Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 68 and to speak to Amendment 171 in my name and to Amendment 169, to which I have attached my name. In the interests of time, I am going to constrain myself to those three amendments. Amendment 68 introduces a new clause to require local authorities to provide family support services for all children and parents in their area. This very much follows on from what the Minister was saying on the previous group about the desire to provide support for parents. Unfortunately, that is not what has largely been happening. We have seen a massive increase in spending on crisis intervention services in the past decade. It is up 67%, and £4 in every £5 spent is going into late intervention. At the same time, the number of children in residential care has increased by 79%. Spending overall went up in that decade by 61%, but there was a 46% decline in early intervention services. That is what this amendment seeks to address. We know that investment in early interventions will reduce the demand for high-cost, later interventions. More families can stay together in healthy ways, in stable and loving homes where children can grow up peacefully, and fewer young children will experience neglect, abuse and harm. This amendment is again, I am pleased to say, following the work of my honourable friend the Member for North Herefordshire. She and others made the case in the other place. What I think lots of people are saying about this Bill, with lots of amendments, lots of attempts, is that there is a huge amount in it to deal with improving care for children who need to live with a foster family or in a residential home, and of course that is terribly important. But, to improve significantly the conditions of children in this country, we need to start far earlier, and that is what is lacking in this Bill. I am not particularly attached to the detailed drafting here, but certainly I would like to see some movement from the Government and the intention to make sure that the Bill covers earlier intervention. Of course, the governing party has a proud record in this area with the Sure Start centres that were first established in 1997, and more than 3,500 of those children’s centres were developed. It has been crucial that they have supported families in a welcoming, non-stigmatising way. You do not have to be a problem or have a problem to visit; it is just something that is there to support you. The reality is, and I should perhaps declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, that at this moment we know how incredibly cash strapped local authorities are, and these services are too often seen as a “nice to have” or even a “we desperately want to keep it, but we just cannot find the money” service, and so they have disappeared. I stress that this clause introduces a requirement for local authorities to provide sufficient family support services. I acknowledge that the only way that local authorities would be able to do this is if there was support funding from the centre. If we take, for example, the Welcome to Parenthood programme run by the children’s charity Barnardo’s, it is calculated that the benefits return £2.44 for every £1 spent. We could be saving significant amounts of money here. I move now to Amendment 171, also in my name, which, again, was originally tabled by my honourable friend in the other place. This is to ensure that every school has a bereavement policy. I declare a personal interest here, as I was 23 years old when I was in a car crash in which my mother was killed. I was not a child, but I was a young adult and I know how utterly wrenching and destroying that experience was. Also, at university, I was in a small group of about 20 students, one of whom was killed in a car crash. I know what a shock it was to that group of students.