Vulnerable Teenagers

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

Before the Minister sits down, I wonder whether I might pick up one point that the Minister made. Mental health support in schools reaches a quarter of the children who need it at present and the aim is to increase that percentage—

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry, the noble Baroness was not here at the beginning of the debate, so it is not appropriate for her to intervene. She can certainly write to the Minister, who will respond in writing. Thank you.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to thank everyone for their contribution today. I am sort of feeling guilty, because I somehow manage to get a slot each time at the end of the business of the week, and people are not able to get back to where they want to get back to—so I apologise for that. I think it has been a really interesting debate. My noble friend Lord McConnell reminded us that this has been going on a long time. I was working with adolescents well over 50 years ago, and working professionally with them for a significant amount of time, too. But we are in different times, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, acknowledged. There are specific things going on now which I never had to deal with when I was doing detached youth work, or even before then working as a social worker.

This commission was set up at the end of Covid. We know that many children had been very lonely and stuck in their rooms on social media, which was corrosive and damaging, and through which predators were able to reach out to them. Some of them did not have any opportunity to engage in things such as the sports the noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about. For those nobody had noticed as a potential problem, they and their families were suddenly facing problems they had never imagined. We still do not know what has happened to thousands of the children who went missing because they were not in school or accounted for anywhere. When I was working, in those days, we did not have to worry about what they were seeing and what was being organised on social media.

Yes, there are problems that adolescents have always faced. My social work tutor used to say to me that the problem was that I had a very peaceful and happy adolescence, and maybe it would have been better if I had had a few more of the problems of the young people I was trying to work with. I was always quite grateful that I had not. We know that young people have always faced problems, but at the moment there are problems we really do not know how properly to tackle. Not being at school and not getting the resilience support and training—which, for me, is how we end up with real losses in terms of mental health—they do not know where to go or who to get it from. When I was starting, there were lots of people around who could be their youth worker, their mentor or their friend, but that has been hollowed out.

I know that this Minister thinks about and works on these things very carefully. The reality is that we all need to do that across the board and look for ways we can identify what is going on in our communities. We never thought there would be this sort of problem in many communities, and there is. As the report says, very often these young people are hidden in plain sight, and these problems are there. We have a responsibility not to give up on these kids and to make sure they have a future, and that their future family have a future in which the care and the relationship is there for as long as it takes.