My Lords, Amendments 75 and 135 have been comprehensively argued and we have a great deal of sympathy with the intention to include in
the Bill reference to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to promote the rights and well-being of children in care and care leavers. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, pointed out, general duties on the Secretary of State exist in relation to health and education, so it is important to consider this issue in the Bill.
Specifically on the UNCRC’s latest report, the Minister underlined at Second Reading that the Government fully recognised the importance of the committee’s work and were looking closely at the report. The report has again warned, as we heard, of the growing and disproportionate impact of austerity and spending cuts on disadvantaged children. It would be helpful if the Minister explained further his thinking on the report and what are the Government’s plans for responding to it.
We recognise the importance of upholding the rights of children in care and care leavers and on ensuring their well-being. Establishing at the end of Clause 3 a duty for the Secretary of State to promote the rights of children and young people covered by the Bill in accordance with the convention and other relevant legislation reinforces the commitment to provide the services that care leavers need. It also defines well-being, which we asked for, and to include physical, mental health and emotional well-being; the skills needed to contribute to society; and the importance of social and economic well-being, for which we have all recognised the need.
The provisions in Amendment 135 would be particularly important if Clauses 15 to 19 remain in the Bill. The Minister knows that there are deep concerns at the wide-ranging scope of these clauses, which we will debate on later amendments. This amendment would place a duty on public bodies and any person providing children’s services of a public nature to have due regard to the UN convention, particularly in functions relating to safeguarding or promoting the welfare of children—it is vital for this protection to be included if the scope of Clause 15 is as wide-ranging as is currently feared—and for regular reports to be published on how the requirement is being met.
Importantly, the amendment refers to this report as needing to be in a format “accessible to children”. In this context, I commend the valuable programme of work currently being undertaken by Coram Voice to find out from young people in care themselves what well-being being actually means to them. Its survey of children in care, Your Life, Your Care, began last year and aims at measuring the quality of their care experience and their own sense of well-being under what it calls the four Rs—relationships, recovery, resilience-building and rights, which very much resonate with the issues and approaches that have come up under the Bill. It can be used to help local authorities demonstrate how they are meeting Ofsted requirements, for example: what they are doing well and what they could improve.
Amendment 76, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, and supporting the Joseph Rowntree Foundation call for the Secretary of State to have power to introduce a social justice premium grant to local authorities for services or grants for care leavers,
reflects the need to find responses to the huge funding pressures faced by local authorities and the impact of the scale of the cuts in recent years. The overall aim of improving care leavers’ life chances and closing the gap between them and children who have not been in care is certainly one we all fully support. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation underlined that this policy is in the early stages of development ahead of the application of its anti-poverty strategy later this year and we look forward to seeing further work on this. The aim of basing the grant and calculations of harm over the care leaver’s lifetime is also laudable but a very challenging proposition.
Overall, it is worth emphasising that further premiums or special funding at the Secretary of State’s discretion, however welcome in the current context, are not the answer to medium or long-term funding problems. Local authorities must be adequately resourced to undertake the work and responsibilities placed on them, and Labour is strongly committed to achieving that. If we listen to care leavers themselves to help shape their services to them, as we all advocate, we know that worrying about money, fear of not being able to pay the bills and getting into debt that can never be paid off is at the heart of a lot of the problems they face.
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