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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am indebted to the House for the opportunity to speak briefly on a particular matter. When one is number 15 on the list of speakers, it is always a relief when the main thrust of your speech has not been covered by others. That is why I make this short intervention. Many noble Lords have talked about the effect which being in care has on the whole of a person’s life. For obvious reasons most noble Lords have focused their attention on 18 to 21 year-olds. I want to go further and talk about the lasting effects of care on former care adults. I am aware that I have previously raised this matter with your Lordships, and I am interested to see that both noble Lords who were Ministers when I did so are sitting on the Government Front Bench. Perhaps that is because access to personal information is not the best subject to raise with the Government at the moment. None the less, it is important. Former care adults have very limited access to information and their care records. Their care records are governed by the Data Protection Act 1998. Unlike people who were adopted, they do not have a right to access information about themselves. That is because the key information which most former care adults want is the name of their parents and any siblings. Under the legislation and case law—the relevant case law is that of Guskin in the European Court of Human Rights—that information is treated as third-party information. So they are denied official access to the one essential piece of their family story that will enable them to piece together their history and identity. I say that because many of the charities which work in this field long ago recognised the importance of that information to the health and well-being of adults and now have policy whereby they tend to make all information freely available. Many local authorities continue to deny access to adults. That is partly in some cases because of a particular interpretation of the Data Protection Act but in others it is done for another reason that I shall come to in a moment. Recognising, as we are, the lifetime effects of having been in care, I contend that it is time for the Government to adopt a new policy on this. When we have discussed this matter previously, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has fallen back on two arguments. The first is the one I have set out concerning the strict application of the Data Protection Act. The second is the fact that in many cases the information no longer exists because local authorities and social work departments are frequently reorganised. I suggest to the Minister that the fact that the information does not exist is irrelevant because former care adults understand that if they choose to approach an authority many years after they were in care it is entirely possible that their records have been destroyed. But former care adults require sensitivity regarding what has happened to them. While they can accept that the information may be gone and cannot be retrieved, how they are told that varies enormously. In some cases, there is extremely good practice where local authorities run a very full, supportive service for anybody who has been in care where they can access counselling and support. Others do not. It is not unheard of for people simply to receive a letter through the post either giving them very personal information or simply telling them that it no longer exists. That is a very inhumane way to treat people who are dealing with the consequences of actions that happened during their childhood for which they had no responsibility. At later stages of the Bill, I shall want to challenge the Minister to extend the legal framework within which people have rights to access information about themselves and may wish to explore whether there is a necessity to do that via an intermediary body, as is done in adoption cases. I shall also want to challenge the Minister on the extent to which we require statutory bodies not only to hold information but to ensure the continued existence of that information long after they may have disappeared.