Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Motion to Take Note

Moved by

That this House takes note of the Report from the Public Services Committee Children in crisis: the role of public services in overcoming child vulnerability (1st Report, Session 2021-22, HL Paper 95).

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to introduce this report to the House before the Recess. The report makes it clear that the UK faces a crisis in child vulnerability. In England alone, over a million children are growing up with reduced life chances, and children paid a very heavy price during the pandemic. The national lockdowns, while necessary, had a severe impact on their education and their mental health. However, things were bad long before the outbreak of Covid-19. The last decade has seen our most disadvantaged children and young people being let down. We have seen cuts to early years and early intervention support, despite the raft of research which shows how important it is to a child’s long-term educational success and life chances, with rising child poverty, criminal exploitation and gang violence, while the gap in attainment at school between the richest and poorest children has continued to grow. Our children deserve better.

Spending on early help for families, such as Sure Start and children’s centres, family support and youth services, was cut by 48% between 2010-11 and 2019-20. Our report found that this had a devastating impact on communities across the country. In 2019, before the pandemic, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England estimated that 1.6 million children were living in homes with serious parental mental illness, addiction, domestic violence or other concerns, but found that support for these children was either patchy or non-existent. It also found that 829,000 of these children were completely invisible to services. This got worse over lockdown. This decimation of family support services has not only damaged the life chances of disadvantaged children but makes very little economic sense. If children and families are unable to access the support that they need when they need it, small problems can escalate into full-blown crises such as joining a gang, being expelled from school or ending up in care. As a result, councils have been forced to spend almost £2 billion a year more since 2010 on crisis management services such as youth justice services, safeguarding and looking after children in the social care system. Ironically, the decision by successive Governments to slash family support services has therefore resulted in an unprecedented increase in the role of the state in family life. In 2015, 69,000 children in England were in care, but by March 2020 the figure was 80,080.

My Lords, it is a privilege to be a member of the Public Services Committee, so ably chaired by my noble friend Lady Armstrong, and to speak in this debate, along with other colleagues and, indeed, former colleagues from the committee. Our inquiry was both illuminating and distressing, all the more so because many of us have worked in child protection for many years and found the same old problems of lack of recognition, lack of co-ordination, lack of a comprehensive strategy and lack of collaboration between agencies with which we have unfortunately been familiar for too many years. It was, to say the least, dispiriting.

To all these old problems was added the pandemic, with 1 million children growing up with reduced life chances, as my noble friend said, public services offering too little, too late, and local services undermined not only through lack of funding but through a lack of the information that would enable them to protect children, such as how many young people took up caring roles as support services were withdrawn as the pandemic progressed. We have no accurate figures about that.

In my brief remarks, I will concentrate on two areas where we found failings but which could, if addressed, provide some early wins and huge steps forward to protecting vulnerable children. The first is a lack of proper engagement with users—children and families—when services are designed. The evidence we received from users of services was the most powerful of all. Six focus groups and seven evidence sessions with parents and children really brought home to the committee the problems faced by families and shaped our recommendations. In short, services must be responsive to individual needs and must be co-produced.

I quote Emma in our report:

“I feel [that public services] just ignore children’s voices. When my mum was going through issues with her mental health, they asked her if she needed any services and she said we were fine. I felt like I needed help, but nobody listened to me. No one wanted to hear my voice.”

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley. It was a genuine pleasure to serve on this committee during this inquiry, and I pay tribute to my very knowledgeable colleagues on the committee—in particular, our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, who carefully steered us through this—and to the clerks at that time, who, among other things, gave great guidance and worked extremely hard to ensure that we obtained the best evidence. An awful lot of it was available for this inquiry.

The report is wide-ranging and, as can be seen, covers some important aspects—far too many to mention. Two particular aspects of the inquiry triggered an interest with me: the use of data, and the enormous benefit of family hubs.

One of the more fundamental aspects of the inquiry, as detailed in the report’s introduction, demonstrated the lack of co-ordination by central government—no news there, you might say—and national regulators, which, we were told,

“undermined the ability of local services working with families to collaborate effectively, intervene early and share information to keep vulnerable children safe and improve their lives.”

Of course, this was not helped by the barriers to sharing data on vulnerable children. For example, we heard from various sources that

“if they wanted to access help they would have to go through avenues where their parents would be involved, which could discourage them to share information with services”.

We heard from the Cabinet Office, which said that public servants faced a complex dilemma about their duty of privacy and how they contrast that with doing the right thing. Witnesses also suggested that the necessity

“for parental consent before data could be shared, and uncertainty among frontline professionals about thresholds for sharing data on at-risk children, inhibited the sharing of vital information.”

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies, in this debate. I am immensely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and all those who have produced this outstanding report. One of the most impressive things about it is that one hears the voices of those who are so often not heard.

I think that the move from Sure Start to family hubs is a model for how we respond. The challenge of looking at the poorest and most vulnerable in our society today is such an important focus for us. The model of the family hub is absolutely invaluable, because in lengthening the time over which a person might need encouragement and help beyond the formative years of nought to five, we remind ourselves that being human is not a problem that can be solved with a quick fix of investment. It is actually a long-term story of investment and hope, of failure and recovery. That perspective, looking at nought to 19, is a really important one. I was also very encouraged by seeing the recognition of the needs of 18 to 25 year-olds, as people move into young adulthood, which is still a very important area.

When I was first ordained as a bishop and working in the north-east, on Teesside, the Sure Start centre in Grangetown—one of the most deprived parts of Middlesbrough—was an incredible place to go to because it offered hope, in contrast to so much that was derelict in life and the environment around there. What I saw there was that this was about families; this was about giving hope not only to children who were vulnerable but to the parents of those children, who did not really know quite how to deal with this gift that they had. Seeing parents with very tiny children being given the skills to parent their child was incredibly moving, and fruitful, of course, in terms of hope for the future.

Another thing I came across in that instance was somebody who, as a child, had been a victim of all the vices that he might have encountered in that area of Middlesbrough. He had fallen foul of the law and had ended up literally in the gutter, where he was picked up by a Christian woman and put back on his feet over the course of time. He established a small charity called Father to the Fatherless—a quotation from Psalm 68. He talked to young male adults—late teenagers—about what he had been, how he had failed and how he had found life, hope and potential for the future.

My Lords, it has become customary to say it is a pleasure to follow the previous speaker, but it is a real pleasure and honour to follow the right reverend Prelate. There were so many interesting insights but also challenges to the committee, so I thank him for that. I need to draw attention to my interests as set out in the register, in particular my current interest as a non-exec at Ofsted; I recused myself where necessary during the inquiry.

I start by paying tribute to the chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. I miss serving on her committee, as it was a natural move for me to go over to the committee on the review of the Children and Families Act 2014, so ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield. I want to take a moment to say that the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, chaired this inquiry with real verve and sensitivity. She and I disagreed from time to time, but she never got into political point-scoring, although some may say that she has now got plenty of opportunity. I have observed her throughout the pandemic and beyond; she is somebody who has continued to work tirelessly for vulnerable children and women in the most horrendous circumstances. I thank her wholeheartedly.

I hesitated but I feel that I need to say a few words about the wider context for tonight’s debate. I am very glad that my noble friend the Minister is the person to respond to it. I am not sure how she feels about it, but she too has dedicated a lot of her life to helping those in need. She certainly needs no lectures from me about how frustrating it is for many of us to debate this in the current circumstances, but we must plough on because we owe it to those people that we have heard about who gave evidence to the committee, sometimes in private and with exceptional bravery. We need to ensure that their voices are heard.

As we have heard, one of the most disturbing realisations highlighted by many of the witnesses was the fact that the pandemic silenced many of those most in need of attention. We have heard again about the number of vulnerable children who became invisible to services, which is why there was such a sense of urgency in the committee’s recommendations. I pay tribute to the millions of public servants and voluntary workers doing sterling work up and down the country. We were lucky to hear from many of them first hand, but we also heard of structural or systemic issues that mean services too often are piecemeal or almost impossible to navigate.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, and to speak this evening on the committee’s report. I mention my non-executive directorship of the Cabinet Office so as to declare that interest.

I join everyone else, first, in saying how much I enjoyed the company of the people who I shared time with on the committee, as I learnt a great deal, and, secondly, in paying tribute to our leader. The noble Baroness did a great job in showing how to lead a group of very opinionated and strong characters, while showing all the skills she had as the Chief Whip for the Tony Blair Government. Her deft skills kept us all in control and guided us in the right way, while listening to everything that we had said. I say thank you to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for that leadership.

I really want to talk about only two areas. The first is the Government’s rejection of the committee’s recommendation to have a national child vulnerability strategy. The second is the recommendation to have more data sharing for the benefit of the vulnerable child, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, remains a concern that we have both probably experienced in another sphere in our professional life. It continues to remain a problem even today.

On the Government saying that they do not want to produce a national strategy, their argument was, first, that they were already taking a strategic approach and, secondly, that a single strategy covering too broad an area of policy risks becoming unmanageable. I thought both arguments were really weak: if the Government have a strategic approach, surely they have recorded it somewhere; if not, I would argue that it will be applied inconsistently. But if it has been written down, surely it could be published. I did not think that was a very strong argument.

Surely the point of strategies is that they are needed in broad areas of complex policy issues, such as vulnerable children. This is crying out for a national approach, with consistency, and to make sure that the right priorities are addressed in the future.

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly in the gap. As others have said, it was a real privilege and pleasure to be a member of the Public Services Committee, under the admirable leadership of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, when this very important inquiry was undertaken. As we have heard, the report contains a number of very important recommendations, and I have been pleased to be able to pursue some of these issues relating to kinship care, mental health and other things in my new role as chair of the Select Committee conducting post-legislative scrutiny of the Children and Families Act 2014.

As we have heard from the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Hogan-Howe, the report contained some important recommendations on information and data sharing, and I wanted to add a small postscript. In the report, we highlighted the important issue of how legislative and practice barriers meant that vulnerable children were already falling through the gaps between local agencies, being invisible to social services, the NHS and the education system. We highlighted agencies feeling unable to share the data that they needed to determine which children needed their help.

I was pleased to be able to take forward some amendments to the recent Health and Care Act that were very much inspired by the work that we have done in this committee, particularly on highlighting the need for a consistent child identifier, or what is sometimes called a unique identifier. I am really pleased that, as a result of those discussions, the Act now commits the Government to laying a report before Parliament within a year, setting out their policy on information sharing, et cetera. I know that a review in a year might perhaps sound like a modest step forward, but it is important. Many parliamentarians and charities have been campaigning on this for many years, and I am very much looking forward to seeing that report next year. Can the Minister say anything about the progress and timing of it?

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate, with many issues raised, questions asked and challenges given. I am sure that the Minister will be able to respond with her usual careful consideration.

This important report starts by reminding us that over 1 million children are growing up with reduced life chances. This stark reality has negative implications for us all, not just those children and their families. For the children concerned, it may lead to lower educational attainment, with a knock-on impact on their life chances in employment, for example. When policymakers focus on skill levels that are not meeting our current needs, as they often do, they should be required to consider the evidence in this ground-breaking report. It demonstrates that too many of our nation’s children are raised in family circumstances that restrict their development. The sad fact is that intervention by the state is too little and far too late for many of these children. Worse still, the evidence gathered by the report points to the colossal waste of public funding in the failure to intervene early in these children’s lives.

I record my thanks to the chair of the committee, on which I was lucky enough to serve, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, for her leadership and her persistence in following the evidence and then finally gathering us all together to agree—which was not always easy—in the production of this report, which I sincerely believe is invaluable.

I will focus my contribution this evening on funding issues. This is where I will disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, because I think funding, and the lack of it, is at the heart of this report. Lots of other issues are very important and have been raised, including data sharing.

I do not think I said that funding was not important. I said that some witnesses had pointed to problems that I thought were not necessarily directly related to funding; they were about communication issues and join-up. Indeed, at times I have called for extra funding for early years myself.