Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I am prompted to ask the Minister a couple of questions as a result of what has been said. Are the needs of care leavers being particularly taken into account? The Office for National Statistics reviewed the mental disorders and level of mental health of young people in care in 2004. The results were really shocking. It found that, on average, 40 per cent had mental disorders. The most vulnerable group, the 10 per cent in children's homes, had 68-plus per cent levels of mental disorder. This is not surprising given the histories of these young people but when they leave care, and one hopes that some of those issues have been addressed while they have been in care, I am concerned that they might have difficulties in terms of these meetings. I wonder whether some of them might even have difficulty turning up to a meeting and whether there needs to be somebody going out to them and making a relationship or whether they need to be worked with through some organisation, such as Action for Children, which knows them well and has built a relationship of trust with them. We talked about people with recognised assessed mental disorders, but with children entering care, it is a matter of great concern. Although they are assessed by a paediatrician or a GP when they enter care, they do not get an assessment from a clinical mental health professional. Often there is concern that their mental disorders are not recognised and they do not get the help that they need. Again, visiting a young offender institution with a forensic child psychiatrist recently, she expressed concern that young people coming into the criminal justice system were not getting a proper assessment of their mental health. So we may find—this may be a more general issue—that there are many young people and adults with mental health disorders and problems, but they have never been assessed. They are not recognised but they are there all the same. In those settings, staff will have to be trained up. I do not know how one deals with such a situation. I can well imagine a young person, who has been abused by their family and who may or may not have had a good experience in the care system, trying to engage with the system being set up by the Government but, due to their history and other issues, they fail and get sanctioned. For them, that is a repeat of the experience that they had in childhood: ““This is all I am; I am just not part of society and not part of anything; I am being pushed away””. We need to try hard to reach out to those young people and help them not to experience what they experienced earlier in their childhood when they were pushed away by their parents. I recognise that it is very difficult to get the balance right but I shall certainly carry out some research on this issue before Report to see what needs to be taken forward.