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Virginia Bottomley (South-West Surrey) (Con): I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I offer profuse apologies to the Minister for Children—I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman), will pass them on to her—and to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for my late arrival as a result of an unavoidable commitment, of which I had informed Mr. Speaker. I thank my office team for recording faithfully every comment made by the right hon. Lady and my hon. Friend, so that I could have the benefit of their wise words.
I pay tribute to the army of extraordinarily impressive charities that we have in this country that are concerned with children. I am thinking of the quality of their briefings, their campaigns and their commitment to improving the well-being of children. It is a privilege to work with them. I should declare my interest as one who spends her time bringing talented people in to run public services and many of our leading charities, so that the policy that we debate here can be turned into the reality of change on the ground. When talking about the Climbié case and the need for change, Herbert Laming did not quarrel with the basic elements of the legislation to which the hon. Member—I almost said my hon. Friend—for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) referred, the Children Act 1989, which I had the privilege to implement and which established the paramountcy of the welfare of the child. Lord Laming focused on the tragedy, the horror, and the lack of proper management and leadership and of effective implementation in the Climbié case. That was shameful for all of us.
I was the Minister who signed the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, so I have enjoyed the many comments about it in the debate. At the time, I was agnostic about the role of a children's commissioner and whether it was the right time to introduce one, but I am delighted that the Bill contains a commitment to establish a children's commissioner for England. I share with others the strong belief that the Government should hold true to the principles established in another place. I give particular credit to my noble Friend Earl Howe, but many others worked with him to ensure that the changes were made.
The deliberate killing of or cruelty to a child is an obscene and disgraceful event. I speak not only of Victoria Climbié, but of the hundreds of children killed during the appalling events in Beslan in Russia last week. However, we should not let our minds be clouded to the enormity of the suffering of many other children who are neglected, but whose cases do not give rise to sensational public headlines or shock us to such an
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extent. Millions of children are dying in Darfur in Sudan, but closer to home we must face the appalling fact of 80 children each year being killed by their parents or carers, and almost 200 children each year being killed in road traffic accidents.
The point of real concern, which many here will share with me, is that around 200 children each year take their own lives. I welcome the comment there has been about the disgraceful state of affairs in our young offender institutions. If I had to be frank, I would say that the only time during my 20 years in this place when I was unhappy about the steps taken by my party and my Government was when we introduced secure training centres. My disappointment when Labour came to power in 1997 was that the Government accelerated that programme rather than reversing it. I do not think it right that a prison institution and its officers should care for children. I am deeply concerned about the state of the criminal justice system, and we should do much more through this Bill and in many other ways to rectify the balance.
The greatest threat to the health of our generation, according to the World Health Organisation, is adolescent mental health. We cannot debate the Bill without taking more seriously what is happening to the emotional and mental health of our adolescents. Only today, a preliminary report of an article to be produced in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry—a journal in which I published a number of articles long ago when I had a proper job—describes the deteriorating mental health of many of our adolescents. Holland has not seen that deterioration, and in the United States it was arrested. Here, we have seen, year after year, numbers of children with nervous disorders—not just suicide and self-harm but a great range of conditions.
I ask the Under-Secretary of State for Health to say what he is doing to ensure that child and adolescent mental health services are given the proper priority and recognition by primary care trusts. We all appreciate what has happened in the health service: if a thing is not targeted, it does not count; if it is not a waiting time or one of the key priorities, it is of pretty peripheral significance. How will the Minister ensure that, at a time when only 5 per cent. of spending on mental health services is on children, we can make a reality of the aims and aspirations of the Bill? How will he deliver that on the ground and in practice?
There is similar concern about the challenges and dilemma of parenting. I am delighted that so many hon. Members have referred to Home-Start. The late Lord Joseph made his original speech about the cycle of deprivation at a pre-school playgroup annual meeting in about 1973. I was there as the Child Poverty Action Group representative, I am pleased to say. Lord Joseph was the great champion of Home-Start as an organisation to befriend vulnerable parents. I ask Members to think about the dilemma that parents face. They are supposed now almost to be techno-managers. They, too, have the target culture as they ask whether their children will survive tests at school and achieve under all the different criteria. Is there space, still, just for nurture and parenting?
The Government speak much about the steps that they have taken to promote children and family life. They stand accused of behaving aggressively in their
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early years in government towards mothers who wished to stay at home. Single mothers may have an awful lot to contend with, but, almost coercively, they were expected to go out to work, and that caused a great deal of distress and worry in many groups who believe that parenting should be valued, difficult as it is and unsuccessful as many of us have been in surviving the task, without having had to deal with the workplace.
I should like to speak briefly about the progress that Surrey has made in taking forward its policies. The director of education there has become the director of children's services. He is one of the most highly regarded officers in that county council. How delighted I am that he has taken that step.
What steps will Ministers take to monitor the quality of people who take over as directors of children's services? Surrey has a particularly impressive record, both in education and in social service delivery, and I am impressed with the decision that the council has made, but I am concerned that in authorities where the director of social services is appointed, and where the educational support services and psychological services support the director of children's services, there may be a greater polarity between the culture of testing attainment in schools and the more nurturing culture in social services and social care.
The House should be under no illusion about the clash of cultures between the social care models, the education models, the health model and the criminal justice models. Professionals in all those areas have trained separately and work separately. Often, their budgets are separate. We can speak fine words about collaboration and co-ordination, but it is extremely difficult to achieve. I do not seek to undermine the aims and objectives of the Bill, but simply describing a structure is not sufficient to ensure that we get the psychology and the relationships right to deliver the change for which we are all hoping.
Perhaps the Minister can tell us what has happened to the chief nursing officer's review of the health visiting, nursing and midwifery contribution to this crucial work. For a young family, one of the most acceptable professionals on the doorstep is the health visitor. The health visitor has licence to see the child with no clothes on, and licence to ask all sorts of personal questions. Would that the training of health visitors included a little more on the emotional and relationship side. Nevertheless, health visitors are a crucial element. I am sure the Minister has taken to heart the concern about shortages of social work staff and many others.
Will the Minister also respond briefly to last week's report by Baroness Helena Kennedy about paediatric pathologists? Tragically, parents do kill their children, but it is equally appalling wrongly to accuse parents of damaging their children. The evidence is that there are fewer and fewer expert paediatricians who want to be expert witnesses, and a real lack of paediatric pathologists as a result of the present circumstances.
There are all manner of other points that I should have liked to address, but there is no time if my hon. Friends are to make a contribution. On reasonable chastisement, I apologise to my children and grandchildren if, on occasions, I have unreasonably chastised them. I do not want to translate into law a measure that might criminalise my hon. Friend the
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Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) or, while she lasts, the right hon. Member for South-West Surrey. I can only say to my children and grandchildren—all four of them—in mitigation for the moments of unreasonable chastisement that sometimes a smack is preferable to cruel, harsh words. When one hears the lengths that parents who never smack their children sometimes go to, one feels that a smack would be less cruel than the ongoing programme of rebuke and humiliation. I may be persuaded otherwise as the years go by, perhaps in time for my great-grandchildren.
The Bill is important. There are a great number of matters to be discussed in Committee and I wish it well. We have the lowest birth rate that we have ever had in this country. We owe it to those fewer children to do our very best to protect and safeguard them.
9.14 pm
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