My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 5, and to Amendments 8 and 9.
I want to include homeless families. I want them to have the offer of 30 hours’ high-quality childcare each week. More than 90,000 children in England are living in temporary accommodation, and more than 2,000 families in England are living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. These are the worst figures in seven years.
I do not know who is to blame for the current situation, but we seem somehow not to have produced enough housing. As a landlord, I know how challenging it is to be a landlord. I feel how badly we, as a nation, have all let these wonderful families down by not providing adequate housing for them. I think there can be some ambivalence about social housing. I have heard a couple of colleagues say, and I understand their concern, “If you offer social housing, then young women will have babies in order to get on the housing list, and we will be creating a culture of dependency”. My response to that is “Perhaps some might”. There is the other perverse situation in which women may bring up children on their own because, in order to get a home, the father has to live separately. On the continent, they seem to be more humane, and they do produce sufficient housing. In Italy, Germany and France the rate of teenage pregnancies is lower than ours. They do not have as much family breakdown as we do. So, experience elsewhere suggests that that ambivalence about providing adequate housing for our people is not necessary. People, families, need decent homes if they are to thrive and do well and secure employment. That is the context of the amendment.
Many years ago, I went with a health visitor to a number of households in Redbridge, in east London. One had damp running down the walls, another had a flooded basement that the landlord would do nothing about. In one, bizarrely, the lavatory was somehow part of the shower arrangement. The mother slept with her child in her bed. The provision was overcrowded and of poor quality.
I have also spoken on a number of occasions with mothers in temporary accommodation. Barnardo’s used to run a project called Families in Temporary Accommodation, managed by John Reacroft. I was fortunate to speak to those mothers about their experience. What I gathered from them is the isolation they have experienced: they might well be placed many miles away from their community, their family, their friends, and they might have to make a number of bus journeys to get where they need to go. Of course, there was also the uncertainty in their lives resulting from living in temporary accommodation.
I therefore encourage the Government to accept this part of the amendment, so that such children can get respite from an unstable and chaotic situation at home, and can have the stability of a hopefully high-quality nursery placement. I ask the Minister to consider asking the Education Secretary if there might be some ministerial discussion about the issue of homeless families, and what the Department for Education thinks needs to be done in this area.
The next subsection of the amendment is concerned with families with children at risk of significant harm. Visiting a nursery some time ago and being told that one of the mothers was a heroin addict helped me to think a little about this issue. Many of these parents will be addicted to either drugs or alcohol, so the benefits for them of having access to 30 hours’ free child care would actually be for the siblings of those three year-olds. Often, it is the siblings in an alcoholic or drug-addicted family who look after the younger children, so the elder children can get a break from having to worry about and care for the younger children. If the parent is taking part in a drug or alcohol programme, that allows them to immerse themselves in that programme and to build new relationships—their old relationships would probably lead them towards a drink or a drug—and to take a full part in the therapy offered, develop new activities and move on.
The family drug and alcohol court, which the last Government were so good at supporting strongly, is helping many families across the country to get off drugs and alcohol. Children who are at risk are, thanks to this work, able to remain with their parents. It has about a 50% success rate. A judge follows a family throughout a year and ensures that the parents give up their addiction and they can keep their children. I encourage the Minister to consider offering this opportunity to families with children at risk.
I turn to my proposal for literacy and numeracy courses. Perhaps it is a bit hard to define what those courses should be, but the research is very clear. I pay tribute to the work of many years by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education and the Workers’ Educational Association, and to the recent report that my noble friend Lady Howarth of Breckland chaired for NIACE, which shows the benefits of family learning. It is so important to educational outcomes that parents be given the opportunity to learn, as well. When they start placing their children in education, they begin to want to learn, too. I am afraid that one can find, especially with very underprivileged families, that when parents are not given that nutrition and nourishment they may get resentful of their children, who are. I remember hearing of one mother—no, I will not go into the details of a rather painful story. However, it is very good to nourish both parents and children.
7 pm
I am taking too long but, moving on to foster care, research has shown that not enough foster carers make use of early years provision. This is something their children could benefit from, so I hope this offer would encourage foster carers to make greater use of early years provision. Perhaps we could save some
time here: will foster carers get the 30-hour entitlement? Are they classed as working people? I will hear later what the Minister has to say on that.
Research has shown that many of the young children coming into care—the under-fives—have mental health issues which are not properly identified. There is the opportunity of being in a high-quality early years setting, where those missed mental health issues may be identified. It is so important for foster carers to have all the possible incentives to continue in what they do—for instance, in 24/7 social work support and their really good support for clinical psychologists. This should be seen as another service that should be offered to our foster carers because we want to retain them and to attract the best. We want to recruit more foster carers, although I am afraid that the Minister and I were a little responsible for putting a stress on local authorities with the “staying put” amendment. Allowing young people to remain with their foster carers to the age of 21 rather reduces the supply of foster carers to young children. We could help support the recruitment of foster carers by bringing this provision in.
I am taking far too long but I am coming to the last of my subsections. It is on care leavers, who have often been abused as children. Many care leavers have a positive experience of care and move on to do very well in their lives, but may have had abuse before entering care. Many of them have unfortunately experienced many discontinuities in care. The report from the Centre for Social Justice of about two months ago highlighted that many left care feeling isolated and went on to have unhappy lives. I have already mentioned that many young women in care, and leaving care, will become pregnant and choose to have their babies. That is problematic when so many of them go on to have their children removed, so it would be really helpful to offer this provision to care leavers, in order to give those children and mothers the extra support they might need. With that, I beg to move.