Debate on the Address

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 12:09 pm on 8 November 2007.

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Photo of The Bishop of Leicester The Bishop of Leicester Bishop 12:09, 8 November 2007

My Lords, many of us on this Bench add our congratulations to the Government on their plans for legislation as outlined in the gracious Speech. There is much we welcome here, and we look forward to making our contribution to the debates on the many Bills that will come before your Lordships' House. However, there is no greater duty placed on a Government than that of their care for their most vulnerable in society. It is on that issue that I shall focus today, particularly in relation to children and young people, speaking as the chair of the Children's Society.

I welcome the Government's proposal to radically improve childhood outcomes and life chances for all children, especially for looked-after children. I welcome the implementation of the Government's White Paper, Care Matters, as the reform of the care system proposed in the Children and Young Persons Bill is, as we know, long overdue. The Government's aspiration to reduce the outcome gap between children in care and their peers and to improve the experience of education for children in care is clearly right but, as always, this particular legislation will require close examination and monitoring. That is because, as I am sure this House is aware, for successive generations we have not satisfactorily looked after our children and young people in care. We need to ensure that the many suggestions arising from the debate on the White Paper do indeed find their way into the proposed Bill and that we are able to build a consensus around the reforms needed.

Policies without people and resources, however, are empty shells and doomed to failure. The new legislation reflects high ideals about what children need, but local authorities—as we have already heard today—are overstretched. We know that council taxes are not going to cover the extra resources required. Professionals involved in making crucial decisions about the welfare of children are boxed in by diminishing budgets and increasing demands on their resources. I wonder how the local authorities are going to find the money to make these proposals work, when the Pre-Budget Report failed to show how we are going to make the painful decisions needed about the redistribution of wealth.

In that connection, I want to draw attention to the one in three children who are living in poverty or with serious inequalities today. Many of these children are suffering family breakdown and rely on child maintenance. The Child Maintenance Bill is the focus of enormous concern about the crucial role maintenance plays in relieving child poverty but also anger about the inability of the Child Support Agency to create a straightforward and effective way of collecting the maintenance. To many commentators the Bill seems to be just a repackaging of old models, rather than containing any radical rethinking of how best to spend government money in this area and encouraging parents to be generous towards their children according to their own means.

There are two specific aspects in this area where I encourage the Government to be bolder. I hope the new legislation will include a right to advocacy for children with disabilities. As the Children's Commissioner for England stated in his response to the Care Matters Green Paper consultation,

"Advocacy offers crucial protection where children face particularly complex circumstances, are in contact with many different services, or have communication difficulties".

There are some 13,300 children and young people with disabilities placed away from home in England and they need a statutory right to independent advocacy, which is about helping them get their views heard and helping them take their proper part in the decisions that affect their lives. This is what gives them dignity, respect and independence, which they are so often unintentionally denied, and it can provide a source of protection by ensuring that their voices are heard within what is otherwise experienced by them as a closed system.

Yet, despite government guidance which says that advocacy providers should ensure that their services are accessible to disabled children, new research has shown that that is not the case. For example, over two-fifths of those surveyed said that they could not provide advocacy for children who did not communicate verbally and over one-third of the services could not provide advocacy for autistic children. Of course, parents can be the children's first and best advocates, but children need formally appointed advocates when the problem is about the child's parent or primary carer or when the child does not want to share their concerns with their parent or simply chooses the independence of having their own advocate.

Another vulnerable group is children and young people who enter this country unaccompanied as asylum seekers. We need the Government to move towards a guardianship scheme for children such as these. Each year, some 3,000 children come to the United Kingdom to seek asylum and they can become virtually invisible when they enter the highly complex asylum process, putting them at risk of exploitation and many other forms of harm. Many have experienced abuse, loss or trauma and need support to help them to be able to talk about what has happened to them before they can make an asylum claim. Local authorities work hard to offer support to these children but their work needs strengthening, supporting and resourcing. The proposed legislation focusing on the care of children and young people provides us with an opportunity to ensure that unaccompanied children seeking asylum are provided with the guardianship that they need to navigate the care, support and asylum processes, as might a parent for a child within a family. Such schemes operate successfully in other countries, where they ensure that the child's best interests are safeguarded in all legal and other proceedings affecting them. Surely this is the least that we should be doing for this most vulnerable section of our children.

I turn briefly to comment on one other area of the gracious Speech under debate today. I very much regret that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans is unable to be in the House today to speak on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, as he made a significant contribution to the work of the Joint Committee which scrutinised the draft Bill. I know that he would have welcomed the Government's decision not to create a new regulatory body combining the functions of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority with those of the Human Tissue Authority. No single body could give adequate scrutiny to such a wide range of important questions, but, as the Church of England's response to the Joint Committee outlined, we remain deeply cautious about the creation of cell nuclear replacement embryos—that is, cloned embryos—and especially about the creation of human/animal hybrids. We will continue to press for very tight controls on embryo experiments and for constant review of the licensing of research into hybrids to ensure that the claimed therapeutic benefits are the only rationale for continuing research programmes.

The start of any new Session of Parliament brings a sense of hope and expectation—perhaps especially one with a new Prime Minister at the helm. I am conscious of the demands that such hope and expectation will place on your Lordships' House and the desire of the Government to deliver on their commitments, but the care of the vulnerable and those without a voice is the standard by which any civilised and just society must be judged. I hope that in this Session we will have the resolve to defend those most in need and place the vulnerable, and especially the needs of children and young people, at the heart of our concerns.