Children’s Social Care
Lyn Brown Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
I wish to raise several issues today, so I hope hon. Members will bear with me. I am afraid the list got a little longer each time this debate was delayed—it is a good job it is being held today, as who knows how long I would have gone on for otherwise.
It is a pleasure to follow the excellent speech by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and the first part of my contribution will focus on the point he rightly highlighted about the lack of effective early intervention. Hon. Members who were in this place before 2015 may know that I have been a critic of the troubled families programme, but I sincerely believe in early intervention. Working closely with families and having a joined-up approach across different public services is the only way to go, and those were the principles that underlined the programme pioneered and implemented by the previous Labour Government before 2010. Those principles also lie behind the troubled families programme.
It is therefore concerning to know that funding for the troubled families programme and its work across our country—both the good and the bad—is set to end next year, with nothing to replace it in sight. I am sure the Government know that there is support across the House for early intervention if it is properly resourced, managed and measured. My only hope is that the looming disaster of Brexit does not distract from the creation of a replacement programme.
It is important to talk about early intervention, because funding for such programmes has fallen massively even as need is soaring. Some 72% of funding for children’s services is now spent on firefighting because children and families are already in crisis, but that funding does not prevent such crises from happening. Early intervention and universal support services have been cut to the bone, with cuts of 60% in each area according to the Children’s Commissioner for England. Those cuts include £1 billion from Sure Start and an additional £900 million from services that work with children and young people. Such massive cuts have meant that social workers find it much harder to work with vulnerable children and families early and effectively. Caseloads have undeniably and inexorably increased, leaving much less time available for regular contact and for building up relationships, trust and understanding with families. That exacerbates family problems, leading to poor child development, school exclusions, more children being taken into care, increases in antisocial behaviour and crime, and signs of abuse or neglect being missed until—sadly, sadly, sadly—it is just too late. Last month, Ofsted’s national director of social care, Yvette Stanley, pointed out that the cuts are clearly a false economy, and that slashing non-statutory services is
“storing up problems for the future”.
Let me remind the Minister about practical early intervention services that are being cut. They include debt and financial advice services, parenting programmes to help families address the causes of disruptive behaviour —programmes that we know are effective—support for victims of domestic violence, and help for getting mums and children out of abusive situations and allowing them to recover. That now all comes out of the children’s services budget, because funding from elsewhere has disappeared.
The list also includes mental health treatment and substance abuse programmes for parents. The Government cannot claim to be pro-family if they continue to remove those forms of support, and the absence of such programmes is driving more and more children into the care of the state. I always try to appeal to what the Government would see as common sense, so let me say simply that it costs more money to take a child into care than it does to prevent them from going into care. Even with a balanced budget approach, the cuts are a massive mistake.
It is bad enough that resources have been cut so much, but demand has also been rising rapidly. Social security cuts and universal credit are undeniably increasing poverty, and poverty leads to more insecurity and massive stresses within families. Some 1.5 million people in the UK are utterly destitute and unable to afford essentials such as shelter, food, heating or clothing, and that includes 365,000 children. The stresses and strains on families’ lives are getting worse because of the Government’s failed and continuing austerity policy.
According to the Government’s own statistics, 1.5 million more disabled people, 300,000 more pensioners, 400,000 more working-age adults and over half a million more children are in poverty than in 2010. The most shocking rise in poverty has been among children with parents in work. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has worked out that there are 710,000 more children in poverty in working households than in 2010. In-work poverty has actually risen faster than employment in recent years. We are talking about working families, many with lone working parents. Many are working long hours and multiple jobs to get by on low pay, constantly struggling to make ends meet. That means that parents are stressed and that they have less time to spend at home and focus on their children, making sure that everything is okay and creating a family whose health is equal to their love.
The worst consequence of child poverty—child homelessness—has also increased massively. That is a huge difference from when I was a child. My family was cleared from a slum in West Silvertown in 1963. We moved into a beautiful, brand-new two-bedroom flat overlooking the dying docks in east London. It was that flat that gave me everything. It was from that flat that everything else stemmed. My mum and dad had stability. They both worked in local factories to provide for us. That home, however small I sometimes felt it was, gave me the ability to study and to grow with my community. It gave me and my sister the opportunity to thrive.
Today’s working class children in the east end have it very different. One hundred and thirty thousand children were homeless over Christmas, an increase of almost 60% in just five years. Ten thousand of those children are stuck in bed and breakfast accommodation, often with a whole family in a single room. Most of the other 120,000 are in temporary accommodation, torn from schools, family and friends, the places they recognise and the support networks they rely on. They often do not even know where their local library is, because they have not been in a place long enough to be able to work it out.
I see the effects of that in my own borough, where I grew up in that secure and safe council flat. Now, appallingly to me, it has the highest level of homelessness in the country. I hear about children having to travel hours each way to school from a different part of the city; families sleeping in dirty, cold, rat-infested rooms; families who have not had a secure, safe place to call a home for year after year after year. How is a child supposed to learn to trust others and feel safe under those conditions? How is a parent supposed to muster the time and energy to engage with a social worker over weeks and months, and how is that social worker supposed to create and maintain a relationship when the family is so insecure?
I believe there is a direct relationship between the crisis in children’s social care and the increase in extremely serious harm caused by criminal gang exploitation in my constituency and the east of London. If the Government want to reduce serious violence, funding children’s services properly is an absolute must. We know that gangs pick on vulnerable children the most. Studies show that poor emotional health at the age of seven is the best predictor of future exploitation by gangs. That means that counselling is one of the most effective ways to prevent children from being exploited. They need to develop resilience.
We know that these children often have undiagnosed special educational needs as well. We should be supporting them, but instead the children and their families are left to struggle on, often alone. Once they reach secondary school, vulnerable children are far more likely to be excluded or off-rolled, increasing the risk of exploitation even more. As we know, exclusions have sky-rocketed by 67% over the past five years. That is the research, but it is also real life. I hear about the consequences from local mums terrified of what has happened to their children. As their MP, I am their last resort. They have already tried everywhere else. I see the same things in the serious case reviews of children who have been tragically and appallingly murdered in gang-related violence. Every review I have seen tells the same story: a vulnerable child; escalating involvement in gang violence; the failure of local agencies to intervene; and opportunities to help not taken. I have absolutely no doubt that cuts to resources are part of the cause.
The case reviews are a statutory responsibility, designed so that lessons can be learned. In summing up, I hope the Minister will tell me the lessons that he and the Department are learning. I have talked about a replacement for the troubled families programme, early intervention, universal preventive services and the cuts, but let us be clear: the crisis in children’s services is systemic. It is just as much about the increased stresses and struggles that families are having to go through because this economy, this social security system and this Government frankly do not work for them.
Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
It is a real honour to be able to talk in this debate and to follow the speakers who have already contributed, particularly my very old friend, the former Children’s Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), with whom I worked between 2008 and 2010. He did not blow his own trumpet enough in his speech. While I would not want to blow his trumpet for him, I might at least acknowledge that he has a trumpet.
The work that my hon. Friend did first as shadow Children’s Minister and then as Children’s Minister over a long stretch, between 2004 and 2012, created a Conservative policy on children’s social work where frankly one had not really existed before. During that time, children’s services, particularly children’s social work, were under considerable strain following the tragic death of baby P, Peter Connelly. It was clear that the systems governing children’s social work were not delivering for vulnerable families and were not enabling talented social workers on the frontline to give the care that they wanted to give to families and children in need. The work that he did exposed that and developed the idea.
My hon. Friend wrote “No More Blame Game” and, while I was working for him, he produced “Child Protection: Back to the Frontline”, which introduced the idea of the Munro review of child protection. That whole-system review was brought in following the 2010 general election and was brilliantly conducted by Professor Eileen Munro from the London School of Economics. It showed how we needed to take a new approach that allowed frontline social workers to be in charge of the work they did, and not governed by central systems, such as the integrated children’s system, which was put in place by the former Administration. I put on record my ongoing and continued admiration for the work that my hon. Friend did outside and inside Government. He continues with that work as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for children.
I want to focus on something slightly different from the issues my hon. Friend has run through. Having worked for him, I went to work at Barnardo’s and the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, the Centre for Social Justice and various places in Whitehall. I looked at fostering, children in care and the root causes of the problems that families in those situations face. It became apparent that, although a great deal of public policy had rightly focused on the needs of children who were in foster care and children who needed to be adopted—another great thing that my hon. Friend did was streamline the adoption process and rapidly increase the number of children who were going into good and loving homes—a large group of children were not in care, but were on the social services’ radar. The Children Act 1989 defines them as children in need. They are numerous, they are needy and they absolutely warrant the increased attention that the Government are now giving them.
There are about 75,000 children in care at any one time, but over the course of any one year there are about 400,000 children in need. Recent work by the Department for Education has shown that in any given three-year period there will be more than 1 million children in need at one point or another. Their GCSE results and future employment prospects are extremely limited: in fact, they are often as poor as, or worse than, those of children in care, for the simple reason that children in care have been taken out of their disruptive, dysfunctional homes and—hopefully—placed in stable foster placements or stable children’s homes and given a second chance, whereas children in need, many of whose families face acute problems, are left in those disruptive environments.
That group was ignored under successive Governments, which was a policy gap, but I am glad to say that this Government and this Minister have started to fill the hole. The review of children in need is starting to expose issues whose existence my preliminary research had led me to suspect, but which I had not been able to flesh out.
One of the most striking statistics is that 51% of young people who are long-term NEETs—not in education, employment or training for a year after they have left school— will have been either in care or in need at one point in their childhood. Such experiences have lasting scarring effects. If we do not deal with them effectively when we notice them, providing the early intervention services that are necessary to prevent children from slipping into these categories, we are storing up problems for the future: problems for society, but also severe problems for those individuals.
The solutions are complex, because the reasons why children and families find themselves in such circumstances are themselves complex. The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) made many important points, and she was right to identify the scarring effects of poverty, but there are issues besides money that are also important. Some are exacerbated by a lack of money, but some are not. Another striking statistic is that half the children in need in this country are not on free school meals.
Lyn Brown
Some of my constituents who are working are not entitled to free school meals for their children. They could well be poorer financially than those who are entitled to free school meals. Free school meals are no longer a proper measure of which child is in poverty. I should be happy to have a conversation with the hon. Gentleman about this over a cup of tea.
Alex Burghart
I should be delighted to take the hon. Lady up on that. I know that what she is saying is absolutely right. However, there are also many children in need who have one parent in work and whose other parent has severe mental health problems or an addiction. The difficulty in such families is not solely related to money; it is caused by the fact that an individual has a very severe problem that is not being adequately met by social services.
When we find a child who is in need and on the edge of care, we need to take a holistic look at that child’s family. In the past, children’s social care sometimes looked very narrowly at how the child was at any one time and not at the immediate environment in which they were living and what could be done to improve it. Indeed, sometimes children ended up in care without their parents being given—or even approached about—the services that were necessary in order to improve that family environment. I would much rather fix the family’s problems in order to keep that family together so that the child can grow up in a stable home.
In terms of what can be done, I am glad the Minister has undertaken this work, which is starting to flush out good practice in the system and areas where more work needs to be done. I venture to suggest some things on which we need to focus. We must look at those slightly older children who are moving towards leaving school. In my experience over the years, I have found that additional professional mentoring conducted in and out of school can be highly effective. There is a wonderful programme in the east of London called ThinkForward, which gives long-term mentoring to children in disruptive homes. The presence of a stable adult to give advice, be a shoulder to cry on and be a support in a time of need is invaluable.
Alex Burghart
I am happy to acknowledge that, when families have less money, they can find themselves in debt, which adds to stress and can contribute to poor mental health. I do not know about the cases the hon. Lady is talking about in her constituency, but I have seen the consequences of people being trapped in problem debt for a long time and not being given help to get out of it. That can certainly be a major problem. That issue is slightly off the subject I was talking about. I hope that, if the hon. Lady is unaware of the ThinkForward programme in the east end of London, she will visit it and promote it.
Lyn Brown
I agree that programmes like that in my constituency make a difference, but may I gently say to the hon. Gentleman that additional youth workers and adults for my children to talk to who enable my children to have options and ways out of gang-related activity is what is massively lacking? I made a speech about this just a few weeks ago, if he would like to look at it in Hansard.
Alex Burghart
I will happily look at it. I hope that Opposition Members will realise that they are agreeing with me and perhaps take a slightly different tone when coming back on me on this subject, because what we are all saying is that it is important for families to have the support they need and for vulnerable children to have the support they need, ideally in home but, if it is too late for that or that cannot be made available, in school.
So what needs to be done? I encourage the Government, local authorities and schools to look at long-term stable mentoring projects for those slightly older children. For other families, as has been raised by other Members, the Troubled Families programme is of profound importance. It got off to a slightly bumpy start but has come to be the mainstay of a lot of local authorities’ earlier intervention plans.
When I was in a different job a couple of years ago, I went to see how Camden had completely integrated its Troubled Families programme as part of a spectrum of care running from health visiting all the way through to the most intensive work in children’s homes. It would be terrible if those Troubled Families contracts were not renewed in some way, and I have every confidence that the Government will renew them. As we do it, it is important to consider what we mean by troubled families. I would venture to suggest that this group of young people, classified under the Children Act 1989 as children in need, and this large group of families who suffer from poor mental health, addiction and other such strains, are, by definition, troubled families. As I say, many local authorities already take this approach, but I think it would add a coherence to Government policy in this area if the work being done with troubled families in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and that being done with children’s social care in the Department for Education were brought together. Some local authorities are very good at merging these approaches. Some are less good. I commend those that are.
Alex Burghart
I can see the hon. Lady trying to get in again. I happily give way.
Lyn Brown
This is the last time. As the hon. Gentleman can hear, I am actually listening to his speech. That is why I am so engaged in it. He is absolutely right about the Troubled Families programme. Many parts of the country do it very well—Manchester, for example, has totally and utterly integrated its services and done it really well—but other local authorities game the money and take it elsewhere. We need to make sure that our next programme gets proper and effective results.
Alex Burghart
I could not agree more. The freedoms given to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority by this Administration have allowed it to become a Petri dish for new ways of doing things, breaking down silo budgets and taking a whole-area approach. I have absolute confidence that the lessons being learned in Manchester will eventually be taken and spread elsewhere. I feel that the hon. Lady made another point other than Manchester that I wanted to come back on.
Alex Burghart
Yes, that was it. Getting the data we need to prove effectiveness is one of those extraordinarily valuable holy grails. Successive Governments have found it very difficult to prove the efficacy of individual programmes, but there is a way forward. In New Zealand a few years ago, the Government brought together a huge amount of personal data through what was known as the integrated data initiative. They spliced together data from social services, housing, tax and so on, and then anonymised it and established ethical rules in advance, so that the data could never be used to find out whether someone had not paid their car tax, for instance. It could never be used against people and could only be used at a community level.
As a result, the New Zealand Government are capable now of effectively performing randomised control trials on all their social impact programmes. They know which programmes to give added investment to and which to wind down. Admittedly, New Zealand is a slightly smaller jurisdiction than the United Kingdom. The combining of data on that sort of scale in the UK is a bigger project, but one that would be unbelievably valuable. I have no doubt that we have the expertise in the Office for National Statistics to do it, and do it well, and I am sure the moment we have it, it will be one of those things we wish we had had long ago.
To conclude, Mr Deputy Speaker—I mean, Madam Deputy Speaker. How very nice to see you there, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was enjoying the company of the Opposition so much I did not notice that your colleague had left and you had arrived. We must consider not just the children with the most acute needs, important though they are and must remain, but young people on the edge of the system who may come in and out of that hinterland many times during their childhoods but might not qualify for the highest level of support.
Before I conclude my remarks completely, I want to dip into one more policy area that I forgot to mention earlier, and this goes back the issue that I was debating with the hon. Member for West Ham. About half of children in need are not eligible for free school meals, which means that about half of children in need do not receive the pupil premium. That has always seemed like a crazy peculiarity. It is laudable that a child whose parents were briefly unemployed six years ago receives the pupil premium, but I would question whether their need is greater than someone who lives in an abusive home and has been in and out of contact with social services, perhaps over a prolonged period of years. I am a full supporter of the pupil premium programme that this Government introduced in 2011, but as it reaches maturity after eight years it would be worth looking at exactly how that pot is allocated. I would always like it to be a bit bigger, but we also need to consider whether some groups have an eligibility that has not been recognised and could be brought into the system.
We have to think about children who are on the edge, we must consider the needs of their families, and we need to examine the Government programmes and local authority structures that can provide for those families and those children. I have high hopes for the local government financial settlement and for the comprehensive spending review next year, and I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), is here to hear my concerns. I am sure that he will take them forward with the same energy that he has brought to the children in need review in his time in office so far.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on securing this debate, on his expertise and on his persistence in ensuring that this debate was held—third time lucky. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) and for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), and the hon. Members for West Ham (Lyn Brown), for Lincoln (Karen Lee), for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin), for Crewe and Nantwich (Laura Smith), and for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), as well as others who intervened, including my hon. Friends the Members for Henley (John Howell) and for Dudley South (Mike Wood), and the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves). They brought valuable—indeed sometimes invaluable—insight to this vital issue.
Nothing is more important than our work to identify vulnerable children early and to give them the support they need to keep them safe. I applaud the all-party group for children for being vocal champions of that, and I give an assurance that the Education Secretary and I share that priority. As many colleagues pointed out, the importance of children’s social care too often goes unrecognised. Many colleagues said that today. It makes headlines only when things go wrong. We should value the contribution of social workers day-in, day-out in making a difference to children’s lives in sometimes very challenging circumstances.
As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar, the challenges facing children in families, communities and beyond are many and varied. As we all know from our constituencies, there can be stark differences in the demographics, economic status and social problems faced by different communities—even between one area and its neighbour. That is why children’s social care is delivered locally within a national legislative framework for safeguarding and child protection in England. That long-standing principle is enshrined in the Children Act 1989 and it places on all local authorities the same duty to take decisive action wherever a child is at risk of, or suffering significant harm.
All 50 judges in the family courts must use the same law when making decisions wherever care proceedings are under way, but local authorities remain best placed to identify, assess and respond to local priorities, setting the criteria for accessing services that reflect the needs of children in their area. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham rightly reminded us, thresholds play an important part in allowing local authorities to do that work. Whether those thresholds are set appropriately and properly understood is scrutinised by Ofsted as part of its inspections, and factored into its independent judgment about the quality of local services.
What Ofsted tells us about quality corroborates some of the APPG’s findings, which suggest that the picture across the country is far from uniform—indeed, it has been described as a postcode lottery. Although some children and families receive good and outstanding services, the majority live in areas where those services are inadequate or require improvement. Some variation is right and necessary in responding to local needs, but such inconsistency in the quality of services is not. We must recognise that Government action is needed if all children are to receive the same quality of support that every child deserves. Addressing this inconsistency is a priority for me and my Department, through our wide-ranging national social care reforms and through strong action to drive up quality where services are less than good.
We will intervene every time Ofsted judges children’s services to be inadequate. Our intervention brings results: the first children’s services trust in Doncaster moved from inadequate to good in just two years. Just last week, Ofsted published an inspection report for Bromley—the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge is not in her place, but she rightly praised the team and the leadership in Bromley—showing that its services are no longer inadequate, but are now judged as good. Today I am delighted to say that, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham reminded us, after almost a decade of deeply entrenched failure, children’s services in Birmingham are no longer inadequate. Ofsted published its inspection report for Birmingham this morning. It noted that the children’s services trust, which we worked with the local authority to establish, has
“enabled the re-vitalisation of both practice and working culture, and, as a result, progress has been made in improving the experiences and progress of children”.
In fact, since 2010, 44 local authorities have been lifted out of intervention and not returned. The significance of that should not be underestimated. We raised the bar for Ofsted inspection in 2013 to drive up quality for children, but by May 2017 20% of authorities had not met our new standards and had been found inadequate. That has since reduced by a third, from 30 to 19 today as a result of our reforms. This is not intervention for intervention’s sake, as the Labour Front-Bench team attempted to spin it, but improving the lives of children and families.
I am not complacent about the challenges. We have seen considerable improvements in some areas, but other areas, such as Wakefield, Bradford and Blackpool, have declined this year. That is why we are investing £20 million in regional improvements to get ahead of failure. As well as supporting every local authority rated inadequate, a further 26 are receiving support from a strong Partner in Practice local authority, with work under way to broker support for many more.
The number of local authorities achieving the top judgments under the new Ofsted framework is small but growing. In December, Leeds was rated as outstanding and, just last week, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford, Essex received the same Ofsted judgment. I visited the hub she spoke about and I have to admire Councillor Dick Madden and his excellent director of children’s services for what they have been able to achieve. That example demonstrates that this is about not just funding, but real, good practice on the frontline and strong leadership. In total, five local authorities have been rated outstanding since 2018, setting the highest ambitions and showing that even within current constraints—there are financial constraints, as the hon. Member for West Ham reminded us—local authorities can deliver outstanding children’s services. My aim is that the improvements we are making continue at pace, so that by 2022 less than 10% of local authorities are rated “inadequate” by Ofsted, halving failure rates within five years and providing consistently better services for thousands of children and families across the country.
Service quality is a significant variable in what differs between local areas. Crucial to service quality is the social care workforce. The practice of staff locally, from the leadership of directors of children’s services to the decision making of social workers, makes a huge difference to ensuring that the right children get the right support at the right time. That is why we have set clear professional standards for social workers, and invested significantly in training and development to meet those standards nationally—to ensure a highly capable, highly skilled workforce that makes good decisions about what is best for children and families.
Nadhim Zahawi
I do not have enough time. I have a lot to get through and I am hoping to make lots of responses to colleagues.
Beyond the front door, decision making is especially critical at the high end of social care, recognising that, where children are at significant risk, these decisions can be life changing, and in both directions. Over-intervening can potentially cause as much harm as the consequences of leaving a child where they are. In most cases, children are best looked after by their families, with removal a last resort. That is paramount and it is important to strike the right balance between local support to keep families together and protecting children from dangers within their family. Where a child cannot live within their birth family, I am clear that finding the right permanent home and permanent family must be a priority, while always taking account of children’s own wishes and feelings. Sometimes the best place for a child can be found within the care system. Sometimes it can be with a new family through adoption and sometimes it can be with family and friends informally or through special guardianship.
A recent sector-led review found a complexity of many overlapping factors contributing to a known rise in care proceedings and entries into care. That is why the sector, my Department, the Ministry of Justice and the recently established What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care are all looking to understand better what makes a difference in supporting children to stay with their families safely and preventing them from reaching crisis point.
Some promising signs are emerging from our innovation and partners in practice programmes. We have invested almost £270 million in developing, testing and learning from new practice. From innovative projects showing real early promise, we have identified the seven features of practice that achieve impact and allow change to take hold. We continue to learn from what achieves the best outcomes for children and families and to support local authorities to adopt and adapt the programmes that successfully intervene. Early help plays a significant and important part in promoting safe and stable families. It is about intervening with the right families at the right time and, most importantly, in the right way. In doing so, the statutory guidance “Working Together to Safeguard Children” is unequivocally clear that local areas should have a comprehensive range of effective, evidence-based services in place to address needs early.
Unfortunately, I am out of time. I would just like to remind the House that my hon. Friends the Members for Brentwood and Ongar and for East Worthing and Shoreham talked about the Troubled Families programme. The three local authorities—Leeds, North Yorkshire and Hertfordshire—where we are going to scale up with the £84 million that the Chancellor backed us with at the Budget were asked how they have delivered effective children’s services. They all mentioned the Troubled Families programme as being a central pillar of their work. I will leave it there. I had much to say in response to many of the contributions today. Perhaps I will write to colleagues on the specific points they raised. I leave a couple of minutes for my good friend, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, to sum up.
International Women’s Day
Lyn Brown Excerpts(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
I want to use today’s debate to highlight an oral history learned at my mum’s knee about the match women of London’s east end, who took control of their lives, setting ablaze a fire of trade union activism that not only secured better conditions at work for themselves, but inspired an era of labour organisation that would see workers’ rights entrenched and a political party of labour founded.
These courageous, poor, ill-educated women worked in appalling circumstances at the Bryant and May factory in east London. In 1888, they came out on strike to secure safer working conditions. Yet their story has been misrepresented and their impact on the early days of the labour movement has been underestimated—they were not the ones writing the histories. Their victory is attributed to Annie Besant, although not in the version I heard from my mum; in fact, she had never heard of Annie Besant. Let us give Annie her due—she did much to highlight the horrific working conditions at the factory—but she was opposed to the strike. She tried to dissuade the women from going on strike; she feared for them.
The version of history in which the defenceless waifs of London’s underclass were rescued by the principled, sympathetic middle-class champions has been comprehensively debunked by the amazing, remarkable, redoubtable author Louise Raw. In her brilliant book “Striking a Light”, she meticulously details just how the match women, led by five workers—Alice Francis, Kate Slater, Mary Driscoll, Jane Wakeling and Eliza Martin—knew their own minds, designed their own tactics, led their own movement and forged their own history. They were the true leaders of the match women’s strike.
Witnesses at the time were in no doubt of the significance of the event. The Star newspaper reported:
“The victory of the girls...is complete. It was won without preparation—without organisation—without funds...a turning point in the history of our industrial development.”
But the true story of the match women is so much more than just proud local women’s history. These women were and are integral to our national story. History records that it was the heroic London dockers of 1889 who spurred the foundation of the labour movement. But the record needs to be clear that it was London’s working-class women, a year earlier, who were the vital spark of trade unionism. The men learned from the women—they learned from their mothers, their wives, their sisters, their daughters and their neighbours. John Burns, a leading trade unionist at the time, told the striking dockers—men—to
“stand shoulder to shoulder. Remember the match girls, who won their fight and formed a union.”
Today the leaders’ names have echoed in this Chamber. But it ain’t enough. We have no memorial to them—their fight, their impact and their place in history. I have asked the Government before, and I ask again: please put pressure on English Heritage. We need to get this changed. I have tried, and so far I have been unsuccessful. English Heritage does not seem the least bit interested, despite its recent commitment to reflect diversity in its blue plaque scheme. I want a blue plaque on the site to recognise the true leaders of the match women’s strike and the 1,400 women who came together to withdraw their labour, demanding and winning safer and fairer working conditions. We need a plaque to remember the women who organised, who fought and who won against massive odds—women who were instrumental in founding a political labour movement that continues to fight for fair pay and conditions for all of Britain’s workers.
Transgender Equality
Lyn Brown Excerpts(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
I have listened with real interest to the arguments made by Members about how the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010—the first legislation I ever whipped—ought to be amended to better protect transgender equality rights. I hope the Government take these arguments seriously and respond appropriately, even if it takes them a further couple of months to do so.
I want to focus on the health aspect of the excellent report by the Women and Equalities Committee: the services provided for transgender people by the NHS. Trans people experience worse health, both physical and mental, than the general population. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has found that a higher proportion of transgender people say that their physical health is “poor or very poor” compared with other LGBT communities and non-LGBT communities. Levels of poor mental health are also higher in the transgender population, with about half of young trans people and a third of trans adults reporting that they have attempted suicide. It is therefore imperative that transgender people have full access to general medical services—appropriate ones.
Transgender people also have specific health needs; untreated gender dysphoria, which, as Members will know, is medically defined as when a person experiences discomfort or distress because of a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity, can and does take a real toll on someone’s mental health. Dr John Dean, the chair of the NHS national clinical reference group for gender identity services, has said that
“not treating people is not a neutral act—it will do harm.”
I could not agree more with Dr Dean. Some trans people’s health and wellbeing would be greatly improved by gender confirmation treatment through our specialist gender identity clinics. Trans people have to be able to access those treatments on our NHS if they need them.
Angela Crawley
The Committee heard from individuals who had gone through harrowing experiences. They had gone to quite extreme lengths to receive the treatment that they wanted in order to have their gender identity recognised in countries where the practices were not as safe as they would be here in the UK. Does the hon. Lady therefore support the aim that the UK must ensure that we can cater for everyone who needs to access these health services?
Lyn Brown
I do indeed. The Committee’s report demonstrated that our NHS is not providing even a basic service, let alone a good service for trans people. The Committee report found:
“The NHS is letting down trans people”.
One of the first problems identified by the report was discrimination faced by trans people when they tried to access general medical services. Dr James Barrett, president of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists, told the Committee:
“The casual, sometimes unthinking trans-phobia of primary care, accident and emergency services and inpatient surgical admissions continues to be striking.”
CliniQ, a specialist sexual health and wellbeing service provider for trans people, told the Committee that
“there is at best considerable ignorance and at worst some enduring and mistaken and highly offensive stereotypes about trans people among the public at large, amongst whom we must unfortunately number some health professionals.”
Sadly, this discrimination has real consequences. Terry Reed, of the excellent Gender Identity Research and Education Society, told the Committee that trans people were often nervous about accessing services because they were “not treated sympathetically” or even “politely” by doctors and staff. Brook, an organisation that provides sexual health and wellbeing services and advice for young people under 25, told the Committee that
“prejudice against trans people among medical staff”
was one of the reasons for poor health outcomes in trans people.
In addition, trans people report real difficulties in accessing specialist treatments and gender identity services. GPs have a legitimate role in acting as gatekeepers to NHS specialists, but I am afraid there is evidence that prejudice and ignorance among our GPs is preventing those who experience gender dysphoria from receiving the services they need. Dr James Barrett has said that there is a “persistent refusal” on behalf of some GPs to make referrals to gender identity clinics. The Beaumont Society has heard of one trans person being told by their GP at their first assessment—and let us think about how much courage someone needs to go to their first assessment:
“You’ll be taking money away from more deserving cancer patients.”
How wicked is that? It is a complete disgrace.
Where someone experiencing gender dysphoria is referred to a gender identity clinic it can take a very long time for them to receive specialist services such as hormone therapy or genital surgery. The process requires an independent assessment from two separate consultants, and a large amount of information needs to be gathered by the consultants about the individual before they can begin to proceed. That process typically takes months and spans several consultations. An additional precondition for genital surgery is that the patient must undergo at least a year of “real-life experience” of living “in the role” of their affirmed gender—it is an enforced pause. I have read the guidelines that explain the rationale behind this enforced pause, and I understand that the social aspect of changing one’s gender role is challenging and that clinicians do not want people to take on surgery until they are fully aware of those challenges, but that does not explain why the pause is often much longer than 12 months. The Government should assess the arguments made by some in the trans community that decisions over whether to go ahead with surgery should be based on the informed consent model. Under that model, doctors could immediately approve medical interventions if they are satisfied that a patient is fully aware of the implications of their decision. It is my understanding that the model is already used in parts of the United States of America. Given that it has already been tried and tested, the Government should be in a position carefully to assess its strengths and weaknesses, and bring that back to us.
It is important that the Government understand that delays in receiving treatment can, and do, cause real suffering. In the 2012 trans mental health study, one trans person said:
“Not having had my gender confirming yet has a constant effect on undermining my self-esteem and self-confidence as well as social transition—I hate every day that I have to live with ‘boy parts’ and I can’t wait to get rid of all recognisable ‘boy bits’.”
Another person told the same study:
“Permission for my chest surgery was delayed and I waited double the usual waiting time...This caused me to go into a deep depression. I had panic attacks when I left the house. I lost my job and then found I couldn’t leave the house.”
Such suffering could be prevented if we improved the speed at which our NHS works for trans people. Delays should not be any longer than is strictly necessary from a clinical point of view.
As a result of the problems that I have outlined, the Select Committee recommended that the Government conduct a root-and-branch review of how NHS services can be improved to better serve trans people and completely stamp out transphobia in our NHS. I am disappointed—I am sure that I speak for many Members here today—that the Government did not accept this clear recommendation. Instead they responded by stating that they will look into broadening the terms of reference of NHS England’s existing task and finish group for gender identity services. When such systematic failure has been identified, the Government should question the governance arrangements that are in place, rather than relying on them even more. I say that gently to the Minister and hope that she has had those conversations with her opposite numbers in the Health team. I invite the Government to give fresh consideration to a root-and-branch inquiry as part of their commitment to the cause of gender and transgender equality.
Caroline Dinenage
I will come to that. Detailed guidance has been provided to staff on how to implement the changes. An advisory board has been set up to inform policy and establish best practice on the treatment and care of transgender and non-binary offenders in prison custody and under the supervision of the national probation service. I will write to the hon. Lady about immigration detention services. I know that the advisory board had its first meeting on 25 November.
Several hon. Members spoke passionately about health, particularly the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). As she said, ensuring accessible and prompt health services for trans people is of continued concern. I am pleased that good, collaborative, progress is being made. Discrimination against trans people in the NHS is not allowed and is unacceptable. NHS England has convened a number of multi-agency symposiums to begin to address this issue. The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) will be pleased to know that NHS England and the General Medical Council have acted on the Select Committee’s recommendations by publishing new guidance on GPs’ responsibilities in treating trans people. We are also tackling the very long waits to access gender identity services, and we are beginning to see results: the average waiting time for patients to receive reconstruction surgery at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has dropped from 94 weeks to 61 weeks, and is getting better.
Lyn Brown
The Minister is doing a remarkable job on the Front Bench at the moment, so I thank her. May I ask her to push her colleagues in the Health team on a root-and-branch review of transgender and LGBT health, as the Select Committee requested? That is fundamental, rather than having small working groups working on small bits of the matter.
Caroline Dinenage
I will of course pass that sentiment on to my colleagues in the Department of Health.
NHS England has increased financial investment in gender identity services from £26 million to £32 million this financial year. In addition to funding, we need to increase capacity in this specialism. That is why a joint initiative between NHS England and Health Education England was launched on 20 October to develop a programme of work to address national workforce and training constraints in that specialty. The planned outcomes will be recommendations for the future workforce, and will include curriculum development, continuing professional development and general awareness training among NHS staff.
The GMC and NHS England are also currently considering piloting a formal process for accrediting competencies in gender identity. To provide a better service nationwide, we will revolutionise service provision. We are seeking new providers to host gender identity clinics, and we will tender for them via national procurement in 2017. We will ensure that they can deliver the requirements of the updated service specifications for adult services. That means not only clinics offering better services, but ensuring better geographical spread.
Education and Social Mobility
Lyn Brown Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Angela Rayner
I am going to make some progress before I take any more interventions.
I want to find common cause, and I know that many Government Members agree with me that expanding academic selection is hardly the best way to ensure that every child makes the best progress. Members of all parties know that all the evidence tells us that providing an excellent education starts at the earliest point. Access to childcare and early years education is absolutely vital, not just in helping children, but in helping every family to fulfil its potential. Indeed, by the time they would take the 11-plus, children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are already, on average, 10 months behind. The evidence shows that investment in early years is the best way to close the attainment gap between the most disadvantaged children and their affluent peers.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree with David Cameron, who said:
“There is a kind of hopelessness about the demand to bring back grammars on the assumption that this country will only ever be able to offer a decent education to a select few”?
Angela Rayner
I find myself agreeing with the former Prime Minister, who was elected to make those contributions to the debate. That was the platform and the manifesto on which the Conservative Government stood, which they are currently rejecting.
I know from personal experience, as will parents from across this Chamber, the incredible impact that childcare can have, not just on children and their education, but on entire families. Leaving school at 16, with no qualifications and a newborn son, Labour’s Sure Start centres helped me to learn to be a better parent to my son. I know that I would not be speaking in this House today without those programmes, and that they have helped to offer my son the opportunities I never had growing up.
Justine Greening
Of course early years education matters. We are investing in not only improved but more childcare for parents around the country—for working parents, in particular—because we think that having a strong start is absolutely vital. As I was saying, this is about improving not just the prospects of individuals and communities, but the prospects of our country and its economy, and we have to build our country’s economy by building our people.
Justine Greening
Of course, this is not about additional secondary modern schools or a return to a binary system. The reforms over the last six years have given children and parents a more diverse offer and set of choices in education than ever before. It is now time to see how grammar schools can play a stronger role in our education system in the 21st century.
Education Funding in London
Lyn Brown Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Robert Neill
I am just going to make this point before I start giving way again—otherwise I will not make a coherent argument at all. There is a reason for that funding, which is that London has, on many levels, greater challenges. There are far more children with English as a second language. There are higher levels of deprivation on almost any indices. There is great wealth, but there is also great deprivation, and those are closely—geographically and physically—juxtaposed. On any view, there are also extra costs involved in being a teacher or in running a school in London. The capital cost of sites is more because the land values are much higher. The cost of housing also means that teachers’ wages have to be higher. It is not illegitimate for those things to be reflected in the formula. London as a city is also the UK’s principal economic driver and puts in more to the UK economy than it takes out, so in that respect we are already subsidising the rest of the UK.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate and on the manner in which he has approached it. I agree with almost everything he has said. I come from an outer-London borough officially, but we have inner-London needs, and that is not reflected in the funding we receive from central Government. Does my hon. Friend—sorry, the hon. Gentleman—agree that we must make sure that funding is commensurate to the needs of the children in an area?
Robert Neill
The hon. Lady is almost an hon. Friend when West Ham are playing on Saturdays, and we hope for a good end to the season. She is right, and that brings me to the second point about funding. First, some outer-London boroughs are no better funded than shire counties anyway, yet in London there are much greater costs than in the rest of the country; and secondly, there is an artificial distinction in how funding in London is split up between inner and outer London. If justice is to be done in a formula, we need to move away from that distinction, which is purely historical. It goes back to the creation of the Greater London Council in 1963, when the then Inner London Education Authority was in fact part of the old London County Council, which had been a county education authority, while the outer-London boroughs had been educational authorities in their own right, either as parts of counties or as county boroughs. The historical anomaly that the hon. Lady mentions is the fact that her local authority is an amalgamation of two county boroughs that are part of the east end but were not in a county of London, so are treated as being in outer London, whereas Wandsworth, for example, which, in many respects, is much more prosperous, is an inner-London borough. That is a wholly illogical and unsustainable distinction that we need to break down because it distorts the arrangements.
Birmingham Schools
Lyn Brown Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Nicky Morgan
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Being a school governor is an important role. What we do not want to do is make that role so burdensome that we put off really good people who would bring with them the skills that our schools need. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend that those of us who are in positions in public life, such as Members of Parliament and councillors, should do all that we can to talent-spot and recommend good people to be school governors, because our schools need them.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State regret her predecessor’s decision to remove the requirement for Ofsted to inspect the duty of all maintained schools to promote community cohesion, and will she now consider restoring it?
Nicky Morgan
I will touch on that with Sir Michael Wilshaw, but we should be clear about the fact that when something is on a list of things that Ofsted or anyone else must inspect, the organisation concerned must genuinely understand and inspect it, and not just tick the box.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lyn Brown Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Nick Boles
The National Careers Service does provide face-to-face meetings for up to 1 million young people, but I am of course happy to meet the hon. Lady and her constituents. We recognised that not all schools were doing exactly what we expected of them. That is why we produced new guidance on making sure that schools are doing what is required of them in offering young people a choice of opportunities, not just within the school but among all other institutions, to take their education forward.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
12. What progress she has made on introducing the technical baccalaureate.
The Minister for Skills, Enterprise and Equalities (Nick Boles)
This feels a little like machine gun fire, but I am always happy to take bullets from the hon. Lady. The technical baccalaureate will be available in all schools and colleges from this September. Students will need to pass one or more tech levels and a maths qualification, such as AS maths or the new core maths qualifications, and to undertake an extended project.
Lyn Brown
I will do my best with the bullets. When the Leader of the Opposition announced the “tech bac” at the Labour party conference in 2012, the Tories briefed that it would leave thousands of young people unemployable. How many young people does the Minister predict will be taking up the Government’s “tech bac” from September 2014, and how many of them does he think will be unemployable?
Nick Boles
The reason we are in government and the hon. Lady is not is that we are very good at taking ideas that are not yet perfect and making them perfect, which is exactly what we have done with the idea of a “tech bac”. I am very hopeful that about 25% of young people will take up the opportunity of a “tech bac”. The key thing is what is in it—that the qualifications that make it up are themselves demanding. That is what we are ensuring.
Teaching Quality
Lyn Brown Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Tristram Hunt
Where teaching assistants are used appropriately, effectively and professionally, they can make a transformational difference in young people’s learning outcomes. Again, it is about having the skills and understanding of how to use teaching assistants.
Our idea to revalidate teachers and to promote continuing professional development has been welcomed by head teachers, business leaders and prominent educationalists. Teacher Mike Cameron—I see the Conservative party does not want to hear from everyday teachers working in the classroom—says that
“Teachers would control the teaching profession… and part of that involves making sure, by re-validation, that as an individual, I am still worthy of calling myself a teacher.”
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Is my hon. Friend as surprised as I am that the Schools Minister is not in his place?
Tristram Hunt
I am decreasingly surprised by the absence of the Schools Minister. When anything tricky comes up in public policy, we have a rather small cohort of Ministers from the Department for Education. As we can see from the amendment to the motion, they are in a neither fish nor fowl place on this.
The CBI has welcomed our policy. Katja Hall said:
“we need to create a culture where teachers are continually developed in the classroom to support them raising standards in schools. A licence system deserves serious consideration”.
From Brett Wigdortz of Teach First to the leading teaching trade unions to Russell Hobby of the National Association of Head Teachers, there is clear engagement and support for the idea. Even the Secretary of State’s old employer, The Times—before he spurned it for the Daily Mail group—has called the policy “courageous and correct”. I would hope for similar support from the coalition parties today.
The Opposition’s call is simply put in the first sentence of the motion: no education system can outperform the quality of its teachers. So instead of the relentless energy spent on endless structural reform, instead of the confused tinkering with the curriculum, instead of telling teachers how to teach chunking or whether they should use exercise books or not, our policy is altogether more ambitious—to work towards a world-class teacher in every classroom. I hope that Government Members will join us this afternoon in supporting the motion.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lyn Brown Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Vince Cable
The real value of the minimum wage started to fall under my predecessors in the wake of the financial crisis, and on each occasion, I, like my Labour predecessor, have followed the advice of the Low Pay Commission. The levels that have been set reflect that independent advice.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
13. What recent estimate he has made of the number of female entrepreneurs.
The Minister for Skills and Enterprise (Matthew Hancock)
There are now a record 4.9 million businesses in the UK, and we estimate that 880,000 of them are led by women, which is 18% of the total. That demonstrates the opportunity for this country, should we manage to get that proportion up.
Lyn Brown
Evidence shows that companies with more women in positions of power outperform their rivals. Does the Minister agree that we cannot afford not to make progress in securing more women in positions of power? If so, what will he do about it if companies do not hear him asking them nicely?
Matthew Hancock
I, too, have seen the research showing that companies with women at the top tend to perform better than those that have only men. That balance in the boardroom is vital, and I am a strong supporter of the agenda the hon. Lady promotes. More than 4,000 start-up loans have gone to women, and we are bringing in a new partner directed precisely at people who are returning to work after having children. For the bigger picture, ensuring that we have more women on boards is a campaign we are working on across the Government.
Child Care
Lyn Brown Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Catherine McKinnell
It is clear that the Government are using figures to manipulate the reality that is being reported by constituents up and down the country.
Let me get back to the situation in Newcastle. Last year, my local authority, in the light of unprecedented funding challenges, consulted on a three-year budget for the period 2013-16. When it began the process, it believed that, as a result of funding reductions from the Government and rising cost pressures from inflation, high energy prices and the costs of providing services to an ever-ageing population, it faced a funding shortfall of £90 million over three years. That figure rose during the consultation process to £100 million. Following further cuts announced in the autumn statement and the local government finance settlement, it is now facing cuts of £108 million. It has already announced the closure of Sure Start centres in my constituency—all of them—and because of the additional funding requirement and shortfall, it has now put all 20 Sure Start centres within the Newcastle city council area under review, so we do not know what their future will be.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is staggering that there is such a lack of understanding about the swingeing cuts that have been made to local government over the past few years and the fact that it will have an effect on essential services? It is wrong to pretend otherwise.
Catherine McKinnell
The Department for Education’s children’s centre database on the gov.uk website shows that there are 3,053 centres whereas the DFE website shows that there were 3,632 Sure Start centres in 2010. The number of Sure Start centres, in the form in which communities recognise and value them, is reducing and the Department’s figures show that. It would be an appalling situation if Sure Start was just about providing affordable child care—we know that the Government have a great challenge on their hands to meet their obligations in that regard—but it is not. Sure Start also provides vital support services to young children and families, who are some of the most vulnerable and hardest to reach in our communities, by providing parenting advice, breastfeeding support, affordable child care or just an opportunity for isolated and often vulnerable and frustrated new mothers and fathers to meet up with other people.
Another huge concern is the impact that Sure Start closures would have on the preventive early intervention work that stops children and families entering the child protection system. I know that the children’s Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), cares about this matter, and I would be grateful if, in his winding-up speech, he commented on the consideration the Government have given to that impact on our child protection system. At present, about 50% of the looked-after children in Newcastle are in the local authority’s care as a result of domestic violence in their home.