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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I give the warmest of welcomes to the Children and Young Persons Bill and the Housing and Regeneration Bill. I hope that the first will prepare the time when children taken into public care can expect at least as good an education as their peers and can expect to stay with the same social worker and foster carer throughout their care experience and beyond, when they move back into their families. I hope that the second will reduce the number of children coming into public care as their parents are relieved of the pressures of temporary accommodation, which is often overcrowded and long distant from the support of their relatives and community. In the interests of keeping within my time, I hope that on this occasion I may read from a script. I warmly welcome the prospect of many more homes and, in doing so, declare my interest as a landlord. The youth homelessness charities, Centrepoint and Foyer, point out that the lack of move-on accommodation prevents them settling significant numbers of their hostel residents. This means that the 16 year-old young black woman who finds herself in a wholly inappropriate bed-and-breakfast accommodation, lacking locks on the bedroom doors and shared with older men of whom she is afraid, is denied the support of a Centrepoint hostel because there is not the room. It means that the young black man who is ready for an apprenticeship in a carpentry shop is denied the support that Foyer could give him to make this happen because there is not the room. Barnardo's Families in Temporary Accommodation Project (FITA) points out that the level of homelessness compels families to accept damp, overcrowded, unhygienic, often privately rented accommodation which can be several bus journeys away from their relatives or communities and deepens the debilitating sense of isolation that such families can experience, especially those with one lone parent. Shortage of affordable housing erodes our efforts to recruit and retain social workers and teachers. Not so long ago I was speaking to the head of a primary school in Camden, north London, who was lamenting the loss of one of her best teachers because that teacher could not get on the housing ladder in London. Care leavers—young people who have been in public care—are deeply concerned at the lack of suitable accommodation for them. Foster parents can be discouraged from fostering because of the lack of space in their homes. Shortage of housing can cause the bitterest resentment against immigrants and the sharpest community divisions. I warmly welcome the prospect of 3 million new homes and congratulate the Government on bringing this forward. As regards the Children and Young Persons Bill, it is gratifying to see the Government produce further legislation specifically to meet the needs of children in public care. The very process of bringing forward legislation will prioritise these children on the agendas of schools and local authorities. There is very much to welcome in its specifics. I wish to consider the principles on which such a Bill should be based and, I trust, establish the matters on which we can agree. First, it is enormously wasteful of public money, and harmful to children, to neglect social services as we have done over so many years. If early intervention is our ambition, intervening when social workers are almost totally demoralised, when foster carers are impossibly difficult to find and when the most vulnerable children have been placed in residential care with the least well equipped and valued carers for many years, should never be repeated. I am deeply grateful to Her Majesty's Government for beginning to address this long neglect. No wonder the Government seem to have had so little return on their £1.9 billion per annum on children in care and their investment in social care training. Contrast this with reports from Ministers and Members of Parliament who have visited Denmark. What they see is a vastly higher quality of provision at a similar or lower cost. Instead of supporting foster carers, social workers and residential childcare workers to deliver excellent care, we have had to invest hugely in checks—we have a new regulatory body forthcoming—to prevent those carers doing harm to those they care for. We have been on the back foot when we should have been pushing forward. The best safeguard for children is an environment of overall excellence, as Sir William Utting, chairman of two reports on safeguarding children, put it. I hope that we can agree that this Bill can be only one of those several first steps that Her Majesty's Government have been taking. Sustained funding for social services must be secured, as so many of your Lordships stated this afternoon. I ask the Minister: are current arrangements right where elected councillors must make spending decisions knowing that their electorate prize good roads and efficient rubbish collection well above the invisible services of foster care and social workers? What steps is he taking to ensure that there is the long-term, consistent investment in the social services that is required? The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester referred to this. The second principle on which I hope that we can agree concerns the importance of stability to children in public care. In launching the Care Matters White Paper, the right honourable Beverley Hughes said, ““Stability, stability, stability””, indicating that this was the cornerstone of the Government's approach. I add to this the vital importance of each child having a long, stable relationship with a particular carer. All our experiences of our own families and all that modern neuroscience has taught us about the development of the child's brain indicate the imperative of a reliable relationship with a close, long-term, consistent carer—someone who takes a genuine interest, thinks about one when one is not there, remembers one's birthday, points out when one has overstepped the mark, someone to admire and to copy. Most importantly, one has to have experience of this reliable relationship if one is later to fall in love, have children and a family of one's own that does not simply repeat the horrors of previous generations. Here we are obliged to consider that most of these children have been let down by the adults they most loved and trusted many times and sometimes in the most horrible ways. Many of these children will be of the firm conviction that adults let one down and that being close to an adult can lead only to disappointment. They will therefore seek out and focus upon any indication—even the smallest unintended one—that they are unwanted. Hitherto, the care system, with many honourable exceptions, has done an effective job of confirming that conviction—that one should trust no one. The third related principle that flows from this is that social workers, foster carers and residential childcare workers must be allowed to bring the very highest level of consideration to the work they do in caring for these children. They have to be allowed the time to reflect and to be able to draw on the expertise of other carers as they manage and sustain their relationship with their children. Does the Minister agree that if we are consistently to maintain the trust of children and young people, those closest to them must have this opportunity for reflection? What is he doing to support such opportunities for reflection? The importance of this was very much highlighted in the Options for Excellence White Paper. The General Social Care Council strongly encourages the Government to implement early and fully the recommendations of that White Paper of October 2006. May I ask a related question? While we know how many placements of children with foster carers break down each year, do we have a reliable figure on how often children have a change of social worker during their time in care, at risk or in need? I think that the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, referred to such a figure. What is the Government's specific target or aspiration for the number of such changes in future? That principle of stability is strengthened by a number of measures in the Bill. Local authorities will be obliged to provide a range of suitable placements locally for children. Social workers will be obliged to visit children on a regular basis, including those in the criminal justice system. Young people in care will be encouraged to remain in care until the age of 18, and pilots will be undertaken to give young people a veto on leaving care before the age of 21. The latter could be especially useful for young people at university, as has been mentioned, who need accommodation during non-term times. All of the above, however, raise important questions about resources. Where are the foster carers to be found to achieve those aims? Vital to retaining the foster carers are the social workers who should support them. The Bill adds considerably to the burden of social workers. Where will the expert social workers be found to meet the need? I acknowledge the significant steps that the Government have taken in recruiting more social workers. Will an obligation to be commissioned locally, except in special circumstances, in some areas encourage the commissioning of poorer quality but more local placements? Will specialist children's homes be edged out by the insistence on commissioning within a local authority? Some 40 per cent of children coming into care currently do so at the ages of 10 to 15. By that age, a significant number of those will have had enough of families, or will not wish to replace their own family with another. To keep the right balance of residents in a children's home, there should at best be an aim for 80 per cent to 85 per cent of capacity, so there needs to be some slack in the system. Will the Bill ensure that there is the right supply of good quality residential care in future? Related to the above is the future of social work. I praise the Government again for the many helpful steps that they have taken to boost social work. The Opposition have recommended in their report on social work that there should be a chief social work officer. I hope that the Government will pay careful attention to that, especially as there is to be a new regulatory body and concern has already been expressed that the voice of social work may not be so prominent in it; my noble friend Lady Howarth referred to that. There is concern about the creation of independent social work practices. I know that the Government see virtue in that, as it may create institutions with a stronger independent focus on the needs of the child. However, I am concerned that this may be a distraction from the fundamentals of the problem that we are facing. I look forward to hearing the Minister's rationale. The final principle on which I hope we may agree is that young people in care need to feel that they can achieve. They need the qualifications to land work that they find rewarding, which meets their abilities and pays their rent. This has been spoken about already, and I warmly welcome what the Government are doing in terms of the education of young people in care. In conclusion, I warmly welcome the two Bills and the opportunity that they both offer to provide increased stability in the lives of our most vulnerable children, in their early family life, in public care, if they have to be taken into care, and in their transition from care. I look forward to working on this legislation.