Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)

My Lords, Amendment 167 in my name is very much about early intervention, which has been a key theme of this group. I support Amendment 68 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I also want to say how important Amendment 169 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and others is. I remember, in a previous life when I was chair of Cafcass, visiting various Pause projects. I was so impressed with the work they were doing and how it was preventing young mothers who had already had one or more children taken away from them and put in care from repeating that. I remember hearing the story of a mother whose eight children had all been taken into care. It was only when they were part of a Pause project that this terrible cycle stopped repeating itself. I am enormously supportive of that amendment. My amendment is fairly important, if not as exciting as some of the others, because it would basically require local authorities to report annually on early intervention services for children and families in their area and report back to the Secretary of State. Frankly, we have already heard the context. We know that early intervention services are crucial for the healthy development of babies, children and young people, in particular giving them and their families access to the help they need before problems escalate and families reach crisis point. We have heard the figures, so I am not going to repeat them. Local authorities have faced severe financial challenges. They have not been able to deliver nearly as many of those early intervention services as I am sure they would like, because their money has, frankly, been taken up with crisis and child protection services that they are under a statutory duty to provide. We have heard about what has happened over the last decade and the reducing numbers of children’s centres, family hubs, family support services, youth services et cetera, so I am not going to repeat that, but I will just say that I felt the impact of this was starkly and clearly set out in Josh MacAlister’s independent review of children’s social care back in 2022. That review made such a powerful case for a stronger focus on early intervention and on giving families the help they need before problems get out of hand. I was lucky enough to hear Josh MacAlister talk about his review last week, in the context of additional help for children in care and care leavers. Who knows? We may even hear something—I live in hope—about additional money for early intervention in the spending review. Let us wait and see. Both the economic case and the moral case for investment in early intervention are incredibly clear, so I am not going to set them out again. From all the discussions that I have been part of in this Chamber over the years on children’s social care, I know that ensuring that children and young people get the right support at the right time is widely supported across the political divide—I do not think it is a contentious issue politically—so I really hope we hear some welcome news in the spending review. The nub of my amendment is that I contend that too little is known about the services currently available in the field of early intervention. The amendment is really designed to promote data collection on these services to create greater awareness of what is available. It would help the Secretary of State to respond to the needs of local authorities, ensuring that sufficient services were being provided across England, as well as better information on the numbers of families who were accessing them and demographic information about the children receiving support. It would measure how effectively the services were working. Put simply, to understand how we can better support children and target funding to help the most vulnerable, we need to know more about what the current picture really looks like. My amendment would simply be a first step in helping us to ensure that children and young people did not fall through the cracks of ineffective service provision and that they got the right support at the right time.