My Lords, I do not intend to replicate the points made by three excellent and very focused contributions; my comments will be not be instead of but additional and complementary to those, but I will stick to my complementary points because that will assist with brevity and perhaps even with clarity.
In backing the amendment, I want to bring to the House two examples from my experience. The first is the major investigation into heroin abuse that I carried out in 2002 in the mining villages of north Nottinghamshire, where I spoke to more than 300 local heroin users. I found one extraordinary correlation that I did not expect. While they had very different stories, backgrounds and situations, every single one of them bar none had suffered some form of major trauma in childhood. That trauma had not been noted by the system—by which I mean primarily schools and, in some instances, social services, but I am concentrating particularly on what schools missed—or, where it was noted, it was not addressed.
I cited in that inquiry specific examples of young children, primary school children, who got to school late because they did not know when they were meant to get up, because no parent was available to get them out of bed. So they would arrive at school at various times and in various forms of wear to try to participate. My experience was that they were not as successful in school as they could have been. But there was no additionality in the local authority, in its processes and in its funding to identify those problems.
Some children had experienced significant violence in their household, sometimes done to them, and, of course, where there was domestic violence against the mother, there was often violence also against the children. That was a critical part of the trauma in many cases. Such trauma can manifest in very different ways at an early age. One of the most common ways that I found was truancy; in other words, the simple act of not attending school, particularly when it was secondary school. What I noted with some disdain—and I continued to do so for many years, though I would argue against it—was how certain children were categorised as disruptive and their behaviour regarded as dysfunctional, which, on the face of it, it sometimes certainly was, and they did not attend school and school was often happy not to have them.
The fundamental problem that then arises is the effect on all the core communication skills, not least literacy. In a disproportionate number of cases, that directly correlates with domestic abuse, as spelled out in this Bill, in the household. That is example number one.
Example number two is that of a friend of mine, Terry Lodge. He was badly abused as a child. There was always violence, and as a consequence Terry did not go to school. He did not go to primary school as often as would have been helpful, and he did not go to secondary school at all. He was forced to work, and put into major industrial manual work at the age of 11 by his family.
Terry’s is one of the cases I took to the national child abuse inquiry. I represented him there, and I still assist him. He has had a full apology from the local
authority, but no compensation yet, four years after his apology. That is absurd and disgraceful—and, more importantly, in my view, damaging. All the way through, Terry Lodge has had one primary request: he never learned to read or write. Nobody is prepared to address that fully. His compensation, if it ever emerges, will be for being handicapped in the labour market, because he could not get to the levels he would have reached if he had been able to read and write.
That directly relates to this amendment, and what it would create. That requirement, in terms of what local authorities do and how they see the world that they are dealing with, is a fundamental weakness in our systems that still exists today. I therefore commend this amendment to the Government. It is vital, and I hope they will accept it.