Staying Put Agenda

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

May I say what an honour it is to have secured this evening’s Adjournment debate?

We have all heard some of the statistics on outcomes for our nation’s 68,000-plus looked-after children, and I think everybody will agree that our country’s record on helping this most vulnerable group of young people when they leave care is nothing short of appalling. Of the 7,000 19-year-olds who were in care at 16, 36% are not in education, employment or training, and only 6% of all care leavers are in higher education, compared with 43% of their peers. We can add to those figures the fact that just 12.8% of children in care obtained five good GCSE grades, compared with 57.9% of their peers, and that about 23% of the adult prison population have spent some time in care. Around a quarter of those living on the streets also have a care background, while care leavers are four or five times more likely to commit suicide. Finally, about 47% of looked-after children aged five to 17 show signs of psychosocial adversity and psychiatric disorders, which is higher than among the most disadvantaged children living in private households.

Physical and mental problems increase at the time of leaving care. In order to address the many serious challenges faced by care leavers, the Government propose to introduce an amendment to the Children and Families Bill to allow young people who are fostered to remain with their carers until they are 21, if they wish and their carers agree and if it is considered to be in their best interests to do so. All young people in foster care will be offered enhanced support until they are 21. For young people in foster care, this is one of the biggest, most fundamental changes to their support when they leave care and is widely applauded as a hugely significant change in the right direction for this incredibly vulnerable group of young people.

The scandal, however, is that the extension to fostering excludes the 9% of young people in care who are placed in children’s homes. These young people have a wide range of needs and challenges. What most have in common is that they are vulnerable. That vulnerability is further enhanced by a stigma attached to residential care among politicians, the public and still, sadly, some in the social work profession. Ministers appear to see living in a family as the best option for children in care—I believe they are right—and as the only setting in which children may thrive. That is reflected by some social workers who see children’s homes as the last resort—a place where children who have “failed” family placements may be sent or as somewhere the more challenging young people may be placed. Many of the public see children’s homes as places where “naughty children” are sent. Historically, that view was compounded by some local authorities that used children’s homes to accommodate the more challenging young people.

When recently asked by the Select Committee on Education to explain different care leaving ages for foster children and those in children’s homes, the Secretary of State for Education replied that fostering is different from residential options and that children’s homes will not get support until an unspecified number of children’s homes nationally have improved within an unspecified time, at which point he may consider it. However, Ofsted inspections of 400 children’s homes concluded by June last year found that on overall effectiveness 65% were good or outstanding and only 7% were inadequate; on outcomes for young people, 67% were good or outstanding and only 3% were inadequate; on quality of care, 74% were good or outstanding, with only 6% inadequate; on safeguarding of children and young people, 69% were good or outstanding, with only 6% inadequate; and, finally, on leadership and management, 57% were good or outstanding and only 9% inadequate.

The Ofsted data, based on Ofsted inspection standards, thus show that the inspectors found most children’s homes to be good or outstanding and only a small percentage to be inadequate. I wonder whether the Secretary of State realises the absurdity of his argument. Surely, as the holder of the purse strings, he should be targeting the homes he is not happy with, and not the young people who are in them through not fault of their own. This suggests strongly that the stigma and misuse of residential care often mask some excellent work that is taking place. It is a credit to residential care that so many of the young children placed in children’s homes under such pressure grow up to lead fulfilling lives.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Perhaps I should declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, but is not part of the problem the fact that the children who end up in residential children’s homes are, as he says, often there as a last resort, and will usually be there for only a matter of months, when what we really need to look at, rather than short-term spot purchasing of places, is long-term planning? Children need to go into good-quality residential children’s homes—the quality still needs to be improved—as a long-term planned option, just as it is for long-term fostering, rather than as a last resort. If that were the case, enabling children to stay on, which would be wholly consistent with fostering, could be seen as much more of a natural process.

[Craig Whittaker]

I agree absolutely with the sentiments expressed by my hon. Friend, who has had massive experience in this field over the years and has worked tirelessly for young people. The solutions sought for these young people need to be diverse, but long-term planning for residential care is, without question, vital.

The problem with allowing the amendment just for those in foster care is that it leads to inequalities and discrimination within the system, creating a two-tier system for these vulnerable young people. It does not include young people in residential care, so the state just washes its hands of children anywhere between the ages of 16 and 18 and cuts them free without any support in the big wide world. I have even heard stories of young people being sent back to their birth families just a few days before their 16th birthday, so the local authority no longer has to support them.

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on looked-after children and care leavers—a post held that the Minister held before me, so he has had massive experience with the APPG—I have been inundated with stories of young people feeling that the state is yet again letting them down because of the inequality and discrimination being created. In this particular case, however, I have noted a real anger coming from those young people in residential care—an anger that I feel is justified. The brilliant campaign led by the “Every Child Leaving Care Matters” team has in less than a month secured 5,000 signatures for the petition from care leavers to change the Government’s mind, and this has been backed by academics and charities from all over the nation. Five thousand young people cannot be wrong: they are angry about their exclusion, and as one young man said to me, “We are being stitched up yet again.”

Strengthening Couple Relationships

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I want to set the scene first, because the problem is of such magnitude that it is important to put the facts on the record. I will admit to him that I am light in the department of what the solutions are, but he will not be surprised to hear that I have some advice for the bishops. I know, however, that my hon. Friends are doing good work in this field.

I was drawing attention to an article in yesterday’s Daily Mail. Some people will say that it refers to an extreme example, which it may be, but it reflects on a smaller scale what is going on right across the nation. I regularly deal with broken family cases at my surgeries. One constituent recently told me that the father of her child walked out the day she went into labour and has not been seen since, although he boasts on Facebook that he has paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash for a London flat. Another told me that the father, who smokes a lot of weed, has not seen the children for two years; he has a child by another woman and is now with a third woman. A third constituent told me that she is expecting a child by a man who is not interested and has no job; he himself was placed in care as a child. This is going on all over the country. I am not talking about a deprived inner-city area. This is Aldershot, Hampshire. If it is happening there, imagine what else is happening in some of our inner cities.

The men who father these children seem to have absolutely no interest in bringing them up, let alone paying for them. It is important that we recognise that we cannot afford to continue to subsidise people who live such dysfunctional lifestyles. We do not have the money. It is immoral, it is wrong and it has to stop. Am I being judgmental in an age when such an approach is deemed inappropriate? Of course I am being judgmental. For the sake of our country, we need to be judgmental. Besides, plenty of people never cease to be judgmental about Members of Parliament.

Let me move from the particular to the general. Let us consider the data. According to the Centre for Social Justice—an excellent organisation—more than 3 million children are growing up in a lone parent household, 92% headed by the mother. Does that matter? I submit that it does matter because the evidence shows that

“marriage provides the most reliable framework for raising children.”

Those are not my words, but those of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), the former Home Secretary, in his 1998 consultation document entitled “Supporting Families”. That view was essentially reiterated by this Government when, in their social justice strategy paper published in March 2012, they said that

“this Government believes marriage often provides an excellent environment in which to bring up children. So the Government is clear that marriage should be supported and encouraged.”

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. His point about dadlessness is important. The lifelong impact on dadless children’s educational achievement and job prospects, among other things, is immense, but does he accept that children sometimes grow up in dadless households because dads who want to be there have been excluded? The purpose of the presumption of shared parenting in the Children and Families Bill, which is going through Parliament now, is to ensure that, wherever possible, those dads who are unable to live with their children because of an acrimonious split continue to have whatever meaningful and valuable contact they have with their children because of the huge value that it brings to the experience of the children.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. It is not one that I intended to cover in my speech, but I am glad that he has put that on the record, because it is clear that there are fathers who do want access to their children and who do want to play an important role in bringing up their children, but they are denied. I hope that the Children and Families Bill will be a move in the right direction to rectify that wrong.

Let me be clear that the problem is not just about the financial cost, massive though that is. As all right hon. and hon. Members are only too aware from their surgeries, there is a massive social cost in human misery, which has an undeniably detrimental effect on children, as my hon. Friend has just illustrated. Statistics show that children of separated parents are more likely to have physical and mental health problems in childhood and to fall into crime or substance abuse in later life. The Centre for Social Justice observes that lone parents are two and a half times more likely to be in poverty than couple families, and children from broken homes are statistically less likely to be able to establish stable relationships themselves, thereby continuing the cycle.

Research by the Office for National Statistics on “The mental health of children and adolescents in Great Britain”, published in 2000, found twice the incidence of disorders in boys aged 11 to 15 in lone-parent households as in married households. Even more interesting, the incidence in cohabiting households was similar not to that in married households, but rather to that in lone-parent households. I shall have more to say on cohabitation in a moment, but clearly one has to recognise that although not all children brought up in such conditions will necessarily struggle in those ways, we cannot ignore the facts if we are to tackle the issue. According to Relate, another excellent organisation, the number of families with dependent children increased by 5% between 1996 and 2012. The number of married-couple families with dependent children fell by 12%, however, and the number of lone-parent families rose by 22% and the number of cohabiting couples doubled. One million fathers do not live with their children.

Marriage, which for the majority of Conservative Members of Parliament can be only between a man and a woman, remains the core of a stable family. Only in this environment do children have both male and female role models for guidance and support. However, the number of marriages has fallen from about 415,000 in 1970 to about 240,000 in 2010, a near 100-year low. The number of single-parent households has risen from 8% of the total in 1970 to 22% in 2010. Since the late 1970s, there has been a steady increase in the rise of cohabitation, with nearly half of all children today born outside marriage, but cohabitation is a relatively unstable substitute for marriage. Figures from the Centre for Social Justice show that fewer than one in 10 married couples separate by their child’s fifth birthday, compared with one in three cohabiting couples.

Many of us welcomed the Government’s acknowledgement of the contribution that marriage makes to a strong society when the Chancellor included a tax break for married couples in his autumn statement. At this point, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who led the campaign on that front, but it can only be the start. I agree wholeheartedly with the Christian Institute that

“most marriages last for life… Children need a father and a mother to nurture them... Children need parents who love them and love each other just as much. That love must be a permanent and not a temporary commitment… The best environment for raising children is marriage because the spouses have committed themselves to each other, and thus their children, for life. No other kind of relationship provides this environment of stability and permanence for children. Social science confirms that lifelong and loving marriage is the ideal context in which to raise children.”

Some say that in a free society, people should be entitled to live any lifestyle that they want and to an extent that is unquestionably true. I am conscious that I am trespassing on delicate territory, as we are all touched in one way or another by such trends, even at the highest levels in our land, but overwhelmingly it is the taxpayer who is picking up the tab for the current state of affairs, so the state cannot be an idle bystander.

Cyber-bullying

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I beg to move,

That this House recognises the serious problem of cyber-bullying and the appalling consequences for an increasing number of children and young people who are its victims; and calls on the Government to take action to help eradicate this form of intimidation and harassment, including the consideration of legislation to make cyber-bullying an offence.

I rise to speak on the motion in my name and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends. I do so in the reassuring knowledge that it is more than likely, I trust, that in the general thrust of a debate on cyber-bullying, party political differences will, for the most part, be set to one side. I say that not out of any sense of presumption, but it is borne of my experiences as a Member of this House and of the united opposition of all parties to the growing phenomena of cyber-bullying and internet trolling.

Let us remind ourselves that cyber-bullying is the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending intimidating or threatening messages. Most hon. Members in the Chamber have access to a mobile phone, an iPad and other electronic devices, which we rely on in carrying out our responsibilities as elected representatives. Our phones and mobile devices are all equipped with software that allows even the most novice of users to browse the internet, and if we so wish, to communicate via social media.

I engage with my constituents via social media daily. Today, technology allows me to reach out and express my views to thousands of people at the click of a button. That is a very useful tool, but the fact that a person can reach out to thousands of people by the click of a button is a harrowing one for approximately 65% of teenagers. We will be blinded by facts and figures in this debate, but they must all be aired to hit home what a problem cyber-bullying is and what a lasting effect it has. We hear more and more reports of young people who take their own lives as a result of bullying, and cyber-bullying in particular.

I arranged to meet Dr Arthur Cassidy, who heads up an organisation in my constituency called the Yellow Ribbon. Dr Cassidy is involved in UK-wide research into cyber-bullying and internet trolling. He has carried out comprehensive research on the effects of bullying on young people, including the long-term effects on the development of its victims. Recent reports have found that approximately 65% of teenagers say that they have experienced online bullying or trolling, with the most common form being cruel posts that comment on the way that someone is dressed or on what they look like. Some 48% of those teenagers said that it had made them feel very upset. More than half of that 65% said that it was happening to them at least once a week.

The anonymity permitted by certain forms of online social interaction can give bullies the false impression that they can say anything they wish, no matter how hurtful, with little consequence for themselves or for the person they might have harmed. Children have the right to feel safe and secure, particularly when they are at school. Schoolchildren are still developing and do not always have the wisdom to avoid cyber-bullying or to seek out the best solutions or help in dealing with this issue.

In October, I contacted every post-primary school in my constituency and asked each school to identify two student representatives to sit on a forum to discuss cyber-bullying. The meeting was attended by Dr Arthur Cassidy, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the community safety partnership and some parents. I thank them all for their help. I felt that it was essential to engage with young people and to hear their views on how social media affect them both positively and negatively.

Many of the children emphasised how difficult it can be to find help when they have been bullied and to get adults to listen to them. They said that many adults do not understand social media and that more should be done to educate parents and teachers about cyber-bullying. I was very impressed by the openness of the young people at the forum. I was hesitant when it was brought together, because I did not think that they would open up in such a forum, but they did. On that day, I made a commitment to those young people that I would do whatever I could as their Member of Parliament to urge the Government to take whatever steps were needed to tackle this growing phenomenon.

I am pleased to say that steps have been taken in my constituency to address the problem. A workshop is scheduled to take place tomorrow evening to offer advice to parents who are concerned about keeping up to date with modern technology and who want to know what they can do to keep their children safe online. I commend the children and young people’s strategic partnership for its role in making that happen.

We need to work together to eradicate cyber-bullying. The venom that a cyber-bully produces has been proven to leave long-term effects and to make the lives of their victims miserable. Many victims succumb to anxiety, depression and other stress-related disorders. The anonymity and protection of distance makes it easier to push the boundaries and to provoke and taunt with practically no accountability.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing forward this important subject. I am interested to hear of the progress that he is making with schools in his constituency. Is not part of the problem the lack of confidence among parents of my generation, older generations and even younger generations, who lack the technological savvy to tackle the problem head-on with their children? Schools have a responsibility to educate not just children, but parents so that they know how to educate and look after their children.

[David Simpson]

Progress is being made on that. Our forum will meet again in the second week of January to hear an update. Hopefully we will see more movement from the Government and the Northern Ireland Assembly on this matter.

The hon. Gentleman is right that in today’s society, talking is almost a thing of the past between parents and their children. They do not interact in the way that they used to. Parents do not understand such things—I am one of them. Because of the generation that I grew up in, I still use just one finger on an iPad, let alone on a full computer. A lot of education is needed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vaizey]

As I said, as well as setting out what the Government are doing, I am here to listen to views from all sides of the House. As the hon. Gentleman made clear, I hope this will be a thoughtful debate about something on which Members are united, which is to see this venomous trend—to use his powerful adjective—curtailed in the best way we can. On the criminal element, as I understand, the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill will include a new offence of causing nuisance and annoyance and there will be the opportunity for someone to get an antisocial behaviour order against people who cause nuisance and annoyance. That can also be used in cases of cyber-bullying.

As well as criminal law, it is important to consider the other issues raised by the hon. Gentleman in his excellent opening remarks, including the whole ecology that exists in terms of we in society uniting to combat this scourge. I hear what he says about cyber-bullying being a growing threat, and I welcome his constructive suggestions—for example, he made a point about doing rather than talking in the work to educate parents in his constituency.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend said that nuisance and annoyance may be covered by new legislation, but we are talking not about that but about downright abuse that can lead some people to commit suicide. Can he tell the House how many people have been prosecuted under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003 for offences that this House would recognise as forms of cyber-bullying?

[Mr Vaizey]

I would hesitate to answer that question in the detail that my hon. Friend requires, at the risk of misleading the House. As I said a few minutes ago, my understanding is that there were 2,000 prosecutions last year. I do not have a breakdown of those figures, but I will write to him if he requires that. The fundamental point, Madam Deputy Speaker, is that under existing legislation prosecutions are taking place for what you or I would recognise as cyber-bullying.

It is important to involve everyone in society in combating this threat. That includes the Government, of course, but also parents, teachers and the industry, which the hon. Member for Upper Bann mentioned. As he knows, the previous Government established the UK Council for Child Internet Safety—UKCCIS—which has continued to work with this Government, bringing together three Ministers: myself, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), who will wind-up the debate, and the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims. The council brings together industry, academia, charities, parents groups, and law enforcement under three Ministers.

It is often said—again, I would welcome any critique of this—that the UK is a pioneer in internet safety, and my experience of working in the field is that we are highly regarded around the world for the work we do. That does not, I hasten to add, signal any sense of complacency on our part, but it shows that we are proactive about the issue, as were the previous Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vaizey]

We are lucky enough to have sitting next to me one of the top Education Ministers, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson). By the time he comes to sum up, he will have an answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question. The change in the law was welcomed, but I cannot say, from my eyrie in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, what statistics the Department for Education has at its fingertips on its effectiveness. The Department is proud of reducing 481 pages of bullying advice down to 11 pages. Common sense tells us that bullying advice is now being read by schools. The hon. Gentleman alluded to search powers, but the 2011 Act also introduced the new simplified Ofsted inspection regime. Since January 2012, Ofsted has four core criteria only, one of which includes freedom from bullying. Schools can therefore be held to account for their policies.

From September 2014, pupils in every key stage—all pupils from ages five to 16—will be taught about online safety as part of the new curriculum. We hope that that will empower young people to tackle cyber-bullying through responsible, respectful and secure use of technology, as well as ensure that pupils are taught age-appropriate ways of reporting any concerns they may have about what they see or encounter online. I was also going to mention—

[Tim Loughton]

rose—

[Mr Vaizey]

That I want to take an intervention from my hon. Friend.

[Tim Loughton]

The Minister is being very generous in giving way. Will he confirm that academies and free schools will not have to follow the curriculum guidelines? What will he be doing, with his colleagues in the Department for Education, to ensure that these important procedures will still be taught in all our schools?

[Mr Vaizey]

All schools will have to have a protection policy in place and they will be subject to Ofsted inspections. My hon. Friend’s intervention gives me an opportunity to say what a fantastic job he did as children’s Minister. One reason why I have such respect for his remarks is because he is one of those former Ministers who has maintained an interest in the policy in which he was so intimately involved, and he continues to make important interventions in our debates.

The Education Act 2011 strengthened schools’ powers—a specific Government intervention in this area—so that teachers can now impose same-day detention, use reasonable force to protect children from harm and have the power to search for and delete images or files that they think are inappropriate. Schools do not exist in a vacuum. Sometimes the rhetoric is such that we almost pass on to schools the responsibility for sorting out all society’s ills. Schools have to work with parents, and parents have to be participants and allies in the work to combat cyber-bullying. Schools need to work with parents to make it clear that no one will tolerate any kind of bullying, and to ensure that parents are aware of the procedures to follow if they believe their child is being bullied. Schools should investigate and act on all reports.

Making parents aware of what they can do to keep children safe online is also important. I am pleased that, as part of our work to protect children from inappropriate content online, the main internet service providers have come together and formed an alliance to carry out a large-scale internet safety awareness campaign for parents. I understand that that will have a budget of approximately £25 million per year for the next three years and will include signposting to further sources of help and advice. I have said to the ISPs on many occasions that while it might be helpful to them in a competitive environment to offer new and up-to-date tools to parents to keep their children safe online, they must also work together as one. They have the experience, they know their customers, they have the highly paid marketing directors and they have the relationships with the advertising agencies and so on to work together as one for the common good to put forward this message. I am pleased we have got this deal with them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow that very balanced, stark and worrying speech from the hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr McCrea), which was in the same vein as that of his colleague, the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson), who opened the debate. This is a very important subject and I pay tribute to the DUP for having brought it to the House’s attention today. It is a very important and topical subject, and it merits greater coverage and attention than is suggested by the number of Members who are able to be here debating it today

We have had a number of debates on related subjects recently, which is a sign of the seriousness with which this House takes this issue and the threat that this problem presents to many of our constituents day in, day out—the young, the old, the vulnerable and everyone else as well. There has in the past perhaps been a focus on access to harmful material on the internet—violent pornography and violence generally—and its hugely insidious effect on our young people and particularly on vulnerable and impressionable teenagers. Just a few days ago yet another case came up and was reported in the newspapers where a boy of 12 raped his younger sister after watching online pornography, prompting a judge to warn yesterday that

“the internet is not a benign babysitter”.

We have become almost conditioned and immune to horrific cases like that being a fact of everyday modern life, but that does not make it any less important that we should urgently tackle this problem. We must not take it for granted. We must do much more than we are doing now collectively as a country, as a Government, and with all the institutions at our disposal.

I welcome the progress made recently in various parts of Government, in co-operation with businesses and other institutions, on the proliferation of filters, which we are now going to see on accessing pornography and harmful material. However, we have a lot more to do, and they are just one part of what needs to be a whole jigsaw of solutions addressing the effects the internet can have on impressionable people who can be influenced by it.

The bigger question is not so much how people get access to the internet and how we restrict it, but why they want to look at these things and why they are influenced by them. Why does the internet have such a huge influence on impressionable boys in particular, and how has it come to normalise hardcore and often violent behaviour for our kids so they take this stuff for granted—stuff that we are aghast at and would have been absolutely aghast at if we had had access to it in our impressionable teenage years? The internet is a fantastic tool that we cannot, and would not wish to, uninvent; it is one of the great fashioning things of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Why do some people turn to the internet to use it to bully, harass and abuse?

As my hon. Friend the Minister mentioned, in my time as children’s Minister I jointly chaired the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, a really important body that is part of the solution. It has been providing answers and it needs to be at the heart of the solutions we provide. We must have a multi-faceted approach, which is why that body, which brings together academia, business, the internet service providers, the child protection people, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, Government and everybody else, is so important. In my time on the UKCCIS we focused on access to harmful content—violent and adult content—for young people in particular, and I think the focus is still the same. I regret, however that we did not latch on earlier, as we needed to do, to the malign effects that the misuse of social media to abuse and bully is having on our children, some of them under the age of 10, every day of their lives.

[Mark Tami]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point and has hit the nail on the head. We can put all the barriers and protections in place, but in terms of bullying, children have access to Facebook and the other similar sites because that is part of modern life. It is how they meet and arrange parties, and if they are not part of that network, they fear they will be excluded, which presents us with a difficult circle to square.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is right. Like it or not, my teenage daughters go absolutely berserk if their internet connection is down or they lose their mobile or other such device. You cannot leave home without it.

It is ironic that, as we heard earlier, at a time when, technologically, communication has never been easier—we can telephone, text, e-mail, tweet, use Bebo—actually, we do not talk to each other much. Certainly, children do not talk to their parents much, and vice versa. When my wife or I sometimes get a request by e-mail from one of my teenage daughters for supper in her bedroom, I think that we have gone quite far enough. She will not be getting any supper that night, if that sort of nonsense goes on.

Important though it is, rather than just concentrating on access to harmful material, we need to take much more seriously the use of social media for malign purposes by young people against other young people, and, of course, by older people masquerading as young people who are seeking to groom and abuse them sexually. It is extraordinary to note the number of young people who will still communicate with strangers—they know not where they come from or what their intentions are, yet they have conversations with them over the internet and even meet up with them, as if they were best friends.

These sites will expand, and more social media opportunities will of course come the way of our children. Some are supposed to be age-barred, but in practice we know that it is almost impossible to do that. Having spoken to young people, including during my time as chairman of the UKCCIS, I know that what really worries them is a malign posting on social media sites, which undermines their integrity. Such a posting can go viral, and in a matter of minutes a huge audience may be privy to some deeply offensive and abusive, personal, private sexual information that is now out there. In the past, such information would have been in hard copy form—a piece of paper available to just one or two people, so it had limited effect. Now, it is out there for ever, potentially.

Some 38% of teenagers have received sexually explicit texts or e-mails, and according to one survey that figure is going up. Indeed, “sexting” is just one of the more alarming manifestations of social media having become part of our everyday lives. This can turn into bullying when threats to send increasingly explicit photos over social media are used as a form of blackmail. Of course, we have had the recent tragic cases of young people, including a 14-year-old girl, being driven to suicide by the fear of what is out there—by the threat of its being publicised and used against them on social media.

[Mark Tami]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that, because potential future employers are increasingly looking at young people’s Facebook history, their career prospects could be ruined and they could be denied such opportunities because of something that has been put on Facebook?

[Tim Loughton]

And of course, as Members of Parliament, we know all too well that, for members of the press—not too many are present in the Press Gallery today—such activities are often part of their job description.

The internet affects everybody’s lives. It is un-cool, as we have heard, not to be on the internet or not to have the latest internet-enabled mobile device. Research by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has shown that almost 40% of our young people are affected by cyber-bullying. A survey by Nominet, which has done a lot of work in this area, showed that 65% of young people have experienced online bullying, or “trolling”, or know somebody else who has. For ChildLine, which is part of the NSPCC, bullying is the second most important issue, accounting for more than 10% of the counselling sessions arising out of the referrals it receives.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman and I have worked on many children’s issues together, and he will remember that the commission on stalking on which we worked found that this terrible use of the internet was destroying people’s lives. Is it not good news that we quickly got the law changed on stalking? People said that it could not be stopped, but we proved that it could be. Now, that same commission is being re-formed to look at cyber-bullying, I hope with the same success.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is right. A recent debate in this place showed what can be done when we put our minds to it and listen to people who have solutions, rather than always listening to those who focus on the problems.

The Department for Education’s own research shows that 30% of secondary school-aged children have been deliberately targeted, threatened or humiliated by abuse on mobile phones or the internet. Cyber-bullying is an even more cowardly form of what we might have known as playground bullying, because it often hides behind anonymity, done by people in the comfort of their own bedroom. However, the psychological effects can be every bit as damaging as physical, face-to-face bullying, and such bullying has the capacity to be spread cancer-like among a much wider body of peers, at the press of a button. It can undermine a young person’s confidence and self-esteem, at a time when they are still finding their own identity. It can lead to depression, truancy, self-harm and even suicide; to a fear of returning to school to face one’s friends, who may be the authors of some of this cyber-bullying; and to a feeling of being permanently unsafe.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Being bullied by electronic means could actually be worse than being bullied in the playground. At least in the playground, people perhaps have their friends around to sustain them. Being bullied privately, perhaps in a quiet place, could really prey on someone’s mind.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and of course in such situations there are no witnesses around. People suffer in silence, and there is not necessarily anybody on hand to report such behaviour to. That is why it is every bit as damaging as, and probably more damaging than, the playground bullying that he and I might have been witnesses to—certainly not part of—in our days of yore in the playground.

Nominet’s “know the net” research suggests that socially and economically disadvantaged children and young people are at greater risk of experiencing cyber-bullying and suffering its adverse effects. It is more likely to affect disabled children, young carers, children with learning disabilities and recipients of free school meals. Cyber-bullies are picking on the most vulnerable children—an even more shameful act. Facebook is the most common place for it, as we have heard. Facebook has made great strides, but there is an awful lot more it can do. Such bullying happens on Twitter, and it happens with Instagram. There are now various new modes of communicating, whereby an image is sent and it self-destructs within 10 seconds, so the evidence is gone. Those are all clever ways that can be used by malign people to bully even more effectively.

What is really worrying is that only 37% of teenagers who experience online bullying report it to a social network, so two thirds do not. Some 36% of those who do not report it said that they choose not to because it is not taken seriously and doing so would be a waste of time. Very few even report it to their parents, yet a third of all parents fear that their child is actually causing bullying on the internet, according to research by the National Children’s Bureau and McAfee. Some 45% of parents have set up Facebook accounts themselves for their own children who are under the age of 13. The recommended minimum age for having a Facebook account is 13, yet some parents are clearly ignoring that. Indeed, Facebook itself has discussed removing that age threshold. However, that is one of the few safeguards that provides guidance to parents on the age at which it is appropriate for their children to be exposed to these very powerful forms of social media. Only one in 10 parents believe that their own children are safe online, yet over a third have never had a conversation with their children about the dangers of the internet, and only one in five bothers to set up controls on their internet devices.

This is an extraordinary situation, a perfect storm. Schools are not doing enough to teach the hazards of the internet effectively. We need better sex and relationship education as armour to deal with some of the sexual abuse on the internet. Parents are afraid of appearing ignorant and do not communicate with their children about the hazards, and the social media companies are still spending too much time on maximising the number of people attracted to their sites, the revenues earned by the sites and the stock market capitalisation as the sites are launched on the American stock market. The Home Affairs Select Committee reported earlier this year that too many of our social media companies remain far too complacent and laid back about the perils of the internet for young and impressionable people.

The other big problem is that abuse of the internet lacks consequences. That was behind my earlier question to the Minister when I asked him how many people were being prosecuted and actually feeling the force of the law. How many people are being shown that what they are doing is not just a bit of harmless fun, a bit of ribbing or a bit of playfully taking the mick out of someone, but that it is dangerous abuse that can ultimately be fatal?

[David Simpson]

Recent figures on trolls who have stopped abusing people online have shown that many of them admitted looking for the most vulnerable targets and making their lives a misery. They admitted that that behaviour was like a drug, and that they would move on to another vulnerable target. Something more needs to be done about this.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is right. It takes an extraordinary mentality to want to use the fantastic technology of the internet to abuse and, ultimately, to cause harm and even death. This is perhaps similar to those people who invent computer viruses and get a kick out of causing huge inconvenience and misery to large numbers of people.

I have been a bit gloomy so far, but I want to end by mentioning a few of the good things. Good progress has been made. The work of the Prime Minister and the Government internationally with the FBI on promoting filters and using greater powers to remove harmful images from the internet is very welcome. The profile of the problem has certainly been raised, which is also welcome. We now have better guidance on e-safety in schools, although my complaint is that that focuses too much on the mechanics of the technology and not enough on the ethics of what is good and not good and what cannot be trusted on the internet.

The Department for Education has awarded £4 million-worth of grants to BeatBullying, the Diana Award, Kidscape and the National Children’s Bureau, all of which are excellent organisations doing some really good practical stuff, but it is a drop in the ocean when we consider how many hundreds of millions of people are using social media. The Education Act 2011 gives teachers greater powers to search for and delete inappropriate images on electronic devices, which is welcome, as is the fact that Ofsted should now be inspecting behaviour as part of its assessment of schools and looking closely at the effectiveness of internal policies to prevent bullying and cyber-bullying. I also welcome the additional funding to enable the Internet Watch Foundation to use its new powers to take down inappropriate sites.

There is more that we need to do, however. We need to empower parents and pupils. We need to ensure that schools not only educate the kids but invite the parents in so that they can learn what the kids have learnt, so that they know what to look out for when they go back home. This is just like healthy eating: schools are very good at giving kids healthier meals and telling them about healthy eating, only to let them go home and be stuffed full of pies by parents who do not have the right attitude. We also need more in-your-face guidance from the Government, through the Department for Education and the Home Office, about the real dangers of what is going on.

[Mr Sheerman]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is always possible to recognise a school that has a big question mark hanging over it when its head teacher says, “My responsibility ends at the school gate”? It could never end there in relation to bullying, because the bullies used to hang out on the street outside. Bullying of that kind, and bullying on the internet, must be tackled by head teachers managing their schools properly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is right. Cyber-bullying might start in the playground, but it can continue in the bedroom of the anonymous person who is carrying out the campaign.

Our social media companies need to do much more. We need far more effective in-your-face reporting mechanisms, proper hot buttons and faster, more effective mediation and adjudication on what is acceptable. Also, there must be consequences, so that the people who post this stuff can have it taken down and have their site confiscated. In some cases, we should not shy away from naming and shaming the perpetrators in school and preventing them from using social media.

As the House has heard, I have my own long-standing troll who continues to post malicious material about my family. For many months, I have been complaining to Google, which hosts his blog. This person has posted pictures of my teenage, under-age daughters on his blog, alongside abusive comments. They have not been removed. When he was spoken to about it, he replaced their faces with horses’ heads, alongside equally abusive comments. After about six months, Google got round to doing something. It sent me this response:

“Hello. Thanks for reaching out to us. We have reviewed your request. At this time, Google has decided not to take action. Blogger hosts third-party content. It is not a creator or mediator of that content. We encourage you to resolve any disputes directly with the individual who posted the content.”

That is not an effective way of dealing with clear and obvious abuse, and I am still on at Google—and it is not just Google—to take this sort of abuse seriously. If it is unable to do that for a Member of Parliament who has a platform here, imagine how many of our children must be suffering in silence because they have no means of drawing attention to this deeply abusive, offensive and completely unnecessary form of cyber-bulling.

We also need better sentencing guidelines. There are some bits of legislation, but we have not yet seen people being hauled before the courts. Frankly, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Director of Public Prosecutions must do better in this regard. They complain that this is a grey area and that the thresholds are high, but cyber-bullying is cyber-violence and if that violence were committed in person in playgrounds or in pubs, it would be dealt with properly by the police and the courts. Cyber-bullying should be no different.

I have recently written to all Members of Parliament, with the help of Nominet, asking for cases in which their constituents had been the victims of cyber-bullying so that we can put together some best practice to use when our constituents come to our surgeries when their children and family members have experienced this kind of bullying. We as Members of Parliament also experience cyber-bullying. I have spoken to Mr Speaker about this and he is sympathetic to our receiving guidance on how to help ourselves to guard against trolling and cyber-bullying, which we should not have to accept as we try to do our jobs.

This is a problem that affects all of us: the young, the old and, in particular, the most vulnerable. It is just a technological advance—albeit a particularly insidious one—from playground bullying to cyber-bulling, but it can go as far as to involve threats of terrorism, as certain Members have found out to their cost. There is no magic bullet, but we all have a responsibility better to educate our children.

Schools should have a designated teacher who is responsible for anti-bullying work, and we should have much more effective procedures and mechanisms for reporting incidents of bullying, including cyber-bullying, in schools. Cyber-bullying should be included and referred to in all policies on behaviour, anti-bullying and acceptable use. All teachers should be given training, support and guidance on dealing with bullying, including cyber-bullying. Those are just some of the recommendations in the BeatBullying “Virtual Violence” report. We need clear guidance along those lines from the Department for Education to schools on whether or not they are bound by the curriculum, and not the current postcode lottery and the laissez-faire approach that I fear we have. We need clear guidance from the Home Office to justice institutions.

We also need greater social responsibility from our social media companies. They need to monitor, and we need to monitor, how good they are at reporting this stuff and taking it down, and how quickly they do it. They need to invest in moderators and to signpost better where young people can go to get help. Above all, there needs to be consequences for cyber-bullying and the Government need to take a greater lead. I have sympathy with what Democratic Unionist party Members were saying about making cyber-bullying an offence, because, as I said earlier and I say again, cyber-bullying is cyber-violence. We would criminalise it in any other context and we need now to look seriously at how the law can treat it equally seriously.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Deaf Children and Young People

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Malcolm Bruce]

I am sure that the Minister will make clear the initiatives that the Government have taken, many of which I commend; they are helpful. I am not here to criticise the Government for what they are doing, but I think that more could be done, and I hope that we can press the Government to consider what that might be.

Ninety per cent. of deaf children are born to hearing parents who, when they are confronted, as I was, with the knowledge that their child is profoundly deaf, often have no knowledge of, or contact with, the deaf community. I pay tribute to the National Deaf Children’s Society, which provides excellent support for people when that happens to them.

Eighty per cent. of deaf children are now being educated in mainstream schools, which is different from the time when my daughter was educated, and they may be the only deaf child in that school. The question that has to be asked is how well deaf children are achieving. Government figures suggest that only 37% of deaf children achieved five good GCSEs last year. That is a dismally low, indeed a shameful, figure because it compares with 69% for hearing children. Let us be clear that deafness is not in itself a learning disability. There is no reason why the majority of deaf children should not achieve the same as other children, provided that they get the right specialist support.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Not only is the difference in achievement between children with hearing problems and their peers shocking but it is getting worse. That figure of 37% was down from 40% the year before. So things are going in the wrong direction. The right hon. Gentleman may also be aware that it is estimated that 80% of teachers of deaf children are over 50. So we shall have a serious recruitment problem if we do not do something about this quickly.

[Sir Malcolm Bruce]

That is right. I have been shown local authority adverts for teachers of deaf children that did not require full capacity in sign language. In some circumstances, the sign language of the children is better than that of the teacher, and that cannot be satisfactory.

Things are getting worse in many areas. The NDCS has carried out a survey that shows that 29% of local authorities are cutting services for deaf children and a further 25% have identified that there is a risk of cuts. Of course we are living in a time of spending restraint, but that should not impact on people who have such real need and are so vulnerable. The Government have made it clear that they want to maintain support for vulnerable learners, but if it is not happening we have to ask the Government what more they can do to ensure that cuts do not happen and that standards are maintained. We have to work out what can be done to maintain support for deaf children, and we should have aspirations to do a lot better.

One suggestion is that Ofsted should be required to inspect services for deaf children. When we consider how much scrutiny mainstream teachers in schools are subject to by Ofsted, many people tell me that they are surprised that teachers of the deaf and specialist support services are subject to virtually no such oversight. That sends a signal that deaf education is less important than mainstream.

Daniel Pelka

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robinson]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, it might have been plagiarism—I hope that is not an inappropriate word—but that was another idea I was going to take from her. We should have not one huge centre but various centres in which creative means of communicating with difficult children are imaginatively developed and explored. The day before Daniel Pelka died, a teacher was found in another school in Coventry—there are loads of them—to talk to him. She happened to be Polish and was able to speak the language, but that is not good enough. It is pathetic that things got to that stage.

I agree with my hon. Friend, so let us make that our No.1 point: children must be talked to and we should develop a whole area of useful specialisations, as opposed to a load of paper that gets churned out continually. Children could tell us what their parents look like by using diagrams. We might start to learn something and it could tell quite a story.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the need to talk to the child. The situation was even worse in this case, because I gather that they relied on another child in the family to communicate with him, which obviously is not appropriate.

There is a big issue of social workers being fobbed off at the door. When social workers are dealing with communities that are not naturally fluent in English, we need to make sure that they have people alongside them who can communicate in the relevant language so that they are not fobbed off by communication difficulties, let alone by all the problems involved in crossing the threshold and finding out exactly what is going on. This is a real problem for some of the incoming communities, particularly those from eastern Europe.

[Mr Robinson]

Yes, that is a problem. Let us think creatively and commonsensically about how we can deal with it. It will not be enough to train a whole load of interpreters to become experts in Polish, arts and crafts and other languages and grammars. We need the same sort of practical thinking as inventive mothers who work part time and know how to do things with their kids.

I do not want to be unkind to the Minister, because he inherited the situation and was gracious and courteous enough to agree to meet me on the afternoon the case review was published, but at that meeting he said, “I think we’re going to make a big difference now,” and produced a 74-page document full of all sorts of jargon. The Minister should not worry, because I will say something else to qualify my comments in a moment. The document was statutory guidance, which is an oxymoron—it is either statutory or it is guidance; it cannot be both. The Minister said, “Well, Geoffrey, if you think that’s feeble, it was 700 pages when I got it.” Think of all the time, effort, pen-pushing and talking that is going on, and yet we cannot find a means of getting through to a young kid because he speaks a different language. It does not make any sense at all.

Secondly—I owe a good deal to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport for this point, too—the lines of responsibility have to be much clearer. Who is responsible? I thank the well meaning and extremely professional National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and half a dozen other agencies, as well as probably a dozen people from other constituencies who have been, or fear they will be, affected by this issue, for their response to tonight’s debate. The first recommendation in the NSPCC’s briefing paper is:

“Front-line agencies must see and listen to the child”.

That is sensible and we all agree with it, but it then states in a green box:

“All notifications of domestic abuse should be sent to a Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH)”.

What sort of line of communication is that? What it amounts to is a mishmash. We see that more and more.

It is not that the agencies are not talking to each other. They probably are not as good at communicating with each other as they should be and improvement is necessary, but the problem is that we do not know who is responsible. The NSPCC says that a lead is needed. It is not a lead that is needed, but somebody who is responsible for the case and who knows that he is responsible for it. I am sorry, I should have said “he or she”, because the only person who had the guts to put a foot in the door and leave it there was a female youth community officer, who did a fantastic job and found out that the abuse was going on.

MASH just about sums up what is wrong. What we need is clearer lines of communication.

[Tim Loughton]

I am loth to intervene again in case the hon. Gentleman does not get on to his other points, but I must say that the MASH is the way to go. It allows all the different agencies to communicate with each other better because they sit next to each other in the same room. In a relatively short period of time, all the relevant people can come together and swap information. Importantly, somebody then picks up the ball and acts on what has been said. That is the responsible person to whom the hon. Gentleman rightly refers. It is happening more effectively in MASHs than it has done before. That is why most London authorities and most other authorities in the country are going that way. It is the way to go.

[Mr Robinson]

I am delighted to hear that and I wish the hon. Gentleman well with it. I hope that it works. However, a MASH can work only if at the end of all the talking—I accept that that has to happen, because there is no other way of getting everybody to know what they need to know—there is a clear line of responsibility. Somebody has to write the minutes, somebody has to say what will be done and there must be a clearly identifiable responsible person or group of people who are charged with carrying it through. Otherwise, it will not happen.

The MASH is a committee and committees do not do anything. It serves the useful purpose of bringing people together so that they can talk and exchange the information that they need to know about. What is missing from the system is a clear way of saying at the end of the meeting what the conclusions and recommendations are. Those must be very short. A person or group of people—a lead, or whatever you want to call them—must then be responsible for carrying out those recommendations.

That was certainly what was missing in Coventry. There was meeting after meeting. Everybody was grouped together and the information was being exchanged. However, when the dreadful news broke, I asked who was actually responsible. The reply was that we were all responsible. If we are all responsible, no one is. We must not be afraid of allocating responsibilities and ensuring that they are carried out. If they are not, retraining is always a good option. People do not have to be sacked. We are not like that on this side of the House. However, people in the country cannot accept that the head of the department, Colin Green, resigned a few days or weeks before the report came out and was appointed to exactly the same position elsewhere. That was wrong. What sort of confidence does that provide?

That point reminds me of another Adjournment debate that I secured about a distinguished surgeon at Walsgrave who was almost sacked because he had reported somebody else. It turned out that the chief executive of the hospital was not up to the job—there were a whole series of these cases—and all six neighbouring MPs served by that hospital called for his resignation. He was sacked—well, that was what it was called, but within six months he was back in charge at Birmingham Heartlands hospital. It is unbelievable what such a network of controls can do.

My next point will, I am sure, again be contentious for the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and others who are a bit on the side of the establishment, because it concerns the compositions of serious case reviews. Each area has its own chairman—that is all it has, actually—and lay members. When it comes to the inquiry, the chairman or chairwoman brings in a rapporteur, a writer of the report, and both she and he know each other—I am not suggesting that is wrong; it could sometimes be very helpful—and have written many of these reports in the past, either together or separately. Already in my book that does not seem quite right. It is not independent, and the essence of the serious case review is that it must be seen to be independent.

My last point—I have left plenty of time for the Minister—concerns Ann Lucas, whom I begged to carry out an independent report. “Why should I be the only one to put Coventry through that when nobody else has ever done it?”—she did not say that, but that was what I felt she felt. That would have meant a completely new board, fresh blood, with people who did not know the situation in Coventry or the chair of the Coventry group, and who had a completely dispassionate view.

I do not think anybody would agree any longer with the police investigating the police. Why should the civil servants who had administered the case in question be those who were the team supporting the independent chair—she was independent—and the so-called appointed independent rapporteur, or reporter? He wrote the report and one could see he is a professional. Every perfect piece of civil service-ese was in it; it could not be faulted. However, out of that comes nothing so far, and so Ann Lucas wrote to me and asked whether I would relay this message to the House tonight. She is an outstanding council leader who has been in the job about six months. She was distraught to find that she had inherited this case, and she went along with a traditional conventional review. She said that

“we need a national debate around safeguarding issues—

that is obvious—

“with the setting up of a Commons Select Committee to take evidence from all concerned. From politicians, from front-line workers, from all agencies, social workers, the police, health agencies—including GPs, hospitals, health visitors and schools. And very importantly, from experts working with Domestic Violence”,

in which she is an expert.

I do not know whether that is a runner, but I am clear that I do not see it ever working—I have not left the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham time to add his comprehensive view. We need a more forensic direct attack. For example, there were four or five points at which Daniel Pelka could have been saved. That is clear. We need a mechanism so that when such a point is reached—I guess the people doing it did not know—or anything like that, the man at the top should be informed. We need a mechanism to intervene and bring things to a head, and in a way it is about management. I hope those points will have helped the Minister in his reply.

Children and Families Bill

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

We have had a wide-ranging debate on the various child care issues, but one point that I think we can all agree on is that there is an urgent need for high-quality, affordable child care in this country. At the moment, many working families are struggling to afford their child care, and I can assure the House that the Government are fully committed to improving the situation. Tax-free child care, which is the key policy that we have been promoting in the Bill, will contribute to that.

I would particularly like to thank the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) for his very constructive comments, particularly on the point about our tax-free child care scheme. I want to reassure the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) that “tax-free” refers to the 20% that parents will benefit by. The critical point is that it is open to many more families.

I understand the hon. Members want to move on to the next debate so, without further ado, I shall finish.

Question put and agreed to.

New clause 10 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 3

Regulation of child performance

‘(1) In section 37 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963 (Restriction on persons under 16 taking part in public performances, etc.) the words “under the compulsory school leaving age” shall be inserted after the word “child” in subsection (1).

(2) After subsection (2) there shall be inserted—

“(2A) In this section, “Performance” means the planned participation by a child aged under the compulsory school leaving age in a public entertainment production, unless that participation—

(a) involves risks that are no greater than the risks faced by that child in the ordinary course of his life and does not require the child to be absent from school or requires an absence from school of not more than four days in a six month period and such absence is authorised by the school;

(b) involves the child doing that which he would do in any event in the ordinary course of his life; or

(c) involves the creation of audio-visual content where there is an overriding public interest in the child’s participation.”.

(3) Subsection (3)(a) of that section shall be repealed.

(4) After subsection (5) of that section there shall be inserted—

“(5A) Regulations under this section shall provide for the local authority to give reasons for any refusal of a licence under this section and shall specify any mitigating action which would be required to allow a licence to be issued.

(5B) A refusal of a local authority to grant a licence may be reversed on appeal.”.

(5) Subsection (6) of that section shall be repealed.

(6) After subsection (7) the following shall be inserted—

“(7A) A licence granted by a local authority shall be transferrable to another local authority if the child moves residence from one local authority area to another.”.

(7) Section 38 of the Act (Restriction on licences for performances by children under 14) shall be repealed.

(8) After section 39 of the Act, there shall be inserted—

“39A Presumption that a licence should be issued

(1) There shall be a presumption that a licence shall be issued unless there is identifiable potential harm that cannot be mitigated by any other action.

(2) For the purposes of this section—

(a) “identifiable potential harm” shall be any outcome that acts adversely against the wellbeing of the child;

(b) “mitigated” shall mean such reasonable action that secures the safety of the child from the impact on their wellbeing; and

(c) “wellbeing” includes the physical, mental and emotional condition and interests of the child.

39B Guidance

‘(1) The Secretary of State shall issue guidance to local authorities on the criteria for issuing licences and the conditions which shall apply to them; and this guidance may make different provision for children falling within different age bands applicable to their development age.

(2) Guidance shall include a requirement for the local authority’s decision to be based on an assessment of the risks involved in the child’s participation in the performance.

(3) Guidance shall include the safeguarding arrangements which shall be made in regard to participation in sporting activities; and in drawing up this guidance the Secretary of State shall consult sports governing bodies.

(4) Guidance shall require the local authority, in considering the terms on which a licence is issued, to have regard to the number of days actually worked spread across a particular period.

(5) Guidance shall require local authorities to provide for on-line applications for licences, to deal with all licences in time if submitted at least 10 days before they are to come into effect, or five days in respect of a repeated application.

(6) Guidance shall provide for local authorities to inspect sites where children taking part in performances are to be accommodated, if they will be residing alongside unconnected adults.

(7) Guidance shall provide for local authorities to disregard absence in connection with licensed performances in school records for authorised absences.

(8) Guidance shall provide that local authorities shall require that matrons or chaperones shall operate under standards accepted by the appropriate advisory bodies.

(9) Guidance shall also include the circumstances in which it is appropriate to authorise a body of persons to organise a performance for which licences will not be required by virtue of section 37(3)(b) of this Act, including where the performers are of 13 years or upwards or if the body is an amateur body and has a nominated child protection person who has received appropriate training and is independent of the chaperone.

(10) Guidance under this section shall be laid before Parliament and shall be subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament as if it were contained in a statutory instrument subject to such annulment.”.

(9) Clause 42 of the Act (Licences for children and young persons performing abroad) shall be amended by inserting after subsection (1)—

“(1A) Licences under section 25 of the principal Act in relation to performances as defined under this Act shall be issued by local authorities rather than as specified in the principal Act.”.

(10) In subsection (2) of that section the words after the word “granted” shall be replaced by the words “regardless of the age of the child”.

(11) In the Children (Performances) Regulations 1968 (SI 1968/1728)—

(a) In Regulation 8 (Medical examinations) in paragraph (2), the words “performance taking place within a period of six months from the date of the said medical examination” shall be replaced by the words “later performance”.

(b) At the end of Regulation 10 (Education) there shall be inserted—

“(6) The child’s parents or guardians must inform the child’s school of any days on which the child will be absent by reason of taking part in performances.”.

(c) In Regulation 12(3) (maximum number of other children a matron shall have charge of), “eleven” shall be replaced by “nine”.

(d) At the end of Regulation 12 (Matrons) there shall be inserted—

“(7) A matron in respect of a performance organised by an amateur body who is unpaid shall not require local authority approval provided that he or she is CRB-checked and is independent of the nominated child protection person.”.

(e) Regulation 17 (Further medical examinations) shall cease to have effect.’.—(Tim Loughton.)

Brought up, and read the First time.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

New clause 4—Continuing support for former foster children—

‘Section 23C of the Children Act 1989 (continuing functions in respect of former relevant children) is amended by the insertion of the following subsections after subsection (5).

“(5ZA) The assistance given under subsection (4)(c) shall include the continuation of accommodation with the former local authority foster parent, unless—

(a) the former relevant child states that he or she does not wish to continue residing in such accommodation, or

(b) the former local authority foster parent does not wish to continue to provide accommodation, or

(c) it is not reasonably practicable to arrange such accommodation.

(5ZB) ‘Former local authority foster parent’ means a local authority foster parent within the meaning of section 22C(12) with whom the former relevant child, as a looked after child, was placed under section 22C(6)(a) or (b).”.’.

New clause 5—Assessment and support of young carers—

‘(1) Where it appears to a local authority that a child within their area may provide or be about to provide care to an adult or a child who is disabled, the authority must—

(a) assess whether the child has needs for support relating to their caring role (or is likely to have such needs in the future); and

(b) if the child is found to have such needs, set out what those needs are (or are likely to be in the future).

(2) Having carried out an assessment under subsection (1) the authority must meet those needs for support which it considers to be necessary to meet in order to safeguard and promote the child’s welfare.

(3) Having carried out an assessment under subsection (1), a local authority must also consider whether the adult is or may be eligible for assessment under the Care Act 2013, and if so must ensure such an assessment is carried out unless that adult objects.

(4) Having carried out an assessment under subsection (1) a local authority must consider whether, in the case of a child who is caring for a disabled child, the child being cared for requires an assessment under the Children Act 1989 and if so shall carry out that assessment unless the person with parental responsibility for that child objects.

(5) The Secretary of State shall issue guidance in relation to the duties set out above having consulted with persons whom the Secretary of State considers to be appropriate, the said guidance to be issued under section 7 of the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970.

(6) Any service provided by an authority in the exercise of functions conferred on them under this section may be provided for the family or for any member of the child’s family, and may include—

(a) services to the adult the child is providing care to meet the adult’s needs for care and support; and

(b) services to the adult to enhance their parenting capacity.

If such services are provided with a view to safeguarding and promoting the child’s welfare.’.

New clause 11—General duty of local authorities to co-operate to secure sufficient accommodation for looked after children—

‘(1) The Children Act 1989 is amended as follows.

(2) After section 22G (General duty of local authority to secure sufficient accommodation for looked after children), insert the following new section:

“22H General duty of local authorities to co-operate to secure sufficient accommodation for looked after children

(1) It is the general duty of a local authority to take steps in co-operation with neighbouring local authorities that secure, so far as reasonably practicable, the outcomes in subsections (2) and (3).

(2) The first outcome applies to the children defined in subsection (3) of section 22G in respect of whom the local authority are unable to secure the outcome defined in subsection (2) of that section.

(3) The first outcome is that the local authority is able to secure accommodation for those children that—

(a) is within a neighbouring authority’s area; and

(b) meets the need of those children.

(4) The second outcome applies to the children defined in subsection (3) of section 22G in respect of whom a neighbouring local authority is unable to secure the outcome defined in subsection (2) of that section.

(5) The second outcome is that the local authority is able to secure accommodation for those children that—

(a) is within the authority’s area; and

(b) meets the need of those children.”.’.

New clause 12—General duty of local authority to secure sufficient early help services—

‘(1) It is the general duty of a local authority to take steps that secure, so far as reasonably practicable, the outcome in subsection (2).

(2) The outcome is that the local authority is able to provide the children and young people mentioned in subsection (3) and their families with provision of early help services that—

(a) are within the authority’s area or a neighbouring authority’s area; and

(b) meet the needs of those children and young people and their families.

(3) The children and young people referred to in subsection (2) are those—

(a) who live within the local authority’s area, or

(b) that the local authority is looking after.

(4) In this section—

“early help services” means services to children under 6 and their families, and services to children and young people (of whatever age) and their families early in the emergence of a problem;

“young people” means people under 25.’.

New clause 13—Duty of local safeguarding children boards to undertake serious reviews—

‘(1) Section 14 of the Children Act 2004 (Functions and procedure of Local Safeguarding Children Boards) is amended as follows.

(2) After subsection (2), insert—

“(2A) Functions of review under subsection (2) shall include a duty to undertake serious case reviews at the direction of the Secretary of State.”.’.

New clause 14—Part-time independent educational institutions to have no right to give corporal punishment—

‘(1) Schedule 1 to the Education and Skills Act 2008 (Minor and consequential amendments) is amended as follows.

(2) In sub-paragraph (5) of paragraph 9, insert the following words at the end of inserted subsection (7B):

“except that it applies in relation to this section as if for paragraphs (a) and (b) of subsection (2) of section 92 of that Act there were substituted the following words “for any amount of time during an academic year, no matter how little”.”.’.

New clause 15—Return from care—

‘(1) The Children Act 1989 is amended as follows.

(2) After section 22C (Ways in which looked after children are to be accommodated and maintained), insert the following new section:

“22CA Return home support services for looked after children returning home to the care of their parents/others with parental responsibility

(1) Whenever a local authority decides that a looked after child should return to the care of its parent, the local authority must assess and monitor the support needs of the child and the parent for as long as is necessary to safeguard and promote the child’s welfare.

(2) If after carrying out an assessment in accordance with subsection (1) above, the local authority decides that the child or the parent has support needs, they must provide a child in care, and, in the case of formerly-accommodated children, offer to provide, ‘return home support services’ to meet the identified support needs for as long as is necessary to safeguard and promote the child’s welfare.

(3) Whenever the local authority provides ‘return home support services’ under subsection (2) above, they must prepare a personal budget if asked to do so by the parent or the child, with a view to the recipient being involved in agreeing and securing those services.”.’.

New clause 16—Provision of further assistance to care leavers up to the age of 25—

‘(1) Section 23CA of the Children Act 1989 (Further assistance to pursue education or training) is amended as follows.

(2) At the end of the section heading insert “or for welfare purposes”.

(3) In subsection (1)(a), at the end, insert “and”.

(4) In subsection (1)(b), omit the last “and”.

(5) Omit subsection (1)(c).

(6) In subsection (4), after “training”, insert “or welfare”.

(7) In subsection (5)(a), omit the last “or”.

(8) In subsection (5)(b), after “training”, insert “or welfare”.

(9) At the end of subsection (5), add the following new paragraphs—

“(c) providing advice and support in relation to his welfare; or

(d) making a grant in exceptional circumstances to enable him to meet expenses connected with his welfare.”.’.

New clause 17—Amendments to the Health Act 2006—

‘(1) The Health Act 2006 is amended as follows.

(2) After section 8, insert—

“8A Offence of failing to prevent smoking in a private vehicle when children are present

(1) It is the duty of any person who drives a private vehicle to ensure that the vehicle is smoke-free whenever a child or children under the age of 18 are in such vehicle or part of such vehicle.

(2) A person who fails to comply with the duty in subsection (1) commits an offence.

(3) A person convicted of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine of £60.

(4) The Secretary of State may introduce regulations to alter the level of penalty payable under subsection (3).

(5) The Secretary of State shall update all relevant regulations regarding the offence created under subsection (2) within six months of this section coming into force.

(3) In section 79(4)(a), leave out “or 8(7)” and insert “, 8(7), or 8A(4).”.’.

New clause 18—Review of impact of under-occupancy penalty on prospective adopters, prospective special guardians and foster parents—

‘Before the end of one year beginning with the day on which this Act receives Royal Assent, the Secretary of State must—

(a) carry out a review of the impact of the housing under-occupancy penalty on prospective adopters, prospective special guardians and foster parents, and

(b) publish a report of the conclusions of the review.’.

New clause 19—Arrangements to support child witnesses—

‘(1) The Secretary of State shall by order introduce arrangements to establish specialist courts in cases where a child has been sexually abused or harmed, and where the child will be required to give evidence to the court, and to be examined by the court.

(2) Arrangements made by order under subsection (1) above shall include arrangements to appoint intermediaries to support child witnesses in all court cases, and other measures to support child witnesses.’.

New clause 20—Personal, social and health education in maintained schools—

‘(1) In section 84(3) of the Education Act 2002 (curriculum foundation subjects for the first, second and third key stages), after paragraph (g) there is inserted—

“(ga) personal, social and health education”.

(2) In section 85(4) of the Education Act 2002 (curriculum foundation subjects for the fourth key stage), at the end there is inserted “, and

(d) personal, social and health education.”

(3) In section 74(1) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which (when brought into force) will substitute a new section 85 in the Education Act 2002, in subsection (4) of that substituted section (foundation subjects for the fourth key stage), at the end there is inserted “, and

(d) personal, social and health education.”

(4) Before section 86 of the Education Act 2002 there is inserted—

“85B Personal, social and health education

(1) For the purposes of this Part, personal, social and health education (“PSHE”) shall include sex and relationship education, including information about same-sex relationships, sexual violence, domestic violence and sexual consent.

(2) The National Curriculum for England is not required to specify attainment targets or assessment arrangements for PSHE (and section 84(1) has effect accordingly).

(3) The Secretary of State for Education shall set out guidance to schools and colleges to ensure that a coherent approach to personal, social, health and economic education is developed, including between primary and secondary schools.

(4) It is the duty of the governing body and head teacher of any school in which PSHE is provided in pursuance of this Part to secure that guidance issued under subsection (3) is followed and that—

(a) information presented in the course of providing PSHE should be accurate and balanced;

(b) PSHE is taught in a way that is appropriate to the ages of the pupils concerned and to their religious and cultural backgrounds, and reflects a reasonable range of religious, cultural and other perspectives;

(c) PSHE is taught in a way that endeavours to promote equality, celebrate diversity, and emphasise the importance of both rights and responsibilities.

(5) In the exercise of their functions under this Part so far as relating to PSHE, a local authority, governing body or head teacher shall have regard to any guidance issued from time to time by the Secretary of State.”.

(5) Section 403 of the Education Act 1996 (sex education: manner of provision) is amended as set out in subsections (6) to (9).

(6) In subsection (1), for the words from the beginning to “at a maintained school” there is substituted “The governing body or other proprietor of any school to which this section applies, and its head teacher, must take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that sex and relationships education is given to registered pupils at the school and that”.

(7) After that subsection there is inserted—

“(1ZA) The schools to which this section applies are—

(a) maintained schools;

(b) city technology colleges;

(c) city colleges for the technology of the arts;

(d) Academies.

A reference in this section or section 404 to the governing body of a school, in relation to a school within paragraph (b), (c) or (d), shall be read as a reference to the proprietor of the school.”.

(8) In subsection (1A)—

(a) for “when sex education is given to registered pupils at maintained schools” there is substituted “when sex and relationships education is given to registered pupils at schools to which this section applies”;

(b) in paragraph (a), after “, and” there is inserted “learn the nature of civil partnership and the importance of strong and stable relationships.”;

(c) paragraph (b) is omitted.

(9) In subsection (1C), for “sex education” there is substituted “sex and relationships education”,

(10) In section 579 of the Education Act 1996 (general interpretation), in the definition of “sex education” in subsection (1)—

(a) for “sex education” there is substituted “sex and relationships education”;

(b) at the end there is inserted “but does not include education about human reproduction provided as part of any science teaching;”.

(11) For section 405 of the Education Act 1996 there is substituted—

“405 Exemption from sex and relationships education

(1) If a pupil of sufficient maturity in attendance at a school to which section 403 applies requests to be wholly or partly excused from receiving sex and relationships education at the school, the pupil shall be so excused accordingly until the request is withdrawn.

(2) The Secretary of State must in regulations define “sufficient maturity”.

(3) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (2) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.

(4) The Secretary of State must lay draft regulations before Parliament before the end of the period of 3 months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed.”.’.

New clause 22—Information sharing about live births—

‘(1) NHS trusts should make arrangements to share with local authorities records of live births to parents resident in their area, to be used by the local authority for the purposes of identifying and contacting new families through children’s centres and any other early years outreach services it may operate.

(2) The Secretary of State must, within a period of six months of Royal Assent to this Act, bring forward regulations placing consequential requirements on trusts and local authorities in exercising their duty under subsection (1), including, but not limited to—

(a) the format of arrangements made;

(b) the safeguarding of information;

(c) the circumstances in which it would not be appropriate for a trust to provide information to local authorities;

(d) the regularity of data transfers;

(e) timescales within which a local authority must contact new families made known to it; and

(f) any further requirements the Secretary of State deems necessary.

(3) Local authorities must establish a pilot scheme to trial the registration of births within children’s centres, and evaluate the effectiveness of the scheme to—

(a) identify and contact new families; and

(b) enable children’s centres to reach more families, in particular those with children under the age of two, or who the local authority consider—

(i) hard to reach, or

(ii) vulnerable.’.

New clause 25—Health bodies: duties with respect to young carers—

‘(1) In exercising their general functions health bodies must—

(a) promote and safeguard the well-being of young carers;

(b) ensure that effective procedures exist to identify patients who are or are about to become carers;

(c) ensure that effective procedures exist to identify patients who it may be reasonably assumed may be receiving care from a child or young person for whom they are responsible;

(d) ensure that appropriate systems exist to ensure that carers receive appropriate information and advice; and

(e) ensure that systems are in place to ensure that the relevant general medical services are rendered to their patients who are young carers, or to the young carers of their patients.

(2) In relation to paragraphs (1)(b), (c) and (d), the Secretary of State may by regulations further provide for the strategies to be developed.’.

New clause 26—Schools: duties with respect to young carers—

‘(1) The appropriate authorities of schools must ensure that, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, they take all reasonable steps to ensure that there is in place a policy which—

(a) identifies young carers within the school; and

(b) makes arrangements for the provision within school of appropriate support to promote the well-being and improve the educational attainment of pupils who are young carers.

(2) In discharging its duty under subsection (1), where appropriate the authority must—

(a) consult with the family of the child or young person identified, or the young person themselves;

(b) involve the local authority in which the identified pupil is ordinarily resident;

(c) refer the identified pupil to additional services outside the school;

(d) have regard to any guidance given from time to time by the Secretary of State.

(3) The “appropriate authority” for a school is—

(a) in the case of a maintained school, the governing body;

(b) in the case of an academy, the proprietor;

(c) in the case of a pupil referral unit, the management committee.’.

New clause 27—Further and higher educational institutions: duties with respect to student carers—

‘(1) The responsible body of an institution to which this section applies must, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, identify or make arrangements to identify student carers and have a policy in place on promoting the well-being of student carers.

(2) This section applies to—

(a) a university;

(b) any other institution within the higher education sector;

(c) an institution within the further education sector.

(3) A responsible body is—

(a) in the case of an institution in paragraphs (2)(a) or (b), the governing body;

(b) in the case of a college of further education under the management of a board of management, the board of management;

(c) in the case of any other college of further education, any board of governors of the college or any person responsible for the management of the college, whether or not formally constituted as a governing body or board of governors.

(4) In discharging its duty under subsection (1), where appropriate the authority must—

(a) consult with the family of the child or young person identified, or the young person themselves;

(b) involve the local authority in which the identified pupil is ordinarily resident;

(c) refer the identified student to additional services outside of the institution; and

(d) have regard to any guidance given from time to time by the Secretary of State.’.

Amendment 33, in clause 1, page 1, leave out line 9 and insert—

‘satisfied that C should be placed for adoption—’.

Amendment 34, in clause 2, page 1, line 15, at end insert—

‘(1A) In subsection (4), after paragraph (f) insert—

“(g) the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background, although this paragraph does not apply to an adoption agency in Wales, to which subsection (5) instead applies.”.’.

Amendment 2, in clause 3, page 2, line 22, at end insert—

‘(1A) The Secretary of State may require local authorities to make arrangements with adoption agencies to compensate them for the cost of recruiting approved prospective adopters.’.

Amendment 29, page 2, line 22, at end insert—

‘(1A) Directions under subsection (1) may not be given before May 2017, being five years after the introduction of adoption scorecards.’.

Amendment 3, page 2, line 32, leave out paragraph (c).

Government amendments 9 and 16.

Amendment 31, in clause 9, page 9, line 8, at end insert—

‘and section 23B (8A) and monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of that local authority in discharging its duties under section 23C (4B) and section 23CA and advising them on ways to improve.’.

Amendment 32, page 9, line 11, at end add—

‘(2) In the Children Act 1989, in section 23B after subsection (8) insert—

(8A) The duty of local authorities under subsection (8) to safeguard and promote the child’s welfare, includes in particular a duty to promote the child’s educational achievement.”.’.

Amendment 49, in clause 10, page 9, line 16, at end insert—

‘unless in the view of the court it is unreasonable to do so’.

Amendment 35, in clause 11, page 10, line 10, at end insert—

‘(2B) “Involvement” is any kind of direct or indirect involvement that promotes the welfare of the child. It shall not be taken to mean any particular division of a child’s time.’.

Amendment 50, page 10, line 10, at end insert—

‘(2B) Involvement shall mean, but is not limited to, direct contact with a child by any means including supervised contact, indirect contact with a child by any means including letters or telephone or receiving information about a child from the other parent or a third party.’.

Amendment 51, in clause 12, page 10, line 35, at end add—

‘(5) A child arrangements order that provides for a child to reside with a particular person is to be interpreted as granting rights of custody to that person.’.

Amendment 5, in clause 14, page 13, line 8, after ‘issued’, insert—

‘unless the court considers it necessary in order to safeguard or promote the child’s welfare to permit additional time for the disposing of the application.’.

Amendment 52, page 13, line 8, after ‘issued’, insert—

‘unless in the view of the court it would be in the best interests of the child to set a different timetable’.

Amendment 6, page 13, line 45, at end insert—

‘or, having taken into consideration the safeguarding and promotion of the child’s welfare, following evidence presented to the court relating to a planned programme of intervention, such longer time period as the court deems appropriate.’.

Amendment 36, in clause 15, page 14, line 46, at end insert—

‘(A1) Section 22 of the Children Act 1989 (general duty of local authority in relation to children looked after by them) is amended as follows.

(B1) In subsection (4), after “proposing to look after,”, insert “including when making any fundamental change to the care plan before or after a care order has been made.”.’.

Amendment 7, page 15, line 3, after ‘provisions’, insert ‘and sibling placement arrangements’.

Amendment 8, page 15, line 6, at end insert—

‘unless it deems such consideration necessary in assessing the permanence provisions of the section 31A plan for the child concerned and making the care order, taking into account the circumstances of the application and the safeguarding and promotion of the child’s welfare.’.

Amendment 53, page 15, line 6, at end insert—

‘but may do so when any matter is brought to the court’s attention by the child’s guardian’.

Government amendments 10 to 15.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for taking up most of the remaining debating time in reading out the list of the remaining new clauses and amendments in the group. It is unfortunate that we have a large group of new clauses and amendments here, covering a very wide variety of important subjects to do with personal, social and health education, foster care continuing support, young carers, care leaver assistants, birth registration, adoption and so on, and yet we are left with barely an hour, particularly for Back Benchers who have not had the opportunity in Committee to point out things that we think are missing from the Bill or things that could be improved. On Second Reading we were time-limited in our contributions, too. I have taken a lot of time in making that point, but it needed to be put on the record.

I will speak as quickly as possible to the nine amendments and new clauses that I have tabled. In doing so, I want to signify my sympathy with new clause 4, tabled by the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins), on continuing support for foster children, which is important. I know there are various problems with the way in which the amendment has been fashioned. I support new clause 22, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), on birth registration improvements. I have a good deal of sympathy, as I said on Second Reading, with improvements to the Bill to assist young carers, particularly new clause 5.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Do the hon. Gentleman’s proposals relate only to the schools he referred to as madrassahs, or do they also relate to supplementary schools and weekend schools?

[Tim Loughton]

The new clause is very broad and could effectively cover other supplementary schools, as they are termed. I know that this subject is fraught with problems. No doubt the new clause will not be a satisfactory solution ultimately, but I think it is a working basis on which to take the matter forward, rather than continuing to ignore it.

New clause 15, which has the full support of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, relates to support services for those returning from care. There has been a big focus, rightly, on improving the whole adoption regime. The Government announced a little while ago that £150 million will be taken from what was the early intervention grant to provide adoption support services. It is really important that we have the right degree of support around placements to ensure that they stick.

We hear a lot about adoption support services, improving care homes and better training for foster carers, but 37% of children in care return to their birth parents, and too many of them then return to care after the initial intensive preparation and support because of lack of ongoing support services. In 2012 that affected 10,000 children who returned to the birth parents—treble the number of children who get adopted. We know that that instability, that revolving door going in and out of care, can be really damaging to those vulnerable children. The NSPCC has put together a very credible case. It has totted up the cost of children remaining in the care system against the cost of giving them proper support packages back with their families, where that is the most appropriate destination for them and only where it is in their best interests.

New clause 15 merits serious consideration. It would provide the right social outcome for vulnerable children in care, but it would also save an awful lot of money if we get it right. I am sure that the Minister, who has great expertise in and knowledge of dealing with different types of children in the care system, will be supportive. It is also supported by an interesting paper produced last November by the Social Care Institute for Excellence, which said:

“Returning from public care to live with a parent is the most likely ‘permanence option’ but, for maltreated children, the least successful. There are wide variations between local authorities in terms of the resources allocated to decision-making about reunification, and the quality of practice.”

Finally, I have tabled three amendments on adoption. I have mentioned why adoption needs to be a priority. Many good things have happened in the past two and a half years on adoption, and I am very pleased that the Minister is committed to carrying that work on. The number of children given the opportunity to be adopted has been increasing, although numbers alone are not the be-all and end-all; it is the quality of the placements that really matters. The adoption scorecards that were introduced a year ago lay out with full transparency how well an authority is doing compared with other authorities across a whole range of measures. We have the adoption gateway to help recruitment, we are speeding up legal proceedings for children left in limbo, we are bringing in and beefing up fostering for adoption, we have the adoption support services that I mentioned, and many other things are happening. All that amounts to a very serious structural overhaul, and it is beginning to work, so we do not want to go and mess it up. I fear that in this Bill, the Government, with the best intentions, are going too far.

Children and Families Bill

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She anticipates my next point, as I was about to say exactly what she just said. Research by the BBC estimates that there are up to 700,000 young carers in this country, and we believe the Government should use the opportunity of this Bill to improve the identification, assessment and support given to young carers. As she reminded the House, the draft Care and Support Bill will give greater rights to adult carers, but support for young carers surely could and should be clarified and strengthened at the same time.

Ministers plan to write a presumption of “parental involvement” into the Children Act 1989. Labour strongly supports the principle that both parents should be involved in a child’s life, unless that compromises the child’s safety or welfare. However, we believe it is wrong to dilute the principle that the child’s best interests should always come first. Both the Select Committee on Education and David Norgrove have expressed significant concerns about the proposal.

The Select Committee on Justice, whose Chairman is in his place, has expressed a number of concerns, and I shall set them out. The first is that the Bill would not achieve its objectives in regard to shared parenting and that there is no evidence of a bias in the courts currently. The second is that the Bill could have a negative impact on the paramountcy principle, which states that when a court determines any question with respect to the upbringing of a child, the child’s welfare shall be paramount. The third is that the Bill will lead to misunderstandings about the right to particular amounts of time for parental contact because of the use of the word “involvement” without any definition and because of the use of presumption. A similar measure in Australia created an expectation that shared parenting meant equal time and led to courts becoming more clogged up as parents challenged decisions made on the basis of a child’s best interests, thus turning relatively straightforward decisions into lengthy conflicts.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Does the shadow Secretary of State not acknowledge that what was proposed and became law in Australia was very different from what is being proposed here? Anything that can, in any way, be interpreted as meaning equality of time would not work. That is why the wording in the Bill, which has taken a lot of work and effort, is absolutely not a presumption about equality of time, but a presumption that all of us must surely agree that a child does best when both parents have as much involvement in the childhood of that child as possible, subject to the welfare provisions, which absolutely still stay paramount in the Bill. Why, yet again, do Labour Members not recognise that there is a problem and that at last we have legislation trying to address it?

[Stephen Twigg]

I certainly do not doubt the sincerity of the attempt to address this issue and to learn from the Australian experience. Labour’s judgment, as I have set it out today, has taken into account not only what the hon. Gentleman and other Government Members have said, but what has been said by organisations working in the sector, including in the field of children’s law. They tell us that there is a gap between the Government’s intention and what might happen in practice. We have to anticipate those unintended consequences, so although I absolutely agree with his final comments about the importance of both parents being involved, provided there is no threat to the safety or welfare of children, the paramount principle has to be the best welfare of the child—that has to come first. The concern is that what the Bill proposes could take us down the road that the Australians went down. We should explore this issue further in Committee, because there is a real difference of opinion on it. I urge Ministers to listen to those who are expressing a different view, so that we make sure that we do not have, as an unintended consequence of this Bill, something that makes the situation worse.

The Bill proposes a 26-week limit for care proceedings. At present, children wait for an average of 55 weeks for a decision about their future. The Government are seeking to address that, and we support them in their aim to speed up proceedings. However, speed should never be at the expense of getting it right for children. We want safeguards to be built into the system to ensure that complex issues are not overlooked and siblings are not separated needlessly. Because much of the delay comes from local authorities, the Government must also address the dangerously heavy case loads of social workers.

Again, we support the recommendations of the Justice Committee. It proposes first that the 26-week time limit should be specified in secondary legislation, while primary legislation should specify the power to set such a limit so that it can be amended easily if it proves unworkable in practice, and secondly that the clause should be amended to give judges the power to take cases outside the 26-week timetable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

Can we nail that misconception straight away? The provision has nothing to do with giving rights to parents; it is about the responsibilities of parents and the rights that children should have. They have a right to have both their parents as involved as possible—[Hon. Members: “And grandparents.”]—as well as other kinship care. I suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that the reason why the addition of this provision to legislation—for the first time—is so important is that it sends a clear and strong message to resident parents who use the court system to freeze the non-resident parent out of their relationship with the children that it will no longer wash. We want to keep more cases out of the courts, to be agreed amicably in the best interests of the children. That is what it is about.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman and former Minister on what we are seeking to achieve, but he should note that the press coverage is already suggesting something rather different, which is the sharing of time—

[Tim Loughton]

But it is wrong.

[Sir Alan Beith]

As the hon. Gentleman says, it is wrong; perhaps the Government will have to make it rather clearer that it is wrong. On dealing with the perception, even if it is false, that there is a bias in the court system, there is another issue that figures much more largely in the concerns of many non-resident parents, predominantly fathers, and that is enforcement. Court orders are made that appear to give them reasonable involvement in the life of their son or daughter, but they are not observed, and the process of enforcing them is long, time-consuming and ineffective. We urged the Government to produce proposals on enforcement. They concluded that, on balance, it would be premature to legislate now to give courts additional enforcement sanctions. What they hope to do is bring cases quickly back to court—preferably to the same judge. I welcome that; it would be highly desirable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

The principle that the interests of the child are paramount, which is enshrined in the Children Act 1989, should underpin all our legislation, policy making and attitudes to children. I therefore welcome the strengthening of the role of the Children’s Commissioner by giving a statutory remit to promote and protect children’s rights. It is crucial that this strengthened mandate is underpinned by sufficient resources.

The Children’s Commissioner’s recent report exposed the extent of child sexual exploitation in this country. I had hoped that the Bill would contain some provision further to support child witnesses in court. I will take a couple of minutes to explain why, giving an example that shocked me deeply—that of a young girl who was the alleged victim of anal rape before the age of three. The girl was interviewed on video six months after the initial disclosure. Aged four, she was brought to court for a live cross-examination via video link about the matters described in the video a year earlier.

To get to court on time, the girl had to be woken at 6 o’clock. However, when she arrived, the court was not ready for her and, after waiting all day, she was sent home. The cross-examination took place the following afternoon, with difficult-to-follow questioning, including the use of double negatives. The prosecution did not apply for a registered intermediary. During cross-examination no one except the judge intervened to ask if the child needed a break. How can this happen in the name of justice in our courts?

The Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 introduced the use of a wide range of special measures for vulnerable witnesses. The use of special measures is important as children do not approach communication in the same way as adults. NSPCC recent research showed that only 2% of young witnesses receive support from registered intermediaries, and also that at least half of young witnesses reported being unable to understand some of the questions that they were asked in court. I agree with the NSPCC that children who have been the victim of abuse should always be supported by a registered intermediary, as they have been shown to improve the administration of justice, ensuring that questioning and cross-examination practice maximises the quality of victim evidence. Furthermore and very importantly, the court experience for the child is less traumatic.

Obstacles to implementing section 28 of the 1999 Act must be overcome as rapidly as possible. Governments have been delaying for practical reasons the implementation of the special measures provision, which would allow a young child’s evidence, including cross-examination, to be obtained out of court and in advance of a trial. This would reduce delays in the start of trials and in the presentation of evidence at trial, a cause of great distress to child witnesses.

[Tim Loughton]

I strongly support the case that the hon. Lady is making, but that applies to older children as well, who are deterred from coming forward with their evidence on the basis that they will be re-traumatised in child sexual exploitation cases, of which there are some notorious ones currently under way. We need to make the system far more child-friendly to enable those children to make their statements that can nail the perpetrators in court, and not make them go through those traumatic events all over again in front of multiple barristers, as can so often be the case. I strongly support the point that the hon. Lady is making.

[Ann Coffey]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. What he says is quite right. It is a problem that goes right through the system, from the youngest to the oldest children. They are put through a terrible trauma, and it is sad that the measures that were introduced in 1999 are not being used in the courts. Something must be done about that.

I welcome the measures to reduce delays in adoptions. Concerns have been expressed about delays in adoption as a result of ideological correctness and because of the requirement in section 1(5) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to give

“due consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background”

when making an adoption placement. The previous Government made it clear that this did not mean that a child should always be matched with a family of their ethnic origin or that this consideration overrode other welfare interests. Clause 2 removes that requirement. If that clarifies that this is not an overriding consideration in placement, that it is welcome. However, the requirement remains to consider the child’s age, sex, background and any of the child’s characteristics that the court or agency considers relevant when making a placement, and of course that will include religion and race. The Children’s Commissioner in her new role has a statutory responsibility to protect children’s rights, including the right for children to learn about and enjoy their own culture. So I do not think this issue can be resolved by legislation alone. It is more a matter of good adoption practice, with the individual needs of the child being paramount.

Just as the issue of ethnicity is complex, so is the issue of contact in adoption placements. This is certainly the experience of constituents of mine, who were informed by the local authority that placed the children for adoption that there was to be a voluntary letter box agreement—that is, letters are exchanged on an agreed basis. The way that that is being implemented was causing a great deal of distress. When I asked my constituents why they continued with this, as they clearly thought it was not in the best interests of the child, they said:

“You are correct, the agreement is voluntary and not legally enforceable. Our concern is this: the LA”—

the local authority—

“have said that although the agreement is not legally enforceable, birth parents have the right to apply for leave of court to get a contact order and so we were to be careful what we agreed to. This is written in a leaflet they gave us after we were told of what the contact arrangements would be. I will be quite honest with you . . . we feel very vulnerable and I have been having sleepless nights worrying about what we are to do. We can’t continue an agreement that is not in the best interests of our children but we feel that we have to continue it as we feel threatened.”

What a situation for adopters to be in!

I am unclear whether clause 8 will help my constituents. It may be that this is an issue of good practice and ensuring that adopters have the proper support. The new helpline manned by adopters, which was announced in September, will be very much welcomed by my constituents.

I tabled a written question on the number of children returning to care as a result of adoption breakdown. I was told that the Department for Education does not currently collect those figures but will do so from 2014. I think that it is important that there is much better research into what is needed to support an adoption placement and into the factors in adoption breakdown, which can take many forms, including sending children to boarding school, youth custody, returning to birth parents, admission to psychiatric units and sleeping on a friend’s sofa.

I understand that research is being undertaken by the university of Bristol. The demands on modern-day adopters are perhaps summed up by its introduction:

“More children have been entering care because of maternal drug/alcohol misuse, and the impact of such use during pregnancy and later parental neglect have detrimental developmental effects. Attachment difficulties/disorders and the impact of early trauma have all risen to prominence and been linked with placement disruption.”

We need that research. We have a shortage of adopters, and perhaps more families would be willing to adopt if they could be reassured that they would get the support they need. We will need a range of different care models, including adoption, family-based and residential, to meet the complex needs of children coming into our care. Adoption will always be the best placement for some children. We need to do all we can to support the therapeutic parenting we are asking of many adopters.

In conclusion, we must also do more to improve the quality of all our care placements so that when children come into the care system because their parenting is not good enough, they are provided with the best possible opportunities and do not again face poor care because of poor parenting in the care system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Llwyd]

I am afraid that does not explain why some corners of the press still believe that to be the case. I accept what the Minister says, however, and I certainly accept the useful explanation given earlier by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham.

[Tim Loughton]

Repeating the misconceptions in the press does not help. Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that if it is crystal clear that both parents are expected to be involved with their children, they are less likely to have to go to court for that to be enforced?

[Mr Llwyd]

I have been practising in the courts for quite a time, and as I understand it, there is a presumption in the courts that the involvement of both parents is good, provided that it accords with the overall principle of the children’s welfare being paramount. Nothing will change drastically, but my concern is that some people who do not have any contact with their children for various reasons will suddenly think that there is now shared parenting and they have a right to do this, that and t’other. I may be wrong, and I hope so.

I accept what the hon. Gentleman said about the need for the parent with residence not to freeze out the other parent. That is absolutely right, but a recent report by the universities of Oxford and Sussex, “Taking a longer view of contact”, states that structural factors such as the frequency and format of contact are relatively unimportant compared with the quality of contact that children experience with both their resident and non-resident parent. It further observes:

“Parenting arrangements after separation cannot be considered in isolation to the patterns of parenting established in intact families.”

It stresses that no contact is better than bad contact, and that there are circumstances, such as when abuse is present, in which no contact should take place.

We know that fewer than one in 10 cases in which parents divorce or separate come before a family court for a decision on contact. It is estimated that between a third and half of the cases that do come to court include allegations of violence or abuse. I believe that the provision in the Bill is more about creating a perception than anything else. This has been a good debate hitherto, and I do not want to fall out unnecessarily on this point, but I simply do not understand why we are legislating to change a perception. At the end of the day, family courts are manned by experienced judges who start with the principle that it is always good for both parents to be involved when it accords with the all-important principle of the welfare of the child being paramount.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in support of the Bill, albeit briefly. I offer my apologies for not being in the Chamber for the beginning of the Minister’s comments; I was upholding the honour of the parliamentary hockey team, which is why I am now limping.

There are many things in the Bill to support. It takes forward much of the work done over our past few years in government, and indeed when we were in opposition, especially on adoption and parenting, and I shall talk about those two subjects in particular.

I very much welcome the special educational need reforms, and I think the Minister is open to amendments to tweak and improve them. I welcome the Children’s Commissioner reforms, on the basis of John Dunford’s excellent report. I also welcome the innovative proposals on parental leave and flexible working, especially in respect of adoption. The hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) should be complimented on her private Member’s Bill a couple of years ago, which brought the matter to the attention of the Government.

I welcome those provisions, but a number of things could be done better. The subject of shared parenting, or parental involvement, as we are now to call it, has a lot of history. We put forward proposals for the 2006 Children and Adoption Bill. I was disappointed that although more than half of Labour MPs, and Liberal Democrats, supported an identical early-day motion, they voted against proposals that could have brought in the provisions in 2006.

The Bill should be seen in the context of many other things that the Government are doing on private law cases in the justice system, such as better mediation services, better relationship support upstream and better enforcement. The Chairman of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, seemed to think there was not a problem. There is a perceived problem and an actual problem. In research on children who do not live with both parents, resident parents reported that between a quarter and a third of the children rarely, if ever, see their non-resident parent. That is a real problem. In 2011, despite serial breaching of contact orders in the many cases that as constituency MPs we see week in, week out, only 53 enforcement orders were granted for non-resident parents to have contact with their children.

[Charlie Elphicke]

We know there is a problem, do we not, because these cases so often fill our constituency surgeries. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work in helping to bring forward this part of the Bill.

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful. It is a problem that we have all known about, but have shied away from doing something about. This is a real opportunity at last to do something about it. It is not about parental rights; it is about parental responsibilities. That includes the responsibilities of parents who have done a runner. The legislation will make it clear to them that they have a responsibility to their children, whether they are on the scene or not. The provision does nothing to dilute the principle of the paramountcy of the welfare of the child; that is absolutely clear. If it did anything else, I would not support it. It is in clause 1; it is subjugated to that very important paramountcy principle in the opening section of the Children Act 1989.

The Bill must send out a very clear message to warring parents—to the 10% of cases who still go to court: “If you think you can play winner takes all, and freeze the non-resident parent out of your child’s relationships and childhood, forget it. Think again, because both of you will have a responsibility to the children, or will be expected to play as full a part as possible in their upbringing.” That is what the provision is all about; it does not dilute the welfare principle.

A lot has happened on adoption in the past few years. This legislation builds on the work of the adoption action plan and the adoption gateway. It was encouraging to see the early glimmers of a reversal in the trend in adoption numbers since 2007; we saw a tick up in 2012, but it is early days. I very much support the measures on fostering for adoption, or concurrent planning, as we used to call it. Coram in particular has done some excellent work on that. It is about a seamless transition for a child, with the risk being taken by the prospective parents, not the child, and about maintaining continuity of care, which is so important to a child in care in the early years.

I strongly support the adoption support services mentioned in the Bill. Peri-adoption support services are probably the most important thing in ensuring a good-quality, lasting placement. As the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) said, we absolutely need to do more research on those adoptions that are disrupted. I am afraid that it is also necessary for us to do more around ethnic matching. As to whether we need legislation to do it, I do not know, but we absolutely need to make it clear that first and foremost a child needs a safe, loving, stable environment from a family. If that family happens to be an ethnic match, that is a bonus; it should not be a deal-breaker for the child.

I am concerned that the £150 million taken from the early intervention grant may mean that provision is taken away from children who remain in care. Even if we double the number of children going into adoption—that is not a target—90% of children in the care system will remain in it, in foster care and residential homes, and will not go into adoption. Yet the only measures in the Bill relating to looked-after children are those for virtual heads, which I welcome, and those on contact arrangements. Why do we not extend personal budgets to foster carers? Why do we not do more to give children in care priority access to mental health services? Half of children in care suffer from mental health problems. That is probably the single biggest contribution we could make to giving them greater stability and a chance to do well at school.

As the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has said, half of children who come into care because of abuse or neglect suffer further abuse when they return home, with up to half of them returning to care. If we did more to support them, so that they could stay with their families, we would have fewer kids in care.

We need to do more. Where I take issue with the Government is on recruitment. We desperately need to recruit more prospective adopters. We desperately need voluntary agencies to recruit more adopters, but it is too early to compel local authorities to take away the responsibility for recruiting adopters. It has been only a year since the adoption scorecard came out. They are three-year track records, and they are always retrospective. We need to give local authorities a greater chance to show that they can recruit more adopters and work in partnership with voluntary agencies. One thing that we could do to help those agencies is create a bounty fee; voluntary agencies would be paid for recruiting prospective adopters. At the moment, the more they recruit, the more they have to pay to retain and train them. They do not get paid until they receive the inter-agency fee. A bounty measure would incentivise voluntary agencies to do more of what they so successfully do to recruit. The Bill risks de-linking adoption from other permanent options.

Finally, I would like to see more measures for supporting young carers, as many hon. Members have mentioned. I would like to see an effective independent complaints or ombudsman system in adoption, for those cases that have gone badly wrong. I would like to see child performance regulations in the Bill—which my ten-minute rule Bill will propose—as it is the only opportunity that we have had and probably will have in this Parliament to introduce them. I would also like to see us do more to compel local safeguarding children’s boards to publish their serious case reviews and to commission them in the first place, as we do not have any primary legislation to do that. There are many other things that I would like to see, but I have run out of time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Monday 3rd September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

1. What progress his Department has made on steps to improve the protection of children in care from sexual exploitation.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

Let me welcome you, Mr Speaker, back from the recess—without a tan. In July I published a report describing extensive progress on implementing last November’s “Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation” action plan. Although all children are potentially at risk, particular challenges arise for children in care, especially those in children’s homes. Accordingly, I announced urgent action to improve children’s residential care, including developing a clearer understanding of when children go missing, allowing Ofsted to share the locations of children’s homes with the police and examining out-of-authority placements.

[Nadine Dorries]

I am sure that the Minister is aware that 45% of children who are in care and looked after are in homes away from their borough. They are removed from their networks of support and the familiarity of adults whom they can trust, which makes them more vulnerable and more prone to abuse. Does he agree with the report by the deputy Children’s Commissioner that children should be cared for as close to home as possible, and, if so, what steps are we taking to ensure that happens?

[Tim Loughton]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend on that point. That is why I launched the progress report jointly with the deputy Children’s Commissioner, picking up what I believe to be the scandal of too many vulnerable children—almost half, as my hon. Friend said—being placed a long way from familiar environments. We have set up a task and finish group specifically to look at the problem and at how we can keep children closer to home and familiar environments when that is in their interests. The group will report back to me within the next few weeks and we will take specific action as a result.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

May I thank the Minister for including me, as chair of the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults, on the working group on children’s homes? If we are to safeguard children in care from sexual exploitation, we need to improve the quality of care in some of our children’s homes. Does he agree that we need to move to more robust inspections that measure outcomes for children in terms of improving their well-being and safety?

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is entirely right and I thank her for her work with the working group. I should also mention that she joined me at the joint press conference to give the useful and detailed findings of her report. The third task and finish group we set up—into which I very much hope she will have some input—is looking at the quality of residential children’s homes and the quality of the work force working in them, where I think we can do an awful lot better. Inspection needs to be better and more appropriate, and we need to ensure that any authority placing a child in a home is absolutely convinced that the quality of care is appropriate and the best available.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

On the protection of children, the Minister will be aware of the recent murder of Shafilea Ahmed and the link to honour violence. What steps are being taken in schools to help to tackle such horrific acts of violence?

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend mentions a particularly horrific case that shocked the whole nation when it appeared in our headlines. It is very important that we raise the profile of this insidious force—which I am afraid is present in too many communities—and ensure a joined-up approach, involving the Home Office, police, local authorities and our schools, so that this is not happening beneath the radar and so that children are educated and know what to do to avoid such tragedies happening again.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

Although Ministers are right to focus attention on the sexual exploitation of children in care, such children continue to face many challenges in their lives. Today’s report by the all-party group on looked-after children and care leavers reveals that, shockingly, only 12% of children in care get five good GCSEs, despite efforts by two successive Governments to change that. Will he tell us why the important strategy on children in care, which was promised to us for this summer, has been delayed?

[Tim Loughton]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question, but she has failed to notice the fact that throughout the last year the Department for Education has announced a series of practical measures to help children in care in all sorts of destinations, to tackle the very scandal that her Government left of the huge gap of achievement in education between children in care through no fault of their own and their peer group. That is why, for example, every child in the care system automatically qualifies for the pupil premium. That is real, practical, tangible action, which her Government never took for those kids who need it most, and there are many more things still to come over the next few weeks and months.

[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

Further to the Minister’s answer on reducing the number of out-of-area placements, will the Government do more to ensure that information is adequately shared between police forces and those who inspect homes and local authority departments, to ensure that any problems can be addressed?

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend gives me the opportunity to shout “House”; that is the full set. We have set up three task and finish groups, and the third is looking specifically at the anomaly left over from regulations in the Care Standards Act 2000, whereby the police are unable to access information about children in children’s homes who go missing or get into trouble, in order to co-ordinate the action that needs to be taken to prevent those children from ending up in the hands of sexual predators and others. That situation will be changed. The group will report its findings to me in the next few weeks, and urgent action will be taken as a result of them.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

Positive for Youth set out for the first time an over-arching vision for youth policy. One of the key principles of its vision is for local leadership and greater partnership in the delivery of services for young people. Local authorities are best placed to decide how best to shape their services, and their duty to secure sufficient services is outlined in revised statutory guidance which we issued back in June. This Government have invested an additional £141 million in a network of 63 Myplace youth centres to support local youth service provision as well.

[Mr Slaughter]

Will the Minister comment on my local authority’s plans for the youth service? It is cutting its budget by half, closing four of the seven permanent youth clubs to obtain their sites for market sale, and now plans to sell free-for-use sports pitches in a public park to a private company for commercial letting.

[Tim Loughton]

Given the hon. Gentleman’s record on accounting for supposed children’s centres closures in his constituency, which turned out not to be the case, one needs to scrutinise some of his comments rather more closely. What I do know is that there is some very innovatory work going on in the youth field between the three boroughs in the tri-borough experiment. [Interruption.] Within the hon. Gentleman’s own constituency, in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, they are leading the way in youth innovation zones, showing new, practical, innovatory ways of bringing services to young people that they need and will use. [Interruption.] He should go and visit them.

[Mr Speaker]

There is plenty of scope for an Adjournment debate on this matter, to judge by responses so far.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating Ifield youth services on providing a broader range of services to younger people through voluntary sector involvement? Does he agree that voluntary sector and faith involvement in providing youth services is extremely important for local communities?

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend makes a pertinent point. We share the same local authority—West Sussex—where there is some innovatory practice in youth services, provided not just by the local authority but in partnership with punchy voluntary organisations which know what young people want and can engage with them and make sure that they are engaging with useful services that will aid their well-being, which is what youth services are all about.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

We already know from parliamentary answers that youth services have suffered a disproportionately large cut in public expenditure, but last month the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action released a report which found that its members had experienced a drop of around a fifth of total expenditure, 40% of them making redundancies, and that children’s and young people’s organisations were being disproportionately hit. As the Minister has expressed concern about local authorities disproportionately cutting youth and children’s services, what precise steps is he taking to make sure that local authorities and the voluntary and community organisations that he rightly praises are not targeting youth services for a larger share of cuts?

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady makes my point. I have expressed my concern about the disproportionate effect—in some cases— on youth services that some short-sighted local authorities have exercised. That is why we consulted on and revised the statutory guidance which we issued back in June, and why also, at the core of Positive for Youth—the most comprehensive policy, which her Government never even attempted—are those best placed to have a voice and scrutinise the value of their youth offer: young people themselves. That is why I am about giving a voice to young people and making sure that they have a place at the top table in the town hall—something that her Government never gave young people.

[Mr Rob Wilson (Reading East) (Con)]

12. What steps he is taking to improve the attainments of the most able pupils in mathematics.

--- Later in debate ---

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

18. What level of response the UK Council for Child Internet Safety received to its consultation on parental internet controls.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

As co-chairs of the executive board of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, the Minister for Equalities, who is also responsible for criminal information, and I launched a consultation on parental internet controls on 28 June. The consultation closes on 6 September and the final number of responses will not be known until then, but to date there have been no fewer than 600 responses from parents, members of the public, charities and businesses.

[Claire Perry]

Members across the House will pay tribute to the Minister and his UKCCIS team for setting up this important inquiry.

We know that 83% of parents are deeply worried about how easy it is for young people to stumble across or find adult material online. Does the Minister think that enough of those parents’ voices are going to be heard in what is quite a technical consultation? Is he looking forward to getting a 110,000-name petition from parents, proving that parents are very interested in this point?

[Tim Loughton]

I pay tribute to the work that my hon. Friend has done on this important issue. She is absolutely right. I absolutely want the internet to be a safer place for our children, and I am open to any suggestions to bring that about. However, a joint effort is needed, which is why UKCCIS is a union of lots of different interested parties. But parents are absolutely at the heart of the issue: they need to know what to look out for in respect of their children’s internet access at home and to talk to their children to make sure that they are safe. We all have a role in this, and I praise the contribution that my hon. Friend is making.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

19. What measures he has put in place to prevent the sale of academy school sports playing fields.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

When a youth service is failing to meet the needs of its local communities, would the Minister support switching the funding to organisations such as sports groups, scouts and guides, so that they can extend their constructive engagement with young people?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. We have some fantastic youth groups, voluntary organisations and people around the country with a passion for engaging young people and a knowledge of how to do so, who in the past have been frozen out too much from the local offer. In future, they need to be part of the offer for young people locally, and must work with local authorities and schools to ensure that young people get the very best opportunities.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

In Darlington, 50 young people at St Aidan’s academy should have got a C this year but got a D. That is not a one-off case; there are schools like it up and down the country. The Secretary of State has said that he is sad about this matter. Does he think that it is fair?

Adoption

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

We have had a well balanced and measured debate. It was slightly less heated than the one going on in the main Chamber at the moment, which may interrupt our deliberations. I add my congratulations to those that others have given my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) on the way that she made her case, acknowledging that the Government need to get on with it and do more, but also that we have undertaken a radical and substantial overhaul of our whole system for looking after children in care, with a particular focus on those who will benefit from adoption and those who could benefit, but are not being considered for it now.

I have a long speech, but first I will take up some of the points that were made, and we shall see how far the Division bell eats into our time. Issues in adoption have not just happened in the past two years under the current Government. In opposition, we had a long-standing interest in improving the adoption situation. I was on the Committee on the Adoption and Children Bill, which became the 2002 Act. The legislation was well intentioned, but some good reforms that it introduced were not sustained and they fizzled out. I am determined that our adoption reforms will last and that an increased number of children, for whom adoption is appropriate, will benefit from it in a more timely manner.

--- Later in debate ---

On resuming—

[Tim Loughton]

As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted by the main Chamber, the Government have taken adoption seriously for a long time. It is helpful that we have the commitment of the Prime Minister, of my Secretary of State, who has great personal experience of adoption, and of Martin Narey, the Government’s adoption adviser, who was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson). All three have given the campaign great impetus.

I assure the House that everything we are doing is not just about improving processes, effectiveness and efficiency, but about getting better placements and better outcomes for children in care generally, and for those for whom adoption is appropriate, who will always be the minority. As the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) said—it is good to see him here today, off his crutches—the Government have been doing a wide range of things across the piece for children in care, including a better deal for foster carers and for children in foster care, special guardianship orders, and this week’s announcements about children in residential homes. For us, there is no hierarchy of forms of care.

I want to pick up some of the points made. I have a deal of sympathy with the measures that the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) tried to introduce via her ten-minute rule Bill. She mentioned our meetings with colleagues in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; she is absolutely right to say that there is financial, social and moral benefit to be gained from getting children out of care, and that we spend a lot on the whole area.

Adoptive parents face challenges, and we must ensure that they have help with them. The worst possible denouement for a child can be when an adoption breaks down, and various Members have stressed the importance of adoption support services, an importance that I absolutely see. We are doing a lot of work in that area, and there will be further announcements throughout the year. We do not want false economy. It is common sense that if one does not put in the work pre, during and post-adoption, a placement is less likely to stick, particularly if the child involved brings with them lots of baggage, emotional trauma or abuse. We need to devote appropriate love, attention and professional care to ensuring that such children can recreate the kinds of empathetic relationships—attachment, which my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) also mentioned—that are so lacking in their lives and that place them at such a disadvantage.

My hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North made a number of good points. Hampshire has an excellent track record, and I was with the director of children’s services, John Coughlin, only this morning. He has done much to support the heavy lifting that the Government have been doing, and we need to do more, to understand how we can recreate attachment and deal with the behavioural problems of many children who are appropriate for adoption. We must ensure that professionals recognise those special needs, and we are working with the College of Social Work and the Social Work Reform Board so that there is a better understanding of the problems faced by children in the care system, particularly those related to attachment.

Awareness of attachment is growing, but we need to do an awful lot more. The figures that my hon. Friend cited of the number of parents in her area who now seek adoption support shows what a false economy it would be not to recognise that such support is needed and do something about it.

[Bill Esterson]

The Minister makes an important point about the better understanding of attachment. The issue is incredibly important, and needs to be addressed. It is also important to have professionals with long-term experience, and to find ways of ensuring that we not only attract but retain high-quality staff in the profession, including foster carers, so that their expertise can be built up over many years. There is no substitute for long-term experience.

[Tim Loughton]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. This is not just about training the professionals and raising awareness among them; it is about raising awareness among parents, as well as children, as to what attachment is all about. We can do that through training, but we can also do it by spending £4.99 on a very good little book that has been authored and published by the father of my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich. The book is about attachment and it is written in layman’s terms. It is a really good aid to try to get people involved in the process to understand the heavy, technical areas involved. I recommend the book to the hon. Member for Sefton Central and might even give him a free copy, because I have been provided with a number of samples.

I do not really need to speak, because the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich, who has great expertise in the area—more than anybody else in Parliament, I think—summed it up very well. It is always a privilege to hear his take on the subject. He has been hugely helpful with his work on the all-party group on adoption. It is always a challenge for someone to go into a crowded room full of experienced young people who want to challenge them and keep them on their mettle. My hon. Friend, together with my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee), has also had input in the ministerial advisory group, and we have recently been joined by Baroness King, a former Member of this House. As my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich said, adoption is an enriching and rewarding experience, not only for the adoptee, but for the family who take in a new family member.

The role of voluntary adoption agencies is crucial. We have a lot to learn from their great expertise and success rate in finding adopters and making sure that adoptions are appropriate, work and last, which is why we are doing a lot of work with them. We must remember that we are trying to deliver child-focused services and to achieve child-focused outcomes, not just trying to make the system work better.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord), who is no longer in the Chamber, said that councils have a responsibility all year around, not just for Christmas or for adoption week. I am sure that many of the directors of children’s services I have been with over the past 24 hours at their conference in Manchester would agree with that. They would probably also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash that it is important to raise the profile of adoption. This debate is part of that process, as are various other campaigns.

As Minister with responsibility for children, I have a responsibility to make sure that we do a lot better for thousands of children who enter care through no fault of their own. My first priority is to make sure that we support vulnerable families to stay together, but if the safety or well-being of a child is threatened, the next step must be to urgently bring them into care. Most children in care will, rightly, return to their families when it is safe for them to do so. Others will need a period in foster care or in a children’s home, but for some there will not be a realistic prospect of growing up with their birth parents or other family members. In such circumstances, adoption can be a lifeline and offer a vulnerable child the hope of a better future and a second chance in a loving, stable family, which is something that every child deserves.

The Government are determined to see more children considered for adoption, but, as I have said, they will always be a small minority. Even if we doubled the number of children who are adopted—I am not in any way setting a target—they would still amount to fewer than 10% of the children who are in care in this country at present. The children we want considered for adoption include those who, in many cases, have been overlooked in the past, particularly older children, kids with disabilities and children in sibling groups, who are a particular challenge; we have to do much better to try to keep sibling groups together, if possible, and find placements for them. We need a special kind of foster or adoptive carer to come forward and take on those responsibilities. When adoption is right for a child, we want and need it to take place without delay, because we know only too well the detrimental impact that delay can have on a child’s development. As my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North said, the first 1,000 days are key. My hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall mentioned the crucial early years. The sooner a child has an appropriate adoption placement, the more likely it is to work and the more likely it is that attachment will click.

Over the past couple of years, a great many things have been going on, a few of which I have mentioned. Revised statutory adoption guidance for adoption agencies has been issued, and we have established an adopters’ charter, which sets out clear principles on how prospective adopters should be treated. I developed the charter with a group of young people who have been adopted and who come to see me regularly. I meet similar groups of children who are in foster care or residential care, and young people who have recently left care. I get some of my best information from those kids. They tell it like it is. It is always a joy, and a challenge, to have them in my office and get their input. Our whole work in this area has been hugely informed by the experience of the child, and it is absolutely right that it should be.

We have worked with Ofsted on strengthening the inspection regime. I had breakfast with its deputy director this morning and we talked about the new regime being introduced by Ofsted to make sure that we inspect the right things in adoption, so that it is all about the outcomes for children and not about processes. We have announced changes to the schools admissions code, which will mean that children who were previously looked after but who left care through adoption, or a special guardianship order or residence order, will retain the same priority for school places that they had as looked-after children. That is essential in trying to narrow the scandalous gap in achievement between children in the care system and their peer group.

We have published children in care and adoption tables, which show wide variation between local authorities in the number of adoptions and the timeliness of placements. The tables have led more recently to adoption scorecards, which I will come to in a moment.

Everything that we are trying to achieve is not pie in the sky, because it is happening in certain parts of the country. I need everybody who has a responsibility in children’s services to up their game and try to emulate the performance of the best for their children in care.

We have commissioned research into the number of adoptions that break down and the reasons behind that, because the last thing an adopted child needs, as my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall mentioned, is to be returned to care. We have published an adoption action plan in which we set out our proposals for tackling delay in the adoption system, including a new, shorter, two-stage approval process for prospective adopters and a new national gateway for adoption, on which we will provide further details at a later stage.

We desperately need more people to adopt. At the moment, too many people who pluck up the courage—it is a huge ask—to knock on the town hall door or pick up the phone and say, “I’m interested in becoming an adoptive parent,” are told, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.” We should be grabbing those people by the throat and saying, “Fantastic—we’ve been waiting for you! Let’s talk you through the process and see whether it’s for you or not,” and, if it is appropriate, then for goodness’ sake let us get them into the assessment process and not put obstacles in their way. Let us do the checks as speedily and as thoroughly as possible, and then let us have them as prospective adopters and see if we can find a suitable child to match with them. That message goes out loud and clear from everything that the Government are doing; we need more people to come forward. It is a big ask but as everybody present with experience of adoption has shown, it is a hugely satisfying achievement, not only for those who adopt, but for the child who is being offered a home and who, in so many cases, has been through an awful lot.

We are making good progress in delivering the action plan commitments. Alas, I have only two minutes left, so I will not be able to give them in full, but we are developing the scope and remit of the gateway, which we hope to launch later this year. We will consult in September on changes to the new adopter approval process and a new fast-track approval process for previous adopters and foster carers; on changes to speed up and encourage adopters to lead the process of finding a suitable match with a child; and on changes to make it easier for prospective adopters to be temporarily approved as foster carers. I expect all those changes to come into force in June 2013, and there will be further announcements—I cannot go into them in detail until tomorrow—to speed up that process.

Other commitments include legislation to reduce delay caused by local authorities seeking adoptive parents who are a perfect or near ethnic match for a child, which my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) mentioned earlier, and acting on the family justice review recommendation to remove the adoption panel function with regard to a child’s adoption decision. That is also a duty for the judiciary, which is why David Norgrove’s review reforms are so crucial to ensuring that everybody is doing their bit to make adoptions happen more speedily, efficiently and effectively in the best interests of children.

The action plan announced new scorecards, the first of which were published in May, on adoption timeliness for local authorities. They are crucial in providing transparency on how local authorities are doing and in ensuring that we have a contextualised record. I recognise, as various hon. Members have mentioned, that there are more challenging children to be adopted. We want to make sure that they are not excluded from the process simply because it might take longer. That is why the adoption scorecards are contextualised and sophisticated, and not just raw targets and tables, which has been a problem in the past.

Following publication of the scorecards, officials met the councils identified as being of the highest concern. A real willingness has been shown by all areas to get the process working better.

Child Sexual Exploitation

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

Today I am setting out details before both Houses of three reports that deal with sexual exploitation of children and I outline the Government’s plans to take our existing action plan forward to deal with this horrendous crime.

The conviction of nine members of a network responsible for child sexual exploitation in Rochdale on 8 May raised serious concerns about the safety of young people in residential care and the ease with which they can fall prey to such abuse. On 9 May, the Secretary of State for Education asked the deputy children’s commissioner to report to him urgently on emerging findings from her inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups. He asked that the report should focus particularly on risks facing looked-after children living in children’s homes.

We are very grateful to Sue Berelowitz for this early report which sets out emerging findings ahead of the interim report which will be published in September. It is being published today, together with our response to its recommendations which we accept in full and are driving forward as set out below.

Sexual exploitation blights the lives of too many of our children and young people and we need to do more to protect children, support victims and punish perpetrators. That is why the Government published their “Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation Action Plan” in November 2011, looking at this abuse from the point of view of the young person and the impact not just on the victim but the whole family. We have been driving forward implementation of the plan, involving five Government Departments working with a wide range of local and national organisations, voluntary and community sector partners, and law enforcement agencies. We have made it very clear that this kind of criminal behaviour will not be tolerated and that offenders like those in the Rochdale case can expect to face the full force of the law.

We are also publishing today a progress report on the implementation of the action plan and announcing further urgent action to help protect young people in residential care in light of recent serious concerns about the vulnerability of such children, in particular those placed a long way from their home area.

Our progress report shows that local safeguarding children boards and others have been rising to the challenge to do more to identify and tackle child sexual exploitation. Recent well-reported police operations have highlighted some very effective joint working by the voluntary and community sector and by statutory agencies. There are many examples of valuable initiatives that are making a practical difference—such as the “Say something if you see something” campaign addressing the problem of hotels unwittingly being used as venues for the sexual exploitation of young people and the Barnardo’s project which is developing specialised foster care placements for victims of child sexual exploitation. The new sentencing regime for dangerous offenders, which is likely to be implemented by autumn 2012, will introduce mandatory life sentences for very serious repeat offenders and help bring more perpetrators to justice.

But as long as exploitation still exists, we can and must do more. There are still areas of the country where the existence of child sexual exploitation is not properly acknowledged or addressed. This is wholly unacceptable, and underlines the need to sustain the drive to implement the action plan fully. To support this, we are publishing alongside the progress report a new, accessible, step-by-step guide for front-line practitioners on what to do if they suspect a child is being sexually exploited. We will continue to work with local safeguarding children boards and practitioners to promote improved practice supported by this new guide.

The Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s report published today sets out a compelling case for making urgent improvements in children’s residential care. While it makes it clear that the majority of children who become victims of sexual exploitation are not in residential care, it is also clear that these young people are disproportionately at risk. The report highlights concerns about the quality and stability of placements in children’s homes. It draws particular attention to the large number of children who are placed a long way from their home area, and who can be at additional risk through such isolation. The Government accept the report’s recommendations about how to secure improvements and provide better safety and support in children’s homes. These concern, in particular, the responsibilities of local authorities in deciding to place a child in another area, and in responding if there are problems.

The Government also welcome the “Report from the Joint Inquiry into Children who Go Missing from Care”, issued on 18 June by the all-party parliamentary groups for runaway and missing children and adults and for looked-after children and care leavers. This emphasised the need to tackle failings in arrangements to safeguard these extremely vulnerable children and young people.

In the light of concerns raised by the Rochdale case about the safety of children in residential homes, Ofsted immediately brought forward for urgent inspection a number of homes where information received suggested some concern about the sexual exploitation of residents.

Ofsted’s new framework for the inspection of children’s homes, which was introduced in April this year, focuses more strongly on whether a home has taken action to implement recommendations in previous reports, and whether improvements are flowing through in consequence.

In addition, we are taking the following immediate action to respond to the recommendations in the reports from the deputy children’s commissioner and the all-party parliamentary groups:

Make sure that we have a clearer picture of how many children go missing from care and where they are by improving the quality and transparency of data;

Ensure children’s homes are properly protected and safely located by removing barriers in regulation so that Ofsted can share information about the location of children’s homes with the police, and other relevant bodies as appropriate;

Help children be located nearer to their local area by establishing a “task and finish group” to make recommendations by September on strengthening the regulatory framework on out-of-area placements. While there may be good reasons for placing a child or young person at some distance from their home area, it is difficult to accept that nearly half of all children in children’s homes benefit from such distant placements. Both reports are clear about the problems that can arise. We will consult on changes in the autumn.

Establish a further expert working group to look at the quality of children’s homes. This will review all aspects of the quality of provision in children’s homes, including the management of behaviour and the appropriate use of restraint, and the qualifications and skills of the work force. Too many children are still being placed in homes for short periods of time, and the care they receive can often fail to address the complexity of their needs. The group will consider the location and ownership of homes, local authority commissioning practices and arrangements to drive improvement. It will complete its work by December.

The actions we are announcing today underline the Government’s determination to tackle child sexual exploitation and protect our most vulnerable children.

The following documents will be available in the Libraries of both Houses:

Report on the emerging findings of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups,

Letter from Tim Loughton MP to Sue Berelowitz, deputy children’s commissioner,

Letter from Tim Loughton MP to Ann Coffey MP, chair of the APPG for runaway and missing children and adults,

“Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation Action Plan” progress report and step-by-step guide for frontline practitioners on what to do if a child is being sexually exploited.