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Children

My Lords, we are all most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for initiating this important debate on the well-being of children. I am also grateful to UNICEF for prompting us to think about a whole range of factors that affect the well-being of children, including, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and others have said, the needfor a clearer understanding of what parental responsibilities are in this regard. It would have been helpful if the UNICEF report card had shown clearly which data referred to which years. In an exercise of this kind, it takes a very long time to collect, verify and check for consistency such a broad range of international data. So, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said, the Government were able to rubbish the report card by saying that it was out of date and that many of the parameters measured have since improved significantly. However, all the countries surveyed in the report will have done better, and we may still be near the bottom of the league table, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has just pointed out. Yesterday’s Treasury figures show that poverty worsened last year, with 200,000 more children living below the breadline. So there is no room whatever for complacency. I want to concentrate on two related aspects of child well-being which have not yet been touched on: the effects on children caused by under-age consumption of alcohol, which is measured by the answer to the question, ““How often have you had so much alcohol that you were really drunk?””, on which the UK is by far the worst of any of the 21 countries surveyed; and the effects on children of alcohol-misusing parents or carers, which is not measured by the survey at all. One heading deals with children's relationships with family and friends, but it ignores the possibility of violence or neglect between parents and children, except very indirectly; for example, by asking about the frequency of eating meals with parents, or of parents talking to their children. Alcohol misuse by children is a colossal and growing problem. I agree with the noble Lord,Lord Northbourne, that it is parents who have responsibility for the well-being of their children and should be looking to this dreadful plague which has afflicted so many of our younger generation. I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, that part of the responsibility rests with the role models that children look to for their conduct—the football stars and pop celebrities whose lifestyles are the very opposite of what we would like to see them adopting. The proportion of 11 to 15 year-olds who drink has stayed at about 60 per cent since 1985, but average weekly consumption has more than doubled to10.9 units, in 2006. The proportion of that age group drinking at least once a week rose from 13 per cent in 1990 to 21 per cent in 2006, and 27 per cent of teenagers report having been drunk 20 times or more. In this, as in the rest of the Government's so-called alcohol harm reduction strategy, we are failing miserably. It is no wonder that the Government refuse to update the Cabinet Office's interim analytical analysis of alcohol harm, which showed that in 2000-01 the cost to the nation was £20 billion a year. Despite the Home Office's attempts to stop alcohol being sold to children, their own figures showed last year that 29 per cent of on-licencees, 21 per cent of off-licencees and 18 per cent of supermarkets were still selling alcohol to minors. The effects of this tidal wave of alcohol include 1,000 young people under the age of 15 needing emergency treatment for alcohol poisoning every year, and 8,900 young people under 18 being admittedto hospital with a diagnosis related to alcohol.The long-term effects of heavy drinking during adolescence include liver damage, especially among those who are also obese; lower oestrogen levels in girls and testosterone in boys; lower bone mineral density in boys; and brain impairment in both sexes. None of that is properly reflected in the posters or literature issued by the Department of Health. Unfortunately, under the rules of your Lordships’ House, I am not—like the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, yesterday—able to show that material to the House. However, the available material on this subject is totally inadequate and such as does exist is not properly displayed in doctors’ surgeries or in hospital out-patient waiting areas. The UK has—as was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Howells, and others—the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. That is indirectly reflected in table 5.2d of the survey, which shows that the UK percentage of 15 year-olds who have had sexual intercourse is way off the scale. Childline says that alcohol is a contributory factor in teenage pregnancy, and many of the stories told by the young people who contact it demonstrate this risk. I shall give just one example. A girl aged 13 said: "““I got drunk at a party. I don't remember having sex, but my friends say I did. Now I'm pregnant””." Alcohol use is frequently cited as a factor associated with unprotected sex. We are living in a highly sexualised culture, and this, coupled with the universal pressure to drink, and the inseparable link between alcohol and every social occasion, makes a disastrous combination. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, spoke of the increasing number of children entering the criminal justice system. That is a very serious problem. How much of that is due to alcohol-related offences committed by those young people? Why do we not bother to measure that relationship in the statistics? A 1995 study estimated that up to 1.3 million children under 16 were in families with alcohol-abusing parents or carers. The amount of alcohol consumed per adult in the UK has risen by 18 per cent since then, so the number of children at risk—if the figures have risen comparably—would be as high as 1.5 million. Those children are more likely to become involved in crime and to exhibit conduct disorders such as truancy and anti-social behaviour; they are also more likely to suffer health problems and to become problem-drinkers themselves. If their mothers drank during pregnancy, they may already have been disadvantaged by low birth weight, which is another factor in the survey where the UK is near the bottom of the league table, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howells, said. In the worst cases—several hundred a year—alcohol misuse by a pregnant woman may lead to foetal alcohol syndrome. In almost half of domestic violence cases, the offender had been drinking, and in three-quarters of these, the victim is the mother. One can imagine the effect on children of seeing their mother being battered by a drunken father or stepfather. It may often be in the same households that the 10 per cent of boys and 20 per cent of girls who are sexually abused, as we heard on Tuesday—often fuelled by drink and sometimes by the same perpetrator—are to be found. Sexual and physical violence, often fuelled by drink, leave permanent physical, emotional and psychological scars on children, impairing their emotional development, health and ability to learn. Nearly 4 million adults in the UK grew up in a family where one or both parents drank to excess. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was pleased, as we all are, with the DfES strategy, just published, for promoting services to parents and helping them to fulfil their responsibilities to children. The document acknowledges that single parents and teenage parents require extra support but ignores the much larger number with drink problems. As Turning Point says, "““the needs of children of alcohol-misusing parents are still overlooked””." Let us have a genuine alcohol harm reduction strategy that will stop children poisoning themselves, and use price and availability as weapons against alcohol abuse by parents so that we can curb this tide of alcohol-related violence and suffering.