My Lords, I want to speak to my Amendment 292J. This is a pretty heroic group of amendments in a bid to assist the Committee.
There is a connection between the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Blake and mine, because her amendment is about encouraging collaboration between the police and local authorities. I too want to see such collaboration. I want to add to that the NHS and other local bodies and, essentially, give a huge boost to support for services for vulnerable children. If we were able to do that, it would have a massive impact on the lives of those vulnerable young children but also ensure that far fewer of them went through our criminal justice system in later life, hence my justification for bringing this amendment to your Lordships today.
I am very much relying on the recently published report of the Public Services Select Committee. I am delighted that my noble friend Lady Armstrong, who excellently chairs the committee, is with me today, and I pay tribute to the members, some of whom will make a brief intervention in this debate, and the staff for their excellent work and the report.
The number of vulnerable children was increasing before Covid hit us, but, since March 2020, the crisis has accelerated. More than 1 million children are now growing up with reduced life chances, and too many end up in our criminal justice system. Despite this, the Government have not yet recognised the need for a child vulnerability strategy. Unfortunately, the results of not having one are readily evident. Our inquiry showed a lack of co-ordination on the part of central government and national regulators, which has undermined the ability of local services to work together to intervene early and share information to keep vulnerable children safe and improve their lives.
This poor national co-ordination means that many children fall through the gaps. In 2019, the Children’s Commissioner warned that more than 800,000 vulnerable children were completely invisible to services and receiving no support. We think this unmet need is likely to have grown during the pandemic. The Select Committee surveyed more than 200 professionals working with children and families and they reported increases of well over 50% during the past 18 months in the number
of children and families requesting help with parental mental ill-health or reporting domestic violence and addiction problems in their home.
The problem is that public services are just too late to intervene before trouble comes. In our most deprived communities, too many children go into care and have poor health and employment outcomes. They are excluded from school or end up in prison.
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We need to deal with these structural weaknesses. Part of that is to do with the way in which priority is given nationally and locally, but it is not divorced from cuts to local authority budgets, which in turn have contributed to a lack of support and collaboration and undermined efforts to improve life chances for deprived children. A particular problem we have identified is the silo working of so many national bodies; they seem to set different targets and funding mechanisms and often work to prevent collaboration between different public services. This is where a national strategy would really come into play. Even the sharing of data between agencies seems to be inhibited; at the end of the day, it is quite extraordinary that public bodies seem to be unable to share data that would improve the life chances of young people if only they could collaborate.
I am sure my noble friend will refer to many of the recommendations in the report, but the one that relates to our amendment is the requirement for a statutory duty on local authorities, the NHS and the police to improve children’s life chances. There is already a duty in the Children and Social Work Act placed on safeguarding partners—the police, the NHS and local authorities—to work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children in local areas. That is the foundation, but it does not compel authorities to co-operate and intervene early to support children at risk of poor long-term education, health or well-being outcomes. Barnardo’s told us that it would be a real advantage to have a statutory duty on the relevant public authorities to commission specific, specialist domestic abuse support for children who have witnessed domestic violence in the home, as one example of what could happen if we were to go down this route.
So there is a persuasive argument for the Government to introduce a statutory duty on local authorities, the NHS and the police to improve long-term outcomes for children in their areas and to ensure that early help is provided to children living in families with serious parental addiction or domestic violence concerns, or parental mental ill-health, to those who are at high risk of criminal exploitation and to young carers. When we think about what this Bill seeks to do, I can think of no better way to try to prevent people going into the criminal justice system than to invest more in vulnerable children. I hope the Minister can respond positively.