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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall not detain your Lordships for long. Coming into bat at number nine, some good innings already have been played and, certainly, many of the best shots that I had in my armoury have been executed. I do not think that it serves anyone’s purposes for me simply to repeat what has been said. I must express delight at feeling part of a debate on an issue where in broad terms we are all in agreement. We all want to travel in the direction that this Bill sets, which seems to me to be a wonderful experience. In the short time I have been in your Lordships' House, I have experienced occasions when it has been somewhat different, much more adversarial and contentious. I am not an expert in the making of policy, nor in the provision of services. I am a Methodist minister and for 40 years I have had the pastoral care of people with children in care, or have been alongside foster parents trying to deal with very difficult and problematical cases that have come their way and have needed all the support that they can get. My awareness of the problem comes from on-the-street experience that will be much more anecdotal than statistical or general. It is a great need, and it is to be welcomed that we are moving towards finding a solution. It is perhaps appropriate to be said at Second Reading that the task before us is to stretch a good Bill—even a cold from which I am suffering cannot prevent me recognising that it is a good Bill—as far as possible to make it a better Bill and the best we can manage in the circumstances. The good will that has been expressed may have some positive outcomes. In the Minister we have someone whose ears are available for picking up the signals that we wish to give him. Many statistics have been rehearsed and I do not want to go through them again. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said that 66 per cent of those who have been in care produce children who end up in care, which seems to institutionalise the need, and the cycle must be broken. That is why I simply want to make remarks about the two areas where special attention needs to be given. One falls outside the scope of the Bill, yet for all that it is terrifically important in the name of joined-up legislation and provision to make allusion to it. It is, of course, the question of prevention. It would be better to do all we can to see to it that the figure of 60,000 children in care was much reduced. Not only would it be less costly, but it would be more wholesome and, by breaking the cycle which simply repeats from one generation to another, the instance of children needing to be put in care would be lower and we would be doing ourselves a favour—prevention is the thing. I find that many of us have the same briefing papers, and indeed some of the lines I have heard offered in the debate are ones that were going to be my purple patches. But I want to pluck from one paper some very simple statistics. When the NCH got involved with Plymouth Family Support Services, 94 per cent of the young people referred did not enter the care system. When in Tower Hamlets, which is much closer to my home, 33 families were offered similar intervention and support, 88 per cent of the young people remained with their families. Again, 15 families in Glamorgan had their cases recorded and not one child in a period of nine months ended up in care. Of course, some of those children might not have gone into care anyway—we understand that—but we have to admit the possibility that adequate intervention and good family support systems are likely to result in less of a problem to manage. That, alongside the provisions on care in this Bill, has to be within our purview at the same time. The second area I want to allude to is that of education, and the Bill is very strong on it. Education empowers and gives people a sense of their own self-worth. We have to learn again how to deliver education—I could go on at some length about that; the demotivation of children who are not in care is very considerable in our educational system—and particularly how to create a system in which well motivated children are taught well and have the best brought out of them. People given a good education find that empowerment and self-worth are the inevitable consequences, and the child himself or herself finds the focused energy that takes them out of the vicious cycle I referred to earlier. That is why I wish that the special provision to provide stability in care during the GCSE years could be extended. I concede that those are crucial years, but would it not be good if it were possible to provide such stability throughout the secondary years, or indeed throughout a child’s educational career in toto? We must do our best in this area. However, we envisage that children in care might go to university, and that we should do something to help them. The mere admission of that possibility is welcome, but why not also provide help for further education and apprenticeships? After all, some 30 per cent of care leavers at 19 are not in education, employment or training. Some extra help to get them out of the holes they are in would be very welcome. A lot has been said about independent advocates for children, and about the fact that independent reviewing officers are not independent of the local authority. My noble friend Lord Judd never speaks without passion, especially about children in prison. Whether they are asylum seekers or not, their childhood is being denied them. I would certainly like to see how the Bill envisages offering similar support when Her Majesty’s Government are the custodian and carer. What special measures might be envisaged for children in custody or secure training centres? All we can do is stir the waters. I have enjoyed the debate thus far and I look forward to a fruitful and positive debate that will make what is a good beginning into something that we can all live with and think, ““This was the moment we did not miss””.