My Lords, I too thank the Minister for introducing this Bill and welcome much of what it has to offer. I was particularly pleased to hear him say in his opening remarks that families and children should not be adapting themselves to the system, but rather that the system should be adjusting itself to the needs of children and families. I hope we can apply that principle to this Bill.
I would like to report on the important progress that the Government are making to safeguard children in children’s homes, following the grooming of girls as young as 12 by gangs of men. I will touch briefly on youth policy and then I will come to the Bill and look at children in care, care leavers and child care briefly.
First, I pay tribute to the coalition Government for their commitment to continue funding international development to the tune of 0.7% of annual national income. At 0.7%, we are the most generous nation in the world. This sets a fine example for others to follow and makes a huge difference to children and families across the developing world.
There is concern that the Government’s welcome attention to adoption has been at the expense of attention to other placements. The noble Baroness, Lady Drake, gave a very eloquent speech about the importance of kinship care. I earnestly look forward to the Government extending their attention to these other areas. However, I would like to put on record my gratitude for their giving attention to the very important area of residential childcare.
Your Lordships may recall that the vast majority of children enter care because of abuse or family breakdown. Residential care has been an option of last resort, so children may have experienced 20 or 30 placements before arriving at a children’s placement and may even have had one or two adoption breakdowns. The vulnerability of these children and our failure to recognise their needs have been highlighted by the cases of gangs sexually exploiting children in Rochdale, Oxford and elsewhere.
The media, particularly the Times newspaper, have done an excellent job at drawing our attention to our failure in these matters. The honourable Anne Coffey MP galvanised the parliamentary response and her report on children missing from care was greeted by the honourable Tim Loughton MP, the then Minister, who set up three working groups to address the concerns expressed. Just last week, the honourable Edward Timpson MP, the new Minister of State for Children, launched three consultations that addressed changes to regulations on out-of-authority placements, data sharing and missing children. I draw the attention of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, to this particular regulation change.
Encouraging work is being undertaken on improving the consistency and quality of staff in children’s homes, and the Local Government Association is undertaking work on improved commissioning of residential care. There is a great deal further to go but the Government have made a good start.
On a further point outwith the Bill: last month’s report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, recommended that there should be a cross-departmental strategy for youth in this country. I commend the report’s recommendation to the Minister and your Lordships. We must do all that we can at this very difficult time to support our young people.
Turning to the Bill and looking at care leavers, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester referred to, I very much hope that we can seize the possibility to improve the life prospects of young people leaving care. These young people are hugely overrepresented in the secure estate, one-quarter of the adult population have care experience in prison, some research has put teenage pregnancy rates of care-leaving girls as high as 50% per cent and they are overrepresented in many areas, including rough sleeping.
The Association of Directors of Children’s Services highlighted the importance of continuity of relationships in their recent report. Continuity of relationships is important above all else for these young people. Young people have always said that and we need to find ways of achieving it. Most importantly, most obviously and most imperatively, we need to allow young people passing the age of 18 to remain with their foster carer under supported lodging arrangements where they so wish. Young people leave the family home on average at the age of 24 in this country. The corporate parent should offer no less a support for young people in our care.
A couple of pilots have looked at the impact of allowing young people to remain with their foster carers to the age of 21. They found improvements in retention in employment, training and education. I think there was a doubling in the number of young people staying on in higher education. While the average retention past 18 is now about 8% in local authorities, in the staying-put pilots in Northern Ireland they were getting up to 25%. A study from the University of Chicago found that, even in the short term, local authorities made savings by caring better in this way for their young people.
I would welcome advice from the Minister and noble Lords on an amendment to enable all those young people in foster care in this country to remain with their foster carers to the age of 21 should they choose. This is a very modest proposal. While there has historically been a shortage of foster carers, recruitment is currently going well and many of those who might provide such supported lodging will in any event be retiring from fostering. The cost to roll this out would be about £2.7 million initially and local authorities would soon recoup that expenditure from savings in social care interventions. Society would benefit in the longer term with fewer children entering care, from their parents who are wanting care themselves, and with fewer care leavers in custody, on benefit or needing support from the health service. A couple of weeks ago we heard from a young man at the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children and Young People in Care and Leaving Care. He said: “I have eight days left to go to my 18th birthday. I’m not ready to leave. What am I going to do?”.
Moving to childcare, I commend the proposals of the honourable Andrea Leadsom MP to the Minister encouraging local authorities to have registrars go into Sure Start children’s centres once a week to register births. This has been shown to be best practice in encouraging fathers and mothers to make contact with the home. Very often they will then go back to make use of the services in the homes. It is a very good method of reaching out to the hardest-to-reach families and getting fathers early on in the child’s life engaged fully in the care of that child. There were concerns from local authorities about the removal of the childcare sufficiency duty, and I look forward to discussing that with the Committee in due course.
I think that my time is up. I reiterate my thanks to the coalition Government for their support and leadership for families and children in the developing world. I thank the Minister and his colleagues for their work on residential care. There is a lot more to do but a
good start has been made. I hope that your Lordships will feel able to offer some support in moving towards the possibility of young people leaving care having the option to stay with their foster parents when they choose to do so.
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