We welcome the coalition’s first Bill to focus on children and families. We especially welcome the fact that the Bill focuses on some of the children who are facing the greatest challenges, such as those with special educational needs and those in the care system.
We believe that the provisions on shared parental leave that build on the maternity and paternity leave entitlements of the last Government, and the measures to improve post-adoption support, are an important step forward for children, and we warmly welcome the introduction of child arrangement orders. However, we have heard considerable concerns from hon. Members throughout the debate about the real-world effect of some of these measures, and they need much greater scrutiny before the Bill becomes law. That is particularly true of the provisions on special educational needs, as highlighted by the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham); the exclusion of children with disabilities from care plans; and the potential postcode lottery of the local offer.
We share concerns raised by the Select Committee on Adoption Legislation in the House of Lords about the practical implications of removing the requirement to consider ethnicity when placing a child for adoption; about prescribing children’s best interests in primary legislation; and about the unusual, if not unique, attempt to impose strict time limits on care proceedings in primary legislation. The needs of individual children must remain paramount, both in principle and in practice. While we welcome the efforts made by the Minister so far to accommodate the concerns that have been raised with him, we believe that the Bill can be significantly improved in those areas and we will seek to work with Ministers to achieve changes as the Bill makes progress.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) outlined, the Bill contains some good measures, but we believe that it will come to be
characterised less by what is in it and more by what is not. It is a Bill about vulnerable children and families, but it says nothing about the problems facing young carers, trafficked and migrant children, and children who have been abused and ill-treated. We know that action is needed in these areas, but where is the action and urgency for those children? In the words of 10-year-old Paige, as reported by Save the Children:
“It doesn’t get any better. It gets worse and worse as the days go on.”
Where is the strategy for children such as Paige, after the dismantling of the Every Child Matters framework?
In line with the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), we will consider how to ensure that the Bill introduces more support for children who have been abused and ill-treated, and who face the prospect of the courts. We will consider how to ensure that the needs of children in the wider care system are not neglected. We are concerned that the Bill is unbalanced. The focus on adoption is welcome, but it should not come at the expense of attention on other children in the care system, the majority of whom are in foster care placements, at a time when we have a shortage of nearly 9,000 foster carers. We share the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), who spoke compellingly about the situation facing children for whom kinship care is and should be the right option.
We want to know what the Government intend to do to ensure that children can remain with their birth parents where that is in their best interests. We are very concerned about the stripping away of support for those children at a time when families are under huge pressure up and down the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) has uncovered the huge cuts that have been made to the early intervention grant and she highlighted the disappearance of more than 400 Sure Start centres since the last election. Recently, the Government took even more of the early intervention grant to pay for their adoption reforms, as my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) pointed out. For some children, remaining with their birth family is the right option: where is the support for them?
The Bill fails to address some of the stark challenges that children face. This is their Bill—it is not our Bill or the Government’s Bill. It is for and belongs to the one in five children who go to school hungry, without decent shoes, without decent clothes and without basic essentials; for the estimated 1.5 million children who, according to Action for Children, are growing up in neglect; for the record numbers of children in the care system; and for the nearly 9,000 homeless families, 2,000 of whom are languishing in bed and breakfast accommodation, up by 51% in the past year.
At a time like this families need support more than ever, but the safety net is being eroded, creating a perfect storm for some children. The Bill is completely silent on the wider problems. The cuts to local authorities are particularly important, because parts of the Bill require social workers to take on an even bigger and more responsible role—for example, in the court process, and in deciding to place children in fostering for adoption arrangements before the court has made a decision. Those are crucial decisions for children, yet nearly eight in 10 social workers say that they are overburdened. The
situation for independent reviewing officers—often the voice of children—is just as difficult. Without action from Government, the reforms could easily work against, not for, children’s best interests.
That is why we warmly welcome the strengthening of the role and remit of the Children’s Commissioner for England. At a time when the reality for some children is very bleak indeed, as illustrated by the bedroom tax, and their needs are easily overlooked by other parts of Government, children need a strong voice. We therefore support the Government’s measures to strengthen the role of the Children’s Commissioner. We will seek in Committee to further strengthen its powers, its remit and its independence.
While we welcome some of the measures in the Bill that help the people who matter most to children—the key adults in their lives—through the shared parental leave provisions and the post adoption support provisions, we have concerns about the capacity of an overstretched, hard-working children’s work force to meet those rising needs. We will therefore seek to improve the Bill in Committee, so that the system gives more support to families—not just to parents who have children with special educational needs, but to siblings and others who play an active role in helping a child at home. We want to be sure that the pathfinder schemes for personal budgets provide concrete proof that they will result in better outcomes for children before they are rolled out. That is our key test for the Bill: does it improve the situation of the children whom it seeks to help?
We are concerned that too often the Government are not child-focused; that too often they see children through the eyes of adults, not adults and adult systems through the eyes of children. It is why we are concerned by measures—for example, the time limits on court proceedings, as we heard from the Chair of the Justice Committee—that seek to prescribe the solution for individual children. We have heard a great deal about them in the course of the debate. It is important to retain individual flexibility for individual children, and we will seek to press the Government on that point in Committee.
We heard concerns from all parts of the House about attempts to define children’s best interests in law. We heard a welcome assurance from the Minister that that is not about seeking to define parents’ rights against children’s rights, but our concerns remain. We share the concerns of the Children’s Commissioner, and many of the organisations working with children, that this sends a dangerous signal that the paramountcy of children’s welfare is being diluted. While we agree strongly with the Government that parental involvement is in the best interests of children, so too are other relationships with grandparents, siblings, step-parents and friends. That is what children say matters to them, and we believe that they ought to be listened to and treated as individuals when decisions that affect them are made.
We will seek to give children a long overdue voice and ensure that the Bill reflects their priorities, not the Government’s, and the stark reality of the situation they face. While we will support strongly the Minister’s efforts where they improve the lives of some children, today we are laying down a challenge to the Government: work with us to improve the lives of more children. At present, many children are silent and invisible in the Bill, and do not have the childhoods that they, or we,
would wish or expect. We lay down a challenge to Ministers to work with us during the passage of the Bill to do better by them.
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