Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

My Lords, my early training was as a social worker and I have continued throughout my career to maintain an interest in looked-after children, as we now call them. I find that a difficult phrase because too often we complain that they have not been sufficiently well looked after. I have also had a lifelong relationship with Action for Children and currently carry out the role of an ambassador for it, which is a bit strange, but there you go. I want to ensure that no one thinks I have interests that I am not talking about. One of my greatest privileges in my previous job as Minister for the Cabinet Office was being given responsibility for social exclusion. I was challenged by the Prime Minister to take a new look at children in care. That has informed many of my views and concerns about the some of the actions that the Government are now taking. I was tempted to raise the Fawcett Society report, because the Minister has once again justified everything on the basis of reducing the deficit. Everybody accepts that there is a deficit, but it is claimed that it is our fault. Yet the Minister acknowledges that it was important to bail out Northern Rock; indeed, the Government now feel able to bail out Ireland with £6 billion. I agree with that, but the Minister should temper the way in which he raises the issue. Whatever our view of how the deficit should be tackled, it is absolutely clear that the people who will suffer most from the Bill and the manner in which the Government are imposing their deficit reduction programme are women and children. I do not think that that was the Government’s intention, but it is the effect of their not adopting the approaches to budget assessment that they have been implored to adopt. We were implored to take the same approach. Gender budgeting is not new. Many organisations have urged Governments to take it more seriously. I attended with the Chief Whip in 2007 a United Nations conference in New York which looked exclusively at gender budgeting. The ideas have been around for a long time. It saddens me that the Government forgot about them when looking at how they would cut the deficit. There is now a lot of debate about how child poverty can be reduced and how children can grow up in a way that enables them to take advantage of their potential. The importance of assets is also recognised. They are more important than they ever were when I was born. Then, very few people could benefit from their parents being able to sell their house, for example; now, it is the expectation among the vast majority of people in this country that they will benefit from some sort of asset transfer. For looked-after children and children from the poorest neighbourhoods, that prospect is still a long way away. That was not the sole reason for introducing child trust funds, but I assure the Minister that it was none the less debated and discussed in think tanks, voluntary organisations and in government when they were being set up. I know very well the views of the Liberal Democrats—I have listened to them on many occasions in the other place—but I simply disagree. We have to find a way in which our poorest children can have the same rights of expectation as other children take for granted. Building up an asset that they can take advantage of is an important part of giving them the same opportunities that others take for granted. I am prepared to have the debate about whether that was the most effective way, but I none the less will continue to argue that it was a noble aspiration and one that we should not lose. I mainly wanted to intervene because of my concern for looked-after children. We cannot afford to be complacent. The work done by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, over many years is to be commended. Many other people in this House have also continued to talk about the needs of looked-after children. But we have such a long way to go. I had the opportunity to go to other countries to look at what was happening. One of the interesting things is that we say that the local authority or the state becomes the corporate parent. Many other countries refuse to do that. I was concerned about something in the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Newby. He said that looked-after children do not have parents. They mainly do, but the parents simply do not know how to parent or look after their responsibilities. In many other countries they say, ““We are not the substitute parents. We are there to form a bridge between what went wrong with those children when they had to leave home and what is happening to them now””. That is probably a healthier position to be in. We should recognise that it does not matter how damaged the background, the children themselves want to be part of the family and want to know about the parents, even if in many people's judgment that is the worst place they could be. We take responsibility in this country for the state being the corporate parent. Yet, as I have heard from young person after young person, they leave care with something like £30. That is it. They leave care with virtually nothing. Many of them leave care without the personal resources to be able to cope. I suspect that there is not a parent in this House who would kick their kids out when they were 16 or 18. We have tried to extend the responsibility for leaving care beyond 18, but it does not happen everywhere and it does not always happen. No one in this House who had parental responsibilities would say, ““That’s it: you're on your own. You get nothing””. It is a shame on us that we are the corporate parent and yet we are not prepared to take any of the measures that we as individuals would expect to take in respect of our own children. We are in real difficulty with this Bill because of the money Bill issue. I do not want to run around the technicalities, but the expectation in the other place was that this Bill could be amended here and then returned to the Commons for consideration. Now that cannot happen. Therefore, I want to go further than other Members. It is not good enough to say that the Government will continue to discuss this issue. We have the right to expect today from the Minister an absolute commitment that the Government will legislate to make sure that an equivalent of the child trust fund is made available to children and young people who are in care. It needs to be a statutory provision. If it is not, the Government will be able to say that it is up to local authorities. I agree with the principle of loosening ring-fencing, but the problem is that there is no ring-fencing around the needs of disadvantaged children or for child protection. When local authorities get their settlement, in the announcement that I expect in the next week, many will have a 30 per cent or even greater reduction in their budget. We are told to expect an average of 28 per cent. Having been responsible for the local government settlement for more years than I care to remember, I know that that means that some will get worse than a 30 per cent reduction and some will have a smaller reduction than that. I predict that the ones that do worse will already be the poorest, given other decisions made by the Government, whereby special grants to local authorities for looking after the most deprived have disappeared. It is almost inevitable that when the settlement comes out it will affect very harshly many of the already most deprived neighbourhoods. In those circumstances, we cannot do this on a wish and a prayer. We have to be convinced that there will be legislation that will defend the interests of looked-after children and make sure that, however small it is, we none the less recognise the importance of their being able to have an asset that they can take with them when they become 18 and leave care. I understand that the Government are drafting legislation quickly, and I am even prepared to grant that they may not have realised that they would not have the chance to amend the Bill again, but they do not have that opportunity. We need to know that legislation will be brought forward in good time to make sure that looked-after children are looked after by this Government.