Lord Bishop of Chester
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The Lord Bishop of Chester
To move that this House takes note of child development in the United Kingdom and its bearing on national well-being.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, I was delighted when I heard that I had been successful in the ballot for today’s debates. The Motion was tabled in part in order to follow up the debate on marriage which I introduced 18 months ago. On that occasion, the debate coincided with National Marriage Week. Today’s debate occurs on the first International Day of the Girl, sponsored by the United Nations. It is of course not my purpose to claim that these coincidences have any metaphysical basis—I merely draw them to your Lordships’ attention.
The importance of children to the overall health of society has been a particular theme in political debate in recent decades. There was an early focus on child poverty. In March 1999, Tony Blair announced that the Government’s goal was the abolition of child poverty by 2020. In the subsequent decade, no less than £134 billion was redistributed to families through the tax credit mechanism alone, and I welcome that. I have seen the beneficial impact on clergy families, which are mainly dependent on a single stipend. Yet even without the recession and the need to cut and limit public expenditure, the previous strategy, which was essentially one of throwing money at the problem, was in trouble.
The central issue can be stated quite simply. The problem is not so much a lack of financial resources, although that can remain a significant issue. The greater problem is the widespread neglect of children in our society. This was the central conclusion of the independent review on child poverty and life chances that the Prime Minister commissioned from Frank Field in June 2010. In the evidence that the review gathered was a report from Tesco on the changing aspects of shoplifting by children. The report stated:
“Children were now far less inclined to steal sweets. Instead, the targets were sandwiches, to assuage their hunger, and clean underwear”.
Frank Field added the comment:
“Does anyone any longer believe that this modern face of neglect will be countered by simple increases in child tax credits?”.
The point can be illustrated by the problems that primary schools often face when children begin school. A head teacher of a large primary school in Birkenhead listed the skills that were often lacking in children when they entered school. They included the ability to sit still and listen; to be aware of other children; to understand the word “no” and the borders that it sets for behaviour; to be potty trained and remember their own name; to speak to an adult to ask for something; to be able to take off their coat and tie their shoelaces; and to talk in sentences.
Frank Field’s report called for the recognition of an initial phase of child development, from pregnancy to age five, to be called the “foundation years” and given the same level of priority and resource as is currently the case for primary and secondary education. The Field report has to be taken with other recent reports by Graham Allen and Clare Tickell and others, as summarised in the helpful Library Note prepared for this debate. I am grateful for the Government’s response in supporting families in the foundation years, and for the increased attention that this neglected area is now receiving.
I welcome the trend away from the approach that was based too narrowly on boosting the level of financial income for poorer families and hoping that somehow that would do the trick. Two recent reports show that there is much more beyond improvements in short-term family income that determine the life chances of poor children and children who for one reason or another face particular challenges. Parental attitudes and hopes matter much more. It is parenting above all that needs the support of wider society—not to be taken over by the state but neither to be regarded as essentially a private matter for the parents concerned. The stakes are too high for society as a whole.
When the Minister responds, I hope that she will explain the Government’s current thinking in this area, and comment in particular on the proposed greater involvement of voluntary and charitable providers in the local delivery of support for parents and children. For all that I welcome recent developments, there is still too much emphasis on pushing children and preparing them as soon as possible to enter formal education. The continental approach that delays formal education until a child is six or even seven is fundamentally healthier.
Our current practices too easily lead to later mistakes in criminalising children at too young an age or dealing with them through adult rather than special youth courts. So much has been said and written in recent decades that it can be quite hard to identify the key underlying issues. In many ways what we need is nothing less than a culture change in how children are viewed in our society. That was required by the UNICEF report of 2007, which put us at the bottom of the child welfare league on various markers and stimulated much of the research of more recent years.
The old Judaeo-Christian view is that children are to be seen as a precious gift from God. We seem to have lost the positive part of that tradition by seeing children as essentially mini or potential adults. The early sexualisation of children illustrates this, and I must acknowledge the devastating tragedy of child abuse by some ordained representatives of the Christian church that has so disfigured the Christian landscape in recent years.
How as a society can we work towards a rediscovery of an understanding of children as a precious gift, irrespective of whether we wish to add “of God”? This will be an uphill task. Reverting here to the Question for Oral Answer we were considering just now, can a society which has virtually embraced abortion on demand really continue to regard its children as precious gifts? I say that as someone who acknowledges that mothers and fathers can face difficult dilemmas, and I have never taken an absolute stance on abortion. But when nearly 25% of recognised pregnancies are deliberately ended, what culture towards children does that promote? This is not the subject of today’s debate, but I cannot avoid a passing reference. We need a wider discussion about this whole matter.
There are wider issues too. We rightly admire the extraordinary power and cleverness of computers, iPhones and so on, but a human being represents a centre of potential and of sheer sophistication way beyond any human invention. We may admire the Mars exploration device, “Curiosity”, and the systems that got it there, but it does not stand comparison with a single human life and its own intrinsic marvel. An illustration that reflects my misspent youth as a scientist will point up our endemic tendency to underestimate the potential which a single life represents. Take all the DNA molecules out of the cells of a typical human body and string them together. How far do you think they might stretch? The extraordinary answer is that they will stretch to the moon and back, which is about half a million miles, and will do so about 8,000 times, which is 4 million billion miles—and that is from a single human body. We should seek to treasure and protect each human child as the miracle and mystery that they are, recovering a tradition that to a significant degree, in our rather pragmatically orientated society, we have lost.
Recent years have seen a growing awareness that child poverty is not just a material or financial problem, and there is a growing body of research into the wider aspects of child well-being, often based on the views and hopes of children themselves. The message from children is that what is most important to them are the relationships which surround and nurture them. Yes, having sufficient money is important, but only in order to sustain the relationships that matter to them. The success of Facebook illustrates this so well, and in particular shows us how young people value a range of relationships both within and beyond their biological family.
As I mentioned, 18 months ago I introduced a debate on marriage, and I would hold today to everything I said then about the importance of marriage for the general well-being of children. I accept that stable relationships matter most rather than marriage per se, and I gladly pay tribute to single parents, who have such a challenging task. Anyone with the responsibility for the care and nurture of children deserves our fullest support. Marriage has to be seen as part of a broader context of relationships in the extended family or too much stress and pressure will be placed on individual marriages. But we can look at it from the other side too. Good marriages are not just a benefit for the couple themselves and for their children, they serve to strengthen the wider society of which they are a part. A strong respect for marriage will actually support single parents and others with the care of children who are in different relationships, and indeed society as a whole in all its aspects. That is because marriage is first and foremost not a contract between two individuals, but a social institution. It is not merely a convenient and helpful way in which two people may choose to relate to each other and thus to be encouraged on that basis. This, if I can make a passing reference to another issue that will come before us again, is the problem with much of the current discussion of same-sex marriage, that it is framed in too individualistic a way and fails to see the wider social setting in which marriage has traditionally been seen. To declare civil partnerships to be marriage is actually unlikely to help us to recover a deeper sense of the honourable place of marriage as the natural and best context for the nurture of children; it will just further confuse a confused society. No doubt we will return to these issues in due course if the Government bring forth their proposals. Indeed, the Prime Minister made this point back in 2007, when he said:
“I want to see more couples stay together, and we know that the best way to ensure this is to support marriage. Not because it matters how adult men and women conduct their relationships. But because it matters how children are brought up. Nothing matters more than children”.
It might be said, and rightly, that the role of government in promoting marriage, stable relationships and good parenting is limited, but there are certain things that only a Government can do. In the coalition agreement there is a commitment to recognise marriage in the tax system through the introduction of transferable allowances between partners. Such a move is sometimes criticised on the grounds that it should not be necessary to offer financial incentives for couples to marry—or, for that matter, to establish a civil partnership—but I believe that that is to miss the point.
A recognition for marriage in the tax system would send a powerful symbolic message from government into society. At the end of the day, Governments cannot simply wash their hands when moral issues are presented, because government is intrinsically a moral activity. To recognise marriage in the tax system would say something important about the wider importance of marriage to society.
It would be possible to limit such transferable allowances to parents with children or even, in line with Frank Field’s recommendations, initially to parents with pre-school children. Can the Minister please tell us when this pledge—I underline the word pledge—in the coalition agreement will start to be implemented? Given the associated IT changes that would be required, if it is not introduced or balanced for introduction in the next Budget, it will simply become an unfulfilled pledge when we get to the next election.
There are many other issues that I could have touched upon in these introductory remarks. I am very much looking forward to the rest of the debate.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part in this debate, which has been as fascinating as it has been wide-ranging. I thank the Minister for her response. On those points to which she did not respond—and the coalition pledge is one of them—a letter to me, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and others might be a helpful addition to the store of human wisdom and understanding in the weeks to come.
The UNICEF report was a wake-up call, and it is encouraging to see how it is being recognised as such. There are issues of encouragement. I go into a lot of schools and, generally speaking, find myself encouraged after doing so. A lot of good things are happening, but we need to go a lot further. It is particularly important that children are seen not just as proto-adults and that we see something again of the dignity of childhood, which is encroached on in so many ways, as noble Lords have mentioned, not least by the internet.
I was reflecting on the irony of your Lordships’ House discussing childhood when 20% of our Members are over the age of 80. The answer is for more of us to cast our speeches in the form of a rap, which my noble friend gave us earlier.