Social Justice Strategy

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, among the customs of this House that I hope will never be changed are the courtesies around the making of maiden speeches. The inevitably nervous speaker is encouraged to pay due and richly deserved tribute to our wonderful staff and no one is allowed to move in or out of the Chamber until the courtesies are completed by someone both welcoming and responding to the speaker. As I reflected on this happy opportunity, I noticed many parallels between the path of the right reverend Prelate to this House and that of my father, who as the Bishop of Wakefield made his maiden speech on a similar subject to today’s.

The first time I went to the right reverend Prelate’s lovely cathedral in Ely was as a student at Cambridge when I attended the installation of one of his distinguished predecessors, Bishop Noel Hudson, a great friend of my father’s. Bishop Noel had a very keen sense of humour. With the invitation he included an Osbert Lancaster cartoon of two bishops in full fig filling in a football coupon during the Church Assembly, one saying to the other, “Cave Basingstoke, the Arch is looking”.

Before being ordained, the right reverend Prelate taught at Glenalmond, where one of my brothers was educated. He was ordained in Durham Cathedral and spent the first 20 years of his ministry in the diocese of Durham, including two years as the Archdeacon of Durham. My father was the Bishop of Jarrow and Archdeacon of Auckland for eight years, living beside that incomparable building. Although Bishop Stephen’s time as Bishop of Ramsbury was nearer to mine on Salisbury Plain during my Army service, I note that since his installation he has been on a mission to southern India, where my father was sent in 1952, resulting in a succession of Indian archdeacons living with us in Durham during their return visits.

This has been a notable week for the Church of England in the House, with the legislation for the ordination of women bishops on Tuesday and now the right reverend Prelate’s outstanding maiden speech during this important debate. I think he has given a very clear indication that not only does he know and care a great deal about social justice, but he will make an important contribution to the work of the House. So, on behalf of all Members, I most warmly congratulate him and hope that we will have the pleasure and privilege of hearing much more from him in the future.

I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, on obtaining this debate and pay tribute to her work in this area. I also thank Maxine James for her extremely helpful Library Note.

I must admit that I always cringe when I hear Ministers and officials talk about strategy, because if the absence of a national security strategy is anything to go by, too little coherence of thought and action in too much of what passes for government policy seems to be the norm in Whitehall. I always remember being chastised by a civil servant in the Home Office for banging on about strategy. She said, “We don’t need strategy; all we need is strategic direction”. I said, “What do you mean by that?”. She said, “Top-down, of course”, and I said, “Well, that explains why we’re in such a mess”. Therefore, I have to admit to being much heartened by seeing the remarks of the Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith, about the Social Justice: Transforming Lives strategy—incidentally, he was once a subaltern in the Scots Guards under my command in Belfast. When he launched the strategy, he said that,

“we cannot conduct our social policy in discrete parts”,

with different parts of government working on discrete issues in isolation. He said that strategy had to have a “fundamental vision” and “driving ethos”, without which it would be “narrow”, “reactive” and unworkable. As a result, a Cabinet committee for social justice had been set up to ensure that all government departments drove forward the aims of the strategy.

At least, that was the intent, but I have to say that I am singularly unhappy that that intent is not being realised. I agree with the five principles of the intent: the focus on prevention and early intervention, so wisely spoken to by my noble friend Lord Northbourne; the concentration on recovery and independence, not maintenance; promoting work as the most effective route out of poverty; most effective solutions being designed and delivered at local level; and interventions providing a fair deal for the taxpayer. Nobody can argue with those, but I worry about how they are being turned into an outcome.

I want for a moment to concentrate on three of the seven key indicators of those principles, because they are those about which I know most. Key indicator 2 is to see an increase over time in the extent to which children from disadvantaged households achieve the same educational outcomes as their more advantaged peers. I am, among other things, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Speech and Language Difficulties. We did a report 18 months ago on the link between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs. I was inspired to do that by my firm belief that the only raw material that every nation has in common is its people—woe betide it if it does not do everything to identify, nurture and develop the talents of all its people, because if it does not, it has only itself to blame if it fails. Right at the start of all that is the need to enable all our children to communicate and engage with their developer or teacher. The fact is that in too many families, or what pass as families around the country now, there is precious little communication between child and parent or whichever adult happens to be there, with the result that they cannot communicate and engage. Therefore, as the Minister will recollect from our discussions during various education Bills, one thing that I have been very keen to see is every child having their communication ability tested and assessed before they are two. It has been discovered that that is the wisest age to do it. The test can be carried out very simply by a health visitor who has been trained by a speech and language therapist. Armed with that ability to communicate, children have some hope of engaging with education but without it there is no further progress.

However, it does not stop there. At all stages of a child’s development up to the time of leaving school, their ability to communicate with the next stage must be assessed. It is interesting, as I have found going round the country that, for example, in Walsall, people tested at secondary school were found to have had slipped through the net at primary school and were not able to go on. Similarly, we found people at the end who could not communicate with employers.

This assessment must happen. It cannot just happen if the Department of Health is left to do the initial assessment. All sorts of other ministries are involved. There is the Department for Education, of course. There is the Department for Communities and Local Government, too, because a lot of this depends on local delivery. Unless there is a proper driving of this strategy to make certain that this happens, it seems that it will not happen. It will fall through the cracks of the discrete operations of individual ministries.

The second key indicator I focus on is key indicator 3, to reduce the,

“percentage of young offenders who go on to re-offend”.

One thing mentioned is the provision of gang advisers in Jobcentre Plus offices. I know very well one of these remarkable gang advisers, a man called Junior Smart. He was himself a pretty good villain and he has employed a number of similar villains to work under the St Giles Trust in one of the toughest parts of London. When I spoke to Junior the other day, he said, “I wish people would stop demonising everything about gangs. What you must remember is that, for many of these unfortunate children, the gang is the family. They have nothing else. Therefore, we must use our work to recreate the family part of what the gang is doing and hope we can eliminate the others”. I thought that was very wise.

One thing that worries me is that, currently, the Government have embarked on a complete negation of all common sense about the treatment of young offenders—ie, the establishment of what they call a secure college in the middle of Leicestershire for 320 12 to 17 year-olds. The truth is, as everyone knows, that the present cohort of children in there is particularly disadvantaged. The people who are less disadvantaged have, thanks to the good work of the Youth Justice Board, been got out of custody. You are left now with the most troubled and damaged. Some 50% have been in care and 80% have some form of mental health problem, including a multiplicity of personality disorders. They have all been absent from some form of school for one reason or another for at least two years. They all come from chaotic and dysfunctional families. The last place they should be is in a large, impersonal institution where they have very little hope of developing the crucial relationship with a responsible adult which is the key to getting them out of this.

I am very worried that the Ministry of Justice is launching on a route that is clearly at variance with the fourth principle listed in the strategy—namely, that most effective solutions are designed and delivered at local level. It has long been known that the three things most likely to encourage the prevention of reoffending are a home, a job and a stable relationship—what used to be called “family” but you cannot call it that now in every case. All of those are put at risk by imprisonment, and there is no group for whom it is worse than children, particularly vulnerable children. I wish that instead of launching this £78 million venture, which still has so much to be proved about it, the Government would set about improving the criminal justice system. I briefly mention four elements.

First, there is the diversion scheme, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. I pay huge tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, for his work on this, because if it is rolled out nationally, it will make an enormous difference: diverting children into proper treatment, particularly mental health treatment, rather than into custody. Secondly, we need vast improvements to the provision of work in the community, which involves not just the Ministry of Justice; it involves the Home Office, the Department for Education, the Department of Health, the Department for Communities and Local Government and, of course, the DWP. If only there were better work in the community for those children, how much better might their future be? Custody needs to be improved; no one would argue with that. There are too many in there and they are not receiving the right treatment. Finally, there is the all-important transition back into the community which, again, requires every ministry to work together.

Those two particulars are currently needed even more than when the Secretary of State launched his strategy in 2012. Although the intent was there, what worries me is that I do not see the concerted effort of the Government to acknowledge that the principles enunciated to enable those things to happen—and for the disadvantaged people whose lives are put at risk by what is not happening—are not being improved in the way that they should be.