Welfare Reform Bill

Although my name does not appear on these amendments in the Marshalled List, as I got in touch with the Bill Office too late for it to be printed, I nevertheless confirm my support for the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. The amendments make the well-being of a child an essential, if not paramount, consideration when implementing new Clauses 17A and 17B. The noble Lord has defended the interests of children resolutely, and this follows on rather naturally from my opening amendment on Tuesday, to which I was pleased that so many noble Lords added their support. In this case, however, we are dealing with a much greater age range. The issue is simple. We all accept that getting an unemployed person back into work is a priority. It is not, however, an overriding priority; it should not be enforced when to do so would cause some kind of harm to the dependants of that person. Indeed, over the past two days the Minister has made similar points. The harm that can be inflicted on children is not just financial, although the consequences of child poverty are many. A dependant is by definition reliant on the parent for all kinds of support. Many who are parents with children in their 30s, 40s and 50s would agree with me that parenting responsibility never ends. I have a 30 year-old son who at the moment is totally dependent on me, and the reason why I keep my cell phone on a buzzer is so that he can get hold of me in the Chamber, Grand Committee or wherever I am. I do not propose for one moment that we should send out a signal that having a child is a passport to sitting back and doing nothing—quite the opposite. We have heard from many sources, including from a meeting convened by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, some weeks ago, to which, unfortunately, I was unable to go. I understand, though, that formerly unemployed people said that being able to pull yourself together and find work is an extremely boosting experience. Work engenders self-reliance, confidence and security. These benefits are as applicable, if not more so, to the families as to the individual. It is my view that a family with adults in employment is the best situation to start from. It should be our aim to help families to secure their own need. However, that must be balanced by an overall consideration for the needs of any children. A work action plan would not be worth its salt if it harmed a participant’s children in some way, through unsuitable hours or lack of suitable childcare. I suspect that the Minister will resist these amendments by saying that of course we would expect any back-to-work plan to take into account the needs of children. If that is so, he should not be afraid to accept these amendments, or ones very similar to them, as a confirmation of that. The amendments seek to protect the time and quality of care that parents who seek work are able to provide for their children. The justification for that is not a surprise to any of us. This is not the first time that such matters have been debated in your Lordships’ House and elsewhere; nor will this be the definitive and final debate on the subject—not, at least, while we still have the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. However, it is worth looking at some of the costly results of neglecting the well-being of children. I have seen figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families relating to children who were excluded for a fixed period from school in 2006-07, as has just been mentioned. In total, there were 425,600 fixed-period exclusions, representing 5.7 per cent of the whole school population. Of those exclusions, a rather jaw-dropping 45,730 were children at primary school. I have seen the response from the Government to a Question asked in another place on truancy. Although it seems that precise figures are not recorded, it appears that persistent absences, where a pupil misses 20 per cent or more of schooling, which I am told is the best indicator of problem absence, ran at 3.6 per cent of the school population in 2007-08. In other words, a hard core of pupils are missing at least one day a week of school—quite probably more—and the overall figures for unauthorised absences are much higher, at more than 1.7 million pupils across England, if I am reading the figures correctly. I do not wish to overload noble Lords with statistics for fear of sounding too prime ministerial, but I have one more set to complete the picture. In 2008, there were 15,819 persistent young offenders—as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will confirm—who, between them, committed 28,834 offences; and those are just the ones whom we know about. I raise these numbers to illustrate, in so far as broad lists of statistics can be illustrative, the dangers of neglecting our youth. One thinks of children carrying knives, which is such a current problem in our inner cities. That surely is caused by neglect of some sort. I believe, probably like the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, that these problems have their infancy in children at a very young age, under the age of seven. I do not think for a moment that the noble Lord’s amendments, if adopted, would provide a sudden and complete panacea to these ills, but their inclusion in the Bill, or something very like them, would indicate that we are prepared to take a step in the right direction.