Children in Need: Adulthood

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) on securing this debate. I come at it from a slightly different direction in some ways, although not all, but none the less I agree that this extremely important issue deserves more debate in this place.

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield OBE, rightly says in her child vulnerability report published in June that 1.6 million children who are living in families with substantial complex needs

“have no established recognised form of additional support.”

She also says that if we expand

“the range of support we offer to vulnerable children and their families, we can support many more children in a more efficient and effective way. This is about an approach that works with children and their families, to develop resilience, confidence and independence”.

In other words, we need to focus more on prevention, so that children who develop very extensive needs can be helped earlier. As the hon. Gentleman said, early intervention is key.

In supporting the next generation, which I believe we are now calling generation Z or the post-millennials, we need better to recognise that transition into adulthood today is so challenging that they need far greater support from their very earliest years than we did. That support must continue right into early adulthood. Even in the best circumstances, the stage of moving from teenage years into adulthood today—that transition into adult life with regard to relationships, money and employment, to name but a few issues—is challenging and stressful. Of course, as we have heard, for those children needing more support and protection, it can be a particularly vulnerable time.

As the Minister knows, for over a year now a large group of some 60 Conservative MPs have been working on and supporting a manifesto to strengthen families, which contains many practical policies. I believe many of those are important if we are to properly support this generation. This generation has experienced profound changes in family structure, which has had a real impact on young people’s health. Changes in family life, and for some the absence of a father in particular, mean that many new parents have not had the role models that previous generations relied on to teach and guide them.

Beyond a good home life, young people need supportive communities, including the friendship of peers, the company of adults and cohesive neighbourhoods, which many now do not have—a place where people know their neighbours. Where that is the case, adolescent wellbeing and mental health is stronger. The environment in which adolescents grow up today has a major impact on their current and future wellbeing, and many need more support not only within their family and from their carers, but within their community and school environments. That is why strengthening family and community life is so important.

I am delighted that, following a meeting with the Prime Minister late last year regarding the manifesto, she commissioned a piece of work to see what more the Government could do to support children and families, which has resulted in her announcement this summer that she has asked the Leader of the House to chair a ministerial group looking at early years family support. Members of the supportive ministerial group include the Minister and the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who has responsibility for family support. I am delighted that there is now a Cabinet-level Minister working on the family issue. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister how he proposes to take forward his work within that team. It is so important that we focus not just on the very earliest years of a child’s life, but right into those later teenage years and beyond, which I hope he will highlight to the team.

One way families and carers can be provided with greater support—the kind of support that Anne Longfield talks about in local communities—is through locally based family hubs. The Children’s Commissioner is very supportive of family hubs and the Minister and I have talked about them many times. They provide a wider range of support for the family, the carers of a child or teenager, and for the child themselves, and they provide that support from childhood right up into early adulthood and beyond. It is not just about those very early years, to which the old Sure Start children’s centres used to be limited. Family hubs are springing up in local communities across the country.

I am delighted that, following the debate a short time ago on family hubs, the Minister indicated that he will continue to look at how the Department can ensure, as he wrote to me following the debate,

“that the local government programme understands fully how the family hub model works and where the most effective practice is taking place.”

He has asked officials to look into that, and I would be grateful if he could give us an update on that work and on his timeframe for reporting on the work that he instituted following that debate.

As I have said, family hubs can provide a solution and early intervention support from a statutory authority, working together with local voluntary groups, charities and so forth, centred in a physical place within a community that families can turn to. They are essential because, as Dr Samantha Callan, an expert in this field, has pointed out:

“the lack of readily accessible family supports, along a spectrum of need, throughout the time children are dependent on their parents (0-19) means that life chances are often severely impaired and social care services are faced with unremittingly high numbers of children who are in need, on child protection plans and coming into care.”

I can give examples. The early intervention provision on the Isle of Wight—family hubs there are well established—means that fewer children on the Isle of Wight are being put on child protection plans. At Middlewich High School in my constituency, when children have special educational needs or disability or mental health challenges, the whole family is supported. After just a few years, the evidence shows the positive impact of the family hub approach on the emotional health and wellbeing of students, with an improvement in GCSE results, which improves life chances.

Another example of a family hub is in the Chelmsford library, which is a one-stop shop for free family services. Everything is included from antenatal contact and school readiness to substance misuse and mental health support, as well as disability support for children up to the age of 25 and so forth. There is a strong base from which late teenage and early adult young people can build their own lives and seek help for themselves as well as through their families.

As I say, I thank the Minister for his follow-up letter in August on family hubs following our debate. I was very pleased to read that

“the family hub approach is one that we would encourage local authorities to adopt if they believe it would deliver improved outcomes for their area.”

I like his approach.

I thank the Secretary of State for Education for the draft guidance he produced this summer on relationships education, which will be a step forward in helping young people build the healthy relationships that are so important if they are to embark upon early adult life in a positive way. The draft guidance emphasises how important it is that children of every background learn that healthy relationships are important as a foundation for future life. As I have said, many of them do not have good role models, but they have an opportunity to learn in school about the importance of family life and bringing up children. The Secretary of State’s foreword, which is very encouraging, says that

“we want the subjects to put in place the key building blocks of healthy, respectful relationships, focusing on family and friendships, both on and offline... All of this content should support the wider work of schools in helping to foster pupil wellbeing and develop resilience and virtues that we know are fundamental to pupils being happy, successful and productive members of society... This should be complemented by development of virtues like kindness, generosity, self-sacrifice and honesty.”

I thank the Minister and his ministerial colleagues for the way in which they are addressing the young people’s challenges. They have genuinely listened to the group of colleagues who are concerned about strengthening family and community life in the ways I have discussed.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Buck. I congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) on securing the debate. It is a pleasure to serve with him on the Work and Pensions Committee; I know he cares deeply about the matters it deals with. I am particularly delighted that we are discussing this subject.

A few years ago, having worked in child protection for a number of years, I became acutely aware of the needs and problems of children who were not in care but were on the edge of it—children who never quite reached the threshold to be taken away from their parents, but who nevertheless faced considerable problems in their lives. As more research was done on children whose needs were assessed under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, it became clear that a large proportion of those children faced the same terrible outcomes as children in care—indeed, some would suffer worse outcomes. That stands to reason: the children who were taken into care were taken out of the disruptive, abusive, neglectful family environment, and put into long-term, stable foster care, or adopted, so their lives were changed, whereas children who did not reach that threshold often stayed under the observation of children’s social services but did not receive services adequate to improve their condition.

I take my hat off to Social Finance UK, which in Newcastle a few years ago did a seminal piece of work ago that exposed just how poor the outcomes were. It identified that children in need or in care formed a small but substantial proportion of young people in Newcastle, but went on in the long term to form the majority of those not in education, employment or training in the city. That is why it is excellent that the Department, under the current Minister, took up that work and ran it on a national scale. The report published earlier this year showed that children who were in care or in need at some point during their childhood accounted for about 10% of the youth population, but went on to account for 51% of all long-term NEETs in young adulthood. Such disruption to family life has long-term consequences.

It is always a pleasure to speak after my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who spoke so eloquently about the need to mend broken families.

[Fiona Bruce]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. I saw a statistic yesterday that highlighted to me the need to focus much more on prevention than we do. Family breakdown costs about £50 billion per annum—various figures are quoted, but that has been quoted recently in many places. However, for every £100 spent on that, the Government spend only £1.50 on trying to prevent the breakdown of families. Something is wrong when it costs £50 billion to mend that brokenness.

[Alex Burghart]

Yes, my hon. Friend eloquently sets out the problem. We need to reconsider our approaches to prevention, early intervention and recovery. The problem faced by children in need is not, I believe, a marginal one, although it has been treated marginally for many years. There are about 380,000 children in need at any one time; the number of children in need at some point during any given year is considerably higher—many hundreds of thousands higher. So it was wonderful that the Children’s Commissioner for England, for whom I used to work, and the Conservative party, took on the cause. I was pleased to see that in our 2017 manifesto we committed to the review of outcomes for children in need that the Minister is currently undertaking. I know everyone in the Chamber awaits the findings of that review with eager anticipation. We need to know exactly what is going on behind the scenes that leads to those young people having such poor educational and employment outcomes. I suspect that the findings will not necessarily come as any great surprise to us, but they will have the “kitemark” seal of the Department behind them.

For too long, we have looked at the symptoms, rather than the causes of the problems that these young people face. We talk about neglect, abuse and family dysfunction, and those are obviously important, but we do not always talk about why that neglect, abuse or family dysfunction occurs in the first place. The causes are painfully predictable: poor mental health, long-term unemployment, addiction, family breakdown and the rest. Only when we turn our attention to fixing those root-cause problems will we start preventing the next generation of problems and helping to rebuild the family lives of those children already in the system.