Clause 10
Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]
9:15 am
David Kidney (PPS (Rt Hon Rosie Winterton, Minister of State), Department for Transport; Stafford, Labour)
It is a great pleasure to serve on a Committee chaired by you, Mr. Williams. In plain English, I like your knowledgeable yet relaxed style of chairing proceedings.
The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham was absolutely right when he said at the beginning of today’s proceedings that, in relation to clause 10, the Government yet again deserve great credit for an excellent piece of new law. I give them a gold badge for that one, because accommodation is a key area of concern to everybody with an interest in the welfare of children in the care system.
As hon. Members know, I chair the associate parliamentary group for looked-after children and care leavers. I have been attending meetings for 11 years now and have chaired the group for about two and a half years. We have debated many times the shortcomings in local authorities’ ability to accommodate children in ways that are good for those children.
I shall give an example from as recently as March this year. We had a discussion about accommodation and, sadly, we still heard story after story of what went wrong. One story that sticks in my mind is that of two young care leavers in my audience. They were brothers who had been taken into care by the local authority at different times and ended up living in different placements. When their time in care came to an end, each was treated differently. The first one to leave care was found accommodation with friends; he knew them well and was comfortable and happy there. He settled in well and got a job, and there was a good support system around him.
That young man’s brother was placed in a shared flat with someone who was well-known in the locality as a top drug dealer. That boy—he was still under 18—was put under immense pressure to take drugs, to sell drugs, to run and to fetch money for the drugs. In the end, he chose absolute homelessness rather than stay there. No one checked the accommodation before he went there and no one listened to his concerns when he was placed there. In the end, he had to make a stark choice and he chose homelessness, rather than being dragged into the drugs trade. Clause 10 tells us that local authorities must “have regard to” meeting the needs of children and have a suitable range of accommodation available for young people. That is most acceptable.
The explanation given for new clause 19 by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham reminded me that the starting point for the debate, on this clause and many others, is the immense range of quality services offered by local authorities. We have heard some superb examples—we hear of them also at meetings of the parliamentary group—of local authorities doing their utmost to keep families together.
If that is not possible, local authorities try to ensure that young children in care are placed somewhere that allows them some community ties—as close to home as they can manage—which perhaps allows them to keep in touch with grandparents, other family members and friends, and even to try to keep the same school, health services and so on, so that if the opportunity arises to rehabilitate those children back to the family early, the support systems are all still in place.
If that is not possible and children have to spend their time in care until it is time to leave—when they become adults—they still have connections with some people so that they can return to a community that still has some support for them.
At the other end of the scale, authorities such as the one alluded to by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham seem to be too easily persuaded to place children out of area and a long way from home. That breaks those community ties and, because of the distance involved, the chance of blood relatives thinking that the children might be rehabilitated. It also leaves youngsters cut off from everything they know, everything they are familiar with and the few supports that they have. No wonder we hear stories of youngsters going off the rails and misbehaving in those areas—they have been cut off from all support. That is bad practice, and the clause brilliantly puts local authorities under a duty to consider keeping children in area if they can. That will be important in driving up standards.
A couple of amendments to clause 10 that were not selected for debate, one of which was mine, would have drawn Ministers’ attention to those young people who have come to the end of their time in care because they are no longer children. Under the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, the local authority will still have some obligation to have regard to their well-being afterwards. I hope the Minister says that local authorities will still be obliged to ensure that looked-after children who have left care are in suitable accommodation.
I shall tell of a recent conversation showing how important proper accommodation can be. Many Members who spoke on Second Reading mentioned the lobbying that day by the Fostering Network, and many foster carers were in Westminster. I spoke to a woman who had brought up a girl as a foster child for many years and who came to love her as a daughter. Despite all the obstacles that the care system put in her way, the girl flew through her GCSEs and A-levels, and finally got to university.
The foster mother was proud of all that the two of them had been through together, so many obstacles having been overcome to get to that position. She then learned that although the girl had accommodation on campus during term times, when she was not at university she was on her own—without accommodation and with no help. The foster mother was so outraged that she gave up being a foster carer and the income that it brought in, converted the girl’s flat into lodgings and rented it to her at whatever state benefit she was able to get to help to pay for it, so that the girl could use it during the breaks.
That went well beyond the call of duty on the woman’s part, and it was done because of the bond of love that had grown between the two of them. However, such events should not be happenstance. We know how few looked-after children get to university; it should not be down to one individual’s bravery and kindness for that child to continue there. That is a good example of accommodation going wrong for youngsters.
Because of my post as chairman of the all-party group, I hold myself out as willing to visit local authority services and meet users. I went to north Staffordshire—the county that I am from—to meet some recent care leavers. True enough, they were all still in touch with the leaving care team, and so were getting contacts, advice and so on. However, several of them told me that they were in a flat, getting housing benefit to pay the rent and did not have a job.
When three of those people had told me the same story about not having a job, I said, “Don’t you think that in this day and age you are in a bit of a dead-end position? You are in a flat, your rent is paid for you, but you have no job and you are not getting any skills. Wouldn’t you rather get skills at a further education college, get a job and make your own way in the world?” Each of them said, “My adviser advised me that the safest thing for me was to stay unemployed and have my rent paid.” That is the local authority that is looking after them advising them to do the opposite to what any of us would want for our children—certainly what I would want for my children—and what the Government want for our country.
There are poor services for people aged over 18 for whom we still have a responsibility. The clause deals with massive improvements in the situation of looked-after children in respect of accommodation. Will it apply to children who have left care but for whom we still have a responsibility, albeit perhaps not the full legal responsibility of looking after children? Nevertheless, that responsibility continues from their time in care.