Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, it is my great pleasure to join in welcoming this important Bill, which could make such a big difference to the lives of so many of our children. I am most grateful for all Her Majesty’s Government’s efforts on behalf of children growing up in poverty. I was grateful to be reminded of the Government’s investment in children’s centres and Sure Start. It is unacceptable that, in a nation as prosperous as ours, so many children continue to grow up in such poverty. As a reflection on what the Minister said, I regret that there is no strong voice for social work because social workers should surely be the champions in this area. I hope that the investment the Government are now making in social work, including the social work task force and the development of a royal college for social work, may raise the status of the profession and that, in future, social workers will be a powerful voice in eradicating child poverty. I listened with great interest to the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and was pleased to hear what he said about tackling addiction in parents. I was also pleased that he highlighted the UNICEF report and how poorly we perform against all other developed nations in regard to children. I wonder whether he and his colleagues will give special attention to the proposal in the forthcoming schools Bill to put personal, social and health education on a statutory basis. That will contain sex and relationship education. The clear evidence from the Netherlands and the United States is that good quality sex and relationship education reduces the number of teenage pregnancies and will help to achieve the target that the noble Lord wishes of more stable parents and more successful families. I hope your Lordships will forgive me if, in the interests of brevity, I read from a script on this occasion. As vice-chair of the Associate Parliamentary Group for Children and Young People In and Leaving Care, I have a particular interest in the children we are speaking of as there is such a strong association between poverty and children being taken into public care. It is hardly surprising to find that where families find their basic needs are not being met, the result can be family dysfunction and risk to the children. I am utterly persuaded of the need for a strategic approach with a strong mechanism to ensure that strategy is implemented. Governments have too short a horizon, less than five years, before they have to face the electorate again. Issues of this kind so easily get lost. I remind your Lordships of the appalling lack of strategy in the development of sufficient housing for our people. I was grateful to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, raise this issue. It appears that in the sale of social housing no thought was given to our people’s needs. Clearly, there have been other pressures such as immigration and reduction in the size and increase in the number of households, but the failure adequately to plan has had catastrophic consequences. It has contributed to powerful resentment against those incomers who are provided with the housing they need. Many families live in unsuitable, unsanitary, overcrowded accommodation. A few years ago, visiting families in West Ham with a health visitor, we saw some of these conditions: a mother sharing her one room with her two young children; another mother with three young children and water running down her mildewed walls; a man showing us the flooded basement of his family home; and a father showing us the lavatory which combined as a shower. More recently, again visiting a family with a health visitor, this time in Walthamstow, we spoke to the mother of a seven week-old baby. A lone parent and a refugee, separated from her own family in Africa and with the father of the child expressing no interest in the child's welfare, she shared the kitchen and the bathroom of this accommodation with five other families. Further testimony of our failure to plan to meet the housing needs of our people has been provided to us by users of Barnardo's Families in Temporary Accommodation Project. So many of these families are separated by long multiple bus journeys from their extended families and communities because of the lack of appropriate accommodation in their area. I pay particular tribute to John Reacroft, who has led this project for many years and has supported your Lordships in understanding this area. A proper strategy to address child poverty that is robust, well implemented and resourced is vital if we are to avoid the same failure as we have witnessed in housing. By contrast, the Government’s rough sleepers’ strategy of 1998 delivered. A clear target was set to reduce rough sleeping to one-third in three years and a robust implementation mechanism was established. Louise Casey was appointed to get this job done. I saw for myself the change that she and the Government wrought. A winter shelter for homeless 16 to 23 year-olds with which I was very familiar was transformed. Prior to 2009, it had seen the least experienced staff working with the most vulnerable young people. The staff were young, some of them were just globetrotters overwintering in the UK and picking up what work was available to them. Among the residents was a young man who had been on the street injecting heroin. His time in the hostel was the opportunity to get him off drugs and into work, training or study and proper accommodation. Another young man had communication difficulties, easily isolated himself and was frustrated at his inability to connect with others. Both of these young men's needs were unmet and the chance to intervene was lost. However, the following year, a crack team of professionals was introduced to the shelter. I had the honour of working with one of them for some time at a later date. I cannot speak for the effectiveness of that team as I was not a visitor to its project, but I am certain that these workers stood a far better chance of intervening effectively and assisting these young men into some meaningful activity and secure accommodation than those present in the previous year had done. Having clear targets and time frames and sufficient resources can ensure that the differences we would all wish to see in improving outcome for our children and young people do happen. Many times I have heard my noble friend Lord Laming call for a clear strategy for children's homes in order to address the shortcomings in that sector. To make a difference we need to make a sustained and focused effort over a number of years and certainly over more than one Parliament. Turning to the detail of the Bill, I share the concern expressed by Barnardo's and others that the Bill should not miss the needs of the most needy. I hope we can strengthen the targets to ensure they reach down to the most vulnerable and that no especially needy groups are overlooked. Sure Start has proven a great success, but its early efforts were put under a cloud by the first evaluation, which found that it failed to reach the most vulnerable group: teenage parents. In framing this Bill, I hope we can ensure that Travellers, black and ethnic minorities, care-leavers, families of ex-offenders and other important groups are not overlooked. I welcome the new duties on local authorities and other local agencies to work together to combat child poverty. I would like to be certain that there are sufficient levers to ensure the development of good quality childcare and appropriate accommodation in particular. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Sieff Foundation. At last September's Michael Sieff conference, Professor Melhuish, Professor of Human Development at Birkbeck College, University of London, made a powerful presentation on the effectiveness of good quality pre-school education on improving the educational attainment of children in deprived areas. He clearly demonstrated that children from similar deprived backgrounds had quite different educational trajectories depending on their exposure to good quality pre-school. In particular, he showed that good quality pre-school care inoculated children against the effects of poor quality primary education. At the age of 11, those children who had experienced good quality pre-school were, on average, doing well in education, whether they had experienced a poor primary school or a good one. Good quality childcare is a key factor in breaking the cycle of failure, and I hope that this Bill will make it more available to families in poverty. Professor Melhuish's presentation on the long-term effects of good quality early years care is on the Sieff Foundation website. There is much public concern about the increasing prevalence of gang culture and gang violence in some of our communities. Last year, a number of parliamentary groups, including the parliamentary group for children and its chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, whom I see is in her place, met to learn about gang violence. We were addressed by Professor John Pitts, who is a youth worker as well as an academic. We heard from him that what was at the root of this change was the way in which many of our communities had been neglected in recent periods of economic success. The immense disparity and the polarisation between the wealthy norm and these impoverished places contributed to a severe intensification of problems. This provided the breeding ground for the new gang culture, which is so much more virulent and anti-social than in the past. I very much hope that this Bill will help to play a part in recognising these areas and ensuring that they receive the interventions needed to prevent them becoming ghettoes. I pay tribute to the health visitors who have helped noble Lords to understand these problems over the years, particularly Ros Bidmead, Marilyn Claydon and Dr Cheryll Adams. To conclude, I applaud the Government for bringing forward this much-needed legislation. Of course, on its own it means nothing, but if local authorities and governments show themselves determined to meet the challenges set out in this legislation it can be an important force for good. I very much regret that I will be absent from your Lordships’ House from 26 January to 5 February but, as far as I am able to participate, I look forward to working with your Lordships to improve the Bill in Committee.