Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I offer my profound apologies for not being able to be here when the debate began. There has also been a change in the groupings so I was not aware of how wrong it was that I was not present for the beginning of the debate. I hope that the Committee will forgive me if I speak briefly to Amendment No. 27, which, as I am sure others have mentioned, would place a duty on local authorities to provide sufficient culturally sensitive short-term placements and family therapy services to meet the needs of looked-after children where a court has determined that that would be helpful. This is a probing amendment and I hope that it will begin a debate about the Care Matters recommendation that we should concentrate our efforts on avoiding the need for care—early intervention—rather than waiting years to pick up the pieces when children or young people arrive in prison. Having trained and worked with a number of therapy modalities many years ago, I am aware of the incredible power of family therapy, almost over and above the other therapies with which I have worked. I refer to an example from 30 years ago which sticks in my mind. Two children in a family were repeatedly admitted to hospital with acute asthma—they were blue and at death's door. This had gone on for a number of years and a highly skilled family therapist in the hospital where I worked at the time decided to take on this family. They were given only six sessions of family therapy, and the children never returned. I was told that their asthma disappeared. For me that was extraordinary. I was relatively young and fairly green and it was very striking. Those children had a particular sematic response to the very profound problems within the family. As we know, the great majority of children illustrate the problems of their parents through emotional, behavioural and mental health problems. My noble friend Lady Murphy said that we do not yet know who can be helped by family therapy. The NICE guidelines are quite good on family therapy. They recommend it alongside CBT as one of the most effective interventions with specific problems, including problems such as depression and anxiety. Many parents and families have those kinds of problems and there is evidence to support the fact that family therapy works. I very rarely disagree with my noble friend Lady Murphy but on this occasion I feel that I am on reasonably firm ground. It is certainly no surprise to me that the NCH claims that, on average, in four out of five referrals to their intensive family therapy services the children do not end up in care, although that appears to be a dramatic statement. I am sure that the intensive family work done by the NCH will be peculiarly helpful for those severely disturbed families. The sort of work that I was doing was much less intensive. Obviously, the Government will be concerned about the cost, but the NCH evidence on cost is just a no-brainer: the tiny cost of £6,000 or £7,000 for family therapy spread over those children whom it benefits as well as those whom it does not. Every child who goes into care costs £36,000 a year, or something of that kind, quite apart from all the long-term costs of youth justice courts, prisons—you name it. Bearing in mind the Government’s commitment in their document to that sort of approach, I hope that the Minister will take the amendment very seriously and take it on board as his own.