Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, in addressing Amendment 278, I speak against the background of the recently published report on children’s rights by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. By any yardstick, the way in which we treat our children in the UK makes depressing reading. In 2007, UNICEF published a report assessing the well-being of children and young people in 21 industrialised counties. It covered educational achievement, health and safety, poverty, behaviour and relationships. The UK came bottom. In April 2009, the Child Poverty Action Group published a similar assessment of child well-being in 29 European countries. The UK ranked 24th, behind Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta. These findings were widely reported and prompted media discussion about why the UK’s children were apparently so unhappy. This amendment does not seek to place a new structural or administrative burden on the system. It merely asks that the children’s trust boards have regard to the need to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child when preparing its young persons’ plans. I for one can see no burden here. In December 2007, the Government published their first children’s plan. It aimed to put the needs of families, children and young people at the very centre of everything that we do. It set out the Government’s plans for the next 10 years under each strategic objective of the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The introduction to the plan records that it has been developed with regard to the principles and articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is therefore unclear on what grounds the Government might oppose this amendment. Children England and the NSPCC have suggested that the UK needs to build a culture of respect for children’s rights and believe that this could be achieved by embedding the principles of children’s rights in policy-making and practices. The Joint Committee, in its report, agrees with those witnesses who emphasised the benefits of incorporating the UNCRC into British law, accompanied by directly enforceable rights. The Joint Committee also stated that it is particularly significant that all four children’s commissioners in the UK, with their extensive experience of working with children, think that it would make a real practical difference to children if the UNCRC were incorporated into UK law. The Government have not persuaded the Joint Committee that children’s rights are adequately protected by UK law or that incorporation of the UNCRC is unnecessary. Having signed up to the convention on behalf of children in the UK, the Government now have a duty and a responsibility to make their agreement and support meaningful in every possible way.