places so he was placed in an inappropriate setting—and he took his life at the age of 16. In an article in the Daily Telegraph in 2012, his mother described him as being in a strip cell. I think he had been self-harming. He was considered a suicide risk so was placed in a strip cell in a horse blanket. He was not properly supervised and he took his own life.
If we overreact, we draw in children and young people who are not a risk and should not end up in the criminal justice system. We can act effectively and pre-emptively to help young people who well might end up in the criminal justice system avoid that route. Once they arrive in it, two-thirds of them will offend again. They are just likely to learn to be better criminals. Thankfully the number of children in custody has been very much reduced over the last period, from 3,000 to below 1,000 currently. There are very tough and challenging young people there, so I welcome the fact that there is a criminal justice response but there are other areas to cover.
I do not wish to speak for too long. I welcome the fact that the Government have talked about youth work in their reaction. Redthread is catching young people when they are in hospital with an injury relating to knife crime and getting a youth worker to speak to them. Again, my reflection on this, going back to what I was saying at the beginning, is that there is a need for a more strategic and stable culture of politics. Youth work has alternately had great resources pumped into it, then been starved of resources, then been pumped with resources, then been starved of resources. This does not create a great profession which can consistently do the outstanding work that is necessary for young people.
I am not blaming any party. I am just saying, “Is this system working for us? Is this system working for the nation?” If you look at Germany, perhaps you can see a system which is more stable and has more continuity. If you look at Angela Merkel or previous Chancellors, they have been in their posts for a long while. Look at the way they make compromises; I know that coalition is unpopular. Negotiation and compromise are unpopular, but they seem to give better outcomes. The last coalition, between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, was very unpopular, but it seemed to give some very good results—on mental health, for instance. Of course, in Germany coalition is the norm. Again, it is deeply unpopular, but the proof of the pudding seems to be in Germany’s economy and a social system where the social contract is still strong.
I do not want to stray too much, but there is a statutory duty on local authorities to provide youth work services. It is a very weak duty so, when they are starved of funds, as they have been, they will tend to invest in other areas. I would appreciate the Minister’s looking at the statutory duty on local authorities to provide youth services and thinking whether that might be strengthened so that we can have consistently high-quality intervention from youth services. Perhaps she has time to meet me to discuss youth work and what we can do to ensure that in the future it grows more professional and more effective. As fathers are not as involved in their children’s lives as they were, youth workers become more important.
As I said earlier, I am a trustee of the Brent Centre for Young People. I shall give an example of the really effective interventions that can be made. I visited its Sport and Thought intervention in a local primary school and watched the boys playing football, supervised by a child and adolescent psychotherapist. He is a very highly qualified expert in child development. Sport and Thought—these boys do not think. They act, on any impulse that comes to them. You can use football to enable them to say, if they are getting into a scuffle, “Stop. What is going on here? Think about what you are doing”.
The subject is much more complex than that, but what struck me is hearing the teacher, who is the main beneficiary of this. She was struggling to manage with these boys, and I heard the gratitude coming from her at this intervention that made them manageable, that helped them to learn and helped the rest of the class to learn. We can invest in such interventions. For instance, I welcome the money that government have put into the troubled families initiative. It would be good to hear from the Minister that that will continue to be funded past 2020. I am afraid that cuts in funding to local authorities in recent years have been so extreme that, despite such welcome initiatives, children’s centres and other early interventions that could help struggling families and help parents stay together have been removed.
I am sorry to have spoken so long. I welcome this government strategy. The problem is complex and the answer needs to be complex. I am grateful for the Government’s approach. I look forward to the Minister’s response.