Child Poverty Bill

We are at one. It has got to be a happy relationship within the home to be of benefit to the children. The first paragraph in the amendment comes back to socio-economic disadvantage. I can think of a couple sitting in their house saying, "Anna, why is it that we don’t have two ha’pennies to rub together?" I cannot imagine Anna saying, "Well, it’s because we’re in a socio-economic state of disadvantage". At one time, the late Charles Dickens did a job in here as a Hansard writer. They serve us very well. When I think of language like that being used, the chapter about Mr Micawber explaining poverty to young David might have been different and it would not have been so interesting. I am interested in the first paragraph of the amendment, about, ""the promotion of increased engagement of parents and families to help eradicate child poverty and socio-economic disadvantage"." There is something that worries me greatly. There are housing estates in Glasgow that were built with very good intentions and provided excellent houses, right from the days of John Wheatley, when he was a Minister and allowed local authorities to build good council housing. Some of that council housing is still standing today, under the provisions that John Wheatley made as housing Minister. When Margaret Thatcher said that we were going to sell every council house in the land, a lot of the John Wheatley houses were the first to go up for sale and are still standing. The difficulty with the housing estates that I know is that in the 1950s, and before that even in the 1930s, there were big factories adjoining them. That is why the housing estates were built. Therefore, you had a working population. You had a social mix. You had the foremen and the managers living in the community; you had the doctors and the teachers living in the community and in those housing estates. If you think of going into a village with 400 households, there would still be the doctors, lawyers, accountants and other people. Young children, including those in poorer households, could look at them and think, "I want to be like that lawyer or that accountant". In Glasgow, which I know—it will be the case throughout the country—there is a fantastic amount of kindness, goodness and willingness to help neighbours on the housing estates. I do not like to criticise public leaders, but that is why I was disappointed when that little girl from the estate got kidnapped and it then turned out that a parent was involved and it was not really a kidnap. Every night, the men and women in that estate and their children—I have never visited there, but I watched the newsreel—were out looking for that wee girl while she was reported missing. There was an unfortunate remark and an apology has been made about that housing estate. People are too quick to judge the housing estates, because they do not see the kindness that goes on in them. I shall give an example. In one deprived housing estate that I know of, a lady who was involved in a marriage breakup stayed in another part of Glasgow. The situation was so bad that she could not afford a removal van. She got her bits and pieces on to public transport and had to make three, four or five journeys from her old house to her new one. When her new neighbours found out about it, they decided to join her on the public transport and help her to do her removal in such poor circumstances. She says, "I never forgot that and I have stayed in this community, poor as it is, with all its difficulties, for the past 15 years and my children, and now my grandchildren, are staying here". That is the goodness that is there. I turn to the reason I have risen to speak. One of the difficulties with so many of the housing estates where terrible poverty exists is that those who are prepared to help and to engage parents will come into the community and then go back out again. No-one is staying in the community with the people who have these hardships, with the exception of the religious clergymen and women—in my case, the Church of Scotland and the Catholic Church. They often stay within their communities 24 hours a day. Even the police, good as they are, need a phone call before they come in for any difficulty that arises. We have all these serious problems, and people need help. We have to find a way of trying to get those who are seeking to help to engage in the community seven days a week and 24 hours a day. It has to be done before we can make any impact and help them. It is not going to be easy. Take a nice suburb on the edge of a city: if a social worker is needed there, they are going into a nice area. In some of these housing estates, there are drug problems, or dogs that are trained to be the first line of defence if police officers are going to raid a house. It is very hard for a social worker to go into a home like that. We have heard of cases where children have been terribly neglected. In almost every case there is a dog in the house, and sometimes more—two or three. Yet as a society we do nothing about it. In fact, if a local authority says, "Let’s keep dogs under control", because they attack postmen and other people who come in to help the community, right away you will find a journalist saying, "That’s terrible, people aren’t being allowed to keep their pets". But there are pets, and there are wild animals. This is one of the difficulties that children have in some of these communities: pit-bull terriers are there because of criminal elements, while these children and their families try to rise above it. If we are putting adverts on national television about getting social workers to help, we have give those social workers back-up and allow them to get into these estates freely. They are not always able to do that. I am very supportive of the amendment, but to engage with people we must find ways of getting into the community, and not just staying there from 9am to 5pm and then going away again. We have to find a way of covering these communities, particularly at weekends, when all sorts of difficulties take place.