Children and Families Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, we have a lot of legislation and I am sure that much that is in the Bill is welcome, but I worry about disengagement—that is to say, the number of people who vote in general elections and other elections. When I look at a Bill, I look for reasons to continue to be worried. The first reason would be if something unexpected came in a Bill, which you would not expect the Government of the day to put forward. The second worry is when a Bill includes aspirations that may be unfulfilled for very good and practical reasons. This disengagement is partly welcome to the public, I regret to say; they are quite interested in becoming disengaged from the political process, which they see as rather inward-looking.

I have one of each of these worries about this Bill. First, on the unexpected element, new Section 3A, in Clause 3, headed “Recruitment, assessment and approval of prospective adopters”—and here I am alongside my noble friend Lady Hamwee—is an authoritarian provision. It gives the Secretary of State power to take certain functions away from local authorities by directions, if the Secretary of State so determines. However, there is no parliamentary procedure for directions, so it is highly draconian. The public knows that local authorities vary widely and will have different opinions about adoption—this is in Part 1 of the Bill—and will come to different conclusions about the best way in which to handle their approach to adoption. I would have thought that it was part of the democratic process that they should be allowed to have different approaches. That, however, is surely in conflict with this Government’s approach to, for example, localism. It is an unexpected clause; I do not welcome it, and it is another reason for disengagement.

Part 5 is my second example. In 2004, in nine sections and one schedule, with a budget that peaked at £3 million, the Children’s Commissioner was created, partly as a response to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a child being defined as anybody up to the age of 18. The convention took 10 years to create, from 1979 to 1989, and we ratified it in 1991. It is a convention with very high aspirations; the list of rights is long and, of course, familiar when we think about detriments, abuse and discrimination—all very familiar things. But signatory states should also take,

“all available measures to make sure that children’s rights are respected, protected and fulfilled”,

and that children “reach their potential”. That is a very demanding and large assignment. To date, the Children’s Commissioner has not attempted to tackle the major political issue of that—the joined-up government issue—and could not have done, having never had the budget. So it has been low-key and has looked at rather small but nevertheless significant detriments. A good example would be the exclusions from school affecting about 6,000 children a year. That seems to have been an excellent thing for the Children’s Commissioner to have done, and there has been other excellent and detailed work on detriments.

However, a big report was done at the request of the Secretary of State, the Dunford report, which identified a certain disappointment with the Children’s Commissioner and a gap between what you might have hoped the commissioner had been assigned to do and what the commissioner was actually doing. Now we have a Bill that strengthens the role of the commissioner, and I shall give two examples. In the 2004 Act, the commissioner had a general function,

“of promoting awareness of the views and interests of children in England”.

In the Bill before us, it has become a primary rather than a general function. The Bill states:

“The Children’s Commissioner’s primary function is promoting and protecting the rights of children in England”.

That has been a response, at least in part, to the Joint Committee on Human Rights and is clearly a much more significant function. In the same list of functions, the Children’s Commissioner is now to,

“monitor the implementation in England of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child”—

that is, to monitor but not report on progress. It is a big task to monitor progress against that convention because a great many provisions in that convention involve not only the righting of wrongs but the promoting of positive outcomes.

As a matter of fact, will the Children’s Commissioner be able to do more and, if so, how? Unless Her Majesty’s Government are clear about the accountability that they expect of the Children’s Commissioner and how that accountability will be discharged, we may be raising expectations about what the commissioner can do, and we shall again be disappointed because there will not be the resources to do what the Bill is asking the commissioner to achieve. That will lead to more disengagement by a perhaps small but significant section of the public who have come to think that expectations have been aroused that cannot be fulfilled. That is a dangerous tendency in the way that we approach the details of legislation.