My Lords, briefly, I support Amendment 74A, to which I have added my name. I draw your Lordships’ attention to my entry in the register of interests about my involvement in a voluntary project for care leavers. I support everything that my noble friend said in support of this group of amendments. As she suggested, I want to put forward a set of arguments in favour of Amendment 74A, which is about the need to acquire better data about outcomes for care leavers.
As I said at Second Reading, delivering the Bill’s undoubted good intentions will be challenging. In particular, it is crucial that the individual circumstances of each young person must be considered if real progress is to be made. As the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, said, these young people face all the challenges that all young people face, but the particular challenges from their specific circumstances are especially demanding. Therefore, their problems are unusually difficult and complex and they require tailored help to meet them. If we are to do so, we must overcome all the problems that public services have traditionally found in personalising delivery to the individual.
Adequate data on outcomes will be crucial if we are to use the Bill’s framework to devise effective strategies, but it is simply unavailable at the moment. For example, as I said at Second Reading, it is known that 5% of care leavers are in higher education at the age of 19; we do not know how many of those will graduate; nor do we know how many care leavers enter higher education in later life, although we know that many of them do so when they feel more ready to take advantage of that opportunity. Such data will be crucial if we are to assess the effectiveness of support for those young people. Requiring local authorities to keep in touch with their care leavers until they are at least 25 will, among all its other virtues, enable better data to be compiled about outcomes for them, which is a vital building block for the success of the Bill in the long term. For that reason, and for all the others that we have already heard, I hope the Government will consider the amendment sympathetically.
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