Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Earl of Listowel

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 18th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I, like my noble friend, am very grateful for government Amendment 20, which we fully support. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and my noble friend Lady King spoke eloquently about children adopted from care outside England who are now resident in England, and on the need for educational equality. We, too, very much welcome the Minister’s intention to bring forward amendments in the other place. Obviously, they will come back to your Lordships’ House in the new year.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, made a very telling point about the particular challenges of looked-after children in custody. At heart, it is a question of whether the Minister’s department’s intention is consistent with that of the Ministry of Justice. It would be very helpful if, between now and Report, the Minister would enable some discussions to take place with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, just to make sure that there is absolute consistency, because I very much take the point that he raised.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I join in welcoming government Amendment 20, which seems to fill an important loophole. In passing, as I did not have an opportunity in the previous grouping, I also thank the Minister for his previous amendments, which are important and which we raised in Committee. As is so often the case, the Minister listens and takes action, and I am grateful to him when he does so, as he did earlier and in this case.

Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Earl of Listowel

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his helpful reply. I found it very reassuring in terms of my particular concern about sponsors. I think that he was saying that most sponsors will already have a track record, and they will be the ones who are being looked at.

Perhaps he could say what proportion is likely to be coming in new to the field, and answer this example. Let us say I ticked all the boxes to become a sponsor for an academy, and seemed to be a very good person to do the job, but I thought that schools were places for work, not play, and that school playtime should be quite short. What would be the process to enlighten me that that is not the case or to weed me out and keep me away from the academy? How much influence might I have? I am thinking here of the story of an academy, which may be apocryphal, that was built without playgrounds for some reason, as somebody believed strongly that that should be the case.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that 28% of five to 15 year-olds are either overweight or obese? Is that not the point that he wishes to stress on this issue?

[The Earl of Listowel]

I thank the noble Lord for saying that. That is a very important point which, with his health background, he would raise. I am simply trying to give an example of a possible candidate and how he might be processed by the system. But from what I heard from the Minister just now I am very much reassured that most of these academy sponsors will be experienced and will have a track record, and we can have confidence in them because of that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I shall speak also to my Amendment 34A. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, regrets not being present and would have liked to support these amendments—she spoke eloquently on these issues at Second Reading. Perhaps I may also say how good it is to see the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in his place. When he was Education Minister many years ago taking through Parliament the Children (Leaving Care) Act, he listened to the concerns of noble Lords and extended protections for children.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I should just correct the noble Earl: for some reason, they would never let me near the Department for Education. I took the Children (Leaving Care) Act through as a Health Minister. Of course, I well recall our debates, because the noble Earl eloquently and consistently raised the issue of the poor outcomes of children in care, and we were concerned about the transition from care into adulthood and about making sure that there was still a duty on local authorities to support. We made some progress but, alas, the figures speak for themselves as regards the outcome for children in care. That is why this issue of mental health is so important.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I could not agree more. If we are reflecting for a moment on the past, Governments have invested a huge amount of money and resource into young people in care, and perhaps that money might have been better spent if more thought had been given to ensuring that mental health was fully integrated with all the educational support that is given to young people in care.

Amendment 32A extends the ability of the Secretary of State to allocate functions and includes the provision of child and adolescent mental health services for children in the adoption system as well as an assessment of their mental health needs. I suppose that the Secretary of State might say of a charity such as the Brent Centre for Young People, “They do a very good job—maybe they should do it more widely, and maybe a certain local authority needs them to give it help in this particular area”.

Amendment 34A ensures that the quantity and quality of mental health support provided for in the adoption system will be maintained or improved by these steps to ensure that there is a movement forward, not backward, in any changes made. The headline I put to your Lordships is that, while this is quite narrowly focused on children in the adoption system, I hope that the Minister might allow me to make a plea for improved mental health support for young people coming into care. In particular and most important, currently, children who come into care have a health assessment by a GP, which is welcome. I will expand on this later, but they really need a mental health specialist or perhaps a clinical psychologist to give them an assessment that is focused on their mental health. Following on from that assessment, they need the services that follow to help them meet the need to recover from the trauma that many of them will have. Therefore, that is the headline I put to your Lordships: an appropriate clinical professional at the very beginning, the services to follow up, then ongoing monitoring to ensure that those services are being provided, as well as of the mental health of the young people. That would make a huge difference.

I am most grateful for the many measures that the Government have taken to improve the adoption system, in particular with the assistance of my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss with regard to the adoption support fund. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how that will apply to this particular area, and on accelerating the adoption process so that children get to a loving family more swiftly than in the past.

There are challenges. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, 60% of children who come into care have experience of neglect or abuse, and 45% have a mental disorder in care as against 10% of the general population. Therefore it is not surprising that they will have often experienced trauma in their lives before arriving into care. Being taken into care—being taken from one’s family—is a traumatic process in itself; then there may be further trauma as regards shift of placements in care. Therefore, there is a huge mental health element to the work that needs to be done here as well as the educational attainment, which is being better grasped for.

It is very welcome that the Children’s Minister, Edward Timpson MP, is well aware of these issues. His father has written on the issues of attachment in the past and, of course, Mr Timpson has siblings who are adopted. He is very sympathetic and has been meeting with the NSPCC and young people who have left care recently to discuss these particular issues. I commend him for paying such attention to this area.

Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Earl of Listowel

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

This is another puzzle because the terms of the agreement with Greater Manchester focus on growth in the economy and specifically mention the skills agenda. I have listened to the Government talk about the issue of skills—albeit at the same time as destroying further education, which of course is where most of these skills are taught; but we will leave that aside for the moment—and I am absolutely amazed because the argument they put forward is that while skills are crucially important, the role of schools is to make sure that, when they come out, young people are ready to go into the workplace; that is, those who do not go into higher or further education, if any is left when they reach the age when they move on from school.

Why on earth is education being taken out of this really exciting development? I am enthusiastic about what is happening in Greater Manchester, and potentially it is hugely exciting, but I just do not understand why education is being left out of it. This is but one example of how, when the Department for Education says that it is consistent with the localism agenda, it is, frankly, completely unbelievable.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry that I was not able to be present in Grand Committee last week, but I have read with interest the Committee report. Two things come to mind in relation to this debate. The first is that I am most grateful to the Minister for organising an extremely helpful meeting with head teachers and regional schools commissioners. At the meeting I raised a question about local accountability which followed from our debate at Second Reading. On the question of regional accountability, I put to a regional schools commissioner the case that while it is important to improve academic outcomes for young people, there may be a reason to override the local interest of parents in their schools. I hope that I am paraphrasing him correctly, but he said that it is really important to bring the local community with one, which seems to support the notion of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and others that if one is to have a successful school, one needs to bring the local community on board as far as possible.

The second point I want to raise is that, having read the Hansard report of the previous sitting, I am concerned by the Government’s focus on a very narrow assessment of education; that is, on academic attainment. Of course it is extremely important that our children should do well academically so that they leave school being able to read and write and are ready in terms of employment, and that is important to their parents as well, but as was made clear in that debate, children need a rounded education. Some children in particular benefit from an education which perhaps does not emphasise academic attainment so much but allows them to excel in sport and vocational attainment in other areas. My sense is that we need to allow some young people to fail and fail and fail again. Young people in care in particular may do poorly in terms of their academic attainment while they are at school, but many of them will do well in their early 20s or even their late 20s. If one puts great pressure on schools to ensure that all children do well academically, the risk is that those children who do not have so much academic capacity may be excluded, be given less attention, or to some degree will be seen as an inconvenience.

Perhaps that is an argument for giving local authorities and local bodies more influence over and supervision of what goes on in academies and elsewhere. The people in Manchester may think, “Well, in this area we have a particular interest in vocational success and we would like to see our schools equipping our children to enter apprenticeships”. I am probably not expressing myself well. I think that my chief concern arose when I read about the new pressures being put on head teachers to ensure that children do well academically because of the emphasis that the Government are placing on this. I worry about those children who may not have so much academic potential but do have potential in other ways. Perhaps the amendment that has been put forward will allay some of those concerns.

Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Earl of Listowel

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, may I just remind your Lordships with this particular concern that health visitors have recently been put under the responsibility of local authorities, so this may be an opportunity to have a little test of how well local authorities manage health provision? I am sure that health visitors would be very grateful if your Lordships would keep a close eye on their development in the new circumstances, because we do not want to see a falling off, as we have seen in the past, in health visitor provision.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I start by echoing the noble and learned Lord’s comments about the co-operation that has clearly been evident during the passage of this Bill, and I hope that the noble Baroness might be prepared to accept the amendment. It may not be absolutely perfect, but of course the Government would have the opportunity of bringing amendments in the other place. I think that it is clear that the House would like the noble Baroness to do that.

It is clearly important that the NHS remains a national service, comprehensive and free at the point of use, where broadly we can get the same quality of service wherever we live in England. Equally, I think that most of us want the NHS to contribute to this new devolution world, and clearly the integration of health and local authority services offers much in itself.

Often, the NHS is the largest local employer in any local authority area, so it has an important contribution to make to the local economy. In my own city of Birmingham, the NHS is responsible for huge inward investment in R&D, and it will be the same in Greater Manchester and in other parts of the country—particularly where you combine medical schools, teaching hospitals, academic health science networks and the encouragement of local industry. One of the things that we all want to see is the NHS being prepared to invest in innovative new products and medicines that have been developed in the UK, which we have been slow to adopt generally.

What we are trying to do here is to take both the huge advantage that devolution gives us and the integration of health and local government but without undermining the essential, national nature of the NHS. Noble Lords have mentioned four areas where that is important. First, in the reconfiguration of services, we cannot have combined authorities getting in the way of the necessary centralisation of specialist and tertiary referral services. Secondly, when it comes to training doctors and nurses, the reason that we have seen a crisis in recruitment and high costs from agency nurses is that a decision was taken in 2010 to reduce training commissions; we have to have national planning and decisions about the number of doctors and nurses that we train. We cannot have local authorities opting out of their responsibilities in that regard.

The noble Earl mentioned health visitors, which is an excellent example of where there has been a transfer of responsibility of public health duties to local authorities. Those health visitors were given a guarantee that they would be employed when they went on their training courses, so we cannot have local authorities now saying, as some are doing, “We can no longer afford to employ you”. Those health visitors were given a guarantee, and as a national service we have to ensure that they are found a job.

What we need to do is ensure that the national characteristic and nature of the NHS—the national rules, the standards and, particularly important, the Secretary of State’s accountability to Parliament for the NHS—are retained in this new devolution package. That is what my noble friend Lord Warner is seeking to enshrine in statute: some clear safeguards that reflect those national characteristics. I hope that the Government will be prepared to accept his amendment.