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Mr. Kidney: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for being so patient with me. Clearly, the children's rights director will be involved in children's homes under the new National Care Standards Commission, but what about all the other looked-after children who are not in children's homes? Will a director or a commissioner assist my hon. Friend in ensuring that the new entitlements are secured for those children?
Mr. Hutton: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I said in response to his first intervention that the children's rights director clearly has a responsibility, especially in adoption and fostering services. I am sure that he will find--he knows about the subject--that many looked-after children are in foster placements, so the role of the children's rights director goes beyond regulated children's homes.
The Government's objective is to ensure that no looked-after child will go without help, that every child is included, that every child will have the chance to make the best of his or her life and that we will never allow another generation of looked-after children to be discarded in the way others have been.
The second clear statement that we are making is that we want to pursue those radical changes in partnership with all those who share our view that it is right and proper to put the needs of those who have been marginalised for too long centre stage in the programme of change.
The future holds out the prospect of further progress and opportunity in all those areas. Of course we have not yet done everything that needs to be done--a lot more needs to be done--but we have started a process that I believe can make a difference to the lives of some of the most damaged children and young people in our society. I am sure that the whole House wants to see that happen. I commend the Bill to the House.
5 pm
Mr. Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge): I start by confirming for the record that there is a substantial degree of cross-party consensus in the House on the Bill, although it is perhaps not so clear that there is such a consensus in the Scottish Parliament. That is important in the context of the way that the Bill works, and I shall return to that point.
The Bill builds on the Children Act 1989, both in terms of the principles behind it and its very architecture. It responds directly to the recommendations and findings of Sir William Utting's review of safeguards for children living away from home, following the inquiry established by the previous Government. As the Minister explained, the Bill in its original form, as introduced in the House of Lords, sought to address the needs primarily of 16 and 17-year-olds either in or leaving care--that is, the needs of children. He described the perverse incentive in the present system for local authorities to shuffle children off their budgets and on to the social security budget, and the discontinuity in responsibility for the care of those who move away from their home local authority areas.
The Bill removes that perverse incentive, provides a series of duties to support 16 and 17-year-olds who are or have been in care and places the responsibility squarely on the local authority that last looked after those children. The Bill's objective, as the Minister described it, is to increase the number of 16 and 17-year-olds staying in care and to extend support to those who leave it. No one can argue with that objective. We have a moral responsibility to ensure equality of opportunity for children who grow up in care. We also have a pragmatic responsibility to address the issues that the Bill seeks to address: as the Minister also said, too many of those children and young people end up homeless or in trouble with the law, with their futures blighted by that poor start for the rest of their lives.
However, the Bill now goes further. As amended in the House of Lords, it extends the obligations of local authorities and, through that, extends the rights of adults who were formerly cared-for children, in some cases up to the age of 24. I shall say more about the implications of that later.
I say now, quite clearly and for the record, that this is a good Bill. It provides an extension of support for some of the most vulnerable children and extends that support to adulthood in ways that represent a sensible and largely cost-effective investment in young people leaving care, to try to secure their futures in the world beyond care. However, that does not mean that the Bill is perfect.
The Minister has spent the past 20 minutes or so detailing the purposes of the Bill and the positive benefits that it will bring. I found myself nodding for a great deal of that time. I shall not bore the House by repeating the arguments in favour of the Bill, but I shall outline the areas that we believe need further improvement--perhaps strengthening--or on which we need further assurances from the Government. Some areas are significant; others are more minor.
I hope that the Minister will take my remarks in the spirit in which I make them. They are intended to be a positive contribution to a constructive debate and are designed to make the Bill workable and robust. I can assure him that we shall engage constructively in Committee, with the aim of ensuring that the Bill that is reported back to the House will achieve the objectives that Members on both sides of the House share.
When the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson), announced the measure in November 1998, he said that the principal objective was to ensure that local authorities' responsibilities for children up to the age of 18 and beyond corresponded more closely to those of a good parent. I confirmed then the Opposition's support for that concept and for the Government in the process of implementing the recommendations of the Utting report. I also confirmed our continued support for the Government in their efforts to ensure the safety of children living away from home and, for that reason, we supported the quality protects programme. I am happy to confirm again today our support for the broad thrust of the Government's programme for continuous improvement of children's services, so that we can work together to make steady advances. Within that broad support, however, we must reserve the right to probe the details where necessary.
I come now to some of the concerns that we have about the Bill. During its passage in the other place, important issues were raised about local authority obligations to those who are over 18--which is to say, adults--who have been in care but have now matured to adulthood. As the Minister recounted, local authorities have historically had powers in relation to people who were formerly in care, and the Bill as originally drafted would have strengthened those powers. However, on the basis of persuasive arguments advanced by my noble Friends and others in the other place, the Government agreed to amend the Bill to create obligations--as opposed to powers--for local authorities in respect of people between the ages of 18 and 21, and in some cases up to the age of 24 when those people are care leavers. By extension, those obligations create corresponding rights for those people.
As the Bill stands, local authorities have a duty to keep in touch with adult care leavers, wherever they are, and to re-establish contact with them if contact is lost, for whatever reason. The local authority will also have an obligation to appoint a young person's adviser and to maintain and review a pathway plan for all such people who were last cared for by that authority. I fully accept that for many young people that will be a welcome safety net, providing the reassurance that the family and the family home provides for millions of other, more fortunate, young people. It will be somewhere to turn to when things go wrong in their lives. It is also a significant
step towards the Bill's goal of creating circumstances for care leavers that resemble, as closely as possible, those enjoyed by other young people. That is an entirely laudable objective.However, we must remember that we are dealing with adults, and the obligation on the statutory services to maintain contact and to re-establish contact with those adults is--potentially--highly intrusive. Essentially, the local authority will be required to track the whereabouts of an adult care leaver, to monitor his life style, and to report and record what he is doing. At its most extreme, tracking people down and maintaining a pathway plan for them, once they are adults, could be sufficiently intrusive to risk falling foul of article 8 of the European convention on human rights.
Mr. Hammond: I see that the hon. Gentleman disagrees, but that is not intended to be a criticism of the fundamentals of the Bill. I remind him of the history. The Bill was originally drafted to deal with 16 and 17-year-olds and its scope has been extended, rightly, during its passage through the other place. However, that has introduced a complication, because what is acceptable in relation to a child, from an authority exercising a parental role, could--I emphasise that word--become oppressive in relation to an adult. Apart from the criminal justice system and the Mental Health Act 1983, I cannot think of any other significant areas that allow the statutory authorities to intervene in that way in the life of a competent adult. I stress again that the majority of care leavers will welcome the provisions as a safety net, but the duty to re-establish contact may be a step too far in some cases. The message to young people who have left care and moved on into adulthood must be that help and support is available if it is wanted, perhaps at the end of a telephone line. I am afraid that assertive outreach, if that is what is required in seeking to discharge the duty to re-establish contact, might be misguided, morally indefensible and potentially highly counter-productive for such care leavers.
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