Family Policy

Jessica Lee Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jessica Lee (Erewash) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Mr Meale, and I am delighted to have secured this important and wide-reaching debate on family policy.

I will begin by reflecting on the royal wedding last Friday. There are, of course, many joyful moments on which to reflect, but I want to focus on the prayer that their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge prepared in advance of their special day. It is telling that before going on to give thanks for their marriage and expressing their wish to serve others, in the first sentence of the prayer they thanked God for their respective families.

The value of the first relationships that we develop, and the care afforded to us by our first carers and family unit, plays a key role in the formation of the years ahead. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that one needs to marry into royalty or luxury to value the importance of family and stability—far from it. That prayer reflects the wishes and aspirations of thousands of newlyweds up and down the country, and it was a valuable statement to make.

Since the coalition Government were formed nearly a year ago, there has been a focus on commissioning reports to examine how to tackle child poverty and how to best assist children and families in the important early years development. Most notable are the reports by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), which looks at the foundation years, and that of the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) on early intervention. The report by Dame Clare Tickell presents her results on the evidence regarding the foundation years. Professor Eileen Munro has examined child protection procedures, and David Norgrove has published an interim report on the Family Justice Review. Most of those reports are at the interim stage, but they have already provided a detailed and highly informative overview for how to approach the complex issue of assisting families, particularly in the early years.

It is important to mention the valuable role played by the voluntary sector in supporting and caring for families. That role varies from national charities and organisations, such as Action for Children or Barnardo’s, to small local organisations that provide niche help and assistance. That work is underpinned by the vision and aspirations of, among others, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He has sought to get to grips with the reasons behind the cycles of poverty in the UK, and he has looked at how best to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged people.

Such an aspiration cannot be achieved by central Government alone, and I believe that we need to empower the most disadvantaged people to make sustained changes and to aspire for their children. The complexities of family breakdown, drug and alcohol misuse, personal debt and educational failure have created long-standing problems for many families. The benefit reforms proposed and implemented by the coalition Government will make work pay, so that providing and taking responsibility for children, and the creation of a work ethic, will hopefully move some families away from those generations of people who did not feel equipped to work. Such people should be equipped with the skills and self- esteem that they require to move into work. I hope that this debate will pull together some of the strands that run through those different reports, and give hon. Members the opportunity to contribute their own views and experiences.

The contribution of the report into foundation years by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead is an excellent place to start such a debate. The report confirms the importance of the early years, and presents evidence to show how critical those years can be in determining the likely outcomes for children as they move into adulthood. Essentially, it proposes to place equal emphasis on the first five years—the foundation years—of a child’s life, as on the primary and secondary sections of a child’s education and development. It is a plan for long-term investment—not only financial investment but investment in services and skills—so as to achieve long-term results and improvements.

The proposal to set life chance indicators to support work undertaken during the foundation years is a bold step, and such indicators would help the Government to understand how investment in the early years is bearing fruit. The right hon. Gentleman seeks ring-fencing for some services, but the report makes it clear that that is not simply a request for funds. Trying to help the most disadvantaged children is not a new approach taken by the coalition Government, because previous Governments have also aspired to tackle that complex issue. The previous Labour Government set a target of abolishing child poverty by 2020, but in my view their approach ignored the long-term complexities behind cycles of poverty. The policy of child tax credits was never going to be a sufficient step towards resolving the social and economic problems for the next generation.

We need a structure where help for the foundation years can be accessed by those most in need. The proposals in the report for Sure Start centres to be refocused make great sense. In my constituency, Erewash, we are blessed with excellent Sure Start centres, and the staff and volunteers work with families and provide a great service to everyone who comes through the doors. Commissioning children’s centres and making them places where child benefit forms can be collected or parenting classes accessed are just some of the proposals aimed at making such centres attractive. In other countries, parenting classes are often a given, and it is part of the culture to undertake them when a new baby arrives. I want to see a shift in culture in the UK to make parenting classes fun and become the norm.

My friends who have had children often describe the sudden sense of responsibility that they felt when they first held their newborn child. As godparent to three young children, I have only to take care of the enjoyable stuff such as presents and day trips and so on, which is great fun. We know, however, that babies do not arrive with an instruction manual, and the shock of suddenly providing for another human being can be overwhelming. Indeed, that shock can be overwhelming for well-supported, financially secure and well-educated parents, so it is easy to see how a parent who, for example, is struggling with their finances, has an unreliable partner, lacks a good family support network or has no knowledge of where to access help could suddenly fall apart. We must reach out and help those parents. We need more health visitors and easily accessible support for parents. If we can provide the right support from the outset, the prospects for children in the future will be much improved.

The report by the hon. Member for Nottingham North sits neatly with the work on foundation years. He has been an advocate of the theory and practice of early intervention work for many years, and we are all grateful for his first report on that subject. The forward to the report reiterates a point that I have made from the outset: the call for early intervention is about not only asking for money but the impact of social disruption, the effect of fractured lives and the sadness of broken families.

The introduction to the hon. Gentleman’s report contains the startling fact that a child’s development score at 22 months is an accurate indicator of educational outcomes at the age of 26. Other indicators in the report show how depression in adult women can often be traced back to their childhood experiences, and how adult criminal activity in men can be a reflection of their formative years. In my view, such facts only increase the need to look at long-term strategies for how we support families with young children, and how we structure support for those vital early years. The use of early intervention work to nip in the bud any struggles or problems faced by families has to be a goal for the future.

The work of Dame Clare Tickell includes data collated from various providers, schools and voluntary organisations. She has considered how best to implement measures to support the foundation years. It is one thing to identify the early years as an area that we need to assist. What we really need to do is to ensure that the work that is undertaken is correct. A question was asked about the most important skills that young children—pre- school children—should learn. Of the 1,184 responses, 81% listed helping to build good personal, social and emotional skills as the highest priority, with developing communication, speaking and listening skills coming a close second. Those are notable responses, as they are just the skills that could be monitored through early intervention work and assessed as part of a foundation years programme.

Another conclusion in the report was about the enthusiasm among professionals to speak, with permission of course, to other professionals involved with families, such as health visitors and support workers, which would very much assist work with families. It, too, is a significant theme and threads through to the steps that we take, but need to improve, in working with the most vulnerable children in society and those at risk of harm.

I come now to the important topic of child protection and support for the most vulnerable families. There is a need to tackle delays in the system and to ensure that the important work that social workers undertake is valued and respected. That is long overdue. My mother was a children’s nurse for about 40 years—probably longer than that—and her role would be considered a front-line role. That would also be the case for nursing staff in accident and emergency departments in particular. Similarly, the role of a child protection social worker, stepping into the unknown in people’s homes, is front-line work and needs to be recognised as such. I am a family lawyer, and most if not all of the social workers with whom I have worked over the years have been subject to verbal abuse and physical assaults. They have to walk into homes where there are alcoholic parents or drug misuse with not a clue about what will happen on the other side of the door. That is not a role to be taken lightly. The reason for dwelling on those experiences is that we need to structure children’s services correctly, so that they can best support the vulnerable children for whose care and well-being they are responsible, which is no small responsibility. Professor Munro set out in the conclusions to her report the need to reduce bureaucracy for social work teams and how we can better structure working practices in children’s services.

I want to champion the role of the voluntary sector in supporting local children’s services. In my constituency of Erewash in Derbyshire, we have an excellent Home-Start organisation, with which I have been honoured and delighted to be closely involved. It provides valuable support for mums, who are often young, who need advice and guidance—it is a supporter. It usually involves an older figure to whom they can turn for advice without fear of judgment or criticism. Such volunteers do not step on the toes of children’s services when they perform their statutory duties. I would object to any suggestion that by supporting the voluntary sector, we are trying to take statutory roles away from government. We are not trying to do that; we are trying to embrace the voluntary sector, support it and give it the voice that it needs. Such volunteers add to the much-needed fabric of a support network for inexperienced parents. I support Home-Start in Erewash and throughout the country, and I support the many other similar organisations.

In Derbyshire, we also have an excellent scheme, which has been rolled out through the county council, for a volunteering passport. After training, volunteers can be awarded the passport as a sign of their commitment and experience, and they can then go forward to assist families. Again, it is often young mothers who need a friendly face and some guidance on parenting skills. The scheme is a success, and it reduces bureaucracy. It could easily be incorporated in new and different projects across the county—indeed, I would like to see it rolled out across the country.

For too long, patterns of abuse and neglect have been passed down the generations in families involved with social services. To link back to the earlier reports, it is often the lack of early intervention work that leaves a vulnerable family without support in the home, which can escalate to emergency situations and then to the statutory involvement of social services. That is not how social workers wish to work with families and, most importantly, it is very damaging for children. Sadly, by that stage, the level of harm to children can be so great that their attachment to their parents and siblings is irreparably damaged and beyond repair, despite attempts to weave the family back together.

An additional factor in this rather depressing scenario is the structure of the family justice system. The family justice system is served by hard-working people who have often worked in it for many years and who have a passion for, and a commitment to, supporting vulnerable families. However, there are long delays in cases being heard and problems with the availability of experts and court time. David Norgrove has been commissioned to tackle those problems head-on, and he has provided a detailed interim report. The proposal to create a free-standing family justice system is well argued and evidenced in the report. It is important, because the current delays impact on planning for a child. If a baby of, say, six months is taken into foster care, it can be a further nine months or so before decisions are made about their future. The baby will therefore have lived more than half their life with an uncertain future. That matters, because it is at that stage that babies and young children are forming important attachments to their carers. Any disruption to their placement and delay in forming those attachments impact on the long-term prospects for young children. That takes us back to the concerns raised in the report by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead on the foundation years. To help the most vulnerable and damaged children in our society, we simply must speed up the decision making and court processes for them.

Finally, I come to the outcomes for looked-after children, which have also, sadly, remained poor. That has been the situation for many years. It was my privilege the other week to meet some young people from Cardiff who had travelled to Westminster. They were all children in foster care. One teenager told me that she had been through nine foster care placements in the past two years and that she did not think that that was fair. I did not hesitate in agreeing with her and saying that if I had been through so many placement changes in such a short time, I would be angry and upset with the system. Fortunately, that young person has now hit it off with an excellent support worker and has a focus and ambitions for the future. She knows where she wants to go. But what about the thousands of other young people who are—rightly—angry and upset? I applaud the Government’s steps to improve the adoption numbers in the UK and the wish to cut out political correctness and delays in approving matches for adoption. We must do that, because a whole generation of children on care orders depend on it.

My reason for initiating the debate is so that the Minister can, I hope, assist us all by responding to it and bringing together the threads of all these different and important reports. For any reforming Government who have recently come to power, there are many issues to tackle. We have all seen what the new Government have had to deal with in relation to the financial situation, reforming welfare benefits, foreign policy and so on, but to me, there is nothing more important than how we deal with young people and families. That takes me back to my opening comments. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recognised the point in their thoughtful prayer, which they set out before they were married. For any person who wants to get on in life, the love and support of a family is the most important foundation. Our duty as parliamentarians is to help as many young people as possible to have a stable and supportive start in life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) on raising the subject. All of us believe that family values are important; I certainly do as an elected representative. They are the core of society, and it is important that they are in place. That is the thrust of what was said by the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous). I missed the beginning of the hon. Lady’s contribution, but I understand that she mentioned Kate and William’s marriage as an important example. That was also important for me: it was not just the pageant, the grandness of the occasion and that 2 billion people around the world watched; it was that it was about two young people in love. That is the core of the marriage relationship. They are two ordinary people, if one takes away all the grandness of last Friday.

I have a couple of points to make about marriage. In correspondence that we all received as elected representatives, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and the Prime Minister clearly stated that family values are important to them. They intended to take action to help, which I would welcome. I will return to that later, but I am conscious that others want to speak, so I will not deliberate for too long.

I have one of those long-suffering wives who from the beginning realised that the guy was going to be away most of the time, and that she would have to look after the family, which is what happened. The role of the lady is important in any marriage. Ultimately, they run the household and look after the children. That bond between mother and child is stronger—perhaps more than it should be—than the one between the father and child. Statistics indicate that 90% of those in a married relationship are happy, and a similar percentage of those cohabiting are also happy. That is an indication that lots of people are committed to the married or cohabiting relationship.

It is not just about the relationship between the mother and father; it is also about the families and the time they spend with their children. The only mealtime I spend with my children is on a Sunday. There is an indication that families should eat together on a more regular basis. A family eating together three times a week provides that strong bond for a marital relationship.

My comments focus on the marriage relationship and the need to build upon it, and the need for Government to play a role. Words are all very well, but actions are needed to back them up, and I want to see that happen. If my wife is watching, she would probably say that that man is talking about love and romance, and wondering whether that is the man she married. I hope it is, but maybe we do not always show our emotions in the way that we should.

Will the Minister indicate the progress of the Conservative promise of a tax break for married couples? I do not think that we should base marriage on finance alone. People do not get married because of a house, car or good job; I hope people always marry for love. The Conservatives and the coalition have clearly stated that they wish to bring in a tax break for married couples, so I want to hear from the Minister where that features in the process. We heard the suggestion discussed a lot in June and July last year but not much since. In Hungary, it has been proposed that families should be allowed an extra vote on behalf of their children. I am not saying that we should do that here, but I am interested to see what we are doing to assist families with a tax break.

My final point is about breaking up. The hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire hit on the fact that not every marital relationship works out. We all have friends who tried hard but the relationship fell down. That happens. We must have a process in place to ensure that those who experience marital break-up can survive and get by. I hope the Minster will state whether there should be a mediation process. I believe that there should be. Should both parties be committed to that mediation process? Yes, they should. That has perhaps been overlooked. It is all too easy, when a relationship falls down, to walk away and leave it. It is almost a part of the disposable society: the car breaks down, get a new car; household appliances break down, get a new one; the marriage breaks down, move on.

[Jessica Lee]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that although families sometimes break down, it is at that point that the parents need to put the interests of their children first and foremost, and set aside their own differences, for the well-being and the future of those children? To emphasise that, the Government have taken various steps in welfare benefit reforms, as well as through the Department for Education.

[Jim Shannon]

A lot of things are being done. I am not saying that things are not being done; they are. I suggest that there are some things we can do but have not been. There is an indication that, with the removal of legal aid, people contemplating divorce or separation might decide to do a quickie and get it over. That means that they would not go through the process. As the hon. Lady has said, children who are clearly part of the relationship are pushed aside and forgotten. Will the Minister indicate where mediation should be in the process?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Grant]

I am happy to commend that special initiative, and the bravery of the individuals affected.

Since the general election, some good and positive family policies have been announced; they include underpinning Sure Start, more health visitors, flexible working and parental leave. However, much more is needed.

I was a legal aid family lawyer for 23 years—I am giving away my age—prior to becoming a Member of Parliament. I declare an interest, in that during those years I saw a relentless rise in family breakdowns. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, Mr Justice Coleridge described family breakdown as a

“never ending carnival of human misery—a ceaseless river of human distress”.

The judge went on to say:

“We are experiencing a period of family meltdown whose effects will be as catastrophic as the meltdown of the ice caps”.

From practice, I know that the situation is indeed dire. Our family courts are overstretched and under-resourced, and there are many delays. The situation will be made even worse with the demise of legal aid and the increasing number of litigants in person. This comes at a time when ever more people need family lawyers, and families are marching through the family courts at an ever-increasing rate and with no sign of decline. Sir David Norgrove, in his interim family justice review, acknowledges the capability and dedication of those who work in the family justice system, but he also says that the family justice system is no system at all. He identifies fundamental failures and faults, and he concludes that our children are badly let down.

Successive Governments seem to have been oblivious to the realities of family life for many—and oblivious, too, to the profiles and personalities, psychological and otherwise, of those who rely on the family justice system and use the family courts to resolve their problems. If those Governments had appreciated the situation they would not have hesitated in comprehensively reforming the family justice system, including the substantive law of divorce, and questions of money and cohabitation; they would also have adequately funded the system, including giving legal aid for family cases.

My firm looked after about 14,000 clients in south London, Surrey and west Kent. The family profile that I shall describe to the House is, sadly, not unusual.

Mother presents with some learning difficulties, a history of violence and a history of drug abuse, but says that she is now clean. She has three children, all girls, with three different fathers. Mother seeks a non-molestation injunction order against X, the youngest daughter’s father, mum having been hit over the head with a pickaxe. There are numerous other incidents of violence. The two older children, too, need injunctions to protect them from X. There are also allegations by the eldest girl that X had touched her in an inappropriate manner. All the girls are having problems at school. The middle girl has been diagnosed with ADHD—attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The school has threatened suspension because of disruptive behaviour. Mother is on income support and feeling suicidal. All the children are on the child protection register. When I took instructions from this lady, her physical appearance and her demeanour when she came into the room led me to think that she was about 50; only when I asked for her date of birth did I realise that she was only 25 years old. That is a true story.

Tragically, the children growing up in these families are watching and learning from bad behaviour and absent boundaries, and they will breed future generations of victims and perpetrators. It is an absolute vicious circle.

[Jessica Lee]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way at this important point in her speech. Does she agree that after taking instruction from such clients, a further question is often posed? We might be dealing with a young mother whose baby may be taken into foster care, and the question is, “Who is there for you? Who can help you and support you?” Sadly, the answer is often no one. The client will have lost the family support network. They may have managed to extricate themselves from an abusive relationship, but they will be on their own and that is such a difficulty.

[Mrs Grant]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and I could not agree with her more. I know that in her practice she has also come across the very situation I described. The answer to her question is that often, there is nobody, which neatly brings me on to my next point in this sad scenario.

It is worth noting that under the Government’s proposals for legal aid, this highly vulnerable woman, with nobody there to help her, would not be entitled to help with her residency and contact issues, with her debt problems or with the educational difficulties that she had with her children.