Equality Bill
12:00 pm
Mike Lindsay: There are good examples in relation to 16 to 18-year-olds. Are they children or adults in relation to child protection legislation, their entitlement to receive services under mental health provision and their entitlement to independent accommodation, particularly if they are care leavers or without goods and provisions? There a number of young people in this country who, because of age alone, fall between too many gaps in services that they should be entitled to. Our argument is that most of those services should not be dependent on age-related guidelines that are often arbitrarily contrived.
We have a perverse situation that for a children’s home to be registered in this country, it has to agree the conditions under which it will be registered. That includes age, which could be limited to between 10 and 14. By definition, that would split up siblings and force children and young people to leave those facilities for no better reason than age.
Our argument is that children’s needs should be judged, based and assessed purely on merit. Generally, whether they need mental health services, children’s social care services and a number of other services should be based on an assessment of their needs. The merits of children’s needs should not be based on the rather crude criterion of age.