Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I completely share the concern of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, that young people who leave care should be provided with the help and support necessary to prepare them for the responsibilities of life as young adults. The Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 already imposes duties on local authorities to allocate a personal adviser, to maintain a pathway plan and, in particular, to keep in touch with all former relevant children until they are at least 21 years of age, and in some cases longer, while they remain in an approved programme of educational training. Clause 19 includes provision to enable young people entitled to care-leaving services who request the support to continue to be supported by a personal adviser beyond their 21st birthday where they have not yet achieved basic educational qualifications, where they remain in education or training, as now, or where they decide to resume education or training. Amendment No. 48 covers accommodation. My department, along with Communities and Local Government, is funding research as part of the wider national youth homelessness strategy to inform good practice guidance on housing and children’s services co-operating to prevent homelessness. The findings from this research will be available in April and will inform new guidance on interagency co-operation to support young people and families with children who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. We are continuing to work with voluntary organisations that support care leavers to build on the Care Matters White Paper commitments to promote and spread best practice in providing supported accommodation services for care leavers. The implementation of a young person’s pathway plan should avoid homelessness. However, where such arrangements break down, the homelessness legislation provides an essential safety net, where necessary. Under that legislation, adults aged 18 to 21 who were formerly in care have priority need. We therefore believe that the amendment is unnecessary, given care leavers’ existing entitlements and the range of services available to them from children’s services teams as care leavers and from other agencies that provide services to vulnerable adults in general. Amendment No. 55 attempts to redefine the Children Act’s definition of ““eligible children””; namely, those children aged 16 and 17 who remain looked after and who are entitled to, in addition to other services, leaving-care support and, in particular, assistance with planning their transition to adulthood. It would not be logical to widen the definition of eligible children to include young adults up to the age of 25 as proposed by the noble Baroness. That is because the legal definition of ““eligible child”” can refer only to someone under 18—that is, a child—who remains looked after by the local authority. Young persons aged 18 to 25 could never be legally defined as children because they have reached legal adulthood and as adults can no longer be looked-after children. For that reason, it would not be possible to accept the amendment as drafted. However, it is right that care leavers should continue to receive assistance from, and to be supported by, the local authority that looked after them. The focus should be to enable and to support the young person as an adult rather than to do this on their behalf. The legal framework for supporting care leavers under Sections 23A to 24D of the Children Act 1989, as amended by the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, provides for proportionate interference in young people’s lives to ensure that they are not cast adrift by the local authority formerly responsible for their care and that they receive the services that they need to the extent that their welfare requires it. Their individual needs will vary from case to case, but we believe that these young adults should be treated as adults and should not be subject to decisions taken on their behalf by a local authority in the way that this amendment, perhaps unintentionally, would bring about. I hope that, having heard these reassurances, the noble Baroness will think that our policy is correct.