Welfare Reform and Work Bill — House of Lords, 2015-12-07
Topic: Social Welfare
Francis Hare (Crossbench, Unknown): I will speak to Amendment 22, moved by my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham and to which my name is attached, simply to say I strongly support the idea of taking measurements earlier in the child’s life. I note what my noble friend said, his reference to a strategy and that the Bill removes a strategy for child poverty. I note in the Government’s general direction of travel that they are quite sceptical of strategies. My sense is that the Government prefer to work from the bottom up, and that in education policy, as in other areas, they are reticent to have overarching plans. I would briefly like to challenge that. The academy schools seem an example of government trying to build from the bottom up. However, what we see in the education department are real difficulties around teacher recruitment. Visiting an academy school—indeed, the best performing non-selective state school in the country—I saw wonderful results but heard complaints that because of the lack of strategy regarding teacher recruitment, there were real concerns that teachers of various kinds and at various levels would not be easily available and of the excellent quality needed in the future. My sense is the Government are rather opposed to strategies in general but I think in certain areas such as this they are really important, and we will come back to that I speak as a Cross-Bencher here: after 15 years in your Lordships’ House, it is rather regrettable that sometimes it seems as if one Government set certain things up and then the next Government set them down. I remember the debates about the Youth Justice Board, which seemed a very effective institution but because it was a quango the Government felt strongly that it had to go. I was pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, managed to persuade the Government that, in fact, it was worth keeping. Therefore, in the discussion of the old Child Poverty Act and the new Welfare Reform and Work Bill, it is worth challenging the Government a bit. I would like to challenge the Government a bit about whether, in part, their motivation might be to simply undo what others have done in the past, and whether there might be a chance to build on the best of the past as well as bring the Government’s own unique contribution to this area I want to be as brief as possible so I will speak now to my amendments in the grouping, the first of which is Amendment 28 on children in care and care leavers. The Bill is a real opportunity to improve the outcomes for young people in care and care leavers. It is an opportunity to gather data, for instance on their educational attainment—yes, that is gathered already—but also on their mental health. Historically, there was recognition by the ONS in 2004 of the mental health needs of looked-after children and great work was done by people such as Professor Jackson on the educational attainment of looked-after children. The educational side has been well resourced and legislated on since then, with things like virtual school heads, designated teachers in schools and priority in admissions—all really important steps forward, but the mental health needs of looked-after children have not been so successfully addressed The Bill is an opportunity to look at various areas of performance with regard to young people in care and care leavers. Gathering them in one place and obliging Parliament to look at them on an annual basis would really keep our focus on making the most effective difference. Of course, in the care system we have the notion of the corporate parent. In each local authority, I suppose the leader would be the corporate parent for the young people in the authority’s care. I suppose that principle extends somewhat to us as well in Parliament. What that means is sometimes difficult to explain. Obviously we do not have relationships with individual young people in care. In Barnet in the past, when Paul Fallon was the director of children’s services, it was ensured that each senior member of the council was an advocate for a young person in care. They did not meet that young person but their job was to follow the career, as it were, of the young person in care. They would write to people, nobble them and just be a champion for the young person in care. We in Parliament cannot meet and know young people in care but we can do our very best to be champions for them in this place. They are the children of the state. If we had the data at our fingertips we would be better equipped to do that A couple of weeks ago I attended the presentation by Dr Mark Kerr of his doctoral thesis. Dr Kerr left care with no educational qualifications. He subsequently has successfully gone through two degrees and it was a tremendously moving experience to hear him making his presentation on young people in care. The system can work well. Young people can do extremely well and it is on us to ensure that we do even better for them Amendment 29 is on children and homelessness. It puts a duty on the Secretary of State to lay data before Parliament on children who are homeless and at risk of homelessness. The purpose of bringing this forward is that child homelessness increases year on year. It now stands at about 90,000, and the number of children living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation increases year on year. There is a maximum limit on the time that a local authority is allowed to place children in bed-and-breakfast accommodation with their families. That is more and more often broken. We know about the housing shortages in particular areas, especially in London and the south-east. The purpose of the amendment is to focus our minds on these young people We might get better data. For instance, we could have data on children at risk of becoming homeless, on how effective we are at preventing children and their families from becoming homeless, and on children who are accepted as homeless with their families, in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, and so on. There is already a statutory duty to gather data on homeless children but there are various duties. There is a different duty for 16 and 17 year-olds which local authorities are obliged to have, so it might be helpful to have in one place a more thought-through approach to this There is an interdepartmental group looking at homelessness, which I welcome. Perhaps this is a bit far from the Minister’s remit, but I would like to know more about how that is progressing. On this issue, particularly given the fact of ever-increasing immigration, there needs to be a senior Minister looking at this, taking forward and championing this matter of family homelessness and having a strategy to really make a difference across the Department of Health, the DWP and the Department for Communities and Local Government. Such a change as this would be helpful in taking that forward My final point is on children in families living in problem debt. I am not sure how much time I have taken and I want to take as little time as possible, but this is a very important matter. The Government have decided to replace the child poverty measures with new life-chances indicators, focusing on measuring the number of children in workless households and the number of children with low levels of educational attainment. When the Secretary of State announced this change, he also highlighted the importance of problem debt in understanding child poverty and children’s life chances. The absence of a measure of problem debt has always been a limitation of the current Child Poverty Act. I know, from the families that I have had experience of, that where a family faces problem debt, a large proportion of family income can go on repaying debt every month, substantially reducing the money available for meeting the basic needs of children in the household. As shown in the report The Debt Trap, families in problem debt owe, on average, £3,437, or an estimated total of £4.8 billion, in arrears to service providers, creditors and government, both national and local. The social cost of problem debt is as high as £8.3 billion.