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Mr. Dawson: I was not going to speak on this subject in Committee and was provoked into it, and the same is the case tonight. I have worked on truancy and school
non-attendance issues for a long time and I do not buy a lot of the statements that have been made in the last 10 minutes.This is a complex, distressing and difficult problem. At the heart of it are children's rights to have an education, and parents' duties to ensure that they receive it. People have referred to many of the factors that make truancy a problem. Of course there can be real and genuine difficulties between parents and schools. Of course there are millions of children with special educational needs; there are often educational needs that go unnoticed, unassessed or unrecognised for many years. We need to attend to such factors. Some teenagers, but often younger children, are palpably beyond the control of parents. Parents who do their absolute darnedest to get their children to go to school need the appropriate support.
There are a thousand aspects to the issue of school truancy and it is extremely difficult to tackle, especially when it has gone on for some time, but some people do not seem to recognise that there is also sheer parental bloody-mindedness. There are people who have no interest whatever in getting their children to attend school and will use any excuse to avoid ensuring that they get the education that they need.
One can respond to that through care proceedings. There is nothing more fundamental than breaking up families, but the clause gives us the ability to bring home to recalcitrant parents the true seriousness of the situation. If the threat of a serious fine or imprisonment is enough to bring parents to court or make them consider the issues seriously, that is a useful element.
Jackie Ballard: What evidence does the hon. Gentleman have that parents who could not care less whether their children go to school will be influenced to change their behaviour by a fine of £2,500, when they are not influenced by a fine of £1,000?
Mr. Dawson: So much depends on individual circumstances. The threat of imprisonment is a potent factor, although I sincerely believe that it would not be carried out. The spectre that people conjure up--of parents being hauled off to jail in great numbers, while the children are taken into care and the whole family explodes--is simply not credible. The circumstances in which such a tactic would be used are comparatively rare, but it is an important element in the armoury that is available.
Mr. John Cryer: My hon. Friend says that he believes that imprisonment will not be used, but it will not be he or I on the bench making the decision. If it will not be used, why put it on the statute book?
Mr. Dawson: The uncertainty about whether it will be used is important. All that I have to back this up is the experience of dealing with parents in this position--and the only way of getting them to face up to the difficulties was by laying down an extremely hard line about the consequences not to their children but to them if there was no change.
Mr. Simon Hughes: I have a simple question. Does the hon. Gentleman think that it would be acceptable for a single parent of several children to be sent to prison for
between one and three months because one of the children was truanting? If not, he should not support a proposal to give magistrates courts the power to do just that.
Mr. Dawson: We have to consider the individual circumstances. I do not believe that the sort of situation that the hon. Gentleman outlined earlier would be dealt with under the existing legislation. We are talking about people who need help and support to deal with the complex problems of truancy. The provision will not necessarily apply to any of the people with whom hon. Members have been in touch, let alone all of them, but my experience tells me that it is useful to have it as a threat to hang over some parents, in some circumstances.
11 pm
Mr. John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington): I, too, have some experience of child care: for 13 years, I was the house father of a small family unit children's home. Sometimes it was difficult to get the children to school.
The Government must recognise that legislation, once introduced, will be used. The provision allowing courts to imprison people for a lengthy period seems draconian, and there is no use arguing that it will be used in only a few cases. If it is used in only one case, a family will be broken up and children will go into care. We must make sure that the provision will have some effect on truancy.
However, all hon. Members know why families do not send their children to school. It happens largely when the system has failed both parents and children. The cycle of deprivation means that parents do not appreciate the importance of education or of sending their children to school. However it has been noted already that other legislation--education Acts and social legislation--provide that children can be taken into care.
In this respect, the Bill is worse than a sledgehammer used to crack a nut. It is a very uncreative way to tackle a problem with which most hon. Members are familiar. This month, I have had discussions in my constituency with the organisation Homestart, and I have been involved with groups of head teachers in establishing a truancy centre. I have also been working with social services officers on individual cases to try to build support in the community and families, and ensure that children are sent to school.
The introduction of a power to imprison parents who refuse to send their children to school cannot be ameliorated by saying that it will be used only as a last option and probably not at all. Can we have confidence in the courts that the provision will not be used? I know the local magistrates in Hayes and Uxbridge, and I am sure that many of those wonderful people would not touch the power with a bargepole. However, I am not so confident about magistrates elsewhere.
I want the powers in any legislation that I am involved with to be so valid that they are used. In this instance, the Government are flying in the face of the experience of all hon. Members. The work that we do in ensuring that parents send their children to school must be based on an understanding of families' problems, not on retribution.
I gave up the opportunity of visiting a constituent in prison today. I wanted to deal with clause 61, although I did not realise that we would come to it so very late at night. I am amazed that the clause has been included in the Bill, as it is so incongruent with the other provisions.
It seems that the Government have taken another opportunity to pander to readers of the Daily Mail by cracking down on parents who do not send their children to school.Will my right hon. Friend the Minister say who has been consulted on this matter? What support has been found among teaching organisations, social work professionals and others? What is the international experience of imposing on parents fines and prison sentences of this length? More creative means of tackling the problem exist. We cannot want to deprive children of their parents simply because the system has failed to inculcate in families the benefits of sending children to school.
Mr. Lidington: Somewhat unusually, I find myself in considerable agreement in this debate with the views expressed not by only the hon. Member for Taunton (Jackie Ballard), but by several Labour Members. I do not want to repeat all the arguments that have been discussed at some length already, but it seems that if a fine is to be a deterrent, one has to assume that the person subject to the fine will feel that they have a reasonable prospect of paying it. Otherwise, imposing a fine becomes completely meaningless.
In my constituency experience, I can think of cases in which parents of children who have been persistent truants are entirely reliant on social security benefits. I find it difficult to see how an increased fine could be a real deterrent in such cases when the prospect of it ever being paid is minimal.
I also agree with the points made by other critics of the clause about the power to imprison. The hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) said that it was fine to have the power to imprison because we would never want to use it, an argument that I found unpersuasive. It is worth having a power on the statute book only if our intention, as legislators, is that in some circumstances at least that power should be exercised by the courts. That would mean that we would have to address the issues raised most strongly by the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes).
This is not a party political point, but we already know that local authority children's homes have a thoroughly bad general record in caring for people if we measure that in terms of the number of people who have been in local authority care who subsequently get into trouble with the courts, the number of young offenders in institutions such as the one in my constituency or the number of such people who go to prison when they are adults. If at all possible, I believe that it is better to keep the family together with the parents caring for their children. The idea that parents should be taken away and locked up, and that the local authority would somehow step in and put everything right by taking the children into care is at odds with experience in this country hitherto.
I hope that even at this stage, the Government will think afresh about the clause and bring forward changes in another place.
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