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Social Inclusion

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, for this opportunity of this important debate. Perhaps I might say to my noble friend Lord Dahrendorf how grateful I was to him for emphasising the progress that has been made in recent years. When one sees that so much needs to be done, one sometimes forgets how much has been achieved. I especially welcome his acknowledgement of that. I shall concentrate on the need to increase stability for children in the care of the state if those children are going to go on to engage in employment and education and to find accommodation for themselves. I shall urge the Government to consider significant further investment in foster care, if the stability, which we all recognise is fundamental to this achievement, is to be gained for children in the care of the state. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for her commitment and the work that she has done in this area in the past, and to all her colleagues for the action that they have taken to improve chances for children in care. I think of the Quality Protects programme, with its significant additional investment, which has now been succeeded by the Choice Protects programme. I think of the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, which produced extra support for young people leaving care, sometimes up to the age of 25. I think of the new duty on local authorities to provide an independent advocate for children in care, and several other achievements. I was pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, recently provide some reassurance to some of us who were concerned about the impact that the changes proposed for schools would have on the education of looked-after children in ensuring that for every new placement for a child there would also be an education placement assured—if I understand the noble Lord correctly. So I welcome the Government’s efforts, but there is a shortage of 8,000 foster carers in England and Wales alone. Some 40 per cent of children placed in foster care are not appropriately placed, according to the chief inspector of the Commission for Social Care Inspection; 40 per cent of children are not properly matched with their carers, which can mean that they are out of their local authority or that it is simply not the right background for them, which is very significant to ensuring the success of their placement. Some years ago I worked as a volunteer in a hostel for 16 to 23 year-olds, and one of the residents was a Bangladeshi who had been there for five months and was coming up to the end of his term of six months. He had spent most of that time in his room; he had not learnt to tidy his room or to cook for himself; he had not been active in finding accommodation for himself or in looking for employment. From what I understood of his background, he had a very difficult family history—there had been a long conflict in his family—and he appeared to be suffering from severe depression. He was going to move on to a bed and breakfast in Tower Hamlets. His future did not seem to me to hold many prospects of integration or inclusion in society. The vast majority of children in care have experienced abuse in the family, severe neglect or conflict between the parents. They need a long period of stability in their lives, and yet one in seven experiences more than three moves in one year in their placements. The most severely traumatised young people will experience more placements, because they are more difficult to contain. At the recent Associate Parliamentary Group for Children and Young People in Care, a 19 year-old young woman told us how she had fought for two consecutive years to be able to carry on with her foster carer and how her younger brother was now carrying on the same struggle to continue with his foster carer. That is widely accepted as a common experience for children in foster care—that they are moved on prematurely into poorly supported accommodation. I recognise the steps that the Government have taken to improve that situation, but there is much work to be done. It is key that we must have more foster carers so that there is the capacity to carry on caring for the children past the age of 18, if necessary. After all, most children leave home at the age of 22, and most children do not have the experiences that children in care have had. So I ask the Minister to consider the report from the British Association for Adoption and Fostering and the Fostering Network, The Cost of Foster Care, which was published in July this year. It looks carefully at the need for allowances, fees and support for foster carers and comes to the conclusion, properly costed, that there needs to be an additional £616 million per year, in England alone, to provide for the requisite foster carers to recruit those vital people. I know that that is not the responsibility of the Minister’s department, but in the spirit of joined-up government I ask her to consult her colleagues on what progress can be made in significantly increasing the funding of local authorities so that they can meet that need. The answer that we have had so far has been that this is a local authority responsibility—but we all know that local authorities already have huge responsibilities, and the number of children in care and the cost of providing for them has significantly increased in the past five years. I hope that the Government can continue to think very carefully about the additional funding that that group needs. Before concluding, let me say how grateful I was for what the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said about children in contact with the law often being children in need of protection. A recent report from the Social Exclusion Unit, to which the Minister drew my attention, points out:"““Although young people have been given 1,197 ASBOs since April 2004—in the same period to date just 16 Individual Support Orders have been issued alongside them to help them work better””." Children need to be contained and to have boundaries, but they also need to be properly supported in foster care and elsewhere. I look forward to the Minister’s response.