Queen’s Speech

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, in what he referred to as this mingle-mangle of a debate. I offer him an alternative word for a confused mixture and my favourite: gallimaufry. I agree with a good deal of what he said about the diplomas, which, given their content, might be more appropriately called pre-vocational diplomas. There is much to say about the Department for Children, Schools and Families portfolio, so I start with the promised children, skills and learning Bill. This catch-all Bill will have many welcome aspects but also others that will cause us some concern. My colleagues in the DIUS team spoke on Monday about the expansion of the apprentices programme, so I will say no more about that. We will return to the matters relating to school improvement and the powers and independence of Ofqual, about which we have some concerns, when the Bill is laid before us. We will look carefully at the proposals for Ofsted. It is key that we eliminate the tick-box mentality, the dangers of which were clearly demonstrated in the inspection of children’s services in Haringey. We also look forward to Professor Rose’s primary review and the broader and more independent Cambridge primary review when those final reports are available for us to comment on. I welcome the proposal to make children’s trust boards statutory. I hope that this will improve the governance of children’s services. There have been far too many failures to protect the most vulnerable children, so I call on the Government to conduct a full review of the adequacy of our child-safeguarding system. This means reviewing not only the legislation, which is not the salve for all ills, but the resources, the practical implementation, and training and workforce issues. I have serious concerns about the way in which multidisciplinary working is operating. In particular, the health services are not as joined up with other services as they might be. When a mother has a baby, she always seeks medical help, so medical professionals have a unique opportunity to identify vulnerable babies. I share the concerns of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about what has happened to health visitors. If the mother is going to bring the child into an unstable family that does not have the financial resources or parental skills to give that child the life that it deserves, that is when a whole raft of services should be wrapped around that family. Those services should not let go until it is safe for the child. A great deal is being done for very young mothers, particularly to enable them to continue their education. I approve of that—we all know that education is the best form of contraception—but it does not happen with older serial mothers such as Karen Matthews, who have never worked and who fail their children. Those are the situations in which the state should step in with high-quality care and parental support, for the sake of the next generation. The Bill also presents an opportunity to improve serious case reviews, 40 per cent of which were recently found by Ofsted to be inadequate, by strengthening the voice of the child. The death of Baby P and other tragic cases have highlighted the need for protection procedures to pay much more attention to seeing and listening to children rather than to deceitful or violent parents. Why have we not learnt that lesson since the Victoria Climbié case? The Bill presents an opportunity to ensure that the local safeguarding children boards have a specific function to ensure that children’s wishes and feelings are obtained and given due consideration. I will seek to add that to the Bill. You have to see a child to get their views. Noble Lords will recall that we expressed reservations about the use of restraint in schools for maintaining good order and discipline, which was brought in under Section 93 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. Therefore, we welcome the announcement that there will be measures to increase the accountability of schools on this matter. However, perhaps we should look again at this power in the light of the Court of Appeal’s July judgment, which quashed the Secure Training Centre (Amendment) Rules 2007, and the review of restraint commissioned by the Joint Youth Justice Unit. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child gives children the right to privacy, so I ask the Government how they will respond to the recent European Court of Human Rights judgment about the retention of the DNA of innocent children. I am also concerned about the proposals in another Bill to allow police officers on the beat to take fingerprints. I fear that that power will be used disproportionately on children, as the stop-and-search power is already. How will the Government ensure that this does not happen and what rights will children have to ensure that their fingerprints are removed from databases when there are no charges of wrongdoing? Like the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, I welcome the transfer of responsibility for the education of children in prisons to local authorities. However, the Government should go further and meet the recommendation of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child by ensuring that all children deprived of their liberty have the same rights to education. Section 562 of the Education Act 1996 excludes children detained under a court order from the right to education. The proposed equality Bill has been welcomed in many quarters but, for me, it is notable for what it does not include. There is nothing to protect children from age discrimination. This Bill could be used to promote children’s active participation in society in a positive way, but the Government are planning to exclude them from these provisions. Noble Lords will know of my passion for high-quality early years education. Of course, I welcome the proposals about Sure Start. However, progress in this Session, which is one year on from the publication of the Children’s Plan—I look forward to reading its one-year report—will come not so much from new laws but from more resources and more training. Investment in early years, especially during a credit crunch, is one investment that brings enormous returns. There are not too many investments of that sort around at the moment. UNICEF report card 8 is published today. I declare an interest as a member of the board of UNICEF UK. This series of reports compares various aspects of children’s well-being in OECD countries. Today’s report is about early childhood education. Its aim is to recognise what Governments have achieved and to highlight areas where more could be done. The rising generation in developed countries is the first for whom care is becoming to a significant degree a public sector responsibility rather than solely a private extended family matter. Today, many young children spend large parts of their day outside their homes in the care of someone other than their parents, who can then work or train. This presents an enormous challenge and a great opportunity to complement the care of parents by providing experiences that will stimulate the child and help him to grow healthy, strong and lively, and for professionals to work with parents to ensure that they gain the skills and knowledge that they need. I cannot overemphasise how strongly I believe that, if we help and support parents when the children are small, we can avoid a lot of the problems and benefit the whole of society. The children who are failed by their parents are those who will become abused, even murdered, suffer from mental health problems or get in trouble with the law, all of which are difficult and costly for the state to reverse. We have a terrible attitude to children in this country. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, I was distressed recently to read the Barnardo’s opinion survey, which showed how many people in this country believe that ““feral”” children ““infest”” our streets and commit 50 per cent of all crime, which is blatantly untrue—they commit about 12 per cent. Early years education is crucial to reducing that figure and to ensuring that all our children reach their full potential. However, if the care is not of good quality, we can do enormous harm instead of good. Report card 8 shows, as usual, Sweden and the other Nordic countries in the lead, with the UK about halfway down, meeting five of the 10 criteria. The areas that still need attention in the UK are parental leave, the staff-to-pupil ratio, percentage of GDP spent on early years, child poverty and universal outreach of essential child health services. I am pleased to welcome the child poverty Bill announced in the gracious Speech, but I point out that the UN committee recommended that measurable indicators be established to show how the Government’s target is being met. I also welcome the Government’s announcement about extending the rights of parents to ask for flexible working hours, a matter for which I campaigned along with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham two years ago. As with all UNICEF reports, this one is underpinned by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which the UK has been a signatory since 1989. The 20th anniversary of its signing by this country will be marked in 2010. Yesterday marked a 60th anniversary, apart from that of the NHS: that of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was enshrined in UK law 10 years ago. I should like to press the Government to do the same for children’s rights. Children, because of their special vulnerability, need special laws to protect them and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has several times pressed the UK Government to enshrine that convention also into UK law. It is a pity that such a Bill was not among those announced in the gracious Speech. However, the Government should be applauded for three major steps that they took on 22 September, the day before appearing before the UN committee. They withdrew their two reservations from the convention—on immigrant children and on young people in custody alongside adults—and signed the optional protocol on trafficked children. The Government deserve our sincere congratulations, but now the hard work starts in order to implement those three aspects of the convention. It is outrageous that the level of knowledge about the convention is so low among children and adults in this country, particularly among professionals. It would be easy, for example, to include a unit about the convention in every initial teacher training course. The convention is lived every day to great advantage in many schools under the Rights Respecting Schools programme, for which I know that the Government have great regard. Teachers, children, parents and school governors love it. Will the Minister tell me whether the DCSF has any plans to encourage or enable more schools to take it up? Its benefits have now been demonstrated from early years right up to the end of secondary level, so there is every reason for the Government to take it on as a national initiative. That would do much more good for school discipline than any further powers about restraint or searching of young people, which I believe we are going to get in the next legislation. For me, the gracious Speech was a bit of a curate’s egg for children but, as always, we on these Benches will make all efforts to improve it and to make sure that it is tasty and nutritious in all the parts.