My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 39 in this group, tabled in my name and those of my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. Our amendment remedies a serious omission in the list of the areas of support that councils are required to include in their local offer. It stipulates that information and services that will help young people to develop and maintain healthy and supportive relationships should be available alongside the other five areas of health and well-being, education and training, employment, accommodation, and participation in society.
When parental care fails, for whatever reason, and children and young people are taken into the care of the local authority, it is easy for us as legislators to treat this primarily as a legal problem. Obviously, it is essential that a minor’s legal status be clear and established. However, first and foremost, we should be aware that these circumstances typically create a relationship problem because of the profound long-term effects of losing parental attachments and the often taken-for-granted bonds with siblings and others in the extended family.
At birth, every child comes into that little unit, their family, where relationships are, ideally, formed and nurtured. Relationships are foundational to all human societies and what human existence is all about; without them, that existence can feel precarious, fraught with fear and difficulties and even fundamentally unwelcome. This is especially the case when making the transition from dependence into independent adulthood, a difficult and protracted shift for every human being, even when they have the back-up of good enough parents.
Although I welcome the inclusion in Clause 1 of the corporate parenting principle that children should have stability in their home lives and relationships, this is the only place where the word “relationship” is mentioned in relation to care leavers. Others noted this infrequency at Second Reading, such as my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, who mentioned a lack in this area. Three-quarters of young people leaving care admit to difficulties due to loneliness and isolation. Almost half found these very difficult to cope with, and those numbers could easily be higher, as admitting to such feelings is still stigmatised in our society.
Information about and provision to assist young people to build relationships should be included in the local offer laid out in the clause because it is highly likely to be another area of lack, given that they have not been able to learn such “habits of the heart” in their birth home. The Government might consider that this is covered by subsection (2)(a), on health and well-being, but we simply cannot take that for granted. Relationships are not yet embedded as a priority for
public bodies. The best example of that is found in Public Health England, whose mission statement says:
“We protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities”.
However, both its annual plan and the public health outcomes framework are relationship-free zones, something that the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships and others have been challenging for several years on the grounds that at least three-quarters of the indicators contained in the public health outcomes framework are directly or indirectly influenced by the quality of people’s couple relationships. It is stated rather narrowly, but noble Lords will take the point.
The inability to form and maintain relationships is a root cause behind poor health and well-being. It undermines educational attainment, employment prospects, the ability to maintain a tenancy and have otherwise stable accommodation, societal participation, and all the other itemised aspects of the local offer. This is not just because of the lack of self-esteem, self-confidence and other internal factors that can put lonely and rootless young people at such a disadvantage. Relationships have instrumental value. The deficit in social capital, when a young person has no family members to open their contact books to get them work experience and almost no settings in which they can acquire soft skills, can have devastating effects. Services do exist for young people to help address these relational difficulties. I have talked before about Love4Life in Loughborough, and Oasis College was recently established to ensure excellence in the many organisations that work in this and other related areas. They will not, however, be automatically commissioned without some indication from the Government that they are indispensable to a comprehensive and effective local offer.
I also gave concrete examples at Second Reading of the kind of services that local authorities can provide and commission. Northern Ireland’s model of person-specific personal advisers enables local authorities to draft in people who already get on with and are trusted by the young person leaving care. At present, care leavers are matched up with someone they may never have met before who usually has a couple of dozen or more vulnerable youngsters on their books. There is also a lot of staff churn, which makes a mockery of relationship stability.
I also recommended consideration of the family finding and engagement model in California and other parts of the United States. That name is slightly misleading in our system and not to be confused with the family-finding process to locate good potential adoptive parents. US family finding makes the most of blood connections with extended family and other supportive relationships that children entering or in the care system have already developed with adults, such as teachers, youth workers or the parents of friends. Instead of allowing them to lapse, local authorities treat these relationships as potential lifelong links and draw on this resource to build intentionally a network of support around young people before they leave care. What they are looking for is a small number of adults who are reliable and willing to be involved in the young person’s life and will keep in touch with
them whatever happens, inviting them for Sunday lunch or to spend Christmas Day with them, for example. As I said, a highly suitable personal adviser could emerge from that process. If the Department for Education were able to furnish local authorities with model contracts, this would help them greatly.
I conclude by saying that this is a probing amendment. If my noble friend does not feel that this clause is the right one in which to place the necessary emphasis on relationships, I am open to the legislation being strengthened in this way elsewhere. Otherwise, the legislation will not, I fear, boost vulnerable young people’s life chances as much as might otherwise have been possible.