Children and Social Work Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

Amendment 26 and new clauses 13 and 16, which I shall speak to, also stand in my name.

A child’s transition from being in care to becoming a care leaver is a notoriously difficult process. Supporting care leavers by offering them the relevant information about services they can access is welcome. That, however, will not address the need for proactive support for all care leavers or ensure that they all have the advice and information they need. Without setting a national minimum standard for the local offer, the very real risk is of a patchwork of provision across the country, where children in one area are offered a different level of service from that offered in another.

The Minister knows what happened with his Department’s implementation of a local offer for children with special educational needs and disabilities, introduced under the Children and Families Act 2014; I hope he will tell us why he thinks that the offer for children leaving care will not develop in the same haphazard way. If an idea has failed once and is not working as it should, surely duplicating it is not the best way to proceed.

At the time, we welcomed the principle of the local offer for learners with special educational needs and disabilities. As we recognised, it is important that those learners and their families receive the information necessary to achieve the best possible outcomes. However, two years later we have seen the local offer in practice, and it has not achieved all that it should have. Frankly, because of the lack of a national framework, we have ended up with a postcode lottery—an inconsistent and sadly often inadequate provision has therefore developed across the country.

The fact that the Government have not looked at those issues and taken steps to ensure that the local offer for care leavers operates in a high-quality national framework simply suggests, perhaps, that they are willing to repeat the same old mistakes. I am in full agreement with the noble Lord Watson, who pushed for the amendment in another place. Having no common policy throughout the country is unacceptable. I argue again that the amendment is necessary. A minimum standard for the offer is needed, to serve as a framework, an undertaking, about the availability of services throughout the country.

The Minister will argue against the amendment, perhaps on the premise that the Government feel that they should not be deciding what is best for care leavers in their local area—that the local authorities and care leavers should decide themselves. That, however, is a straw-man argument. What we are asking for is simply a minimum standard so that whatever else is decided, there is a minimum level of protection for our most vulnerable children who are leaving care.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I apologise to the Committee; I am afraid the Victoria line was not my friend this morning. I arrived as the shadow Minister was talking about corporate parenting and how the Bill is about what we should want for our own children. Surely my hon. Friend’s argument for a national minimum standard is exactly that; it is about the very basics that we would want for every single child because we would want it for our own child.

The risk of the Government’s approach is that, although there may be examples of good practice, there are also examples of poor practice. A national minimum standard would guard against that and protect every child as we would wish our own child to be protected.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. We have seen that the implementation of the local offer for special educational needs and disabilities is just that: an inconsistent approach and a patchwork model across the country.

A minimum level would be a benchmark that could never be lowered but could always be built on and improved. Surely that is the gold standard that we would want for all our care leavers. There is no evidence that introducing a set of minimum standards limits innovation and creativity; it is a simply a failsafe level of care. It would give clarity to both the local authority and the care leaver on what they can and cannot expect.

Care leavers often say that they struggle with what they are or are not entitled to. This would give them absolute clarity and help them plan better for independence. In practice, I lost track of the number of times when I dealt with parents who were themselves former care leavers. I went through everything and told them what they had been entitled to and they did not have a clue. This would be a good way to avoid such situations at the outset. Children should know what they are entitled to. If there is a minimum standard, they will always know what to expect.

A minimum standard would ensure that services offered would not be withdrawn when budgets are further cut by central Government and would let the people we are discussing know that their local authority and other agencies in their area really do care about their future and are committed to it wholeheartedly. Leaving the local offer to each local authority would not achieve that. The Minister must agree that we cannot justify a single child leaving care failing to receive the information that they need.

Will the Minister explain how he will ensure that the local offer will be accessible to all care leavers, whatever their circumstances when they leave care? How will he ensure that every single local authority will provide a local offer that meets the standard necessary to ensure the best possible outcomes for care leavers? Will he be taking any additional steps to ensure that there is not simply another postcode lottery that will leave a vast number of vulnerable young people unable to access the resources and support that they need? We cannot allow discrepancies in the level of care of the scale that I spoke about earlier to continue. There is no other practical way to achieve that in a timely manner.

I move on to amendment 26. As I have said, leaving care is a difficult process. Care leavers are faced with a set of difficulties that other children their age simply do not face. Is that in part why the Government introduced the local offer for care leavers that I referred to?

It is astonishing that the Bill is devoid of any mention of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. There are more than 3,000 such children in the UK care system. According to analysis of Home Office data, nearly all unaccompanied asylum-seeking children under 16 are fostered at some point. I assume that the Committee and others would think that when those children leave care they are entitled to the same support and assistance with their transition to independence as their peers—but they are not, despite being the most vulnerable of care leavers, having fled conflicts and horrors that most us can hardly begin to imagine.

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[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I shall come on to the absolute hash that the Home Office has made of the situation later in my comments.

After the children have been settled in placement for however long they have been in the UK, the rug is ripped out from underneath them as they reach 18 years old, when they must apply for extended leave to remain in the UK. The majority are turned down, so the place they understood to be their home is no longer their home. Worse still, the Home Office often does not get its act together and remove them, despite turning them down, so they disappear and are off the radar. The Government do not know how many care leavers are in that situation or where they have disappeared to, but it does not take long to guess that if someone is here illegally and is facing the fear of returning to their country of origin, they will go underground and be susceptible to exploitation, whether emotional, financial or sexual.

[Stella Creasy]

In our discussions of the Bill, we are going to come on to a number of conversations about how we treat child refugees, but the point my hon. Friend is making is simple: at the stroke of midnight on someone’s 18th birthday, they do not stop being a vulnerable young person. These are young people who we have accepted are vulnerable and should be cared for. The idea that we simply cut off all support at 18 simply does not accord with the principles behind much of the Bill. I hope that the Minister will listen to the case and think again about how we treat these young people. Someone’s turning 18 does not stop them from being a vulnerable young person.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

That is why a lot of support targeted at care leavers lasts until they are 25 years old. Someone does not stop being vulnerable simply because they have turned 18.

I was a member of the Immigration Bill Committee. I do not recall the experience with much fondness. In the consideration of that Bill, which is now an Act, those on the Labour Benches argued against what I am describing. We argued that the provisions in that Act that limit the support for care leavers subject to immigration control undermined children and leaving care legislation, and gave immigration control greater prominence over young people’s welfare.

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[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

No, it is not; it is a “time will tell.”

I will not spend much longer on this new clause; it is quite straightforward. It asks that the Secretary of State carries out an annual review on access to apprenticeships and further and higher education, and takes into account some of the barriers that care leavers face around fees, grants and accommodation. We know that such problems have existed for care leavers for a very long time, so it is about time we got on, looked at that, and made policies around it.

New clause 16 seeks to improve care leavers’ transition to independence by proposing various changes to welfare and benefits that would offer much needed financial support at a critical juncture. Without financial support, it is likely that a lot of the Government’s intentions towards care leavers will not amount to any real tangible changes for children leaving care. The national offer for care leavers that I am proposing will ensure that the maximum sanction for care leavers under the age of 25 will be four weeks, in line with the current sanction regime for 16 and 17-year-olds. It will allow working care leavers under the age of 25 to claim working tax credit. It will extend the higher rate of the local housing allowance single room rate to care leavers up to the age of 25, delaying the transition to the lower shared accommodation rate that applies at 22 years. It will also amend the council tax regulations to exempt care leavers from that tax until the age of 25.

The Government’s document, “Keep On Caring”, which was published in July, states:

“Most care leavers who spoke to us talked about the problems they had making ends meet. Paying rent, Council Tax, household bills and transport costs meant that many care leavers had difficulty managing their finances and they had often experienced debt and arrears.”

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that more than half of young people leaving care have difficulty managing their budgets and avoiding debt. Yet almost half of local authorities in England fail to offer adequate financial support and advice for care leavers. If local authorities are not able to help when a young care leaver needs help, where on earth are they supposed to go? Unlike many of us in this room, they have never had the option of turning to their parents, wider family, or family friends. Often, if the local authority does not help them, nobody does.

The way that the Government have applied sanctions has had a devastating effect on not only the sick and disabled, but care leavers. Between October 2013 and September 2015, 4,000 sanctions were imposed on care leavers. They are more likely to receive sanctions, and less likely to know where to go or how to appeal a decision made against them.

[Stella Creasy]

It is worth reflecting on that statistic in the context of my hon. Friend’s amendment. We are talking about care leavers being three times as likely to be sanctioned. If we go back to the principles she was talking about of corporate parenting and wanting the same—the best—for every child in care as we want for our own children, that suggests that those children are not getting the help that they need, and that they are also not getting financial education. There is clearly a particular issue about care leavers and the benefit system that we must address. The Bill is the ideal opportunity to do that and her amendment would fit into that metric. I hope that Government Members will think about that. Care leavers are three times more likely to be sanctioned, so clearly something is not working. We need to act.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

My hon. Friend is right. When I have spoken to care leavers who have been sanctioned, often they have not known that they have been sanctioned. What they will say is, “My money has been stopped.” They do not know where to go and they do not know what to do for help. They will sometimes bury their head in the sand, not realising that they could appeal the decision. It is therefore vital that we get it right for them.

For those who were able to get help, 60% of sanctions were overturned, which means that a high proportion of care leavers are having sanctions misapplied. I note Lord Nash’s wish in the other place for sanctions to be reduced, but I was alarmed when he showed concern that a reduction is sanctions towards care leavers might “unintentionally lower our aspirations” for them. When a care leaver has sanctions imposed through no fault of their own—often those sanctions are misapplied—I assure the Minister that their aspirations will not be anything if they cannot afford to heat their home or feed themselves, or if they end up without a roof over their head.

We also wish to make an amendment to extend working tax credit to care leavers under the age of 25. It is right that care leavers should be encouraged to engage in high-quality employment and training opportunities. However, they must be given better support to get into work and to be able to afford to work. Under the current system, only those with children or those who are disabled under the age of 25 can claim working tax credit. An assumption is built into the system that those under 25 on low incomes will be living at home with their family, where they will have access to the extra financial support that they need.

As we are all acutely aware, for care leavers, that it not the situation. It appears that the system penalises—some would even say it discriminates against—care leavers under the age of 25. Currently, care leavers in their first year of an apprenticeship could be earning as little as £3.40 an hour. I am interested to know why the Minister thinks that a young care leaver can manage to pay rent, council tax contributions and utility bills—let alone clothe and feed themselves—on such a meagre income.

For non-care leavers, restricting higher levels of support until 25 has some rationale, as under-25s often have a support network to help them. However, care leavers do not have that support network. It is not right that, when they fall into financial hardship, they suffer a shortfall in support compared with equivalent older workers, especially considering their ineligibility to receive the national living wage until they are 25.

It is estimated that the extension of working tax credit to care leavers under the age of 25 would cost a total of £27.8 million a year. Does the Minister recognise the huge strain of being liable for the full cost of running a household at a young age and the pressure that imposes on the finances of young care leavers? The payment of working tax credit to care leavers under 25 would be a significant step in closing that gap in provision.

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[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I am aware of that report, which makes heart-breaking reading. There are lots of reports out there about care leavers. Following up on the intervention by the hon. Member for North Dorset, I agree that some local authorities have done good things in this area, but there should not be a piecemeal approach; support should be offered to all care leavers across the board. Why should one care leaver in one authority have a different service from another one? Care leavers do not care about localism; they want their local authority to give them the same thing as their friends and other care leavers next door.

[Stella Creasy]

Dare I suggest that, if we are going to have a discussion about the core principles of our political movements, one of the core principles for me as a proud socialist is value for money? One of the concerns behind the amendment is exactly that. The hon. Member for North Dorset talks about localism, the cuts to local authorities budgets and the need to be parsimonious—some of us might use a different term—but we must recognise that if 60% of sanctions on care leavers are overturned on appeal, the system is not cost-effective. If we are looking at how we might make savings, treating those young people as we wish our own children to be treated, which is a common theme this morning and perhaps for the entire Bill, is not only the right thing to do morally but the most cost effective and therefore—dare I say it?—socialist thing to do.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I thank my hon. Friend for her excellent intervention. She touches on an important point: elsewhere, if we want to save money, we have to invest. Investing in care leavers prevents them from entering the justice system and from being homeless, which costs more in the long term.

I suspect that the Minister will reiterate what Government peers said in the other place: it is not for the Government to set in statute what local authorities should be doing, and I expect he will get a cheer from the hon. Member for North Dorset—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] We are not asking the Government to tell our local authorities what they should be doing; we are just asking for a minimum standard for care leavers. These amendments seek that new minimum. Care leavers surely deserve safe, secure, affordable accommodation, but under the current proposals I do not see how they can be expected to make their way in life and deal with the issues of having lived in care with the extra burden of financial difficulty. Does the Minister agree that council tax enforcement undertaken by local authorities completely undermines the principles in this Bill? Does he therefore agree that care leavers should be exempt from council tax until the age of 25?

The Minister is well versed regarding the many challenges that young care leavers face, particularly those of a financial nature. I am sure, deep down, he wants to make sure that the state plays a greater part in supporting care leavers, but the current plans just do not hit it. Last year, almost 11,000 left the care of their local authority and began the difficult process into adulthood. The Government have a duty to those 11,000 vulnerable young people to say that they are not forgotten and that they do not just become another poverty or homelessness statistic on our streets.

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Although I look ahead to the role of the review in Scotland, given that 85% of welfare spending is still reserved, it is important that the UK Government also look at the role they play in the provision of financial support.

[Stella Creasy]

I support the core principles of the amendments that Labour Members have tabled this morning, and I recognise that some Government Members do share those principles; the difference is in how we achieve those outcomes. Let me be clear about the aspirations that I think we all share. They are, as I have already said: to treat all children in care as we would treat our own children, to do so in a fair and equitable manner, and to do so in a way that is possible to implement. The difference is in recognising how we get implementation right.

As the shadow Minister has said, it is the difference between having a minimum standard—a base below which we will allow nobody to fall—and recognising that there may be variation at a local level. The treatment of particular groups of care leavers, particularly young asylum seekers, is important, as is the recognition that there is a particular challenge when it comes to care leavers and financial management. It is right that we should seek to address those three core principles in a Bill such as this.

The amendments proposing a basic minimum standard are not intended to be restrictive; they are intended to help our young people know their rights. When dealing with care leavers in our casework, I think that we all recognise young people struggling to understand what will happen to them next. A national minimum standard is about being able to answer that question with certainty, without necessarily saying that the outcomes will therefore be the same universally, but recognising that there will be a basic standard and a basic principle about how we treat these young people. That does not mean that things cannot be personalised; it simply means that we can all be confident that every young vulnerable person is helped. As I have said before, just because someone turns 18 does not stop them being vulnerable; it simply means that they are moving into a new phase in their life. We must address that.

If the Minister is not minded to accept the amendments, he must tell us how he can have confidence that, across the country, those young children who we accept responsibility for through corporate parenting will get those services. I say that because I think that all of us have seen in our surgeries the consequences when there is not that support.

The shadow Minister talked about special educational needs. I think that all of us have dealt with cases of parents trying to argue for their children to have the rights that they should have. Even if there is a statement to that effect, it provides a basic standard for what that child should get. It does not mean that there is not then further work to be done about how things are enacted, but it does mean that the parents can be confident about what the child will receive. We are talking about the same principle here. It is about recognising that these young people need to know what will happen next. Having a national minimum standard would mean that we in this place could be confident that these policies will be implemented on the ground to a level that all of us would want as a starting point for those children.

On the second principle, particularly with regard to children who are asylum seekers, the discussion is a complicated and sensitive one to have in the UK right now. Other amendments, especially those that I have tabled—I am pleased that my hon. Friend the shadow Minister also has two—deal with how we would treat young children, the guidance and the principles to do with basic rights in the UN convention on the rights of the child. Those amendments continue in the same spirit, recognising that when we stand up as a country to support those young people, that support must be consistent with how we treat every young person.

That is the right thing to do morally, and legally internationally. I worry for the Minister—I am interested to hear his take on this—because if he has not included young asylum seekers in the principle, what are the legal ramifications, given that we treat them similarly under the age of 18? What might such a child have seen? Today we are having an emergency debate on Syria, where children will have seen horrors in their lifetime that many of us cannot even begin to contemplate.

How do such children end up here? One of the questions all of us have is about safe and legal routes. When children do end up here, however, and we take responsibility for them, in our hearts are we suggesting that at the age of 18 we stop caring about what happens to their outcomes? If we do not stop caring, we have to recognise that at the age of 18 they again need our help, just as we recognise that children born in the UK who come from troubled backgrounds might need our help past the age of 18. If children are to be excluded from the very provisions that we would like to see apply to other children we recognise as vulnerable, I ask Government Members to think about why they feel it is okay to discriminate on the basis of nationality—in essence, that is what excluding young refugees from the amendment will do.

The third issue is debt. Young people in care are disproportionately more likely to be in debt. Again, all of us recognise the myriad reasons for that, but the outcome is the same: a group of young people in our society for whom we have taken corporate responsibility have a particular problem, and one of the consequent problems manifests itself in how they deal with our benefits system. The amendments are designed to address that. All of us can see at first hand in our constituencies and when we deal with such children that they might not have backgrounds that give them the best understanding of budgeting. The hon. Member for a Scottish constituency, the name of which has completely slipped my mind—

[Marion Fellows]

Motherwell and Wishaw.

[Stella Creasy]

It was on the tip of my tongue. The hon. Lady put it very well when she argued that our benefits system, especially when dealing with young people, is designed on the principle that even if they do not live at home, they probably have a home relationship on which they are able to draw; that they can draw not only on financial support, but on support to be able to budget and to manage at that point in life when we start to get our own rent and bills. That group of young people do not have such support as a background, so we have to make specific arrangements for them. That is what the amendment would do.

As I said to the hon. Member for North Dorset, in places we do not do that, which costs us more as a result, so again I ask the Minister to do something, even if not in this legislation. I completely take the point of the other hon. Gentleman for—I am doing terribly this morning at remembering constituency names—

[Michael Tomlinson]

Mid Dorset and North Poole.

[Stella Creasy]

How could I forget Mid Dorset! What a wonderful community. The hon. Gentleman will have seen even in Mid Dorset, as I see in Walthamstow, young people struggling to make sense of what rights and entitlements they have as they take that first step. They struggle even when they have their mum and dad with them to help, yet we are talking about young people who do not have that support. He is right to point to the Homelessness Reduction Bill as having such provision, but his case is to marry that with what we do in this Bill—that is exactly what the amendment would do. It simply states that we have to continue thinking about that group of young people needing a particular level of support because we can see their problems. The two are not contradictory; in fact, they are complementary.

I ask the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole to think about that. Perhaps in the lunch break he will make the case to the Minister that we should be looking at the financial support we give to our young people. The evidence tells us that our benefits system is not working for them, which is costing us money, and it is not joining up with other pieces of legislation. As a result, very vulnerable young people are being left at risk.

There are ways in which we can save money in the system and get a better outcome. The amendments are trying to get us there. I think that Government Members share the same objective. The question is this: if they will not accept the amendments on those three core principles, what would the standards be beyond which we will never let a young person fall? If we accept that a younger person is vulnerable, how do we ensure that we do not discriminate against them on the basis of nationality? How are we addressing the clear and obvious problems that our young people in care have with financial management, which manifests in how they deal with the benefits system, and comes from not having the safety net of mum and dad?