My Lords, this is a very important group of amendments, and I very much support my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley in her Amendments 78F, 79E, 79H, 88C, 88E and 88F. I also support my noble friend the Leader of the Opposition in her Amendment 79L, emphasising the importance of working with the National Health Service.
My Amendments 79F, 79J and 79M in Clause 2 concern the position of young carers. They aim essentially to ensure that local authorities provide or arrange services to prevent young carers from developing needs for care and support, as well as preventing and reducing needs for adults and adult carers. The 2011 census identified 178,000 young carers who have to care for a relative in England and Wales alone. It is good that the Government have now acknowledged that, given the changes being introduced by the Care Bill for adult carers, the law must also be reviewed for young carers. However, we need a much clearer indication of what these changes will look like and particularly of how the Care Bill will ensure that adults receive sufficient care and support so that children are protected from excessive and inappropriate caring roles. We cannot have a situation where people have unmet care and support needs, which results in children and young people having to meet these needs.
I recently met a young man who had been caring for someone in his family for most of his life. He told me that it would have made a huge difference to him if his family had received support earlier. If this had happened, his caring responsibilities might not have had such a clear and serious impact on his education. He is doing well now and hopes to go to university, but it has clearly been extremely challenging for him to stay in education, and there are many thousands of other young people who have been similarly affected. That is why my amendments to Clause 2 are so important. They make clear that local authorities must take steps to prevent children from carrying out caring duties that have a detrimental effect on their health and well-being. Can the noble Earl assure me that the Care Bill will be amended to ensure that this is the case? If he can, I would welcome an indication of which parts of the Bill will be amended so that young carers are protected.
My other amendments on this issue are to Clause 12, which provides for regulations on whole-family assessment. Again, the Government have indicated that they will look at how the law might be changed for young carers in the Bill, but it is not clear how that might be done. We know that currently adult social care services and health services routinely fail to identify children who may be caring for an adult, even where the adult is assessed. That also applies to educational establishments. That means that often children can continue to undertake harmful caring roles and end up developing needs for care and support themselves.
It is very important that adult needs assessments relate to any child in the household, so that inappropriate caring by children is prevented and children's needs for support are prevented or reduced. The law must be
clear that adult services need to help to identify young carers. The presence of a young carer should always constitute an appearance of need for the family and should automatically trigger an assessment of the person for whom they care. Can the noble Earl confirm that this is indeed the Government’s view? Will it be made clear, through primary care or regulations, that there should be consideration of whether a joint child and adult assessment would be appropriate and that children’s services should work together; consideration of whether any child should be assessed for support in their own right under children’s law; and consideration of whether lower-level support may be needed for the whole family, including the child?
It is a pity that we are taking this important debate at so late an hour, and no doubt we will return to this matter on Report, but I look forward to the noble Earl’s response.
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