Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Report (3rd Day)

Amendment 90

90: After Clause 27, insert the following new Clause— “Report: barriers to parental support in the care and wellbeing of critically ill children(1) Within twelve months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must lay before each House of Parliament a report on the barriers preventing parents of critically ill children aged between 29 days and 16 years from being by their children’s bedsides during periods of hospital care and the impact and potential harms this has on children’s care, wellbeing and family life.(2) A report laid under subsection (1) must include assessments of—(a) the adequacy of existing measures in facilitating the care, wellbeing and family life of critically ill children aged between 29 days and 16 years by their parents,(b) the barriers facing parents of such children, including—(i) financial pressures,(ii) pressures arising from the parent’s existing or future employment commitments, and(iii) mental health difficulties,(c) options for providing additional support to the parents of such children during periods of hospital care, and(d) the impact such additional support would be likely to have on such children’s care, wellbeing and family life. (3) In preparing the report laid under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must consult—(a) parents of children who have received care in hospital for an extended period,(b) healthcare professionals, and(c) charities and civil society organisations offering support to parents of children receiving care in hospital.(4) In preparing a report laid under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must have regard to the UK’s international obligations, including under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989.(5) A Minister of the Crown must within the period of 28 Commons sitting days beginning with the laying of a report under subsection (1) make arrangements for a debate on the report by the House of Commons.(6) A Minister of the Crown must within the period of 28 Lords sitting days beginning with the laying of a report under subsection (1) make arrangements for a debate on the report by the House of Lords.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment seeks to require the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the barriers preventing parents of critically ill children aged between 29 days and 16 years from being by their bedside during periods of hospital care, including financial and workplace pressures, and mental health needs, and the impact this has on the child’s care, wellbeing and family life.

My Lords, Amendment 90 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, seeks to require the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the barriers preventing parents of critically ill children being by their bedside.

I have been working with Ceri and Frances Menai-Davis for around a year. After their son Hugh passed away, they could have stepped back. Instead, they made a conscious decision to stand up and try to change the lives of other families. They are in the south-west Gallery today, as they have been for previous debates. They have turned the most devastating personal loss into a determination to make sure that other parents are not left to face the same failures that they experienced.

When Hugh died in 2021, Ceri and Frances left the hospital at 11.30 pm. When the doors closed behind them, Hugh was still in there, and suddenly they were out of the system. They stood outside with their bags, trying to work out how they could carry on. They had a three year-old child at home whom they had not seen for three weeks. There was no transport, which they did not expect, and they took an hour and a half taxi ride home in silence while the driver chatted about football and the weather, unaware that their world had just collapsed.

When they walked through their front door, everything was still there: toys, unfinished drawings and the remains of Hugh’s birthday cake still in the kitchen. The pain was unbearable. They woke the next morning and sat in silence. Then, Hugh’s younger brother, Raife, woke up, who they had not seen in three weeks, and said, “Where’s Hughie?” There was no guidance and no support, and they had to do what no other parent should ever have to do: look online.

Ceri tried to access mental health support, but no one could help. The GP was unaware of their situation and just offered sleeping pills. Charities said that there was a 12-week wait. Ceri has been very clear with me that he simply would not have survived 12 weeks without immediate support. By chance, he was introduced to a trauma clinic, and it literally saved his life. The GP and the community team never called; the family were literally on their own.

My Lords, I will speak extremely briefly, having signed the amendment so powerfully introduced and presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. I did so after having met Ceri and Frances. I saw that the amendment did not have a second name attached to it and thought that there needed to be a demonstration that there is broader support there. I have no doubt that many noble Lords will have been moved by what we have just heard and would absolutely agree that action is urgently needed. We need to assess the situation and come up with a plan to deal with it, so other families are not put in this situation. Happily, this is relatively rare, but some 3,000 families a year are placed in this situation and they must be supported. I hope that we will hear some positive words from the Minister.

Briefly, Amendment 99 has not yet been introduced, but it seeks to address another tragic situation, where, again and again, children are born and taken away, usually from the same mother. I spoke extensively on that in Committee, so I will not repeat it now.

This is an important group of amendments. I hope we can see some positive direction forward and a further demonstration in your Lordships’ House that campaigning, often by people who have suffered so much, can make a difference and improvements in our society.

My Lords, I urge my noble friend the Minister to look at the amendment and think carefully about what the Government could conceivably do. I honestly think that anyone who has met Ceri, Frances or both of them could do nothing other than to say that we really need this, urgently. I will speak only briefly. When I met Ceri this week, he was delighted to say that Brentford Football Club, as an employer, is already taking this on and doing something about it. Clearly, there are people who feel that this is not just urgent but a matter of decency and humanity. We should find a way of doing something about it.

My Lords, I was not intending to speak to the amendment, but I also met Ceri this week, and it was a privilege to talk to him. I had not heard that part of his story until my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson told us about it.

I recently stepped down as a trustee of the children’s hospice Noah’s Ark, in Barnet. When I think about the support that families get there—not just during the course of their child’s illness and while they pass away but support for siblings, and the ability, through the Butterfly Suite, to be with the child they have recently lost for a number of days thereafter, through to follow-up and bereavement support that hospice staff provide, as well as advice on benefits and access, which might be crucial to the well-being of those parents —I am struck by the stark difference. That support is provided by charitable funds. It should not be that way. This is a postcode lottery. We have responsibilities to this group of families, who fight so bravely by themselves but who need our support and that holistic wraparound care.

My Lords, I strongly support Amendments 99 and 101, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. These are designed to tackle the sad and difficult problem of successive removals of children and babies from their parents, in particular from their mothers.

When a child is removed permanently under a court order, typically, a number of things can happen, and, indeed, not happen. The court which made the care order and consequent order for placement for adoption will have no further involvement. The local authority which brought the case may well have little or no further engagement with the birth family, who will receive no more attention and support, at least until there is another pregnancy, by which time it can be too late to address the underlying problems.

The mother, probably traumatised, may react to the first removal of a child with a bad decision to have another child, in the hope, rather than the expectation, that things will turn out better next time round, which is unlikely to occur. The mother and the father, if identified, will have become mistrustful of the local authority social workers and feel stigmatised and unwilling to seek or accept help. The mother may become hard to reach and may not reveal the next pregnancy until the last minute. Her underlying problems, by then, will not have been addressed; indeed, they may have become compounded.

Unless there has been some significant and unexpected change, the local authority will have no alternative but to start new care proceedings for the new child, usually with the same bad outcome as before. Speaking as someone who has had to deal with these cases, I know that those representing the mother and the court will struggle to find any real improvement or anything else to distinguish the case from that of the previous child. These are truly the most wretched cases for any court to deal with.

The charitable organisation Pause has considerable expertise in this area and has evolved a model of preventive support to break the cycle of repeated pregnancies and recurrent removals. The Nuffield Family Justice Observatory and others have had valuable input into this problem and highlighted the statistics. One in five care proceedings are repeat proceedings. The repeat proceedings are more likely to involve babies, and almost half of all newborn babies subject to care proceedings are born to mothers who have had a previous child removed. Indeed, it is quite likely that the mother herself will have been in the care system not so long before. The additional financial cost to local authorities for care proceedings and consequential adoption proceedings, and the support required to pay for foster care and adopters, is enormous. The human cost, obviously, is unresolved misery and grief.

My Lords, I rise briefly to lend my support to all three of these amendments. I was very pleased to add my name to Amendments 99 and 101 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran.

Listening to the debate today, I think this group is dealing with some of the most heartbreaking events that children and families ever face. It has really been very harrowing just to listen to the circumstances that some of these families have found themselves in. I was profoundly moved by the way the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, introduced her amendment. It is a really important amendment, and I very much hope that the Government will be able to look sympathetically at it.

I will just say a few words in addition to what the noble Lord, Lord Meston, has said, particularly about Amendment 99. As we heard from the noble Lord, almost half of newborns in care proceedings are born to mothers who have already been through proceedings with another child, so far too many children are entering care from parents who have already had at least one child removed from their care.

As we have heard, without support—and that is what this amendment is all about: the support that we want to see local authorities offering after a child is removed—parents, particularly mothers, are often left struggling to cope with all the existing difficulties that led to the child removal in the first place, while facing the additional trauma, grief and stigma of losing a previous child. This leads to further child removals too many times. It is simply a heartbreaking, vicious cycle.

But with the right support, parents can stabilise, overcome that trauma and make lasting change. The reason I feel so passionately about this is that in my time as chair of Cafcass, I was privileged to visit various Pause projects, to talk to the people who were providing the support and to talk to the mothers about the difference that having that support had made and why they now felt they could turn their lives around so that they would not find themselves in a position like that of a mother I was talking to—I think I said this in Committee, so forgive me if I am repeating myself—who had had eight children removed and now it was about the ninth child. We just cannot allow these situations to perpetuate. It is not something that a decent and humane society can do.

My Lords, I echo other noble Lords and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grey- Thompson, for her very powerful and moving speech. Sadly, like other noble Lords, I know families who have been touched in similar ways. Both personally and professionally, I hope that the Government listen to the noble Baroness’s advice.

My Amendments 99 and 101 have support from more than 20 children’s charities and the Children’s Commissioner, and I am very grateful to the co-signatories to my amendment. In Committee the response from the Minister focused on early help and family support that the Government will require local areas to deliver as a way of meeting the needs of these women. But as the noble Lord, Lord Meston, said, although the funding is obviously very warmly welcomed, it does not address the issues for families who have children removed into care, because once a child is removed from a parent’s care, services and support follow the child.

There is no requirement or expectation that the support needs formally identified for the woman during the care proceedings process will be provided after the removal of a child. Without support to change their circumstances, parents are vulnerable to repeat the same traumatic cycle that led to their first, second or—as the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said—eighth child being removed. I think the late Nick Crichton removed a 14th child from the same woman, which led to the work that has been referred to today. We know that almost half of newborns in care proceedings are born to families who have been through proceedings at least once.

My Amendment 99 would provide for stopping this cycle of recurrent removals through the provision of specialist support for parents. This would be right from a human point of view, as we have heard very powerfully today, but also from a financial point of view. There is clear evidence, including from the research commissioned by the Department for Education, that investment in these services leads to significant returns, as the noble Lord, Lord Meston, referred to—£4.50 for every £1 invested over four years—and greater gains over the longer term.

My Amendment 101 is also important because most local authorities do not know how many families are affected or the costs involved. If we can collect and publish that information, it will allow for better planning, accountability and targeted support.

In his letter to Peers on 17 December, the Minister for Children and Families touched on the issues of post-removal support and wrote that the Government are offering to publish a post-separation good practice resource, are talking to pathfinder areas and will update statutory guidance and share good practice examples. That is all very helpful but very far from enough.

I will of course listen to the Minister’s response, but if I do not hear a much more positive response to my amendments than in Committee, I am inclined to test the opinion of the House.

My Lords, I did not intend to speak but I too was greatly moved by the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and I have had the experience of trying to care for a child in intensive care while worrying about another child at home. It is not an experience I would wish on anyone. It led me to become a trustee of the Cosmic charity, which tries to help families going through these types of experiences at the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, said, charities do incredible work supporting families in the most difficult circumstances. I urge the Government to think about what work they could do to look at the amendment and to see what more could be done to support parents and children in this situation.

Switching lanes to a Treasury mindset, I also support my noble friend Lady Barran’s Amendments 99 and 101. I know that the Government are sincere in their efforts to give every child the best possible start in life. I also know that at the Treasury and across Whitehall there is a huge push on government efficiency. This strikes me as an area where our failure to invest properly and consider how we can prevent these tragedies occurring has a huge fiscal cost, as well as the enormous emotional cost that we have heard about today.