Children and Social Work Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-10-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Elspeth Howe (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I too begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for his amendment on mental health and the corporate parenting principle. I tabled an amendment on this issue in Committee and I am pleased to see that our concerns are being addressed. Ensuring that the mental and physical health of children in care reaches a point of parity is a welcome amendment. It represents an important statement of principle and I am pleased to see steps being taken towards achieving the ambitions set out in the Government’s Future in Mind strategy Principles are important, but so too are actions. I should like to use the remainder of my time to speak in support of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. There are currently more than 70,000 children in care in England—70,000 children who no longer live in their family home and who are reliant on the support of the state for all their needs. We have a duty to care for their physical safety, but we have a fundamental responsibility to care for their emotional well-being as well. It is not enough to remove a child from their family home and hope that this will be enough to change their lives. We must aim higher than this. We must aim to provide them with homes that are far better than the family homes they have just left It is vital that we find proactive ways of supporting children in care. The first step in this process is to identify the types of support from which a child in care would benefit most. To do this, we need to introduce mental health assessments for children entering care and throughout their time in the care system. The point at which they enter care is crucial, as other noble Lords have said. If a child’s first experiences of life in care are positive—if it becomes a space through which their mental health and emotional needs are attended to—then they will be so much more likely to thrive and have the confidence to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them. If problems are left unidentified, this can have particularly grave consequences for looked-after children The research report, Achieving Emotional Wellbeing for Looked After Children, published by the NSPCC last year, highlighted how children are particularly vulnerable when they experience poor emotional well-being while in care. This report illustrated the way in which poor mental health can lead to placement instability which, in turn, leads to a further decline in emotional well-being A teenage girl called Emily told the NSPCC about the impact that placement instability was having on her emotional well-being. She said: "I can’t cope any more. I have been in care my whole life and have been pushed around between foster families and adopted families. I feel so let down, broken hearted and like I don’t belong anywhere. No one wants me to be here so maybe I should do them a favour" What a horrible thought to come from anybody, let alone a child of that age Sadly, many children who enter care come from chaotic circumstances. Often they have never known what it was like to live in a safe, stable and secure family home. Entering care should be about giving them this stability but, sadly, this is not the experience of many looked-after children. Having the right support in place to help children make sense of their experiences from before they entered care is crucial. If we can find ways to help them manage their emotions in a safe way, many of the challenging behaviours that often lead to placement breakdown could be avoided. We can, and surely must, do better by these children. This strikes me as an eminently sensible place from which to start.