It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson).
I want to talk about protecting and supporting vulnerable people, particularly children and young adults, which is a theme that emerges strongly from the Government’s legislative programme, and focus on life chances. On 31 March 2015, there were 69,540 looked-after children, and according to Adoption UK, as many as 61% of them were looked after by the state because of abuse or neglect. Only 5,330 looked-after children were adopted during the year ending last March, which was a welcome improvement, proportionately, on previous years but still far too low.
I therefore welcome the ambition in the Children and Social Work Bill to provide more children with stable and loving homes through long-term adoption. Stability, security and permanent affection are central to enhancing life chances, and the new commitment to extend the right of care leavers to a personal adviser up to the age of 25 is central to that mission, and I warmly welcome it. The assumption that a young person will be ready to face the world at the age of 18 became old fashioned long ago and was never really the case for people in the care system.
When it comes to looking after the nation’s young people, an increasingly important issue is harmful sexual behaviour. Child abuse gets a lot of coverage but harmful behaviour between children does not. I am currently chairing an inquiry with Barnardo’s into support and sanctions for children who display and are victims of harmful sexual behaviour. We have heard harrowing testimonies from young people with experiences ranging from the use of sexual language inappropriate for a particular age to the sharing of explicit images, online grooming and sexual acts themselves. The risk is increased for children in care.
This issue is rarely tackled because it is tough and uncomfortable to do so, but it is important that both perpetrators and victims have the chance for their experiences to be heard and that we in Parliament act. One young person was looked after from the age of 12. She had an abusive family background and parents with mental health difficulties and was a victim of child sexual exploitation while being looked after in a local children’s unit. She was described as naive, keen for affection and vulnerable to coercion and was exploited by men whom she believed to be her boyfriends.
In such circumstances, we must make sure that the duty of care, which should be shared by everyone—parents, foster parents, carers, teachers, social workers, medical practitioners and police forces—is indeed shared and that there are no gaps or loopholes. I hope that Ministers will take issues such as harmful sexual behaviour into
account when considering the precise measures in the Bill, particularly around foster care, the role of schools, police training and standards for social work. I will be highlighting our inquiry’s recommendations to the Government when they are announced within the next few months.
I turn now to the counter-extremism and safeguarding Bill. As a member of the Home Affairs Committee, I take a particular interest in this area, but I am sure that Ministers recognise that tackling extremism is not just a home affairs issue. It is a challenge for our justice system; within education, it is a duty-of-care issue; it is a foreign policy and defence concern; it is an equalities matter; it involves social media; and, above all, it is a life chances issue. It cannot be tackled in isolation as just a home affairs issue, because the causes, the consequences and the challenges are global and multi-dimensional. I know that Ministers will closely consider how Departments across Government can be brought together to make the Bill as effective as possible.
Members of the Muslim of community are fighting for the survival of their families and communities, seeking to challenge divisive and hateful views and deserve our support and encouragement as they challenge those ideologies on their own doorsteps. These ideologies and this extremism, increasingly rife, are like an invasive species. The Islam that came to this country with the communities that have settled here since the second world war is not the Islam now taught in some Muslim schools or practised in certain mosques. Wahhabi Islam is not the faith of my parents and does not reflect the cultural richness of the Muslim communities of the subcontinent, from which most of our diaspora come. Rather like an invasive species, Wahhabism has driven out many of the traditions that make my faith a spiritual rather than a political journey. It represents teachings that interpret Islam as a narrow stone age rulebook intolerant of modern society’s norms or indeed much of the basic human decency that we take for granted.
The fight against extremism is not one that should be fought just from Westminster using Westminster’s tools. As the Prime Minister noted in a reply to me last Wednesday, we must empower Muslims to challenge intolerant and hateful ideologies. It takes a huge amount of courage to speak out against organisations when there are self-appointed leaders who groom the young and impressionable. To tackle extremism and to protect vulnerable young people from being attracted to it, we have to challenge it both at source and later on in its journey. We need to think about the establishments, groups and forums where some of these divisive ideas are coming from. I hope the Bill will look at how we can prevent religious or educational establishments from receiving overseas funding if they are unwilling to sign up to an agreed set of tolerant principles that their own society considers acceptable. We already have rules that funders of political parties and unions must adhere to, so why not have them for these other institutions, too?
Safeguarding children from extremism requires powers to take action in any education setting where vulnerable children may be at risk of grooming and indoctrination. Grooming a child for sexual exploitation was once misunderstood; now it is rightly a cause for extreme action and punishment. The same should be the case for educators and youth leaders who teach hate, including those at the centre of events in Birmingham’s “Trojan
horse” schools. We should never allow those individuals back into the classroom or to have any leadership role with children.
On integration and life chances, I have been very encouraged by my conversations with Louise Casey about her review into relations within and between communities, and I am sure that the Government will look to incorporate some of her central recommendations into this and other legislation.
Modern challenges in modern times need modern and bold legislation. Being cautious is not the job of a responsible Government who are effective at taking on those challenges. So I warmly welcome the proposals set out in this Queen’s Speech, and the values and aims that thread through them. When each of these proposals is taken forward, I urge the Government to stay the course and to continue to be ambitious in tackling the challenges they have rightly prioritised as needing our attention and focus.
8.46 pm