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Children and Families

My Lords, with others I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, for bringing this debate to the House and to her consistent and distinguished commitment to the issues which it raises. As chair of the Children’s Society, I must declare my interest. This debate builds on many of the issues raised by the Good Childhood report which we debated a few months ago. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote in his afterword that this report forces, ""the reader to ask what we have in the ‘bank’ of mind and spirit in our culture that reinforces love and fidelity and offers some robust account of what long-term human welfare looks like and what it demands"." I want briefly to say something about what well-being looks like and something about what it demands. There are at present no universally agreed ways of defining and measuring well-being. In terms of children, ideas about well-being have often been transferred directly from concepts which apply to adults, with inadequate reference to children themselves. In addition, there has been a tendency to focus more on children’s future well-being or "well-becoming" as adults than on their experience of childhood, and to measure child well-being in terms of the absence of negative indicators, such as substance abuse, rather than the presence of positive ones. How do we attend wisely to the views of children themselves on these matters? This year, for example, the Get Ready for Change! project saw a group of children and young people carrying out a major children’s rights investigation and submitting their own report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva to inform its examination of the United Kingdom. Such projects fall far short of a systematic attempt to monitor and assess the experiences of children over time. For that reason, the Children’s Society is developing a well-being framework based on a consultation exercise with Ipsos MORI. The first phase of the survey, a representative sample of over 7,000 children, in years six, eight and 10, was completed in July 2008. The findings are due to be published this summer. This will be a major part of identifying well-being among different subgroups of children, leading to the development and testing of a new index of child well-being. Some of the themes are already clear, even predictable. The family is clearly of paramount importance. When children and young people were asked to choose between love, respect, support and freedom, in terms of their importance in family relationships, 70 per cent chose love. We can begin to see where this message is getting through in the recent Children, Schools and Families Select Committee report on looked-after children, which concluded, ""the greatest gains in reforming our care system are to be made in identifying and removing whatever barriers are obstructing the development of good personal relationships, and putting in place all possible means of supporting such relationships where they occur"." I want briefly to focus on child poverty, for it is clear that the well-being of children demands a fundamental change in our approach to inequalities and a renewed political determination to deliver on the targets for child poverty eradication. I hope that we shall hear from the Minister on the subject, because if there is a golden thread linking all the policies around child well-being, this is it. The financial crisis offers us a chance to rethink our public values; to evaluate the collective social, political and economic costs of our present inequalities, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s recent research has clearly revealed. Living in poverty has an immediate and enduring impact on children’s lives. In my own diocese, in some of the inner city schools, 85 per cent of children are on free school meals; one school has children speaking 40 different languages. Here we see powerfully the impact of poverty and multiple disadvantage and we realise that those forms of inequality demand focus and sustained attention on the alleviation of poverty. It was therefore a serious disappointment that in the Budget the Government were not able to prioritise spending in that area, putting only £20 extra per child per year on tax credit, or merely 38p per child per week. Will the Minister commit today to doing everything possible to ensure that the pre-Budget report in the autumn gets the Government back on track to reach the 700,000 children who need to be taken out of poverty if the 2010 target is to be achieved? The well-being of children focuses our attention on the central task of a civilised society: the task of inducting children into responsible and fulfilling lives. That is a challenge at every point of government policy but especially in facing with real, enduring courage the challenge of the toxic combination of inequality, high child poverty and low social mobility in this country, relative to many European comparators and illustrated by the UNICEF report to which reference has already been made. If we are to move beyond what has been called the mixed climate of fear and dislike that seems to affect so many perceptions of children and young people, the agenda for addressing the needs of the 3.9 million children in poverty in this country must be faced. That remains the single greatest threat to the well-being of children and families today.