| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Clarke: Does the hon. Gentleman not see the parallel between parents giving children the right to pursue their adult lives once they have been given that
opportunity, and this Parliament, having devolved power to another Parliament, allowing it to exercise the very powers that we gave it?
Mr. Hammond: The hon. Gentleman is right. I am not qualified to say whether the Bill is the first measure that we have dealt with since the devolution settlement that contains both clauses that are the subject of devolved responsibility and clauses that are reserved matters. In this instance, clause 6 deals with the withdrawal of social security benefits.
There are complications in implementing such legislation. The Government who answer to this place can control, so long as they have a working parliamentary majority, the implementation of clauses 1 to 5, 7 and 8, but they cannot so directly control the implementation of clause 6 in Scotland. The Government's amendments in another place to clause 8 clearly envisage that legislation mirroring the non-reserved parts of the Bill may not be in place in Scotland when the Bill comes into effect in England.
The Government's proposed response is to delay implementation of clause 6, which removes the right to benefits for 16 and 17-year-olds, until Scottish legislation placing similar obligations on local authorities to those that the Bill seeks to impose on local authorities in England is in place. That shows a flaw in the devolution arrangement. Where non-reserved and reserved matters interact and the Scottish Parliament is disinclined simply to mimic English legislation within a time scale that fits the Government's purpose, there will be a gap.
In this instance, there is potentially a real danger. If clause 6 is not implemented in Scotland at a time when the rest of the Bill is in force in England and Wales, benefits will continue to be available in Scotland to 16 and 17-year-old care leavers after they are withdrawn in England. That will make Scotland precisely the magnet for young people who want to access cash benefits that London and other areas have been under the present arrangements. If local authorities are, as the Minister has told us, actively encouraging 16 and 17-year-olds to leave care and put themselves on to the social security budget, there must be a danger, depending on the financing arrangements for local authorities, that there will be an incentive during the interim period to encourage 16 and 17-year-olds to go north.
It is clear that there is no intention behind the Bill to encourage young people to migrate from the area where they have been looked after. Indeed, the intention is precisely the opposite. It is also not the intention to give an incentive to local authorities to push them out. However, the difficulties in relation to Scotland may undermine the Government's intentions and create in Edinburgh and Glasgow the magnets that we have seen in London. The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Mr. Shaw) may have read the Bill more closely than I and may be able to correct me, but it seems from my reading of it that young people may be able to have it both ways, with their local authority in England retaining a statutory duty to support them even when they move away, while being able to claim cash benefits in Scotland.
The inevitable conclusion is that there is a case for delaying implementation of the Bill until that can be done on a United Kingdom basis, to avoid unintended
consequences. The ideal situation from the point of view of the Bill, if not from that of the devolution settlement, would be the Government prevailing upon the Scottish Executive to introduce the necessary legislation, reflecting the English legislation, within the same timetable. Otherwise, the Bill may not work as well as we all hope.I have outlined our principal concerns. I hope that Labour Members will treat them as constructive contributions to the debate and as issues that can be thrashed out and resolved in Committee. If I am wrong on any of these concerns, I shall be the first to admit that. However, I think that they all require further investigation. Some of them are more serious than others, but none of them is fatal to the Bill or to any of its underlying objectives. They can all be accommodated within the Bill's structures, either by amendment or by ministerial clarifications and the use of regulations or guidance.
I re-emphasise that we support what the Government are doing with the quality protects programme. We support the Bill and we shall continue to support the cross-party consensus on building progressively on the Children Act 1989, to strengthen and broaden the protection that it offers to vulnerable children and young people wherever they may be.
5.39 pm
Mr. Frank Dobson (Holborn and St. Pancras): I wholeheartedly welcome the Bill, in part because it keeps promises that I made on behalf of the Government. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on the huge amount of work that he has done in fleshing out those original promises, and also on the speed with which he gathered up the topic when it was handed on to him by our right hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng) who initiated a great deal of the work, for which he did not receive as much credit as he should have done, and for which I received more credit than I deserved.
More importantly, I welcome the Bill because it is a major step towards ending what can only be described as Britain's abject failure to look after children in care. A great deal of attention was paid to the problem of molesting children in care, and rightly so, but, until recently, little attention has been paid to the general failure to provide decent care for young people who were in care.
Children in care form less than 1 per cent. of the child population, but 38 per cent. of young people in prison and 30 per cent. of young people who are homeless have been in care. It is also worth bearing in mind that, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, they are usually two to three years less mature than other children of their age, a matter which is relevant to the points made by the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) in relation to competent adults. Generally speaking, their mental development, their maturity, is a long way behind that of other young people of the same age, and we should bear that in mind.
We must remember that children and young people in care have been designated by officialdom on our behalf as needing care and protection. In many cases, it is clear that they have received neither. That was not just the fault of social services or individual care staff. We were all responsible for those failures--care staff, social services
managers, councils and councillors. Police, lawyers, courts and schools did not do their job properly. Voluntary organisations, including religious organisations, did not do their job properly. Neighbours did not give sufficient attention to what was happening. The news media did not give the matter sufficient attention, and nor did Government Departments. There was an abject failure on behalf of the Government's social services inspectorate. This Parliament did not give the matter enough attention. Ministers did not give it enough attention, and the previous Labour Opposition did not give the matter the attention that it deserved. There were some honourable exceptions in those categories, but not many, and the time has come to put things right.The quality protects programme, launched in 1998, which relates to all children's services, is making a start. The introduction of the National Care Standards Commission will be a step forward, and the Bill, which deals particularly with preparing people for leaving care, delaying them leaving care and providing them with more help, and more concerted and thought-out help, after they have left care, will also be a huge step forward.
Almost half of all the children in care leave care in the year that they are 16. After that, the statutory duties on local authorities are too feeble to think about. They bring to mind the old saying that they offer every assistance short of actual help. Councils have the power to provide help, but they have no duty to do so after the age of 16. That legislative shortcoming, combined with the benefit rules, have provided a huge incentive for officialdom to encourage young people to leave care. That is wrong, as I think that we all accept, and the Bill changes all that.
Throughout the development of the policy, as my hon. Friend the Minister was kind enough to say, I always said that the basic questions should be, "Would this have been good enough for me when I was a child? Would this be good enough for my children now?" We have an obligation to provide for children in care nothing less than we would want to provide for our own children.
The Bill basically proposes two major changes. Children will be looked after until they are 18 rather than 16, and, all being well, that age limit will be raised later to 21. I shall come to that. It also specifies that a person--not a machine, a council or a department, but a person--will be responsible for helping these young people to plan their lives, and then for helping them to carry out that plan, initially when they are in care, and then after they have left care. The Bill tries to make society, as corporate parents, do what might be described as what normal parents do. We should aim to provide what John Betjeman once felicitously referred to as
- the love that in a family dwells.
We asked officials to prepare a paper spelling out what ordinary families do or try to do, not necessarily continuously, but intermittently, for their own children between the ages of 16 and 21. The main thing is to provide a home to live in, or return to. Then there is the shoulder to cry on, the encouragement to do a bit more work at school or college, the morale-boosting chat before going to an interview, the consolation afterwards if the interview goes wrong, or the celebration if it goes right. Young people want someone to provide a lift when they want to go somewhere, a meal, or, when they are a bit
older, someone to take them for a drink, someone to get the washing done, someone to touch for a tenner when they are skint, someone to keep an eye on them, someone who cares about them.The intention is that, as a result of the Bill, and as a result of a lot of hard work by a dedicated staff, young people leaving care will have someone who knows and cares for and helps them, and they will both know what obligations one has to the other. That is what the Bill tries to provide. That is why it is so welcome. These changes in the law are necessary and they are long overdue.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |