I will speak to Amendment 47 in this group. Many noble Lords will recognise that adolescence is a difficult time for many young people. Anna Freud, the founder of the Anna Freud Institute, wrote three times on adolescence. Her final paper was entitled Adolescence as a Developmental Disturbance. Adolescence—the transition from childhood to adulthood—can often be a difficult time, but if one is a child in care, has experienced trauma before entering care and then may well have experienced further trauma on entering care—the process of being taken into care is traumatic in itself—one may find oneself with a protracted adolescence. Anna Freud describes the process of adolescence as the detachment of a child from their parent and the gradual process of moving to become an independent adult individual. I paraphrase, but that is roughly how she would describe adolescence.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that adolescence is about the detachment from the parent. The child has a close attachment to the parent; adolescence sunders that relationship. When we talk about continuing support of such young people up to the age of 25 by local authorities, it is very important to recognise that the developmental drive for those young people is to push themselves away from their corporate parent, the local authority, particularly because of their early experience. Just like any other good parent, the corporate parent, the local authority, has to make very clear to their child or young person: “We are here for you.
You may not like us—you may hate us or despise us; that is normal for adolescents—but we are still here for you, we still care for you and we still want to see you and support you. We are here for you when you need us”. That is what I hope the amendment covers. It puts more of an onus than the Bill currently does on local authorities to say to those young people: “We want to support you. This is the offer we have for you”, and, for instance, sending Christmas cards and postcards, doing everything in their power to keep in touch and to treat them, in this regard, just as they would younger people aged under 21.
I recall Ashley Williamson, a care leaver I have known for a while. He did not get back into contact with his personal adviser until he was perhaps 20. He was just on the edge of losing the right to a personal adviser, but very fortunately he got back in contact. It made a huge difference to his life, because he and his personal adviser clicked. She supported him to get stable housing for himself. Following that, his life improved and he became a very effective lobbyist in Parliament, coming to parliamentary groups to talk about what needs to be done for care leavers and expressing concerns about the sexual abuse and exploitation of young people in care.
We have heard eloquent words about the treatment of young mothers, in particular, coming out of care. I remind your Lordships that young people and teenagers in care are far more likely to become pregnant than those in the general population. Very sadly, the number of children taken away from young people who have grown up in care is also far higher as a proportion than in the general population. If anything can be done to ensure that the financial environment for those families is as beneficial and supportive as possible, that would be a very good thing, as I hope your Lordships will agree. We need to do all we can to support these families. We know from the statistics that they are highly vulnerable, so the measures described here are very welcome and I hope the Minister can give a positive response.