New Clause 16
Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]
2:15 pm
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
I do not wish to delay the Committee for too long. New clause 16 is a probing amendment. I am in sympathy with new clauses 21 and 22 in the name of the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole and others. I want to focus on health records. We had a discussion on that and the problems that occur on the Adoption and Children Bill. I am involved with a charity called Cardiac Risk in the Young, which will be holding an annual reception on the Terrace before long. It deals with the tragedy of young people who drop down dead all of a sudden due to a congenital heart defect about which they knew nothing, often relating to problems inherited from parents or defects that could have been detected or been scanned for and dealt with before the fatality happened. As we discussed during the Adoption and Children Bill, there are cases of children who develop a genetic disease later in life, without any knowledge that they may have inherited it from a birth parent with whom they no longer have contact and/or knowledge of.
The purpose of new clauses 21 and 22, which were proposed by BAAF, is to ensure that the lifelong needs of post-care adults are not overlooked during debates on the reform of the care system. It is paramount, when appropriate, that a child who has been through the care system should be able to access the medical records of their birth parents, or that those medical records should be available to the person responsible for caring for that child, so that when the child becomes an adult he or she can refer to them to see whether they mention anything that might prejudice their health later in life.
The idea of a genetic key has been mentioned. For those children who end up in the care system and then go for adoption, there should be a formalised system for keeping their health records and the records of their birth parents safely, so that they can be made available to the children and the children’s health advisers when appropriate. Although it is common sense for that to happen, it does not happen often enough.
When children are pushed from one placement to another, and have unsettled lives, the capacity for medical records to go missing is exacerbated. We know that a large number of children in the care system have not had the basic vaccinations, so their health outcomes are already prejudiced. They do not have access to some of the basic medical preventions that are available to the rest of the population.
The new clauses are probing, to see whether such provisions are necessary and, if it is not already good practice, whether the Government would consider them as a basis for spreading good guidance, so that a directive along those lines could be issued to local authorities.