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12.5 pm
Mr. Phil Hope (Corby): I congratulate the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) on securing this debate. I declare a minor interest having produced parenting education materials for use in schools, which have been successfully implemented and have had an impact on young people's lives. The local authority in my constituency is identified in the report as having the 29th highest rate of teenage pregnancies, so it is a local concern as well as a matter in which I have had a personal interest in the past.
As a member of the Government's personal, social and health education working group, I am delighted that this report has come out in conjunction with the report of that group so as to focus attention on the problem of teenage pregnancies in the broader context of mainstream changes to the school curriculum and the work of other organisations to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies.
Teenage pregnancy is not an easy issue for us to tackle, either as individual Members of Parliament or as a Government. People hold strongly held beliefs on this issue. Some people have deeply held religious beliefs, so we must tackle this subject with care. Young people and their parents have to make intimate decisions. However, the cost of doing nothing is high. The statistics in the report show that teenage mothers have poorer education opportunities, poorer jobs and often bring up their children living in relative poverty. Their babies have poorer health--there is a higher infant mortality rate among those babies--and that imposes wider costs on the community. Doing nothing is not an option. We must find solutions, however difficult they may be.
It is particularly interesting that the risk factors associated with high levels of teenage pregnancy identified in the report include poverty and education problems. The young people involved are not in education, employment or training; they live in areas of deprivation and are excluded from other sources of education or health service support. Those factors must be addressed. It is interesting that young people told the social exclusion team that there were three causes of becoming a teenage parent. The primary cause was that they felt that they had nothing to lose. They had low self-esteem and did not feel valued as individuals. They felt that they had no future and no hope, so they became pregnant as a way of feeling valued. They had something to which they could give unconditional love and which would give them unconditional love back. That is our failure. Why cannot we provide those young people with a sense of optimism, hope and self-esteem for the future, so that they do not make that difficult and probably wrong choice.
Those young people also described the cause of their pregnancy as ignorance. It is not good enough, as we approach the 21st century, for people to become pregnant through ignorance. Hon. Members have spoken about the mixed messages that young people receive. The media bombards them with messages that it is almost compulsory for young people to have sex, but they do not talk about it at home because it is too embarrassing and difficult. The result is not less sex, but less protected sex. The risk is not just of becoming pregnant, but of infection from sexually transmitted diseases.
Action must be taken to tackle the causal and risk factors associated with high levels of teenage pregnancy. The report is right to refer to two strands of activity. The first is prevention: we should try to prevent young people from becoming pregnant, but if they do and they have a baby, we should provide them with the support they need for their own development and for the care of their child.
The difficulty is that many teenagers do not know how easy it is to get pregnant or how hard it is to be a parent. Education in sex, relationships and parenthood is required from schools, youth services and other providers.
The report is right to say that that should start in primary school. I was at a broadcast of a Central Television programme called "Weekend Live" on Friday night that focused on teenage pregnancies. There was a 14-year-old mother with a two-year-old daughter. She had her baby when she was 12 and had become pregnant when she was 11. We have to start sex education at a younger age if we are to prevent very early pregnancies. The report clearly recommends that.
The report demonstrates statistically that effective sex education can reduce sexual activity among young people. I particularly like the idea of peer education. As the hon. Member for Billericay said, older young people talking to younger people about their experiences is an effective way of getting the message across at school or in community projects.
The report places particular emphasis on involving parents in school policy on sex education and trying to change the climate in which they talk to their children about the subject. The message given to boys should be strengthened. Page 97 of the report says:
Most teenage parents go back to live with mum to be looked after with their baby. That works. I met a number of such families on Friday night and the mums of the teenage parents seem to enjoy having their daughter at home with the baby and being the grandmother who brings them up. That is fine when it works, but three out of 10 of the 15 and 16-year-olds do not have that option. We cannot simply abandon them. Too manyteenage parents find themselves in bed-and-breakfast accommodation or in council flats on faraway estates with no family and no support. The Government's strategy of semi-independent supported accommodation with a mentor, advice on parenting skills and health education is the right way to provide the support that those young people need at the time when they are most vulnerable and do not have other people around them. It has been unfortunate to say the least that certain parts of the press have referred to those arrangements as hostels or some form of punitive measure. The aim is to support young parents. The National Council for One Parent Families, Gingerbread and others have been actively involved in pilot projects showing how the policy can be implemented and have supported that aspect of the report.
Mrs. Caroline Spelman (Meriden):
I shall not take more than a few moments to make my points,because these Adjournment debates are principally for
Only the hardest of hearts would not have sympathy for the young teenage girl who finds herself in that predicament, but I urge the Minister to look closely at some of the statistical evidence in the report. The clear overall message is that Britain lags way behind other European countries, but the more worrying fact is that we are going against the trend. We have been going backwards during the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, while the situation has improved in other European countries.
There are other key points in the report that are worthy of closer examination. Why is the rate of teenage pregnancy 70 per cent. higher in Shropshire than it is in Cambridgeshire? There must be a reason for the statistical irregularities. I urge the Minister to look more deeply at the analysis.
We welcome the report, which identifies some of the causes of teenage pregnancy, but there are deeper layers of reasoning behind the rising incidence. We should face up to the mismatch between girls and boys. It is acceptable for lads to go out and sow their wild oats and the girls feel that they have to say yes. We must empower girls so that they feel comfortable to say no and we need to ensure that our young men play their part.
Without being overly party political, I must point out to the Minister that the messages that the Government send are important. Doing away with the married couples tax allowance and using the money to increase child benefit is tantamount to saying that it is okay to have babies, but it is not important to get married. The signals that we give to society are important.
Young people are bombarded with information about sex and reasons for having sex. It has been turned into a sport, decoupled from the emotions and responsibility that go with it. The situation is not helped by the way in which the subject is taught. Perhaps the British are particularly handicapped in this respect and find it too difficult to talk about. We have to address that. In many ways, the parents need to be taught about how to teach it. Many of us who are parents had dire experience of being taught about sex in schools, but that is the only experience that we had, and perhaps our parents did not do a very good job either. It is important not just to teach the youngsters, but to teach the parents how to talk about it.
I strongly endorse the suggestion of my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay that young mums should be taken into classrooms. A young mum telling her classmates or those just a little younger than her about the constraints that have come upon her will give a strong message not to do it.
"Young men are half of the problem and the solution. Sex and relationships education in and out of school should bring them more into the picture. Young men also need to be targeted with information about the consequences of sex and fatherhood, including their financial responsibility to support their children."
However hard that educational process may be, it is up to our schools and our teachers to find ways to make it happen.
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