European Women’s Football Championship: Girls and Young Women

Debate between Munira Wilson and Margaret Ferrier

Wednesday 9th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Football Championship and participation of girls and young women in sport.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. Before we kick off, I want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), who has shown great leadership in this place, not just on women’s football but women’s sport in general. I really hoped she could be with us today, but sadly she cannot.

I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this debate, which has been a little late due to the sad death of the Queen. It was scheduled for just after the summer recess following the Lionesses’ success but had to be pushed back. I want to take this opportunity to record my and the House’s congratulations to our fantastic English national football team, the Lionesses, on their historic win at the European championships earlier this year.

After 56 years of hurt, England finally brought football back home, and it took the women to achieve it. The nation celebrated and we were all bursting with pride. It was the first time in my life I have ever seen England lift an international trophy in football, and I was bawling my eyes out as it happened. The residents of Teddington in my constituency were so proud that the Lensbury club was the Lionesses’ training base for the tournament—and still is for some of their home fixtures—that crowds gathered that night at about midnight or 1 am to welcome the Lionesses back from Wembley to celebrate their awesome victory.

There is no doubt that the Lionesses brought the nation together this summer, and the legacy of their stunning win is there to be shaped. News this week from YouGov that an extra 4 million of us now define ourselves as fans of women’s sport is testament to their performance. Indeed, women’s participation and profile in other sports is increasing. But like many of the Lionesses themselves, I strongly believe that that legacy should be more than just warm memories. It must mean support for the generation of girls and young women now inspired to get out on the pitch and bend it like Beth.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

Only 63% of young girls have football offered as part of physical education in school, and football continues to largely be seen as a sport for men and boys. Does the hon. Lady agree that this cultural change should start at a young age to drive passion for the sport among girls and young women, and nurture future talent?

[Munira Wilson]

I could not agree more. The hon. Lady has already cited a statistic I was going to come to later on. I could talk in a lot of detail about how we must promote girls’ sport in schools and the community.

I saw at first hand the impact of England’s triumph on my own daughter, who is eight. Together we attended her first live football match during the tournament, just down the road from where we live in Brentford. We went to see Spain play Denmark. By the final, when England were playing Germany, she was giving her own expert commentary on the game and providing live demos of various tricks in our living room. She was super excited when we had the chance to watch the Lionesses beat the USA at Wembley last month.

Like parents and PE teachers across the country, I believe girls like my daughter deserve every chance and should be given every possible opportunity to follow that passion, be it for football or any other sport. This is a legacy that the Lionesses themselves have thrown their full energy into achieving. Following their success in the summer, they wrote to both the Conservative party leadership candidates, calling on them to take action to ensure every young girl in the nation is able to play football at school. They called for all girls to have access to two hours of PE lessons every week. The current Prime Minister responded at the time by saying he would love to see all schools provide two hours a week.

It sounds like a simple ask, but as the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) has already mentioned, just 63% of schools in England offer equal access to football during PE lessons. That means that more than one in three girls are excluded from the beautiful game. When we look at secondary education in particular, the numbers get even worse, with less than half of schools empowering girls to play football as part of the curriculum. At secondary schools, teaching gets increasingly gendered, whereas in primary schools, children are taught in mixed groups.

According to the Youth Sport Trust, a staggering 42,000 hours of PE have been lost over the last decade as the curriculum has been more and more squeezed, with a relentless focus on tests and ensuring boxes are ticked for Ofsted inspections. Girls in particular have been impacted. The trust found that by the age of seven, girls were already a whole year behind on physical literacy—that is the development of movement and sports skills.

With such a patchy offering of girls’ football in schools, it is no surprise that many of our current generation of women footballers have spoken of struggling to access the sport, relying on extracurricular clubs and far-flung opportunities to rise to the top of their game. That is not to talk down the importance of extracurricular clubs and activities. The Liberal Democrats would love to see a much stronger offer from the Government in that area, including vouchers to help all children access extracurricular opportunities—both as part of the post-pandemic catch-up package, and longer term, outside the covid recovery.

A number of organisations are doing a sterling job in supporting the women’s game. Of course, that includes the Football Association. It runs grassroots initiatives in schools, such as the Disney-inspired Shooting Stars programme, and in the community, such as the Squad Girls’ Football programme, which is designed to keep secondary school-aged girls engaged with football where PE lessons may fall short. That is supported by Sport England. The FA’s community-based Weetabix Wildcats programme for girls is offered through Hampton Rangers Junior Football Club in my constituency on a Saturday morning. I was also pleased to support the FA’s #LetGirlsPlay initiative earlier this year, by going to play football with girls at both Twickenham School and Trafalgar Junior School in my constituency. I urge all Members to take up the opportunity next year. It was great fun—even if people made total fools of themselves, as I am sure I did—but it was also a real boost to the schools and to the pupils there.

McDonald’s Fun Football programme brought England legends Sir Geoff Hurst and Karen Carney into Parliament last week. I learnt that it runs waves of footballing activity across the country, with over 500 children in my constituency benefiting from the programme at Orleans Park School. They also enabled two year seven pupils from Teddington School to have the training session of a lifetime with footballing hero Beth Mead in September. There is no doubt that those extracurricular clubs and corporate responsibility initiatives play a vital role in nurturing children’s passions, but it is equally important that they do not become a substitute for access to sport in school for free as part of the curriculum. Otherwise, we risk football—and indeed many other sports—becoming elitist and open to only those who can afford to pay.

I am grateful to the parliamentary engagement team for all its work in securing feedback and stories from parents, young people and teachers for this debate. One teacher, James, said:

“My daughter is involved in netball and cricket outside of school. This has given her great fitness and confidence and is hugely beneficial to her overall wellbeing. For her to actively participate in this way costs hundreds of pounds per year but she simply would not have had any opportunity to play team sport regularly otherwise.”

We cannot let that cost be a barrier.

[Munira Wilson]

I could not agree more. As the hon. Lady says, there needs to be parity in terms of salaries, sponsorship and so on. That does not mean that the women’s game wants to ape the men’s game. I went to an event in this place celebrating women’s football, and the clear message given by those who are involved in the women’s sport was that women’s football has its own special culture. Frankly, I think it is far healthier and far nicer than the men’s sport. I would never have taken my young daughter to a men’s football match, just because of the sort of culture and atmosphere there.

I do not think that male footballers need to be paid as much as they are paid, but I do think that women footballers should be paid more. If I am not mistaken, Lewes Football Club is the one football club in the country that pays men and women equally.

I welcome the Minister who will answer the debate today, the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew); I welcome him to his place and to his new role. He is from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and I very much welcome some of the positive noises that have come from both the Secretary of State and her predecessor, the right hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries), on this issue.

I understand that the Department is committed to investing some £230 million to build or improve up to 8,000 sports pitches across the UK. That is clearly a step in the right direction. However, it is also yet another example of how utterly disjointed the Government’s policies are when it comes to our children and young people, because at the same time that DCMS is building community pitches, schools across our country are haemorrhaging playing fields and other sports facilities due to shrinking budgets. Liberal Democrat analysis has uncovered that 100 school sports fields have been sold off in the last seven years, impacting more than 75,000 pupils. That not only puts the Lionesses’ legacy at risk but potentially bars tens of thousands of children from a full range of outdoor sports.

While we are on the subject of sports fields, it is with great regret that I tell the House that Udney Park playing fields in Teddington, which is in my constituency, was sold off in 2015 by Imperial College to a hedge fund company that sought to make a quick buck on that precious community site. Having been prevented by planning inspectors from concreting over the fields and building on them, the facility has since gone to rack and ruin, with community groups fighting tooth and nail for it to be maintained for community sporting use.

I salute my constituent Jonathan Dunn, who has led the charge to bring Udney Park playing fields back into community use, and I hope that, now the ground has been sold on to another investor, that it will be revitalised quickly and then opened up to the many grassroots sports clubs in my constituency that are clamouring for playing field space across the Borough of Richmond and simply cannot get enough of it. If the Minister is able to offer any assistance in that regard, I would be absolutely delighted.

Participating in sport is a fantastic way to take care of young people’s physical health, to boost their mental wellbeing and to teach children important skills, such as teamwork and communication. More than 150 children and young people sent in their views for this debate, as part of the Pupil Parliament programme, and they wrote overwhelmingly about the positive impact that sport has had on their lives. They said it made them more confident and more fulfilled, and gave them a sense of community.

At the same time, when those children were asked what had been holding them back, the same few words cropped up and again, including phrases such as “men’s sport” and “women’s sport”, which is the idea that netball and gymnastics are female and football, rugby and cricket are male. In light of the Lionesses’ victory, those ideas and phrases may seem like outdated tropes, but they are far from being a thing of the past when our children and young people still feel held back and over a third of girls do not have the opportunity to play football at school.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Women’s football has a longer history than people might think. Church documents reportedly refer to women playing football in my local authority area in South Lanarkshire back in 1628. Does the hon. Member agree that women’s contributions to football over the centuries should be recognised more frequently, to inspire girls and young women to take up the sport today?

Kinship Carers

Debate between Munira Wilson and Margaret Ferrier

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered support for kinship carers.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ali, and introduce this important debate. I am grateful to have this opportunity to acknowledge and champion the thousands of grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings and family friends who step up to support a child in crisis. With the Government due to respond to the independent review of children’s social care by the end of the year, this feels like a pivotal moment to recognise and unlock the role that family and friends can play in raising children who would otherwise be brought up in care.

I want to use this debate to commend to the Department for Education the proposals contained in my Kinship Care Bill, which I presented to Parliament earlier this year. Sadly, the day after I presented my Bill, the then Children’s Minister, the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), resigned. I hope that today’s debate does not have the same impact on the new Minister, whom I welcome to her place. As the then Minister could not respond when I introduced my Bill, I look forward to hearing what the Minister present has to say today. I will touch on a range of issues that I brought up when my Bill was introduced and go a bit beyond that, too.

This is a big week for kinship care. Today, we have this debate. Tomorrow, I am hosting a reception to champion kinship carers and Kinship Week, which was earlier this month; I look forward to the Minister and the shadow Education Secretary, the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), joining us. On Thursday, ITV will broadcast a documentary highlighting the struggles faced by grandparents who look after children whose parents are not able to care for them.

Members might wonder why I decided to champion this particular issue. The reason is plain and simple: it is because of the stories that some of my constituents have brought to me. I want to tell the story of Kim, who lives around the corner from me in my constituency and who was one of the first constituents to approach me during the first covid lockdown to highlight just how little support the family had.

Kim is a kinship carer to her grandchild, who sadly had a difficult start in life with her parents and maternal grandparents—Kim is her paternal grandmother. At one point, Kim and her husband found themselves literally holding the baby. When the family courts were considering the case, the judge very unusually took aside Kim’s husband and asked if they would be willing to apply for a special guardianship order for the child. The story of how their situation came about from the sidelines in a not particularly routine way is representative of how many kinship carers find themselves looking after children who have either lost a parent or whose parent is going through a difficult situation, meaning that they can no longer care for them.

Kim, who is self-employed, reduced her working hours to manage her childcare commitments. She was initially given an allowance, but it was means-tested. When her allowance was withdrawn, Kim and her husband challenged it, but it is now half of what she used to get, despite the fact that her costs have increased as her granddaughter grows older and her work income reduced through the pandemic.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

Raising children is expensive. Over the past year, 89% of kinship carers reported that they were worried about their financial circumstances. Does the hon. Lady share my concerns that this kind of widespread financial stress will inevitably lead to negative impacts on the mental wellbeing of both carers and the children they are looking after?

[Munira Wilson]

Absolutely. There was a recent survey by the charity Kinship that showed the financial stress that many kinship carers found themselves under. The cost of living pressures that everyone faces are felt particularly acutely by kinship carers, who often find themselves looking after an additional member of their family without additional financial support. That survey showed that some kinship carers are struggling to pay their mortgage and even to put food on the table.

As I was saying, Kim had to remortgage her house, and accept financial help from friends and family, to afford the legal costs of applying for a special guardianship order. That was despite the fact that, as I have already mentioned, it was the family court judge who had made the suggestion of applying for the order. Kim’s granddaughter had a lot of mental health needs, and needed a lot of emotional and development support, but social services were very slow to provide that support. It was only after about a year that Kim was finally granted funding for some attachment therapy for her granddaughter through the adoption support fund. When I have talked to Kim about her situation, she described at length the damage that her granddaughter would sometimes cause to possessions in the house and to the house itself, and she would physically attack Kim and her husband, because of this attachment disorder. However, Kim had to fight to get support for therapy for that child. Kim says:

“On a personal level, we’ve had to give up our roles as grandparents and become her parents. We have done so gladly, but there are moments when we do grieve for those lost roles that we will never get back. Our grand-daughter is in our care until she turns 18 and we will be in our early and mid-seventies—not what we expected as we headed towards our older years.”

The sad irony is that Kim is actually one of the lucky ones, because her granddaughter was classified as “previously looked after”, so she was eligible for far more support, such as the adoption support fund money that funded the therapy, and pupil premium plus. That is much more than many other kinship carers receive.

Kim’s grandchild is one of perhaps more than 160,000 children across England and Wales who are cared for by someone who already knows and loves them. The numbers are quite sketchy. That is partly to do with the poor definitions, which I will touch on later, and the fact that we do not count how many people are in these sorts of arrangements.

We know that those who end up being looked after by somebody they know and love, as opposed to going into foster care or being cared for by someone they do not know, have equal or better mental health, education or employment chances than those children looked after by unrelated foster carers. Indeed, a child is over two and a half times more likely to live in three or more placement settings if they are in foster care than if they are in kinship care. The What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care found that kinship care placements are 2.6 times more likely to be permanent than unrelated foster care arrangements. Additionally, most people prefer kinship care to living with unrelated foster carers.

Despite the fact that we hear all of those statistics, which show better outcomes for children looked after by people who know them, kinship care is the Cinderella service of our social care system. It is less well understood than foster care, despite there being double the number of children in kinship care than there are in foster care. Kinship carers also receive only a fraction of the support received by foster carers or adoptive parents. That is why I introduced my Kinship Care Bill in July, which calls for kinship carers to be provided with three types of support, to put them on a par with the support that foster carers and adoptive carers receive. It proposes that kinship carers are provided with a weekly allowance, at the same level as the allowance for foster carers; it would give kinship carers the right to paid leave when a child starts living with them; and it would provide extra educational support for children in kinship care, by giving them pupil premium funding, and priority for their first choice of school, as which looked-after receive.

Earlier this year, I had an encouraging but brief discussion with the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Colchester, when he was Children’s Minister. During that brief conversation, he suggested that while the Government were broadly supportive of providing greater support to kinship carers, Ministers had two main concerns. The first was who should be regarded as a kinship carer—the definition issue that I pointed out—and the second was how the Department for Education could possibly persuade the Treasury to make the extra money available to pay for it. Sadly, the events of the past few weeks will probably ensure that that second part is a lot harder for the Minister to achieve.

The independent review of children’s social care recommends making weekly allowances and paid employment leave available to carers with either a special guardianship order or a child arrangements order where the child would otherwise be in care. That would begin to provide a definition of who should get some additional support; it would be a huge step forward, and I understand the logic of that approach. Kinship care arrangements with a legal order are less likely to deteriorate, with just one in 20 special guardianship orders dissolving before the child turns 18.

However, that narrow definition ignores the realities of most kinship care arrangements, where a close relative is phoned at short notice by the council warning that if they do not take the child now, they will go into local authority care. Those people do not have a legal order—at least initially—despite the council proposing the arrangement, yet they are then expected to cough up thousands of pounds of their own money to secure a special guardianship arrangement, as we heard in Kim’s story. The independent review of children’s social care noted that four in 10 families receive no help with the legal costs associated with becoming a kinship carer, spending on average more than £5,000. Moreover, denying support to close relatives using informal arrangements punishes families who have sorted out their situation themselves without getting the local authority involved at all.

The Government already have systems in place for identifying informal carers, which could be adapted. The Children Act 1989 provides a definition of privately fostered children: a person other than a close family member caring for a child for at least 28 days. Informal kinship carers are also exempt from the two-child limit on benefits if their social worker signs form IC1, so I encourage the Minister to reconsider the eligibility criteria for schemes such as pupil premium plus or the adoption support fund where support is only available to kinship children who were previously looked after by the local authority. Why is it that if a grandparent steps up when asked by the council to look after a child to prevent them going into care, they are then punished by the state for making that decision, whereas that child would have been entitled to extra support had they gone into care? It is a totally perverse incentive to allow the child to go into care in order to receive additional support.

Turning to the issue of financing support for kinship carers, my message to the Minister is this: the question is not whether her Department can afford to support kinship carers, but whether it can afford not to. The numbers speak for themselves. The independent review of children’s social care warns that on the current trajectory, more than 100,000 children will be in local authority care by 2032—a record high—and it will cost local authorities £5 billion more than it does now. On average, it costs £72,500 a year for a local authority to look after a child; by contrast, in 2021, it would have cost on average just shy of £37,000 to provide a child in kinship care with a social worker and a weekly allowance for their carers. Well-supported kinship care could therefore save the taxpayer over £35,000 per child a year. The Minister’s Department will be speaking to the Chancellor of the Exchequer about the efficiency savings—otherwise known as cuts—that it will have to make, and I suggest that preventing children who could otherwise be looked after by a kinship carer from going into care is a very good efficiency saving.

Tomorrow, Kinship is launching its national campaign, “The value of our love”, to highlight how it makes sense to invest in kinship care. It delivers better outcomes and experiences for children by keeping them within their loving families, and is good value for the public purse. During the cost of living emergency, that support is needed more than ever. As has already been pointed out, Kinship’s 2022 financial allowances survey found that four in 10 kinship carers could not afford household bills, and one in four were struggling to afford food for their family.