Clause 26
Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]
5:15 pm
Helen Southworth (Warrington South, Labour)
I was motivated to table the new clauses because of concerns among a number of colleagues about evidence on the outcomes for some young people in care in children’s homes, and the difference between those outcomes and the inspection reports for those homes. We were motivated particularly by the concept, which is becoming commonly held, that parents share responsibility with their children for much of the children’s behaviour, and that parents should be held accountable to a degree when children engage in antisocial or criminal activities. That is because parents have a responsibility to guide and support their children and to ensure that they are aware of different ways of behaving and given chances to learn new and better ways of behaving. Most of all, children should be supported by their parents so that they do not travel down the paths that, unfortunately, far too many children have taken, which lead to criminal records and custodial sentences.
The purpose of the three new clauses is to get a virtuous circle, rather than a downward spiral, so that the different participants who support a child or young person in a children’s home work together effectively to ensure that the young person gets the support and intervention they need to achieve the sorts of successes that meet their potential.
New clause 37 would require children’s homes to keep records of specific activities that any good and responsible parent would notice, such as incidents of children going missing from the home. The current system of recording the reporting of a child going missing resulted in 23 children’s services departments being unable to tell the parliamentary all-party group for children who run away or go missing how many children in their own care had been reported missing to the police in 2005. Also, a significant number of children’s services departments that could give a response to that question gave a radically different response when asked the same question by their local police force. In many instances, the police forces had recorded a different number of young people who had been reported missing while in the care of the local authority than that local authority had.
When one looks at the pattern of who is responsible within a children’s services department, one will see that it is eminently possible for that sort of information not to be recorded effectively and passed to those who could do something about it. Indeed, one might say that some people have a vested interest in not recording it effectively, because it can draw attention to the fact that they are not parenting particularly effectively.
We need a proper, rigorous system for ensuring that those who are responsible for caring for children, ensuring that they have a safe and comfortable place to go and supporting them in that process are required to record instances when their children are reported missing to the police and make that information available on inspection so that they can be held accountable for it.